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MAJLISPEPERIKSMNMALAYSIAMAJLISPEPER/KSMNMALA
YSIAMAJLISPEPERIKSMNMALA
YSIA
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MAJLJSPEPMALAYSIAN UNIVERSITY ENGLISH TEST NMALAYSIA
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MAJLJSPEPERIKSMNMALA
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90
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1ALA
YSIAMAJLJSPEPER/KSMNMALA
YSIA
MAJLJSPEPERIKSMNMALA
YSIAMAJLJSPEPERIKSMNMALA
YSIAMAJLJSPEPERIKSMNMALA
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MAJLJSPEPERIKSMNMALAYSIAMAJLISPEPERIKSMNMALA
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Instructions to candidates:
DO NOT OPEN THIS QUESTION PAPER UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO.
There are forty-five questions in this test. For each question, choose the most appropriate
answer. Indicate your answer on the separate answer sheet given.
Read the instructions on the answer sheet carefully.
Attempt all questions.
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Stress isn't always bad. A stress researcher Hans Selye (SEL-yay) (1976) observed,
"To be totally without stress is to be dead." Stress is the mental and physical
condition that occurs when a person must adjust or adapt to the environment.
Unpleasant events such as work pressures, marital problems, or financial woes
naturally produce stress. But so do travel sports, a new job, mountain climbing,
dating, and other positive activities. Even if you aren't a thrill seeker, a healthy
lifestyle may include a fair amount of eustress (good stress). Eustress can be
energizing. Activities that provoke "good stress" are usually experienced as
challenging and rewarding.
A stressor is a condition or event in the environment that challenges or threatens
a person. Stress reactions are complex. Let's examine some of the chief factors
that determine whether or not stress is harmful. It goes almost without saying that
some events are more likely to cause stress than others. Imagine standing at the top
of a wind-whipped ski jump for the first time. Internally, there would be a rapid
surge in your heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and muscle tension. Short-term
stresses of this kind can be uncomfortable, but they rarely do any damage. Police
officers, on the other hand, suffer from a high rate of stress-related diseases. The
threat of injury or death, plus occasional confrontations with drunk or belligerent
citizens, takes a toll. A major factor here is the unpredictable nature of police work.
An officer who stops someone to issue a traffic ticket never knowsif a cooperative
citizen or an armed gang member is waiting in the car.
A study done with rats shows how unpredictable events add to stress. Rats
in one group were given shocks preceded by a warning tone. A second group
got shocks without warning. The third group received no shocks, but heard the
tone. After a few weeks, the animals that received unpredictable shocks had severe
stomach ulcers. Those given predictable shocks showed little or no ulceration. The
lucky group that received no shocks also had no ulcers (Weiss, 1972).
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The table below gives an overview of typical signs or symptoms of prolonged stress.
Warning Signs of Stress
Emotional Signs
Anxiety
Apathy
Irritability
Mental fatigue
Behavioural Signs
Physical Signs
Excessive worry about illness
Frequent illness
Exhaustion
Overuse of medicines
Physical ailments and complaints
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To manage stress, one must learn to recognize the signs and symptoms of
stress. In doing so, one can avoid the negative effects of stress which could result
in
extreme or suicidal behaviour.
30
According to the table, physical signs of stress are the most serious.
A True
B False
C Not stated
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Mall Stores. With the growth of mass merchandising and shopping malls in
the 1970s, several bookstore chains emerged. Typified by B. Dalton and Walden
Books, which together had 2300 stores at their peak, these chains ordered books
in huge lots from the publishers and stocked their stores coast to coast with rubber
stamp inventories. Often, these chains bought books even before they were
printed, basing their decisions on publishers' promises for promotional blitzes and
big discounts for bulk purchases. When huge stocks arrived, the mall stores had to
move them-sometimes going to extraordinary steps with display and discounts
to fulfill their own projections, and sometimes without consideration for a book's
literary qualities. Suddenly, book-selling became market-driven with flashy
displays and other incentives prodding customers to buy-hardly a customer
driven way of doing business.
