Questions 1-10

In the later part of the nineteenth century, the direction of expansion in the
United States shifted from the countryside to the city. During the crises of the 1870s
and the 1890s, tens of thousands of families abandoned their farms and ranches and
Line headed for urban areas. Even prosperity produced migration from the countryside to
5 the city. As pioneers settled rural districts, eventually the number of farms or ranches
approached the maximum number the land would support. Landowners sought to
increase their productivity through mechanization, and those who were successful
invested their returns in the purchase of additional land and equipment, expanding their
holdings by buying the farms of less fortunate neighbors, who moved on. Compare this
10 pattern of economic development with that of the city, where innovations in
manufacturing led to the creation of new opportunities and new jobs. But in the
countryside, economic development inevitably meant depopulation. Rural areas in the
central part of the country had begun to lose population by the 1880s, and over the next
half century most of the rural West was overtaken by this trend. For every industrial
15 worker who became a farmer, 20 young men from farms rushed to the city to compete
for his job.
Less well-known is the fact that for every 20 young farm men, as many as 25 or
30 young farm women moved from the rural West to the cities. As a government report
noted in 1920, young farm women were more likely to leave the farm and move to a
20 western city than were young farm men. This amounted to a stunning reversal of the
traditional pattern of western urban settlement, which featured the presence of many
young, unattached men among the migrants but almost no single women.
What explains the greater rates of female migration to the cities? In the opinion of
many contemporaries, young women were pushed out of the countryside by constricted
opportunities, particularly limited educational and vocational options.

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 Questions 11-21
The deepest that any person can get below the surface of Earth is to the bottom of
the deepest mine, a mere 4 kilometers; the deepest hole ever drilled into Earth’s crust
reached less than 20 kilometers below the surface. Although the details of Earth’s
Line gravitational and magnetic fields give some extra information about what is going on
5 inside Earth, for the most part our understanding of Earth’s interior is still dependent
on the detection of seismic waves, the vibrations caused by earthquakes. These waves
travel through Earth and are reflected and refracted by boundaries between different
layers of rock.
What the analysis of seismic waves shows is a layered structure built around a solid
10 inner core, which has a radius of about 1,600 kilometers. This inner core is surrounded
by a liquid outer core, which has a thickness of just over 1,800 kilometers. The whole
core is very dense, probably rich in iron, and has a temperature of nearly 5,000 degrees
Celsius. The circulation of this electrically conducting material in the liquid outer core
is clearly responsible for the generation of Earth’s magnetic field, but nobody has ever
15 been able to work out a thoroughly satisfactory model of how this process works.
The high temperature in the core is in part a result of the fact that the Earth formed
as a ball of molten rock. Once a cool crust had formed around the molten ball of rock,
it functioned as an insulating blanket. Even so, without some continuing injection of
heat, the interior of Earth could not still be as hot as it is today, more than four billion
20 years later. The extra heat comes from radioactive isotopes (originally manufactured by
stars), which decay into stable elements and give out energy as they do so. In about
ten billion years, even this source of heat will be used up, and Earth will gradually cool
down.
11. What does the passage 12. The word “mere” in line 2 is
mainly discuss? closest in meaning to
(A) The similarities between (A) approximate
Earth’s inner core and (B) insignificant
outer core (C) measured
(B) The structure and (D) lengthy
temperature of Earth’s
interior
(C) When seismic waves
were first used to
study Earth’s interior
(D) Why Earth’s solid inner
core is surrounded by
a molten outer core

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 Questions 22-32
Amber is not a mineral but is used as, and called, a semiprecious stone. The oldest
and most continuous use of it is for decoration. Although it is ancient tree resin, amber
is not fossilized in the most commonly understood sense of the word. We often think of
Line fossils as the remains of extinct organisms, like dinosaur bones, and impressions of
5 ferns, leaves, and insect wings in rocks. Unlike these kinds of fossils, which are usually
mineral replacements of the original structure, amber is entirely organic; its
composition from the original tree resin has changed little over millions of years. Even
the inclusions of tiny organisms in amber are strikingly intact. Exquisite preservation is
a natural property of certain kinds of resins, although the process is not completely
10 understood.
Hundreds of deposits of amber occur around the world, most of them in trace
quantities. Amber is found in places where the hardened resin of various extinct plants
is preserved, but special conditions are required to preserve this substance over
millions of years, and only occasionally has amber survived in quantities large enough
15 to be mined. Only about 20 such rich deposits of amber exist in the world, and the
deposits vary greatly in age. It is a common misconception that amber is derived
exclusively from pine trees; in fact, amber was formed by various conifer trees (only a few
of them apparently related to pines), as well as by some tropical broad-leaved
trees.
20 Amber is almost always preserved in a sediment that collected at the bottom of an
ancient lagoon or river delta at the edge of an ocean or sea. The specific gravity of solid
amber is only slightly higher than that of water; although it does not float, it is buoyant
and easily carried by water (amber with bubbles is even more buoyant). Thus, amber
would be carried downriver with logs from fallen amber-producing trees and cast up as
25 beach drift on the shores or in the shallows of a delta into which the river empties.
Over time, sediments would gradually bury the wood and resin. The resin would
become amber, and the wood a blackened, charcoal-like substance called lignite.

