PASSAGE 3
Questions 21-30
A few languages have only one class of nouns and treat all nouns the same way, but most languages have different classes of nouns. One common way to classify nouns is by gender. In Indo-European languages, genders typically include feminine, masculine, and neuter. Latin has all three of these, but in many of its modern descendants, such as Spanish and French, the neuter gender has all but disappeared. However, a few words in French, especially pronouns with no clear gender, such as cela (this), are considered neuter by some grammarians.
English is one language that uses natural gender (also called logical gender). Gender depends on biology. Mother is feminine, father is masculine, and chair is neuter. There are, however, a few oddities. Ships are sometimes referred to as she, and so are nations. Animals can be neuter or follow natural gender.
Other languages use grammatical gender. Languages that have only two genders, such as Arabic, Spanish, French, and Urdu, all use grammatical gender. So do some languages, such as German, Russian, and Greek, which have masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. Sometimes grammatical gender is logical, especially for nouns that refer to people. In Spanish, for example, hijo (son) is masculine and hija (daughter) is feminine. However, while the assignment of gender to certain nouns seems obvious to a native speaker of these languages, it seems arbitrary and confusing to non-native speakers. Why is chaise (chair) feminine in French but banc (bench) masculine? Why, in German, is Fels (rock) masculine, Fenster (window) and Tür (door) feminine? And noun gender varies by culture. In French, soleil (sun) is masculine, while lune (moon) is feminine. The reverse is true in German: Sonne (sun) is feminine, but Mond (moon) is masculine.
In some languages, such as modern Greek, it is impossible to predict the gender of a noun by the form of the noun. Gender must simply be memorized. In other languages, it is possible, or at least it is sometimes possible. In Latin, most singular nouns that end in a are feminine, most singular nouns that end in us are masculine, and most nouns that end in um are neuter. There are, however, exceptions, such as agricola (farmer), which is masculine, and ulmus (elm tree), which is feminine. For some languages, there are complicated and often incomplete rules that relate form to gender. This is true in German. It may be useful to learn the rule that nouns that end in lein and chert (meaning young or small) are all neuter. The noun Mädchen (little girl) is, rather unexpectedly, neuter. However, is it worth learning that, of the 107 single-syllable nouns ending in a nasal sound plus another consonant, 70% are masculine? A student may end up learning more rules than nouns.
Besides gender, there are many other classes of nouns. According to the linguist Carl Meinhof, the Bantu language family has a total of 22 noun classes. Tamil – spoken in Sri Lanka – divides nouns into rational versus non-rational. In Ojibwa (a Native American language), there is a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns. The names of all living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the earth, belong to the animate class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as the word for raspberry is animate but the word for strawberry is inanimate.
Câu 1: What is the passage mainly about?
- A. grammatical gender of nouns
- B. noun classification
- C. animate and inanimate nouns
- D. rational and non-rational nouns.
- A. it has only one class of nouns.
- B. the neuter gender exists.
- C. It originates from the Latin language.
- D. gender depends on biology.
- A. can be either feminine or masculine
- B. is not really a pronoun
- C. is neither masculine nor feminine
- D. should not be considered neuter
- A. they are exceptions to the general gender rules in English
- B. they prove that English follows grammatical gender
- C. they always follow natural gender
- D. they show that natural gender is always logical
- A. French
- B. Spanish
- C. English
- D. Russian
- A. They are more important for native speakers of German than for non-native learners.
- B. It is more important for students to learn these rules than to memorize nouns.
- C. The only rule that students must know is the one about nouns that end in lein and chen.
- D. Some of them are confusing and are probably not very useful.
- A. noun classes other than gender
- B. the work of linguist Carl Meinhof
- C. noun classes in the Bantu language family
- D. gender in non-Western languages
- A. logical
- B. inconsistent
- C. sensible
- D. rational
- A. distinguishes between animate and inanimate
- B. has 22 noun classes
- C. distinguishes between thinking and non-thinking
- D. has a class for all nouns that don’t fit into other classes
- A. By pointing out that sacred things are considered animate
- B. By explaining that two types of fruit belong to the same class
- C. By showing that two very similar items belong to different classes
- D. by suggesting that raspberries and strawberries are connected to the earth
PASSAGE 4
Questions 31-40
Nickel (Ni), a precious metal with unique resistance to high temperatures, corrosion, and other extreme conditions, is occasionally used alone but is more often combined with another metal or metals to form an alloy used for different industrial applications. Different combinations of nickel and other metals can be combined to form alloys with specific characteristics.