These formulaic stores focused on what could be moved rapidly without any
attention to whether they had a balance represented on their shelves. Asked once
where the books by the influential psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud could be found,
a B. Dalton store manager answered: "Ahhh, I think we had one once." The new
criteria was not literary or enlightenment but what products could be moved. The
goal: fast inventory turnover.
While superstore customers liked the discounts, the price war profoundly
damaged publishers. Unable to move all the new inventory, the superstores shipped
truckloads of books back to publishers. Refunds had been common practice in
publishing, almost a consignment relationship between stores and publishers. The
volume of the new returns, however, caught publishers unaware; at Harper Collins,
for example, operating profits fell 66 per cent in 1996, forcing the publisher to take
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drastic steps. It cancelled 106 books for which it had issued advances to authors.
It also cut back its acquisition of new titles. In 1996, U.S. book output had reached
58 000 new titles. It was down to 56 000 in 1997 and still dropping. Book output,
one measure of a culture's quality, suffered.
50
Before mall stores came into existence, book-selling was dominated by individual businesses.
A True
B False
C Not stated
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B False
C Not stated
10 The literary qualities of books increase book sales in mall stores.
A True
B False
C Not stated
11 "Ahhh, I think we had one once" (line 28). This suggests that the book is
A not discounted
B
12 Mrs. Tan wants her children to read and also enjoy food and video shows in the same place.
a mall store
13 Book output, one measure ofa cultures quality, suffered (lines 50 and 51 ). The implication of
this statement is
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.
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Happiness, researchers find, is infectious: the more happy people you associate
with, the happier you become. Happiness is contagious, according to new research.
The same team. that demonstrated that obesity and smoking spread in network has
shown that the more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be
happy. And being connected to happy people improves a person's happiness, they
reported in the British Medical Journal.
"People are asked how often during the past week they enjoyed life, were
happy, felt hopeful about the future and felt just as good as other people," Fowler
said.
The 60 per cent of people who scored highly on all four questions were rated
as happy, while the rest were designated unhappy. People with the most social
connections-friends, spouses, neighbours, relatives-were also the happiest, the
data showed. "Each additional happy person makes you happier," Christakis said.
"Imagine that I am connected to you and you are connected to others and others
are connected to still others. It is this fabric of humanity, like an American patch
quilt."
Each person sits on a different-coloured patch. "Imagine that these patches are
happy and unhappy patches. Your happiness depends on what is going on in the
patch around you," Christakis said.
"It is not just happy people connecting with happy people, which they do.
Above and beyond, there is this contagious process going on."
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"If a social contact is happy, it increases the likelihood that you are happy
for by 15 per cent," Fowler said. "A friend of a friend, or the friend of a spouse
or a sibling, if they are happy, increases your chances by 10 per cent," he added.
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"But every extra unhappy friend increases the likelihood that you' II be unhappy
by seven per cent," Fowler said. The finding is interesting but it is useful too,
Fowler said.
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"Among other benefits, happiness has been shown to have an important effect
on reduced mortality, pain reduction, and improved cardiac function. So better
understanding of how happiness spreads can help us learn how to promote a
healthier society," he said.
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The study also fits in with other data suggested in 1984, that having US$5000
extra increased a person's chances of becoming happier by about two per cent.
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"A happy friend is worth about US$20 000," said Christakis whose team is also
examining the spread of depression, loneliness and drinking behavior.
(Adapted from New Straits Times, January 6, 2009)
I and II
I and IV -
II and III
an outburst of happiness -
Observations
B Experiments
C
Surveys
ambitious
self-esteem
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Allyson was convinced that she had nothing to put on her resume. In a conference,
her instructor asked Allyson to describe exactly what she had done. Allyson's
"baby-sitting" was actually house management and child care. But a summer job
at Harvard had consisted of changing beds and cleaning rooms for conference
guests.
Her five summers of work at a law firm sounded more promising. She went to
the library, formulated medical and legal questions, and searched for answers. The
information she found helped the firm win a $7 million out-of-court settlement.
Not bad for a sophomore in college. But Allyson was in advertising and wanted
to go into copywriting, not market research. The experience was certainly worth
putting on her resume, but the kind of thinking she had done as a law clerk was not
the kind of thinking she needed to demonstrate to an advertising agency.
