单选题 .  Section A
    In this section there are several 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
    There's this great recurring "Saturday Night Live" skit from several years back where Phil Hartman plays an unfrozen caveman who goes to law school. He pontificates (发表武断的意见) on the American judicial system while marveling at modern technology like "the tiny people in the magic box" (a TV). It fits a common stereotype: Human ancestors were, well, cavemen, and not as smart as we are today. A new hypothesis from a Stanford geneticist tries to turn this stereotype upside down.
    Human intelligence may have actually peaked before our ancient predecessors ever left Africa, Gerald Crabtree writes in two new journal articles. Genetic mutations during the past several millennia are causing a decline in overall human intellectual and emotional fitness, he says. Evolutionary pressure no longer favors intellect, so the problem is getting worse. He is careful to say that this is taking quite a long time, so it's not like your grandparents are models of brilliance while your children will be cavemen rivaling Hartman's SNL character. But he does maintain that an ancient Athenian, plucked from 1000 BC, would be "among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions."
    His central thesis is that each generation produces deleterious (有害的) mutations, so down the line of human history, our intelligence is ever more impaired compared to that of our predecessors.
    Not surprisingly, the hypothesis, published in the journal Trends in Genetics, has several geneticists scratching their heads.
    "It takes thousands of genes to build a human brain, and mutations in any one of those can impair that process, that's absolutely true. It's also true that with each new generation, new mutations arise.., but Crabtree ignores the other side of the equation, which is selection," said Kevin Mitchell, associate professor at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin. "Natural selection is incredibly powerful, and it definitely has the ability to weed out new mutations that significantly impair intellectual ability. There are various aspects in these papers that I think are really just thinking about things in a wrong way."
    Crabtree said he wanted to examine the cumulative effect of generation-to-generation mutation on intelligence, which is thought to be controlled by many genes. Using indexes that measure X-chromosome (染色体)-related mental retardation, he comes up with between 2,000 and 5,000 genes related to human intellectual ability. Using another index measuring average mutations that arise in each generation of children, he calculates that within 3,000 years, "we have all sustained two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual or emotional stability."
    "There is a general feeling that evolution constantly improves us, but it only does that if there is selection applied," Crabtree said in an interview. "In this case, it is questionable about how much selection is occurring now compared to the process of optimizing those genes, which occurred in the jungles of Africa 500,000 years ago."
    There's already evidence for this in other areas, he argues. Take our sense of smell. Humans have far fewer olfactory receptors than other animals, he said—we're guided by our intellect now, not by smell. We can think about where a piece of food came from, how it was processed, which plant it's from, who has been around it, and so on. A dog, on the other hand, simply sniffs something and either eats it or doesn't.
    Similarly, he believes evolution now selects for other traits—namely, the most healthy and the most immune, not the most intelligent.
    But geneticists took issue with his claims, not to mention his citations and methods. Mitchell took issue with Crabtree's characterization of genes—he describes them as links in a chain, with incredible overall disruptive power. They're like a bulb on a string of Christmas tree lights that suddenly fails to work, taking out the entire strand with it: "It can be concluded that genes related to intelligence do not operate as a robust network, but rather as links in a chain, failure of any one of which leads to intellectual disability," he writes. Mitchell countered that this ignores other genes that don't cause intellectual disability.
    "Biological systems are robust to degradation of several different components," Mitchell said. "Evolution has gone to a lot of trouble to craft your genome so it's finely honed to do its job, and it doesn't make sense that you would have all this random mutation in your brain cells. Also, you would have a very high rate of brain cancer."                     
    Passage Two
    Social mobility in the U. K. could be reversed unless the government and universities make changes to encourage and pay for more students from disadvantaged backgrounds to take degrees, according to the government's independent adviser on the issue. Alan Milburn said in a report that social mobility was now "flatlining at best" after gains in the early part of the last decade.
    "Given the headwinds that universities and higher education institutions are facing—tuition fees, student caps, public funding constraints—there's a real danger things will go backwards, rather than forwards," Milburn told the Guardian. "As the economy changes, who gets into university does become a very important driver of social mobility."
    The report recommends changes across government policy and the way universities select, fund and encourage students from more disadvantaged areas, who he argues have been shown to do better at university than pupils from private schools with the same grades. Suggestions include offering all students from poorer backgrounds an interview and considering offering places to those with lower grades. Acknowledging pressure on public spending during the recession, Milburn calls on all parties to commit to government funding for higher education rising from 1.2% currently to 1.5%, the average for the OECD group of advanced economies.
