单选题 .  Section A  MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
    Passage One
    (1) Google has an ambitious vision for spectacles. On June 27th Sergey Brin, one of the company's co-founders, revealed the next stage of Project Glass, its effort to create wireless-connected glasses that allow their wearers to do a host of things, including receiving and responding to messages, and taking and sharing photos and videos. The goal is to get prototypes in the hands of software developers early next year and then to sell a more polished set of specs to consumers in late 2013 or early the following year.
    (2) A product of Google's secretive X Lab, whose mission is to push the boundaries of computing, the glasses were on show at the company's developer conference in San Francisco along with several other gadgets, including a cheap tablet computer and a new wireless media player for the home. These gadgets attracted plenty of attention, but the longest queues at the event were at booths where folk were trying on Google's spectacles.
    (3) That is hardly surprising because the glasses seem like something out of a science-fiction novel. A tiny transparent display towards the top of one lens allows wearers to see text and images by glancing upwards. And the spectacles can be controlled using either voice commands or a somewhat bulky touchpad integrated into one of the arms. Mr. Brin says the goal is to "get technology out of the way" so people can, say, take videos without having to pull out a camera or smartphone each time they do so.
    (4) Google's glasses reflect a growing interest in wearable computing, which many experts think could be the next big thing in personal technology after smartphones and tablets. But some tech veterans give warning that designing novel devices people feel comfortable wearing is an especially tricky task. "In general, the first attempt at producing new computing paradigms rarely sticks," notes Sumeet Jain of CMEA Capital, a venture-capital firm.
    (5) If Google's glasses are to prove an exception to that rule, the firm will have to meet several challenges. One is to refine their design so that wearers don't look like nerds from a laboratory. Another is to relieve inevitable concerns around privacy that the glasses will raise. The firm will also need to reassure people their eyeballs won't be blitzed with advertising, which is Google's preferred way to mint money. Mr. Brin stresses the aim is to make a profit on the glasses themselves, whose mass-market price will be well below the $1,500 developers are paying for a pair. That should make them worth a close look.
   
    Passage Two
    (1) Because I married a photographer, once we had children, our holiday cards of course became vehicles for their cuteness and his creativity. In 2000, baby number one's chubby smiling face in a Santa hat was the cover image. In 2004, our now-four faces were ornaments on a tree. By 2006, we wore stocking caps and lay down in bed together with a thought bubble over our sleeping heads filled with cherries. Our best card was our last, in 2010. We dressed in extravagant holiday finery, gowns, jackets and bow-ties. We titled it: "Don We Now Our Gay Apparel."
    (2) That was two years ago. We mailed it out in envelopes, signed, sealed and delivered by the U. S. Postal Service and its analogues in distant lands. Good cheer and laughs in mailboxes all around! It's been downhill ever since. By last year, we'd let our mailing list go to seed. We communicated with most of our friends online and no longer had street addresses for them.
    (3) I didn't know it then but my world, my social world, was changing. Today, my 1,500 Facebook friends—l, 300 of whom I have never actually met—have already seen the best of the year's haul of pictures of my kids. They also know where I've gone on vacation and sometimes, what I cooked for dinner or what I thought of a movie on a Saturday night in May. There's little point to writing a Christmas update now, with boasts about grades and athletic skill, hospitalizations and holidays, and the dog's accidents, when we have already posted these events and so much more of our trifles all year long. The urge to share has already been well satisfied.
    (4) Likewise, as receivers, we already have real-time windows into the lives of people thousands of miles away. We already know exactly how they've fared in the past year, much more than could possibly be conveyed by any single Christmas card. If a child or grandchild has been born to a former colleague or high school friend living across the continent, not only did I see it within hours on Shutterfly or Instagram or Facebook, I might have seen him or her take his or her first steps on YouTube.
    (5) Still, the demise of the Christmas photo card saddens me. It predicts the end of the U.S. Postal Service. It signals the day is near when writing on paper is non-existent. Finally, it is part of a decline of a certain quality of communication, one that involved delay and anticipation, forethought and reflection. Opening these cards, the satisfaction wasn't just in the Peace on Earth greeting, but in the recognition that a distant friend or relative you hadn't heard from in a year was still thinking about you, and maybe sharing news about major events of the past 12 months.
    (6) We know each other so well now, perhaps too well. And yet, all the time logged into our computers has also taken us away from our nearest and dearest. Who can say they spent as much time looking into the eyes of family, friends and neighbors as into the colorful phone or laptop screen last year? This season, instead of sending cards, my winter holiday greeting at the end of 2012 will be this: after posting the obligatory seasonal wishes online on Christmas Eve, I will be clicking off the electronic messaging services, and trying to connect in person with my friends, neighbors and family members for a change.
   
