In the ruins of the Palm Beach Hotel you get a powerful sense that an era is drawing to a close that Israel's attempt to settle its people on the Gaza Strip is in its last days. 【C1】______ the fine sand in front of the beach hotel. But since the Palestinians launched their uprising against Israel—the intifada—【C2】______, Gaza has become a violent, dangerous place. People don't come on holiday anymore. The Palm Beach resort complex was abandoned【C3】______. The reception area and the dining room have been stripped of their fixtures and fittings. The wind off the sea blows in across floors【C4】______. A similar fate awaits everything that Israel has built here—if【C5】______ in August, as planned. Some young settlers have been squatting in the hotel as it's decayed around them. For Elazaar Elchiam, life is good. He lives for nothing in【C6】______. The Mediterranean waves are just metres away, and Elazaar has a passion for surfing. 【C7】______ in one of the nearby settlements—where red-roofed bungalows surrounded by lawns bake in the summer sun. Elazaar dreads the thought that this may well be his 【C8】______. The settlers say Israel is making a mistake. That it's handing victory to the Palestinian militants who have been attacking Gush Katif for years.【C9】______ the possibility that the settler's homes will be treated as the spoils of victory by groups 【C10】______. To prevent that, it's possible that the army will demolish everything in the days before the Israelis leave. Debbie Rosen, a mother【C11】______ in Gush Katif, said she hates the thought of her home being destroyed. But at the same time she couldn't bear the idea of what she called "【C12】______" taking over the house as they celebrate Israel's retreat. Since the Israeli army captured Gaza 【C13】______—in the Six Day War—it's been occupied territory. When it moved civilian settlers into the Strip it was breaching the Geneva Conventions— 【C14】______. This means nothing to settlers like Debbie Rosen. She said she never thought of her home as being 【C15】______. For her, Gaza is part of the land that God promised the Jews. The occupation may mean nothing to the settlers of Gush Katif—but it means everything【C16】______, in the Palestinian town of Khan Younis. For decades, for Palestinian families, the occupation 【C17】______ and limits and humiliations in many areas of life—and it's hated. Along the western side of Khan Younis Israeli troops man watchtowers that are part of【C18】______. And the area has seen many clashes between the army and Palestinian militants. They frequently 【C19】______ on the settler communities that they see as being so symbolic of the Israeli presence. The beach used to be an escape from the heat and 【C20】______ of Khan Younis. But to keep the militants out of the settlement zone, the army has blocked the Palestinian road to the sea. Khan Younis has lost its beach.

In barely one generation we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them—often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. "Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries," the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, "and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. " He also famously remarked that all of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Passage 1

In A short story by Ian McEwan, Reflections of a Kept Ape, a woman takes a pet chimpanzee as her lover. Although truth is often stranger than fiction, a study published this week by scientists in America demonstrates that both can be pretty odd. The research concludes that humans and chimpanzees interbred after the two species first separated, before eventually going their different ways some 5.4 million years ago. Humans are thus much more recently related to their closest relatives than was previously thought. The researchers, led by David Reich of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examined the genetic record of humans and chimpanzees. The sequencing of the human genome was completed in 2001 whereas that of the chimpanzee genome was finished last autumn. The two genomes are alike, differing by only 1.2% over the course of some 3 billion pairs of the genetic "letters" in which the language of genes is written. In fact, almost a third of the shared genes (each of which is several thousand letters long) are identical in the two species. Instead of looking at average genetic differences, though, Dr. Reich and his colleagues used the complete sequences to reveal the evolutionary history of the genomes. Scientists have long suspected that some regions of the human (and chimpanzee) genome must be older than others—that some sections trace their origins far back to the common ancestral population that gave rise to humans and chimps. Dr. Reich and his colleagues examined these common sequences, mindful of the assumption that genes steadily collect mutations as time goes by. They aligned sections of the human and chimpanzee genomes and identified how much they diverged. At different genes, humans share a common genetic ancestor with chimpanzees at different times. By studying more than 31,000 bits of the genome and measuring how closely humans are related to chimpanzees in different places, the scientists were able to study how quickly the species became different from each other. The results were published online this week in Nature. The team found that it took at least hundreds of thousands of years and, perhaps, 4 million years for human and chimpanzee ancestors to stop interbreeding after they began to be differentiated. Humans and chimpanzees were interbreeding for all this time, before finally separating no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. This is more recent than was thought. Moreover, the argument that the two species were interbreeding over such a long time is, to say the least, controversial. Most interesting was what the scientists discovered about the X chromosome in humans and chimpanzees. The X is one of two chromosomes that determine a person's (or a chimp's) sex. Females carry two copies of the X chromosome while males carry one X and one Y chromosome. The progeny of interbreeding start with a big evolutionary disadvantage. It is thought that if human and chimp ancestors initially became separate species and then started to interbreed, then the hybrid males produced tended to be infertile. (No one knows exactly why males are more affected than females, just that they are in groups ranging from mammals to insects.) A viable hybrid population could only be created if the fertile females mated back to one of the ancestral populations. The scientists found that human and chimpanzee X chromosomes are relatively similar. Indeed, their differences are roughly some 1.2 million years younger than the average of all the non-sex chromosomes. This lends weight to the theory that a viable hybrid population was sustained by interbreeding over a long time. Further evidence could come from the fossil record. Fossil finds are notoriously difficult to classify—people disagree on which physiological features are important; and each new find represents a class of one. The Toumai skull, found in Chad in 2001 and thought to be the earliest hominid, is between 6 million and 7.4 million years old. However, Dr. Reich points out, if humans and chimpanzees had undergone an initial separation at this time, it could account for why the skull has human-like features, including a relatively flat face without a protruding snout. The interbreeding came after this time. The researchers, along with other scientists across the world, are now working to sequence the complete genome of other close relatives to humans, including gorillas and orangutans. Primate evolution could yet reveal plenty more oddities.

