阅读理解Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage oneWhen I was six or seven, I was taken out of school and put to bed for several months for an ailment the doctor described as “fast=beating heart.” I felt all right—perhaps I felt too good. It was the feeling of suspense. At any rate, I was allowed to occupy all day my parents’ double bed in the front upstairs bedroom.I was supposed to rest, and the little children didn’t get to run in and excite me often. Davis School was as close as across the street. I could keep up with it from the window beside me, hear the principal ring her bell, see which children were tardy, watch my classmates eat together at recess: I knew their sandwiches. I was homesick for school; my mother made time for teaching me arithmetic and hearing my spelling.But I never dreamed I could learn as long as I was away from the schoolroom. After they’d told me goodnight and tucked me in—although I knew that after I’d finally fallen asleep they’d pick me up and carry me away —my parents draped the lampshade with a sheet of the daily paper, which was tilted, like a hat brim, so that they could sit in their rockers in a lighted part of the room and I could supposedly go to sleep in the protected dark of the bed. They sat talking. What was thus dramatically made a present of to me was the secure sense of the hidden observer. As long as I could make myself keep awake, I was free to listen to every word my parents said between them.I don’t remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn’t supposed to—perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one. I was conscious of this secret and of my fast- beating heart in step together, as I lay in the slant-shaded light of the room with a brown, pear-shaped scorch in the newspaper shade where it had become overheated once.What they talked about I have no idea, and the subject was not what mattered to me. It was no doubt whatever a young married couple spending their first time privately in each other’s company in the long, probably harried day would talk about. It was the murmur of their voices, the back- and-forth, the unnoticed stretching away of time between my bedtime and theirs that made me back there at my distance. What I felt was not that I was excluded from them but that I was included, in—and because of—what I could hear of their voices and what I could see of their faces in the cone of yellow light under the brown-scorched shade.I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer; and owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind.A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began to write stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade, all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.I have always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go. As time and my imagination led me on, I did plunge.

阅读理解Passage 3 Southwell in Nottinghamshire is full of surprises

阅读理解Text 2 Trying to map the brain has always been cartography for fools

阅读理解 It used to be that a corporation's capital consisted of tangible assets such as buildings, machines, and finished goods. But, in the information economy, value has shifted rapidly from tangible to intangible assets, such as management skills and customer loyalty. But how do you measure intangible assets? Karl Erik Sveiby began trying to answer that question as a magazine publisher in Sweden and went to become Scandinavia's leading authority on knowledge-based businesses. In his latest book, The New Organizational Wealth, he offers insights into valuing and managing intangible assets. Noting that Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software firm, once traded at an average share price of $70 at a time when its book value was $7, Sveiby asks: 'What is it about Microsoft that makes it worth 10 times the value of its recorded assets? What is the nature of that additional value that is perceived by the market but not recorded by the company?' Sveiby's answer is intangible assets, which he defines as employee competence, internal structures (systems, patents, etc.), and external structures (customer and supplier relationships and the organization's image). Because of these factors, it follows that owners hold a kind of intangible equity in the company, in addition to tangible assets such as cash and accounts receivable. Since knowledge is a key intangible asset, the ability to transfer knowledge from one employee to another, or from outside sources to employees, is a key business capacity, in Sveiby's view. The greater the transfer of knowledge, the more overall employee competence improves. The best method for transferring knowledge, says Sveiby, is through direct experience with a subject rather than simply listening to someone or reading about it. Experience enables learning more than overt teaching because people acquire knowledge tacitly, by observation and listening in an unstructured environment. And, he adds, people will more readily learn from an activity if they enjoy it. Once the flow of information within an organization is managed properly, the competence of the organization increases, and the relations with customers improve. But Sveiby also points out that knowledge and information are not the same thing. Information has no value until it becomes integrated knowledge and therefore useful.

