Đề thi thử THPT Quốc gia năm 2016 môn Tiếng Anh trường THPT Thực Hành Cao Nguyên, Đắk Lắk (Lần 1)

What is meant by the term economic resources? In general, these are all the natural, man-made, and human resources that go into the ___ (33)___ of goods and services. Economic resources can be broken down into ___ (34)___ general categories: property resource – land and capital, and human resources – labor and entrepreneurial skills.

What do economists mean ___ (35)___ land? Much more than the non-economist, land refers to all the natural resources ___ (36)___ are usable in the production process: arable land, forests, mineral and oil deposits, and ___ (37)___ on. What about capital? Capital goods are all the man-made aids to producing, storing, transporting, and distributing goods and ___ (38)___. Capital goods differ from consumer goods in that ___ (39)___ satisfy wants directly, while the former do so indirectly by facilitating the production of consumer goods. It should be noted that capital as defined here does not ___ (40)___ to money. Money, as such, produces nothing.

The term labor refers to the physical and mental talents of humans used to produce goods and services (with the exception of a certain set of human talents, entrepreneurial skills, which will be considered separately because of their special significance). Thus the services of a factory worker or an office worker, a ballet ___ (41)___ or an astronaut all fall ___ (42)___ the general heading of labor.

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.

Basic to any understanding of Canada in the 20 years after the Second World War is the country’s impressive population growth. For every three Canadians in 1945, there were over five in 1966. In September 1966, Canada’s population passed the 20 million mark. Most of this surging growth came from natural increase. The depression of the 1930s and the war had held back marriages, and the catching-up process began after 1945. The baby boom continued through the decade of the1950s, producing a population increase of nearly fifteen percent in the five years from 1951 to 1956. This rate of increase had been exceeded only once before in Canada’s history, in the decade before 1911 when the prairies were being settled. Undoubtedly, the good economic conditions of the 1950s supported a growth in the population, but the expansion also derived from a trend toward earlier marriages and an increase in the average size of families. In 1957 the Canadian birth rate stood at 28 per thousand, one of the highest in the world.

After the peak year of 1957, the birth rate in Canada began to decline. It continued falling until in 1966 it stood at the lowest level in 25 years. Partly this decline reflected the low level of births during the depression and the war, but it was also caused by changes in Canadian society. Young people were staying at school longer; more women were working; young married couples were buying automobiles or houses before starting families; rising living standards were cutting down the size of families.

It appeared that Canada was once more falling in step with the trend toward smaller families that had occurred all through the Western world since the time of the Industrial Revolution. Although the growth in Canada’s population had slowed down by 1966 (the increase in the first half of the 1960’s was only nine percent), another large population wave was coming over the horizon. It would be composed of the children who were born during the period of the high birth rate prior to 1957.