阅读理解An invisible border divides those arguing for computers in the classroom on the behalf of students'' career prospects and those arguing for computers in the classroom for broader reasons of radical educational reform. Very few writers on the subject have explored this distinction--indeed, contradiction--which goes to the heart of what is wrong with the campaign to put computers in the classroom. 　　An education that aims at getting a student a certain kind of job is a technical education. Justified for reasons radically different from why education is universally required by law. It is not simply to raise everyone''s job prospects that all children are legally required to attend school into their teens. Rather,we have a certain conception of the American citizen, a character who is incomplete if he cannot competently assess how his livelihood and happiness are affected by things outside of himself. But this was not always the case, before it was legally required for all children to attend school until a certain age, it was widely accepted that some were just not equipped by nature to pursue this kind of education. With optimism characteristic of all industrialized countries, we came to accept that everyone is fit to be educated. Computer-education advocates forsake this optimistic notion for a pessimism that betrays their otherwise cheery outlook. Banking on the confusion between educational and vocational reasons for bringing computers into schools, computer-education advocates often emphasize the job prospects of graduates over their educational achievement. 　　There are some good arguments for a technical education given the fight kind of student. Many European schools introduce the concept of professional training early on in order to make sure children are properly equipped for the professions they want to join. It is, however, presumptuous to insist that there will only be so many jobs for so many scientists, so many businessmen, so many accountants. Besides, this is unlikely to produce the needed number of every kind of professional in a country as large as ours and where the economy is spread over so many states and involves so many international corporations. 　　But, for a small group of students, professional training might be the way to go since well- developed skills, all other factors being equal, can be the difference between having a job and not. Of course,the basics of using any computer these days are very simple. It does not take a lifelong acquaintance to pick up various software programs. If one wanted to become a computer engineer, that is, of course, and entirely different story. Basic computer skills take--at the very longest--a couple of months to learn. In any case, basic computer skills are only complementary to the host of real skillsthat are necessary to becoming any kind of professional. It should be observed, of course, that no school, vocational or not, is helped by a confusion over its purpose.

阅读理解Passage Three A young woman was riding the subway with her small dog

阅读理解Text Four 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If you want to know why Denmark is the world‟s leader in wind power, start with a three-hour car trip from the capital Copenhagenmind the bicycliststo the small town of Lem on the far west coast of Jutland

阅读理解Passage 3 Developing a peaceful, understanding, and supportive relationship between parents and children is not an easy task

阅读理解Those who’ve heard of Zane Grey usually identify him as the author of best-selling westerns, but few realize that he was the commercially most successful American author of the 1920s. Each year from 1915 to 1924, he had a new novel on the annual list of top-10 bestsellers. Riders of the Purple Sage, The Light of Western Stars, and The Rainbow Trail are still popular, but Grey’s best story may be his own colorful and remarkably little-known life. Zane Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio. Grey recalled his own youth as full of relentless conflicts with his stern, demanding father, a farmer’s son who had become a successful dentist in Zanesville. Grey’s delinquency and poor record in school exacerbated matters. Then, midway through his junior year, he had to drop out of high school to help his father who suddenly became poor by pulling teeth for needy locals. For diversion, Grey played baseball — with enough talent to earn scholarships to several universities. He chose the University of Pennsylvania not only for its accomplished team, but also for its dental school, which offered him immediate admission, sparing him the tough undergraduate program. After graduation, he concentrated more on baseball than dentistry, hoping to reach the major leagues, but to no avail. He retreated to a full-time practice in New York City, but quickly discovered that writing about ancestors whose lives were more distinguished and exciting than his was preferable to coping with decayed teeth and bad breath. During a summer escape in 1900 to rural Lackawaxen on the upper Delaware River, he met Lina “Dolly”Roth, 11 years younger, a New York doctor’s daughter who enthusiastically supported his yearning to become a writer. After their marriage in 1905, her substantial inheritance enabled him to quit dentistry and write full time. Their cross-country honeymoon trip carried them to the Grand Canyon at the dawn of its tourist appeal. Grey was captivated by the canyon’s natural splendor. He would return there twice more for mountain-lion hunts, which inspired Heritage of the Desert, his first western story, published in 1910 when he was 38. For the next 15 years, he returned annually to the Southwest to find new material for more books.