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 Questions 33-42
Native Americans probably arrived from Asia in successive waves over several
millennia, crossing a plain hundreds of miles wide that now lies inundated by 160 feet
of water released by melting glaciers. For several periods of time, the first beginning
Line around 60,000 B.C. and the last ending around 7000 B.C., this land bridge was open.
5 The first people traveled in the dusty trails of the animals they hunted. They brought
with them not only their families, weapons, and tools but also a broad metaphysical
understanding, sprung from dreams and visions and articulated in myth and song,
which complemented their scientific and historical knowledge of the lives of animals
and of people. All this they shaped in a variety of languages, bringing into being oral
10 literatures of power and beauty.
Contemporary readers, forgetting the origins of Western epic, lyric, and dramatic
forms, are easily disposed to think of “literature” only as something written. But on
reflection it becomes clear that the more critically useful as well as the more frequently
employed sense of the term concerns the artfulness of the verbal creation, not its mode
15 of presentation. Ultimately, literature is aesthetically valued, regardless of language,
culture, or mode of presentation, because some significant verbal achievement results
from the struggle in words between tradition and talent. Verbal art has the ability to
shape out a compelling inner vision in some skillfully crafted public verbal form.
Of course, the differences between the written and oral modes of expression are not
20 without consequences for an understanding of Native American literature. The
essential difference is that a speech event is an evolving communication, an “emergent
form,” the shape, functions, and aesthetic values of which become more clearly
realized over the course of the performance. In performing verbal art, the performer
assumes responsibility for the manner as well as the content of the performance, while
25 the audience assumes the responsibility for evaluating the performer’s competence in
both areas. It is this intense mutual engagement that elicits the display of skill and
shapes the emerging performance. Where written literature provides us with a tradition
of texts, oral literature offers a tradition of performances.

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Questions 43-50
Color in textiles is produced by dyeing, by printing, or by painting. Until the
nineteenth century, all dyes were derived from vegetable or, more rarely, animal or
mineral sources.
Line Since madder plants could be grown practically everywhere, the roots of some
5 species of the madder plant family were used from the earliest period to produce a
whole range of reds. Red animal dyes, derived from certain species of scale insects,
were also highly valued from ancient times through the Middle Ages. Blues were
obtained from indigo, which was widely cultivated in India and exported from there,
and from woad, a plant common in Europe and also used in the Near East from the
10 beginning of the Christian era. Before the first, nonfading “solid” green was invented
in the early nineteenth century, greens were achieved by the overdyeing or overprinting
of yellow and blue. However, yellow dyes, whether from weld or some other plant
source such as saffron or turmeric, invariably fade or disappear. This accounts for the
bluish tinge of what were once bright greens in, for example, woven tapestry.
15 The range of natural colors was hugely expanded and, indeed, superseded by the
chemical dyes developed during the eighteen hundreds. By 1900 a complete range of
synthetic colors had been evolved, many of them reaching a standard of resistance to
fading from exposure to light and to washing that greatly exceeded that of natural
dyestuffs. Since then, the petroleum industry has added many new chemicals, and from
20 these other types of dyestuffs have been developed. Much of the research in dyes was
stimulated by the peculiarities of some of the new synthetic fibers. Acetate rayon, for
example, seemed at first to have no affinity for dyes and a new range of dyes had to be
developed; nylon and Terylene presented similar problems.
The printing of textiles has involved a number of distinct methods. With the
25 exception of printing patterns directly onto the cloth, whether by block, roller, or
screen, all of these are based on dyeing; that is, the immersion of the fabric in a dye
bath.

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