Đề thi môn Tiếng Anh vào Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội đợt 1 năm 2015

A trend that has emerged recently is the sharing of childcare (36) ........ between husband and wife. Young couples will try to arrange their work schedules so that they work (37) ........hours or shifts in order that one parent is always home with the children. Since childcare is expensive, this saves money for the young couple trying to establish (38)........and provide a secure environment for the family. Husband and wife may also share household (39) ......... Some fathers are just as capable as mothers at cooking dinner, changing and bathing the baby, and doing the laundry.

In some cases, the woman’s salary is for family (40) ......... and the father becomes the “househusband." These cases are still fairly rare. One positive trend, however, is that fathers seem to be spending more time with their children. In a recent survey, 41% of the children sampled said they spend equal time with their mothers and fathers. “This is one of our most (41) ........cultural changes,” says Dr. Leon Hoffman, who co-directs the Parent Child Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In practice, for over 30 years, Hoffman has found "a very dramatic difference in the involvement of the father in everything from care-taking to general decision (42) ........around kids' lives.”

Another factor has recently been added to the childcare (43) ......... The number of people who work from home nearly full-time rose 23% from the last decade. The (44) ........of technology - computers, faxes, teleconferencing - has made it easier for at-home workers to be constantly in touch. Will this new flexibility in
the workforce bring a positive change for the (45) ........of children? Only time will tell.

(From Mosaic Reading I by Brenda Wegmann and Miki Knezevic)

Speed reading is not just a parlour trick you can use to impress your friends and family. For many, it's a necessary tool for managing time and information in the fast-paced business world; and for many others, specifically students, it's the only way to get through reading-heavy class loads.

The practiced speed reader can pick up a lengthy document or a thick stack of paper and use their skill to get the meat of their subject by skimming for the most important details and information. Without developing the ability to speed read, this time-saving technique is merely flipping through pages fast.

Speed reading, or increasing the rate at which you read text, is linked to increasing the rate at which you understand what you’re reading. The key to successful speed reading is increasing your understanding of the text as you increase the rate at which you read the words. This natural step takes training and practice, but don’t be intimidated by the idea of a challenge. Once you've mastered it, it's a skill that will stick with you for the rest of your life. With continued practice, common words and sentence structures became more familiar and because your brain was tuned and ready, your eyes started taking in Wocks of wml* at a time. The difference between average readers and speed readers is in the blocks of words their eyes take in at one time. The larger the blocks, the faster your eyes move through the text.

Speed reading teaches you how to take your reading and your comprehension to the next level. The techniques used in teaching speed reading focus on your individual abilities, namely where you are right now and what might be keeping you from progrcssing. For example, if you are a slow reader, factors that hold you back may include, but are not limited to, moving your lips or reading out loud or holding the text too close to your eyes. If you are in the practice of moving your lips, or speaking or whispering while you read, you're slowing yourself down dramatically.

Your lips can only move so fast. You should be able to read at least two or three times faster than you can speak. In effect, you’re keeping yourself at that word-by-word stage that children generally grow out of in elementary school.

Having the ability to speed read can make a significant difference in your life, especially if reading is a strong component of your work. Implementing some simple techniques can get you reading faster and more efficiently in no lime at all.

(From Understanding Speed Reading by Brandon C.Hall)

Smart cards and mobile phones are becoming an increasingly popular way to make all sorts of payments.
Even now, in Japan thousands of transactions, from paying rail tickets to picking up the groceries, take place every day with customers passing their handsets across a small flat-screen device. And predictions in the world of finance reckon that payments using mobile phones will have risen to more than $50 billion in the very near future.

What's the appeal of e-cash? Compared to cheques or credit cards, it offers the speed of cash, but more so. It takes just one tenth of a second to complete most transactions and as no change is required, errors in counting are eliminated. Fraud and theft are also reduced and for the retailer, it reduces the cost of handling money. Sony's vision of having a chip embedded in computers. TVs and gimes consoles means that films, music and games can be paid for easily and without having to input credit card details.

And what about the future of the banks? Within grip on the market, banks and credit-card firms want to be in a position to collect most of the fees from the users of mobile and contactless-payment systems. But the new system could prove to be a "disruptive technology" as far as the banks are concerned. If payments for a few coffees, a train ticket and a newspaper are made every day by a conmuter with a mobile, this will not appear on their monthly credit card statements but on their mobile phone statements. And having spent fortunes on branding, credit-card companies and banks do not want to see other payment systems gaining popularity. It's too early to say whether banks will miss out and if so, by how much. However, quite a few American bankers are optimistic They feel there is reason to he suspicious of those who predict that high-street banks may be a thing of the past. They point out that Internet banking did not result in the closure of their high-street branches as was predicted. On the contrary, more Americans than ever are using local branches. So, as to whether we'll become a totally cash-free society or not, we’ll have to wait and see.

(From Face2Face Advanced by Gillie Cunningham & Jan Bell with Chris Redston, CUP)