2015 — Review

Research Students

Section I Vocabulary

1. Some of the ( ) of hay fever are a runny nose, watery eyes, and a headache.

2. The president believes that all ( ) of the company should help one another even if they belong to different departments.

3. Some people will ( ) in their efforts to stop smoking.

4. He would never do anything to ( ) the future of his government.

5. She didn't sound very ( ) about the idea of her parents coming to visit.

6. The tension between those countries was almost ( ).

7. My daughter studied those subjects ( ) in order to pass the exams.

8. A recent survey revealed that the ( ) majority of small businesses go broke within the first two years.

9. The time it takes to climb a rope or a ladder leaves soldiers highly ( ) to attack.

10. In this country, the film market is ( ) by a few major corporations that have monopoly control over the production, distribution, and screening of movies.

Section II Grammar

1. We will now discuss the ( ) merits of each candidate.

2. You should complete and submit this form ( ) Friday, April 3.

3. Don't you find ( ) unpleasant walking in the heavy rain?

4. ( ) it not been for the support of the volunteers, we couldn't have organized such a large event.

5. John spent 50 dollars and had his watch ( ) at a watchmaker's shop.

6. The organizer ordered the receptionists to take the names of ( ) comes to the conference.

7. Over the next few years, the size of the armed forces is expected to shrink ( ) 20 percent during peacetime.

8. Strange ( ) it may seem, there is no generally agreed-upon way to distinguish between a "language" and a "dialect."

9. Due to the variety of plants and animals in the ocean, it is impossible to know exactly ( ) many insects or sea creatures there are.

10. Believe it or not, at the beginning of the 20th century there ( ) still places in the world where you could pay your bills with shells and beads.

Section III Error Detection

1. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]Many of us see planes as cold and flu factories, with recirculated air spreading virus around a long metal tube. [B]But that's only partly true. [C]There's no doubt that traveling by plane increases the risk of developing respiratory infections, but it has more to do with passengers being crowded into a confined space than because of the recirculated air, [D]says infectious diseases specialist Dr. Irani Ratnam.

2. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]Leonardo da Vinci made many important discoveries; for instance, he produced the first accurate sketch of the human spine. [B]His notes also contain the earliest known description of a certain type of liver disease. Had he published his findings, [C]he would be considered important than the Belgian scientist Andreas Vesalius, whose influential textbook "On the Fabric of the Human Body" appeared in 1543. [D]But he never did.

3. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]I used to think of myself as a fairly cosmopolitan sort of person, but my bookshelves told a different story. [B]Apart from a few Indian novels and one or two Australian books, my literature collection consisted British and American titles. [C]I never tackled anything in translation. [D]My reading was confined to stories by English-speaking authors.

4. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]Color is determined by which wavelengths of light bounce off an object. [B]When light hit a surface, [C]certain wavelengths can be absorbed by the material's electrons. [D]Whichever wavelengths cannot be absorbed bounce back to be seen as a particular color by an observer.

5. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]Certain fears can be inherited through the generations, a provocative study of mouse reports. [B]The authors suggest that a similar phenomenon could influence anxiety and addiction in human beings. [C]But some researchers are skeptical. [D]The findings do not identify any biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon.

6. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]The sari is a lifelong garment. [B]Tied tight or loose, low slung with your navel showing, or over a pregnant bump, the same one will fit you from adolescence into old age. [C]It can be worn as a dress, a sarong, as pantaloons, and even shorts. [D]What more, the handwoven sari industry supports tens of thousands of Indian workers in rural areas.

7. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]France once had a great literary culture, and most French people would say it still do. [B]But if so, how come their books don't sell in the English-speaking world? [C]Is that our fault or theirs? [D]And how come the French themselves read so many books that are translated from English and other languages?

8. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]Cats, according to new research from Japan, recognize their owner's voice but just can't be bothered to react to it. [B]"Historically speaking, cats have not been domesticated to obey humans' orders," the research team said. [C]This is in contrast to the history of dogs and humans. [D]The former has been bred over thousands of years to respond to orders and commands.

9. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]Unless reductions in the emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels begin soon, the Earth might be much closer to catastrophic warming than is widely believed. [B]So argues climatologist James Hansen of the Columbia University Earth Institute. [C]Their paper further underscores other recent studies showing that [D]even small delays in shrinking the industrial output of carbon dioxide could complicate attempts to temper climate change for generations.

10. Identify the grammatically incorrect part:

[A]In days of old, the platforms of train stations were knee deep in what looked like fog. [B]I always thought was steam from the engines, [C]but now I wonder if it didn't come from cigarettes. [D]Depending on your preference, it was either absolute heaven or absolute hell.

Section IV Cloze

The interest in the nature of human languages appears to have arisen when the human species evolved in the history of time. There is no culture that has left records that do not reveal either philosophical or practical concerns for this unique human characteristic. Different historical periods reveal different emphases and different goals although both interests have existed in parallel. Egyptian surgeons were concerned with clinical questions; an Egyptian papyrus, dated about 1700 BCE, includes medical descriptions of language disorders following brain injury. The philosophers of ancient Greece, on the other hand, argued and debated questions dealing with the origin and the nature of language. Plato, writing between 427 and 348 BCE, devoted his Cratylus Dialogue to linguistic issues of his day, and Aristotle was concerned with language from both rhetorical and philosophical points of view. The Greeks and the Romans also wrote grammars, and discussed the sounds of language and the structures of words and sentences. This interest continued through the medieval period and the Renaissance in an unbroken thread to the present period. Linguistic scholarship, however, was not confined to Europe; in India the Sanskrit language was the subject of detailed analysis as early as the twelfth century BCE. Panini's Sanskrit grammar dated about 500 BCE is still considered to be one of the greatest scholarly linguistic achievements. In addition, Chinese and Arabic scholars have all contributed to our understanding of human language. The major efforts of the linguists in the nineteenth century were devoted to historical and comparative studies. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist in this tradition, turned his attention to the structural principles of language rather than to the ways in which languages change and develop, and in so doing, became a major influence on twentieth-century linguistics.

