单选题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen 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)"The world isn't flat," writes Edward Glaeser, "it's paved." At any rate, most of the places where people prefer to dwell are paved. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, and every month 5 million people move from the countryside to a city somewhere in the developing world.
    (2)For Mr Glaeser, a Harvard economist who grew up in Manhattan, this is a happy prospect. He calls cities "our species' greatest invention": proximity makes people more inventive, as bright minds feed off one another, more productive, as scale gives rise to finer degrees of specialisation; and kinder to the planet, as city-dwellers are more likely to go by foot, bus or train than the car-slaves of suburbia and the sticks. He builds a strong case, too, for town-dwelling, drawing on his own research as well as that of other observers of urban life. And although liberally sprinkled with statistics, Triumph of the City is no dry work. Mr Glaeser writes lucidly and spares his readers the equations of his trade.
    (3)What makes some cities succeed? Successful places have in common the ability to attract people and to enable them to collaborate. Yet Mr Glaeser also says they are not like Tolstoy's happy families: those that thrive, thrive in their own ways. Thus Tokyo is a national seat of political and financial power. Singapore embodies a peculiar mix of the free market, state-led industrialisation and paternalism. The well-educated citizenries of Boston, Milan, Minneapolis and New York have found new sources of prosperity when old ones ran out.
    (4)Mr Glaeser is likely to raise hackles in three areas. The first is urban poverty in the developing world. He can see the misery of a slum in Kolkata, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro as easily as anyone else, but believes that "there's a lot to like about urban poverty" because it beats the rural kind. Cities attract the poor with the promise of a better lot than the countryside offers. About three-quarters of Lagos's people have access to safe drinking water; the Nigerian average is less than 30%. Rural West Bengal's poverty rate is twice Kolkata's.
    (5)The second is the height of buildings. Mr Glaeser likes them tall—and it's not just the Manhattanite in him speaking. He likes low-rise neighbourhoods, too, but points out that restrictions on height are also restrictions on the supply of space, which push up the prices of housing and offices. That suits those who own property already, but hurts those who might otherwise move in, and hence perhaps the city as a whole.
    (6)So Mr Glaeser wonders whether central Paris might have benefited from a few skyscrapers. He certainly believes that his hometown should preserve fewer old buildings. And he thinks that cities in developing countries should build up rather than out. New downtown developments in Mumbai, he says, should rise to at least 40 storeys.
    (7)The third, related, area is sprawl, which is promoted, especially in America, by flawed policies nationally and locally. Living out of town may feel green, but it isn't. Americans live too far apart, drive too much and walk too little. The tax-deductibility of mortgage interest encourages people to buy houses rather than rent flats, buy bigger properties rather than smaller ones and therefore to spread out. Minimum plot sizes keep folk out of, say, Marin County, California. He says that spreading Houston has "done a better job of providing affordable housing than all of the progressive reformers on America's East and West coasts."
    (8)Cities need wise government above all else, and they get it too rarely. That is one reason why, from Paris in 1789 to Cairo in 2011, they are sources of political upheaval as well as economic advance. The reader may wonder if Mumbai really would be better off as a city of high-rise slums rather than low-rise ones.
    PASSAGE TWO:
    (1)Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years, and you're 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you're at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men's mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness.
    (2)Langer's findings were stunning: After just one week, the men in the experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) had more joint flexibility, increased dexterity and less arthritis in their hands. Their mental sensitivity had risen measurably, and they had improved posture. Outsiders who were shown the men's photographs judged them to be significantly younger than the controls. In other words, the aging process had in some measure been reversed..
    (3)Though this sounds a bit woo-wooey, Langer and her Harvard colleagues have been running similarly inventive experiments for decades, and the accumulated weight of the evidence is convincing. Her theory, argued in her new book, Counterclockwise, is that we are all victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health. We mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our serf-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative clichés that dominate our thinking about health, we can "mindfully" open ourselves to possibilities for more productive lives even into old age.
