24.

(A) suffocation.
(B) serenade.
(C) slaughter.
(D) smidgen.

20.(A) swervingly. (B) serenely. (C) superstitiously. (D) surreptitiously. The man (21) with opening fire on a Taiwanese church congregation of mainly elderly people in Southern California wanted to "execute in cold blood as many people in that room as possible," a prosecutor said Tuesday in announcing murder, attempted murder and other charges for the shooting that killed one person and wounded five. Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer referred to David Chou, 68, as a monster whose rampage was (22) by the heroic actions of a doctor who charged at him, a pastor who hit Chou with a chair and several parishioners who tied him up until police arrived. "This monster (23) a diabolical plan to lock the church doors with his victims inside in order to lead what he thought were innocent lambs to (24)," Spitzer said. "But what he didn't realize was the parishioners at the church that day weren't lambs - they were lions and they fought back against the evil that tried to (25) their house of worship."

21. (A) chartered. (B) charged. (C) chanced. (D) chosen.

22. (A) abated. (B) abetted. (C) tended.(D) thwarted.

23. (A) crafted. (B) canned. (C) combined. (D) condemned.

25. (A) infiltrate. (B) interprete. (C) implore. (D) insinuate. After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying (26) to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called (27) countries in the world. There would be another, for certain. Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second (28) or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample. And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children— babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without (29) and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn't happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren't—that's a flat-out fabrication); guns don't kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing (30) to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

26. (A) disppointedly. (B) disinterestedly. (C) desperately. (D) demotedly.

27. (A) civilized. (B) barbarian. (C) infrastrctural. (D) courteous.

28. (A) Appointment. (B) Astonishment. (C) Amazement. (D) Amendment.

29. (A) expectation. (B) experience. (C) education. (D) exception.

30. (A) accessories. (B) accomodations. (C) accentuations. (D) accounts. Reading Comprehension 40% Read the passages and choose the best answer for each of the questions. Every so often in "Top Gun: Maverick," Pete Mitchell (that's Maverick) is summoned to a face- to-face with an admiral. Pete, after all these years in the Navy more than 35, but who's counting - has stalled at the rank of captain. He's one of the best fighter pilots ever to take wing, but the U.S. military hierarchy can be a treacherous political business, and Maverick is anything but a politician. In the presence of a superior officer he is apt to salute, smirk and push his career into the middle of the table like a stack of poker chips. He's all in. Always. The first such meeting is with Rear Adm. Chester Cain, a weathered chunk of brass played by Ed Harris, who has an impressive in-movie flight record of his own. (Without "The Right Stuff," there would have been no "Top Gun.") He seems to be telling Pete that the game is over. Thanks to new technology, flyboys like him are all but obsolete. Based on this scene, you might think that the movie is setting out to be a meditation on American air power in the age of drone warfare, but that will have to wait for the next sequel. Pete still has a job to do. A teaching job, officially, but we'll get to that. The conversation with Cain is not so much a 35 herring as a meta-commentary. Pete, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you, is the avatar of Tom Cruise, and the central question posed by this movie has less to do with the necessity of combat pilots than with the relevance of movie stars. With all this cool new technology at hand - you can binge 37 episodes of Silicon Valley grifting without leaving your couch - do we really need guys, or movies, like this?