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Some of the items under ACHIEVEMENTS were interesting. The Locker Room
was a restaurant in town where Allyson had had dinner. Its menu said the restaurant "had
a long history." In fact, the restaurant was new; it was the building
15 that was old.
Allyson went up to the owner, told him several of the things that were
wrong with the menu, and offered to rewrite it. The owner told her he would pay
her for doing that and also invited her to submit ideas for ads.
The instructor was impressed. The whole anecdote might work in a job
application letter, while the resume could highlight the fact that Allyson had written
menu and advertising copy of real business (not just a class). "What you need," the
instructor said, "is a skills resume."
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The next step was to answer two questions: "What do you want to do?" "What
do you think the employer is looking for?" Allyson replied, "I want to get a job as
a copywriter in Cleveland.
It's the IO" biggest market, and I'd rather work as
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"Then your resume needs to do that. And it can. You're coming across as
a self-starter, a problem solver. When you actually write your resume, use the
language of your field. Problem solver is a positive term in most fields, but it
may or may not be right for advertising. Given what you've done, you could have
headings for WRITING EXPERIENCE, CREATING ADVERTISEMENTS,
PLANNING PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGNS, RESEARCH, and SPEAKING,
with a list of items under each one.
"Your resume is going to make you look qualified. Highly qualified. Other
students are going to read it and say, 'But she has done so much. I haven't done
anything.' They're going to feel just the way you felt when you said you hadn't
done much in the last four years. But you have done a lot. You'll look great in
your resume. Anyone can, who understands the options and who puts in the time
and energy."
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Of course, Allyson still had to tinker with headings, decide what details to use,
and experiment with layout and spacing.
(Adapted from Locker, K.O. 2006. Business and Administrative Communication.
7t1i ed. New York: McGraw Hill.)
A irrelevant
B insufficient
C irreplaceable
24 The instructor was impressed with Allyson's achievement at the restaurant because
A the instructor can relate to the experience
B Allyson has worked for a reputable restaurant
C Allyson has shown abilities that suit her future career
25 To survive the cut (line 40) means
A to be selected
B to be interviewed
C to be recommended
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it is objective
it has appeal
27 What does the instructor say about the term problem solver (line 51 )?
A It may not suit the needs of an advertisement agency.
B
It is similar to self-starter.
experienced in advertising
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If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it's because they are. But
some disasters do seem to be affecting us worse-and not for the reasons you may
think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of
flood and storm disasters has gone up by 7.4 per cent every year in recent decades,
according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. Of the
total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected
by floods.
It is tempting to look at the line-up of storms in the Atlantic (Hanna, Ike,
Josephine) and blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another
inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly
because of where we live, not just how we live.
In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse to big cities
near water. The population of Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150 000
in the 1930s, a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population
of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1600 per cent to 2 400 000. So the same
intensity hurricane today wreaks all sorts of havoc that wouldn't have occurred
had human beings not migrated.
If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it's not
obvious in the historical weather data. And whatever effect it is having is much,
much smaller than the effect of development along the coastlines. In fact, if you
look at all storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine we had today's populations on
the coasts, you would see that the worst hurricane would have actually happened
in 1926.
If it happened today, the Great Miami storm would have caused $140 to $157
billion in damages. (Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in U.S. history, caused
$100 billion in losses.) "There has been no trend in the number or intensity of
storms at landfall since 1900,"says Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at
the University of Colorado. "The storms themselves haven't changed."
What's changed is what we've put in the storm's way. Crowding together in
coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First, it is harder for us to evacuate
before a storm because of gridlock. And in much of the developing world, people
don't get the kinds of early warnings that Americans get. So large migrant
populations get flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has
repeatedly been the hardest hit by disasters in recent years. Secondly, even if we
get all the humans to safety, we still have more stuff in harm's way. So each big
hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controlling for inflation.
But the most insidious effect of building condos and industry along the water is
that we are systematically stripping the coasts of the protection that used to
'cushion the blow of extreme weather. Three years after Katrina, southern
Louisiana is still
losing a football field worth of wetlands every 38 minutes.
