Direction: In the following questions, you have two brief passages with 5 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swam by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put it in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there – sometimes a mile and a half wide; we ran nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up – nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next, we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere – perfectly still – just like the whole world was asleep; only sometimes the bullfrog's cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water was a kind of dull line – that was the woods on the other side; you couldn’t make anything else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and wasn’t black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along-ever so far away – trading scows and such things and long black streaks – rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep creaking or jumbled up voices, it was so still and sounds come so far and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
(1) reckon (V.) : to think something/have an opinion about something
(2) monstrous (Adj.) : very large and frightening
(3) navigating (V.) : sailing over/through a sea, river, etc.
(4) towhead (N.) : a sandbar/low-lying alluvial island in a river, especially one with a stand of trees
(5) scows (N.) : a large flat-bottomed boat with square ends, used chiefly for transporting freight
(6) streaks (N.) : a long thin mark/line
(7) snag (N.) : difficulty
(8) moor (N.) : a high open area of land that is not used for farming, especially an area covered with rough grass

Direction: In the following questions, you have two brief passages with 5 questions following each passage. Read the passages carefully and choose the best answer to each question out of the four alternatives.
PASSAGE
A crucial element that defines the soap opera is the open-ended nature of the narrative, with stories spanning several episodes. One of the defining features that makes a television program a soap opera, according to Albert Moran is “that form of television that works with a continuous open narrative. Each episode ends with a promise that the storyline is to be continued in another episode.” In 2012, Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times wrote of daily dramas, “Although melodramatically eventful, soap operas such as this also have a luxury of space that makes them seem more naturalistic, indeed, the economics of the form demand long scenes, and conversations that a 22episodes-per-season weekly series might dispense with in half a dozen lines of dialogue may be drawn out, as here, for pages. You spend more time even with the minor characters, the apparent villains grow less apparently villainous.” Soap opera storylines run concurrently, intersect and lead into further developments. An individual episode of a soap opera will generally switch between several different concurrent narrative threads that may at times interconnect and effect one another or may run entirely independent of each other. Evening soap operas and serials that run for only a part of the year tend to bring things to a dramatic end of season cliffhanger.
SOME IMPORTANT WORDS
(1) spanning (V.) : to last all through a period of time or to cover the whole of it
(2) defining (Adj.) : decisive ; critically important
(3) melodramatically (Adv.) : in a way that is full of exciting and exteme emotions or events
(4) apparent (Adj.) : that seems to be real/true but may not be
(5) concurrently (Adv.) : at the same time
(6) cliff hanger (N.) : a situation in a story, film/movie, competition, etc. that is very exciting because you cannot guess what will happen next, or you do not find out immediately what happens next