Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

Most parents want their sons and daughters to have equal chances of success when they grow up. Today, equality of the sexes is largely mandated by public policy and law. However, old-fashioned ideas and a lot of prejudice are still part of our culture and present challenging questions for parents.

Gender stereotypes are rigid ideas about how boys and girls should behave. We all know what these stereotypes are: A “feminine” girl should be insecure, accommodating and a little illogical in her thinking. A “masculine” boy should be strong, unemotional, aggressive, and competitive. How are children exposed to these stereotypes? According to the researchers David and Myra Sadker of the American University of Washington, D.C., boys and girls are often treated differently in the classroom. They found out that when boys speak, teachers usually offer constructive comments, when girls speech, teachers tend to focus on the behavior. It’s more important how the girls act rather than what they say.

The emphasis on differences begins at birth and continues throughout childhood. For example, few people would give pink baby clothes to a boy or a blue blanket to a girl. Later, many of us give girls dolls and miniature kitchenware, while boys receive action figures and construction sets. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when certain activities are deemed appropriate for one sex but not the other. According to Heather J. Nicholson, Ph.D., director of the National Resource Center for Girls, Inc., this kind of practice prevents boys and girls from acquiring important skills for their future lives.

“The fact is,” says Nicholson, “that society functions as a kind of sorting machine regarding gender. In a recent survey, fifty-eight percent of eighth-grade girls but only six percent of boys earned money caring for younger children. On the other hand, twenty-seven percent of boys but only three percent of girls earned money doing lawn work”. If we are serious about educating a generation to be good workers and parents, we need to eliminate such stereotypes as those mentioned previously.

Gender stereotypes inevitably are passed to our children. However, by becoming aware of the messages our children receive, we can help them develop ways to overcome these incorrect ideas. To counteract these ideas, parents can look for ways to challenge and support their children, and encourage confidence in ways that go beyond what society’s fixed ideas about differences of sex are.

(Source: https://en.islcollective.com)

Which of the following could be the main idea of the passage?

It can be inferred from the passage that _______.

According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true?

The word “ceased” in paragraph 2 mostly means _______.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 44 to 50

If you go back far enough, everything lived in the sea. At various points in evolutionary history, enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out onto the land, sometimes even to the most parched deserts, taking their own private seawater with them in blood and cellular fluids. In addition to the reptiles, birds, mammals and insects which we see all around us, other groups that have succeeded out of water include scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without whose prior invasion of the land, none of the other migrations could have happened.

Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing and reproduction. Nevertheless, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial re-tooling, and returned to the water again. Seals have only gone part way back. They show us what the intermediates might have been like, on the way to extreme cases such as whales and dugongs. Whales (including the small whales we call dolphins) and dugongs, with their close cousins, the manatees, ceased to be land creatures altogether and reverted to the full marine habits of their remote ancestors. They don’t even come ashore to breed. They do, however, still breathe air, having never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their earlier marine incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time ago and, like all vertebrate returnees to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one respect, less fully given back to the water than whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches.

There is evidence that all modem turtles are descended from a terrestrial ancestor which lived before most of the dinosaurs. There are two key fossils called Proganochelys quenstedti and Palaeochersis talampayensis dating from early dinosaur times, which appear to be close to the ancestry of all modem turtles and tortoise. You might wonder how we can tell whether fossil animals lived in land or in water, especially if only fragments are found. Sometimes it’s obvious. Ichthyosaurs were reptilian contemporaries of the dinosaurs, with fins and streamlined bodies. The fossils look like dolphins and they surely lived like dolphins, in the water. With turtles it is a little less obvious. One way to tell is by measuring the bones of their forelimbs.

Which of the following is TRUE about the main reason for discrimination?