Choose the letter of the underlined part that is NOT correct in usage.

Complete the sentence with the best answer. 

Passage #1 

   The ancient Silk Road, the trade route to connect China with Medieval Europe, 22 . Thousands of years ago, numerous trade caravans packed with spices and silk crisscrossed the Eurasian land mass. In those days, 23 , which lived up to its name as the Middle Kingdom. Now 24 , which highlights more than 8,000 kilometers of high-speed railway across 17 countries, entailing the transport network of cargo as well as passengers all the way to London, China hopes to revive its power and role at the center of the universe. The new Silk Road is a sign of how China sees the world of the future— 25 . What 26 , including a potential trade war with the West and conflicts over energy security. 

(A) less predictable and more dangerous 

(B) the country sees are threats 

(C) with an audacious scheme to launch a high-speed rail project 

(D) was undoubtedly one of the first greatest avenues of globalization 

(E) all roads led to China

    Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change 27 people think and behave. They say our ability to focus 28 by bursts of information. The stimulation provokes excitement—a dopamine squirt—that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored. While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Scientists say, heavy 29 actually have more trouble focusing and shutting 30 irrelevant information, and they experience more stress.

Passage #1

    Every year, billions of tons of soil are washed away by floods that destroy farmland and entire hillsides are undermined by violent storms. To combat this potentially catastrophic erosion, governments around the world have used giant walls of concrete and stone to prop up mountains and reinforce riverbanks. 

    William Louey thinks there may be a better approach. Louey runs a Hong Kong engineering company that claims success with an environmentally-friendly material called Geofiber, a kind of soil mixed with fiber. Instead of burying nature in concrete, engineers are using Geofiber to make slopes that are strong enough to resist landslides and fertile enough to support vegetation and wildlife. Geofiber has one more advantage. Water may become trapped behind a concrete wall and may eventually damage it. Geofiber allows water to drain naturally, which reduces pressure on a slope.

    A prevailing phenomenon in the era of globalization is that many individuals develop a flexible notion of citizenship as strategies to accumulate capital and power. Many scholars identify the phenomenon as “flexible citizenship,” which refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, transnational travel, and displacement that induce people to respond fluidly and opportunistically to political, economic and social changes. In their quest to accumulate capital and prestige in the global arena, these transnational subjects stress, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments and cultural regimes. These logics and practices are produced within particular structures of meaning about family, gender, nationality, class mobility, and social power.

   Flexibility and mobility enable the transnational subjects to construct a new mode of identity across political borders. To illustrate, transnational subjects include figures such as multicultural professionals, multiple-passport holders, the “astronauts” shuttling across borders on business, or “parachute kids” dropped off by parents on the trans-Pacific business commute. The individuals who are able to benefit from their participation in global capitalism mostly celebrate flexibility and mobility. Today, as mobility and flexibility form an integral part of human behavioral patterns, the new connections between flexibility and the logics of displacement, on the one hand, and capital accumulation, on the other, have given new valence to the strategies of maneuvering and positioning. Flexibility, migration and relocation, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become fashionable practices.