One common nickel-based alloy is stainless steel, which generally contains 10 percent nickel and 90 percent iron. Alloys containing lower percentages of nickel resist stress and extreme temperatures more poorly compared to alloys with higher percentages of nickel. Alloys with higher percentages of nickel are called super-alloys, and may have nickel percentages as high as 70 percent, along with other substances that give them very specific performance features. Substances commonly combined with nickel to make super-alloys are chromium, iron, and cobalt. Super-alloys are used for chemical processing, the aerospace industry, various medical applications, and power plants.
It is vital that nickel mined for use in super-alloys is as pure as possible, because the parts manufactured from super-alloys are generally responsible for the proper functioning of the larger unit, or “safety-critical.” For this reason, mined nickel is refined specifically until it reaches the proper level of purity to be combined in a super-alloy for safety-critical parts. This extremely pure nickel is called high-purity nickel, and is extremely valuable because only a small portion of the nickel mined worldwide is ever refined to the required state of purity to be labeled high-purity nickel.
Nickel is extracted from ore by roasting at high temperatures. [A] This achieves up to a 75 percent purity level, which is enough for the many alloys creating stainless steel. [B] For more resistant alloys, however, the nickel must be refined further. [C] The most common nickel-refining process is a three-step procedure of flotation, smelting, and something called the Sherritt-Gordon process, in which the nickel is treated with hydrogen sulfide (which removes any copper) and then a solvent that separates the nickel from any cobalt. [D] This procedure can achieve 99 percent purity, which is enough for most industrial applications, but is still not high-purity nickel.
High-purity nickel is further refined using the Mond process achieving 99.99 percent purity to create high-purity nickel. Named after its creator, the Mond process has been in use for over a century and involves several steps of refining. The first involves changing the nickel to nickel carbonyl by combining the nickel with carbon monoxide at a very specific temperature. Then the nickel carbonyl is put through a chamber filled with nickel pellets and stirred until it decomposes and sticks to the pellets, or heated to a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius at which it turns into a fine, pure powder called carbonyl nickel, or high-purity nickel.
Because the refining process to create high-purity nickel requires so many steps and such specific conditions, it is not performed in many locations. This means that high-purity nickel is quite expensive, and the producers of high-purity nickel have significant control over the market price. This creates a unique industry situation, and the two main producers of high-purity nickel have been investigated by authorities in several countries to determine if they have been colluding on price or exercising undue control over prices through the duopoly in the industry.
Câu 11: What is the passage mainly about?
- A. Nickel-based common alloys
- B. Nickel-based super alloys
- C. Nickel extraction
- D. Nickel mining
- A. super-alloys resist stress and extreme temperatures better than regular alloys do
- B. super-alloys contain iron just as stainless steel does
- C. super-alloys contain cobalt instead of iron
- D. stainless steel is a super-alloy with stress-resistant characteristics
- A. paid
- B. mined
- C. combined
- D. purified
- A. they contain higher percentages of nickel
- B. they contain higher percentages of stainless steel
- C. they require longer mining times
- D. they do not contain nickel
- A. mining the nickel
- B. removing copper from the nickel
- C. creating a super-alloy
- D. achieving 99.9 percent purity
- A. the alloy process
- B. the Sherritt-Gordon process
- C. the Mond process
- D. the carbonyl nickel process
- A. The Mond process and Sherritt-Gordon process are interchangeable.
- B. The Mond process achieves lower purity than the Sherritt-Gordon process does.
- C. The Mond process must be started immediately after mining the nickel to be effective.
- D. The Mond process achieves higher purity than the Sherritt-Gordon process does.
- A. [A]
- B. [B]
- C. [C]
- D. [D]
- A. Nickel not refined and made into super-alloys is made into stainless steel.
- B. Nickel must be refined before it can be combined into a super-alloy.
- C. The Mond process produces high-purity nickel.
- D. The Sherritt-Gordon process is not sufficient to refine nickel enough to make safety-critical parts.
- A. to explain why safety-critical parts are so expensive to manufacture
- B. to propose a solution to the revenue problems the producers of high-purity nickel face
- C. to question why producers can’t lower prices to the market
- D. to explain why the two producers of high-purity nickel have such influence over the price of high-purity nickel
