Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 44 to 50.
The Internet is by far and away the most important invention of our lifetime, and it’s made great changes to our lives. It’s changed the way we shop and think about money. Undeniably, the future of money has never been so uncertain. Twenty years from now, will we still be using notes and coins, or will we be using something completely different? Many experts predict that soon everyone all over the world will be using a single currency, the Bitcoin – digital money.
Up to now, digital money has mostly been the stuff of science fiction films. Recently, however, a number of stories about Bitcoin have made their way into our newspapers, and governments around the world have started to think about the consequences of such a monetary system. Bitcoin first made an appearance in 2009, when computer whizz-kids invented ‘mining’, a way of earning them by solving very complicated mathematical problems.
One such person was James Howells, an IT expert from Newport in Wales. Like many of the Bitcoin pioneers, he probably didn’t think too much about his earnings. That was until, one day in 2013, he discovered that the value of his Bitcoins had gone up, and they were now worth about £4 million!
So where had Howells stored his treasure? After looking for a long time – on the hard disk of his computer, on every single USB stick he could find in his home – the terrible truth slowly dawned on him. He’d stored the Bitcoins on an old hard disk, and he’d thrown it away while clearing out old computer stuff the previous summer. Howells rushed to the recycling centre he’d taken it to. He was told he’d have to search through waste more than a metre deep in an area the size of a football field.
