Đề chính thức Đề thi tốt nghiệp THPT môn Tiếng Anh năm 2026 - Mã đề 1128

Among the many paradoxes surrounding money, one deserves particular attention: the wealth that truly counts is precisely the wealth you cannot observe. When a sleek Lamborghini glides past, it is normal (7) __________. Closer inspection often tells a different story. A large number of those who drive luxury vehicles are, in fact, only modest earners (8) __________ to the privilege of being seen in such a car. It is uncertain to say whether someone driving a car worth one hundred thousand pounds is affluent. Yet the certain thing is that they have one hundred thousand pounds less than they did before they got the car, or one hundred thousand pounds more in debt. (9) __________.

We tend to judge wealth by what we see as visible details are the only evidence we have access to. Nobody walks around displaying a printout of their savings, (10) __________ - handbags, holiday villas, posts on social networks - to decide who is prospering. Contemporary marketing has fed this habit, packaging the illusion of success as a saleable product. (11) __________. It hides in the upgrade declined, the jewellery left in the display case, the watch never bought, the wardrobe never expanded and the business-class seat politely waved away.

In short, wealth is whatever money has not yet been swapped for tangible goods. That is why distinguishing wealthy from rich deserves careful thought; mistaking one for the other has quietly ruined many a budget.

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.

For most undergraduates today, opening a laptop at the start of a lecture has become as automatic as sitting down. The device is no longer a tool consciously chosen; it is simply there, blinking softly, ready to absorb every word that the instructor utters. Yet researchers who study students' attention argue that this convenience comes at a price most learners are unaware that they are paying.

A recent multi-campus study tracked the in-class behaviour of nearly two thousand undergraduates across humanities and science courses. Even when students claimed to be "fully focused," eye-tracking data showed that they shifted between unrelated tabs an average of fourteen times per fifty-minute session. The students themselves were astounded when they were shown the results. Many had believed that they were absorbing every point made in class.

The findings underline an unsettling truth: digital multitasking is not just inefficient; it is invisible to those engaged in it. Cognitive scientists describe this as "the illusion of competence" - the false sense that because information has passed beneath one's eyes, it has been understood and stored. Tests administered a week after the lectures consistently revealed otherwise, with laptop-using students recalling roughly a third less than those taking handwritten notes.

Things go from bad to worse when we take into account the fact that the very tools that distract students are also genuinely essential for some forms of academic work. Annotating digital texts, accessing research databases and recording lectures all benefit from screen-based learning. The crucial question for tertiary institutions, then, is not to get rid of devices altogether but to teach students when and how to set them aside. Until that skill is cultivated, the lecture hall may continue to function less as a place of collective inquiry and more as a quiet place of solitary screens.