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"Human beings have been clearing away our best protections all over the
world," says Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the
University of Colorado. "The natural protections are diminishing-whether
you're talking about mangrove forests in areas affected by the Indian ocean
tsunami or wetlands in the Gulf Coast or forests, which offer protection against
45
landslides and mudslides."
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Increasingly, climate change is on people's minds, and that is all for the better.
Even if climate change has not been the primary driver of disaster losses, it is
likely to cause far deadlier disasters in the future if left unchecked.
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climate change
where we live
how we live
hurricanes are stronger in intensity and cause more destruction than before
the hurricanes in the 1930s caused less damage than the ones today
there has been no change in the strength of storms from 1900 to 2005
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34 Asia is the hardest hit by disasters (line 34). The main reason for this is
A
C
Crowding together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few
levels.
D
So each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controllingfor inflation.
36 ... we can do something about this problem. (lines 4 7 and 48). The writer is of the opinion that
A man is responsible for the losses caused by natural disasters
B
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Nothing like it had been attempted before, and even NASA's experts wondered
if it could really work. But after monitoring the data, there was little doubt that
they had to do something-or else lose contact with their space probe forever.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 had sent back spectacular images of Jupiter and
Saturn and then soared out of the solar system on a one-way mission to the stars.
But after 25 years of exposure to the frigid temperatures of deep space, the probe
was beginning to show its age. Sensors and circuits were on the brink of failing,
and with the probe 12 500 billion kilometres from Earth there seemed nothing
anyone could do. Unless, that is, the NASA engineers could somehow get a
message to Voyager 1, instructing it to dust off some spares and use those instead.
In April 2002, one of the huge radio dishes belonging to NASA's Deep Space
Network sent the message out into the depths of space. Even travelling at the
speed of light, it took over 11 hours to reach its target, far beyond the orbit of
Pluto. Yet, the little probe managed to hear the faint call from its home planet,
and successfully made the switch-over. It was the longest distance repair job
in history, and a triumph for the NASA engineers. But it also highlighted the
astonishing power of techniques developed by an American communications
engineer who had died just a year earlier, named Claude Shannon. In the 1940s, he
had single-handedly created an entire science of communication which has since
found its way into a host of applications, from DVDs to satellite communication
to barcode-anywhere, in short, where data has to be conveyed rapidly yet
accurately.
Known as Information Theory, it underpins many of today's most important
technologies. But now a whole new area of application is starting to emerge
one with profound implications for the very nature of space and time. Some
of the world's leading physicists believe that Information Theory holds the key
to understanding some of the most profound mysteries in the cosmos, from the
nature of black holes to the very meaning ofreality.
This all seems light-years away from the down-to-earth uses Shannon originally
had for his work, which began when he was a 22-year-old graduate engineering
student at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939. He set
out with an apparently simple aim: to pin down the precise meaning of the concept
of "information". The most basic form of information, Shannon argued, is whether
something is true or false-which can be captured by a single binary unit or "bit",
of the form 1 or 0. Having identified this fundamental unit, Shannon set about
defining otherwise vague ideas about information and transmitting it from place to
place. In the process he discovered something surprising: it is always possible to
guarantee messages get through random inference-"noise"-intact. The trick,
Shannon showed, is to find ways of packaging up-"coding"--information to
cope with the ravages of code, while still staying within the information-carrying
capacity-"bandwidth "-of the communication system.
Shannon also laid the foundations for efficient ways of storing information,
by stripping out unnecessary-"redundant"-bits from data which contributed
little real information. As mobile phone text-messages like "I CN C U" show,
it is often possible to strip out a lot of data without losing much meaning. As
with error-correction, however, there's a limit beyond which messages become
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too ambiguous. Shannon showed how to calculate this limit, opening the way to
the design of compression methods that cram maximum information into minimal
space.
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Low temperatures
D Age of Voyager 1
39 The writer cites the example of Voyager 1 to highlight
A the highly specialised work of NASA engineers
B
41 The word yet (line 21) as used in the passage signals that something is
A unusual
B
surprising
impossible
predictable
coding of information to cope with interference so that the message remains intact
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A ambiguity of messages
B
44 The word hype (line 52) refers to something that Shannon considers to be
A popular
B
overrated
controversial
D extraordinary
45 A suitable title for the passage is
A
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