Đề thi chọn đội tuyển chính thức học sinh giỏi dự thi quốc gia THPT môn Tiếng Anh - Năm học 2020-2021 - Sở GD&ĐT Ninh Bình (Có đáp án)

ed.
A. otherworldly
B. world-beating
C. worldly-wise
D. word-perfect
6. Daunting and ________ as the task appeared, I was glad to be busy again.
A. preposterous
B. prepotency
C. preponderant
D. prerogatives
7. It'll be ________ for the first three days after the operation.	
A. touch-and-go
B. make-or-break
C. get-up-and-go
D. up-and-coming
8. A bench ________ was issued for his arrest when he did not appear.	
A. warrant
B. security	
C. order
D. summon
9. Are the developers aware of the environmental ________ of building the dam in that location?	 
A. accumulations
B. implementation
C. ramifications
D. speculation
10. They were faced with ________ problems and had to discontinue the expedition.
A. insouciant
B. insufferable
C. insurmountable
D. insufficient
11. He's so lazy! We all have to work harder because he's always ________ his duties.
A. evading
B. shirking
C. ducking
D. dodging
12. Her eyes were tired from gazing at the ________ screen of her computer all day.  
A. flickering
B. twinkling 
C. glimmering 
D. sparkling
13. His three years at university were the ________ to a brilliant career. 
A. launching-pad 
B. stepping-stone
C. diving-board
D. starting-line 
14. The Smiths needn’t hurry as there was ______ time for them to get to the airport.
A. ample
B. lavish
C. extensive
D. spacious
15. Most people feel a slight ________ of nostalgia as they think back on their schooldays.
A. feeling
B. surge
C. pang
D. chain
Your answers:
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II. Give the correct form of the words in brackets. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes. 
A. 
1. The Ministry of Education and Training decided to organize a/an (COLLEGE) ________ footballer championship to create a common playground for all students.
2. Many years had gone by until the Africans captured by the English colonizers managed to break free from (SERVE) ________ to their masters.
3. The system of counties was essential to Frankish government, and a count could wield considerable power, particularly in (FAR) ________ regions.
4. Jaubert had been a reasonable man to work for, had never asked her to do anything illegal or (TASTE)________. 
5. Darwin's theory of evolution was a(n) (SHED) ________ dividing the old way of thinking from the new one.
B.
	Dyslexia, also referred to as “specific reading disability,” (6. dominate) ___________ affects a person’s ability to read and write. Dyslexics have difficulty connecting visual symbols (i.e. letters) with their corresponding sounds. Many people who suffer from dyslexia also have trouble with (7. enunciate) ___________, organization and short-term memory. Dyslexia is the most common learning (8. able) __________ in children. It is not related to (9. intellect) _________ ability, vision or access to education. Approximately 5-10 percent of school-age children in North America suffer from the condition, with each case varying in (10. severe) __________. Children are generally diagnosed with dyslexia during the elementary school years when they are learning how to read and spell.
Your answers:
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PART C- READING (6.0 points)
I. Read the text below and decide which answer A, B, C or D best fits each gap. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes. 
UNIVERSAL WET WEEKEND
	The weather across much of the British Isles (1) ________ settled last week, with a good (2) ________ of sunshine. On Saturday, the lunchtime temperature at Bridlington in the northeast of England was 28.20C, which compared favorably with Alicante in southern Spain at 290C. The rest of the world, however, was (3) ________ with some extreme conditions. A tropical storm, given the name Helen, hit Hong Kong on Saturday morning, though her presence had been (4) ________ in advance. From noon on Friday, the showers and outbreaks of rain became more and more frequent so that by midnight on Sunday, thirty-six hours later, there had been 333mm of rainfall, not far off the average for the month of August, at 367mm. Even on Sunday there was a (5) ________ in Helen’s tail. The town centre of Shanwei, near Hong Kong, was flooded when 468mm of rain fell in the sixty hours (6) ________ up to midday on Sunday, nearly twice the normal August rainfall. On the other (7) ________ of the globe, tropical storm Gabrielle moved across the Gulf of Mexico and overnight rain (8) ________ the usual rainfall for the whole month. Although most of Europe enjoyed sun, the high temperatures were sufficient to set off some (9) ________ showers. On Tuesday morning, a thunderstorm at Lyons in eastern France (10) ________ 99mm of rain in just six hours.
1. A. kept 	B. remained 	C. lasted 	D. held
2. A. extent 	B. quantity 	C. proportion 	D. deal
3. A. coping	B. matching 	C. colliding 	D. queuing
4. A. waited 	B. found 	C. felt 	D. warned
5. A. sting 	B. prick 	C. stab 	D. poke
6. A. going 	B. leading 	C. taking 	D. approaching
7. A. section 	B. side 	C. face 	D. part
8. A. overtook 	B. beat 	C. passed 	D. exceeded 
9. A. huge 	B. weighty 	C. heavy 	D. strong
10. A. deposited 	B. placed 	C. lay 	D. set
Your answers:
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II. Complete the following passage by filling in each blank with one suitable word. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes. 
	It is important to note that policies (1) ______ scientific issues are influenced in no small part by societal factors. These include the relative importance of certain environmental issues, the degree of trust in the institutions (2) ______ the research, and not least the social standing of those affected by the issue. In other words, environmental problems are in many ways socially constructed (3) ______ to the prevailing cultural, economic and political conditions within a society. It has been suggested, for example, that contemporary 'post-materialist' Western societies pay greater attention to 'quality' - including environmental quality – than (4) '______ '. This theory does not (5) ______ assume that people of low-income countries have no interest in environmental protection, as the example of the Chipko movement in India clearly demonstrates, but demonstrates that the way a resource is valued varies widely (6) ______ different communities.
	Finally, it cannot be denied that the ‘issue of the day’ changes constantly. One issue becomes more or less urgent than another, based on current events. Concurrently, new issues (7) ______ the political agenda. It has been noted that it often takes a 'policy entrepreneur', someone who dedicates time, energy and financial resources (8) ______ a certain issue, to raise its profile. Furthermore, whether an issue is (9) ______ up by political, environmental or media groups, depends very much on the degree to which it suits their particular agenda, not to (10) ______ budget.
Your answers:
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III. Read the following passage and do the tasks that follow. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes. 
Aphantasia: A life without mental images
Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind?
Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye. But this year scientists have described a condition, aphantasia, in which some people are unable to visualise mental images.
Niel Kenmuir, from Lancaster, has always had a blind mind's eye. He knew he was different even in childhood. "My stepfather, when I couldn't sleep, told me to count sheep, and he explained what he meant, I tried to do it and I couldn't," he says. "I couldn't see any sheep jumping over fences, there was nothing to count."
Our memories are often tied up in images, think back to a wedding or first day at school. As a result, Niel admits, some aspects of his memory are "terrible", but he is very good at remembering facts. And, like others with aphantasia, he struggles to recognise faces. Yet he does not see aphantasia as a disability, but simply a different way of experiencing life.
Mind's eye blind
Ironically, Niel now works in a bookshop, although he largely sticks to the non-fiction aisles. His condition begs the question what is going on inside his picture-less mind. I asked him what happens when he tries to picture his fiancée. "This is the hardest thing to describe, what happens in my head when I think about things," he says. "When I think about my fiancée there is no image, but I am definitely thinking about her, I know today she has her hair up at the back, she's brunette. But I'm not describing an image I am looking at, I'm remembering features about her, that's the strangest thing and maybe that is a source of some regret."
The response from his mates is a very sympathetic: "You're weird." But while Niel is very relaxed about his inability to picture things, it is often a cause of distress for others. One person who took part in a study into aphantasia said he had started to feel "isolated" and "alone" after discovering that other people could see images in their heads. Being unable to reminisce about his mother years after her death led to him being "extremely distraught".
