Reading Comprehension - Despite their fierce reputation, Vikings Reading Comprehension The passage below is accompanied by a set of three questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Despite their fierce reputation. Vikings may not have always been the plunderers and pillagers popular culture imagines them to be. In fact, they got their start trading in northern European markets, researchers suggest. Combs carved from animal antlers, as well as comb manufacturing waste and raw antler material has turned up at three archaeological s

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Reading Comprehension - Typewriters are the epitome of a technology Reading Comprehension The passage below is accompanied by a set of three questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Typewriters are the epitome of a technology that has been comprehensively rendered obsolete by the digital age. The ink comes off the ribbon, they weigh a ton, and second thoughts are a disaster. But they are also personal, portable and, above all, private. Type a document and lock it away and more or less the only way anyone else can get it is if you gi

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Reading Comprehension - The end of the age of the internal Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question. The end of the age of the internal combustion engine is in sight. There are small signs everywhere: the shift to hybrid vehicles is already under way among manufacturers. Volvo has announced it will make no purely petrol-engined cars after 2019...and Tesla has just started selling its first electric car aimed squarely at the middle classes: the Tesla 3 se

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Reading Comprehension - During the frigid season.... Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question. During the frigid season...it's often necessary to nestle under a blanket to try to stay warm. The temperature difference between the blanket and the air outside is so palpable that we often have trouble leaving our warm refuge. Many plants and animals similarly hunker down, relying on snow cover for safety from winter's harsh conditions. The small area between

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Reading Comprehension - Passage - Creativity is at once our most precious Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Creativity is at once our most precious resource and our most inexhaustible one. As anyone who has ever spent any time with children knows, every single human being is born creative; every human being is innately endowed with the ability to combine and recombine data, perceptions, materials and ideas, and devise new ways of thinking and doi

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Reading Comprehension - Passage - Do sports mega events Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of three questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Do sports mega events like the summer Olympic Games benefit the host city economically? It depends, but the prospects are less than rosy. The trick is converting...several billion dollars in operating costs during the 17-day fiesta of the Games into a basis for long-term economic returns. These days, the summer Olympic Games themselves generate total rev

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Reading Comprehension - Passage - Scientists have long recognized Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of three questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Scientists have long recognized the incredible diversity within a species. But they thought it reflected evolutionary changes that unfolded imperceptibly, over millions of years. That divergence between populations within a species was enforced, according to Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist of the 1940s, when a population was separat

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Reading Comprehension - Passage - This year alone, more than 8,600 stores Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question. This year alone, more than 8,600 stores could close, according to industry estimates, many of them the brand -name anchor outlets that real estate developers once stumbled over themselves to court. Already there have been 5,300 retail closings this year... Sears Holdings—which owns Kmart—said in March that there's "substantial doubt"

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Reading Comprehension – Passage – I used a smartphone GPS to find my way through the cobblestoned maze of Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question I used a smartphone GPS to find my way through the cobblestoned maze of Geneva's Old Town, in search of a handmade machine that changed the world more than any other invention. Near a 13th-century cathedral in this Swiss city on the shores of a lovely lake, I found what I was looking for: a Gutenberg p

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Reading Comprehension - Passage - Understanding where you are in the world Reading Comprehension - Passage The passage below is accompanied by a set of six questions. Choose the best answer to each question. Understanding where you are in the world is a basic survival skill, which is why we, like most species come hard-wired with specialized brain areas to create congnitive maps of our surroundings. Where humans are unique, though, with the possible exception of honeybees, is that we try to communicate this understanding the world with other

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