    Passage Three
    (1) In The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar, a business professor at Columbia University and a leading expert on decision making, tells us that making sound choices is even more difficult than we think. To learn how to make better decisions, we first need to become aware of the pitfalls (陷阱) we typically encounter.
    (2) Iyengar reveals, for example, that having many options to choose from does not lead to better outcomes, despite popular assumptions to the contrary. For instance, she found that consumers were far more likely to buy jam when given fewer flavor choices, not more. "We frequently pay a mental and emotional tax for freedom of choice," she writes. To become better choosers, Iyengar proposes that when confronted with an abundance of options, people should focus first on the easiest elements of the decision and work up to the more complex parts.
    (3) She illustrates this point using one study in which Audi buyers had to choose among 144 total car features. One group started with the features that required fewer options, such as whether they wanted leather or upholstered interiors, and worked up to features with many options, such as choosing among 56 colors for the car's interior and exterior. The other group started with the hardest choices and moved toward the easier ones. In the end, those in the group that went from the hardest to easiest spent an average of 1,500 euros more on their cars than the other group and reported they were less happy with their decisions.
    (4) Iyengar also explains that we often make decisions not based on our tastes but on how we think our decisions will be perceived. In 2000 a team of psychologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University showed that people receiving a free sample of beer chose against their tastes to avoid looking like copycats to their peers. Individuals who picked their beers in private, however, chose what they enjoyed and said they were happy with their decisions. Iyengar points out that the people who chose against their tastes were often unconscious of what motivated their decisions. Thus, she proposes that one way to avoid strong and sometimes silent influences is to try to become more aware of them in the first place.
    (5) Ultimately, Iyengar wants us to recognize that our decisions—both the mundane (普通的) and momentous—are influenced by many factors and that the more we recognize those factors, the more satisfied we will be.
   
    Passage Four
    (1) Executive coaching is primarily concerned with confidential one-to-one discussions between the coach and the executive. It is aimed at performance improvement. Primary needs are diagnosed and agreed upon, a "developmental-action plan" is drawn up, the skill base of the executive is broadened by coaching, and then the new skill sets are tested in the workplace under the guidance of the coach. Sometimes, these needs involve team coaching, but individual coaching is the normal starting point. The coach needs to guide the executive outside his or her comfort zone in order to improve performance.
    (2) A coaching assignment normally focuses on two or three developmental needs of the individual, and lasts for 6 to 12 months. However, it sometimes involves multiple assignments aimed at bringing about cultural change in an organization. For example, a new chief executive may want to change the culture of his organization. He could then hire a coach, and brief him or her to change the mindset of his direct subordinates on a one-to-one basis.
    (3) Compared with traditional management training, which is typically related to broadbased organizational change, sometimes of a technical nature, executive coaching is targeted to individual and small-group change. The primary focus of coaching is often behavioural and leadership change, and is rarely of a technical nature. The difference between coaching and training is that coaching is one-to-one, highly confidential and over 6-12 months, whereas training is typically of a short-term, group-work-shop nature.
    (4) Referring to the key ingredients for enhanced performance and team success, business coaching has a lot to learn from sports.
    (5) According to sports coaches, a coach is a catalyst for change, and is not paid to preserve the status quo, but to lift people out of their comfort zone, so that they grow and develop. The coach must stay in touch with the state of the art and extract from it what is relevant.
    (6) All sports coaches believe passionately in the power of the team to lift performance not by just a little, but by 100%. Considerable energy is devoted to defining goals, roles, a code of conduct and to fostering group dynamics in order to optimize team productivity.
    (7) Both success and failure are learning opportunities, and there is a severity in their cold-eyed, weekly analysis, which business has yet to develop. Top athletes scrutinize both success and failure with their coach to extract lessons from them, but they are never distracted from longer-term goals.
    (8) To be a champion athlete means developing an elitist attitude—not involving arrogance, but rather an unceasing desire to learn and improve. They never accept second best, but always strive for what has not yet been achieved.
    (9) There must be a sport/life balance, so that athletes are not obsessed by their goals, and thus lack a sense of perspective to cope with inevitable failure or occasional success, or the ability to re-charge their batteries outside the sporting arena.
    1.  The most popular product(s) at Google's developer conference in San Francisco was/were ______.(Passage One)