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问答题American Dream The term "American dream" is widely used today. But what exactly does this concept mean? Where does the term come from? Has the meaning of the term changed over time? Questions like these can complicate a seemingly simple term and lead us to an even more important question: is the American dream a myth or a reality today? The term "American dream" first appeared in a ramous novel written by Horatio Alger in 1867. The novel, Ragged Dick, was a "rags to riches" story about a little orphan boy who lived in New York. The boy saved all his pennies, worked very hard, and eventually became rich. The novel sent the message to the American public that anyone could succeed in America if they were honest, worked hard, and showed determination to succeed. No matter what your background, no matter where you were from, no matter if you had no money or no family, hard work and perseverance would always lead to success. Today, the message from Alger"s novel is still a prevalent one in this country. It is still used to define the American dream. A very basic definition of the American dream is that it is the hope of the American people to have a better quality of life and a higher standard of living than their parents. This can mean that each generation hopes for better jobs, or more financial security, or ownership of land or a home. However, new versions and variations of the American dream have surfaced since Alger"s novel was published. For one thing, the idea that Americans are always seeking to improve their lifestyle also suggests that each generation wants more than the previous generation had. Some people would argue that this ever-increasing desire to improve the quality of one"s life may have started out on a smaller scale, in the past, but today has led to an out-of-control consumerism and materialism. Another, more benign view of the American dream is that it is about the desire to create opportunities for ourselves, usually through hard work. A hallmark of the American dream, some would argue, is the classic "self-starter," the person who starts out with very little in life—little money, few friends, few opportunities—and works hard to make his or her way in the world. A classic example of this type of American dreamer would be former president Abraham Lincoln, who was born in a log cabin, was largely self-educated, and yet worked his way up in the world to eventually become a United States president. This view of the American dream has also been associated with immigrants and their quests for a better life in a new country. Americans have long been fascinated by immigrant stories, and many feel great pride about their own families who may have come from other countries, worked very hard, and created a better life for future generations. A more recent interpretation of the American dream has to do with equality. Civil rights activists such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used some of the rhetoric associated with the American dream to urge people to work for equal opportunities for all Americans, not just some Americans. A harsh reality was becoming clear to some people, especially in the 1960s and 1970s: not everyone had the same opportunities. If people were denied jobs, education, or other opportunities because of their race, ethnic background, or gender, was the American dream only a myth?

问答题Genghis Khan massacred the population of whole cities as he built his Mongol empire. But in 1227, when his son avenged his death by ordering the slaying of the Central Asian Tangut people, he destroyed a whole culture, as the local Tangut language was never again spoken. The world now loses a language every two weeks, a rate unprecedented in history. Of course, not all meet such a violent end. Two lively and accessible new books, Andrew Dalby"s Language in Danger and The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, map the intricate combination of politics, genocide, geography and economics that more typically conspire in their demise—and ask whether we are losing a testament to human creativity that rivals great works of art. Linguists estimate that in 100 years fewer than half the world"s 6,000 languages will still be in use. Will this mean a more peaceful, communicative world or an arid linguistic desert, subject to the tyranny of the monoglot yoke? In answering this question, Dalby and McWhorter take us on a fascinating and colorful spin through history, chronicling the rise of empires and crisscrossing the globe to take in the indigenous tribes of west Africa, Tasmania and the Amazon, tracking down itinerant healers in Bolivia, whale hunters off the coast of Germany, Russian immigrants in New York—in short, anyone who can cast light on the unique ways people communicate. McWhorter likens linguistic change to Darwin"s theory of evolution, arguing that languages, like animals and plants, inevitably split into subvarieties, alter in response to environmental pressures and evolve new forms and useless features. In prose that is bold and compelling, he warns against seeing grammar as a repository of culture, arguing that it is more often formed by chance and convenience and does not reflect its speakers" world view any more than "a pattern of spilled milk reveals anything specific about the bottle it came from". His theory is slightly undermined by careless errors, a Latin sentence he has composed, on which his first chapter rests, has four mistakes in nine words. (Later, rather amazingly, he bungles the masculine and neuter forms of illa, the basic word for "that". ) Rather than disassociating languages from the people who speak them, Dalby takes on the difficult but equally rewarding challenge of drawing out the distinct consciousness expressed by each tongue. As Babel becomes homogenized, surviving languages have fewer new words and ideas to draw on. Without Greek there would be no "wine-dark sea". We would not "bury the hatchet" if American Indians hadn"t done it already. Despite these differences, both authors agree that with each language we learn, our ability to comprehend the world is given fresh, new scope. The word for "world" in Yupik, an Eskimo-Aleut language of Alaska, encompasses weather, outdoors, awareness and sense, as compared with its European equivalents, which tend to refer to "people, a crowd, inhabitants", as in the French "du monde", a lot of people, or the classical Greek "he oikoumene", meaning the settled zone. Whereas in English we may simply say "he is chopping trees", Tuyuca speakers in the Amazon rain forest must change their suffixes to specify whether this was told to them, they saw it themselves, they heard the sound or they"re simply guessing. Why are these languages disappearing? Globalization is the modern equivalent of Genghis Khan, both authors argue. English is now competently spoken by about 1.8 billion people worldwide. Parents consider it the key to a more prosperous life. Fearing that without fluency in the languages of the cultures of "tall buildings" their children will be deprived of standardized education and the ability to reap the rewards of international trade, they allow their own tongues to die off with the elderly. Dalby and McWhorter rewrite the script on language change from nearly opposite but equally intelligent perspectives, agreeing on the most significant point, if our rich linguistic heritage is not preserved, even English speakers may find themselves uncomfortably lost for words.

