A wind turbine and a coal-power station stand side by side in Selby, England. Both generate electricity. ___________31________ Many industrial countries have promised to limit the amount of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide they produce each year. But in May 2011, Britain became the first nation in the world to take legal steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2020. Chris Huhne, Britain's Energy 

Secretary, set a "carbon budget.” __________32_______ And he promised that by 2050, emissions would be down by at least 80%.Such bold steps would change the way Britain produces energy. 

            33     The new rules put the U.K. on a very tough course. It is not known what sacrifices, if any, will be needed to make the changes. The agreement will certainly be good for the environment. ________34______ It seems likely that companies specializing in wind turbines will build in the U.K. Renewable energy, or power that comes from such sources as wind, could bring big business to Britain. _____35___ But, says British Prime Minister David Cameron, it will be worth the cost. "The transition to a low-carbon economy is necessary, real and global," says Cameron. "By stepping up, showing leadership and competing with the world, the U.K. can prove that there need not be a tension between green and growth."

(A) British officials hope it will also boost the economy. 

(B) He pledged that the United Kingdom would cut carbon emissions in half by 2027, compared to what they were in 1990. 

(C) The bad news might be the price of electricity, which will likely rise. 

(D )Burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil sends huge amounts of polluting greenhouse gases into the air. 

(E) An industrial country has never before taken such serious steps to develop a low-carbon economy.

 Many diseases that doctors thought had almost disappeared are now making a comeback. (26) An NHS spokesperson said that tuberculosis is now more common in England than it is in less developed countries such as Rwanda, Iraq, and Guatemala. (27) In 2013, it killed 1.5 million people worldwide, and that number is rising. Tuberculosis largely affects very poor people. It is an infectious disease that affects the lungs. (28) Researchers say that many of the diseases that are making a comeback are both preventable and treatable. (29) The number of elderly who have to go without  food has doubled in the past three years. (30) A UK doctor said she did not understand why society wasn't doing more to fight TB and that there needed to be a bigger focus on better nutrition and proper medicine. 

(A) Its symptoms include bad coughs, fever, weight loss and sweating. 

(B) Britain's National Health Service has reported a serious rise in the number of people with diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, measles and whooping cough. 

(C) This is putting these old people in greater danger of getting TB. 

(D) Tuberculosis can be cured by offering patients with antibiotics . 

(E) One big problem in England is that tuberculosis is affecting old people who have malnutrition – they do not have enough to eat. 

(AB) Tuberculosis is also increasing across the globe.

   A non-virtual, real-life Amazon bookstore opened in Manhattan on Thursday with no obvious signs of corporate guilt at having driven countless independent bookstores to oblivion with the scythe-like power of the company’s e-book discounting. The store opened to a crowd waiting outside, some of them curious about the retro spectacle of a big-box bookstore, as if resurrected from the dead, selling actual books over the counter instead of the internet. All in the name of Amazon, the Colossus that ate the Indies.

   “We’re all about discoverability,” said one of the friendly employees offering greetings and guidance. The store’s strategy is to mine Amazon’s massive online archives of reader data to steer the most popular books to shoppers. The circularity of this crème-de-la-crème process provides the sales leverage. The store stocks only 3,000 of the most popular, data-driven titles — for instance, a history best seller that’s been judged a good read by 2,796 previous readers, who gave it a 4.8 approval rating on a scale of 5. Collectively, the store boasts, its stock has received 1.7 million 5-star reviews from Amazon.com customers.

    How to resist in this age of rampant populism? The question was once addressed by Robert Silvers, founding co-editor of The New York Review of Books, the enduring resource for dedicated readers in Gotham and beyond. Mr. Silvers preferred to mine the tastes and opinions of gifted writers and editors whom he chose for being able to offer all manner of bookish recommendations and delights, not least some serendipity. “We do what we want and don’t try to figure out what the public wants,” he explained unapologetically. In venturing offline with its seventh brick-and-mortar store nationally, Amazon signals that it is on to something new in its ever expansive business outlook. We all may have thought that product delivery by drone was the next big Amazon thing. But the future turns out to be a typical retail store in the Time Warner Center off Columbus Circle. Another half dozen are due this year, including a second Manhattan store, on 34th Street.

    The speculation is that dozens more are planned nationally and that Amazon, which already handles nearly half of the nation’s book sales, may eventually expand into selling far more products than the books and Kindle electronics the stores currently offer. The store is tuned for speedy business, with sales via credit or debit cards, no cash. The privileges that come with Amazon Prime are quickly honored. No prices are evident; a customer runs a book under a scanner for Amazon’s shifting price system.

    There’s no cafe to indulge idle time, and the floors don’t invite flopping with a book or a cranky toddler. Ask a worker about the narrow predictability of data mining, and the reply comes: “It’s data with heart.” Amazon says its recommendations include in-house “curators’ assessments” to add a variable touch to the crowdsourcing. Still, the store lacks the little handwritten employee recommendations posted in independent bookstores as humanizing beacons. Amazon compensates at each book pile with a small placard featuring its percentiles of popularity and review notes from blurb-savvy customers (“Far beyond the ordinary…”). “It’s weird — they keep talking about ‘discovery,’ but how do you discover something different in a process that channels people into a smaller and smaller focus?” asks Chris Doeblin, owner of the independent Book Culture store and two others in the city.

　　Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany in 1770. His father, Johann Beethoven, was also a musician and wanted his son to be a child prodigy.   26   

　　Johann’s resolution to make his son into a successful musician was so extreme that he would pull poor Ludwig out of bed in the middle of the night and force the young boy to practice piano until the early hours of the morning. 

