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
    If Shakira, a Colombian pop star, marries her boyfriend, the Spanish national footballer Gerard Piqué, the only unusual things about it would be that she is even more famous than he is and ten years older. Otherwise, theirs would be just a celebrity example of one of the world's biggest social trends: the rise of international marriages—that is, involving couples of different nationalities.
    A hundred years ago, such alliances were confined to the elite of the elite. When Randolph Churchill married Jennie Jerome of New York, it seemed as if they had stepped from the pages of a Henry James novel: brash, spirited American heiress peps up the declining fortunes of Britain's aristocracy. Now, such alliances have become almost commonplace. To confine examples to politicians only: the French President Nicolas Sarkozy is married to the Italian-born Carla Bruni and his Prime Minister Francois Fillon has a Welsh wife, Penelope Clarke. Nelson Mandela is married to Graca Machel (from Mozambique). Denmark's new Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is married to a Briton, Stephen Kinnock. And two leading female politicians of Asian countries, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and India's Sonia Gandhi, are both widows from international marriages. In rich countries alone such unions number at least 10 million.
    International marriages matter partly because they reflect—and result from—globalisation. As people holiday or study abroad, or migrate to live and work, the visitors meet and marry locals. Their unions are symbols of cultural integration, and battlefields for conflicts over integration. Few things help immigrants come to terms with their new country more than becoming part of a local family. Though the offspring of such unions may struggle with the barriers of prejudice, at their best international marriages reduce intolerance directly themselves, and indirectly through their offspring.
    Defining what counts as international is tricky too. A wedding of a local man and a foreign-born bride is easy. But the marriage of two foreigners in a third country sometimes counts and sometimes doesn't. Trickiest of all is how to treat the marriage of a second-generation immigrant who has citizenship of a host country (say, the child of a Moroccan in France or a Mexican in America). If such a person marries a native Frenchwoman or an American, that usually does not count as international, even though it is an alliance across ethnic lines. Conversely, if he marries a girl from his parents' country of origin, that does count as international—but this is not a marriage across an ethnic divide and may indicate isolation not assimilation.
    Belatedly, answers to these questions of scale and definition are coming, chiefly thanks to the efforts of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), a professional association of demographers, and, especially, of Doo-Sub Kim, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul who chairs its panel on cross-border marriages. Global figures remain sketchy, but marriage patterns in Asia and Europe, at least, are becoming clearer. Some tentative, often surprising, conclusions are emerging.
    Asia is the part of the world where cross-border marriages have been rising most consistently. According to Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore, 5% of marriages in Japan in 2008-2009 included a foreign spouse (with four times as many foreign wives as husbands). Before 1980, the share had been below 1%. In South Korea, over 10% of marriages included a foreigner in 2010, up from 3.5% in 2000. In both countries, the share of cross-border marriages seems to have stabilised lately, perhaps as a result of the global economic slowdown. International marriages have played a significant role in modifying the ethnic homogeneity of East Asian countries.
    International marriages are common in much of Europe, too. Calculations by Giampaolo Lanzieri, an Italian demographer, show that in France the proportion of international marriage rose from about 10% in 1996 to 16% in 2009. In Germany, the rise is a little lower, from 11.3% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2010. Some smaller countries have much higher levels. Nearly half the marriages in Switzerland are international ones, up from a third in 1990. Around one in five marriages in Sweden, Belgium and Austria involves a foreign partner.   
    Passage Two
    In June of 1836, Nathan Rothschild left London for Frankfurt to attend the wedding of his son Lionel to his niece (Lionel's cousin Charlotte), and to discuss with his brothers the entry of Nathan's children into the family business. Nathan was probably the richest man in the world, at least in liquid assets. He could, needless to say, afford whatever he pleased.