阅读理解What a UK exit from EU could mean? Perhaps UK Prime Minister David Cameron believed back in 2013, when he promised a referendum on whether Britain would stay in the EU, that Euroskeptics couldnt possibly win

阅读理解The Internet, E-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. In the future,capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on networkedrelationships, contractual arrangements and access rights.Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportionto all the new Internet and business-to-business Internet services being introduced into our lives? Ihave asked this question of hundreds of CEOS and corporate executives in Europe and the UnitedStates. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, “No, quite contrary.” The very people responsiblefor ushering in what some have called a “technological renaissance” say they are working longerhours, feel more stressed, are more impatient, and are even less civil in their dealings with colleaguesand friends—not to mention strangers. And whats more revealing, they place much of the blame onthe very same technologies they are so aggressively championing.The techno gurus promised us that access would make life more convenient and give us more time.Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to liberate us have begun to enslave us ina web of connections from which there seems to be no easy escape.If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast geographic frontier,the .com generation, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. Every spare moment ofour time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the most scarceof all resources. Our e-mail, voice mail and cell phones, our 24-hour Interact news and entertainmentall seize for our attention.And while we have created every kind of labor-and time-saving device to service our needs, we arebeginning to feel like we have less time available to us than any other humans in history. That isbecause the great proliferation of labor-and-time-saving services only increases the diversity, paceand flow of commodified activity around us. For example, e-mail is a great convenience. However,we now find ourselves spending much of our day frantically responding to each other’s electronicmessages. The cell phone is a great time-saver. Except now we are always potentially in reach ofsomeone else who wants our attention.Social conservatives talk about the decline in civility and blame it on the loss of a moral compass andreligious values. Has anyone bothered to ask whether the hyper speed culture is making all of us lesspatient and less willing to listen and defer, consider and reflect?Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really count and what types of access really matterin the e-economy era. If this new technology revolution is only about hyper efficiency, then we risklosing something even precious than time—our sense of what it means to be a caring human being.

阅读理解Passage 2 Advertisers tend to think big and perhaps this is why theyre always coming in for criticism

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

阅读理解What does the author mostly want to tell us in the last paragraph?

阅读理解Directions: There are 4 passages in this part. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D. You should decide on the best choice.Passage 2Psychologists have found that privately made confidential resolutions are rarely followed, whereas a public commitment to achieve some goal, such as losing weight or giving up smoking is likely to be much more effective. This is because the approval of others for doing something desirable is valued. In contrast, disapproval for failure can lead to feelings of shame.Advertising agencies have designed studies bearing out the truth of this observation. In this research, a group of strangers was bombarded with information about the qualities of a particular product. They were then asked to either announce out loud or write down privately whether they intended to buy the product. It was later discovered that those who publicly declared their intention to buy were considerably more likely to do so than those who affirmed their intentions in private.In another study, an experimenter claiming to represent a local utility company interviewed house owners telling them he was investigating ways in which energy consumption could be reduced. Half the subjects, randomly selected, were told that if they agreed to conserve energy their names would be mentioned in an article published in the local newspaper; the remaining half were told their names would not be used. All those interviewed agreed to cooperate and signed a form either giving consent for their names to be used or stating that their names would not be used. Later in the year, the amount of gas consumed in each house was recorded. The owners who had agreed to their names being published had used significantly less gas than those who remained anonymous.

