_______ difficult times together, they were very close friends. 

He is an economist who believes in the advantages of _______ competition.

_______ the apartment is, the cheaper the rent is. 

The new regulations may cause more _______ among the teachers. 

I'm going to take part in this contest, _______? 

I _______ a terrifying dream when the alarm clock went off at six o'clock this morning.

Every family has their own rules, and so does mine. 

We need to find the _______ cause of our employees’ lack of motivation.

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 1 to 7. 

     Companies big and small are plotting their post-pandemic working futures, and it seems likely that ever fewer of us will fully return to the office as it was before. If the Covid-19 crisis subsides and economies can largely reopen, the experiences of so many people working from home over the past year will surely shape what happens next. For many of us, this could emerge as a return to the office for three days a week. Patterns will obviously vary, but a common aand Friday at home. 

     This coming shift will largely be driven by employers making a calculation between two different, equally important forces. One is what companies see as the need for in-person creativity and connections, which will spur their desire to bring people back into offices. For many, we are at our most creative working face to face, meeting people, talking over lunch and coffee, or gathering in groups. At home, however, we tend to be more efficient in the daily tasks that make up much of working life. This is the competing force that may keep many of us out of the office, even after Covid. Working at home under the right conditions - which means in your own room with good broadband and no children around - can be highly efficient. This greater efficiency on current tasks also combines with other factors, like the time saved by avoiding the daily commute, offering a compelling reason for people to stay at home. The past year of Covid home working has perhaps opened many more people's eyes to this. 

     As companies come to decisions on new working arrangements, they will be essentially making a basic trade-off: the expectation of greater creativity in new projects at the office, but greater productivity on existing tasks at home. And, as with most trade-offs, the right answer is not all or nothing - but something in the middle. Employees seem to prefer this working pattern too. In a recent survey of 5,000 employees in Britain, working in the office for three days a week was the most popular choice. Not only is this pattern more efficient for companies, then, but it also helps to keep employees happy and motivated. 

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 following questions from 41 to 45. 

     In a recent interview with Quartz, an online publication, Bill Gates expressed skepticism about society's ability to manage rapid automation. To prevent a social crisis, he mused, governments should consider a tax on robots; if automation slows as a result, so much the better. It is an intriguing if impracticable idea, which reveals a lot about the challenge of automation. Mr. Gates argues that today's robots should be taxed either their installation, or the profits firms enjoy by saving on the costs of the human labour displaced. The money generated could be used to retrain workers, and perhaps to finance an expansion of health care and education, which provide lots of hard-to-automate jobs in teaching or caring for the old and sick. 

     Mr. Gates seems to suggest that investment in robots is a little like investing in a coal-fired generator: it boosts economic output but also imposes a social cost, what economists call a negative externality. Perhaps rapid automation threatens to remove workers from old jobs faster than new sectors can absorb them. That could lead to socially costly long-term unemployment, and potentially to support for destructive government policy. A tax on robots that reduced those costs might well be worth implementing, just as a tax on harmful blast-furnace emissions can discourage pollution and leave society better off. Reality, however, is more complex. Investments in robots can make human workers more productive rather than expendable; taxing them could leave the employees affected worse off. Particular workers may suffer by being displaced by robots, but workers as a whole might be better off because prices fall. Slowing the use of robots in health care and herding humans into such jobs might look like a useful way to maintain social stability. But if it means that health-care costs grow rapidly, gobbling up the gains in workers' income.