    Then 59 years old, Nathan was in good health if somewhat portly, a bundle of energy, untiring in his devotion to work and indomitable of temperament. When he left London, however, he was suffering from an inflammation on his lower back, toward the base of his spine. (A German physician diagnosed it as a boil, but it may have been an abscess. ) In spite of medical treatment, this festered and grew painful. No matter. Nathan got up from his sickbed and attended the wedding. Had he been bedridden, the wedding would have been celebrated in the hotel. For all his suffering, Nathan continued to deal with business matters, with his wife taking dictation. Meanwhile the great Dr. Travers was summoned from London, and when he could not cure the problem, a leading German surgeon was called in, presumably to open and clean the wound. Nothing availed; the poison spread; and on 28 July 1836, Nathan died. We are told that the Rothschild pigeon post took the message back to London. He is dead.
    Nathan Rothschild died probably of staphylococcus or streptococcus septicemia—what used to be called blood poisoning. In the absence of more detailed information, it is hard to say whether the boil (abscess) killed him or secondary contamination from the surgeons' knives. This was before the germ theory existed, hence before any notion of the importance of cleanliness. No bactericides then, much less antibiotics. And so the man who could buy anything died, of a routine infection easily cured today for anyone who could find his way to a doctor or a hospital, even a pharmacy.
    Medicine has made enormous strides since Nathan Rothschild's time. But better, more efficacious medicine—the treatment of illness and repair of injury—is only part of the story. Much of the increased life expectancy of these years has come from gains in prevention, cleaner living rather than better medicine. Clean water and expeditious waste removal, plus improvements in personal cleanliness, have made all the difference. For a long time the great killer was gastrointestinal infection, transmitted from waste to hands to food to digestive tract; and this unseen but deadly enemy, ever present, was reinforced from time to time by epidemic microbes such as the vibrio of cholera. The best avenue of transmission was the common privy, where contact with wastes was fostered by want of paper for cleaning and lack of washable underclothing. Who lives in unwashed woolens—and woolens do not wash well—will itch and scratch. So hands were dirty, and the great mistake was failure to wash before eating. This was why those religious groups that prescribed washing—the Jews, the Muslims—had lower disease and death rates; which did not always count to their advantage. People were easily persuaded that if fewer Jews died, it was because they had poisoned Christian wells.
    The answer was found, not in changed religious belief or doctrine, but in industrial innovation. The principal product of the new technology that we know as the Industrial Revolution was cheap, washable cotton; and along with it mass-produced soap made of vegetable oils. For the first time, the common man could afford underwear, once known as body linen because that was the washable fabric that the well-to-do wore next to their skin. He (or she) could wash with soap and even bathe, although too much bathing was seen as a sign of dirtiness. Why would clean people have to wash so often? No matter. Personal hygiene changed drastically, so that commoners of the late 19th and early 20th century often lived cleaner than the kings and queens of a century earlier.
    The third element in the decline of disease and death was better nutrition. This owed much to increases in food supply, even more to better, faster transport. Famines, often the product of local shortages, became rarer; diet grew more varied and richer in animal protein. These changes translated among other things into taller, stronger physiques. This was a much slower process than those medical and hygienic gains that could be instituted from above, in large part because it depended on habit and taste as well as income. As late as World War Ⅰ, the Turks who fought the British expeditionary force at Gallipoli were struck by the difference in height between the steak- and mutton- fed troops from Australia and New Zealand and the stunted youth of British mill towns. And anyone who follows immigrant populations from poor countries into rich will note that the children are taller and better knit than their parents.                         
    Passage Three
    The Japanese say they suffer from an economic disease called "structural pessimism" Overseas too, there is a tendency to see Japan as a harbinger of all that is doomed in the economies of the euro zone and America—even though figures released on November 14th show its economy grew by an annualised 6% in the third quarter, rebounding quickly from the March tsunami and nuclear disaster.
    Look dispassionately at Japan's economic performance over the past ten years, though, and "the second lost decade", if not the first, is a misnomer. Much of what tarnishes Japan's image is the result of demography—more than half its population is over 45—as well as its poor policy in dealing with it. Even so, most Japanese have grown richer over the decade.