    (4)Consider another of Langer's mindfulness studies, this one using an ordinary optometrist's eye chart. That's the chart with the huge E on top, and descending lines of smaller and smaller letters that eventually become unreadable. Langer and her colleagues wondered: what if we reversed it? The regular chart creates the expectation that at some point you will be unable to read. Would turning the chart upside down reverse that expectation, so that people would expect the letters to become readable? That's exactly what they found. The subjects still couldn't read the tiniest letters, but when they were expecting the letters to get more legible, they were able to read smaller letters than they could have normally. Their expectation—their mindset—improved their actual vision.
    (5)That means that some people may be able to change prescriptions if they change the way they think about seeing. But other health consequences might be more important than that. Here's another study, this one using clothing as a trigger for aging stereotypes. Most people try to dress appropriately for their age, so clothing in effect becomes a cue for ingrained attitudes about age. But what if this cue disappeared? Langer decided to study people who routinely wear uniforms as part of their work life, and compare them with people who dress in street clothes. She found that people who wear uniforms missed fewer days owing to illness or injury, had fewer doctors' visits and hospitalizations, and had fewer chronic diseases—even though they all had the same socioeconomic status. That's because they were not constantly reminded of their own aging by their fashion choices. The health differences were even more exaggerated when Langer looked at affluent people: presumably the means to buy even more clothes provides a steady stream of new aging cues, which wealthy people internalize as unhealthy attitudes and expectations.
    (6)Langer's point is that we are surrounded every day by subtle signals that aging is an undesirable period of decline. These signals make it difficult to age gracefully. Similar signals also lock all of us—regardless of age—into pigeonholes for disease. We are too quick to accept diagnostic categories like cancer and depression, and let them define us.
    (7)That's not to say that we won't encounter illness, bad moods or a stiff back. But with a little mindfulness, we can try to embrace uncertainty and understand that the way we feel today may or may not connect to the way we will feel tomorrow.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)When catastrophic floods hit Bangladesh, TNT's emergency-response team was ready. The logistics giant, with headquarters in Amsterdam, has 50 people on standby to intervene anywhere in the world at 48 hours' notice. This is part of a five-year-old partnership with the World Food Program (WFP), the UN's agency that fights hunger. The team has attended to some two dozen emergencies, including the Asian tsunami in 2004. "We're just faster," says Ludo Oelrich, the director of TNT's "Moving the World" program.
    (2)Emergency help is not TNT's only offering. Volunteers do stints around the world on secondment to WFP and staff are encouraged to raise money for the program (they generated euro2.5m last year). There is knowledge transfer, too: TNT recently improved the school-food supply chain in Liberia, increasing WFP's efficiency by 15-20%, and plans to do the same in Congo.
    (3)Why does TNT do these things? "People feel this is a company that does more than take care of the bottom line," says Mr. Oelrich. "It's providing a soul to TNT." In a 2006 staff survey, 68% said the pro-bono activities made them prouder to work at the company. It also helps with recruitment: three out of four graduates who apply for jobs mention the WFP connection. Last year the company came top in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
    (4)TNT's experience illustrates several trends in corporate philanthropy. First, collaboration is in, especially with NGOs. Companies try to pick partners with some relevance to their business. For TNT, the food program is a good fit because hunger is in part a logistical problem. Standard Chartered, a bank, is working with the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee on microfinance and with other NGOs on a campaign to help 10m blind people.
    (5)Coca-Cola has identified water conservation as critical to its future as the world's largest drinks company. Last June it announced an ambitious collaboration with WWF, a global environmental organization, to conserve seven major freshwater river basins. It is also working with Greenpeace to eliminate carbon emissions from coolers and vending machines. The co-operation is strictly non-financial, but marks a change in outlook. "Ten years ago you couldn't get Coca-Cola and Greenpeace in the same room," says Neville Isdell, its CEO.
    (6)Second, what used to be local community work is increasingly becoming global community work. In the mid-1990s nearly all IBM's philanthropic spending was in America; now 60% is outside. Part of this involves a corporate version of the peace corps: young staff get one-month assignments in the developing world to work on worthy projects. The idea is not only to make a difference on the ground, but also to develop managers who understand how the wider world works.
