Kỳ Thi KSCL Tốt Nghiệp THPT Tiếng Anh 2021-2022 - Lần 1

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 26 to 30.
Ways to Cut Down on Holiday Trash
The holiday season is a time for celebrating with friends and family. It is often called the "giving season" because during the holidays people give gifts and have celebrations. Unfortunately, this can all lead to a lot of waste. (26) _______, there are ways to reduce the amount of waste you create. Experts recently gave some ideas to the Associated Press.
The (27) ______ about paper waste have caused many people to look at other choices for wrapping a present. You can use reusable bags for gifts. Vaccariello recommends keeping gift bags and other decorations that you receive. You can reuse them the next time you give a gift. You can buy from companies (28) _______make environmentally-friendly gift wrap. Some companies make recyclable wrapping paper and do not use materials that are not recyclable. You can also wrap gifts in old maps, pages from magazines, and art paper. The person receiving the gift could use the wrapping for something else. Ozawa, editor at Martha Stewart Living, says she likes the Japanese tradition of furoshiki. This is where gifts are wrapped in cloth. The pretty and strong wrapping cloths can be used for (29) ________things, instead of just being thrown away. You could also wrap a gift in a colorful scarf or tablecloth. This makes the wrapping cloth part of the gift itself. Instead of decorating a gift with something plastic, you can use something (30) ________ such as pine cones, rosemary, or other evergreen.

(https://learningenglish.voanews.com)

We have been making cheese for millennia, but researchers are only now getting to grips with how bacteria, fungi and viruses combine to create its characteristic flavours and textures. When it comes to finding new and exotic species, there is no need to travel to the rainforest or trawl the deep ocean. Just open your fridge. The cheeses in there contain a wealth of surprises, if you look closely enough.

Although cheese production began at least 7000 years ago, we are only just beginning to understand what is really going on in this complex ecosystem that we delight in devouring. “Cheese is a fascinating ecological niche,” says Paul Cotter, a microbiologist at food and agricultural research body Teagasc who is based in Cork, Ireland. New work on the cheese microbiome is revealing a riot behind the rind, with complex interactions between a diverse array of bacteria, moulds and yeasts helping to create characteristic flavours and textures. “There are a lot of microbes that we’re eating every day on some of our favourite cheeses, and we know incredibly little about what they’re doing to drive the flavour of those cheeses,” says Benjamin Wolfe at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Understanding this better will not only help control the flavours of existing cheeses, but also help us develop tasty new ones.

Here’s a tour of some of the surprises hidden in your cheeseboard. Cheeses are dominated by bacteria that digest the main sugar in milk, lactose, and turn it into an acid. But they are also home to a menagerie of other microbes that develop as cheese matures, and exactly how many organisms cheese contains is only just being revealed. Studies using gene-sequencing technologies keep finding new bacteria, some previously unknown to science.

(https://www.newscientist.com)

When corals are mentioned, many people think of rock-life forms in the sea filled with colorful fish. But corals are made up of hundreds of thousands of small organisms which live and feed like any other sea life. For the past five years, researchers in Hawaii and Australia have been engineering corals inside a lab to see if they could better resist the effects of climate change. They say it is now time to see how their creations perform in nature. The scientists say climate change linked to human causes has led to warming oceans that can harm sea life. They say if the more heat-resistant corals they developed do well in the ocean, the method can be used to help save suffering and dying reefs.
The team tested three methods for making corals that would be strong and healthy in nature. One was the method of selective breeding. This method involves scientists choosing parents with desirable characteristics for reproductive purposes. A second method subjected the corals to increasing temperatures to condition them to be able to survive in warm ocean environments. The third involved making changes to the algae that provide corals with necessary nutrients. The leader of the project, University of Hawaii researcher Kira Hughes, said all the methods proved successful in the lab. She told The Associated Press that some scientists might worry that such methods go against the natural processes of nature. But with the planet continuing to warm more and more, she does not see any better options.
“We have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future,” Hughes said. When ocean temperatures rise, corals release algae that supplies nutrients and gives them color. This causes them to turn white, a process called bleaching. When this happens, corals can quickly become sick and die. But for years, scientists have been observing corals that have survived bleaching, even when others have died on the same reef. They are now centering on those healthy survivors and hoping to further increase their resistance to heat. Those corals were used as the parents for the newly created kinds.
(https://learningenglish.voanews.com)