阅读理解 Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring-the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year—the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. Gen Zs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that's tighter than it's been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U.S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them. If 'entitled' is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and 1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren't interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U. S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good. That's a big change from the previous generation. 'Millennials wanted more flexibility in their lives,' notes Tanya Michelsem, Associate Director of YouthSight, a UK-based brand manager that conducts regular 60-day surveys of British youth, in findings that might just as well apply to American youth. 'Generation Zs are looking for more certainty and stability, because of the rise of the gig economy. They have trouble seeing a financial future and they are quite risk averse.'

阅读理解When you think of the tremendous technological progress we have made, it’s amazing how little wehave developed in other respects. We may speak contemptuously of the poor old Romans becausethey relished the orgies of slaughter that went on in their arenas. We may despise them because theymistook these goings on for entertainment. We may forgive them condescendingly because theylived 2000 years ago and obviously knew no better. But are our feelings of superiority really justified?Are we any less blood-thirsty? Why do boxing matches, for instance, attract such universal interest?Don’t the spectators who attend them hope they will see some violence? Human beings remains asbloodthirsty as ever they were. The only difference between ourselves and the Romans is that whilethey were honest enough to admit that they enjoyed watching hungry lions tearing people apart andeating them alive, we find all sorts of sophisticated arguments to defend sports which should havebeen banned long age; sports which are quite as barbarous as, say, public hangings or bearbaiting.It really is incredible that in this day and age we should still allow hunting or bull-fighting, that weshould be prepared to sit back and watch two men batter each other to pulp in a boxing ring, that weshould be relatively unmoved by the sight of one or a number of racing cars crashing and burstinginto flames. Let us not deceive ourselves. Any talk of ‘the sporting spirit’ is sheer hypocrisy. Peopletake part in violent sports because of the high rewards they bring. Spectators are willing to pay vastsums of money to see violence. A world heavyweight championship match, for instance, is frontpage news. Millions of people are disappointed if a big fight is over in two rounds instead of fifteen.They feel disappointment because they have been deprived of the exquisite pleasure of witnessingprolonged torture and violence.Why should we ban violent spoils if people enjoy them so much? You may welt ask. The answer issimple: they arc uncivilized. For centuries man has been trying to improve himself spiritually andemotionally — admittedly with little success. But at least we no longer tolerate the sight madmencooped up in cages, or public floggings of any of the countless other barbaric practices which werecommon in the past. Prisons are no longer the grim forbidding places they used to be. Social welfaresystems are in operation in many parts of the world. Big efforts are being made to distribute wealthfairly. These changes have come about not because human beings have suddenly and unaccountablyimproved, but because positive steps were taken to change the law. The taw is the biggest instrumentof social change that we have and it may exert great civilizing influence. If we banned dangerous andviolent sports, we would be moving one step further to improving mankind. We would recognize thatviolence is degrading and unworthy of human beings.

阅读理解Questions 61 to 70 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Text 2 A wise man once said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing

阅读理解 It's generally been said that history is written by the winners. This was never more true than on March 12, when the Texas board of education voted 10-5 in favour of curriculum standards that would promote conservative takes on controversial issues in the pages of the state's textbooks. The changes, expected to win final approval in May, include an increased emphasis on and sympathetic treatment of such Republican standards as the National Rifle Association and the Moral Majority. They also boast the advantage of capitalism and the role of Christianity in the nation's founding. Even Thomas Jefferson's profile will be reduced; some board members were less than fond of his ideas about the division of church and state. This is not Texas' first such skirmish. Since the 1970s, the state has tried to drop books that were seen as too liberal or anti-Christian, to omit passages on the gay-rights movement and to tone down global-warming arguments. But the nation's battle over textbooks stretches back almost half a century earlier. In 1925, Tennessee's Butler Act(which was abolished in 1967) made it illegal to teach 'any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.' The Scopes 'monkey trial' famously followed. In 1974, a clash erupted in Kanawha County, West Virginia, over the controversial writings of such authors as George Orwell, Arthur Miller and Allen Ginsberg. Opposition was so heated that some schools were firebombed. As one of America's largest textbook buyers, the Longhorn State has a good deal of sway over what is sold to schools nationwide. And while Napoleon may have maintained that 'history is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon,' getting Texans to come together on the past may prove to be their Waterloo.

阅读理解Text D There are many theories about the beginning of drama in ancient Greece

阅读理解One thing almost everyone is agreed on, including Americans, is that they place a very high valuation upon success. Success does not necessarily mean material rewards, but recognition of some sort—preferably measurable. If a boy turns out to be a preacher (传道者) instead of a businessman, that''s all right. But he bigger his church is, the more successful he is judged to be. A good many things contributed to this accent on success. There was the Puritan (清教徒的) belief in the virtue of work, both for its own sake and because the rewards it brought were regarded as signs of God''s love. There was the richness of opportunity in a land waiting to be settled. There was the lack of a settled society with fixed ranks and classes, so that a man was certain to rise through achievement. There was the determination of an immigrant to gain in the new world what had been denied to him in the old, and on the part of his children an urge to throw off the immigrant onus(负担) by still more success and still more rise in a fluid and classless society. Brothers did not compete within the family for the favor of the parents as in Europe, but worked hard for success in the outer world, along paths of their own choosing.

阅读理解How we look and how we appear to others probably worries us more when we are in our teens or early twenties than at any other time in our life

阅读理解If one wants to work more efficiently at his low point in the morning,he should______.