    (7)Third, once a formal program is in place, it becomes hard to stop. Indeed, it tends to grow, not least because employees are keen. In 1996 KPMG allowed its staff in Britain to spend two hours a month of their paid-for time on work for the community. Crucially for an accountancy firm, the work was given a time code. After a while it came to be seen as a business benefit. The program has expanded to half a day a month and now adds up to 40,000 donated hours a year. And increasingly it is not only inputs that are being measured but outputs as well. Salesforce.com, a software firm, tries to measure the impact of its volunteer programs, which involved 85% of its employees last year.
    (8)All this has meant that straightforward cash donations have become less important. At IBM, in 1993 cash accounted for as much as 95% of total philanthropic giving; now it makes up only about 35%. But cash still matters. When Hank Paulson, now America's treasury secretary, was boss of Goldman Sachs, he was persuaded to raise the amount that the firm chipped in to boost employees' charitable donations. Now it is starting a philanthropy fund aiming for $1 billion to which the partners will be encouraged to contribute a share of their pay. No doubt that is good for the bank's soul.
    PASSAGE FOUR
    (1)Under the 1996 constitution, all 11 of South Africa's official languages "must enjoy equality of esteem and be treated equitably". In practice English, the mother tongue of just 8% of the people, increasingly dominates all the others. Its hegemony may even threaten the long-term survival of the country's African languages, spoken as the mother tongue of 80% of South Africans, despite the government's repeated promises to promote and protect indigenous languages and culture.
    (2)Under apartheid, there were just two official languages, English and Afrikaans, a variant of Dutch with a dash of French, German, Khoisan (spoken by so-called Bushmen and Hottentots), Malay and Portuguese. Pre-colonial African languages were relegated to the black townships and tribal "homelands". Even there, English was often chosen as the medium of education in preference to the inhabitants' mother tongues. Black South Africans increasingly rejected Afrikaans as the language of the main oppressor; English was a symbol of advancement and prestige.
    (3)Today, 16 years after the advent of black-majority rule, English reigns supreme. Not only is it the medium of business, finance, science and the internet, but also of government, education, broadcasting, the press, advertising, street signs, consumer products and the music industry. For such things Afrikaans is also occasionally used, especially in the Western Cape province, but almost never an African tongue. The country's Zulu-speaking president, Jacob Zuma, makes all his speeches in English. Parliamentary debates are in English. Even the instructions on bottles of prescription drugs come only in English or Afrikaans.
    (4)Yet most black South Africans are not proficient in English. This is because most of their teachers give lessons in a language that is not their own. To give non-English-speaking children a leg-up, the government agreed last year that all pupils should be taught in their mother tongue for at least the first three years of primary school. But outside the rural areas, where one indigenous language prevails, this is neither financially nor logistically feasible.
    (5)Some people suggest reducing the number of official languages to a more manageable three: English, Afrikaans and Zulu, the mother tongue of nearly a quarter of South Africans. But non-Zulus would object. Unless brought up on a farm, few whites speak an African language. For the school-leaving exam, proficiency in at least two languages is required. But most native English-speakers opt for Afrikaans, said to be easy to learn, rather than a useful but harder African tongue. At universities African-language departments are closing.
    (6)Some effort is being made to protect African languages from this apparently inexorable decline. The Sunday Times, South Africa's biggest-selling weekend paper, recently launched a Zulu edition. In September the Oxford University Press brought out the first isiZulu-English dictionary in more than 40 years.
    (7)Many of the black elite, who send their children to English-speaking private schools or former white state schools, may accept English emerging as the sole national language. Many talk English to their children at home. Fluency in the language of Shakespeare is regarded as a sign of modernity, sophistication and power.
    (8)Will South Africa's black languages suffer the fate of the six languages brought by the country's first Indian settlers 150 years ago? Maybe so, thinks Rajend Mesthrie at the University of Cape Town. For the first 100-odd years, he says, South Africa's Indians taught and spoke to their children in their native tongues. But English is now increasingly seen as "the best way forward". Today most young Indians speak only English or are bilingual in English and Afrikaans, though they may continue to chat at home in a kind of pidgin English mixed with Indian and Zulu.1.  The sentence in the first paragraph "The world isn't fiat...it's paved." implies that ______.(PASSAGE ONE)