    The former Labour MP and cabinet member, who was the first person in his family to go to university, said social mobility created "fallers as well as risers", echoing candid comments by the Liberal Democrat business secretary, Vince Cable, who told an audience on Wednesday that social mobility was often a "two-way street" and "a zero-sum game". "We want everyone to move up and no one to move down," said Cable. "But in the real world not everyone can be a star. Social mobility is often embodied in the comprehensive school pupil who reaches Oxbridge, but what about the school dropout who finished up in a lowly menial job? That is also social mobility. But this is surely what meritocracy is all about—success through hard work, not through birth."
    Milburn's report says universities spend more than ￡400m to soften the impact of higher tuition fees on students from poorer backgrounds, but says there is little evidence that it is well spent, and calls for deep changes. It advocates that money is spent not just on reducing fees but helping to fund poorer students, and calls for a new version of the scrapped Educational Maintenance Allowance, intended to help poorer pupils remain in school to do A-levels. Universities are asked to agree to use "contextual data" when assessing applications to give pupils from worse schools a better chance, even if they have lower grades. Because some universities—especially from the Russell Group of higher ranked institutions—have objected to such a move in the past, Milburn offers them alternatives, including running new programmes to assess and prepare school-leavers, such as summer schools, and guaranteeing interviews to pupils from schools in disadvantaged areas.
    Ministers are urged to scrap a cap on student numbers, which Milburn calls an artificial limit on aspiration, and to better explain the tuition fees policy, under which students start repaying their loans when their earnings rise above a certain threshold. One option would be to rename the policy a graduate tax, which it is "in all but name", says Milburn, though he says it might be too late for that. He also calls for more funding for post-graduates, probably through upfront loans, saying the issue is "in danger of becoming a social mobility timebomb".
    The proposal to re-introduce the EMA was widely welcomed by social and education organizations, including the children's charity Barnados, which said it had evidence that children were having to choose between the cost of breakfast and their bus fare to school. The left-of-centre IPPR thinktank welcomed the report's suggestion that "we should look at applying the lessons of the pupil premium in schools to the university sector, with more funding being provided to institutions if they recruit from disadvantaged backgrounds".                       
    Passage Three
    Cambridge has taken the top spot in this year's Guardian University Guide league table, breaking its arch rival Oxford's six-year stint as the U. K. 's leading institution. Oxford has come second and St Andrews third, while the London School of Economics has climbed four places from last year to take fourth place. University College London, Warwick, Lancaster, Durham, Loughborough and Imperial College make up the top 10.
    Our analysis shows that universities with low rankings are almost as likely to be planning to charge maximum tuition fees of ￡9,000 in autumn 2012 as those with high rankings. London Metropolitan University, which comes bottom of the Guardian tables, intends to charge between ￡4,500 and ￡9,000 for its degrees. Salford, Liverpool John Moores, Manchester Metropolitan and the University of East London—all of which rank in the bottom 20—want to charge ￡9,000 for at least some of their courses.
    The government's access watchdog, the Office for Fair Access, is looking at the fees each university in England wants to charge and will announce in July whether it approves. All the English universities in our top 20 intend to charge ￡9,000 fees, apart from London School of Economics, which has not yet decided. The first university that proposes to charge less than ￡9,000 for all of its courses is Sunderland, which is ranked 48th. There are a total of 120 institutions in the tables: 38 in the top half intend to charge ￡9,000 for at least some of their courses, while 18 in the bottom half propose to do the same.
    Universities are ranked according to how much they spend per student; their student/staff ratio; the career prospects of their graduates; what grades applicants need; a value-added score that compares the academic achievements of first-years and their final degree results; and how content final-year students are with their courses, based on the annual National Student Survey. Birmingham City University has fallen most since last year—24 places, from 66th to 90th—while Middlesex is the biggest climber, reaching 75th place this year compared with 112th last year. Durham has risen from 17th place to eighth. While the oldest universities dominate the top positions in the tables, the newest have improved their rankings since last year. Winchester has leapt from 96th place to 69th.
    The tables, compiled by an independent consultancy firm, Intelligent Metrix, are weighted in favour of the National Student Survey. As part of the survey, final-year students are asked to score their universities for overall satisfaction, feedback and contact hours. Other league tables concentrate more on research ratings. The Guardian publishes an overall ranking table, separate tables to show which universities are best—and worst—for each subject and another table for specialist institutions. The more a university spends on each student, the more likely it is to have a high ranking and the more satisfied its students seem. However, our judges took into account that some universities do not teach expensive courses, such as engineering, and so their spending is lower.