    In aggregate, Japan's economy grew at half the pace of America's between 2001 and 2010. Yet if judged by growth in GDP per person over the same period, then Japan has outperformed America and the euro zone. In part this is because its population has shrunk whereas America's population has increased.
    Though growth in labour productivity fell slightly short of America's from 2000 to 2008, total factor productivity, a measure of how a country uses capital and labour, grew faster, according to the Tokyo-based Asian Productivity Organisation. Japan's unemployment rate is higher than in 2000, yet it remains about half the level of America and Europe.
    Besides supposed stagnation, the two other curses of the Japanese economy are debt and deflation. Yet these also partly reflect demography and can be overstated. People often think of Japan as an indebted country. In fact, it is the world's biggest creditor nation, boasting ￥253 trillion ($ 3.3 trillion) in net foreign assets.
    To be sure, its government is a large debtor; its net debt as a share of GDP is one of the highest in the OECD. However, the public debt has been accrued not primarily through wasteful spending or "bridges to nowhere", but because of ageing, says the IMF. Social-security expenditure doubled as a share of GDP between 1990 and 2010 to pay rising pensions and health-care costs. Over the same period tax revenues have shrunk.
    Falling tax revenues are a problem. The flip side, though, is that Japan has the lowest tax take of any country in the OECD, at just 17% of GDP. That gives it plenty of room to manoeuvre. Takatoshi Ito, an economist at the University of Tokyo, says increasing the consumption tax by 20 percentage points from its current 5%—putting it at the level of a high-tax European country—would raise ￥50 trillion and immediately wipe out Japan's fiscal deficit.
    That sounds draconian. But here again, demography plays a role. Officials say the elderly resist higher taxes or benefit cuts, and the young, who are in a minority, do not have the political power to push for what is in their long-term interest. David Weinstein, professor of Japanese economy at Columbia University in New York, says the elderly would rather give money to their children than pay it in taxes. Ultimately that may mean that benefits may shrink in the future. "If you want benefits to grow in line with income, as they are now, you need a massive increase in taxes of about 10% of GDP," he says.
    Demography helps explain Japan's stubborn deflation, too, he says. After all, falling prices give savers—most of whom are elderly—positive real yields even when nominal interest rates are close to zero. Up until now, holding government bonds has been a good bet. Domestic savers remain willing to roll them over, which enables the government to fund its deficits. Yet this comes at a cost to the rest of the economy.
    In short, Japan's economy works better for those middle-aged and older than it does for the young. But it is not yet in crisis, and economists say there is plenty it could do to raise its potential growth rate, as well as to lower its debt burden.                     
    Passage Four
    You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr. Wrangham's opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
    Cooking is a human universal. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body's energy) could not keep running. Dr. Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
    In fact, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity's "killer app" : the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
    Humans became human with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man's—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man's apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
    Dr. Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern "raw foodists", members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
    Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It "denatures" protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
    In support of his thesis, Dr. Wrangham, who is an anthropologist, has ransacked other fields and come up with an impressive array of material. Cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, where it can be absorbed, from 50% to 95%. Previous studies had suggested raw food was digested equally well as cooked food because they looked at faeces as being the end product. These, however, have been exposed to the digestive mercies of bacteria in the large intestine, and any residual goodies have been removed from them that way.
    Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr. Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is.
    The archaeological evidence for ancient cookery is equivocal. Digs show that both modern humans and Neanderthals controlled fire in a way that almost certainly means they could cook, and did so at least 200,000 years ago. Since the last common ancestor of the two species lived more than 400,000 years ago, fire-control is probably at least as old as that, for they lived in different parts of the world, and so could not have copied each other.
    Older alleged sites of human fires are more susceptible to other interpretations, but they do exist. And traces of fire are easily wiped out, so the lack of direct evidence for them is no surprise. Instead, Dr. Wrangham is relying on a compelling chain of logic. And in doing so he may have cast light not only on what made humanity, but on one of the threats it faces today.    1.  The author gives examples of international marriages in politicians to ______.(Passage One)