阅读理解Directions: In this part for the test, there will be 5 passages for you to read. Each passage is followed by 4 questions or unfinished statement, and each question or unfinished statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. You are to decide on the best choice by blackening the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.Passage One My last flight to Rome landed at stupid o’clock in the morning so I was almost looking forward to getting a cup of hot coffee from the flight crew. Instead, I opted for holding my eyelids up with two fingers so I could find the first coffee shop in the airport. Coffee always tastes terrible on planes and there could be a simple — and disgusting — reason why.A couple of weeks ago, an assortment of airline employees spilled some of their industry’s secrets in an Ask Reddit thread, and two of them had some unpleasant things to say about the coffee-makers. A user named Muddbutt7 wrote:“ Sometimes, the vehicle that fills the potable water for washing hands and making coffee is parked next to the vehicle that in used to dump the [toilets] and fill the blue juice for the lavatories. They’re not supposed to. Sometimes, they parked at a distance from each other, which is policy, yet the guy who is filling the water is using gloves that he hasn’t in over 2 years. ”While a second user named Worseto added:“The coffee is absolutely disgusting because no one washes the container that goes out every morning. The station agents who get paid way too little don’t give a [ expletive ] about cleaning it. I certainly didn’t when I worked for AA. Also, because we weren’t given the proper supplies to clean it. We pretty much just rinsed it out and dumped coffee into it. ”After reading those sort of stomach-churning confessions, Huffington Post attempted to determine how true those statements are. Abbie Unger, a former flight attendant, told the site:“It is true that the portable water tanks are not cleaned. But they are only filled with potable (drinkable) water, so it’s not like there is old coffee in a big container somewhere. The water doesn’t make for an excellent cup of coffee, but it’s not unsafe. ”So basically, the reason that cup of Starbucks during your Delta flight tastes worse than the cup you had at the airport is because of the water, which is a point that has been raised previously. The Environmental Protection Agency began investigating the safety of the water on airplanes in 2004, after discovering that 15%—or 1. 5 out of every 10 planes—tested positive for coliform bacteria in the drinking water.In 2013, NBC 5 looked into whether those numbers had improved and discovered that 12% of planes had at least one positive test for coliform in what was then the EPA’s most recent survey. Although the EPA said that there had not been any cases of anyone getting sick from the water onboard a plane, insiders still say that the tanks 一 and the hoses that are used to fill them 一 can be pretty gross (“pretty gross” is a highly scientific term).In a Forbes piece called “Why Airline Crews Skip the Coffee and Tea On Board”，former US Air employee John Goglia wrote:“Thirty years ago when I was working for US Air, we began a process to bleach the water tanks that hold the water and flush out the system. This was done on a regular basis. Yet, it was clear to anyone working on these tanks and their hoses that a lot of sediment was accumulating in the system, sediment that was akin to pond scum. Even after the tanks were bleached and flushed，some sediment always remained. ”Of course, there could be other reasons why the coffee tastes so unpleasant. Cornell University scientists believe that the loud, inescapable sound of cabin noise can affect the way we both perceive and taste foods during flight. Either way, we might just stick with coffee served at ground level from now on.

阅读理解Itisallverywelltoblametrafficjams,thecostofpetrolandthequickpaceofmodernlite,butmannersontheroadsarebecominghorrible.Everybodyknowsthatthenicestmenbecomemonstersbehindthewheel.Itisverywell,again,tohaveatigerinthetank,buttohaveoneinthedriver’sseatisanothermatteraltogether.Youmighttoleratetheoddroad-hog,therudeandinconsideratedriver,butnowadaysthewell-manneredmotorististheexceptiontotherule.Perhapsthesituationcallsfora“BeKindtoOtherDrivers”campaign,otherwiseitmaygetcompletelyoutofhand.Roadpolitenessisnotonlygoodmanners,butgoodsensetoo.Ittakesthemostcool-headedandgood-temperedofdriverstoresistthetemptationtorevengewhensubjectedtouncivilizedbehavior.Ontheotherhand,alittlepolitenessgoesalongwaytowardsrelievingthetensionsofmotoring.Afriendlynodorawaveofacknowledgementinresponsetoanactofpolitenesshelpstocreateanatmosphereofgoodwillandtolerancesonecessaryinmoderntrafficconditions.Butsuchacknowledgementsofpolitenessarealltooraretoday.Manydriversnowadaysdon’tevenseemabletorecognizepolitenesswhentheyseeit.However,misplacedpolitenesscanalsobedangerous.Typicalexamplesarethedriverwhobrakesviolentlytoallowacartoemergefromasidestreetatsomehazardtofollowingtraffic,whenafewsecondslatertheroadwouldbeclearanyway;orthemanwhowavesachildacrossazebracrossingintothepathofoncomingvehiclesthatmaybeunabletostopintime.Thesamegoesforencouragingoldladiestocrosstheroadwhereverandwhenevertheycareto.Italwaysamazesmethatthehighwaysarenotcoveredwiththedeadbodiesofthesegrannies.Aveterandriverwhosemannersarefaultless,toldmeitwouldhelpifmotoristslearnttofiltercorrectlyintotrafficstreamsoneatatimewithoutcausingthetotalblockagesthatgiverisetobadtemper.Unfortunately,modernmotoristscan’tevenlearntodrive,letalonemasterthesubtleraspectsofboatmanship.Yearsagotheexpertswarnedusthatthecar-ownershipexplosionwoulddemandalotmoregive-and-takefromallroadusers.Itishightimeforallofustotakethismessagetoheart.

