阅读理解Passage 2 As Gilbert White, Darwin, and others observed long ago, all species appear to have the innate capacity to increase their numbers from generation to generation

阅读理解Modern liberal opinion is sensitive to problems of restriction of freedom and abuse of power. Indeed,many hold that a man can be injured only by violating his will, but this view is much too narrow. Itfails to recognize the great dangers we shall face in the uses of biomedical technology that stem froman excess of freedom, from the unrestrained exercise of will. In my view, our greatest problems willbe voluntary self-degradation, or willing dehumanization, as the unintended yet often inescapableconsequence of sternly and successfully pursuing our humanization goals.Certain desires and perfected medical technologies have already had some dehumanizingconsequences. Improved methods of resuscitation (复苏) efforts to save the severely ill and injured.Yet these efforts are sometimes only partly successful. They succeed in rescuing individuals butthose individuals may have severe brain damage and be capable of only a less-than-human,vegetating existence. Such patients found with increasing frequency in the intensive care units ofuniversity hospitals, have been denied a death with dignity. Families are forced to suffer seeing theirbeloved ones so reduced and are made to bear the burden of a prolonged “death watch”.Even the ordinary methods of treating disease and prolonging life have changed the context in whichmen die. Fewer and fewer people die in the familiar surroundings of home or in the company offamily and friends. At that time of life when there is perhaps the greatest need for human warmth andcomfort, the dying patient is kept company by cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, respiratorsaspirators, oxygenators, catheters and his intravenous drip. Ties to the community of men arereplaced by attachments to an assemblage of machines.This loneliness, however, is not confined to the dying patient in the hospital bed. Consider theincreasing number of old people still alive thanks to medical progress. As a group, the elderly are themost alienated members of our society. Not yet ready for the world of the dead, not deemed fit forthe world of the living, they are shunted aside. More and more of them spend for the extra yearsmedicine has given them in “homes for senior citizens”, in hospitals for chronic diseases, and innursing home — waiting for the end. We have learned how to increase their years, but we have notlearned how to help them enjoy their days. Yet we continue to bravely and sternly push back thefrontier against death.

阅读理解To relieve your stress, you are encouraged to________.

阅读理解Task 3 Directions :This task( No.56 to No.60)the same as Task l.Tuangou ,also called team buying or group buying, is a recently developed shopping strategy starting in ChinA、Several people connect over the Internet and agree to contact a seller of a specific product so that they can buy the same item as a group at a lower price.And the sellers benefit by selling many products at once.When people agree on group buying, individual members of the buying group can vouch for (替………担保) a particular seller’s quality to the rest of the group, therefore Tuangou helps of similar phenomena in Europe and North AmericA、However, most of the group buying in these places is organized and done not by the team members themselves, but through online go-between. Where did Tudngou begin_______ ?

阅读理解 Though pundits were quick to declare that the election of Barack Obama represented the emergence of a 'post- racial' America, the macroeconomy has provided a corrective. During the American economy's last deep recession, in the early 1980s, black unemployment soared to twice the level among whites, passing 21% in 1983. And according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, time has changed little. The current unemployment rate among black Americans is almost 16%; among whites the figure is under 10%. The yawning gap between blacks and whites persists across demographic lines. The current 'mancession' has hit male-dominated professions hardest. But white men face a relatively mild unemployment rate of just over 10% compared with over 18% among black men. For the worst-off, the data are catastrophic. Among young black men without a high-school diploma, nearly half have no jobs. These rates are based on a labour-force number which excludes those in prison; if there were not five times as many blacks behind bars as whites, the figures would look even worse. There is no shortage of explanations for the gap. States with weaker labour markets, like South Carolina and Michigan, also tend to have larger black populations than low-unemployment states like Iowa and Montana. Predominantly black neighbourhoods are often a long way from where jobs are concentrated, in largely white suburbs, so those without cars cannot get to them. Blacks are also at a disadvantage when it comes to relying on friends and family connections to find jobs; there is not the same network of family businesses that whites and Latinos have. Some studies have found that this factor may explain as much as 70% of the difference in black and white unemployment rates, and may also explain the difference between black and Latino jobless rates. Among young men, for instance, the near-20% Hispanic unemployment rate is much closer to that for whites (17%) than blacks (30%). And discrimination, too, plays a part. What is clear is that the unemployment problem in black communities will not end with the recession. The employment-to-population ratio among black adults is only just above 50%, and it is closer to a shocking 40% for young black men; for adult whites it is 59%. Black workers are also unemployed for about five weeks longer, on average, than the rest of the population. Some 45% of unemployed blacks have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, compared with just 36% of unemployed whites. That means continued loss of skills, and a longer and harder road back into the workforce.

