The old man found it increasingly difficult to read. His eyesight was beginning to fail. (compound sentence)

Write a letter of enquiry according to the following situation: You are a high school student and plan to go to the Exeter College of Art for further study in September, 2020. Write to the admission office to describe your current status and academic interest; ask about admission requirements; and enquire about tuition, accommodation and living expenses. Please sign your name as Li Fei. (150-200 words)

Read the following paragraph and write TWO irrelevant sentences.

As severe heat waves continue to spread across the European countries, weathermen are now saying that the all-time temperature record in Europe could be broken in the coming days. The temperature in Spain and Portugal, in particular, is expected to rise dramatically over the weekend. Spain and Portugal are countries both located mostly on the Iberian Peninsula. In other parts of Europe, Sweden's highest ice peak is melting at a rate of several centimeters a day. Wildfires have also raged(肆虐) in some parts of Europe and the most damaging one occurring across Greece has killed more than 90 people. The current European record is 48°C set in Athens in July 1977. One of the major problems lies in the fact that few countries are fully equipped to cope with the insufferable(难以忍受的) heat, although some emergency measures have been taken by individual countries.

Read the following paragraph and choose the best topic sentence from the four options that follow. Write the corresponding letter of your choice on the answer sheet.

Writing a summary is an excellent way to understand what is read. This in itself is an important goal of academic study. If you don't understand your source material, chances are that you will not be able to refer to it usefully in an essay or a research paper. Summaries help you understand what you read because they force you to put the text into your own words. Practice of writing summaries also develops your overall writing skills, since a good summary, like any other piece of good writing, is clear, coherent, and concise. Summaries are useful to your readers as well. You can best demonstrate the source material to your readers by summarizing it if they are not familiar with it. Summaries are required frequently in academic writings. In critique papers, you summarize material in order to critique it; in synthesis papers, you summarize to show relationships between sources.

A. Summary writing serves various purposes in academic study.

B. The purpose of a summary is to facilitate academic reading.

C. A good summary should demonstrate clarity and coherence.

D. A summary is a shorter version of the source material.

Read the following paragraph and write the topic sentence.

You're not the only one who could eat up a bag of chips in one sitting. The reason you keep dipping your fingers back into the chip bag has more to do with salt than with fat. Normally, fat helps make a meal more satisfying as it provides high calories, so people don't want to just keep eating and eating. However, eating salt triggers the release of dopamine(多巴胺), a chemical substance that controls your brain's pleasure center. Once your brain gets that first reward hit, it starts wanting more. When food is low in salt, it's easy to practice self-control instead of overeating, but when you add salt to that food, all of a sudden, those controls are gone.

Rearrange the following sentences so that they read logically. Write the corresponding letters in a proper sequence on the answer sheet. The positions of some sentences have been given.

A. They may reject the truth of your reasons, or accept them as true but deny that they are relevant to your claim and so cannot support it.

B. But thoughtful readers don't accept a claim just because you back it up with your reasons and your evidence.

C. They may think of alternative claims you did not consider.

D. A responsible researcher supports a claim with reasons based on evidence.

E. Hence the problem all researchers face is not just responding to readers' questions, alternatives, and objections, but imagining them.

F. So you have to predict as many of their questions as you can, and then acknowledge and respond to the most important ones.

G. Unless they think exactly as you do, they will probably think of evidence you haven't, explain your evidence differently, or, from the same evidence, draw a different conclusion.

H. In other words, your readers are likely to question any part of your argument.

Judged from the look of the sky, we will have a storm this evening.

Choose the best topic sentence from the four options below. Write the corresponding letter of your choice on the answer sheet.

A. Nuclear power plants cost a lot of money to build and to operate.

B. Nuclear power has been proven to be an uneconomical energy source.

C. Nuclear fuels must be mined, refined, and transported over great distances.

D. There are no nuclear power plants in such African countries as Ethiopia and Rwanda.

The Visitor Center stands next to a modem swimming pool which is a two-story building.

Today, I didn't make good time driving to work. Because every traffic light along the way was red.

It's commonly acknowledged that drawing a plan is easier than to carry it out.