Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspapaer war between giants of the American press in the late nineteenth century. The first full-color comic strip appeared in January 1894 in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly full-color comic supplement, similar to today’s Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst’ rival New York paper, the Morning Journal.

Both were immensely popular and publishers realized that supplementing the news with comic relief boosted the sale of papers. The Morning Journal started another feature in 1896, the “Yellow Kid”, the first continuous comic character in the United States, whose creator, Richard Outcault, had been lured away from the World by the ambitious Hearst. The “Yellow Kid” was in many ways a pioneer. Its comic dialogue was the strictly urban farce that came to characterize later strips, and it introduced the speech baloon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters’ heads.

The first strip to incorporate all the elements of later comics was Rudolph Dirks’s “Katzenjammer Kids”, based on Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz, a European satire of the nineteenth century. The “Kids” strip, first published in 1897, served as the prototype for future American strips. It contained not only speech baloons, but a continuous cast of characters, and was divided into small regular panels that did away with the larger panoramic scenes of earlier comics.

Newspaper syndication played a major role in spreading the popularity of comic strips throughout the country. Though weekly colored comics came first, daily black-and-white strips were not far behind. The first appeared in the Chicago American in 1904. It was followed by many imitators, and by 1915 black-and-white comic strips had become a staple of daily newspapers around the country.

The word “it” in paragraph 2 refers to _______.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that best combines each pair of sentences in the following questions

We cut down many forests. The Earth becomes hot

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that best combines each pair of sentences in the following questions

He is very intelligent. He can solve all the problems in no time

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions

Had she read the reference books, she would have been able to finish the test

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions

“I will pay back the money, Gloria.” Said Ivan

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions

It started to rain at 2 o’clock and it is still raining

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the underlined part that needs correction in each of the following questions

I don’t mind waiting for other ten minutes, but will you please keep me company? 

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the underlined part that needs correction in each of the following questions

Caroline has worn her new yellow dress only once since she buys it

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the underlined part that needs correction in each of the following questions

The police told us to refrain from touching the furniture in case they would need to look for fingerprints

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42 

     Many ants forage across the countryside in large numbers and undertake mass migrations; these activities proceed because one ant lays a trail on the ground for the others to follow. As a worker ant returns home after finding a source of food, it marks the route by intermittently touching its stinger to the ground and depositing a tiny amount of trail pheromone – a mixture of chemicals that delivers diverse messages as the context changes. These trails incorporate no directional information and may be followed by other ants in either direction. 

     Unlike some other messages, such as the one arising from a dead ant, a food trail has to be kept secret from members of other species. It is not surprising then that ant species use a wide variety of compounds as trail pheromones. Ants can be extremely sensitive to these signals. Investigators working with the trail pheromone of the leafcutter ant Atta Texana calculated that one milligram of this substance would suffice to lead a column of ants three times around Earth. 

          The vapor of the evaporating pheromone over the trail guides an ant along the way, and the ant detects this signal with receptors in its antennae. A trail pheromone will evaporate to furnish the highest concentration of vapor right over the trail, in what is called a vapor space.  In following the trail, the ant moves to the right and left, oscillating from side to side across the line of the trail itself, bringing first one and then the other antenna into the vapor space. As the ant moves to the right, its left antenna arrives in the vapor space. The signal it receives causes it to swing to the left, and the ant then pursues this new course until its right antenna reaches the vapor space. It then swings back to the right, and so weaves back and forth down the trail

According to the passage, the highest amount of pheromone vapor is found _____ 

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42 

     Many ants forage across the countryside in large numbers and undertake mass migrations; these activities proceed because one ant lays a trail on the ground for the others to follow. As a worker ant returns home after finding a source of food, it marks the route by intermittently touching its stinger to the ground and depositing a tiny amount of trail pheromone – a mixture of chemicals that delivers diverse messages as the context changes. These trails incorporate no directional information and may be followed by other ants in either direction. 

     Unlike some other messages, such as the one arising from a dead ant, a food trail has to be kept secret from members of other species. It is not surprising then that ant species use a wide variety of compounds as trail pheromones. Ants can be extremely sensitive to these signals. Investigators working with the trail pheromone of the leafcutter ant Atta Texana calculated that one milligram of this substance would suffice to lead a column of ants three times around Earth. 

          The vapor of the evaporating pheromone over the trail guides an ant along the way, and the ant detects this signal with receptors in its antennae. A trail pheromone will evaporate to furnish the highest concentration of vapor right over the trail, in what is called a vapor space.  In following the trail, the ant moves to the right and left, oscillating from side to side across the line of the trail itself, bringing first one and then the other antenna into the vapor space. As the ant moves to the right, its left antenna arrives in the vapor space. The signal it receives causes it to swing to the left, and the ant then pursues this new course until its right antenna reaches the vapor space. It then swings back to the right, and so weaves back and forth down the trail

The word “oscillating” in line 17 is closest in meaning to