阅读理解Passage 4 As one works with color in a practical or experimental way, one is impressed by two apparently unrelated facts

阅读理解In the last decade the mass media have grown worldwide to be larger, more influential and more powerful. After it was possible in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 60s to receive one TV program and in the 60s and 70s to receive three TV programs, the number of receivable TV programs has risen for a huge part of the population in western Europe through cable TV to eleven or even more programs in the last years. More TV channels are announced. Additionally there is the huge offer of videos. The distribution of video recorders in the population is increasing. Worldwide we are on the way to communication to a mass media society in which fiction, fantasy, the definition of reality assumes a greater role than reality itself, where people want to be permanently entertained, and where the description of the content gains more emphasis than the content itself. For centuries news on crime have greatly attracted the population, In the Middle Ages ballad singers moved very successfully from town to town in order to spread their ballads which were to a great part murder stories. Criminal stories are not a new development because they do not report anything really new. They are regularly told according to the pattern of the "familiar sensation" because they have a function of relief for the society, because through them, the "law-abiding citizen" can set himself apart from the criminal, because they prove to him that his behavior is "normal" and because he can be content to feel that he is better than the criminals and that he successfully managed to escape the criminal act. There is a huge demand in the population for crime news because they are entertaining and remove the boredom of everyday life. The mass media willingly fulfill this demand because crime news are cheap and easy to get hold of and because they help sell almost any product. That is why there is a symbiosis, an unholy alliance between mass media and society against which the critical criminologist advances his objections almost in vain.

阅读理解 A small group of Internet security specialists gathered in Singapore to start up a global system to make e-mail and e-commerce more secure, end the rapid growth of passwords and raise the bar significantly for Internet fraud, spies and troublemakers. The Singapore event included an elaborate technical ceremony to create and then securely store numerical keys that will be kept in three hardened data centers there, in Zurich and in San Jose, Calif. The keys and data centers are working parts of a technology known as Secure DNS, or DNSSEC. DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is a directory that connects names to numerical Internet addresses. Preliminary work on the security system had been going on for more than a year, but this was the first time the system went into operation, even though it is not quite complete. The three centers are fortresses made up of five layers of physical, electronic and cryptographic security, making it virtually impossible to damage the system. Four layers are active now. The fifth, a physical barrier, is being built inside the data center. The technology is viewed by many computer security specialists as a ray of hope amid the recent cascade of data thefts, attacks, disruptions and scandals, including break-ins at Citibank, Sony, Lockheed Martin, RSA Security and elsewhere. It allows users to communicate via the Internet with high confidence that the identity of the person or organization they are communicating with is not being tricked or forged. Internet engineers like Dan Kaminsky, an independent network security researcher who is one of the engineers involved in the project, want to counteract three major deficiencies in today's Internet. There is no mechanism for ensuring trust, the quality of software is uneven, and it is difficult to track down bad actors. One reason for these flaws is that from the 1960s through the 1980s the engineers who designed the network's underlying technology were concerned about reliable, rather than secure, communications. That is starting to change with the introduction of Secure DNS by governments and other organizations. The event in Singapore capped a process that began more than a year ago and is expected to be complete after 300 so-called top-level domains have been digitally signed. Before the Singapore event, 70 countries had adopted the technology, and 14 more were added as part of the event. While large countries are generally doing the technical work to include their own domains in the system, the association of Internet security specialists is helping smaller countries and organizations with the process.

阅读理解I hope ________ roundthe tourist sites by a specialist guide

阅读理解Passage Four Many people have looked to the stars and wondered what it would be like to take a trip into outer space

阅读理解What is the writer's attitude towards the idea of renting clothes?

