Commercial airliners do not fly in the vicinity of volcanic eruptions because even a small amount of volcanic ash can damage its engines.

The concert is expected to attract a lot of audience, so you should book _______ tickets in advance.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 39 to 43.

      Scientists have dreamed for a long time about building a 'flying train' which can float through the air above the tracks. With Maglev technology, their dreams are now a reality. Maglev trains have no wheels. Instead, powerful magnets lift them into the air and push them forward, at speeds of up to 500 km per hour.

      As well as speed, Maglev has a number of advantages over other transport systems. The trains are quieter and the journey is smoother because they don't have wheels. They are also greener because they don't use fuel and so create less pollution. Right now there is only one high-speed Maglev train system in the world. It carries passengers from Shanghai city centre to the airport. However, work has started on a new, longer Maglev track in Japan. Trains will go from Tokyo to Nagoya in 40 minutes. But don't expect to ride on it on your next trip to Japan. It won't open until 2027! Then, in 2045, the line will extend to Osaka.

      There is one major problem with Maglev technology: it is incredibly expensive to build the tracks. Transport planners predict that the Tokyo to Osaka line will cost 91 billion dollars. The high cost means that Maglev technology probably won't replace other forms of transport in the near future. However, the technology is still in development and somebody might find a cheaper and simpler way to build the tracks. And then, who knows? In the future, some of us might fly to work by train.

(Adapted from Navigate by Caroline Krantz and Julie Norton)

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 44 to 50.

      The world's population reached five billion on the day I was born. That was in Indonesia back in 1987, and my parents were amazed that there were so many people on the planet. However, since then the population has continued to increase.

      The growth of our human population is extraordinary. For more than two million years, humans lived with no permanent home, finding plants to eat and hunting animals for meat. Then, just 10,000 years ago, we invented agriculture. At that time, there were only about five million humans, but this fgure quickly doubled. The population reached a billion in 1805, and since then it has multiplied seven times.

      The human population has never been bigger, but in some ways the planet seems to be getting smaller. In the past, travellers from Europe to Indonesia spent months at sea. Now you just have to sit on a plane for a few hours. When you arrived in another country a hundred years ago, you saw unfamiliar styles of clothing and architecture and discovered a completely different culture. In many places today, clothing and new buildings are very similar, and people enjoy the same sports, music, flms and TV shows. We also buy the same products from huge, global companies. In our different continents, we are starting to live the same lives. Even the languages that we use are becoming more global. There are around seven thousand languages in use today, but the number is decreasing fast.

      The same thing is happening around the world. Experts think that the number of different languages will halve to just 3,500 by the end of this century. Where will it stop? Will there be a time in the future when Earth's billions all speak just one language, and there are no cultural differences to divide us? Perhaps the planet would be more peaceful if this happened, but I must admit that the idea is quite depressing. I prefer to think that, as our population grows, we can celebrate not the similarity but the fascinating diversity of the human race.

(Adapted from Insight by Roberts and Sayer)

Young couple got divorced after they realized that they were not compatible.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that best combines each pair of sentences in the following questions.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word whose underlined part differs from the other three in pronunciation in each of the following questions.

Which of the following is NOT true, according to the passage?