Đề thi thử THPT Quốc gia môn Tiếng Anh trường THPT Chu Văn An - Hà Nội năm 2015 (Đợt 6)

The wind controls our planet’s weather and climate. But how much do we understand about these complex force (1) _______ can kill and spread fear? On the night of October 15, 1987, the south of England was (2) _______ by strong winds. Gusts of over 130 km/h (3) _______ through the region. Nineteen people were killed, £1.5-billion worth of damage was (4) _______ and 19 million trees were blown down in just a few hours. Although people thought of this (5) _______ a hurricane, the winds of 1987 were only a (6) _______ 7 storm. They remain far better known than the much more serious storms of January 25, 1990, (7) _______ most of Britain was hit by daytime winds of up to 173km/h. On this occasion, 47 people were killed, even though (8) _______ in 1987, the weather forecasters issued accurate warnings. Extreme weather events such as these are dramatic (9) _______ of the power of the wind. It is one part of the weather that people generally do not give a second (10) _______ to, but across the world the wind plays a crucial role in people’s lives.

Washington was the first city in history to be created solely for the purpose of governance. Following the Revolution, members of Congress had hotly debated the question of a permanent home for themselves and for those departments – the Treasury, the Patent Office and so on – which even the sketchiest of central governments would feel obliged to establish. In 1790, largely in order to put an end to congressional bickering, George Washington was charged with selecting a site for the newly designated federal district. Not much to anyone’s surprise but to the disappointment of many he chose a tract of land on the banks of the Potomac River, a few miles upstream from his beloved plantation Mount Vernon. 

The District of Columbia was taken in part from Virginia and in part from Maryland. At the time it was laid out, its hundred square miles consisted of gently rolling hills, some under cultivation and the rest heavily wooded, with a number of creeks and much swampy land along the Potomac. There is now a section of Washington that is commonly referred to as Foggy Bottom; that section bore the same nickname a hundred and eighty years ago. 

Two ports cities, Alexandria and Georgetown, flourished within sight of the new capital and gave it access by ship to the most important cities of the infant nation – Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Salem and Portsmouth – and also to the far-off ports of England and the Continent.

The most influential filmmaker of the early silent period was the American producer and director D.W. Griffith, who developed the aesthetics of the motion picture. In 1908, at the Biograph Film Co. in New York City, Griffith began to refine the elements of moviemaking as they had evolved up to that time. He used the camera functionally, starting his shots only on significant action and stopping as soon as the action was completed. He also moved the camera closer to his players in order to heighten *emotion; he was the first director to use the close-up as a means of emphasis, flying in the face of the popular belief that audiences would not understand two eyes or a hand filling the screen. Griffith trained and developed his own company of actors, which came to include such future stars as Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish. He experimented freely with lighting, camera angles, and the use of filters over the lenses to achieve unique effects. Griffith also broke his scenes into a number of different shots, timing their lengths to create increasing excitement as well as rhythmic momentum never before achieved on film. He proved that the basis of film expression is editing and that the unit of editing is the shot, not the scene. 

In 1913 Griffith completed the first of his epics, Judith of Bethulia, in four reels; Biograph executives were outraged at its length and failed to release it until 1914, by which time longer films had become more common. In the meantime, Griffith left Biograph to join the Mutual studio in Hollywood, Calif, and had begun work on his 12-reel American Civil War film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), the screen’s first true masterwork, which marked the emergence of motion picture as a full-fledged art form. Expertly mixing the spectacle of battle with the pathos of human drama, The Birth of a Nation possesses a cumulative power that took many white audiences by storm; many blacks and others, however, have long complained that the film fosters negative stereotypes of African-Americans and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. Even more impressive is Griffith’s later film Intolerance (1916), made in part as an answer to critics of The Birth of a Nation and often cited as the greatest motion picture ever made. An immense historical pageant, it tells four stories from separate epochs simultaneously, cutting from one to another with a visual and emotional force that has seldom been equaled on the screen.