Question: If you have ever gone through a toll booth , you know that your relationship to the person in the booth is not the most intimate you'll ever have. It is one of life's frequent affairs: You hand over some money; you might get change; you drive off. Late one morning in 1984, headed for lunch in San Francisco, I drove toward a booth. I heard loud music. It sounded like a party. I looked around. No other cars with their windows open. No sound trucks. I looked at the toll booth. Inside it, the man was dancing. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm having a party," he said. "What about the rest of the people?" I looked at the other toll booths. He said, "What do those look like to you?" He pointed down the row of toll booths. "They look like......toll booths. What do they look like to you?" He said, "Vertical coffins. At 8:30 every morning, live people get in. Then they die for eight hours. At 4:30, like _ from the dead, they reemerge and go home. For eight hours, brain is on hold, dead on the job. Going through the motions." I was amazed. This guy had developed a philosophy, a mythology about his job. Sixteen people dead on the job, and the seventeenth, in precisely the same situation, figures out a way to live. I could not help asking the next question: "Why is it different for you? You're having a good time." He looked at me. "I knew you were going to ask that. I don't understand why anybody would think my job is boring. I have a corner office, glass on all sides. I can see the Golden Gate, San Francisco, and the Berkeley hills. Half the Western world vacations here......and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing." According to the passage, which of the following statements is true? A) The author passed by the toll booth every day. B) The worker enjoyed his work very much. C) Only western people like to spend their holidays in the Berkeley hills. D) The dancing worker was getting badly along with his colleagues.
Answer: B

Question: The 30-mile road that runs through the mountains of Willie Valley makes most drivers' hands sweat. But Andersen, a 46-year-old father of four, wasn't expecting any trouble on the road last New Year's Eve, when he set off for a ski trip to the Bear Mountains with nine-year-old daughter Mia, four-old son Baylor, and nine-year-old neighbor Kenya. Andersen had driven through the Valley hundreds of times over the years. The weather was fine. But the higher they drove, the more slippery the road became. Rounding a sharp U-turn, Andersen saw a heavy truck off the road and immediately hit his brakes. In a minute, the car was going at 25 miles per hour down the mountain before falling down from a ten-foot dam into the extremely cold Logan River. The crash had broken a few windows, and within seconds, the car was filled with water. "It was frightening that we were going fast into deep water," remembers Andersen, a soft-spoken manager. Having lost all sense of direction, Andersen began to search the freezing water for the kids. Mia had been right next to him in the front seat; now, in the blackness, he couldn't find her. "I thought, if I don't get out, maybe none of us are going to get out." Andersen got out of his seat belt, swam through a broken window, and, deeply and quickly, breathed air at the surface. That's when he saw a group of men, about ten in all, appear at the top of the dam. One after another, they rushed down into the water. Helping onto safety all the three children, they began to shout at the father, "Who else is in the car?" Andersen says respectfully, " _ ." Which of the following can be the best title of the text? A) Stay calm when in trouble B) Drive rounding a U-turn C) Miracle rescue from a river D) Mystery of the Bear Mountains
Answer: A

Question: An Australian inventor has designed and built an environmentally friendly ferry  that uses solar and wind power to transport people around Sydney Harbor. Robert Dane and his Solar Sailor were given the top prize at the Australian Design Awards recently.      The Solar Sailor has been in use for six months. It uses four sources of energy for its power -- solar, wind, battery power with stored solar energy and a fuel generator  in store all controlled by computers. The ferry can travel up to 7.5 knots on just wind and solar power. It's solar wings and fiberglass solar panels   which not only take in sunlight and store it in batteries, but also act as sails.       "We angle  our solar panels to the sun in two planes , which increases the amount of energy we get from the sun by 40 percent," Dane says. "And also we can use that same structure to do another job, which is also the sail, and so these wing sails actually push the ferry forward just like a soft sail does."       Computers check the sun and wind and angle the solar wings to take in the most sunlight. If there isn't much wind or it is a cloudy day, energy stored in the batteries runs the electric motor for up to five hours. "If the batteries are too low, then the computer turns the generator on so the boat is always able to meet a commercial schedule, or get from point A to point B no matter what," Dan explains.      Dane got his idea for the Solar Sailor from a book on insects. He was amazed how insects use their wings to collect solar energy to warm themselves.       "When I read that, I realized there was a good example in nature for what we were going to do, which was to use a solar wing to collect solar energy and also to sail," he says. Which of the following is NOT true? A) Dane got his idea for the ferry from a book. B) That insects use their wings to collect solar energy gave Dane the idea. C) If the batteries are too low, the ferry travels a little more slowly. D) Solar wings and fiberglass solar panels can also act as sails.
Answer: