Questions 1-11 are based on the following passage and supplementary material.

The singularity is described as the point at which advances in artificial intelligence (AI) [1] leads to the creation of a machine smarter than humans. While most people believe the singularity could arrive within 5-10 years, there’s quite a bit of associated unease. When asked how the thought of machine superintelligence made them feel, [2] 62 percent of the general population expressed negative emotions. Most tech executives had positive emotions about superintelligence.

 Several notable futurists predict this will occur between 2030 and 2045. Not everyone agrees with this timeline. Estimates are based upon many factors, not the least of which is the continued increase in computing performance, eventually reaching as many connections as the human brain but [3] operating much faster. Nick Bostrom and Vincent Muller conducted a survey with AI experts and found the median estimate is a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed between 2040-2050, with a nine in ten chance by 2075. These experts believe that superintelligence will then be developed within the following 30 years, pushing the date to somewhere between 2070 and 2110. With the singularity [4] understood, an AI-enabled machine [5] will have achieved cognitive abilities beyond that of the most gifted human minds.

[6] Not surprisingly, scientists believe that this progress will be a positive one. Computer scientist Stuart Russell has said that success at creating human-level AI would be the biggest event in human history. Elon Musk has famously discussed how this superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity. Musk is not alone in this concern. [7] Bostrom considers the singularity potentially catastrophic for humanity. Nevertheless, [8] its quite possible that such superintelligence could be the key to addressing the complex assortment of human problems such as climate change.

On a more optimistic note, futurist Ray Kurzweil acknowledges there will be a few bumps along the way, but that ultimately, superintelligence would allow for a [9] alliance between man and machine.

No one knows with any reasonable certainty when superintelligence will arrive. Professor Murray Shanahan at London’s Imperial College believes the media often gives the impression that human-level AI of the sort we see in sci-fi movies is just around the corner. But it’s almost certainly decades away. As a result, survey respondents believe the singularity will be achieved [10] much sooner than are the experts, with 61 percent of the general population and 73 percent of tech executives saying this moment will arrive within 10 years. Views on whether this will be a positive development are quite split. [11] About half of tech executives hold a positive view while just over a third of the general population expressed positive views.

Questions 12-22 are based on the following passage.

(1) Marketing executives in television work with a relatively stable advertising medium. (2) [12] Most television ads: Still feature actors, still run 30 or 60 seconds, and still show a product. (3) However, the differing dynamics of the Internet pose unique challenges to advertisers, forcing them to adapt their practices and techniques on a regular basis. (4) In many ways, the television ads aired today are similar to those aired two decades ago. [13]

In the early days of Internet marketing, online advertisers employed banner and pop-up ads to attract customers. These techniques reached large audiences, generated many sales leads, and would come at a low cost. However, a small number of Internet users began to consider these advertising techniques [14] unobtrusive and irksome. Yet because marketing strategies relying heavily on banners and pop-ups produced results, companies invested growing amounts of money into purchasing these ad types in hopes [15] to capturing market share in the burgeoning online economy. As consumers became more sophisticated, frustration with these online advertising techniques grew. Independent programmers began to develop tools that blocked banner and popup ads.  The popularity of these tools exploded when [16] a search engine at the time an increasingly popular website fighting to solidify its place on the Internet with other web service giants, offered free software enabling users to block pop-up ads. The backlash against banner ads grew as new web browsers provided users the ability to block image-based ads such as banner ads. [17]

A major development in online marketing came with the introduction of pay-per-click ads. [18] Banner or pop-up ads required companies to pay every time a website visitor saw an ad. Pay-per-click ads allowed companies to pay only when an interested customer clicked on an ad. More importantly, however, these ads [19] dodged the pop-up and banner blockers. As a result of these advantages and the incredible growth in the use of search engines, which provide excellent venues for pay-per-click advertising, companies began turning to pay-per-click marketing in droves. However, as with the banner and pop-up ads that preceded them, pay-per-click ads came with their drawbacks. When companies began pouring billions of dollars into this emerging medium, online advertising specialists [20] have started to notice the presence of what would later be called click fraud: representatives of a company with no interest in the product advertised by a competitor click on the competitor's ads simply to increase the marketing cost of the competitor.  [21] Click fraud grew so rapidly that marketers sought to diversify their online positions away from pay-per-click marketing through new mediums.

Although pay-per-click advertising remains a common and effective advertising tool, marketers adapted yet again to the changing dynamics of the Internet by adopting new techniques such as pay-per-performance advertising, search engine optimization, and affiliate marketing. [22]

Questions 23-33 are based on the following passage.

Before the 1950s, music defined its own circles, but, at best, only shaded the frame of popular American culture. The birth of Rock and Roll forever changed that as larger and larger numbers of youth came, not only to identify with the music they were listening to, but to identify [23] themselves by that music.

We use pop songs to create for ourselves a particular sort of self-definition, a particular place in society. The pleasure that a pop song produces is a pleasure of identification; in responding to a song, we are drawn into [24] affective alliances with the performers and with the performers' other fans.  [25] Thus, music like sports is clearly a setting in which people directly experience community, feel an immediate bond with other people, and articulate a collective pride.

At the same time, because of its qualities of abstractness, pop music is an individualizing form. Songs have a looseness of reference that makes them immediately accessible. [26] Their open to appropriation for personal use in a way that other popular cultural forms (television soap operas, for example) are not—the latter are tied into meanings which we may reject.

This interplay between personal absorption into music and the sense [27] that it is, nevertheless, something public, is what makes music so important in the cultural placing of the individual: music also gives us a way of managing the relationship [28] among our public and private emotional lives. Popular love songs are important because they give shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without embarrassment or incoherence. {29}Our culture has a supply of pop songs that say these things for us in interesting and innovative ways. Clearly one of the effects of all music, not just pop, is to focus our attention on the feeling of time, and intensify our experience of the present. One measure of good music is its "presence," its ability to "stop" time, to make us feel we are living within a moment, with no memory or anxiety about what has come before us, or what will come after. We invest most in popular music when we are teenagers and young adults—music ties into a particular kind of emotional [30] tranquillity when issues of individual identity and social place, and the control of public and private feelings, are at a premium.  

What this suggests, though, is not that young people need music, but that "youth" itself is defined by music. Youth is experienced as an intense presence through an [31] impatiens for time to pass and a regret that it is doing so, in a series of speeding, physically insistent moments that have nostalgia coded into [32] it. [33]

Questions 34-44 are based on the following passage.

Governments of developing countries occasionally enter into economic development [34] agreements with foreign investors, which provide capital and technological expertise that may not be readily available in such countries. Besides the normal economic risk that accompanies such enterprises, investors face the additional risk that the host government may attempt unilaterally to change in its favor the terms of the agreement or even to terminate the agreement [35] altogether and appropriate the project for itself. In order to make economic development agreements more attractive to investors, some developing countries have attempted to strengthen the security of such agreements with clauses specifying that the agreements will be governed by “general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” a set of legal principles or rules shared by [36] the world major legal systems. However, advocates of governments’ freedom to amend or repeal such agreements argue that these agreements fall within a special class of contracts known as administrative contracts, a concept that originated in French law. They assert that under the theory of administrative contracts, a government [37] retained inherent power to [38] change or finish its own contract, and that this power indeed constitutes a general principle of law. However, their argument is flawed on at least two counts.

First, in French law, not all government contracts are treated as administrative contracts. Some contracts are designated as administrative by specific statute, in which case the contractor is made aware of the applicable legal rules upon [39] enter into agreement with the government. Alternatively, the contracting government agency can itself designate a contract as administrative by including certain terms not found in private civil contracts. Moreover, even in the case of administrative contracts, French law requires that in the event that the government [40] only modifies the terms of the contract, it must compensate the contractor for any increased burden resulting from the government’s action. [41] In effect, the government is thus prevented from modifying [42] those contractual terms, that define, the financial balance of the contract.

[43] Second, the French law of administrative contracts, although adopted by several countries, is not so universally accepted that it can be embraced as a general principle of law. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, government contracts are governed by the ordinary law of contracts, with the result that the government can reserve the power to modify or terminate a contract unilaterally only by writing such power into the contract as a specific provision. Indeed, the very fact that termination and modification clauses are commonly found in government contracts suggests that a government’s capacity to modify or terminate agreements unilaterally derives from specific contract provisions, not from inherent state power. [44] Contracts between governments and private investors can be secured only by reliance on general principles of law.