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 34 to 38.
Bali, the fabled “Island of the Gods”, has been enchanting visitors for centuries with its rich cultural traditions and spectacular panoramas. From lofty, mist enshrouded volcanoes and cool mountain lakes down through terraced rice fields to a golden strand lapped by azure waters, every square inch of Bali offers a fresh and unforgettable image. No less enchanting are its people, some 2.7 million souls whose artistry and piety are recognized throughout the world Balinese Hinduism, a complex fusion of Indian cosmology. Tantric Buddhism and homegrown mythology, is the primary faith of Bali's inhabitants, and so deeply woven into the fabric of their daily lives that the line between the spiritual and the material is blurry at best. Those of you keen on delving into the island's fascinating culture will have plenty of opportunities, as colorful ceremonies and traditional performances occur with regularity of sunrise. Most hotels offer nightly dance shows of one form or another, tailored to tourist audiences but none the less exquisite. The hill town of Ubud, the island's premier arts center, also has a full schedule of performance, and the nearby stone-cutter's village of Batubulan is famed for its Barong lion dances. The shoppers among you will find Bali a treasure house of handicrafts and fine works of art. The Balinese are incredibly gifted artists and craftsmen, and their material creations are imbued with the same sense of wonderment with which they regard their universe. Stone and wood carvings, traditional and modern paintings and intricately designed jewelry in gold and silver are readily in shops and galleries throughout the island. As for recreation, there is no shortage of option. Nature walks, horseback riding, diving, surfing, even bungy jumping, and white water rafting await the adventurous here. (Source: https://books.google.com.vn/books)
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 44 to 50.
Advocates of the laws and journalists who cover the issue often neglect to ask what will replace plastic bags and what the environmental impact of that replacement will be. People still need bags to bring home their groceries. And the most common substitute, paper bags, may be just as bad or worse, depending on the environmental problem you are most concerned about. That is leading to a split in the anti-bag movement. Some bills, like in Massachusetts, try to reduce the use of paper bags as well as plastic, but still favour paper. Others, like in New York City, treat all single-use bags equally. Even then, the question remains as to whether single-use bags are necessarily always worse than reusable ones. Studies of bags’ environmental impacts over their life cycle have reached widely varying conclusions. Some are funded by plastic industry groups, like the ironically named American Progressive Bag Alliance. Even studies conducted with the puret of intentions depend on any number of assumptions. How many plastic bags are replaced by one cotton tote bag? If a plastic bag is reused in the home as the garbage bag in a bathroom waste bin, does that reduce its footprint by eliminating the need for another small plastic garbage bag? If your chief concern is climate change, things get even muddier. One of the most comprehensive research papers on the environmental impact of bags, published in 2007 by an Australian state government agency, found that paper bags have a higher carbon footprint than plastic. That is primarily because more energy is required to produce and transport paper bags. “People look at paper and say it’s degradable, therefore it’s much better for the environment, but it’s not in terms of climate change impact,” says David Tyler, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon who has examined the research on the environmental impact of bag use. The reasons for paper’s higher carbon footprint are complex but can mostly be understood as stemming from the fact that paper bags are much thicker than plastic bags. “Very broadly, carbon footprints are proportional to mass of an object,” says Tyler. For example, because paper bags take up so much more space, more trucks are needed to ship paper bags to a store than to ship plastic bags. (Adapted from https://www.wired.com/)
Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks from 39 to 43. ChatGPT: New AI chatbot has everyone talking to it A new chatbot has passed one million users in less than a week, the project behind it says. ChatGPT was publicly released on Wednesday by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research firm (39) _____ founders included Elon Musk.ChatGPT is the latest in a series of AIs which the firm refers to as GPTs, an acronym which (40) _____ for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. To develop the system, an early version was fine-tuned through conversations with human trainers. The system also learned from access to Twitter data according to a tweet from Elon Musk who is no longer part of OpenAI's board. The Twitter boss wrote that he had paused access “for now”. The results have impressed (41) _____ who've tried out the chatbot. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman revealed the level of interest in the artificial conversationalist in a tweet. The project says the chat format allows the AI to answer “follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests”A journalist for technology news site Mashable who tried out ChatGPT reported it is hard to provoke the model into saying offensive things. (42) _____, OpenAI warns that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”. Training the model to be more cautious, says the firm, causes it to decline to answer questions that it can answer correctly. Briefly questioned by the BBC for this article, ChatGPT revealed itself to be a cautious interviewee (43) _____ of expressing itself clearly and accurately in English. (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology)