Model 35

1-حريق هائل

(1) Over the roar of the fire, Mike heard Ben shout, “Hurry! The fire is almost on us!” Mike’s arms were sore and tired, but he swung his axe even faster. He didn’t even stop to wipe the tears from his stinging eyes. The greedy fire kept coming. The more the fire destroyed, the more it wanted. Mike worked shoulder to shoulder with the other smokejumpers to build a firebreak. His only thought was to stop the flaming monster that was raging through the forest.
(2) At last, the smokejumpers finished the firebreak. If the fire were powerful enough, it would jump over the firebreak that they had worked so hard to make. Then they would have to start all over again. Mike stood motionless, his face black with ash, his shirt wet with sweat. He was too exhausted to move because he had given all of himself to fighting the fire. He turned his head and noticed Ben watching him.
(3) Suddenly all that Ben had taught Mike about proving his bravery was clear. A man was not brave if he did something just to prove his courage. He was brave only when he forgot about himself. Today Mike had showed that he cared very much about the others with whom he was working.

1. According to Paragraph (2), Mike was too exhausted to move because ………

2. According to Paragraph (3), Ben taught Mike that being brave involves……….

3. The pronoun his in Paragraph (3) refers to ………

2-الباندا العملاق

1) An American-born giant panda will soon be travelling to China. The Chinese government has an agreement with foreign zoos to lend giant pandas out only for scientific study. After a few years, they, and any cubs they may produce, must all be returned to China. Mei Lan, a three year-old female, is being prepared for her trip to China, where her parents were born. A special FedEx flight from the U.S. is being arranged for her.
2) Chinese Zookeepers are getting ready for her arrival by planning a special diet, and even language lessons for her. They are advertising for a tutor to teach Mei Lan Chinese. The caretakers at her new home, the Chengdu Panda Research Center in Sichuan, want to help her adapt quickly and feel comfortable in her new environment. Mei Lan has lived at a zoo in the city of Atlanta, Georgia, since her birth, and she is unfamiliar with Chinese. The teacher must have a bachelor’s degree or higher and be fluent in both English and Chinese.

4. According to Paragraph (2), why do the Chinese zookeepers want Mei Lan to learn Chinese?

5. According to Paragraph 2, Where has Mei Lan been living?

3-النجوم

(1) If we look at the night sky carefully, we will see that the stars are of many different colors. Some are red, others are yellow and some are blue. This is also shown when we take color photographs of the night sky. You can take such a photograph with an ordinary camera as long as it is kept steady. A thirty second exposure is sufficient.
(2) Astronomers have been able to classify stars according to color. They have found that blue stars are the largest and red stars the smallest. However, there are a few stars which cannot be classified in this way. These are the superstars. For example, Ryiejol is a blue superstar as big as 40,000 suns and Beetle juice is a superstar with a size equal to 17,000 suns.
(3) Suppose an astronomer observes two stars, one brighter than the other. If neither of them is a superstar, he will know immediately that the brighter star is closer. Astronomers have instruments like light meters which can measure the brightness of a star quite accurately. It is possible to measure a star’s distance from the earth if astronomers know the color, brightness and whether or not it is a superstar.

6. The pronoun it in Paragraph 1) refers to the ………..

7. The word brighter in Paragraph 3) is closest in meaning to ………

8. Which of the following colors is NOT mentioned in the passage?

4-الحرب الباردة

(1) Starting with major scientific breakthroughs during the 1930’s, countries have developed weapons that are based on nuclear energy. The use of nuclear weapons reached its height with the outbreak of World War II and the Cold War. Two of the world’s major superpowers, the USA and Soviet Union, threatened each other with the use of nuclear weapons, which was referred to as the Cold War.
(2) Although relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had been strained in the years before World War II, the U.S.-Soviet alliance of 1941-1945 was marked by a great degree of cooperation and was essential to securing the defeat of Nazi Germany. As late as 1939, it seemed highly improbable that the United States and the Soviet Union would forge an alliance. U.S.-Soviet relations had soured significantly following Stalin’s decision to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in August of 1939. In spite of intense pressure to sever relations with the Soviet Union, Roosevelt never lost sight of the fact that Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, posed the greatest threat to world peace. In order to defeat that threat, Roosevelt confided that he “would hold hands with the devil” if necessary. Finally, two devastating atomic bomb attacks against Japan by the United States, coupled with the Soviets’ decision to break their neutrality pact with Japan by invading Manc1huria, finally led to the end of the war in the Pacific. Soon after the war, the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union began to unravel as the two nations faced complex post- war decisions
(3) At various conferences, the most important of which were at Yalta and Potsdam, the three powers split Germany and its capital Berlin in two, with the eastern portion controlled by the Soviet Union and the western portion controlled jointly by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Additionally, the Soviet Union was given influence over the governments of several Eastern European states, where they promptly set up loyal, communist puppet regimes.
(4) The United States and the West feared the creation of this Eastern Bloc, as Western journalists and government termed it, and the further spread of communism and/or totalitarian states in the rest of the world. U.S. foreign policy became one of containment – essentially, stopping the spread of communism wherever it could. This was in direct opposition to the Soviet Union’s policy of fostering the spread of communism, especially in its Asian neighbors. The Americans then feared that the USSR/ Communist influence that already spread over Eastern Europe, would influence the democracies of western Europe.

9. In which year did US-Soviet relations sour significantly?

10. At which conferences did the three powers split Germany?

11. What was the U.S. foreign policy after World War II?

5-الطلب في الإقتصاد

The meaning of demand
(1) Demand refers to both the willingness and the ability of customers to pay a given price to buy a product or service. The amount of a product or service demanded at each price level is called the quantity demanded.
(2) In general, the quantity demanded falls as price rises, while the quantity demanded rises at lower prices. Therefore, there is an inverse relationship between the price of a product or service and the demand. This rule is known as the law of demand.