阅读理解Science of setbacks : How failure can improve career prospectsA) How do early career setbacks affect our long-term success? Failures can help us learn and overcome our fears. But disasters can still wound us. They can screw us up and set us back. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was genuine, scientifically documented truth to the expression what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger ?B) One way social scientists have probed the effects of career setbacks is to look at scientists of very similar qualifications. These scientists, for reasons that are mostly arbitrary, either just missed getting a research grant or just barely made it. In social sciences, this is known as examining near misses and narrow wins in areas where merit is subjective. That allows researchers to measure only the effects of being chosen or not. Studies in this area have found conflicting results. In the competitive game of biomedical science, research has been done on scientists who narrowly lost or won grant money. It suggests that narrow winners become even bigger winners down the line. In other words, the rich get richer.C) A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, followed researchers in the Netherlands. Researchers concluded that those who just barely qualified for a grant were able to get twice as much money within the next eight years as those who just missed out. And the narrow winners were 50 percent more likely to be given a professorship.D) Others in the US have found similar effects with National Institutes of Health early-career fellowships launching narrow winners far ahead of close losers. The phenomenon is often referred to as the Matthew effect, inspired by the Bible’s wisdom that to those who have, more will be given. There’s a good explanation for the phenomenon in the book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert Laszlo Barabasi. According to Barabasi, it’s easier and less risky for those in positions of power to choose to hand awards and funding to those who’ve already been so recognized.E) This is bad news for the losers. Small early career setbacks seem to have a disproportionate effect down the line. What didn’t kill them made them weaker. But other studies using the same technique have shown there’s sometimes no penalty to a near miss. Students who just miss getting into top high schools or universities do just as well later in life as those who just manage to get accepted. In this case, what didn’t kill them simply didn’t matter. So is there any evidence that setbacks might actually improve our career prospects? There is now.F) In a study published in Nature Communications, Northwestern University sociologist Dashun Wang tracked more than 1,100 scientists who were on the border between getting a grant and missing out between 1990 and 2005. He followed various measures of performance over the next decade. These included how many papers they authored and how influential those papers were, as measured by the number of subsequent citations. As expected, there was a much higher rate of attrition (减员) among scientists who didn’t get grants. But among those who stayed on, the close losers performed even better than the narrow winners. To make sure this wasn’t by chance, Wang conducted additional tests using different performance measures. He examined how many times people were first authors on influential studies, and the like.G) One straightforward reason close losers might outperform narrow winners is that the two groups have comparable ability. In Wang’s study, he selected the most determined, passionate scientists from the loser group and culled (剔除) what he deemed the weakest members of the winner group. Yet the persevering losers still came out on top. He thinks that being a close loser might give people a psychological boost, or the proverbial kick in the pants.H) Utrecht University sociologist Arnout van de Rijt was the lead author on the 2018 paper showing the rich get richer. He said the new finding is apparently reasonable and worth some attention. His own work showed that although the narrow winners did get much more money in the near future, the actual performance of the close losers was just as good.I) He said the people who should be paying regard to the Wang paper are the funding agents who distribute government grant money. After all, by continuing to pile riches on the narrow winners, the taxpayers are not getting the maximum bang for their buck if the close losers are performing just as well or even better. There’s a huge amount of time and effort that goes into the process of selecting who gets grants, he said, and the latest research shows that the scientific establishment is not very good at distributing money. Maybe we should spend less money trying to figure out who is better than who,he said, suggesting that some more equal dividing up of money might be more productive and more efficient. Van de Rijt said he’s not convinced that losing out gives people a psychological boost. It may yet be a selection effect. Even though Wang tried to account for this by culling the weakest winners, it’s impossible to know which of the winners would have quit had they found themselves on the losing side.J) For his part, Wang said that in his own experience, losing did light a motivating fire. He recalled a recent paper he submitted to a journal, which accepted it only to request extensive editing, and then reversed course and rejected it. He submitted the unedited version to a more respected journal and got accepted.K) In sports and many areas of life, we think of failures as evidence of something we could have done better. We regard these disappointments as a fate we could have avoided with more careful preparation, different training, a better strategy, or more focus. And there it makes sense that failures show us the road to success. These papers deal with a kind of failure people have little control over—rejection. Others determine who wins and who loses. But at the very least, the research is starting to show that early setbacks don’t have to be fatal. They might even make us better at our jobs. Getting paid like a winner, though? That’s a different matter.