{{B}}A: Spot DictationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear a passage and read the same passage with blanks in it. Fill in each of the blanks with the word or words you have heard on the tape. Write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Remember you will hear the passage ONLY ONCE.{{/B}}

In Bolivia, life is slowly returning to normal after almost a month of demonstrations.【C1】______—from poor peasant farmers to miners have been demanding【C2】______ and calling for constitutional reform. The protesters are angry at what they see as【C3】______ natural resources by foreign companies and governments. There's a long history of the country's rich natural resources being exploited by foreigners with【C4】______, 60 per cent of whom are native residents. Many now hope the new president, Eduardo Rodriguez, may find a solution to the country's problems. Rebecca Hampson has been visiting La Paz and【C5】______. "Put your hands over your ears!" shouted the boy in the hotel.【C6】______ was marching past the front door letting off【C7】______ as they went. A few minutes later the sting of police tear gas seeped under the door frame. That was【C8】______, then no one imagined that the protests and gradual shutting down of the country would last this long. "It'll all calm down in a few days," people kept telling us. But we decided to 【C9】______, on what turned out to be one of the last buses, to Sorata, a small town in the beautiful Cordillera Real mountains. Two weeks later the whole country had【C10】______, and the only way we could get back to La Paz was to join a convoy of protestors.【C11】______ the night before with an official from the local Aymara—the largest indigenous group in Bolivia. "【C12】______ with scarves and hats so that our brothers at the road blockades don't question you," he told us, "and be here in the square at 4:30 in the morning." I had no idea how I,【C13】______ and short hair, could be mistaken for an Aymara woman with their bowler hats, long plaits and【C14】______! But it was an offer we gratefully accepted. Next morning we were eventually bundled into the back of a crowded bus. The few words of Aymara we'd picked up went down very well with our fellow passengers and【C15】______ Spanish conversation. Eduardo, a high school teacher, explained how the local council leader【C16】______ from every organisation—schools, hospitals, farms, tour agencies, etc.—to go to La Paz to march. There was a long list of names, and anyone extra trying to sneak onto the buses would be kicked off. This list might also be checked at【C17】______ between Sorata and La Paz. Our presence on the bus【C18】______ as dedicated protestors at risk so the warm welcome we received showed real generosity. Eduardo and his friends were very keen to start marching. "It's the only way to get the government to listen to us," they all said.【C19】______—first: nationalisation of Bolivia's oils and gas reserves "so that we can keep the revenue ourselves to 【C20】______". Second: a change in the constitution "to give equal rights and opportunities to us.