问答题During the term of this Contract, all technical documentation, including but not limited to manufacturing technologies, procedures, methods, formulas, data, techniques and know-how, to be provided by one Party to the other shall be treated by the recipient as "Confidential Information". Each Party agrees to use Confidential Information received from the other Party only for the purpose contemplated by this Contract and for no other purposes. Confidential Information provided is not to be reproduced in any form except as required to accomplish the intent of, and in accordance with the terms of, this Contract. Title to such information and the interest related thereto shall remain with the provider all the time. Each Party shall provide the same care to avoid disclosure or unauthorized use of the other Party"s Confidential Information as it provides to protect its own similar proprietary information. Confidential Information must be kept by the recipient in a secure place with access limited to only such Party"s employees or agents who need to know such information for the purposes of this Contract and who have similarly agreed to keep such information confidential pursuant to a written confidentiality agreement which reflects the terms hereof. The obligations of confidentiality pursuant to this Article shall survive the termination or expiration of this Contract for a period of five years.

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问答题Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted the Stars and Stripes atop Iwo Jima"s Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are sparring over the accuracy of Eastwood"s two films about the clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling the role of African Americans in the battle, Eastwood has whitewashed history. "Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said last month at the Cannes Film Festival. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist." Eastwood bristled at the charge. "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn"t raise the flag," he countered in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people"d go, "This guy"s lost his mind."" Eastwood also suggested Lee should "shut his face". That didn"t go down so well. Eastwood "is not my father, and we"re not on a plantation either," Lee fumed. "I"m not making this up. I know history." History, as it turns out, is on both their sides. Lee is correct that African Americans played a key role in World War II, in which more than 1 million black servicemen helped topple the Axis powers. He is correct too in pointing out that African-American forces made significant contributions to the fight for Iwo Jima. An estimated 700 to 900 African Americans, trained in segregated boot camps, participated in the landmark battle, which claimed the lives of about 6,800 servicemen, nearly all Marines. Racial prejudice shunted blacks into supply roles in Iwo Jima, but that didn"t mean they were safe. Under enemy fire, they braved perilous beach landings, unloaded and shuttled ammunition to the front lines and weathered Japanese onslaughts on their positions. "Shells, mortar and hand grenades don"t know the difference of color," says Thomas McPhatter, an African-American Marine who hauled ammo during the battle. "Everybody out there was trying to cover their butts to survive." But Eastwood"s portrayal of the battle is also essentially accurate. Flags of Our Fathers zeroes in on the soldiers who hoisted the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi. None of the six servicemen seen in Joe Rosenthal"s famous photograph—the iconic image depicts the second flag-raising attempt; the first wasn"t visible to other U.S. troops on Iwo Jima—were black. (Eastwood"s other film, Letters from Iwo Jima , is told largely from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.) Eastwood is also correct that black soldiers represented only a small fraction of the total force deployed on the island. That may be true, but it is not enough to placate Yvonne Latty, the author of a book about African-American veterans. Given the hazards of their mission and the virulent racism they endured—McPhatter says he has to execute his mission without giving orders to white troops, even if they were needed—Latty argues that black soldiers warrant more than fleeting inclusion in the film. Christopher Paul Moore, author of a book about black soldiers in World War II, praises Eastwood"s rendering of the battle but laments the limited role it accords African Americans. "Without black labor," he says, "we would"ve seen a much different ending to the war." Adds Latty: "The way America learns history, unfortunately, is through movies." Eastwood poignantly memorialized a heroic chapter in American warfare. But using a wider-angle lens might have brought into sharper focus a group often elbowed to history"s fringes.

问答题 Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. You will hear the passages ONLY ONCE. After you have heard each passage, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. You may take notes while you are listening.

问答题Robots came into the world as a literary device whereby the writers and film-makers of the early 20th century could explore their hopes and fears about technology, as the era of the automobile, telephone and aeroplane picked up its reckless jazz-age speed. Since moving from the page and screen to real life, robots have been a mild disappointment. They do some things that humans cannot do themselves, like exploring Mars, and a host of things people do not much want to do, like dealing with unexploded bombs or vacuuming floors. And they are very useful in bits of manufacturing. 　　But reliable robots-especially ones required to work beyond the safety cages of a factory floor—have proved hard to make, and robots are still pretty stupid. So although they fascinate people, they have not yet made much of a mark on the world. That seems about to change. The dramatic growth in the power of silicon chips, digital sensors and high bandwidth communications improves robots just as it improves all sorts of other products.

