Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word or the phrase that is CLOSEST in meaning to the underlined in each of the following questions.
Some people think their abilities have limitations, but with encouragement they can perform much better than expected.
A.possibilities
B.certainties 
C.promises
D.boundaries

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each question from 51 to 60.
           Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective. Satire rarely offers original ideas. Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists don’t offer the world new philosophies. What they do is look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false. Don Quixote makes chivalry seem absurd; Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swift. It wasn’t the originality of the idea that made these satires popular. It was the manner of expression, the satiric method, that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with commonsensebriskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous  juxtaposition, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.
          Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they live in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an awareness of truth, though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear and read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideas that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish service of humanity. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they don’t hear them expressed.
The various purposes of satire include all of the following EXCEPT________.
A.introducing readers to unfamiliar situations
B.brushing away illusions
C.reminding readers of the truth
D.exposing false values

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each question from 51 to 60.
           Perhaps the most striking quality of satiric literature is its freshness, its originality of perspective. Satire rarely offers original ideas. Instead, it presents the familiar in a new form. Satirists don’t offer the world new philosophies. What they do is look at familiar conditions from a perspective that makes these conditions seem foolish, harmful, or affected. Satire jars us out of complacence into a pleasantly shocked realization that many of the values we unquestioningly accept are false. Don Quixote makes chivalry seem absurd; Brave New World ridicules the pretensions of science; A Modest Proposal dramatizes starvation by advocating cannibalism. None of these ideas is original. Chivalry was suspect before Cervantes, humanists objected to the claims of pure science before Aldous Huxley, and people were aware of famine before Swift. It wasn’t the originality of the idea that made these satires popular. It was the manner of expression, the satiric method, that made them interesting and entertaining. Satires are read because they are aesthetically satisfying works of art, not because they are morally wholesome or ethically instructive. They are stimulating and refreshing because with commonsensebriskness they brush away illusions and secondhand opinions. With spontaneous irreverence, satire rearranges perspectives, scrambles familiar objects into incongruous  juxtaposition, and speaks in a personal idiom instead of abstract platitude.
          Satire exists because there is need for it. It has lived because readers appreciate a refreshing stimulus, an irreverent reminder that they live in a world of platitudinous thinking, cheap moralizing, and foolish philosophy. Satire serves to prod people into an awareness of truth, though rarely to any action on behalf of truth. Satire tends to remind people that much of what they see, hear and read in popular media is sanctimonious, sentimental, and only partially true. Life resembles in only a slight degree the popular image of it. Soldiers rarely hold the ideas that movies attribute to them, nor do ordinary citizens devote their lives to unselfish service of humanity. Intelligent people know these things but tend to forget them when they don’t hear them expressed.
As a result of reading satiric literature, readers will be most likely to__________.
A.teach themselves to write fiction      
B.accept conventional points of view
C.become better informed about current affairs
D.reexamines their opinions and values

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each question from 36 to 45.
Until recently, most American entrepreneurs were men. Discrimination against women in business, the demands of caring for families, and lack of business training had kept the number of women entrepreneurs small. Now, however, businesses owned by women account for more than $40 billion in annual revenues, and this figure is likely to continue rising throughout the 1990s. As Carolyn Doppelt Gray, an official of the Small Business Administration has noted. “The 1970s was the decade of women entering management, and the 1980s turned out to be the decade of the woman entrepreneur.”
          What are some of the factors behind this trend? For one thing, as more women earn advanced degrees in business and enter the corporateworld, they are finding obstacles. Women are still excluded from most executive suites. Charlotte Taylor, a management consultant, had noted. “In the 1970s women believed if they got an MBA and worked hard they could become chairman of the board. Now they have found out that isn’t going to happen, so they go out on their own.”-
          In the past, most women entrepreneurs worked in “women’s” fields – cosmetics and clothing, for example. But this is changing. Consider ASK Computer System, a $22 million a year computer software business. It was founded in 1973 by Sandra Kurtzig who was then a housewife with degrees in math and engineering. When Kurtzig founded the business, her first product was software that let weekly newspapers keep tabs on their newspaper carriers – and her office was a bedroom at home, with a shoebox under the bed to hold the company’s cash. After she succeeded with the newspaper software system, she hired several bright computer-science graduates to develop additional programs. When these were marketed and sold, ASK began to grow. It now has 200 employees, and Sandra Kurtzig owns $66.9 million of stock. Of course, many women who start their own businesses fail, just as men often do. They still face hurdles in the business world, especially problems in raising money; the banking and finance world is still dominated by men, an old attitudes die hard. Most businesses owned by women are still quite small.
          But the situation is changing; there are likely to be many more Sandra Kurtzig in the years ahead.
What is the main idea of the text?
A.Women today are opening more businesses of their own.
B.Women are better at small businesses than men are.
C.The computer is especially lucrative for women today.
D.Women today are better educated than in the past, making them more attractive to the business world.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word(s) for each of the blanks.
          It’s nature of athletic records that they are broken and their place is taken by others. Yet in many sports (26)________there is a mark which isn’t (27)________in itself, but which becomes as legend as athletes try to break it. The most famous of these is the attempt to run the mile in less than four minutes.
          In 1945, the mile record was (28)_______to 4 minutes, 1.5 seconds. And there, for nine years, it stuck. Then, in 1954, a medical student (29)_______Roger Bannister decided to try and break the record. He had been (30)________for this day since running the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds the previous year.
          Two other runners set the pace for him and (31)________250 yards to go he burst ahead for the finish. He wrote afterwards: “my body had exhausted all its energy, but it (32)________on running just the same….. Those (33)________few second seemed never-ending. I could see the line of the finishing tape…I jumped like a man making a desperate attempt to save him from danger…” Bannister’s time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. (34)________this record had been broken on many (35)________since, Bannister’s achievement will never be forgotten.
(35)________
A.times
B.events
C.occasions
D.incidents