阅读理解Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following passage: Whenever you see an old film, even one made as little as ten years ago, you cannot help being struck by the appearance of the women taking part

阅读理解Passage 2There can be magic in the touch of a hand that loves you. .It brings comfort and a silent promise that says, "I am here and you are not alone."When my children were born, I memorized every detail about them: the skin that felt so soft,the lips that looked like a pink flower. and the eyes that looked deep into my soul.And of course, their hands.As babies, they reached for me whenever they were hungry or tired or just needed to be held.Sometimes, if they woke in the night . just the touch of my hand would ease them back to sleep.They clung to me when they took their first steps and we held hands when crossing streets and .walking from the car to their classroom on their first day of school.My hands picked them up when they fell, and clapped louder than anybody else at their sports games and plays. Their hands waved at me from the window of a school bus, the stage of an auditorium, and from the bottom of a pool.As they grew older and more independent ,1 noticed that they didn't hold my hand much anymore. I told myself it was part of growing up, and I should just be glad they could do things on their own now. But when you have been needed so much for such a long time, it's hard to step back and feel unnecessary.Then one day, I was visiting my oldest son in New York, where he was working as an actor on a TV show..As we were about to cross a busy street that was filled with traffic,he grabbed my hand and shouted, "Hang on to me, Mom, "then led me safely across.At that moment, I realized two things. First, my boy had become a man. Second, it was clear that our roles had changed. We still needed each other, but in different ways than that scene has replayed in various ways with each of my three children.They have all taught me to lean on them just as they once leaned on me, and that we can always lean on each other. We live miles apart, but stay in touch every day.There is magic and comfort and healing in the touch of a hand that loves you, even if it"touches" you from afar.How did the author get along with her children when they were young?

阅读理解Some people have criticized the Disney management for being culturally insensitive in building a theme park in France. Disney has (1) to the accusation with comments of its own. People from Disney have said that the company is very sensitive to the idea that its park shows a(n) (2) of cultural concerns. They have tried to make it more European by (3) European cultural elements. The legends and fairy tales which come from Europe (4) prominently in the park. The (5) development of the theme park, in fact, has a European base. Disney has also (6) that the park will be special. It will have a uniqueness (7) to its European setting. All the direction (8) in the park will be in two languages. They will be in French (9) in English. Some performers in the park will (10) in French, Spanish and English. (11) the other hand, Disney will remain American. Disney does (12) that the park is American. That is, it does have an American cultural focus in (13) . Disney sees this (14) something important. It is the main selling (15) to attract people. The 320 million European citizens who live (16) a two-hour flight want to visit Disney, because it is American. The Europeans coming to the park would be disappointed by a park that is strictly representative (17) their own countries. The people who visit the park will be very happy with the American culture they see (18) by Disneyland During their trip, they will experience not only the cultures of Europe, (19) that of the US as well. One thing is (20) though: All other previous theme parks in Europe have been unsuccessful. It is not yet clear how a Disney theme park will do in France.

阅读理解Text 3 Someday a stranger will read your e-mail without your permission or scan the websites youve visited

阅读理解Since January, Lisa, 45, has been walking on eggshells at work

阅读理解The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may not seem harmful—so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered. If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it’s loaded with spam, it’s undoubtedly because at some point in time you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong Web site.Do you think your telephone number or address is handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you’ve probably never heard of—like Acxiom or Merlin—buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered. You may think your cell phone is unlisted, but if you’ve ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources—including pizza delivery companies. These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with.In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of “Big Brother” —the government is watching you or a big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don’t necessarily involve large faceless institutions: A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband’s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus, while very little of this is news to anyone—people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere—there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft.And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns. The general defense for such indifference is summed up a single phrase: “I have nothing to hide.” If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn’t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It’s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over.It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they’re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.

阅读理解The author wrote this article mainly to

阅读理解Questions 11 to 20 are based on the following passage