问答题For America"s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university"s popularity is put to an objective standard, how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn"t even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility. A primary draw at CUNY is a programme for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1,100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY"s five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges, free education. Those accepted by CUNY"s honours programme pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $ 7,500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year"s programme are up 70%. Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group—criteria that are increasingly important at America"s elite colleges. Most of the students who apply to the honours programme come from relatively poor families, many of them immigrant ones. All that CUNY demands is that these students be diligent and clever. Last year, the average standardized test score of this group was in the top 7% in the country. Among the rest of CUNY"s students averages are lower, but they are now just breaking into the top third (compared with the bottom third in 1997). CUNY does not appear alongside Harvard and Stanford on lists of America"s top colleges, but its recent transformation offers a neat parable of meritocracy revisited. Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America"s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its gruelling standards. City"s golden era came in the last century, when America"s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933—1954 City produced nine future Nobel laureates. But in the second half of the last century, CUNY once lost its glamour. What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddleheadedness. In the 1960s, universities across the country faced intense pressure to admit more minority students. Although City was open to all races, only a small number of black and Hispanic students passed the strict. That, critics decided, could not be squared with City"s mission to "serve all the citizens of New York". At first the standards were tweaked, but this was not enough, and in 1969 massive student protests shut down City"s campus for two weeks. Faced with upheaval, City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York"s high schools could attend. The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America"s lower-end education. By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or maths (meaning that they had not learnt it to high- school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that "central to CUNY"s historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students" high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: "Access to what?"". Using the report as ammunition, profound reforms were pushed through by New York"s then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and another alumnus, Herman Badillo (1951), America"s first Puerto Rican congressman. A new head of CUNY was appointed. Matthew Goldstein, a mathematician (1963), has shifted the focus back towards higher standards amid considerable controversy. For instance, by 2001, all of CUNY"s 11 "senior" colleges (i.e., ones that offer full four-year courses) had stopped offering remedial education. Admissions standards have been raised. Students applying to CUNY"s senior colleges now need respectable scores on either a national, state or CUNY test, and the admissions criteria for the honours programme are the toughest in the university"s history. Contrary to what Mr. Goldstein"s critics predicted, higher standards have attracted more students, not fewer: this year, enrolment at CUNY is at a record high. There are also anecdotal signs that CUNY is once again picking up bright locals, especially in science.

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问答题If you thought that only women on the heavier side felt bad about their bodies after being bombarded with images of stick thin models, well, you'd better think again, for the affliction is common to all members of the fairer sex. And, it doesn't take a week or a month or even a year for those negative feelings to set in, but only three minutes. In a recent study, researchers measured how some women felt about themselves, from their body weight to their hair, and then exposed them to images of models in magazine ads for one to three minutes. The women were then asked to evaluate themselves again, and in all cases, they reported a drop in their level of satisfaction with their own bodies. The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from social interventions aimed at curbing the effects of the media. Unlike past interventions that have targeted specific groups of women, such as those with preexisting eating and body-image concerns, this study suggests that such attempts are important for all women.

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问答题According to a report, the birth sex ratio in China is still out of proportion and could cause serious imbalance among the people in the decades ahead, with millions of men in China unable to find wives. Topic: Imbalanced birth sex ratio Questions for Reference: 1. What might the serious imbalance suggest? 2. What can the government do to remedy the situation? 3. Do you think the situation will improve in the near future?

问答题自古以来，我国各民族人民劳动、生息、繁衍在祖国的土地上，各民族组之间建立了紧密的政治经济文化联系，早在两千多年前就形成了幅员辽阔的统一国家。悠久的中华文化，成为维系民族团结和国家统一的牢固纽带。 　　我们的先人历来把独立自主作为立国之本。中国作为人类文明发祥地之一，在几千年的历史进程中，文化传统始终没有中断。近代中国虽屡遭列强欺凌，国势衰败，但经过全民族的百年抗争，又以巨人的姿态重新站立起来。

问答题中国已经明确了本世纪头20年的奋斗目标，这就是紧紧抓住重要战略机遇期，全面建设惠及十几亿人口的更高水平的小康社会，到2020年实现国内生产总值比2000年翻两番，达到4万亿美元左右，人均国内生产总值达到3000美元左右，使经济更加发展、民主更加健全、科教更加进步、文化更加繁荣、社会更加和谐、人民生活更加殷实。我们深知，中国在相当长时期内仍然是发展中国家，从中国有13亿人口的国情出发，实现这个奋斗目标是很不容易的，需要我们继续进行长期的艰苦奋斗。

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问答题中华文明历来注重以民为本，尊重人的尊严和价值。早在千百年前，中国人就提出“民惟邦本，本固邦宁”、“天地之间，莫贵于人”，强调要利民、裕民、养民、惠民。今天，我们坚持以人为本，就是要坚持发展为了人民，发展依靠人民，发展成果由人民共享，关注人的价值、权益和自由，关注人的生活质量、发展潜能和幸福指数，最终是为了实现人的全面发展。保障人民的生存权和发展权仍是中国的首要任务。我们将大力推动经济社会发展，依法保障人民享有自由、民主和人权，实现社会公平和正义，使13亿中国人民过上幸福生活。