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word(s) for each of the blanks.
          It’s nature of athletic records that they are broken and their place is taken by others. Yet in many sports (26)________there is a mark which isn’t (27)________in itself, but which becomes as legend as athletes try to break it. The most famous of these is the attempt to run the mile in less than four minutes.
          In 1945, the mile record was (28)_______to 4 minutes, 1.5 seconds. And there, for nine years, it stuck. Then, in 1954, a medical student (29)_______Roger Bannister decided to try and break the record. He had been (30)________for this day since running the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds the previous year.
          Two other runners set the pace for him and (31)________250 yards to go he burst ahead for the finish. He wrote afterwards: “my body had exhausted all its energy, but it (32)________on running just the same….. Those (33)________few second seemed never-ending. I could see the line of the finishing tape…I jumped like a man making a desperate attempt to save him from danger…” Bannister’s time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. (34)________this record had been broken on many (35)________since, Bannister’s achievement will never be forgotten.
(34)________
A.but
B.in spite of
C.however
D.although

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word(s) for each of the blanks.
          It’s nature of athletic records that they are broken and their place is taken by others. Yet in many sports (26)________there is a mark which isn’t (27)________in itself, but which becomes as legend as athletes try to break it. The most famous of these is the attempt to run the mile in less than four minutes.
          In 1945, the mile record was (28)_______to 4 minutes, 1.5 seconds. And there, for nine years, it stuck. Then, in 1954, a medical student (29)_______Roger Bannister decided to try and break the record. He had been (30)________for this day since running the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds the previous year.
          Two other runners set the pace for him and (31)________250 yards to go he burst ahead for the finish. He wrote afterwards: “my body had exhausted all its energy, but it (32)________on running just the same….. Those (33)________few second seemed never-ending. I could see the line of the finishing tape…I jumped like a man making a desperate attempt to save him from danger…” Bannister’s time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. (34)________this record had been broken on many (35)________since, Bannister’s achievement will never be forgotten.
(33)________
A.last
B.late
C.latest
D.later

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word(s) for each of the blanks.
          It’s nature of athletic records that they are broken and their place is taken by others. Yet in many sports (26)________there is a mark which isn’t (27)________in itself, but which becomes as legend as athletes try to break it. The most famous of these is the attempt to run the mile in less than four minutes.
          In 1945, the mile record was (28)_______to 4 minutes, 1.5 seconds. And there, for nine years, it stuck. Then, in 1954, a medical student (29)_______Roger Bannister decided to try and break the record. He had been (30)________for this day since running the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds the previous year.
          Two other runners set the pace for him and (31)________250 yards to go he burst ahead for the finish. He wrote afterwards: “my body had exhausted all its energy, but it (32)________on running just the same….. Those (33)________few second seemed never-ending. I could see the line of the finishing tape…I jumped like a man making a desperate attempt to save him from danger…” Bannister’s time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. (34)________this record had been broken on many (35)________since, Bannister’s achievement will never be forgotten.
(32)________
A.went
B.continued
C.ran
D.got

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word(s) for each of the blanks.
          It’s nature of athletic records that they are broken and their place is taken by others. Yet in many sports (26)________there is a mark which isn’t (27)________in itself, but which becomes as legend as athletes try to break it. The most famous of these is the attempt to run the mile in less than four minutes.
          In 1945, the mile record was (28)_______to 4 minutes, 1.5 seconds. And there, for nine years, it stuck. Then, in 1954, a medical student (29)_______Roger Bannister decided to try and break the record. He had been (30)________for this day since running the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds the previous year.
          Two other runners set the pace for him and (31)________250 yards to go he burst ahead for the finish. He wrote afterwards: “my body had exhausted all its energy, but it (32)________on running just the same….. Those (33)________few second seemed never-ending. I could see the line of the finishing tape…I jumped like a man making a desperate attempt to save him from danger…” Bannister’s time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. (34)________this record had been broken on many (35)________since, Bannister’s achievement will never be forgotten.
(31)________
A.on
B.in
C.with  
D.by

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word(s) for each of the blanks.
          It’s nature of athletic records that they are broken and their place is taken by others. Yet in many sports (26)________there is a mark which isn’t (27)________in itself, but which becomes as legend as athletes try to break it. The most famous of these is the attempt to run the mile in less than four minutes.
          In 1945, the mile record was (28)_______to 4 minutes, 1.5 seconds. And there, for nine years, it stuck. Then, in 1954, a medical student (29)_______Roger Bannister decided to try and break the record. He had been (30)________for this day since running the mile in 4 minutes, 2 seconds the previous year.
          Two other runners set the pace for him and (31)________250 yards to go he burst ahead for the finish. He wrote afterwards: “my body had exhausted all its energy, but it (32)________on running just the same….. Those (33)________few second seemed never-ending. I could see the line of the finishing tape…I jumped like a man making a desperate attempt to save him from danger…” Bannister’s time was 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. (34)________this record had been broken on many (35)________since, Bannister’s achievement will never be forgotten.
(30)________
A.trying
B.studying
C.running
D.training