1. Fill in blank ( 1 )

2. Fill in blank ( 2 )

3. Fill in blank ( 3 )

4. Fill in blank ( 4 )

5. Fill in blank ( 5 )

6. Fill in blank ( 6 )

7. Fill in blank ( 7 )

8. Fill in blank ( 8 )

9. Fill in blank ( 9 )

10. Fill in blank ( 10 )

Section V_1 Reading I

Long before guns and arrows, spears were the tool of choice for ancient hunters. Topped with sharp, pointed rocks, spears at first made it possible to kill animals by stabbing them close-up. Later, spears were sturdy enough to be thrown at animals from a distance. Until recently, the earliest known throwing spears dated back 80,000 years. But a recent discovery in East Africa now extends that type of spear hunting to a far earlier time, one that precedes humans. It suggests that at least 279,000 years ago, an earlier, humanlike species must have been hunting big game, like hippos and antelope. Scientists dug up spear tips from that far back in time at a site in Ethiopia called Gademotta. Back then, during the Stone Age, tools were usually made from found materials like stone, wood or bone. Any early spear-throwers at that time weren't people but early ancestors of humans called hominids. Hominids are a family of primates that includes humans and their extinct ancestors (known only from fossils). The ancient hominids' spears most likely were long wooden poles topped with sharp, hand-chipped tips made from glassy volcanic rock, explains Yonatan Sahle, an archaeologist who has been studying the ancient spear tips made from this rock, known as obsidian. Given the tips' age, his team concludes that prehuman species must have spear-hunted too. His team reported its findings on November 13, 2013, in the journal PLOS ONE. The new finding challenges previously held ideas about the earliest throwers of stone-tipped spears, says archaeologist John Shea, who did not work on the new study. Previous studies had suggested ancient peoples started attaching stones to spears capable of stabbing animals close-up no earlier than 100,000 years ago. The new find shows that more complex throwing spears were made at Gademotta long before then. They probably belonged to a species "out of which the human species evolved in eastern Africa," Shea told Science News. Which hominid left behind the points? No one knows. Scientists have unearthed no prehuman fossils at the site.

1. According to the article, the earlier type of spears differed from the later type in that they were

2. According to the recent discovery, the earliest known use of spears was

3. The prehuman species that used the spears described in the recent discovery were

4. Until the recent discovery, it had been generally believed that

5. Just who made the recently discovered, earliest known throwing spear is

Section V_2 Reading II

For most of human history, science has been used alongside magic, religion, and technology to try to understand and control the world. Science might be something as simple as observing the sun rise each morning, or as complicated as identifying a new chemical element. Magic could be looking at the stars to foretell the future, or maybe what we would call a superstition, like keeping out of the path of a black cat. Religion might lead you to sacrifice an animal to appease the gods, or to pray for world peace. Technology might involve knowing how to light a fire or build a new computer. Science, magic, religion, and technology were used by the earliest human societies that settled in river valleys across India, China, and the Middle East. The river valleys were fertile, which allowed crops to be planted each year, enough to feed a large community. This allowed some people in these communities enough time to focus on one thing, to practice and practice, and become expert at it. The first "scientists" (though they wouldn't have been called that at the time) were probably priests. In the beginning, technology (which is about "doing") was more important than science (which is about "knowing"). You need to know what to do, and how to do it, before you can successfully grow your crops, make your clothes, or cook your food. You don't need to know why some berries are poisonous, or some plants edible, to learn how to avoid one and grow the other. You don't have to have a reason why the sun rises each morning and sets each evening, for these things to happen, each and every day. But human beings are not only able to learn things about the world around them, they are also curious, and that curiosity lies at the heart of science. We know more about the people of Babylon (in present-day Iraq) than we do about other ancient civilizations for a simple reason: They wrote on clay tablets. Thousands of these tablets, written almost 6,000 years ago, have survived. They tell us how the Babylonians viewed their world. They were extremely organized, keeping careful records of their harvests, stores, and state finances. The priests spent much of their time looking after the facts and figures of ancient life. They were also the main "scientists," surveying land, measuring distances, viewing the sky, and developing techniques for counting. We still use some of their discoveries today. Like us, they used tally marks to keep count; this is when you make four vertical marks and cross through these diagonally with a fifth, which you might have seen in cartoons of a prison cell, made by the prisoners keeping count of how many years they have been locked up. Far more importantly, it was the Babylonians who said there should be sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour, as well as 360 degrees in a circle and seven days in the week. It is funny to think that there is no real reason why sixty seconds make a minute, and seven days make a week. Other numbers would have worked just as well. But, the Babylonian system got picked up elsewhere and it has stuck.

1. What do science, magic, religion, and technology have in common?

2. What made it possible for the earliest human societies to settle in the areas of India, China, and the Middle East?

3. Why do people today know more about Babylon than other ancient civilizations?

4. Based on the information provided in the article, which of the following best describes the tally marks used by the Babylonians?

5. Which of the following statements is TRUE?