Reading Comprehension Test 13

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[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question given after it:[/passage-header]Opera refers to a dramatic art form, originating in Europe, in which the emotional content is conveyed to the audience as much through music, both vocal and instrumental, as it is through the lyrics. By contrast, in musical theatre an actor's dramatic performance is primary, and the music plays a lesser role. The drama in opera is presented using the primary elements of theatre such as scenery, costumes, and acting. However, the words of the opera, or libretto, are sung rather than spoken. The singers are accompanied by a musical ensemble ranging from a small instrumental ensemble to a full symphonic orchestra.

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Opera originated in ______________

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[passage-header]Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]Sight is our most precious sense and many people fear blindness more than they fear any other disability. Eye, the organ of sight, is our most important organ for locating and observing the world around us. We use our eyes in almost everything we do -- reading, working, watching movies and television, playing games and countless other activities.
The human eyeball measures only about 25mm in diameter. Yet the eye can see objects as far away as a star and as tiny as a grain of sand. The eye can quickly adjust its focus between a distant point and a near one.

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The drama in opera is presented by using the primary elements of theatre like ________________.

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I know what your e-mail in-box looks like, and it isnt pretty: a babble of come-ons and lies from hucksters and con artists. To find your real e-mail, you must wade through the torrent of fraud and obscenity known politely 5 as unsolicited bulk e-mail and colloquially as spam. In a perverse tribute to the power of the online revolution, we are all suddenly getting the same mail: easy weight loss, get-rich-quick schemes, etc. The crush of these messages is now numbered in billions per day. Its becoming 10 a major systems and engineering and network problem, says one e-mail expert. Spammers are gaining control of the Internet.

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Read the below passage carefully and answer the questions:
Giving children computers in grade school is a waste of money and teachers time. These children are too young to learn how to use computers effectively and need to spend time on learning the basics, like arithmetic and reading. After all, a baby has to crawl before she can walk.

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Choose the statement that is best supported by the information given in the question passage.

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But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with the preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephants had been behaving. They all said the same thing; he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

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[passage-header]Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows.[/passage-header] Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due to simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
[passage-footer]Passage adapted from: Politics And The English Language, George Orwell[/passage-footer]

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The ground is full of seeds that cannot rise into seedlings; the seedlings rob one another of air, light and water, the strongest robber winning the day, and extinguishing his competitors. Year after year, the wild animals with which man never interferes are, on the average, neither more not less numerous than they were; and yet we know that the annual produce of every pair is from one to perhaps a million young; so that it is mathematically certain that, on the average, as many are killed by natural causes as are born every year, and those only escape which happen to be a little better fitted to resist destruction than those which die. The individuals of a species are like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swimmers have a chance of reaching the land.
[passage-footer]Adapted from an essay by T.H Huxley[/passage-footer]

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