阅读理解 Since the Nov.4 election, investors have been abandoning stocks in a kind of slow-motion crash that experts say underlines just how anxious they are about what is likely to be a long and deep recession. Even after a late-day rally on Friday, the benchmark Standard Poor's 500 index has plunged 20 percent since the election. That more than wiped out the index's 18 percent gain in the six trading days ahead of the balloting as optimism grew that Barack Obama would be elected president. Analysts aren't blaming Obama specifically for the post-election hangover. Rather, they peg it to growing fears that the Bush Administration and Congress are fumbling the $ 700 billion bailout plan and the weakened economy's impact on financial stocks—highlighted by the plunge in shares of Citigroup Inc. to below $ 4 a share. 'You can almost hear people yelling, 'Get me out at any price, ' ' said Al Goodman, chief market strategist at Wachovia Securities. 'It's the highest level of fear and depression in my 45 years as a student of the market.' Market experts define a crash as a decline of 20 percent over a single day or several days. Over seven trading days that ended Oct.9, the Dow lost 22 percent. This month, the SP 500 skidded more than 25 percent in the 12 trading days after the election before a bounceback on Friday narrowed the loss to 20 percent. All told, stocks have lost a stunning $ 2.6 trillion since Nov.4, as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 index, which reflects the value of nearly all U.S. stocks. The Friday afternoon news that Obama is likely to choose Timothy Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, to be the next Treasury secretary helped spark a rally that sent the Dow Jones industrial average surging almost 500 points. Geithner has worked closely with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke this year as the government seized control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer American International Group Inc. But analysts say it would be a mistake to say Friday's market reversal marks an end to the carnage that has wiped out 45.8 percent of the value of the SP 500 index since the start of the year. 'I don't think anyone can say we've reached the bottom yet, ' said Chuck Gabriel, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners in Washington. 'It's going to be a very gloomy Christmas.' Kim Caughey, equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh, said that 'for investors to get more confidence, we need to know details' of the new administration's plans to handle the crisis.' There's been a vacuum of leadership' she added, ' and when that happens, you get fear and rumors, and then people sell.'

阅读理解Who is Sir David Atten borough?

阅读理解B I am watching my son and hundreds of his classmates, marching in perfect order into the univer- sity football stadium(体育场)

阅读理解 Imagine a disease spreading across the globe, killing mostly middle-aged people or leaving them chronically disabled. Then one day researchers come up with a drug that can prevent some of the disease's nastier effects. You would think the world's ageing public would be eternally grateful. The disease does exist. It is called tobacco addiction. The drug too is real and in animal tests has prevented lung damage that leads to emphysema. But the inventors have received no bouquets. Prevailing medical opinion seems to be that the drug is a mere sideshow, distracting smokers from the task of quitting. Another experimental drug, which could protect smokers against cancer, is also viewed with suspicion because it could give smokers an excuse not to quit. On the face of it these responses make sense. It is ingrained in society that smokers have only themselves to blame and their salvation lies in a simple act of will. If they will not quit smoking, they cannot expect help from anyone else. But this logic is flawed. Check a survey of smokers and you find two-thirds want to give up and one-third will have tried in the previous year. Yet, even with nicotine gum, patches and drugs to ease the ordeal, the quit rate is still under 10 per cent. In the UK, the proportion of people who smoke has not fallen in a decade. Tobacco has a powerful grip, and many smokers are caught in a trap they cannot escape: they have a disease like any other and deserve the chance to reduce the harm it does to them. This reasoning is hard for many to swallow. It certainly leaves governments and anti-smoking groups in a bind. They are happy to pay lip service to methods for reducing harm—of which there are a growing number—but they are slow to create policies based upon them. European Union countries, for example, took years to even consider regulating the dangerous additives in cigarettes. One fear is that methods for reducing harm will dilute the message that tobacco kills—especially when given to youngsters. But that message won't change, in the present case, even if both drugs turn out to work in human trials, they would not protect against all the deadly side effects of smoking. And the drugs do not have to be free to all. They could be available only on prescription for people who doctors believe genuinely cannot give up. There are things that no drug aimed at harm reduction will ever be able to do. It will not cut passive smoking or stop tobacco companies persuading millions of teenagers to light up. For these reasons all other ways to counter smoking must continue, from banning tobacco advertising to raising tobacco taxes. But it would be a mistake to ignore the harm reduction measures. For those who are not convinced, forget smokers for a moment. Preventive drugs could also help non-smokers, especially those working long hours as, say, musicians and bar staff in smoky rooms. Should we deny them too?