阅读理解It is hard to think of an industry in which competition is more important than pharmaceuticals

阅读理解Directions: In this section, there are 4 passages followed by multiple-choice questions. Read the passage and thenwrite ONE best answer for each question on your ANSWER SHEET.Passage ThreeWe have all heard of experts who fail basic tests of sensory discrimination in their own field: wine snobs who can’t tell red from white wine (though in blackened cups), or art critics who see deep meaning in random lines drawn by a computer. We delight in such stories since anyone claiming to be an authority is fair game. But what if we shine the spotlight on choices we make about everyday things? Experts might be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of their skills as experts, but could we be forgiven for being wrong about the limits of our skills as experts on ourselves?We have been trying to answer this question using techniques from magic performances. Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we secretly altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to secretly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering “reasons” for their “choice”.We called this effect “choice blindness”, echoing change blindness, the phenomenon identified by psychologists where a remarkably large number of people fail to spot a major change in their environment. Recall the famous experiments where X asks Y for directions; while Y is struggling to help, X is switched for Z ─ and. Y fails to notice. Researchers are still pondering the full implications, but it does show how little information we use in daily life, and undermines the idea that we know what is going on around us.When we set out, we aimed to weigh in on the enduring, complicated debate about self-knowledge and intentionality. For all the intimate familiarity we feel we have with decision making, it is very difficult to know about it from the “inside”: one of the great barriers for scientific research is the nature of subjectivity.As anyone who has ever been in a verbal disagreement can prove, people tend to give elaborate justifications for their decisions, which we have every reason to believe are nothing more than rationalizations after the event. To prove such people wrong, though, or even provide enough evidence to change their mind, is an entirely different matter: who are you to say what my reasons are?But with choice blindness we drive a large wedge between intentions and actions in the mind. As our participants give us verbal explanations about choices they never made, we can show them beyond doubt ─ and prove it ─ that what they say cannot be true. So our experiments offer a unique window into confabulation (the story-telling we do to justify things after the fact) that is otherwise very difficult to come by. We can compare everyday explanations with those under lab conditions, looking for such things as the amount of detail in descriptions, how coherent the narrative is, the emotional tone, or even the timing or flow of the speech. Then we can create a theoretical framework to analyse any kind of exchange.This framework could provide a clinical use for choice blindness: for example, two of our ongoing studies examine how malingering might develop into true symptoms, and how confabulation might play a role in obsessive- compulsive disorder.Importantly, the effects of choice blindness go beyond snap judgments. Depending on what our volunteers say in response to the mismatched outcomes of choices (whether they give short or long explanations, give numerical rating or labeling, and so on) we found this interaction could change their future preferences to the extent that they come to prefer the previously rejected alternative. This gives us a rare glimpse into the complicated dynamics of self- feedback (“I chose this, I publicly said so, therefore I must like it”), which we suspect lies behind the formation of many everyday preferences.We also want to explore the boundaries of choice blindness. Of course, it will be limited by choices we know to be of great importance in everyday life. Which bride or bridegroom would fail to notice if someone switched their partner at the altar through amazing sleight of hand? Yet there is ample territory between the absurd idea of spouse- swapping, and the results of our early face experiments.For example, in one recent study we invited supermarket customers to choose between two paired varieties of jam and tea. In order to switch each participant’s choice without them noticing, we created two sets of “magical” jars, with lids at both ends and a divider inside. The jars looked normal, but were designed to hold one variety of jam or tea at each end, and could easily be flipped over.Immediately after the participants chose, we asked them to taste their choice again and tell us verbally why they made that choice. Before they did, we turned over the sample containers, so the tasters were given the opposite of what they had intended in their selection. Strikingly, people detected no more than a third of all these trick trials. Even when we switched such remarkably different flavors as spicy cinnamon and apple for bitter grapefruit jam, the participants spotted less than half of all switches.We have also documented this kind of effect when we simulate online shopping for consumer products such as laptops or cell phones, and even apartments. Our latest tests are exploring moral and political decisions, a domain where reflection and deliberation are supposed to play a central role, but which we believe is perfectly suited to investigating using choice blindness.Throughout our experiments, as well as registering whether our volunteers noticed that they had been presented with the alternative they did not choose, we also quizzed them about their beliefs about their decision processes. How did they think they would feel if they had been exposed to a study like ours? Did they think they would have noticed the switches? Consistently, between 80 and 90 percent of people said that they believed they would have noticed something was wrong.Imagine their surprise, even disbelief, when we told them about the nature of the experiments. In everyday decision- making we do see ourselves as knowing a lot about ourselves, but like the wine buff or art critic, we often overstate what we know. The good news is that this form of decision snobbery should not be too difficult to treat. Indeed, after reading this article you might already be cured.

