TEXT E In the days before Diana became accustomed to daily hairdressers, high fashion and expertly applied makeup, she looked her best when she was wearing her least. No frilly blouses concealed her elegant neck, carefully cut skirts her long legs, or bulky sweaters her well-rounded figure. She was young and not fully aware of just how attractive she could be. But if she wanted to impress a young man, any young man, she always made it a point to go swimming or sailing or, at the very least, play a game of tennis. When Prince Charles saw her aboard Britannia at Cowes in the late summer of 1980, he wasn’t however particularly interested. She belonged to his younger brother Andrew’s set, and had come aboard, not at Chariest s invitation, but with Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones, his cousin and sixteen years his junior. Diana was three years older than Sarah, but still almost a generation away. And besides, Charles had his mind on other things—most particularly the breakup of his romance with the beautiful but self-willed Anna Wallace. There was also the fact that if he noticed Diana in anything more than passing, he thought about her as the sister of one of his former girlfriends—Lady Sarah Spencer—who had recently married (he hadn’t attended), and whatever others might have been plotting he most certainly was not thinking of renewing his romantic links with the Spencer girls. But if Charles was not instantly enchanted by the fresh, gambolling nineteen-year-old who spent some days aboard the Royal Yacht, his staff were. "She was so unassuming and so natural,’ one recalls. And in the manner of all servants, particularly ones who are in the employ of the bachelor Prince, they inevitably started speculating amongst themselves if she was the one for what they called "the job". So, it seems, did Diana. At the age of sixteen she had jokingly told a friend that she was "out to get’ Charles. But that may have been just romantic fantasizing on the part of a young girl whose main reading was the soapy romances penned by her step-grandmother, the redoubtable Barbara Cartland. The Prince’s late valet, Stephen Barry; insisted however: "She went after the Prince with single-minded determination. She wanted him—and she got him!" She had, of course, met him many times before in the years of her childhood spent as a near-neighbour of the Windsors at Sandringham when Charles used to pop his head round the nursery door where she was having tea with Andrew and Edward, or during a shooting party on Sandringham Estate where at the age of sixteen she was reintroduced to him by her sister Sarah. More recently she had encountered him at polo. But then he had always been busy or with a girlfriend in tow. This time he was alone. She made sure Charles was watching when she bravely followed his example and went windsurfing in the ehoppy and not-too-warm waters of the Solent. Naturally flirtatious, she made sure he noticed her long slim legs and trim figure. And he could not fail but start to take an interest—if only a comparative one—in the beautiful younger sister of a former girlfriend. Accounts of this first meeting vary. Some claim that it is where the famous romance began. Others insist that his interest was but a mild one; that with Anna still in mind, the timing was wrong and he simply regarded her as a new and pretty addition to his surprisingly limited circle of friends. But she had certainly impressed him enough for him to invite her up to Balmoral shortly afterwards. Diana accepted with alacrity. How many years younger was Diana than Charles when they met aboard Britannia at Cowes
A. 16.
B. 13.
C. 19.
D. 9.
TEXT C Northern marshes are being turned into empty, desecrated mud flat wasteland. The culprit Snow geese. These marshes are the breeding ground for snow geese. Once destroyed, some fear the species will take over the habitat of the Canada goose—a popular game bird in Minnesota. If this happens, Minnesota hunting and land conditions could be greatly affected. The snow goose population has been on the rise in the last 25 years, but numbers are hitting an all-time high. This year there is an estimated 4.5 or 6 million birds, triple what the population was 25 years ago. Although effects of the snow goose invasion aren’t apparent in Minneapolis, northern Minnesota and Canada can clearly see the signs. The population growth is due to the birds’ wintering habits. They fly south to Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi to nest. The conditions and food availability there have made it possible for more birds to survive the winter and make the trip back north. The period over which they’ve increased in number correlates to a change in agriculture practices in the region. After World War II, there was an increase in man-made fertilizers, yielding an increase of corn, rice, wheat and other crops. There have also been other changes in agricultural practices causing an increase of production in cereal crops. The geese find the agricultural areas better than the natural areas. The geese have escaped from any natural limits. They are not doing this on their own; it is in response to human practices. Usually, about 70 to 75 percent of the birds make it back to Canada in late winter and early spring. But the surviving number of snow geese has steadily climbed each year to reach 95 percent in the last couple of years. Because so many survive, they strip the capacity of the breeding ground. The snow geese are destroying salt marshes where they nest in the summer, about 30 percent of the salt marshes are completely destroyed, leaving them as inhabitable mud flats. Another 35 percent of salt marshes are significantly damaged. There are three possible solutions: Let the problem take care of itself and wait for the population to crash, deal directly with the population by changing hunting limits and regulations or address the cause of the problem in the south. The author seems to imply that ______.
