Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D to choose the word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 25 to 29  

HOW TELEVISION CHANGE THE WORLD

     The television has undoubtedly changed society. For a modern person to think about (25) ____________ the world was like without television is actually hard to imagine. The world before the TV was one of little information flowing in to communities throughout the world. All information that people could get was filtered through newspapers often had specific biases that caused them to (26) ___________ the news to whatever their preference was. Although television would follow this to a certain (27) ____________, it was able to hit a widespread audience at the same time. In other words, people literally watched the broadcast at the same time each day, and they began (28) ____________ news as things happened. 

     A television grew into something that practically every household in industrialized nations had, businesspeople were quick to realize the (29) ____________ television had. They realized there was an enormous amount of money to be made, and therefore they were willing to invest in the technology and infrastructure that made it possible.

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.