Đề thi thử đại học môn Tiếng Anh

Both the number and the percentage of people in the United States involved in nonagricultural pursuits expanded rapidly during the half century following the Civil War, with some of the most dramatic increases occurring in the domains of transportation, manufacturing, and trade and distribution. The development of the railroad and telegraph systems during the middle third of the nineteenth century led to significant improvements in the speed, volume, and regularity of shipments and communications, making possible a fundamental transformation in the production and distribution of goods.

In agriculture, the transformation was marked by the emergence of the grain elevators, the cotton presses, the warehouses, and the commodity exchanges that seemed to so many of the nation's farmers the visible sign of a vast conspiracy against them. In manufacturing, the transformation was marked by the emergence of a "new factory system" in which plants became larger, more complex, and more systematically organized and managed. And in distribution, the transformation was marked by the emergence of the jobber, the wholesaler, and the mass retailer. These changes radically altered the nature of work during the half century between 1870 and 1920.

To be sure, there were still small workshops, where skilled craftspeople manufactured products ranging from newspapers to cabinets to plumbing fixtures. There were the sweatshops in city tenements, where groups of men and women in household settings manufactured clothing or cigars on a piecework basis. And there were factories in occupations such as metalwork where individual contractors presided over what were essentially handicraft proprietorships that coexisted within a single buildings. But as the number of wage earners in manufacturing rose from 2.7 million in 1880 to 4.5 million in 1900 and to 8.4 million in 1920, the number of huge plants like the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia burgeoned, as did the size of the average plant. (The Baldwin Works had 600 employees in 1855, 3,000 in 1875, and 8,000 in 1900.) By 1920, at least in the northeastern United States where most of the nation's manufacturing wage earners were concentrated, three-quarters of those worked in factories with more than 100 employees and 30 percent worked in factories with more than 1,000 employees.

Today electronic monetary systems are gradually being introduced that will transform money into even less tangible forms, reducing it to arrays of "bits and bytes" or units of computerized information, whizzing between machines at the speed of light. Already, electronic fund transfer allows money to be instantly sent and received by different banks, companies, and countries through computers and telecommunication devices.

A child prodigy (59) ….. four is receiving computer lessons at Brunei university, in London. Nicholas MacMahon is studying at university because he is (60) …. clever for school. A(n) (61) ….. lecturer at the university, Valso Koshy, said that the boy was remarkably intelligent.

Nicholas spoke (62) ….before he was one and (63) ….the time he was 18 months old he was taking telephone (64) ….. . This was soon followed by conversational French. These are the trademarks of a highly gifted child, unusual but not unique. The strange thing (65) …. Nicholas is his reading – he taught himself to read before he could speak. Ms. Koshy, an expert (66) …. gifted children, says Nicholas is quite exceptional. Yet "exceptional" underrates his amazing (67) …. to read, almost from birth. "He was talking when he was one and we realized from start that he could read," his father said. "Soon after, he was (68) ….my spelling, words (69) …. caterpillar. Now he (70) ……insects by their Latin names.‟

The list of (71) …. is impressive, but frightening. A four-year-old who can (72) …. a Boeing 747 from a DC 10, devours encyclopedias, read The Daily Telegraph and is (73) …. on the way to becoming a violin virtuoso is hardly normal.