Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 39 to 43.

      We need to attend to the tree loss because of the following tree benefits. Firstly, trees provide shade for homes, office buildings, parks and roadways, cooling surface temperatures. They also take in and evaporate water, (39) ______ cools the air around them. Secondly, trees absorb carbon and remove pollutants from the atmosphere. Trees also reduce energy costs by $4 billion a year, according to Nowak's study. “The shading of those trees on buildings (40) ______ your air conditioning costs. Take those trees away; now your buildings are heating up, you're running your air conditioning more, and you're burning more fuel from the power plants, so the pollution and emissions go up.” (41) ______, trees act as water filters, taking in dirty surface water and absorbing nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil. Last but not least, (42)______ studies have found connections between exposure to nature and better mental and physical health. Some hospitals have added tree views and plantings for patients as a result of these studies. Doctors are even prescribing walks in nature for children and families due to evidence that nature exposure lowers blood (43) ______ and stress hormones. And studies have associated living near green areas with lower death rates.

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 48.

Sylvia Earle is an underwater explorer and marine biologist, who was born in the USA in 1935. She became interested in the world's oceans from an early age. As a child, she liked to stand on the beach for hours and look at the sea, wondering that it must be like under the surface. When she was 16, she finally got a chance to make her first dive. It was this dive that inspired her to become an underwater explorer. Since then, she has spent more than 6,500 hours under water, and has led more than seventy expeditions worldwide. She has also made the deepest dive ever, reaching a record-breaking depth of 381 meters.

In 1970, she became famous around the world when she became the captain of the first all-female team to live under water. The team spent two weeks in an underwater "house". The research they carried out showed the damage that pollution was causing to marine life, and specially to coral reefs. Since then she has written several books and magazine articles in which she suggests ways of reducing the damage that is being done to the world's oceans. One way, she believes, is to rely on fish farms for seafood, and reduce the amount of fishing that is done the out at sea.

(Adapted from Complete IELTS by Rawdon Wyatt)

By then, the elite performers had all totaled 10000 hours of practice over the (43) ________of their lives, the merely good students 8000 hours and the future music teachers just over 4000 hours.