Question 1 One of the big programming surprises of the 2002 summer TV series was a show on the Fox Network called American Idol, a talent search that highlighted several aspiring performers. The final episode of the show garnered the biggest audience share among 18- to 49-year olds that the network has ever had. Based on a British series called Pop Idol, American Idol is another in a long list of shows that the United States has imported. In fact, many popular U.S. TV shows originated overseas. These include the quiz shows Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and The Weakest Link, both also from Britain . Other examples include Survivor, imported from Sweden; Big Brother , based on a Dutch series of the same name; and TLC's Trading Spaces, based on the British series, Changing Rooms. The stated main idea of this paragraph is

Question 2 Many people have owned, or have heard of, traditional “piggy banks,” coin banks shaped like pigs. A logical theory about how this tradition started might be that because pigs often symbolize greed, the object is to “fatten” one’s piggy bank with as much money as possible. However, while this idea makes sense, it is not the correct origin of the term. Te genesis of the piggy bank is the old English word “pygg,” which was a common kind of clay hundreds of years ago in England. People used pots and jars made out of this red “pygg” clay for many different purposes in their homes. Sometimes they kept their money in one of the pots, and this was known as a pygg bank. Over the years, because “pygg” and “pig” sounded the same, glaziers began making novelty banks out of pottery in the shape of a pig as a kind of joke. These banks were given as gifs and exported to countries where people spoke other languages and where no one had ever heard of pygg clay. The tradition caught on all over the world, and today piggy banks come in all colors and are made of all kinds of materials, including plastic. This passage is mainly about how

Question 3 At the time Paine wrote "Common Sense," most colonists considered themselves to be aggrieved Britons. Paine fundamentally changed the tenor of colonists' argument with the crown when he wrote the following: "Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither they have fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still." The main idea of the paragraph suggests that Paine

Question 4 What then is “Greek” about Greek art? And how much of it is “art”? For the Greeks, “art” was craft and artists were by and large thought of as artisans: good with their hand and not much else (though famous ones, like Pheidias, came to be respected for their political power and the money that it made them.) Much of what we appreciate as “Greek (line 5) art” today, or have done so in the past, has been elaborated, embellished, and reinvented. In short, it has been translated by the crucial intervention of Rome and the Middle Ages, not to mention the systematic efforts of Western European elites in early modernity. Which of the following best describes the main idea of the passage?

Question 5 People have different ways of learning. Some are better at making mental pictures of new ideas. Others are more comfortable with writing lists of things to memorize. Certain people can learn best when listening to music, while others need silence to concentrate. Which of the following is the main idea of the passage?

Question 6 In addition to attempting to provide basic food supplies, water, and sanitation, governments are expected to ensure that biomedical technologies are readily available, including immunization and indispensable medication including antibiotics and painkillers. Increasingly, however, as the media reminds us every day, money is spent on weapons as a result (line 5) of local conflicts, leaving ever fewer resources for medical care, Furthermore, regulations implemented in the name of security as a response to threats of terrorism, real and imagined, have brought about restrictions by local governments on the movement of peoples as they attempt to flee from violence and abject poverty, resulting in a phenomenal rise in refugee and squatter populations. Epidemics of infectious disease thrive in conditions of (line 10) poverty and instability, and today have the potential to wreak widespread havoc in a matter of hours, striking even the world’s wealthiest — as demonstrated by the case of Atlanta lawyer Andrew Speaker in 2007, who was infected with a lethal strain of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), leading to a frantic search for other exposed passengers on transatlantic flights. Which of the following best sums up the main idea of the passage?

Question 7 When cartoonist Charles M. Schulz was a boy in elementary school, other boys teased him for being small and not very good at sports, and his art teacher told him he had no talent for drawing. He had few friends and was too shy to talk to a red-haired girl he admired. Later in life, Schulz used his childhood experiences in his comic strip Peanuts: the strip’s main character, the sad and lonely Charlie Brown, represents Shulz as a little boy. Peanuts was unique at the time because it contained no adult characters. Readers fell in love with Charlie Brown, and Peanuts eventually became one of the most popular comic strips of all time. What is the main idea of the passage?

Question 8 Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, (1919) Considering that the little party had been seated round the tea-table for less than twenty minutes, the animation observable on their faces, and the amount of sound they were producing collectively, were very creditable to the hostess. It suddenly came into Katharine's mind that if someone opened the door at this moment he would think that they were enjoying themselves; he would think, "What an extremely nice house to come into!" and instinctively she laughed, and said something to increase the noise, for the credit of the house presumably, since she herself had not been feeling exhilarated. At the very same moment, rather to her amusement, the door was flung open, and a young man entered the room. Katharine, as she shook hands with him, asked him, in her own mind, "Now, do you think we're enjoying ourselves enormously?" … "Mr. Denham, mother," she said aloud, for she saw that her mother had forgotten his name. Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the selection?

Question 9 Jack London, Call of the Wild, (1903) Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller's place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by graveled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon. Which of the following is the main idea sentence of the paragraph?

Question 10 Green Bank, West Virginia, is a tech-savvy teenager’s nightmare. In this tiny town in Pocahontas County— population 143—wireless signals are illegal. No cell phones. No WiFi. No radio. No Bluetooth. No electronic transmitters at all. You’re not even allowed to cozy up to an electric blanket. The remote town is smack in the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile stretch of land designated by the Federal Communications Commission to protect two government radio telescopes from human-made interference. The rules are most strict in Green Bank. So strict that a police officer roves the streets listening for forbidden wireless signals. It’s necessary, though. The town is home to the Green Bank Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world—and arguably our most powerful link to the cosmos. Scientists there listen to radio energy that has journeyed light years, unlocking secrets about how the stars and galaxies formed. A rogue radio signal could prevent potential discoveries, discoveries that could answer big questions about how the universe ticks. The main idea of the passage is