BSECTION 1: LISTENING TEST/B

In even the bleakest climate change scenarios for the end of this century, science has offered hope that global warming would eventually slow down. But a new study published Monday snuffs out such hope, projecting temperatures that rise with carbon emissions until the last drops of oil and lumps of coal are used up. Global temperatures will increase on average by 8°C(14. 4°F)over pre-industrial levels by 2300 if all of Earth's fossil fuel resources are burned, adding five trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere, according to the research by Canadian scientists published in Nature Climate Change. In the Arctic, average temperatures would rise by 17°C(30. 6 °F). Those conclusions are several degrees warmer than previous studies have projected. If these temperatures do become reality, greenhouse gases would transform Earth into a place where food is scarce, parts of the world are uninhabitable for humans, and many species of animals and plants are wiped out, experts say. "It would be as unrecognizable to us as a fully glaciated world," says Myles Allen, head of a climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Allen was not involved in the new study, but his research has focused on carbon's cumulative impacts on climate. Noting that it took less warming, 6°C(10. 8 °F), to lift the world out of the Ice Age, Allen said, "That's the profundity of the change we're talking about." The 8-degree rise in global temperatures would blast past the 2°C(3. 8 ° F)limit that nations agreed upon last year in the Paris talks. It also would heat the world to a level approaching that of the early Eocene Period, 52 million to 56 million years ago, when palm trees grew as far north as Alaska? and crocodiles swam in the Arctic. Mammals survived Eocene temperatures: this is when early primates appeared. Some horses, however, shrank to the size of house cats, adjusting through evolution to a diet altered either by heat or carbon. Today's organisms and ecosystems may not be able to adapt to warming over the next 200 to 300 years—an instant on the geological time scale, says Scott Wing, the Smithsonian Institution's curator of fossil plants. Also, Wing notes that when the Eocene heat began, the Earth's poles weren't covered with ice as they are today. "In the future, warming will melt ice caps, which will expose bare ground, increase heat absorption at high latitudes, and cause more warming," Wing says. The study predicts that precipitation would quadruple in the tropical Pacific, while it would be reduced by up to third in the Americas and a factor of two over parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and the Amazon. Allen says not only could tropical rain forest systems collapse, but drought in southern Europe and the United States would be " completely catastrophic for agriculture. " Wealthy nations might maintain food supply, but not places like southern Africa. "A lot of people would have to leave, or a lot of people would die," Allen says.

Fifty years ago, Robert Solow published the first of two papers on economic growth that eventually won him a Nobel prize. Celebrated and seasoned, he was thus a natural choice to serve on an independent "commission on growth" announced last month by the World Bank. (The commission will weigh and sift what is known about growth, and what might be done to boost it.)Natural, that is, except for anyone who takes his 1956 contribution literally. For, according to the model he laid out in that article, the efforts of policymakers to raise the rate of growth per head are ultimately futile. A government eager to force the pace of economic advance may be tempted by savings drives, tax cuts, investment subsidies or even population controls. As a result of these measures, each member of the labour force may enjoy more capital to work with. But this process of "capital deepening", as economists call it, eventually runs into diminishing returns. Giving a worker a second computer does not double his output. Accumulation alone cannot yield lasting progress, Mr. Solow showed. What can? Anything that allows the economy to add to its output without necessarily adding more labour and capital. Mr. Solow labeled this font of wealth "technological progress" in 1956, and measured its importance in 1957. But in neither paper did he explain where it came from or how it could be accelerated. Invention, innovation and ingenuity were all "exogenous" influences, lying outside the remit of his theory. To practical men of action, Mr. Solow's model was thus an impossible tease: what it illuminated did not ultimately matter; and what really mattered, it did little to illuminate. The law of diminishing returns holds great sway over the economic imagination. But its writ has not gone unchallenged. A fascinating new book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh, tells the story of the rebel economics of increasing returns. A veteran observer of dismal scientists at work, first at the Boston Globe and now in an online column called Economic Principals, Mr. Warsh has written the best book of its kind since Peter Bernstein's Capital Ideas.Diminishing returns ensure that firms cannot grow too big, preserving competition between them. This, in turn, allows the invisible hand of the market to perform its magic. But, as Mr. Warsh makes clear, the fealty economists show to this principle is as much mathematical as philosophical. The topology of diminishing returns is easy for economists to navigate: a landscape of declining gradients and single peaks, free of the treacherous craters and crevasses that might otherwise entrap them. The hero of the second half of Mr. Warsh's book is Paul Romer, of Stanford University, who took up the challenge ducked by Mr. Solow. If technological progress dictates economic growth, what kind of economics governs technological advance? In a series of papers, culminating in an article in the Journal of Political Economy in 1990, Mr. Romer tried to make technology "endogenous", to explain it within the terms of his model. In doing so, he steered growth theory out of the comfortable cul-de-sac in which Mr. Solow had so neatly parked it. The escape required a three-point turn. First, Mr. Romer assumed that ideas were goods—of a particular kind. Ideas, unlike things, are "non-rival": Everyone can make use of a single design, recipe or blueprint at the same time. This turn in the argument led to a second: the fabrication of ideas enjoys increasing returns to scale. Expensive to produce, they are cheap, almost costless, to reproduce. Thus the total cost of a design does not change much, whether it is used by one person or by a million. Blessed with increasing returns, the manufacture of ideas might seem like a good business to go into. Actually, the opposite is true. If the business is free to enter, it is not worth doing so, because competition pares the price of a design down to the negligible cost of reproducing it. Unless idea factories can enjoy some measure of monopoly over their designs—by patenting them, copyrighting them, or just keeping them secret—they will not be able to cover the fixed cost of inventing them. That was the final turn in Mr. Romer's new theory of growth. How much guidance do these theories offer to policymakers, such as those sitting on the World Bank's commission? In Mr. Solow's model, according to a common caricature, technology falls like "manna from heaven", leaving the bank's commissioners with little to do but pray. Mr. Romer's theory, by contrast, calls for a more worldly response: educate people, subsidies their research, import ideas from abroad, carefully gauge the protection offered to intellectual property. But did policymakers need Mr. Romer's model to reveal the importance of such things? Mr. Solow has expressed doubts. Despite the caricature, he did not intend in his 1956 model to deny that innovation is often dearly bought and profit-driven. The question is whether anything useful can be said about that process at the level of the economy as a whole. That question has yet to be answered definitively. In particular, Mr. Solow worries that some of the "more powerful conclusions" of the new growth theory are unearned, flowing as they do from powerful assumptions. At one point in Mr. Warsh's book, Mr. Romer is quoted comparing the building of economic models to writing poetry. It is a triumph of form as much as content. This creative economist did not discover anything new about the world with his 1990 paper on growth. Rather, he extended the metre and rhyme-scheme of economics to capture a world—the knowledge economy—expressed until then only in the loosest kind of doggerel. That is how economics makes progress. Sadly, it does not, in and of itself, help economies make progress.

