BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO Cán bộ coi thi 1: _______________________

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC HÀ NỘI Cán bộ coi thi 2: _______________________

ĐỀ THI – KỸ NĂNG: ĐỌC

THỜI GIAN LÀM BÀI: 60 PHÚT
ĐỀ THI GỒM 07 TRANG
Họ và tên thí sinh: …………………………………… Chữ ký: ……………
Ngày sinh: …….......……. Giới tính: ……………..… Số BD: ……………

INSTRUCTION: There are THREE sections in this test. Writie all your answers on your answer sheet while reading. You
have NO EXTRA TIME to transfer your answers onto the answer sheet. At the end of the examination, hand in both the
question paper and the answer sheet.

READING PASSAGE 1: You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 below.

THE STORY OF COFFEE

A. Coffee was first discovered in Eastern Africa in an area we know today as Ethiopia. A popular legend refers to a
goat herder by the name of Kaldi, who observed his goats acting unusually friskily after eating berries from a bush.
Curious about this phenomenon, Kaldi tried eating the berries himself. He found that these berries gave him
renewed energy.
B. The news of this energy laden fruit quickly moved throughout the region. Coffee berries were transported from
Ethiopia to the Arabian Peninsula, and were first cultivated in what today is the country of Yemen. Coffee
remained a secret in Arabia before spreading to Turkey and then to the European continent by means of Venetian
trade merchants.
C. Coffee was first eaten as a food though later people in Arabia would make a drink out of boiling the beans for its
narcotic effects and medicinal value. Coffee for a time was known as Arabian wine to Muslims who were banned
from alcohol by Islam. It was not until after coffee had been eaten as a food product, a wine and a medicine that it
was discovered, probably by complete accident in Turkey, that by roasting the beans a delicious drink could be
made. The roasted beans were first crushed and then boiled in water, creating a crude version of the beverage we
enjoy today. The first coffee houses were opened in Europe in the 17th Century and in 1675, the Viennese
established the habit of refining the brew by filtering out the grounds, sweetening it, and adding a dash of milk.
D. If you were to explore the planet for coffee, you would find about 60 species of coffee plants growing wild in
Africa, Malaysia, and other regions. But only about ten of them are actually cultivated. Of these ten, two species are
responsible for almost all the coffee produced in the world: Coffea Arabica and Coffea Canephora (usually known
as Robusta). Because of ecological differences existing among the various coffee producing countries, both types
have undergone many mutations and now exist in many sub-species.
E. Although wild plants can reach 10 - 12 metres in height, the plantation one reaches a height of around four
metres. This makes the harvest and flowering easier, and cultivation more economical. The flowers are white and
sweet-scented like the Spanish jasmine. Flowers give way to a red, darkish berry. At first sight, the fruit is like a big
cherry both in size and in colour. The berry is coated with a thin, red film (epicarp) containing a white, sugary
mucilaginous flesh (mesocarp). Inside the pulp there are the seeds in the form of two beans coupled at their flat
surface. Beans are in turn coated with a kind of resistant, golden yellow parchment, (called endocarp). When
peeled, the real bean appears with another very thin silvery film. The bean is bluish green verging on bronze, and is
at the most 11 millimetres long and 8 millimetres wide.
F. Coffee plants need special conditions to give a satisfactory crop. The climate needs to be hot-wet or hot
temperate, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, with frequent rains and temperatures varying
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from 15 to 25 Degrees C. The soil should be deep, hard, permeable, well irrigated, with well-drained subsoil. The
best lands are the hilly ones or from just-tilled woods. The perfect altitude is between 600 and 1200 metres, though
some varieties thrive at 2000-2200 metres. Cultivation aimed at protecting the plants at every stage of growth is
needed. Sowing should be in sheltered nurseries from which, after about six months, the seedlings should be moved
to plantations in the rainy season where they are usually alternated with other plants to shield them from wind and
excessive sunlight. Only when the plant is five years old can it be counted upon to give a regular yield. This is
between 400 grams and two kilos of arabica beans for each plant, and 600 grams and two kilos for robusta beans.
G. Harvesting time depends on the geographic situation and it can vary greatly therefore according to the various
producing countries. First, the ripe beans are picked from the branches. Pickers can selectively pick approximately
250 to 300 pounds of coffee cherry a day. At the end of the day, the pickers bring their heavy burlap bags to
pulping mills where the cherry coffee can be pulped (or wet milled). The pulped beans then rest, covered in pure
rainwater to ferment overnight. The next day the wet beans are hand-distributed upon the drying floor to be sun
dried. This drying process takes from one to two weeks depending on the amount of sunny days available. To make
sure they dry evenly, the beans need to be raked many times during this drying time. Two weeks later the sun dried
beans, now called parchment, are scooped up, bagged and taken to be milled. Huge milling machines then remove
the parchment and silver skin, which renders a green bean suitable for roasting. The green beans are roasted
according to the customers’ specifications and, after cooling, the beans are then packaged and mailed to customers.
Questions 1-6: The reading passage on The Story of Coffee has 7 paragraphs A – G.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs B – G.
Write the appropriate number (i – xi) in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use them all.

