A.over
B.under
C.through
D.between

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 35 to 42.
Humans are bringing about another global-scale change in the atmosphere: the increase in what are called greenhouse gases. Like glass in a greenhouse, these gases admit the Sun's light but tend to reflect back downward the heat that is radiated from the ground below, trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere. This process is known as the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is the most significant of these gases – there is 25 percent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than there was a century ago, the result of our burning coal and fuels derived from oil. Methane, nitrous oxide, and CFCs are greenhouse gases as well.
Scientists predict that increases in these gases in the atmosphere will make the Earth a warmer place. They expect a global rise in average temperature somewhere between 1.0 and 3.5 degrees Celsius in the next century. Average temperatures have in fact been rising and the years from 1987 to 1997 were the warmest years on record. Some scientists are reluctant to say that global warming has actually begun because climate naturally varies from year to year and decade to decade, and it takes many years of records to be sure of a fundamental change. There is little disagreement, though, that global warming is looming.
Global warming will have different effects in different regions. A warmed world is expected to have more extreme weather, with more rain during wet periods, longer droughts, and more powerful storms. Although the effects of future climate changes are unknown, some predict that exaggerated weather conditions may translate into better agricultural yields in areas such as the western United States, where temperature and rainfall are expected to increase, while dramatic decreases in rainfall may lead to severe droughts and plunging agricultural yields in parts of Africa, for example.
Warmer temperatures are expected to partially melt the polar ice caps, leading to a projected sea level rise of 50 centimeters by the year 2050. A sea level rise of this magnitude would flood coastal cities, force people to abandon low-lying islands, and completely inundate coastal wetlands. Diseases like malaria, which at present are primarily found in the tropics, may become more common in the regions of the globe between the tropics and the polar regions, called the temperate zones. For many of the world's plant species, and for animal species that are not easily able to shift their territories as their habitat grows warmer, climate change may bring extinction.
(Source: Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation)
The word "looming" in paragraph 2 probably means                                       .  
A.showing
B.fading
C.ending
D.appearing

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word(s) CLOSEST in meaning to the underlined word(s) in each of the following questions. 
“A friend in need is a friend indeed”: Our friends have voiced their strong criticism of China’s escalation of tension on our continental shelf. 
A.facing the reality  
B.worsening the situation 
C.easing the tension  
D.improving the condition

He asked me_________.
A.what my phone number 
B.what my phone number were
C. what my phone number was    
D.what was my phone number

Task 1. Mark the letter A, B, C, D to indicate the word whose underlined part differs from the other three in pronunciation.

A.practising                
B.amusing
C.advertising              
D.arising

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word(s) CLOSEST in meaning to the underlined word(s) in each of the following questions.
The issue of pay rise will loom large at this year’s conference as it is what all the attendees want to mention.
A.be discussed 
B.be improved
C.become important 
D.be avoided

Now I understand why she spoke English most of the time: this was a way of avoiding___________for one of the natives.
A.to take her                                
B.taking    
C.being taken                           
D.to be taken

__________that increasing numbers of compact-disc players will be bought by consumers in the years to come.
 
A.They are anticipated 
B.In anticipation
C.Anticipating       
D.It is anticipated

This bookshop is rather small in _______with the ones we have just visited. (compare)
A.comparative
B.comparision
C.comparatist
D.comparator

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 39 to 45.
Long before they can actually speak, babies pay special attention to the speech they hear around them. Within the first month of their lives, babies' responses to the sound of the human voice will be different from their responses to other sorts of auditory stimuli. They will stop crying when they hear a person talking, but not if they hear a bell or the sound of a rattle. At first, the sounds that an infant notices might be only those words that receive the heaviest emphasis and that often occur at the ends of utterances. By the time they are six or seven weeks old, babies can detect the difference between syllables pronounced with rising and falling inflections. Very soon, these differences in adult stress and intonation can influence babies' emotional states and behavior. Long before they develop actual language comprehension, babies can sense when an adult is playful or angry, attempting to initiate or terminate new behavior, and so on, merely on the basis of cues such as the rate, volume, and melody of adult speech.
Adults make it as easy as they can for babies to pick up a language by exaggerating such cues. One researcher observed babies and their mothers in six diverse cultures and found that, in all six languages, the mothers used simplified syntax, short utterances and nonsense sounds, and transformed certain sounds into baby talk. Other investigators have noted that when mothers talk to babies who are only a few months old, they exaggerate the pitch, loudness, and intensity of their words. They also exaggerate their facial expressions, hold vowels longer, and emphasize certain words.
More significant for language development than their response to general intonation is observation that tiny babies can make relatively fine distinctions between speech sounds. In other words, babies enter the world with the ability to make precisely those perceptual discriminations that are necessary if they are to acquire aural language.
Babies obviously derive pleasure from sound input, too: even as young as nine months they will listen to songs or stories, although the words themselves are beyond their understanding. For babies, language is a sensory-motor delight rather than the route to prosaic meaning that it often is for adults.
The word “They” in paragraph 2 refers to _______.
A.mothers               
B.investigators          
C.babies        
D.words