[004] - Đề thi thử tiếng Anh THPT Quốc gia 2024 - Cô Vũ Mai Phương (Đề số 04)

Television is still one of our most popular forms of entertainment. It brings people closer. ___(34)___ families still watch shows or enjoy live sports programmes together. Television gives people something to talk about at school and at work and it often gets us talking about important issues. ___(35)___, television - like everything else in the world today – is changing.
The most important ___(36)___ on television recently has been technology. Computers and the Internet have completely changed the way we get information and entertainment. Watching films and videos online is becoming more and more popular. Computers and smartphones, ___(37)___ are much cheaper than ever before, help people choose their favourite programmes quickly and more effectively. Today, as life is getting faster, our mobile screens are the best way to watch programmes anywhere we like. Therefore, television stations have to change the way they make shows in order to give ___(38)___ what they want.

Today we hear more and more about the importance of getting enough sleep. Sleep can give energy to both our bodies and our brains. It can also affect our feelings, behaviour, and memory.
Studies have shown that people in some countries spend less time sleeping and more time working. But our bodies cannot work well without enough sleep. Losing just one or two hours of sleep a night, over a long period of time, can badly affect our health. We cannot work for many hours; we can get angry easily; and we can even lose our IQ points. That explains why, without enough sleep, an intelligent person may have difficulty doing daily tasks.
Studies have also shown that the time of year seems to affect how much sleep we need. People usually sleep longer in the winter, sometimes as much as 14 hours a night. However, in the summer, they sometimes sleep as little as six hours, without having any problems.

As the Internet has become more and more popular, we may be reading a great deal more than we used to. However, the way we are reading materials on the Internet, or online reading, is very different from the way we traditionally read printed materials.
In the traditional way of reading, we would start at the beginning of a book and read through to the end. In online reading, in contrast, we start reading a page, but may never finish it because a link on that page leads us to a passage on a different page, and so on. As we go from one page to another, we have to remember lots of different ideas at the same time. This new way of reading is quite different from the traditional one.
There are both advantages and disadvantages of online reading. In online reading, the brain gets better than ever at doing many tasks at the same time, or multitasking; and thanks to this, we can work quickly and think creatively. Multitasking is useful in certain working environments, but it also makes it more difficult for us to read at a deep level. We are, therefore, much less likely to analyse what we read in a critical way, or gain any real insight into the contents we are reading. This might lead to a future when a whole new generation lacks the ability to think critically and deeply about what they are reading.
The world is changing and our brains are probably changing to meet new demands in the modern world, just as they have always done throughout history. However, it is important for us to consider how to maintain our critical, deeper reading skills, while still dealing with online reading materials.