1. Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term “future shock” as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time”. The book became an international bestseller, selling over 6 million copies, and has been widely translated.

Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change overwhelms people, he believed, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation” – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term “information overload.”

What would be the most suitable title for the passage?

2. Theories are divided about the cause of the Permian mass extinctions. Some hypothesize that the impact of a massive asteroid caused a sudden disappearance of species. However, a look at the carbon – isotope record suggests that existing plant communities were struck down and re-found several times. To produce such a pattern would require a succession of asteroid strikes thousands of years apart. Other theorists have proposed that volcanic explosions raised the Corban dioxide level leading to intense global warming. One problem with this theory is that it cannot explain the massive marine extinctions at the end of the Permian period. A new theory posits that rising concentrations of toxic hydrogen sulphide in the world’s oceans plus gradual oxygen depletion in the surface waters caused the extinctions in the surface waters caused the extinctions. Fortunately, this theory is testable. If true, oceanic sediments from the Permian period would yield chemical evidence of a rise in hydrogen sulphide – consuming bacteria.

Ques 2. The primary purpose of the passage is to

3. Thomas Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of the invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications.

Choose the best heading for the paragraph from the list below.

4. Unemployment was the overriding fact of life when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States on March 4, 1933. An anomaly of the time was that the government did not systematically collect statistics of joblessness; actually it did not start doing so until 1940. The Bureau of Labor Statistics later estimated that 12,830,000 persons were out of work in 1933, about one-fourth of a civilian labor force of more than 51 million.

Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act on May 12, 1933. The president selected Harry L. Hopkins, who headed the New York relief program, to run FERA. A gifted administrator, Hopkins quickly put the program into high gear. He gathered a small staff in Washington and brought the state relief organizations into the FERA system.

While the agency tried to provide all the necessities, food came first. City dwellers usually got an allowance for fuel, and rent for one month was provided in case of eviction.

Ques 1. This passage is primarily about what?

5. In linguistics, a corpus (plural corpora) is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). A corpus may be used to help linguists to analyse a language, or for the purpose of dictionary writing or language teaching. The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late twentieth century from a wide variety of genres with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time.

What is a corpus according to text?