    The tables show that Cambridge has overtaken Oxford in philosophy, law, politics, theology, maths, classics, anthropology and modern languages. However, Oxford overtook Cambridge in psychology and also came top in chemistry, business and management, and art and design. Loughborough is best for sports science, while King's College London is top for dentistry. University College London topped the table for English, while Trinity Laban Conservatoire excelled for drama and dance. Northumbria has shot up the table for modern languages, from 48th last year to third this year. Universities with high rankings tend to have fewer dropouts, and fewer students per academic. The top 20 institutions have a drop-out rate after the first year of just 4%, compared with almost 12% for the bottom 20.
    Professor David Tidmarsh, vice-chancellor of Birmingham City University, says he expects his university's fall in position to be temporary: "It is caused by student number growth, which has now been curbed, and student satisfaction scores, which we expect to improve significantly as a consequence both of increased investment and of the way in which we are engaging students as partners in their learning experience." He says the university is investing ￡180m in new buildings, facilities and equipment. Swansea Metropolitan, Wolverhampton and Liverpool Hope did not allow the Guardian to use their data.
    Meanwhile, the government has cut the number of places universities can offer on teacher training courses. Cambridge University, which comes top of our table for education courses, will have 49 fewer places on its teacher training course this September, an 11% cut. Altogether, almost 4,000 fewer places will be available on teacher training programmes. A spokesman from the Department for Education says pupil numbers are falling sharply in secondary schools and so the need for new teachers has gone down.                             
    Passage Four
    The gender pay gap for full-time workers has fallen below 10% for the first time in 15 years since comparable records began. The difference between men's and women's median hourly full-time pay fell from 10.5% in 2011 to 9.6% in 2012, according to the annual survey of hours and earnings from the Office for National Statistics(ONS). Women's average hourly earnings grew by 2% to ￡12 over the 12 months to April, while men's earnings grew by 1.1% to ￡13.27, prompting one employment expert to claim "women are steadily chipping away at the glass ceiling."
    The figures show women now earn an average gross full-time salary of ￡23,100—￡5,600 less than their male counterparts and ￡200 less than the gap of ￡5,800 seen in 2011. But at the current rate of change women's full-time pay will not equal men's until 2040.
    Economists said the narrowing gap can in part be explained by men's full-time earnings rising slower than women's. Others suggested a variety of reasons including a cultural shift, more progressive attitudes displayed by bosses, and higher aspirations among women. While women are better paid than men when it comes to part-time work, the ONS said the fact more women work part-time jobs, which tend to have lower rates of pay, means the overall pay gap remains high at 19.7% compared to 20.2% in 2011.
    The Trades Union Congress(TUC) said the lack of high quality part-time work is illustrated by the five highest paid occupations—aircraft pilots; chief executives and directors of advertising and PR; marketing and sales; and telecommunications firms—being dominated by men and having "a negligible number" of part-time positions. In contrast, four of the five worst paid occupations—waiters and waitresses, bar staff, catering assistants and launderers—are dominated by women and have more part-time jobs than full-time ones.
    Frances O'Grady, general secretary designate at the TUC, said: "No healthy modern economy should have an enduring gender pay gap and growing in-work poverty. Unfortunately, common sense solutions such as senior level job shares and flexible working are rarely available in the private sector, and are now under attack in the public sector." Unless we change the way we work we will never eliminate the pay gap or tackle poverty.
    Wages for full-time employees in the U. K. increased by just half the rate of inflation, the study showed, with the median salary rising by 1.4% to ￡26,500 in 2012 against inflation of 3%—meaning households are experiencing pay cuts in real terms.
    Xenios Thrasyvoulou, founder of the online freelance marketplace PeoplePerHour, said: "Women are steadily chipping away at the glass ceiling. They may be starting to win the battle of the sexes, but the workforce as a whole is losing the battle with inflation."
    The gap between the highest and lowest paid employees also narrowed, with the hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of full timers in the top 1% of earners falling by 0.2%, compared to a rise of 2.3% for those in the bottom 1%.
    The number of people earning below the national minimum wage fell during the past 12 months, the ONS said, from 299,000 in 2011 to 287,000 this year. But the ONS admitted the figures were not exact due to the impossibility of identifying people such as apprentices and trainees exempt from the minimum wage rate or only entitled to lower rates.
    Public sector workers earned more than those in the private sector across almost all measures used by the ONS. The median gross weekly pay of full-time employees in the public sector was ￡565 in 2012, up 1.6% from ￡556 in 2011, compared to ￡479 in the private sector, up 1.5% from ￡472 in 2011.
    But the ONS pointed out that many low-paid occupations such as hairdressers, bar and restaurant staff and junior sales roles do not exist in the public sector.    1.  According to the passage, "Saturday Night Live" skit is a ______.(Passage One)