Đề thi thử THPT môn Tiếng Anh – Chuyên ĐH Sư Phạm lần 4 năm 2015

Line The principle of use and disuse states that those parts of organisms’ bodies that are used grown larger. Those parts that are not tend to wither away. It is an observed fact that when you exercise particular muscles, they grow. Those that are never used dimish. By examining a man’s body, we can tell which muscles he uses and which he doesn’t. we may even be able to guess his profession or his reaction. Enthusiasts of the “body- building” cult make use of the principle of use and disuse to “build” their bodies, almost like a piece of sculpture, into whatever unnatural shape is demanded by fashion in this peculiar minority culture. Muscles are not the only parts of the body that respond to use in this kind of way. Walk barefoot and you acquire harder skin on your soles. It is easy to tell a farmer from a bank teller by looking at their hands alone. The farmer’s hands are horny, hardened by long exposure to rough work. The teller’s hands are relatively soft.

The principle of use and disuse enables animals to become better at the job of surviving in their world, progressively better during their lifetime as a result of living in that world. Humans, through direct exposure to sunlight, or lack of it, develop a skin color which equips them better to survive in the particular local conditions.

Too much sunlight is dangerous. Enthusiastic sunbathers with very fair skins are susceptible to skin cancer. Too little sunlight, on the other hand, leads to vitamin-D deficiency and rickets. The brown pigment melanin which is synthesized under the influence of sunlight, makes a screen to protect the underlying tissues from the harmful effects of further sunlight. If a suntanned person moves to a less sunny climate, the melanin disappears, and the body is able to benefit from what little sun there is. This can be represented as an instance of the principle of use and disuse: skin goes brown when it is “used”, and fades to white when it is not.

The development of writing (56) ______ a huge difference to the world and might see it as the beginning of the (57) ______. Pieces of pottery with marks on that are probably numbers have been discovered in China that date from around 4000 BC. Hieroglyphics and other forms of “picture writing” developed in the (58) _______ around Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), where the ancient Sumerian civilization was based, from around 3300 BC onwards. However, the first (59) ________ alphabet was used by the Phoenicians around 1050 BC. Their alphabet had 22 letters and it is estimated that it lasted for 1000 years. The first two signs were called “aleph” and “beth”, which in Greek became “alpha” and “beta”, which gave us the (60) ________ word “alphabet”

The modern European alphabet is based on the Greek and (61) _______ to other European countries under the Romans. A number of changes took place as time passed. The Romans added the letter G, and the letter J and V were (62) ______ to people in Shakespear’s time. If we (63) _______ the history of punctuation, we also find some interesting facts. The Romans used to write quaesto at the end of a sentence in (64) _______ to show that it was a question. they started to write Qo in (65) _______ of the whole word, and then put the Q above the o. In the end, that became the question mark “?”

A small but growing group of scholar, evolutionary, psychologists, are being to sketch the contours of the human mind as designed by natural selection. Some of them even anticipate the coming of a field called “mismatch theory”, which would study maladies resulting from contrasts between the modern environment and the “ancestral environment”. The one we were designed for.

There is no shortage of such maladies to study, Rates of depression have been doubling in some industrial countries roughly every 10 years. Suicide is the third most common cause of death among young adults, after car wrecks and homicides.

Evolutionary psychology is a long way from explaining all this with precision, but it is already shedding enough light to challenges some conventional wisdom. It suggests, for example, that the nostalgia for the nuclear family of the 1950s is in some way misguided – that the model family of husband at work and wife at home is hardly a “natural” and healthful living arrangement, especially for the wives. Moreover, the bygone lifestyles that do look fairly natural in light of evolutionary psychology appear to have been eroded largely by commercialism. Perhaps the biggest surprise from evolutionary psychology it its depiction of the “animal” in us. Freud, and various thinkers since, saw “civilization” as an oppressive force that thwarts basic animal instincts and urges and transmutes them into psychopathology. However, evolutionary psychology suggests that a larger threat to metal health may be the way civilization thwarts civility. There is a gentler, kinder side of human nature, and it seems increasingly to be a victim of repression in modern society.