i. Growing Coffee v. Arabian Coffee ix. Consuming Coffee

ii. Problems with Manufacture vi. Coffee Varieties x. Climates for Coffee
Processing the Bean vii. Modern Coffee xi. The Coffee Plant
iv. First Contact viii. The Spread of Coffee
Example Answer
Paragraph A iv
1 Paragraph B viii. 4 Paragraph E xi
2 Paragraph C ix 5 Paragraph F x
3 Paragraph D vi 6 Paragraph G iii
.

Questions 7-9: Complete the labels on the diagram of a coffee bean below.
Choose your answers from the text and write them in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet.

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 7 epicarp 8 mesocarp 9 endocarp
Questions 10-13: Using the information in the passage, complete the flowchart below.
Write your answers in boxes 10-13 on your answer sheet.

Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Coffee Production Process

. Harvesting time depends on the geographic situation and it can vary greatly therefore according to the various
producing countries. First, the ripe beans are picked from the branches. Pickers can selectively pick approximately
250 to 300 pounds of coffee cherry a day. At the end of the day, the pickers bring their heavy burlap bags to
pulping mills where the cherry coffee can be pulped (or wet milled). The pulped beans then rest, covered in pure
rainwater to ferment overnight. The next day the wet beans are hand-distributed upon the drying floor to be sun
dried. This drying process takes from one to two weeks depending on the amount of sunny days available. To make
sure they dry evenly, the beans need to be raked many times during this drying time. Two weeks later the sun dried
beans, now called parchment, are scooped up, bagged and taken to be milled. Huge milling machines then remove
the parchment and silver skin, which renders a green bean suitable for roasting. The green beans are roasted
according to the customers’ specifications and, after cooling, the beans are then packaged and mailed to customers.

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READING PASSAGE 2: You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–27, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.

The students’ problem

(A) The college and university accommodation crisis in Ireland has become ‘so chronic’ that students are being
forced to sleep rough, share a bed with strangers – or give up on studying altogether.

(B) The deputy president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Kevin Donoghue, said the problem has become
particularly acute in Dublin. He told the Irish Mirror: “Students are so desperate, they’re not just paying through the
nose to share rooms – they’re paying to share a bed with complete strangers. It reached crisis point last year and it’s
only getting worse. “We’ve heard of students sleeping rough; on sofas, floors and in their cars and I have to stress
there’s no student in the country that hasn’t been touched by this crisis. “Commutes – which would once have been
considered ridiculous – are now normal, whether that’s by bus, train or car and those who drive often end up
sleeping in their car if they’ve an early start the next morning.”

(C) Worry is increasing over the problems facing Ireland's 200,000 students as the number increases over the next
15 years. With 165,000 full-time students in Ireland – and that figure expected to increase to around 200,000 within
the next 15 years –fears remain that there aren’t enough properties to accommodate current numbers.

(D) Mr. Donoghue added: “The lack of places to live is actually forcing school-leavers out of college altogether.
Either they don’t go in the first place or end up having to drop out because they can’t get a room and commuting is
just too expensive, stressful and difficult.”

(E) Claims have emerged from the country that some students have been forced to sleep in cars, or out on the
streets, because of the enormous increases to rent in the capital. Those who have been lucky enough to find a place
to live have had to do so ‘blind’ by paying for accommodation, months in advance, they haven’t even seen just so
they will have a roof over their head over the coming year.

