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

The authors noted that while other forms of pollution are decreasing, noise pollution has been increasing. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that there has been an increase in the number of people who have been complaining about excessive noise in the WHO region. Populations that are exposed to high noise levels can be afflicted by other symptoms such as: stress reactions, sleep-stage changes, and clinical symptoms like hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. All these impacts can contribute to premature mortality. It is important to note that these adverse health problems impact all age groups including children and adolescents. In fact, it has been reported that children who live and or study in an area afflicted with noise pollution tend to suffer from stress, impairments in memory and attention as well as difficulty reading.

“In Western Europe, the guidelines say, traffic noise results in an annual loss of at least one million healthy years”. Traffic noise is currently ranked second among environmental threats to public health. The danger of noise pollution is more present to us when we are asleep. Because the human ear is so sensitive, it never rests, it is always working, picking up and transmitting sounds for our brains to interpret. This always on working process is where the danger lies, though you may be sleeping, sounds are still being picked up and processed. The most common side effects of this phenomenon are sleep disturbance and tiredness, impaired memory judgment, and psychomotor skills. The other more serious outcomes of this can be the triggering of the body’s acute stress response, which raises blood pressure and heart rate as the body and brain go into a state of hyperarousal. According to the European Environment Agency, at least 10,000 cases of premature deaths from noise exposure occur each year, although incomplete data mean this number is significantly underestimated.

Which of the following is the best title for 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?