　　At the age of 11, Ludwig received professional piano and composition training in Bonn under the royal court’s organist, and by the mid-1790s he had made a reputation for himself as a master pianist in Vienna, the musical capital of the age.   27   

　　A huge turning point in Beethoven’s life occurred in 1798, when his hearing started to become impaired.   28   This caused him to shun company and become depressed. He even contemplated suicide. 

　　Battling both depression and his loss of hearing, Beethoven continued to produce music with a special adaptation to his piano.   29   The music that he created during this period expressed heroism and struggle and went on to become some of his most famous compositions. 

　　 30   After the performance of his Ninth Symphony, he turned around to see the ecstatic applause of the audience but broke down in tears when he realized that he couldn’t hear them. 

　　 After a long illness, Beethoven died at the age of 56 on March 26, 1827. The true cause of his death was unknown for a long time, but later analysis of his hair and skeleton suggests that he was accidentally poisoned by his doctors, who prescribed excessive doses of lead-based medicine. Whatever the cause, the death of the great man shocked Vienna. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral procession, paying their respects to a true musical genius of their time. 

   No student of a foreign language needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing word sequences and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs and suffixes, we are able to communicate tiny variations in meaning. We can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks to convey subtle differences in meaning. Nor is this complexity inherent to the English language. 51 The Cherokee pronoun system, for example, can distinguish between 'you and I', 'several other people and I' and 'you, another person and I'. In English, all these meanings are summed up in the one, crude pronoun 'we'. Grammar is universal and plays a part in every language, no matter how widespread it is. So the question which has baffled many linguists is - who created grammar?

   At first, it would appear that this question is impossible to answer. To find out how grammar is created, someone needs to be present at the time of a language's creation, documenting its emergence. Many historical linguists are able to trace modern complex languages back to earlier languages, but in order to answer the question of how complex languages are actually formed, the researcher needs to observe how languages are started from scratch. Amazingly, however, this is possible. Some of the most recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. 52 Since they had no opportunity to learn each other's languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowner. They have little in the way of grammar, and in many cases it is difficult for a listener to deduce when an event happened, and who did what to whom. Speakers need to use circumlocution in order to make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children did not simply copy the strings of words uttered by their elders, they adapted their words to create a new, expressive language. Complex grammar systems which emerge from pidgins are termed creoles, and they are invented by children.

   Further evidence of this can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a series of gestures; they utilize the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. Moreover, there are many different languages used worldwide. 53 Previously, all deaf people were isolated from each other, but in 1979 a new government introduced schools for the deaf. Although children were taught speech and lip reading in the classroom, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures that they used at home. It was basically a pidgin. Each child used the signs differently, and there was no consistent grammar. 54 Although it was based on the signs of the older children, the younger children's language was more fluid and compact, and it utilized a large range of grammatical devices to clarify meaning. What is more, all the children used the signs in the same way. A new creole was born.

   Some linguists believe that many of the world's most established languages were creoles at first. The English past tense –ed ending may have evolved from the verb 'do'. 'It ended' may once have been 'It end-did'. Therefore it would appear that even the most widespread languages were partly created by children. 55 Their minds can serve to create logical, complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

(A) All languages, even those of so-called 'primitive' tribes have clever grammatical components. 

(B) At that time, slaves from a number of different ethnicities were forced to work together under colonizer's rule. 

(C) The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. 

(D) However, children who joined the school later, when this inventive sign system was already around, developed a quite different sign language. 

(E) Children appear to have innate grammatical machinery in their brains, which springs to life when they are first trying to make sense of the world around them. 

  This American anachronism may be on its way out. Johns Hopkins abandoned it in 2014, reducing the percentage of legacy students from 13 to 4 percent. “Legacy preference is immobility written as policy, preserving for children the same advantages enjoyed by their parents. It embodies in stark and indefensible terms inherited privilege in higher education,” Hopkins President Ron Daniels has written. In 2021, Amherst College followed suit.
    Lawmakers are starting to move against legacy admissions too. A bill introduced into Congress in March 2022 would prohibit colleges that get federal money from giving an advantage to legacy applicants. A bill has been introduced in the New York Assembly and Senate that would ban the practice in both public and private colleges in the state. A similar bill is being considered in Connecticut. Colorado banned legacies in public colleges last year.
    These recent efforts, however, are not the first time lawmakers have made a run at legacy preferences. In 2003, Senator Edward Kennedy proposed requiring colleges in receipt of federal funds to publish data on the economic and racial composition of their legacy admits. His bill was defeated.
Things may be different this time around, but we should not be too sure. Powerful vested interests are at work here. They include those of the well-connected alums of these colleges,who are rather inclined toward a policy that will give their children a better chance of following in their footsteps. Support for both legacy and donor preferences rises with household income, according to a USA Today poll. Many upper-middle-class parents feel little compunction about pulling every string possible to get their offspring a place at a prestigious college, even if that means elbowing out a more qualified but less fortunate applicant. The prevailing norm in the U.S. is that parents should do everything possible to
help their children get ahead of others. Few feel any shame in sending their children to expensive private K–12 schools or providing internship opportunities to friends and family.
Even many parents who profess a desire for a fairer society appreciate that legacy applicants get an admission bump equivalent to an extra 160 points on their SAT. Parental interest is often seen as an unalloyed virtue. Blood is thicker than justice.