KỲ THI TỐT NGHIỆP TRUNG HỌC PHỔ THÔNG NĂM 2026

Money has many ironies, and here is an important one: wealth is what you do not see. On spotting a Ferrari driving around, (6)____. In reality, however, many drivers of expensive cars turn out to be only mediocre successes who spend a huge percentage of their paycheck on a vehicle. Someone driving a hundred-thousand-dollar car might indeed be wealthy. Yet the only firm data point you have about their wealth is that they have a hundred thousand dollars less than they did before they bought the car or a hundred thousand dollars more in debt. (7)____.

We tend to judge wealth by what we see (8)____. We cannot peer into people's bank accounts or brokerage statements, so we rely on outward appearances to gauge financial success: cars, houses, photographs on social media. Modern capitalism has turned helping people fake it until they make it into a cherished industry. (9)____. Wealth hides in the nice car not purchased, the diamonds left in the shop and the first-class upgrade declined. Wealth is the financial assets that have not yet been converted into the stuff you see.

Hence, we should be careful (10)____. It is more than mere semantics; not knowing the difference is the source of countless poor money decisions.

(Adapted from Psychology of Money)

Environmental services, even when they arise without any human labour, are by no means cost-free. Every cost should be understood in terms of opportunity cost. For environmental services, the opportunity cost amounts to the net gain relinquished because the resources are no longer available for their second-best application. Whenever a resource has alternative uses, it cannot legitimately be deemed free.

For instance, a section of river might serve as a site used for either white-water canoeing or hydroelectric generation. Constructing a dam to produce electricity would flood the rapids, so this makes white-water canoeing here out of the question. The opportunity cost of preserving the river for canoeing equals the net benefit of the electricity that would otherwise have been produced, once the expenses of generation and distribution have been subtracted. By the same token, the opportunity cost of erecting the dam involves everything the river in its natural state would have provided – leisure activities, wildlife, scenic beauty, and whatever worth future generations might attach to experiencing the rapids.

This understanding carries considerable weight for planning development. [I] Numerous decisions initially appearing to be cost-free moves in favour of growth prove, when examined carefully, to be against something else. [II] Clearing a forest to make way for crops is hardly without cost; it is paid for through losses in carbon storage, biological diversity, and all the functions the forest once performed unnoticed. [III] Channelling a river for irrigation has its price – namely, whatever the river was doing before its course was altered. [IV] Even leaving a swathe of land alone exacts a cost, since the earnings that intensive exploitation might have produced are equally sacrificed.

From this perspective, economic development can never be reduced to whether a project delivers a positive return. Rather, what must be asked is whether that return outweighs the value of sacrifices. Policies considering this – by pricing scarce environmental services, or obliging those in charge to consider both sides – are not against development. What they demand is that development should be worth its true cost. The danger lies not in counting too much, but in counting too little.

(Adapted from Environmental Economics and Policy)

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.

(Adapted from https://vanderbilthustler.com)