Ý chính, tiêu đề (main idea)

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 17 to 26.

It is important to stress that environmental services have costs, even when they are produced without any human input. All costs ought to be measured as opportunity costs. The opportunity cost for environmental services is the net benefit forgone because the resources providing the service can no longer be used in the next most beneficial way. Resources are not free if they can be put to alternative uses.

Consider a stretch of river that can be used either for white-water canoeing or for electric power generation. Because the dam that generates the power would flood the rapids, the two uses are incompatible. The opportunity cost of saving the river for white-water canoeing is the net benefit taken out – after accounting for the cost of generation and distribution – for electricity. Conversely, the opportunity cost of building the dam is everything the unspoiled river would have produced: the recreation, the wildlife, the scenery, and whatever value future generations might place upon experiencing the rapids themselves.

This insight has far-reaching implications for development policy. [I] Many decisions that appear at first to be costless choices in favour of growth turn out, on closer inspection, to be choices against something else. [II] Cutting down a forest for cropland is not free; it is paid for in carbon storage, biodiversity, and the regulating services the forest performed silently. [III] Diverting a river to irrigate fields is not free; the price is whatever the river was doing before the diversion. [IV] Even leaving land untouched is not free, for the income that intensive use might have generated is traded off as well.

Economic development, in this view, is never simply a question of whether a project yields a positive return. It is a question of whether the return exceeds the value of what must be relinquished. Policies that recognise this – by attaching prices to scarce environmental services, or by requiring decision-makers to weigh both sides of the account – do not stand against development. They insist that the development chosen be worth what it truly costs. The danger lies not in counting too much, but in counting too little.

(Adapted from Environmental Economics and Policy)

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 33 to 40.

For decades, students have been convinced that academic success is largely dependent upon meticulous notetaking. What has changed in recent years is not the importance of the practice but the tools used to perform it. The keyboard has subtly supplanted the pen, and with it, the nature of how information is recorded during a lecture has shifted unbeknownst to students.

Researchers in cognitive psychology have begun to examine what this change has cost learners. In a series of comparative studies, students taking notes by hand consistently outperformed those using laptops on questions that demanded conceptual understanding, even when both groups had access to the same material. The reason, according to the researchers, lies less in the technology itself than in what each method asks of the brain. Typing rewards speed; handwriting forces selection.

The act of writing by hand is slower, and that slowness appears to be its hidden virtue. Unable to capture every word, students are obliged to listen, decide what matters and condense ideas into their own phrasing. This continuous filtering, referred to as encoding by psychologists, turns out to be instrumental in aiding long-term recall. One lecturer summarised the striking contrast after reviewing her students’ work: the laptops, she said, had produced transcripts, while the notebooks had produced understanding.

It would be misleading, of course, to claim that handwriting is inherently superior or that all keyboards undermine learning. Hard-working typists can summarise, while indolent writers can drift. What the research highlights is not a conclusion on devices but a question about effort: which tool, in a given context, asks more of the learner. As a ban on students’ use of laptops in classrooms remains a bone of contention among tertiary institutions, the deeper challenge may be helping students recognise that what feels easier in the moment is not always what serves them best afterwards.

(Adapted from https://www.brookings.edu)