12. What happens when the price of a good or product increases?

13. What happens when the price of a product or good decreases?

6-ماهي الشبكة؟

(1) A network is nothing more than two or more computers connected by a cable (or in some cases, by a wireless connection) so that they can exchange information.
(2) Of course, computers can exchange information in other ways besides networks. Most of us have used what computer nerds call the sneakernet. That’ s where you copy a file to a diskette and then walk the disk over to someone else’s computer. (The term sneakernet is typical of computer nerds’ feeble attempts at humor, and why not? As a way to transfer information, sneaker- net was pretty feeble).
(3) The whole problem with the sneakernet is that it’s slow— plus, it wears a trail in your carpet. One day, some penny-pinching computer geeks discovered that connecting computers together with cables was actually cheaper than replacing the carpet every six months. Thus, the modern computer network was born.
(4) You can create a computer network by booking all the computers in your office together with cables and installing a special network interface card (an electronic circuit card that goes inside your computer — ouch!) in each computer so you have a place to plug in the cable. Then you set up your computer s operating- system software to make the network work, and — voilà — you have a working network. That’s all there is to it.
(5) If you don’t want to mess with cables, you can create a wireless network instead. In a wireless network, each computer is equipped with a special wireless network adapter that has little rabbit-ear antennas. Thus, the computers can communicate with each other without the need for cables.
(6) Computer networking has its own strange vocabulary. Fortunately, you don’t have to know every esoteric networking term. Here are a few basic buzzwords to get you by:
(7) Networks are often called LANs. LAN is an acronym that stands for local area network. It’s the first TLA, or three-letter acronym, that you see in this book. You don’t really need to remember it or any of the many TLAs that follow. In fact, the only three-letter acronym you need to remember is TLA.
(8) You may guess that a four-letter acronym is called an FLA. Wrong! A four-letter acronym is called an ETLA, which stands for extended three-letter acronym. (After all, it just wouldn’t be right if the acronym for four-letter acronym had only three letters.)
(9) Every computer connected to the network is said to be on the network. The technical term (which you can forget) for a computer that’s on the network is a node.
(10) When a computer is turned on and can access the network. When a computer can’t access the network, it’s offline. A computer can be offline for several reasons. The computer can be turned off, the user may have disabled the network connection, the computer may be broken, the cable that connects it to the network can be unplugged, or a wad of gum can be jammed into the disk drive.
(11) When a computer is turned on working properly, it’s said to be up. When a computer is turned off, broken, or being serviced, it’s said to be down. Turning off a computer is sometimes called taking it down. Turning it back on is sometimes called bringing it up.
(12) Don’t confuse local-area networks with the Internet. The Internet is a huge amalgamation of computer networks strewn about the entire planet. Networking the computers in your home or office so they can share information with one another and connecting your computer to the worldwide Internet are two entirely separate things.

14. What is a three-letter acronym called?

15. What is a four-letter acronym called?

16. What is a “node”?

7-العشوائية

(1) Randomness and uncertainty exist in our daily lives as well as in every discipline in science, engineering, and technology. Probability theory is a mathematical framework that allows us to describe and analyze random phenomena in the world around us. By random phenomena, we mean events or experiments whose 11 outcomes we can’t predict with certainty.
(2) Let’s consider a couple of specific applications of probability in order to get some intuition. First, let’s think more carefully about what we mean by the term’s “randomness” and “probability” in the context of one of the simplest possible random experiments: flipping a fair coin.
(3) One way of thinking about “randomness” is that it’s a way of expressing what we don’t know. Perhaps if we knew more about the force, I flipped the coin with, the initial orientation of the coin, the impact point between my finger and the coin, the turbulence in the air, the surface smoothness of the table the coin lands on, the material characteristics of the coin and the table, and so on, we would be able to definitively say whether the coin would come up heads or tails. However, in the absence of all that information, we cannot predict the outcome of the coin flip. When we say that something is random, we are saying that our knowledge about the outcome is limited, so we can’t be certain what will happen.
(4) Since the coin is fair, if we don’t know anything about how it was flipped, the probability that it will come up heads is 50%, or 12. What exactly do we mean by this? There are two common interpretations of the word “probability.” One is in terms of relative frequency. In other words, if we flip the coin a very large number of times, it will come up heads about 12 of the time. As the number of coin flips increases, the proportion that come up heads will tend to get closer and closer to 12. In fact, this intuitive understanding of probability is a special case of the law of large numbers, which we will state and prove formally in later chapters of the book.
(5) A second interpretation of probability is that it is a quantification of our degree of subjective personal belief that something will happen. To get a sense of what we mean by this, it may be helpful to consider a second example: predicting the weather. When we think about the chances that it will rain today, we consider things like whether there are clouds in the sky and the humidity. However, the beliefs that we form based on these factors may vary from person to person – different people may make different estimates of the probability that it will rain. Often these two interpretations of probability coincide – for instance, we may base our personal beliefs about the chance that it will rain on an assessment of the relative frequency of rain on days with conditions like today.
(6) The beauty of probability theory is that it is applicable regardless of the interpretation of probability that we use (i.e., in terms of long-run frequency or degree of belief). Probability theory provides a solid framework to study random phenomena. It starts by assuming axioms of probability, and then building the entire theory using mathematical arguments.

17. What is one important idea related to “randomness” that the writer mentions in Paragraph (3)?

18. What is one important idea related to probability that the writer mentions in Paragraph (4)?