The super-visualiser
At the other end of the spectrum is children's book illustrator, Lauren Beard, whose work on the Fairytale Hairdresser series will be familiar to many six-year-olds. Her career relies on the vivid images that leap into her mind's eye when she reads text from her author. When I met her in her box-room studio in Manchester, she was working on a dramatic scene in the next book. The text describes a baby perilously climbing onto a chandelier.
"Straightaway I can visualise this grand glass chandelier in some sort of French kind of ballroom, and the little baby just swinging off it and really heavy thick curtains," she says. "I think I have a strong imagination, so I can create the world and then keep adding to it so it gets sort of bigger and bigger in my mind and the characters too they sort of evolve. I couldn't really imagine what it's like to not imagine, I think it must be a bit of a shame really."
Not many people have mental imagery as vibrant as Lauren or as blank as Niel. They are the two extremes of visualisation. Adam Zeman, a professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology, wants to compare the lives and experiences of people with aphantasia and its polar-opposite hyperphantasia. His team, based at the University of Exeter, coined the term aphantasia this year in a study in the journal Cortex.
Prof Zeman tells the BBC: "People who have contacted us say they are really delighted that this has been recognised and has been given a name, because they have been trying to explain to people for years that there is this oddity that they find hard to convey to others." How we imagine is clearly very subjective - one person's vivid scene could be another's grainy picture. But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury.
He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people. But he adds: "I think it makes quite an important difference to their experience of life because many of us spend our lives with imagery hovering somewhere in the mind's eye which we inspect from time to time, it's a variability of human experience."Top of Form
Questions 1–8
Do the following statements agree with the information in the reading text?
Write
TRUE                          if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE                        if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN              if there is no information on this
1. Aphantasia is a condition, which describes people, for whom it is hard to visualise mental images. 
2. Niel Kenmuir was unable to count sheep in his head.                     
3. People with aphantasia struggle to remember personal traits and clothes of different people.                     
4. Niel regrets that he cannot portray an image of his fiancée in his mind
5. Inability to picture things in someone's head is often a cause of distress for a person
6. All people with aphantasia start to feel 'isolated' or 'alone' at some point of their lives.                          
7. Lauren Beard's career depends on her imagination.                  
8. The author met Lauren Beard when she was working on a comedy scene in her next book.                      
Questions 9–13
Complete the sentences below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes. 
9. Only a small number of people have imagination as ___________as Lauren does.
10. Hyperphantasia is __________to aphantasia.
11. There are a lot of subjectivity in comparing people's imagination - somebody's vivid scene could be another person's __________.
12. Prof Zeman is ____________that aphantasia is not an illness.
13. Many people spend their lives with _______________somewhere in the mind's eye.
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IV. In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For question 1- 7, read the passage and choose from paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph which you do not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes. 
RAINMAKER WITH HIS HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
	Critics dismissed Graeme Mather’s attempts to make clouds rain. But now recent experiments appear to have vindicated him. Anjana Ahuya reports.
	Dr. Graeme Mather lived his life with his head in the clouds, as a documentary film to be shown this week shows. Against the advice of almost everybody else in the meteorological community, the Canadian scientist devoted his professional life to trying to make clouds rain.
1
	Before Dr. Mather became involved, the science of weather modification had already claimed many reputations. The idea that clouds could be manipulated first circulated in the 1940s, and efforts gathered pace soon after the Second World War.
2
	However, the entire discipline fell into disrepute when commercial companies hijacked the idea, took it around the world, and then failed to deliver on their promises. Cloud-seeding, as the process was known, became the preserve of crackpots and charlatants.
3
	Scientists theorized that if they could inject the cloud with similarly shaped crystals, these imposter crystals would also act as frames around which droplets would clump. The cloud would then be tricked into raining. Silver iodide, whose crystals resemble those of ice, seemed the best bet. Sadly, none of the experiments, including Dr. Mather’s, which had been going for more than five years, seemed to work. Dr. Mather was about to admit defeat when serendipity intervened.