阅读理解Passage 1 What is the nature of the scientific attitude, the attitude of the man or woman who studies and applies physics, biology, chemistry, geology, engineering, medicine or any other science? We all know that science plays an important role in the societies in which we live

阅读理解Passage Two 　　Japan and Germany have the worlds oldest populations, but neithercountry has enough trained health care workers to meet the needs of older adults

阅读理解Passage 1 Family Matters This month Singapore passed a bill that would give legal teeth to the moral obligation to support ones parents

阅读理解Passage One At all ages and at all stages of life, fear presents a problem to almost everyone

阅读理解Questions 31 to 40 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Passage Two Daniel Anderson, a famous psychologist, believes its important to distinguish televisions influences on children from those of the family

阅读理解We have to realise how old, how very old, we are. Nations are classified as "aged" when they have 7 per cent or more of their people aged 65 or above, and by about 1970 every one of the advanced countries had become like this. Of the really ancient societies, with over 13 per cent above 65, all are in Northwestern Europe. We know that we are getting even older, and that the nearer a society approximates to zero population growth, the older its population is likely to be-- at least, for any future that concerns us now. 　　To these now familiar facts a number of further facts may be added, some of them only recently recognised. There is the apparent paradox that the effective cause of the high proportion of the old is births rather than deaths. There is the economic principle that the dependency ratio-- the degree to which those who cannot earn depend for a living on those who can--is more advantageous in older societies like ours than in the younger societies of the developing world, because lots of dependent babies are more of a liability than numbers of the inactive aged. There is the appreciation of the historical truth that the aging of advanced societies has been a sudden change. 　　If "revolution" is a rapid resettlement of the social structure, and if the age composition of the society counts as a very important aspect of that social structure, then there has been a social revolution in European and particularly Western European society within the lifetime of everyone over 50. Taken together, these things have implications which are only beginning to be acknowledged. These facts and circumstances had a leading position at a world gathering about aging as a challenge to science and to policy, held at Vichy in France. 　　There is often resistance to the idea that it is because the birth rate fell earlier in Western and Northwestern Europe than elsewhere, rather than because of any change in the death rate, that we have grown so old. Long life is altering our society, of course, but in experiential terms. We have among us a very much greater experience of continued living than any society that has ever preceded us anywhere, and this will continue. But too much of that lengthened experience, even in the wealthy West, will be experience of poverty and neglect, unless we do something about it. 　　If you are in your thirties, you ought to be aware that you can expect to live nearly one third of the rest of your life after the age of 60. The older you are now, of course, the greater this proportion will be, and greater still if you are a woman.

阅读理解Shakespeares sonnets are very different from Shakespeares plays, but they do contain dramatic elements and an overall sense of story

阅读理解As you all know, the United States is a country on wheels. Nearly eight million new cars are made each year; four households out of five own at least one car, and more than a quarter have two each. Yet you’ll be surprised to learn that some of the car-owners even suffer from malnutrition.In 1968, a nation-wide survey of malnutrition was made for the first time. It found that 10 million people are suffering in health through inadequate feeding; the causes of their plight were varied. Unemployment over a long period should be considered as the main factor. And unemployment, strange to say, nine times out of ten results from automation, both in industrial and agricultural areas. For example, in the rural South when a cotton plantation suddenly cuts its force from 100 people to three, the problem to help the displaced arises. So is the case with industrial automation. In fact, probably 2 million jobs are made unnecessary each year in the whole country as a result of the automation process, thus making unemployment a chief social concern. According to government statistics, the number of people unemployed was over 5 percent for the period from 1958 to 1963. In July 1981, it rose to 7.8 percent. As a matter of fact, it has long been known that even during the most prosperous periods there have been people without enough to eat. So I think that’s why President Kennedy said in his inauguration speech in 1961, if the government did not help the poor, it could not save the rich.In 1966, the Social Security Administration calculated that a family of four needed an income of $3,355 a year to be above the line of poverty. And in 1977, the average poverty line of the country was slightly more than $6,200 annual income for a non-farm family of four. According to the Social Security Act, families of that size below poverty line are eligible to receive benefits from the special welfare program. The average weekly payment of benefits now is equivalent to 36 percent of the worker’s normal wage. And the number of people who receive government benefits is increasing. In 1973, social insurance payments by governments, mainly to old age pensioners and people who had lost their jobs or were off work through illness, amounted to $86,000 million. Those not fully qualified for insurance payments received $29,000 million in public aid.But problems still exist. Many people are not reached by the anti-poverty program, because local authorities and agencies do not want to play their part or do not gave the resources to do so. Some poor people will not accept help for various reasons. Of course, there are some more important factors which lie in the structure of the society, but I don’t consider it necessary to dig into them here. Yet we will perhaps agree that social welfare programs have solved to some extent the problems of feeding, clothing and housing those below the poverty line. On the whole, it perhaps might be said that American people are living a better life than people in most other countries.

阅读理解1. If you lock a bunch of high-IQ people in a room and tell them to get on with a simple task, what will they emerge with? Lower IQs, for one thing. A study done by Virginia Tech and a few other institutions, written up over the winter in a publication of the Royal Society, tried to replicate how people think under social pressure. Subjects with an average IQ of 126 were clustered into problem-solving groups and exposed to judgments about their work. A pecking order formed.The low performers sho

阅读理解Passage 2 Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage: Maggie Walker was born in 1867 in Richmond, Virginia