TES BAHASA INGGRIS
READING COMPREHENSION
Reading 1 (no 161-166)
Hydrogen, one of earths’s abundant elements, once was seen as green energy’s answer to the petroleum driven, easy to produce, available everywhere and nonpolluting when burned. Hydrogen energy was defeated by a mountai of obstacles, the fear of explosion by te highly flammable gas, the difficulty of carrying the fuel in large, heavy tanks in the vehicle and the lack of a refeuling network. Automakers turned to biofuels, electricity or the gas-electricity hybrid.
But hidrogen, its turned out, never was completely put of the race. Now Israeli scientists and entrepreneurs claim to have brought hydrogen energy a step closer by putting it in much smaller, lighter, containers. Rather than using metal or composite cylinders of compressed gas that look like bulky scuba gear, hydrogen is packed into a glassed tube called capillary array, about the width of a drinking straw. The scientist say 11000 such arrays will fuel a car for 400 km, take less than half the space and weight of tanks currently installed in the few hydrogen cars now available.
The scientist make no attempt to improve the standard fuel cell, which is not much different today from when it was invented more than 150 years ago. A fuel cell makes electricity from chemical reaction involving hydrogen and oxygen, producing only water vapor as a byproduct. The fuel cell can be compared with the standards car’s engine, while the capillary arrays would be comparable to the gasoline tank.
While its backers call the technology a breakthrough, it is unlikely to gain traction without a large injection of capital to scale up development. It also would need a distribution system and the support of major car companies, which have poured billions of dollars into their own closely guarded research program. Like electrics stars, the driving force behind hydrogen research is the need to break away from oil and rein in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, especially carbon dioxide from industry and transport. Transportation add about 13% of manmade carbon to the atmosphere. Hydrogen boasts zero emissions. It can be produced from water through electrolysis, or harvested as the waste product of nuclear reactors and chemical plants. Within few years, perhaps a decade, hydrogen fuel will shift the world’s energy balance away from oil.
Reading 2 (no. 167-173)
Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic desaign. The movement was, among other things, a protest again the barbarism of The War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectually rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationally and the rejection of the prevailling standards of art. It influenced later moveents including Surrealism.
Dada probably began in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 (by some accounts in October 6) and there were active Dadaists in New York such as Marcel Duchamp and the Liberian art student, Betrice Wood, who had left France at the onset of World War I. At around the same time there had been a Dadaists movement in Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, and Paris. In 1920, Max Ernst, Hans Arp and social activist Alfred Grunwald set up the Cologne Dada group. The French avant-garde kept abreast of Dada activities in Zurich due to the regular communication from Tristan Tzara, who exchanged letters, poems and magazines with French writers, critics and artist. But while broad reaching, the movement was also unstable; artis went on to other ideas and movements, including Surrealism, Socialist Realism and other forms of modernism.
By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists who remained had fled or been forced into exile in the United States, some died in death camps under Hitler, who personally disliked the kind of radical art that dada represented. The movements became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.
The Cabaret Voltaire fell into disrepair until it was occupied by a group claiming to be neo-dadaism in June-August 2002. After their eviction the Cabaret Voltaire became a museum dedicated to the history of Dada and the Dada movement.
Reading 3 (no. 174-180)
Many historical linguist are able to trace modern complex languages back to earlier languages, but in order to answer the question of how complex language are actually formed, the researcher needs to observe how languages are started drom scratch. To find out how grammar is created, someone needs to be present at the time of a language’s creation, documenting its emergence. However, it is possible.
Some of most recent language envolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. At this time, slaves from a number of different ethnicities were forced to work together under colonizer’s rule. Since they had no opportunity to learn each other’s languages, they developed a make-shift language called pidgin. Pidgins are string of words copied from the languages of the landowner. They have little in the way of grammar, and in many case it is difficult for a listener to deduce when an event happened, and who did what to whom. Speakers need to use circumlocution in order the make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex languageis for a group of children to be exposed to it when they learn they mother tongur. Slave children did not simply copy the strings of words uttered by their elder, they adapted their words to create a new expressive language. Complex grammar system which emerge from pidgins are termed creoles, and they are invented by children.
Some linguist believe that many most established languages were creoles at first. The English pas tense –ed ending may have encolved from the verb ‘do’. ‘It ended’ may once have been ‘It end-did’. Thus, it would appear that even the most widespread languages were partly created by children. Children appear to have innate gramatical mechanism in their brains, which emerges when they are first trying to make sense of the world for them. Their minds can serve to create logical, complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.