Poorer children would be offered the chance to attend lessons on Saturday to help catch up with their middle-class peers  , the shadow schools secretary, Michael Gove, said today. The Conservatives would give English state schools the freedom to choose to have longer teaching hours and extra classes at the weekend; he told the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' annual conference. Gove said the move would help to close the achievement gap with richer children whose parents could afford extras such as tutoring and music lessons. He told delegates  in Manchester, "For children who come from homes where parents don't have the resources to provide  _ and cultural experiences, there are benefits in having those children in the learning environment, in school, for longer." "Parents would love to have schools starting earlier in some circumstances, and certainly going on later in the afternoon, given the reality of their working lives," he said. He held up the example of Kipp (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools in the US, which are often based in the poorest communities and open from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, plus Saturdays.  But it would be up to schools to decide to offer longer hours, Gove added. Parents said Saturday classes could become a "badge of dishonor" if pupils were forced to go while teachers raised concerns about their workload. Margaret Morrissey, of Parents Outloud, said, "I think the suggestion the government made about one-to-one teaching for these kids would be a more preferable way of improving these children's performance. I'm just not sure whether taking away a child at weekends is actually going to make them cleverer in the week." The ATL's general secretary, Mary Bousted, said, "If we want Saturday schools, then we need more teachers doing the extra hours, not the same teachers working longer." What is Margaret Morrissey's opinion about the new program? A) Favorable. B) Doubtful. C) Optimistic. D) Acceptable.
B


"I stepped out and was _ ," local journalist Bahram Baloch told the BBC. "I could see this gray, dome-shaped   body in the distance, like a giant whale swimming near the surface. Hundreds of people had gathered to watch it in disbelief." This island has become a global curiosity. How was it formed in just a few minutes? As you might already know, many islands in the sea are formed by volcanoes. There are numerous volcanoes under the sea. As the hot lava erupts and cools down, it piles up and forms the shape of a mountain. When the mountain "grows" to higher than the sea level, the part that's above the water is what we call an "island". This is how the island was formed after the Pakistan earthquake, except that instead of a regular volcano, it was a "mud volcano" that brought about this island. Lava is not the only thing that's locked under the Earth's crust -- there is also gas. When an earthquake happens and breaks part of the crust, the gas is released at an extremely high speed, pushing mud up to the surface, according to National Geographic. But only earthquakes that are extremely powerful can cause mud volcanoes to push up enough mud to produce islands -- and this 7.7-magnitude earthquake in Pakistan was strong enough. The island is about 20 meters high, up to about 90 meters wide and 30 meters long, nearly the size of a soccer field. In fact, mud volcano islands aren't new. This is the fourth island of this kind in the region since 1945. But those islands usually didn't last long. "It will probably be gone within a couple of months," said Bill Barnhart, a researcher with the US Geological Survey. After all, "it's just a big pile of mud that was on the seafloor that got pushed up". According to the article, islands formed by mud volcanoes   _  . A) are quite difficult to locate B) usually disappear after a short period of time C) are formed by hot lava from volcanoes D) used to be part of the Earth's crust
B


(Q).
For Yali Liu, the hardest thing about UK higher education is having to go to the pub. "It's how much you need to invest socially with other students," she says. "I don't like going to a pub or club, but people just keep going out and I feel the pressure to go out too." This is because, unlike in China, she says, there is so much emphasis during the course on teamwork and group projects, so socialising with other students - especially British people, is crucial. Liu, 23, who is in her final year of a BSc in business administration at the University of Bath, is one of more than 80,000 Chinese students studying in UK universities. They are responsible for a large proportion of the more than PS10bn a year that international students contribute to the UK economy. However, research shows that where their academic attainment  is concerned, the picture is not satisfactory. While nearly 58% of all students - and 45% of overseas students graduated with a first-class degree last year, this was true of only 35% of students from China. To find an explanation, Zhiqi Wang and Ian Crawford, lecturers at the University of Bath, compared the performance of Chinese and British undergraduates in each year of their degree. Taking a sample of 100 British and Chinese students and comparing their average marks and final degree classification, they found a dramatic drop in performance among the Chinese students between year one, when they performed better than their UK counterparts, and year two, when they performed worse. They believe the drop results from two factors. First, Chinese students fail to adapt their approaches to learning and so their performance declines in the later years when the complexity of the work increases. Second, many young people in China enroll in higher education due to pressure from family rather than their own motivation. Professor Sedghi thinks part of the problem may be the changing socio-economic background of Chinese undergraduates. While 85% of Chinese students at British universities before 2000... What can be inferred about Yali Liu from the passage? A) She is not good at socialising with local students. B) She is bored with the teamwork and group projects. C) Her family can't afford her education in the UK. D) The university won't award her a first-class degree.
(A).

A