Đề thi thử vào lớp 10 môn Tiếng Anh (chuyên) trường THPT Chuyên Nguyễn Huệ lần 3 năm học 2016 - 2017

When it rains, it does not always pour. During a typical storm, a (26. COMPARE) _______ small amount of the lock-up moisture in each cloud reaches the ground as rain. So the idea that human intervention - a rain dance, perhaps - might encourage the sky to give up a little (27. ADD) _______ water has been around since prehistoric times. More recently, would-be rain makers have used a more direct procedure - that of throwing (28. VARY) _______ chemicals out of aero-planes in an effort to wring more rain from the clouds, a practice known as “cloud seeding”. Yet such techniques, which were first developed in the 1940s, are (29. NOTORIETY) _______ difficult to evaluate. It is hard to (30. CERTAIN) _______, for example, how much rain would have fallen anyway. So, despite much anecdotal evidence of the advantages of cloud seeding, which has led to its adoption in more than 40 countries around the world, as far as scientists are concerned, results are still (31. CONCLUSIVE) _______. That could be about to change. For the past three years (32. RESEARCH) _______ have been carrying out the most extensive and (33. RIGOUR) _______ evaluation to date of a revolutionary new technique that will substantially boost the volume of (34. RAIN) _______. The preliminary (35. FIND) _______ of their experiments indicate that solid evidence of the technique’s effectiveness is now within the scientists’ grasp.

Charles Conrad went to the moon with Apollo 12 and circled the Earth in Skylab. But from now on, he is going to aim high for himself. His company, Universal Space Lines, hopes to produce a more economic rocket that will be able to go in space again and again. (0) _____ G _____

NASA, the U.S, government-owned space program, plans to develop such a rocket. However, the immediate priority is missions to Mars, which will require different technology. So it is more likely that people outside the NASA program will develop re-useable rocket design. Rick Tumlinson runs an independent organization called the Space Frontier Foundation and firmly believes that it is time for business to get involved.

(36) __________
So Tumlinson is also in business to prove a point. Space is our destiny, he says, so why not get on with it a bit more eagerly? To this end, the SFF is holding a conference in Los Angeles shortly, to be called Space: Open for Business.

(37) __________
Another company, Kistler Aerospace, has similar plans; “Our goal is to become a delivery service to low Earth orbit that will radically re-align the economics of doing business in space. Satellites will be our parcels: our vehicles will be operated in repeated flights with air freights efficiency.”

(38) __________
Their own view is that it is impossible for NASA, which is government-owned, to offer an “open frontier”. This is not a matter of budgets or schedules, but of fundamental purpose and design. NASA is “elitist and exclusive”, whereas the SFF believes in opportinities for everyone “a future of endlessly expanding new choices”.

(39) __________
Of course, the ex-astronaut and businessman Charles Conrad agrees. “I’m trying to get affordable space transportation up and operative so that everybody can enjoy space. And by the way, the Japanese are hard at work building a space hotel.”

(40) __________
If he is right, mass space travel will have arrived by 2050 and space tourism will have become a viable industry. More importantly, the human race will have made serious progress in crossing that final frontier.

A. Companies will always be looking for profit. For this reason, the SFF is not in favor of American missions to Mars, claiming that there’s nothing in it for investors. At the same time, they do accept that these missions could bring scientific benefits.

B. He sees the NASA program as a bit of a dinosaur. “25 years after the Wright Brothers, people could buy a commercial plane ticket ... but many years after landing on the moon, we sat around watching old astronauts on TV talking about the good old days.”

C. In 1997, the SFF ran a survey on the Internet, called “Cheap Access to Space”, where it asked American taxpayers for their views on the U.S space program and on what American’s future priorities should be in space transportation.

D. U.S government officials don’t see the future for space tourism. Here again, private companies may well prove them wrong. David Ashford, director of Bristol Spaceplanes Limited, once said that space tourism would begin ten years after people stopped laughing at the concept. Recently, he added this striking comment: “people have stopped laughing.”

E. Charles Conrad is due to speak there. But his company is in fact only one of several that already have blueprints for getting into space and back cheaply. Rotary is working on something that would be launched like a rocket but return like a helicopter. Pioneer Rocket plane believes there could be a million dollar market in delivering packages from one side of the planet to the other in an hour.

F. They would like to see “irreversible human settlement” in space as soon as possible and maintain that this will only happen through free enterprise. “Building buildings and driving trucks is not what astronauts should be doing; that’s what the private sector does.”

G “Cheap” is an important word in space technology nowadays and re-useable rockets will be a key way of controlling costs. They will deliver things to orbits, bring stuff back to Earth and then go up again, perhaps with machinery for a space factory, or even carrying tourists.

Maybe you recycle cans, glass, and paper. Do you know that nature recycles, too? One of the things nature (51) _______ is water. Water goes from oceans, lakes, and rivers into the air. Water falls from the air as (52) _______ or snow. Rain and snow eventually find their way back to the oceans. Nature’s recycling program for water is (53) _______ the water cycle.

The water cycle has four stages: storage, evaporation, precipitation, and runoff. Water on Earth gets stored in oceans, lakes, rivers, ice, and even underground. Water goes from storage into the atmosphere by a (54) _______ called evaporation. When water evaporates, it changes from a liquid (55) _______ a gas, called water vapor. Water vapor goes up into (56) _______ atmosphere. Water returns to the Earth as precipitation in rain or snow by changing into drops of water when the air (57) _______ cold enough. Clouds are collections of water droplets. Most precipitation (58) _______ into the oceans and goes right back into storage.

Water that falls on land always flows from (59) _______ places to lower ones. This flow is called runoff. Water from land flows into streams. Streams join (60) _______ to make rivers and eventually the water flows into storage in the oceans. Then the water cycle starts all over again.