[此试题无题干]

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," said that great baseball-playing philosopher, Yogi Berra. And yet we continue to try, churning out forecasts on everything from the price of oil to the next civil war. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of the sciences of uncertainty (who gave us "known unknowns"), has no time for the "charlatans" who think they can map the future. Forget the important things: we can't even get it right when estimating the cost of a building—witness the massively over-budget Sydney Opera House or the new Wembley Stadium. The problem is that almost all forecasters work within the parameters of the Gaussian bell curve, which ignores large deviations and thus fails to take account of "Black Swans". Mr. Taleb defines a Black Swan as an event that is unexpected, has an extreme impact and is made to seem predictable by explanations concocted afterwards. It can be both positive and negative. Examples include the September 11th 2001 attacks and the rise of the Internet. Smaller shocks, such as novels and pop acts whose popularity explodes thanks to word of mouth, can also be Black Swans. Humans are bad at factoring in the possibility of randomness and uncertainty. We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict, and overestimate our own knowledge. When researchers asked a group of students to choose a range for the number of lovers Catherine the Great had had, wide enough to ensure that they had a 98% chance of being right, a staggering 45% of them got it wrong. Why didn't they guarantee being correct by picking a range of none to ten thousand? After all, there were no prizes for keeping the range tight. The answer is that humans have an uncontrollable urge to be precise, for better or (all too often) worse. That is a fine quality in a watch-repair man or a brain surgeon, but counter-productive when dealing with uncertainty. Mr. Taleb cut his philosophical teeth in the basement of his family home in Lebanon during the long civil war there (another Black Swan), devouring books as mortars flew overhead. By the time he began work as a financial-market "quant" in the 1980s, he had already become convinced that the academic mainstream was looking at probability the wrong way. He remains a maverick, promoting the work of obscure thinkers and attacking Nobel laureates. All he is trying to do, he says, is make the world see how much there is that can't be seen. Why, he asks, do we take absence of proof to be proof of absence? Why do we base the study of chance on the world of games? Casinos, after all, have rules that preclude the truly shocking. And why do we attach such importance to statistics when they tell us so little about what is to come? A single set of data can lead you down two very different paths. More maddeningly still, when faced with a Black Swan we often grossly underestimate or overestimate its significance. Take technology. The founder of IBM predicted that the world would need no more than a handful of computers, and nobody saw that the laser would be used to mend retinas. Nor do we learn the right lessons from such eruptions. Mr. Taleb argues convincingly that the spectacular collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management was caused by the inability of the hedge fund's managers to see a world that lay outside their flawed models. And yet those models are still widely used today. This is ridiculous but not surprising. Business is stuffed full of bluffers, he argues, and successful companies and financial institutions owe as much to chance as to skill.That is a little unfair. Many blockbuster products have their roots in bright ideas, rigorous research and canny marketing, rather than luck. And corporate "scenario planners" are better than they used to be at thinking about Black Swan-type events. Still, this is a small quibble about a deeply intelligent, provocative book. Deftly weaving meditation with hard-edged analysis, Mr. Taleb succeeds in bringing sceptical empiricism to the masses. Do not expect clear answers. He suspects that crises will be fewer in number but more severe in future. And he suggests concentrating on the consequences of Black Swans, which can be known, rather than on the probability that they will occur, which can't (think of earthquakes). But he never makes professional predictions because it is better to be "broadly right rather than precisely wrong".