阅读理解Text 4 Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world

阅读理解 Each day, computers help millions of people do their jobs more effectively. For example, they can help managers decide on a future course of action, and they can then help with the follow-up checks on performance to see if planned goals are being achieved．By using accurate and timely facts supplied by data base management software, a manager can do a better job of identifying problems and opportunities. And managers may not need to spend as much time in controlling when a computer can respond with a triggered report if actual performance varies from what was planned．The time saved in controlling may allow managers to give more attention to employees' concerns, and this, in turn, may result in improved morale (士气). But employment benefits certainly aren't restricted to managers. Healthcare researchers and other scientists also use computers to conduct research into complex problem areas that couldn't otherwise be studied．Lawyers use online legal data banks to locate precedent (先前的) cases in order to serve clients better. Salespeople can receive more timely information about products in stock, can promise customers that their sales orders will be handled promptly, and can thus improve their sales performance because of the computer system. And the job duties of some office and factory workers have changed from routine, repetitive operations to more varied and appealing tasks through computer usage. For example, office workers who understand text processing, computing, and data communication usually have vital roles and are given critical office functions to perform.

阅读理解The author believed that the new awards are

阅读理解 Gene therapy and gene based drugs are two ways we could benefit from our growing mastery of genetic science. But there will be others as well. Here is one of the remarkable therapies on the cutting edge of genetic research that could make their way into mainstream medicine in the coming years. While it's true that just about every cell in the body has the instructions to make a complete human, most of those instructions are inactivated, and with good reason: the last thing you want for your brain cells is to start churning out stomach acid or your nose to turn into a kidney. The only time cells truly have the potential to turn into any and all body parts is very early in a pregnancy, when so called stem cells haven't begun to specialize. Yet this untapped potential could be a terrific boon to medicine. Most diseases involve the death of healthy cells—brain cells in Alzheimer's, cardiac cells in heart disease, pancreatic cells in diabetes, to name a few; if doctors could isolate stem cells, then direct their growth, they might be able to furnish patients with healthy replacement tissue. It was incredibly difficult, but last fall scientists at the University of Wisconsin managed to isolate stem cells and get them to grow into neural, gut, muscle and bone cells. The process still can't be controlled, and may have unforeseen limitations; but if efforts to understand and master stem cell development prove successful, doctors will have a therapeutic tool of incredible power. The same applies to cloning, which is really just the other side of the coin. True cloning, as first shown with the sheep Dolly two years ago, involves taking a developed cell and reactivating the genome within, resetting its developmental instructions to a pristine state. Once that happens, the rejuvenated cell can develop into a full-fledged animal, genetically identical to its parent. For agriculture, in which purely physical characteristics like milk production in a cow or low fat in a hog have real market value, biological carbon copies could become routine within a few years. This past year scientists have done for mice and cows what Ian Wilmut did for Dolly, and other creatures are bound to join the cloned menagerie in the coming year. Human cloning, on the other hand, may be technically feasible but legally and emotionally more difficult. Still, one day it will happen. The ability to reset body cells to a pristine, undeveloped state could give doctors exactly the same advantages they would get from stem cells: the potential to make healthy body tissues of all sorts, and thus to cure disease. That could prove to be a true 'miracle cure'.

