Mai had forgotten to turn off the light in her badroom before she left. Her mother blamed her for that.

Mary finished all her homework. Then, she played badminton with her sister.

Climate change leads to numerous catastrophic consequences.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following sentences.

I started writing this essay hours ago and it’s still not right.

Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?

What was surprising about the students’ results after taking the 1950s-style exams?

According to the passage, how did exams in the 1950s differ from those in the twenty-first century?

Which of the following statements is TRUE about the food the students ate at school?

The word “authoritarian” in the second paragraph is closest in meaning to ____.   

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 29 to 35.

Do you think education is better now than it was in your grandparents’ time? Many older people in the UK believe the opposite. “Schools were better in our day,” they complain. “There isn’t enough discipline these days. Kids don’t work as hard as we did, either. The syllabus isn’t as challenging, so clever students aren’t being stretched enough. They need to study things in greater depth. Exams are much, much easier now as well.”

Were schools better years ago? Some British teenagers travelled back in time to a 1950s boarding school. They got a big surprise! The first shock came when the teenagers met their new teachers. Dressed in traditional black gowns, they look so frosty and uncaring! They were really authoritarian, too, so anyone caught breaking the rules – talking in classes, mucking about in the playground or playing truant – was in big trouble! Punishments included writing ‘lines, or staying after class to do detention. The naughtiest kids were expelled.

Things were just as bad after class. At meal times the students had to endure a diet of plain, no-nonsense, healthy food. Homework was obligatory and it took ages! Copying essays off the Internet wasn’t an option, as personal computers didn’t exist in the 1950s!

At the end of ‘term’ everyone sat 1950s-style exams. The old exams were much longer than their twenty- first century equivalents and involved learning huge amounts of facts by heart. History papers were all dates and battles. Math’s papers were trickier, too; calculators weren’t around in the 1950s, so the students had to memorize multiplication tables and master long division. Our candidates found this really difficult.

The exam results surprised a lot of people. Students predicted to do well in their real-life, twenty-first century exams often got low grades in the 1950s exams. Does this prove modern exams are too easy? Do twenty-first century kids rely too much on modem technology, like calculators and computers? The TV series' That'll teach ‘me! focused on a 1960s vocational school. UK school-kids study a range of academic subjects these days. But in the 1960s, children judged to be less ‘able’ went to vocational schools. These helped them learn job skills. Boys studied subjects like metalwork, woodwork or gardening. In some classes, they even learned how to milk goats! The girls’ timetables included secretarial skills. They also learned to cook, clean and sew – probably not much fun for most girls.

What criticism is sometimes made about modern education in the first paragraph?

Some experts say, causing sea levels (28)____several meters over the next 50 to 150 years.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 24 to 28.

The impacts of global warming are being felt everywhere. Extreme heat waves have (24)____ tens of thousands of deaths around the world in recent years. (25)____ in an alarming sign of events to come, Antarctica (26)____ been losing about 134 billions metric tons of ice per year since 2002. This rate could speed up (27)____ we keep burning fossil fuels at our current pace, some experts say, causing sea levels (28)____several meters over the next 50 to 150 years.

          (Text adapted from https://www.nrdc.org/stories/global-waring-101)

Having watched TV programes about the farmer’s careless use of chemical fertilizers on they crops, many citizen dwellers decided to grow their own vegetables.