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People moved quickly in April to cancel plans to bestow a lifetime achievement award on Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and a longtime NAACP contributor, who was caught on tape scolding a female friend for posting online photos with black friends. Many people were surprised to learn the civil rights organization ever meant to praise a man with a history of discriminating against blacks. They shouldn't have been. In 2009 the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter honored Sterling with its President's Award, as he agreed to pay $ 2. 8 million to settle federal civil charges that he unfairly treated blacks at L. A. apartment buildings he owns. Sterling is one of several individuals and institutions with reputations in need of repair who've received accolades or favorable treatment from the NAACP, at times before or after large donations. At the May 15 gala where Sterling was supposed to pick up his prize, the group's L. A. chapter will honor executives from Wal-Mart Stores and FedEx, both major contributors embroiled in long-running controversies involving allegations of employment discrimination. The companies deny the allegations. The group's financial disclosures show each company gave the NAACP $ 200,000- $ 999,999 in 2011. That year the U. S. Supreme Court backed Walmart in a major employment discrimination lawsuit brought against the company by women employees. The ruling made it harder to mount class actions alleging discrimination by employers. FedEx has settled many race discrimination claims, including a $ 53 million payout to truck drivers in 2007. The NAACP also accepted more than $ 1 million from Bank of America in 2011, the same year the bank agreed to pay a record $ 335 million in a federal lawsuit alleging predatory lending to minorities. Spokesmen for Walmart and FedEx said their companies have long supported the NAACP solely because of its good work. Bank of America didn't respond to requests for comment. Peter Dreier, director of the urban and environmental policy department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, says donating to the NAACP has become a painless way for corporations accused of racism to ensure a measure of sympathy, or at least silence, from the civil rights group, whose leaders rarely criticize the misbehavior of those who give it money. "The NAACP, with its glittering history of incredible activism, has become an empty shell," he says. The NAACP isn't the only organization to spruce up big companies' reputations. "It's part of every communication specialist's playbook to align clients who have particular issues with nonprofits that are strong in those issues," says crisis communications strategist Sam Singer. At times it can backfire when the relationship between sinner and redeemer seems a little too convenient—or has the whiff of quid pro quo. Environmentalists have taken the World Wildlife Fund to task for accepting money from companies that use a lot of water and other natural resources, including Coca-Cola, then lending its respected panda logo to their corporate sustainability campaigns. The NAACP hasn't been loo picky about where its donations come from. The late Benjamin Hooks once joked that the only thing "tainted" about tobacco industry money was "there ain't enough of it," according to tobacco industry documents from lawsuits against cigarette makers. A 2009 resolution condemning the industry for targeting blacks—who suffer an inordinate health toll from smoking died without a floor vote at the NAACP's centennial convention, says Carol McGruder, co chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. "When you let unethical corporations associate themselves with our organizations, it makes them look like they're doing something for our community, and they're not," McGruder says. "The harm they do to our people is not offset by their corporate giving. " The NAACP's interim president and CEO, Lorraine Miller, wrote in an e-mail that money "docs not buy corporations a free pass if their actions run afoul of our mission. We do not hesitate to stand up to, speak out against or even sue our corporate contributors when we differ on an issue of civil rights. " In 2009 the NAACP did sue a contributor. Wells Fargo, over alleged predatory lending practices targeting blacks, allegations Wells Fargo denied. But the group dropped the case in 2010, saying it would instead "work constructively" with the bank. Wells Fargo announced it would donate $ 2. 5 million a year for five years to fund an NAACP financial literacy campaign. "The more we learned about each other, the more we decided to collaborate," says Wells Fargo Senior Vice President Gigi Dixon. The federal government didn't let the bank off so easily. In 2012, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $ 184 million to settle allegations that it steered black borrowers into subprime loans.

