Kỳ Thi KSCL Tốt Nghiệp THPT Lần 2 Tiếng Anh 2022 - Mã Đề 628

Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California. Tan (1)_________ up in Northern California, (2)_________ when her father and older brother both died from brain tumors in 1966, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Europe, where she attended high school in Montreux, Switzerland. She returned to the United States for college. After college, Tan worked as a language development consultant and as a corporate freelance writer. In 1985, she wrote the story "Rules of the Game" for a writing workshop, which (3)_________ the early foundation for her first novel The Joy Luck Club. Published in 1989, the book explored the relationship between Chinese women and their Chinese–American daughters, and became the longest–running New York Times bestseller for that year. The Joy Luck Club received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It has been translated into 25 languages, including Chinese, and was made into a major motion picture for (4)_________ Tan co–wrote the screenplay. Tan's (5)_________ works have also been adapted into several different forms of media.

Have you ever entered a tropical rainforest? It's a special, dark place completely different from anywhere else. A rainforest is a place where the trees grow very tall. Millions of kinds of animals, insects, and plants live in the rainforest. It is hot and humid in a rainforest. It rains a lot in the rainforest, but sometimes you don't know it's raining. The trees grow so closely together that rain doesn't always reach the ground.
Rainforests make up only a small part of the Earth's surface, about six percent. They are found in tropical parts of the world. The largest rainforest in the world is the Amazon in South America. The Amazon covers 1.2 billion acres, or almost five million square kilometers. The second largest rainforest is in Western Africa.
There are also rainforests in Central America, Southeast Asia, Northeastern Australia, and the Pacific Islands.
Rainforests provide us with many things. In fact, the Amazon Rainforest is called the “lungs of our planet” because it produces twenty percent of the world’s oxygen. One fifth of the world’s fresh water is also found in the Amazon Rainforest. Furthermore, one half of the world’s species of animals, plants, and insects live in the Earth’s rainforests. Eighty percent of the food we eat first grew in the rainforest. For example, pineapples, bananas, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, chocolate, coffee, and sugar all came from rainforests. Twenty-five percent of the drugs we take when we are sick are made of plants that grow only in rainforests. Some of these drugs are even used to fight and cure cancer. With all the good things we get from rainforests, it’s surprising to find that we are destroying our rainforests. In fact, 1.5 acres, or 6,000 square meters, of rainforest disappear every second. The forests are being cut down to make fields for cows, to harvest the plants, and to clear land for farms. Along with losing countless valuable species, the destruction of rainforests creates many problems worldwide. Destruction of rainforests results in more pollution, less rain, and less oxygen for the world.
(Adapted from Reading Challenge 2 by Casey Malarcher and Andrea Janzen)

For many American university students, the weeklong spring break holiday means an endless party on a sunny beach in Florida or Mexico. In Panama City Beach, Florida, a city with a permanent population of around 36,000, more than half a million university students arrive during the month of March to play and party, making it the number one spring break destination in the United States. A weeklong drinking binge is not for anyone, however, and a growing number of American university students have found a way to make spring break matter. For them, joining or leading a group of volunteers to travel locally or internationally and work to show problems such as poverty, homelessness, or environmental damage makes spring break a unique learning experience that university students can feel good about. Students who participate in alternative spring break projects find them very rewarding. While most university students have to get their degrees before they can start helping people, student volunteers are able to help people now. On the other hand, the accommodations are far from glamorous. Students often sleep on the floor of a school or spend the week camping in tents. But students only pay around $250 for meals and transportation, which is much less than some of their peers spend to travel to more traditional spring break hotspots.
Alternative spring break trips appear to be growing in popularity at universities across the United States. Students cite a number of reason for participating. Some appreciate the opportunity to socialize and meet new friends. Others want to exercise their beliefs about people's obligation to serve humanity and make the world a better place. Whatever their reason, these students have discovered something that gives them rich rewards along with a break from school work.