4
	Dr. Mather was convinced that something that the place was spewing into the atmosphere was encouraging the downpour. Subsequent experiments confirmed that hygroscopic salts pouring into the sky from there were responsible. Hygroscopic salts attract water – once in the atmosphere, the particles act as magnets around which raindrops can form.
5
	He was wary; Dr. Mather was known to be a smooth-talking salesman. “He was charming and charismatic, and many scientists don’t trust that,” he says. “He was also not well-published because he had been working in the commercial sector. Overall, he was regarded as a maverick. On that occasion, he presented results that I was convinced were impossible. Yet the statistical evidence was overwhelming, which I couldn’t understand.”
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	“If those findings can be reproduced there, it will be the most exciting thing to have happened in the field for 20 years. It will be remarkable because some of the results are not scientifically explainable.” He adds, however, that scientists must exercise caution because cloud-seeding is still mired in controversy. He also points out that, with water being such a precious resource, success will push the research into the political arena.
7
	Dr. Copper says: “With the paper mill, he saw something that other people wouldn’t have seen. I am still uncomfortable with his idea because it throws up major puzzles in cloud physics. But if Dr. Mather was right, it will demonstrate that humans can change clouds in ways that were once thought impossible.”
MISSING PARAGRAPHS. 
Dr. Mather refused to be daunted by this image. After all, the principle seemed perfectly plausible. Water droplets are swept up to the top of the clouds on updrafts, where they become supercooled (ie, although the temperature is below freezing, the water remains liquid). When a supercooled droplet collides with an ice crystal, it freezes on contact and sticks. Successive collisions cause each ice crystal to accumulate more water droplets; the crystals grow until they become too heavy to remain suspended in the atmosphere. As the crystals fall through the cloud, they become raindrops. The ice crystals therefore act as frames to ‘grow’ raindrops.
Dr. Mather unfortunately will not be involved in the debate about such matters. He died aged 63, shortly before the documentary was completed. It will ensure that this smooth-talking maverick is given the recognition he deserves.
He and a colleague decided to collect a last batch of data when they flew into a tiny but ferocious storm. That storm, Dr. Mather says in the film, changed his life. Huge droplets were spattering on the tiny plane’s windscreen. No such storm had been forecast. Back on the ground, they discovered the storm was located directly above a paper mill.
A trail in Mexico has been running for two years, and the signs are promising. ‘We were sufficiently encouraged in the first year to continue the seeding research. But the results are preliminary, because we have only a very small sample of clouds at the moment. We need to work over two more summers to reach a proper conclusion.’
He arranged to fly to South Africa “with the full intention of explaining what was wrong with the experiment”. Instead, he came back convinced that Dr. Mather was on to something. He is now running two experiments, one in Arizona and one in northern Mexico, to try to verify the South African results. The experiments use potassium chloride, which is similar to table salt (sodium chloride) and, it is claimed, non-polluting.
The scientific community remained sniffy in the face of this apparent proof. Foremost among the sceptics was Dr. William Copper, of the United States National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Dr. Cooper, regarded as one of the world’s finest cloud scientists, saw Dr. Mather present his astonishing claims at a cloud physics conference in Montreal.
They involved weather experts firing rockets into clouds to stop the producing hail, which damages crops. The clouds, it was hoped, would dissolve into a harmless shower.
The desire to do so led him to set up a project in South Africa, which was ultimately to convince him that it was possible. As the programme reveals, experiments around the world appear to prove his faith was justified.
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PART D – WRITING (4.5 points)
I. The table shows the proportions of pupils attending four secondary school types between 2000 and 2009. Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words. (1.5 points)
Secondary School Attendance
2005
2010
2015
Specialist schools
12%
11%
10%
Grammar schools
24%
19%
12%
Voluntary-controlled schools
52%
38%
20%
Community schools
12%
32%
58%
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