The text below is for question number 1 and 2
Reading comprehension is one of the most complex cognitive activities in which
humans engage, making it difficult to teach, measure, and research. Despite decades of
research in reading comprehension, international and national reading scores indicate
stagnant growth for U.S. adolescents. In this article, we review the theoretical and empirical
research in reading comprehension. We first explore different theoretical models for
comprehension and then focus on components shown to be important across models that
represent potential targets for instruction. In the last part of the article, we consider
solutions for translating research to practice and policies for improving instruction.
Improving reading scores will require a concerted and collaborative effort by researchers,
educators, and policy makers with a focus on long-term solutions. An early and sustained
focus on developing background knowledge, vocabulary, inference, and comprehension
monitoring skills across development will be necessary to improve comprehension. Source:
Amy M Elleman, Eric L. Oslund. 2019. Reading Comprehension Research: Implications for
Practice and Policy
1. What did the researchers do to conclude their findings?
A. The researchers did quantitative research
B. The researchers developed a theory to support their background of the research
C. The researchers did a theoretical and empirical research in reading comprehension
D. The researchers found samples for their research
E. The researchers did narrative inquiry research.
2. Based on the research abstract above, what are the essentials focus to improve reading
comprehension?
A. Doing sustainable research
B. Developing vocabulary and inference
C. Focusing on reading scores
D. Understanding the reading models
E. Practicing theoretical research on reading comprehension
The text below is for question number 3 and 4
We often think it is very funny if a film shows a woman or a girl screaming and
running fright in the sight of a mouse or a cockroach. However, we don't consider our own
little secret fears a laughing matter.
It becomes a problem only when the fear develops into a mental condition that
affects all aspects of a person's life. Studies of thousands of people with an abnormal dread
show that every time they think about - or come into contact with = the subject of their
fear, they show all the physical signs of a person who is facing serious danger; a racing
heart, dry mouth, cold sweat, and weak knees.
Doctor and psychiatrists' welcome publicity about phobias, for this helps to convince
their patients that their fears are not unique. It reassures the patients to know that there
are other people who are afraid of the same thing, and it makes the patients more willing
to try to understand what is causing their fear. Once they realize what in their subconscious
is causing their fear, are half-way to being cured. Psychiatrists believe that those
unreasonable fears are caused by deep-seated reasons, perhaps a terrifying experience
during childhood.
One typical case was Mrs. Mary Batchelor, a London housewife, who suffered from
agoraphobia (fear of open spaces). For twenty-three years, she remains indoors. Following
publicity about other agoraphobia cases, she was persuaded to go out for their first time to
watch her son perform with a pop group.
Most of us suffer from claustrophobia (fear of being in closed spaces) in a mild way,
but the go about in great fear of being trapped without escape in a lift, in a packed train or
in an aircraft. Altogether, there a hundred and thirty phobias listed in the medial dictionary,
ranging from acrophobia (fear of heights) to xenophobia (morbid dislike of foreigners). Some
phobias are very odd indeed. There are cases of people who turn cold with terror at the
sight of a cabbage leaf, run a way in fright at the sight of a bird or faint when they hear a
dog bark. There was even a man who refused to eat anything that he knew had been touched
by someone who had handled matches.
3. The following statements may be the purposes of the writer in writing the text,
EXCEPT...
A. To explain the causes of different kinds of phobias
B. To convince people about the importance of publicity about phobias
C. To inform people how to overcome their abnormal fears
D. To persuade people with abnormal fears to talk to psychiatrist
E. To inform people about different kinds of phobias
4. What is the main idea on the last paragraph?
A. Variety of phobia ranging from the common one to the very odd phobia
B. One phobia case that happened in United Kingdom
C. A brief explanation on how phobia happens
D. Research findings on how to cure phobia
E. How phobias are portrayed in medical lens
The text below is for question number 5-6
Most of us still believe that in order to be healthy we must have eight hours of sleep a night
or that if we sleep poorly over a period of time, we'll get lines in our faces, bags under our
eyes, a worn look, and worst of all, be unable to perform our daily tasks effectively.