阅读理解Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage 2Everyone is interested in whether different foods or nutrients affect our odds of getting diseases like cancer or of developing risk factors for those diseases, such as too much weight or high blood pressure. But there are many barriers to studying dietary change, which is why we still have no easy answers to the question of what, exactly, we should eat to be at our healthiest. It’s also why you can be forgiven for often feeling whipsawed by headlines: Is coffee good or bad? What about alcohol, garlic, or chocolate?This week researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that breast cancer survivors who cram their diets with fruits and vegetables are no more likely to escape a recurrence than women who stick to the usual five-a-day recommendation. Does that mean fruits and vegetables don’t protect against cancer? No—just that in this specific group of women with breast cancer, the extra greens and additional apples didn’t seem to help.We asked researchers to explain why studies involving dietary changes are so hard to do—and what consumers should keep in mind when they read about them. Here’s what the experts said:Most diet studies take place in the real world. That means study subjects are keeping diaries of what they eat as they go rather than having their intake strictly controlled by someone else. You can give them meal advice, counseling, and how-to books up to their ears, but at the end of the day, they are on their own when it comes to what they put in their mouths. It’s easier to get people to add something—like garlic, in the form of tasty sandwich spreads, or dark chocolate—than to take something away; no wonder a recent study comparing low-fat and low-carb diet plans found that almost no one was sticking to them by the end.In studies focusing on diet, including the recent study on breast cancer recurrence, the amount of calories subjects reported eating would have caused them to lose far more weight than they actually did lose. The misreporting isn’t necessarily vicious, but the inaccuracies add up. Say you’re phoned about your daily intake on a day when it was someone’s birthday at work and you had a slice of cake. You may not report it, thinking that a typical day wouldn’t include the cake forgetting yesterday’s “special occasion” piece of pizza, and the Big Gulp of the day before. Or, despite the portion size guides you get, you characterize your bagel from the deli as a 4- ounce standard serving when a 4-ounce bagel hasn’t been sighted in any major city for a decade.“You can’t put a camera in everyone’s belly and see exactly what they ate,” says Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at the Stanford Prevention Research Center who has recently published research on garlic and diet plans. You can get around this in some studies by taking objective measurements. Weight, for example, or if you’re assessing intake of fruits and veggies, you can measure the level of pigments called carotenoids in the blood. In the breast cancer study, blood tests showed that the study subjects actually did eat more fruits and veggies (carotenoid concentration was 73 percent higher in those women after one year and 43 percent higher after four years). But objective measures can’t definitively nail down whether someone is eating nutrients in certain proportions.

阅读理解We’ve all heard about endangered animals. Creatures like the critically endangered black rhinoceros are famous. But what are the most endangered plants? They might not be as exciting or loveable as animals, but they are just as important to the ecosystem — and humanity relies on that ecosystem. Here are three of the most threatened plants today.【B6】______These plants occupy some of the most inaccessible, remote parts of our planet. They are threatened by habitat destruction, illegal collection, poaching, and competition with invading species. Attenborough’s pitcher plant is known only from the relatively inaccessible summit of Mount Victoria in Palawan in the Philippines. There are thought to be only a few hundred of them.【B7】______Attenborough’s pitcher plant is one of the biggest, with pitchers up to 30 cm in height that can trap insects and rats. It was only discovered in 2007 when a team of botanists, tipped off by two Christian missionaries, scaled Mount Victoria. 【B8】______ The suicide palm is a gigantic palm found only in remote parts of north-west Madagascar. It lives for about 50 years, then flowers only once, and dies soon after. Suicide palms were discovered in 2005 by a cashew plantation manager during a family outing, and formally described in 2008. With trunks reaching 18 m in height, and huge fan-leaves up to 5 m across, the palms can be seen on Google Earth. 【B9】______ The coral tree, with its bright red flowers and spiny trunk, occurs only in the remote forests of south-east Tanzania.【B10】______However, the forest patch was cleared to grow biofuels, and the species was feared to have gone extinct again until it was re-rediscovered in 2011. There are now fewer than 50 mature individuals in the wild, in a single unprotected location. A. Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants that trap animals in liquid-filled bowls called pitchers. B. They are almost all classed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). C. It was declared extinct in 1998, but rediscovered in 2001 in a small patch of forest. D. As a result, the population has dropped more than 95% over the last 20 years. E. There are only about 90 in the wild. F. It is named after British natural history broadcaster David Attenborough.

