Đề thi HK1 Tiếng Anh 12 - Đề số 5

When Kalpana Chawla was little, she often asked her father to take her on plane rides at the local flying club in Karnal, India. This showed her great passion for flying from a very young age, and it led her to pursue a career in engineering. After earning a degree in aeronautical engineering from a college in India, Kalpana moved to the United States and became a U.S. citizen in the 1980s.

In 1988, Kalpana began working for NASA. Six years later, she was selected to train as an astronaut. After a year of rigorous training, she became the first Indian-born woman in space by being assigned to her first space mission on the space shuttle Columbia.

Kalpana’s first mission began on November 19 and ended on December 5, 1997. During this mission, Kalpana and her fellow astronauts orbited the Earth 252 times, and they travelled 6.5 million miles in only more than two weeks. Kalpana made a huge contribution to space science during this mission. Reflecting on her experience, she said, “When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.”

In 2000, Kalpana was chosen for her second space mission, once again on the space shuttle Columbia. However, technical problems delayed the mission until 2003. Between her two missions, she spent a total of 30 days, 14 hours, and 54 minutes in space. Tragically, the Columbia disintegrated upon reentry to Earth on February 1, 2003, and Kalpana and her fellow astronauts did not survive.

After her death, Kalpana was honored in various ways. She had some buildings, a street and an asteroid named in her memory. Noteworthily, she was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, gaining the recognition she truly deserved for her contributions to space exploration.

(Adapted from Asian-American Astronauts | ReadWorks)

If you want to firm up your body, head to the gym. If you want to exercise your brain, listen to music. There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does. If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.

Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. Still, experts are trying to understand how our brains can hear and play music. A stereo system puts out vibrations that travel through the air and somehow get inside the ear canal. These vibrations tickle the eardrum and are transmitted into an electrical signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where it is reassembled into something we perceive as music.

Experiments have been conducted to observe this strange yet fascinating phenomenon. Johns Hopkins researchers have had several jazz performers and rappers produce music while lying down inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine to watch and see which areas of their brains light up. Kiminobu Sugaya and world-renowned violinist Ayako Yonetani have been teaching one of the most popular courses in The Burnett Honors College - “Music and the Brain”. The two explain how people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s also respond positively to music.

“Usually in the late stages, Alzheimer’s patients are unresponsive,” Sugaya says. “But once you put in the headphones that play their favourite music, their eyes light up. They start moving and sometimes singing. The effect lasts maybe 10 minutes or so even after you turn off the music.”

Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it, and thus, benefit from it.

(Adapted from: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/keep-your-brain-young-with-music )