"Untrue" says Dr. Alice Kuhn Schwartz, a psychologist and co-author of Somniquest. "You
may look awful to yourself, but except for the first hour or so in the next morning when you
probably will be puffy-eyes due to depletion of a certain hormone that's the result of lack
of sleep you'll soon like your usual self and, perform normally. If you do not feel worn, the
cause is stress, not lack of sleep. Also, there is no set number of hours you must sleep to
maintain good health. Some people get along beautifully on four and half hours, others sleep
nine hours. Anywhere within that range is normal."
Recent studies of patients at sleep clinics have revealed significant facts about the causes
of insomnia as well as was to deal with it....... Besides that, insomnia may be cause by
physical illness; itching, aches, asthma, arthritis, ulcers, and heart problems that involve
shortness of breath or difficulty in breathing. In order to overcome insomnia, millions of
Americans turn to drugs - both over the counter drugs and prescription drugs. "No pill will
produce normal sleep." Says Dr. James Minard, sponsor of sleep studies at New Jersey
Medical School. "You reach no proper levels of sleep through a pill; you're merely sedated."
What you can do if you suffer from insomnia? Two things: you eat certain foods that you will
fall asleep and stay asleep, and you can do certain things that are sleep-inducing. Here are
some guidelines Dr. Schwartz has worked out after years of research.
• If you have had a bad night's sleep, do not stay in bed later the next morning.
• Do not go to bed earlier the next night. Stick to your usual bedtime and rising pattern.
• Do not nap during the day. Naps cut down on night sleep-time.
• Never lie awake in bed for more than 30 minutes. By lying in bed sleepless you form an
association between your bed and sleeplessness, thus reinforcing you poor sleeping
pattern.
• When you get out of bed after half an hour of sleeplessness, do something but make sure
if it's something that doesn't interest you much.
• Never watch TV or listen to the radio.
• Try sitting in a chair in a darkened room, you'll get surprised how fast you'll get sleepy.
5. The main purpose of the text is to...
A. State that people with insomnia tend to be unhealthy
B. Describe ways to cope with insomnia
C. State that insomnia is a common problem, but there are no cures for it
D. Discuss the causes of insomnia
E. Inform that in order to be health, someone must have eight hours of sleep a night.
6. Which of the following sentences can complete the missing sentence in paragraph 3 in
the passage?
A. It is no surprise that stress and depression (over family, health, job, or other
problems) are linked to insomnia.
B. Physical illness contributes significant amount within the cause of insomnia.
C. This cause significantly affects people to insomnia.
D. Insomnia is affected by illness.
E. The studies identify the causes of insomnia that happens to people.
7. The relation between insomnia and physical illness explained in the passage is similar to
the phenomenon between...
A. A doctor and his assistant
B. Obesity and sugars
C. A chef and a food
D. A driver and a car
E. A polaroid and a photo
The text below is for question number 8-12
Generally, by people's own accounts, the public idea of women at home is that they are dull
and boring, and the stereotype of a working woman is of hard, ambitious, selfish creatures.
It is not just that you are either gentle and dull or selfish and interesting. It is you are either
a good mother or you are an interesting woman.
"Young women now seem to get a very clear picture that they have got a choice. If they are
going to do mothering well, they have got to pay for it by not being interesting women. If
you are an interesting working woman, you are a bad mother," Lyn Richards puts the blame
for such notions and for resulting family tensions on the failure of people to talk enough
about them. The media, too, are guilty. "There is a lot of media coverage of successful
career women and still a lot, especially in women magazines, on the joys of motherhood.
There's not that much about the trouble of either role and precious little about combining
the roles. Yet half the women who are married in our society are working."
Nor is much thought given to the task of loosening the ties entrapping men. Lyn Richards, a
working mother, grateful for the privilege of genuinely choosing and being able to afford
the role, criticizes the systematic exclusion of men from child rearing and the really pretty
fabulous aspects of having children. She condemns as ludicrous the idea of the 9 to 5
treadmill of work as an absolute duty for men. "The sheer irony to me is that the womens'
movement has told women the way to be liberated is to get into the 9 to 5 work force that
men have been againts for a century. Really we should be using changes in women's values
to shake up all the oppression and rigidity that men have been under."