(F) According to the Irish Independent, it’s the ‘Google effect’ which is to blame. As Google and other blue-chip
companies open offices in and around Dublin’s docklands area, which are ‘on the doorstep of the city’,
international professionals have been flocking to the area which will boast 2,600 more apartments, on 50 acres of
undeveloped land, over the next three to 10 years.

(G) Rent in the area soared by 15 per cent last year and a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Grand Canal
costs €2,100 (£1,500) per month to rent. Another two-bedroom apartment at Hanover Dock costs €2,350 (almost
£1,700) with a three-bedroom penthouse – measuring some 136 square metres – sits at €4,500 (£3,200) per month
in rent.

(H) Ireland’s Higher Education Authority admitted this was the first time they had seen circumstances ‘so extreme’
and the Fianna Fáil party leader, Michael Martin, urged on the Government to intervene. He said: “It is very
worrying that all of the progress in opening up access to higher education in the last decade – particularly for the
working poor – is being derailed because of an entirely foreseeable accommodation crisis.

Questions 14-21: Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A–H. Choose the most suitable paragraph headings
from the list of headings and write the correct letter, A–H, in boxes 14–21 on your answer sheet.

14. Cons of the commuting D 16. Commutes have become common in Ireland
nowadays B
15. Thing that students have to go through A
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17. Danger of the overflow C 20. Regression H

18. Cause of the problems F 21. Eyeless choice E

19. Pricing data G

Questions 22–27: Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?

In boxes 22–27 on your answer sheet, write:

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

22. The accommodation problem in Ireland is especially bad in Dublin T

23. Commutes are considered ridiculous. F

24. The number of students in Ireland is not likely to increase in the future F

25. Due to the opening of the new offices around Dublin, the number of local restaurants will go up significantly
over the next 3 to 10 years NG

26. The rent price went up by 15% last year T

27. Michael Martin stated that crisis could have been omitted if the government reacted properly NG

READING PASSAGE 3: You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28–40, which are based on Reading
Passage 3 below.

How the mind ages

The way mental function changes is largely determined by three factors-mental lifestyle, the impact of chronic
disease and flexibility of the mind.
Experiments have shown that younger monkeys consistently outperform their older colleagues on memory tests.
Formerly, psychologists concluded that memory and other mental functions in humans deteriorate over time
because of changes in the brain. Thus mental decline after young adulthood appeared inevitable. The truth,
however, is not quite so simple.
Stanley Rapoport at the National Institute of Health in the United States measured the flow of blood in the brains of
old and young people as they completed different tasks. Since blood flow reflects neural activity. Rapoport could
compare which networks of neurons were the same, the neural networks they used were significantly different. The
older subjects used different internal strategies to accomplish comparable results at the same time,'Rapoport says.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, psychologist Timothy Salthouse compared a group of fast and accurate
typists of college age with another group in their 60s. Both groups typed 60 words a minute. The older typists, it
turned out, achieved their speed with cunning little strategies that made them more efficient than their younger
counterparts. They made fewer finger shifts, gaining a fraction of a second here and there. They also read ahead in
the test. The neural networks involved in typing appear to have been reshaped to compensate for losses in motor
skills or other age changes.

