Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 29 to 33. For years 'bogus' was a word the British read in newspaper headlines but tended not to say. Its popularity among the teenagers of America changed that, although they didn't use it with its original meaning. It came from the Wild West. Its first appearance in print, in 1827, was in the Telegraph of Painesville, Ohio, where it meant a machine ...

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 29 to 33.

For years 'bogus' was a word the British read in newspaper headlines but tended not to say. Its popularity among the teenagers of America changed that, although they didn't use it with its original meaning. It came from the Wild West. Its first appearance in print, in 1827, was in the Telegraph of Painesville, Ohio, where it meant a machine for making forgeries of coins. Soon, those 'bonuses' were turning out 'bogus money' and the word had undergone a change from noun to adjective.

By the end of the 19^th century, it was well-established in Britain, applied to anything false, spurious or intentionally misleading. But the computer scientists of 1960 s America, to whom we owe so much linguistic innovation, redefined it to mean 'non-functional', 'useless', or 'unbelievable', especially in relation to calculations and engineering ideas. This was followed by its emergence among Princeton and Yale graduates in the East Coast computer community. But it was the adoption of the word by American teenagers generally, who used it to mean simply 'bad', that led to it being widely used by their counterparts in Britain.

Interestingly, 'bogus' is one of only about 1,300 English words for which no sensible origin has emerged. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests a connection with a New England word, 'tantrobogus', meaning the devil. A rival US account sees it as a corruption of the name of a forger, called Borghese or Borges.