Indeed, there has been a change. "The new thing since I married is that it's normal for both
husband and wife to go on working when they marry. Now marriage is not a particularly big
deal. Very often it just legalizes something which has been going on anyway and it certainly
does not change a woman's whole basis of life, her notion of who she is. The real-life change
is having the first child and when that happens, I think that probably most couples are still
reverting to something like the traditional concept of marriage. But the longer people put
off having a child the more likely it is that they won't because they have set up a viable life
style. They do not to have kids now to have a good marriage.
Not that motherhood and raising families are wholly going out of fashion but rather that
people are having smaller families. Consequently, the period in a woman's life when she is
not required to devote herself to mothering is lengthening. "Motherhood-the mother role-
just is not a very good identity base today," Lyn Richards says. "Motherhood is a short-term
appointment now. It does not last long."
8. The expression "combining the roles" in "precious little about combining the roles"
(Paragraph 2) in the passage means...
A. Being either a married or a career woman
B. Working both in an office and at home
C. Serving the family and doing office work
D. Enjoying motherhood and caring for the family
E. Having a dual role of mother and career woman
9. What is the main idea of the first paragraph?
A. The option of a working woman and a woman at home
B. Definition of a good mother or an interesting woman
C. Society's perspectives toward women at home and working women
D. A dull woman's example
E. How people intepret interesting woman.
10. From paragraph 3, it can be concluded that...
A. Most couples hold into the concept of conservative marriage
B. The notion of women in the early years
C. The lifestyle of women have not changed
D. The shift of perspective about marriage in recent years
E. The good marriage is the one that holds to modern marriage concept.
11. If Lyn Richards is correct, in the future, women in families of younger generations...
A. Have less children to care for
B. Make up career individuals
C. Will be more prosperous
D. Are more individualistic
E. Share an equal responsibility
12. Lyn argues that in rearing children in a family...
A. Women's role should be more dominant
B. Both men and women are equally responsible
C. Men's role should be put into account
D. Working women share equal work distribution
E. Men's role should be excluded.
The text below is for question number 13-14
Did you ride your bike to school when you were a kid? A generation ago most kids rode,
walked, or caought the bus to school; very few of us were dropped off by our parents at the
school gate. These days most of us have experienced the daily traffic jams around schools
at drop-off and pick up times, as parents drives their children to the school gate. While
there is no national data on the number of schildren who walk or ride to school, a recent
Victorian survey found nearly half of all children are driven to school every day.
Parents choose to drop their kids at school for a number of reasons - mostly to do with safety
and convenience. But experts say chauffeuring your kids to school every day could mean
they are missing out on much needed exercise and other life skills.
Research suggests at least a third of Australian children aged 9-16 years are not getting the
amount of daily physical activity recommendation in national guidelines. This is not because
children's participation in leisure or sporting activities has dropped off, says Dr Jan Garrard.
Participation in these activities has not altered much over the years. Garrard says but what
has changes is the level of incindental activity children do. "When you look at countries
where children are just active as part of everyday life, they do not have to be sporty. All
they have to do is to getaround the way the community gets around by walking and cycling,
and they get enough physical activity," she says.
13. By writing the sentences "...chauffeuring your kids to school every day could mean they
are missing out on much needed exercise and other life skills." (paragraph 2), the author
implies that...
A. Kids given a lift to school lately lose vital social and physical advantages
B. Taking kids to school makes them deprived individuals when they grow up
C. Schooling means not only learning in classes but also socializing with others
D. Parents spoil their kids' future social and physical life by giving them a lift
E. When a child needs physical and social training, parents should facilitate them
14. What did Dr. Garrard claim based on the text above?
A. Parents who drop their children to school give a great contribution to the traffic jam.
B. There is an improvement on how children spend their leisure time.
C. Half of all children are driven to school every day.
D. Nowadays, children lack of doing sporting activities and socializing in community.
E. School is a community that has shaped children' life skills.
The text below is for question number 15-16
Although a seems like the spears of spam - unwanted junk sent to millions of people each
days - a recent problem, spam has been around as long as the Internet has. In fact, the first
documented case of spam occurred in 1978, when a computer company sent out 400 e-mails
via the Arpanet, the precursor to the modern Internet. Now, spam e-mails account for more
than two-thirds of all the e- mails sent over the internet, and for some unlucky users, spam
makes up to 80 percent of the messages they receive. And despite technological innovations
such as spam filters and even new legislation designed to combat spam, the problem will
not go away easily.
