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 43 to 50.

         With Robert Laurent and William Zorach, direct carving enters into the story of modern sculpture in the United States. Direct carving - in which the sculptors themselves carve stone or wood with mallet and chisel - must be recognized as something more than just a technique. Implicit in it is an aesthetic principle as well: that the medium has certain qualities of beauty and expressiveness with which sculptors must bring their own aesthetic sensibilities into harmony. For example, sometimes the shape or veining in a piece of stone or wood suggests, perhaps even dictates, not only the ultimate form, but even the subject matter.

The technique of direct carving was a break with the nineteenth-century tradition in which the making of a clay model was considered the creative act and the work was then turned over to studio assistants to be cast in plaster or bronze or carved in marble.

Neoclassical sculptors seldom held a mallet or chisel in their own hands, readily conceding that the assistants they employed were far better than they were at carving the finished marble. With the turn-of-the-century Crafts movement and the discovery of nontraditional sources of inspiration, such as wooden African figures and masks, there arose a new urge for hands-on, personal execution of art and an interaction with the medium. Even as early as the 1880's and 1890's, nonconformist European artists were attempting direct carving. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Americans — Laurent and Zorach most notably — had adopted it as their primary means of working.

Born in France, Robert Laurent(1890-1970)was a prodigy who received his education in the United States. In 1905 he was sent to Paris as an apprentice to an art dealer, and in the years that followed he witnessed the birth of Cubism, discovered primitive art, and learned the techniques of woodcarving from a frame maker.

Back in New York City by 1910, Laurent began carving pieces such as The Priestess, which reveals his fascination with African, pre-Columbian, and South Pacific art. Taking a walnut plank, the sculptor carved the expressive, stylized design. It is one of the earliest examples of direct carving in American sculpture. The plank's form dictated the rigidly frontal view and the low relief. Even its irregular shape must have appealed to Laurent as a break with a long-standing tradition that required a sculptor to work within a perfect rectangle or square.

How does direct carving differ from the nineteenth-century tradition of sculpture?

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I read two books, but I didn’t find them interesting

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The rings of Saturn are so distant to be seen from Earth without a telescope

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Time and neglect had ____________ the property

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The International Organizations are going to be in a temporary way in the country

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An artist ____________ will do his best to express innocence and inexperience in the child’s face

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It was his lack of confidence that surprised me

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His face looks ____________, but I can’t remember his name

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 36 to 42.

The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologists long regarded it as an example of adaptation by natural selection, but for physicists it bordered on the miraculous.

Newton's laws of motion assume that the total amount of spin of a body cannot change unless an external torque speeds it up or slows it down. If a cat has no spin when it isreleased and experiences no external torque, it ought not to be able to twist around as it falls.

In the speed of its execution, the righting of a tumbling cat resembles a magician's trick. The gyrations of the cat in midair are too fast for the human eye to follow, so the process is obscured. Either the eye must be speeded up, or the cat's fall slowed down for the phenomenon to be observed. A century ago the former was accomplished by means of high-speed photography using equipment now available in any pharmacy. But in the nineteenth century the capture on film of a falling cat constituted a scientific experiment.

          The experiment was described in a paper presented to the Paris Academy in 1894. Two sequences of twenty photographs each, one from the side and one from behind, show a white cat in the act of righting itself. Grainy and quaint though they are, the photos show that the cat was dropped upside down, with no initial spin, and still landed on its feet. Careful analysis of the photos reveals the secret; as the cat rotates the front of its body clockwise, the rear and tail twist counterclockwise, so that the total spin remains zero, in perfect accord with Newton's laws. Halfway down, the cat pulls in its legs before reversing its twist and then extends them again, with the desired end result. The explanation was that while nobody can acquire spin without torque, a flexible one can readily change its orientation, or phase. Cats know this instinctively, but scientists could not be sure how it happened until they increased the speed of their perceptions a thousandfold.

According to the passage, a cat is able to right itself in midair because it is

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A fire must have a readily available supply of oxygen. ________, it will stop burning

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He is the manager of the factory. He’s ________it

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Which ____________  agency do you work for?

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There is a ____________  of skilled craftsmen in the industry

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 31 to 35.

          It stands to reason that a city like Los Angeles, which is home to the rich and famous, is also where you find the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants.

Celebrity Personal Assistants is a unique group among Hollywood professionals. (31)_______ the lawyers and agents who rub shoulders with the stars and make millions, personal assistants (PAs) are not paid well. They typically earn about $56,000 a year which, (32)_______ their round-the-clock obligations, isn’t much by Hollywood standards. As for the job description, it’s also far from glamorous.

Responsibilities include doing laundry, fetching groceries and paying bills. So what's the attraction? One celebrity PA says, ‘I don’t (33)_______ myself a vain or superficial person, but it would be wrong to say that we all don't like being close to someone's that's powerful.’ But not everyone is qualified for the job.

Rita Tateel teaches would-be assistants to the stars and begins her lessons with some (34)_______ truths: 'You must be in good health at all times, because you are running a celebrity's life. If you get sick their life can't just stop. And you need to be flexible and able to (35)_______ in all kinds of hours. You have to be a can-do person. If there’s one word that celebrities don't want to hear, that word is “no”.’

Điền ô số 34

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.

Calling Jim is pointless. His phone is out of order

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“I didn’t break the window,” Jim said