Passage One

Most American college students need to be efficient readers. This is necessary because full-time students probably have to read several hundred pages every week. They don’t have time to read a chapter three or four times. They need to extract as much information as possible from the first or second reading.

An extraordinarily important study skill is knowing how to mark a book. Students mark the main ideas and important details with a pen or pencil, yellow or blue or orange. Some students mark new vocabulary in a different color. Most students write questions or short notes in the margins. Marking a book is a useful skill, but it’s important to do it right. First, read a chapter with one pen in your hand and others next to you on the desk. Second, read a whole paragraph before you mark anything. Don’t mark too much. Usually you will mark about 10% of a passage. Third, decide on your own system for marking. For example, maybe you will mark main ideas in yellow, important details in blue and new words in orange. Maybe you will put question marks in the margin when you don’t understand something and before an exam. Instead, you just need to review your marks and you can save a lot of time.

16. What should American college students do to cope with their heavy reading assignments?

17. What suggestion does the speaker give about marking a textbook?

18. How should students prepare for an exam according to the speaker?

Passage Two

The thought of having no sleep for 24 hours or more isn’t a pleasant one for most people. The amount of sleep that each person needs varies. In general, each of us needs about 8 hours of sleep each day to keep us healthy and happy. Some people, however, can get by with just a few hours of sleep at night.

It doesn’t matter when or how much a person sleeps. But everyone needs some rest to stay alive. Few doctors would have thought that there might be an exception to this. Sleep is, after all, a very basic need. But a man named Al Herpin turned out to be a real exception, for supposedly, he never slept!

Al Herpin was 90 years old when doctors came to his home in New Jersy. They hoped to challenge the claim that he never slept. But they were surprised. Though they watched him every hour of the day, they never saw Herpin sleeping. He did not even own a bed. He never needed one.

The closest that Herpin came to resting was to sit in a rocking chair and read a half dozen newspapers. His doctors were puzzled by the strange case of permanent sleeplessness. Herpin offered the only clue to his condition. He remembered some talk about his mother having been injured several days before he had been born. Herpin died at the age of 94, never, it seems, having slept at all.

19. What is taken for granted by most people?

20. What do doctors think of Al Herpin’s case?

21. What could have accounted for Al Herpin’s sleeplessness?

Passage Three

Hetty Green was a very spoiled, only child. She was born in Massachusetts USA in 1835. Her father was a millionaire businessman. Her mother was often ill, and so from the age of two her father took her with him to work and taught her about stocks and shares. At the age of six she started reading the daily financial newspapers and opened her own bank account. Her father died when she was 21 and she inherited 7.5 million dollars. She went to New York and invested on Wall Street. Hetty saved every penny, eating in the cheapest restaurants for 15 cents. She became one of the richest and most hated women in the world. At 33 she married Edward Green, a multi-millionaire, and had two children, Ned and Sylvia.

Hetty’s meanness was well-known. She always argued about prices in shops. She walked to the local grocery store to buy broken biscuits which were much cheaper, and to get a free bone for her much loved dog. Once she lost a two-cent stamp and spent the night looking for it. She never bought clothes and always wore the same long, ragged black skirt. Worst of all, when her son, Ned, fell and injured his knee, she refused to pay for a doctor and spent hours looking for free medical help. In the end Ned lost his leg. When she died in 1916 she left her children 100 million dollars. Her daughter built a hospital with her money.

22. What do we learn about Hetty Green as a child?

23. How did Hetty Green become rich overnight?

24. Why was Hetty Green much hated?

25. What do we learn about Hetty’s daughter?

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