阅读理解Oddly, the latter must suppose that speaking loudly will somehow make up for the listeners apparent lack of comprehension

阅读理解Passage Three As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place where many are looking for solutions is in the classroom

阅读理解 I strongly believe that understanding is more important than love, especially when it comes to parenting and intimate relationships. As a psychologist for more than twenty years I can tell you that I have never had an adult looking back at her childhood and complaining that her parents were too understanding. And similarly, I have met many divorced people who still love each other but yet they never really understood each other. The painful reality is that love is just not enough. I'll admit that there are people who I love and who I still need to better understand. I hope I'll continue my work to understand them. The willingness to understand is very important. It is not always easy, but healthy love is strengthened by the willingness to understand. Love without understanding will wilt like flowers without water. Our egos are what seem to get in the way of understanding those who we love and care about. Often it is our need to be right that makes what others think and feel so wrong for us. I have certainly been quite guilty of this in some of my relationships. As I have written repeatedly in my books, empathy, is truly the emotional glue that holds all close relationships together. Empathy allows us to slow down and try to walk in the shoes of those we love. The deeper our empathy, the deeper—and healthier—our love. Not all relationships are meant to be. Yet all relationships that are meant to flourish in a healthy way, must stress understanding just as much, if not more, than love.

阅读理解 Back in 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius realized that by burning coal we were adding carbon dioxide to the air, and that this would warm the Earth. But he mentioned the issue only in passing (顺便地), for his calculations suggested it would not become a problem for thousands of years. Others thought that the oceans would soak up any extra CO2, so there was nothing much to worry about. That this latter argument has persisted to this day in some quarters highlights our species' propensity (倾向) to underestimate the scale of our impact on the planet. Even the Earth's vast oceans cannot suck up CO2 as quickly as we can produce it, and we now know the stored CO2 is acidifying the oceans, a problem in itself. Now a handful of researchers are warning that energy sources we normally think of as innocuous could affect the planet's climate too. If we start to extract immense amounts of power from the wind, for instance, it will have an impact on how warmth and water move around the planet, and thus on temperatures and rainfall. Just to be clear, no one is suggesting we should stop building wind farms on the basis of this risk. Aside from the huge uncertainties about the climatic effects of extracting power from the wind, our present and near-term usage is far too tiny to make any difference. For the moment, any negative consequences on the climate are massively outweighed by the effects of pumping out even more CO2. That poses by far the greater environmental threat; weaning ourselves off fossil fuels should remain the priority. Even so, now it is the time to start thinking about the long-term effects of the alternative energy sources we are turning to. Those who have already started to look at these issues report weary, indifferent or even hostile reactions to their work. That's understandable, but disappointing. These effects may be inconsequential, in which case all that will have been wasted is some research time that may well yield interesting insights anyway. Or they may turn out to be sharply negative, in which case the more notice we have, the better. It would be unfortunate to put it mildly, to spend countless trillions replacing fossil-fuel energy infrastructure(基础建设) only to discover that its successor(替代物) is also more damaging than it need be. These climatic effects may even be beneficial. The first, tentative models suggest that extracting large amounts of energy from high-altitude jet streams would cool the planet, counteracting the effects of rising greenhouse gases. It might even be possible to build an energy infrastructure that gives us a degree of control over the weather: turning off wind turbines here, capturing more of the sun's energy there. We may also need to rethink our long-term research priorities. The sun is ultimately the only source of energy that doesn't end up altering the planet's energy balance. So the best bet might be invest heavily in improving solar technology and energy storage—rather than in efforts to harness, say, nuclear fusion. For the moment, all of this remains supposition(推测). But our species has a tendency to myopia. We have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by taking the long view for a change.

阅读理解Passage 3 Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage: When Bill de Blasio ran for New York City mayor last year, he promised to end a controversial (有争议的), citywide cell-phone ban(禁令)in public schools, which is not equally enforced in all schools

阅读理解I walked slowly to the teachers office wondering ________ she decided to talk with me

阅读理解Text 1 Today there are three different kinds of New Yorkers: the people who act as if they were born here; the people who are here and wish to be elsewhere; and the collection of virtual New Yorkers all over the world, who wish they were hying in New York

阅读理解China is the most populous nation in the world; India has one billion people in a land one-third the size of Australia; and Indonesia, the fourth, most-populous nation, has 107 people crammed into each square kilometer of land