阅读理解International airlines have rediscovered the business travelers, the man or woman who regularly jets from country to country as part of the job. This does not necessarily mean that airlines ever abandoned their business travelers. Indeed, companies like Lufthansa and Swissair would rightly argue that they have always catered best for the executive class passengers. But many lines could be accused of concentrating too heavily in the recent past on attracting passengers by volume, often at the expense of regular travelers. Too often, they have seemed geared for quantity rather than quality. Operating a major airline in the 1980s is essentially a matter of finding the right mix of passengers. The airlines need to fill up the back end of their wide-bodied jets with low fare passengers, without forgetting that the front end should be filled with people who pay substantially more for their tickets. It is no coincidence that the two major airline bankruptcies in 1982 were among the companies specializing in cheap flights. But low fares require consistently full aircraft to make flights economically viable, and in the recent recession the volume of traffic has not grown. Equally the large number of airlines jostling for the available passengers has created a huge excess of capacity. The net result of excess capacity and cutthroat competition driving down fares has been to push some airlines into collapse and leave many others hovering on the edge. Against this severe background, it is no surprise that airlines are turning increasingly towards the business travelers to improve their rates of return. They have invested much time and effort to establish exactly what the executive demands for sitting apart from the tourists. High on the list of priorities is punctuality; an executive''s time is money. In-flight service is another area where the airlines are jostling for the executive''s attention. The free drinks and headsets and better foods are all part of the lure.

阅读理解 Imagine a world where your doctor could help you avoid sickness, using knowledge of your genes as well as how you live your life. Or where he would prescribe drugs he knew would work and not have debilitating side-effects. Such a future is arriving faster than most realise: genetic tests are already widely used to identify patients who will be helped or harmed by certain drugs. And three years ago, in the face of a torrent of new scientific data, a number of new companies set themselves up to interpret this information for customers. Through shop fronts on the internet, anyone could order a testing kit, spit into a tube and send off their DNA—with results downloaded privately at home. Already customers can find out their response to many common medications, such as antivirals and blood-thinning agents. They can also explore their genetic likelihood of developing deep-vein thrombosis, skin cancer or glaucoma. The industry has been subject to conflicting criticisms. On the one hand, it stands accused of offering information too dangerous to trust to consumers; on the other it is charged with peddling irrelevant, misleading nonsense. For some rare disorders, such as Huntington's and Tay-Sachs, genetic information is a diagnosis. But most diseases are more complicated and involve several genes, or an environmental component, or both. Someone's chance of getting skin cancer, for example, will depend on whether he worships the sun as well as on his genes. America's Government Accountability Office (GAO) report also revealed what the industry has openly admitted for years: that results of disease-prediction tests from different companies sometimes conflict with one another, because there is no industry-wide agreement on standard lifetime risks. Governments hate this sort of anarchy and America's, in particular, is considering regulation. But three things argue against wholesale regulation. First, the level of interference needs to be based on the level of risk a test represents. The government does not need to be involved if someone decides to trace his ancestry or discover what type of earwax he has. Second, the laws on fraud should be sufficient to deal with the snake-oil salesmen who promise to predict, say, whether a child might be a sporting champion. And third, science is changing very fast. Fairly soon, a customer's whole genome will be sequenced, not merely the parts thought to be medically relevant that the testing companies now concentrate on, and he will then be able to crank the results through open-source interpretation software downloadable from anywhere on the planet. That will create problems, but the only way to stop that happening would be to make it illegal for someone to have his genome sequenced— and nobody is seriously suggesting that illiberal restriction. Instead, then, of reacting in a hostile fashion to the trend for people to take genetic tests, governments should be asking themselves how they can make best use of this new source of information. Restricting access to tests that inform people about bad reactions to drugs could do harm. The real question is not who controls access, but how to minimise the risks and maximise the rewards of a useful revolution.