A dead language is a language that no longer has any native speakers, although

it may still be studied by a few or used in certain contexts. If there are only a few
remaining elderly speakers of a language and it is no longer used for communication,
then that language is effectively considered dead even before its last native speaker
has passed away. The death of a language is rarely a sudden event, but usually takes
place gradually as a language is marginalized or slowly replaced by other languages.
Some of the most well-known dead languages include Latin, Sanskrit, Old English,
Aramaic, Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Coptic, Iberian, Etruscan and Proto-Indo-European,
just to name a few.
Dead languages are often confused with extinct languages, or languages that are
no longer in current use and don't have any active speakers. While some scholars have
tried to draw a line between the two, in reality, dead languages and extinct languages
have undergone more or less the same phenomenon: they have lost native speakers
and are no longer commonly used.
Due to increasing globalization, thousands of languages are becoming extinct or
are at current risk of extinction. The world's linguistic diversity is steadily declining as
major world languages (such as English) take over and languages with less speakers
begin to die out or lose native speakers.
Almost a quarter of the world's languages have less than a thousand remaining
speakers, and least 3,000 languages are guaranteed to become extinct within the next
century.

1. The main idea of paragraph 3 is …

A. Causes of dead languages and extinct languages.
B. Effect of dead languages and extinct languages.
C. Differences between dead languages and extinct languages.
D. Examples of extinct languages
E. The number of extinct languages.

The 2008 financial crisis was the worst economic disaster since the Great
Depression of 1929. It occurred despite the efforts of the Federal Reserve and the U.S.
Department of the Treasury. The crisis led to the Great Recession, where housing
prices dropped more than the price plunge during the Great Depression. Two years
after the recession ended, unemployment was still above 9%. That doesn't count those
discouraged workers who had given up looking for a job.
In 2006, housing prices started to fall for the first time in decades. At first, realtors
applauded. They thought the overheated real estate market would return to a more
sustainable level. They didn't factor in a number of factors, such as too many
homeowners with questionable credit being approved for mortgage loans, even some
for 100% or more of the home's value. Some blamed the Community Reinvestment Act,
which pushed banks to make investments in subprime areas. Several studies by the
Federal Reserve found it did not increase risky lending. Others blamed Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac for the entire crisis. To them, the solution is to close or privatize the two
agencies. If they were shut down, the housing market would collapse because they
guarantee the majority of mortgages.
 Deregulation of financial derivatives was a key underlying cause of the financial
crisis. Two laws deregulated the financial system. They allowed banks to invest in
housing-related derivatives. These complicated financial products were so profitable
they encouraged banks to lend to ever-riskier borrowers. This instability led to the crisis.
The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) allowed
banks to use deposits to invest in derivatives. Bank lobbyists said they needed this
change to compete with foreign firms. They promised to only invest in low-risk securities
to protect their customers. As banks chased the profitable derivative market, they didn't
keep this promise.

2. What topics does the paragraph preceding the passage most likely discuss?
A. The methods of identifying financial crisis.
B. How great depression can be remedied from the worst case.
C. The negative effects of financial crisis in United States.
D. The Introduction of financial crisis in United States.
E. The causes of great depression in United States.

3. How does the second paragraph relate to the first paragraph? The second
paragraph …
A. argues how great depression is the cause of country’s collapse.
B. shows the cause of great depression in United States
C. highlights the problem of modernization act in United States
D. explains the collapse of housing market
E. brings the urgency of solving great depression.

Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories. By the Gate, in
1963, two years after she had received her master's degree from the University of
Wisconsin and become an instructor of English at the University of Detroit. Her
productivity since then has been prodigious, accumulating in less than two decades to
nearly thirty titles, including novel, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and
literary criticism. In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from the
University of Detroit to the University of Windsor, in Ontario, and in 1978, to Princeton
University. Reviewers have admired her enormous energy but found a productivity of
such magnitude difficult to assess.
In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition
by authors such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol
Oates has seemed at times determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on the
essentially mimetic quality of her fiction. Hers is a world of violence, insanity, fractured
love, and hopeless loneliness. Although some of it appears to come from her own direct
observations, her dreams, and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of
others. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock car racing, though
she had never seen a race. In them (1969) she focused on Detroit from the Depression
through the notes of 1967, drawing much of her material from the deep impression
made on her by problems of one of her students. Whatever the source and however
shocking the events or the motivations, however, her fictive world remains strikingly akin
to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news and talk shows,
and the popular magazines of our day.

4. What is the main purpose of the passage?

A. To review Oates’s By the North Gate.
B. To compare some modern writers.
C. To describe Oates’s childhood.
D. To outline Oates’s career. 
E. To tell who Oates is.