Everyone quickly evacuated the building as a gang of thugs ________ a bomb.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to choose the word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 34 to 38.

LIVING AND LEARNING ON AN ISLAND

Children living on remote islands and in other areas (34) ________ the population is very small often end up being educated in very small schools, sometimes with no more than fifty students. Herm, (35) ________ , is one of the smallest of Britain's Channel Islands. It has a school that has fewer than ten pupils of primary school age, and a teacher who is (36) ________ to come over from the larger island of Guernsey every day. Children over the age of ten ought to live, as well as study, at a secondary school on Guernsey, even though many would prefer to live at home.

Small schools such as Herm are often threatened with closure - because compared to bigger schools, they are expensive to (37) ________ . When schools close, the teachers lose their jobs and pupils are sent to (38) ________ school which is often far away. This often turns out to be disruptive for the pupils’ education.

(Adapted from Oxford Exam Trainer Helen Weale)

Trang isn’t at home now. I really need her help.

The reigning champion has been undergoing a punishable exercise regime with the hope of successfully defending his title.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that best combines each pair of sentences in the following questions.

Thomas Edison is famous for inventing the light bulb. But not many people know that in the 1920s he invented the first employment test to recruit staff for his research laboratory. It had questions in it like, ‘Who killed President Lincoln?’ and ‘Where is the Sargasso Sea?’. It was difficult to answer the questions and only a few people managed to pass the test. Nowadays we would ask: Is it really necessary to know things like this if you want to work for an inventor?

Now, a hundred years later, employment tests are still used by companies, but are very different in what they test. The way that companies recruit new staff has also changed. One recent trend in recruitment is ‘gamification’. Gamification, in general, means using characteristics of games (e.g. scoring points, competing with others and rules of play) to add some fun to situations that are usually more serious. One of the first companies which has used gamification to recruit new staff is the cosmetics company, L'Oréal. L'Oréal created an online computer game called Reveal, where you try to solve real-life problems in a virtual environment. The best players were invited for an interview.

Another company, the international hotel group Marriott, developed a Facebook game, My Marriott HotelTM to attract young people to a career in the hotel industry. In the game, players managed a virtual hotel kitchen. The game could be played in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Mandarin. It was designed to recruit staff in markets outside the USA. The game was a great success and brought thousands of people to the Marriott Facebook career page. Experts believe gamification is likely to become so common in recruitment that perhaps we should all train as games designers!

(Adapted from Navigate by Caroline Krantz and Julie Norton)

Bill and Mickey are at the supermarket.

- Bill: “Why don’t we buy some vegetables for dinner?”

- Mickey: “ ________ ”

The word it in paragraph 1 refers to ________ .