The reason spammers - the people who and businesses that spreat spam - are difficult to
stop is that spam is so cost effective. It costs a spammer roughly one-hundredth of a cent
to send soam, which means that a spammer can still make a profit with extremely low
response late, as low was one sale per 100.000 e-mails sent. This low rate give spammers a
tremendous incentive to continue sending out millions and millions of e-mails, even if the
average person never purchases anything from them. With so much at stake, spammers have
gone to great lengths to avoid or defeat spam blockers and filters.
Most spam filters rely on a fairly primitive "fingerprinting" system." In this a system analyzes
several common feature in them. Any arriving e-mails that match these features are
deleted. But the fingerprinting defense proves quite easy for spammers to defeat. To
confuse the program, a spammer simply has to include a series of random characters or
numbers. The additions to the spam message change its "fingerprint" and thus allow the
spam to escape detection. and when programmers modify the fingerprint software to look
for random strings of letters, spammers respond by including nonrandom content such as
sport scores of stock prices, which again defeats the system.
A second possible solution take advantage of a computer's limited learning abilities. So
called "smart filters' use complex algorithms, which allow them to recognize new versions
of spam messages. These filters may be initially fooled by random characters or bogus
content, but they soon learn to identify these features. Unfortunately, spammers have
learned how to avoid these smart filters as well.
15. The best title for the text above is...
A. The Development of Spam and Spammers
B. The Success of the Development of Spam Filters
C. The Development of using E-mails
D. How to Make Profit through Spamming
E. Spam: Problems and Solutions
16. From the text above, we can conclude that...
A. Spam has facilitated humans' life.
B. Spam is one of the best solutions for people in business field.
C. Spam has advantageous features for the users.
D. Spam has appeared on the Internet since the beginning og 19th century.
E. Spam provides systems to filter the unimportant symbols.
The text below is for question number 17-20
Situated on steep slopes, montane and watershed forests are especially important in
ensuring water flow and inhibiting erosion. Yet, during the 1980s, montane formations
suffered the highest deforestation rate of tropical forests.
When the forests are cut down, less moisture is evapotranspired into the atmosphere
resulting in the formation of fewer rain clouds. Subsequently there is a decline in rainfall,
subjecting the area to drought. Today Madagascar is largely a red, treeless desert from
generations of forest clearing with fire. River flows decline and smaller amounts of quality
water reach cities and agricultural lands. Colombia, once second in the world with
freshwater reserves, has fallen to 24th due to its extensive deforestation over the past 30
years. Escessive deforestation around the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, combined with
the dry conditions created by El Nino triggeres strict, water rationing in 1998, and for the
first time the city had to import water.
There is serious concern that widespread deforestation could lead to a significant decline
in rainfall and trigger a positive feedback process of increasing desiccation for neighboring
forest cover. The newly desiccated forest becomes prone to devastating fires. Such fires
materialized in 1997 and 1998 in conjunction with the dry conditions created by el Nino.
Millions of acres burned as fires swept through Indonesia, Brazil, Colombia, Central America,
Florida, and other places. The Woods Hole Research Center warned that more than 400.000
square kilometers of Brazilian Amazonia were highly vulnerable to fire in 1998.
17. What is the writer trying to inform the readers?
A. The effect of erosion
B. The impact of deforestation
C. The decrease of rain forests
D. The excessive explorations of forests
E. The issues on several tropical forests
18. Based on the information from paragraph 2, we can say that...
A. Tropical forests affect human and non human's lives.
B. Rain forests contribute greatly to support human's lives.
C. Deforestation brings negative impact to lives, one of which is lack of water.
D. Amazon forest is vulnerable by 1998.
E. Dry condition affects the growth of trees in the forests.
19. According to the text, what is the effect of El Nino?
A. It triggers positive feedback of deforestation
B. It helps rainfall
C. It developes the quality of water
D. It leads to dry conditions in forests
E. It enhanced the quality of trees
20. What happened when the forests are cut down?
A. It resulted in fewer rain clouds.
B. It leads to fires.
C. It helps to form rain cloud.
D. There is an increasing desiccation.
E. It makes consistent rain.