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In fact, there's evidence that deterioration in mental functions can actually be reversed. Neuropsychologist Marion
Diamond at the University of California has shown that mental activity maks neurons sprout new dendrites* which
establish connections with other neurons. The dendrites shrink when the mind is idle. For example,'when a rat is
kept in isolation, the animal's brain shrinks, but if we put that rat with other rats in a large cage and give them an
assortment of toys, we can show, after four days, significant differences in its brain.'says Diamond. After a month
in the enriched surroundings, the whole cerebral cortex has expanded, as has its blood supply.'But even in the
enriched surroundings, rats get bored unless the toys are varied. Animals are just like we are. They need
stimulation,'says Diamond. A busy mental lifestyle keeps the human mind fit, says Warner Schaie of Penn State
University. ‘People who regularly participate in challenging tasks retain their intellectual abilities better than mental
couch potatoes.'
In his studies, Schaie detected a decline in mental function among individuals who underwent lengthy stays in
hospital for chronic illness. He postulated it might be due to the mental passivity encouraged by hospital routine.
One of the most profoundly important mental functions is memory. Memory exists in more than one form, what we
call knowledge- facts- is what psychologists such as Harry Bahrick of Ohio Wesleyan University call semantic
memory. Events, conversations and occurrences in time and space, on the other hand, make up episodic memory.
It's true that episodic memory begins to decline when most people are in their 50s, but it's never perfect at any age.
Probing the longevity of knowledge, Bahrick tested 1,000 high school graduates to see how well they remembered
the school subject algebra. Some had completed the course a month before, other 50 years earlier. Surprisingly, he
found that a person's grasp of algebra did not depend on how long ago he'd taken the course. The determining factor
was the duration of instruction. Those who had spent only a few months learning algebra forgot most of it within
two or three years while others who had been instructed for longer remembered better. According to Bahrick,'the
long-term residue of knowledge remains stable over the decades, independent of the age of the person and the
memory.'
Perhaps even more important than the ability to remember is the ability to manage memory- a mental function
known as metamemory.'You could say metamemory is a byproduct of going to school,'says psychologist Robert
Kail of Purdue University,'The question-and-answer process,especially exam taking, helps children learn and
teaches them how their memory [Link] may be one reason why the better educated a person is, the more
likely they are to perform well in many aspects of life and in psychological assessments: A group of adult novice
chess players were compared with a group of child experts at the game. But when asked to remember the patterns
of chess pieces arranged on a board, the children won.' Because they'd played a lot of chess, their knowledge of
chess was better organized than that of the adults, and their existing knowledge of chess served as a framework for
new memory,'explains Kail. Cognitive style, another factor in maintaining mental function, is what Schaie calls the
ability to adapt and roll with life's punches.'He measured mental flexibility with questions and tests requiring
people to carry out in an offbeat way an everyday activity they had done millions of times. One example was asking
people to copy a paragraph substituting uppercase letters for lowercase ones. These tests seem silly, but flexible-
minded people manage to complete them,'says Schaie. The rigid person responds with tension instead and performs
poorly. Those who score highly on tests of cognition at an advanced age are those who tested high in mental
flexibility at middle age'.
On a more optimistic note, one mental resource that only improves with time is specialized knowledge. Crystallised
intelligence about one's occupation apparently does not decline at all until at least age 75. Vocabulary is another
such specialized form of knowledge. Research clearly shows that vocabulary develops with time. Retired teachers
and journalists consistently score higher on tests of vocabulary and general information than college students.
Questions 28-30: Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes 28-30 on your answer sheet.
28. What does the writer say about the performance of older typists on the test?
A. They used different motor skills from younger typists.
B. They had been more efficiently trained than younger typists.
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C. They used more time-saving techniques than younger typists.
D. They had better concentration skills than younger typists.
29. The experiment with the rats showed that
A. brain structure only changed when the rats were given a familiar toy
B. the rats became anxious after a lengthy period of time alone
C. the rats lived longer then they were part of a social group
D. the rats'brains expanded or shrank depending on the level of mental activity
30. A comparison between adults and children who played chess showed that
A. the children were as capable as the adults of remembering a series of numbers
B. the children had better recall of the layout of pieces
C. the adults stored memories of chess moves in a more logical manner
D. the adults had clearer memories of chess games they had played
Questions 31-36: Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 31-36 on your answer sheet.
Types of memory
Psychologists distinguish between two different types of memory: 31… memory ………….. and 32. …… memory
….. memory. A study was conducted into people's knowledge of 33. … ………. to determine recall ability. This
aspect of memory was found to be a function not of age but rather of length of tuition.
School also helps with a brain function called 34. …………. This is why a more highly educated person is
generally more successful and does better in 35. … ………… tests.

Some of our mental functions remain unaffected by age or even improve. For example, as we get older, our
knowledge of 36. … VOCABULARY………. increases.
Questions 37-40: Look at the following statements and the list of people below. Match each statement with the
correct person, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet.
37. The educational system makes students aware of how their memory works. E
38. Although older people may use a different mental approach when completing a task, they can still achieve the
same result as younger people A
39. Being open to new ways of doing things can have a positive impact on your mental condition as we get older C
40. Both animals and humans need to exist in an environment full of interest. B
List of People
A Stanley Rapoport
B Marion Diamond
C Warner Schaie
D Harry Bahrick
E Robert Kail

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--------END OF THE READING TEST---------