READING TEST #6

Directions: In this section of the test, you will read FOUR different passages, each followed by 10 questions about it. For questions 1-40, you are to choose the best answer A, B, C or D, to each question. Then, on your answer sheet, find the number of the question and fill in the space that corresponds to the letter of the answer you have chosen. Answer all questions following a passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage.

You have 60 minutes to answer all the questions, including the time to transfer your answers to the answer sheet.

PASSAGE 1
Questions 1-10

Failure: We all avoid it, and most of us fear it. However, without failure, progress would be impossible. Indeed, the word success comes from the Latin succedere, meaning “to come after.” And what does success usually come after? Failure. It seems that one cannot exist without the other.

Learning from Failure
Every failure – even the worst ones – helps us learn to do things differently in the future. “I learned how not to climb the first four times I tried to summit Everest.” says mountaineer Pete Athans, who has now reached the world’s highest peak seven times. “Failure gives you a chance to refine your approach. You’re taking risks more and more intelligently.” In Athans’ case, his setbacks taught him that it was important to choose a less challenging route for his first climb up Everest. Learning from past mistakes and making changes helped him to reach the top successfully.

Failure also reminds us that things can go wrong – sometimes with disastrous results. Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner is the first woman to summit all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without extra oxygen. In 2007, while climbing in Nepal, she was in an avalanche. Luckily, she survived, but two nearby Spanish climbers died. The experience taught Kaltenbrunner that no matter how prepared a person is, bad things can still happen. The events of that day troubled her deeply, but in time, Kaltenbrunner decided she had to learn from the experience and move on. “I realized that I couldn’t make the tragedy unhappen.” she says, “and I couldn’t stop climbing – this is my life.”

The Value of Negative Results
Accepting failure is not easy for many, though. We are often reluctant to admit failure because our professional reputations depend on success. However, things are slowly changing, notably in the fields of business and science. In the past decade, for instance, some scientific journals – mostly in medicine and conservation have published reports of failed experiments. The belief is that the science community can also learn from “negative” results and that this can eventually lead to positive outcomes.

In many ways, the business world already understands the value of negative results. To encourage entrepreneurship, the Netherlands-based ABN AMRO bank started an Institute of Brilliant Failures to learn more about what works and what doesn’t in banking. Similarly, Eli Lilly and Company, the pharmaceutical corporation, has “R&D outcome celebrations”– failure parties – to study data about drugs that don’t work. (Almost 90 percent of all drug trials fail and the drugs cannot be sold.)

In fact, one of the business world’s most famous failures eventually became one of its biggest successes, in part because the product’s makers learned from their mistakes. In the early 1990s, Apple Corporation created a handheld device called the Apple Newton. The product, though unique at the time, was expensive and heavy; moreover, some of its most important features didn’t work properly. Consequently, it became one of Apple’s biggest failures, and in 1998, the company stopped selling it. However, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, believed the product had potential and he began to explore ways of improving it. In time, this led to the creation of the iPhone and the iPad, two of the company’s most successful products.

The story of the Apple Newton can teach us another important lesson about failure. Not only should we try to learn from it; if we want to succeed, we must also be persistent. Though Apple stopped selling the Newton in 1998, the first iPhone wasn’t available until 2007. It took a lot of research and hard work to go from the Apple Newton to iPhone, but in the end, the effort paid off.

Ultimately, there is a lot we can learn by studying mistakes. Perhaps the most important lesson is that failure and success are two sides of the same coin. One truly cannot exist without the other

Câu 1: What is the passage mainly about?