A. humans are responsible for the problem
B. hunting limits and regulations should be lifted
C. birds have a strong capability to survive
D. the Canada geese are a better species than the snow geese
TEXT D It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the new machines and on the society into which the machines have been introduced. For example, it has been suggested that the employment of women in industry took them out of the household, their traditional sphere, and fundamentally altered their position in society. In the nineteenth century, when women began to enter factories, Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by doing so, women would give up their femininity. Friedrich Engels, however, predicted that women would be liberated from the "social, legal, and economic subordination" of the family by technological developments that made possible the recruitment of "the whole female sex ... into public industry." Observers thus differed concerning the social desirability of mechanization’ s effects, but they agreed that it would transform women’s lives. Historians, particularly those investigating the history of women, now seriously question this assumption of transforming power. They conclude that such dramatic technological innovations as the spinning jenny, the sewing machine, the typewriter, and the vacuum cleaner have not resulted in equally dramatic social changes in women’s economic position or in the prevailing evaluation of women’s work. The employment of young women in textile mills during the Industrial Revolution was largely an extension of an older pattern of employment of young, single women as domestics. It was not the change in office technology, but rather the separation of secretarial work, previously seen as an apprenticeship for beginning managers, from administrative work that in the 1880’s created a new class of "dead-end" jobs, thenceforth considered "women’s work". The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire. Women’s work has changed considerably in the past 200 years, moving from the household to the office or the factory, and later becoming mostly white-collar instead of blue collar work. Fundamentally, however, the conditions under which women work have changed little since before the Industrial Revolution: the segregation of occupations by gender, lower pay for women as a group, jobs that require relatively low levels of skill and offer women little opportunity for advancement all persist, while women’s household labor remains demanding. Recent historical investigation has led to a major revision of the notion that technology is always inherently revolutionary in its effects on society. Mechanization may even have slowed any change in the traditional position of women both in the labor market and in the home. Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of the passage
A. Mechanization of work has little changed the conditions of women.
B. Mechanization revolutionizes a society’s customary roles of its members.
C. Mechanization of Work creates new jobs that did not exist previously.
D. Women’s work has changed considerably in the past 200 years.
TEXT D It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the new machines and on the society into which the machines have been introduced. For example, it has been suggested that the employment of women in industry took them out of the household, their traditional sphere, and fundamentally altered their position in society. In the nineteenth century, when women began to enter factories, Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by doing so, women would give up their femininity. Friedrich Engels, however, predicted that women would be liberated from the "social, legal, and economic subordination" of the family by technological developments that made possible the recruitment of "the whole female sex ... into public industry." Observers thus differed concerning the social desirability of mechanization’ s effects, but they agreed that it would transform women’s lives. Historians, particularly those investigating the history of women, now seriously question this assumption of transforming power. They conclude that such dramatic technological innovations as the spinning jenny, the sewing machine, the typewriter, and the vacuum cleaner have not resulted in equally dramatic social changes in women’s economic position or in the prevailing evaluation of women’s work. The employment of young women in textile mills during the Industrial Revolution was largely an extension of an older pattern of employment of young, single women as domestics. It was not the change in office technology, but rather the separation of secretarial work, previously seen as an apprenticeship for beginning managers, from administrative work that in the 1880’s created a new class of "dead-end" jobs, thenceforth considered "women’s work". The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the twentieth century had less to do with the mechanization of housework and an increase in leisure time for these women than it did with their own economic necessity and with high marriage rates that shrank the available pool of single women workers, previously, in many cases, the only women employers would hire. Women’s work has changed considerably in the past 200 years, moving from the household to the office or the factory, and later becoming mostly white-collar instead of blue collar work. Fundamentally, however, the conditions under which women work have changed little since before the Industrial Revolution: the segregation of occupations by gender, lower pay for women as a group, jobs that require relatively low levels of skill and offer women little opportunity for advancement all persist, while women’s household labor remains demanding. Recent historical investigation has led to a major revision of the notion that technology is always inherently revolutionary in its effects on society. Mechanization may even have slowed any change in the traditional position of women both in the labor market and in the home. The increase in the numbers of married women employed outside the home in the 20th century was NOT due to ______.
A. their economic necessity
B. more women employers
C. shortage of single women workers
D. high marriage rates