Passage 1

If you have ever wondered just how hard it is for kids from broken neighborhoods to avoid prison, a glance at data compiled by the Justice Mapping Center gives an easy answer: it's even harder than you might think. While crime is up around the nation and spread out across cities in a broad pattern, the majority of people convicted of crimes come from very few and very concentrated neighborhoods, according to the center, a Brooklyn-based research group that tracks the declared residency of convicts. More than 50% of adult male inmates from New York City come from just 14 districts in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn (with the most, about 12%, coming from East and Central Harlem) even though men in those 14 areas make up just 17% of the city's total population. Similar patterns can be seen in places like Phoenix—where one community, South Mountain, is home to 1% of Arizona's total population but 6.5% of the state's inmates—and Austin, Texas, where one section has 19% of the city's population but 27% of those on probation. Why does this matter? Because, say Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, who run the Justice Mapping Center, if you can pinpoint the few-block area that produces the most criminals, you can create programs that specifically target the problems of the people who live there and help them avoid the behaviors that land them in jail. That, in return, could save millions of dollars. New York State spends $42,000 an inmate a year. Multiply that by the number of prisoners who grew up on the same streets in parts of Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn, and you get what Cadora calls "million-dollar blocks" because that's what it costs the state to keep criminals from those areas behind bars. It's hard to argue that this money couldn't be better spent. "If you had ... this block and that million dollars, would you do the same thing?" asks Cadora. Some communities are saying no. Framing the debate as one of economics rather than simply social justice can provide political cover for officials to try out innovative alternatives to traditional incarceration. In the vanguard of this movement was the juvenile-justice department of Deschutes County, Ore., which about 10 years ago made a deal with the state: if Deschutes reduced the number of juveniles it sent to state-run detention centers, Oregon would give back to the county the money that it had been spending to incarcerate those Deschutes kids. By giving up 16 out of 26 beds for young offenders at the state facility, Deschutes recouped nearly $4 million over seven years and put that money toward what it called the Community Youth Investment Program. The county assigned social workers to provide guidance and parenting skills in homes with newborns who had at least one parent on probation or parole. It began screening kindergartners for antisocial tendencies; those most at risk were singled out for special attention. Of course, teens continued to assault people and steal cars. But instead of going to the state-run jail, those caught and convicted had to make various community-building reparations like apologizing to the victim, paying restitution and participating in service projects or apprenticeships. In seven years the county's youth-incarceration rate dropped 25%, and the number of teens who received citations or were arrested for crimes went down 28%. According to Bob La Combe, who runs the county's juvenile system, young people are "making the connection between the crime they committed and the harm to the community." The state, however, may take more convincing. Because of budget cuts, Oregon stopped funding the program in 2003. The community-based justice initiative is now paid for by Deschutes, but money for some of the preventive measures is likely to run out this summer. Funding will probably always be a problem for these kinds of projects. But even some conservatives are realizing that being tough on crime for the past three decades hasn't reduced the disproportionate number of criminals coming from certain areas. The Department of Justice now backs about 300 Weed and Seed programs nationwide, some in areas as small as a few square blocks. Police, prosecutors and neighborhood-watch groups collaborate to weed out the drug dealers and other undesirables, while public and private social-service providers seed the area with wholesome extracurricular activities, new community centers, job counseling and beautification projects that offer residents an alternative way of life. "Criminal justice isn't what makes people behave," Cadora says. "You strengthen the institutions so people have a stake in things."

{{B}}Task 2 Passage TranslationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 English passages. 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.{{/B}}

Can you spot a good marriage? I was pretty sure I could, starting with my own. My husband and I rarely argued, we had similar careers, and we shared common interests. So nobody was more surprised than we were when our 17-year marriage ended in divorce. It turns out I had been judging my marriage by the wrong standards-as most of us do. In one famous study, researchers asked therapists, married couples, and others to watch videotaped conversations of ten couples and try to identify the relationships that had broken up. Even the therapists guessed wrong half the time. Luckily, scientists have identified some simple but powerful indicators that can help you recognize marital strife long before your relationship hits the skids. For instance, a couple go hiking on their first date. They marry, and years later, the wife tells this story: "We got terribly lost that day. It took us hours to find our way back, but we laughed about how neither of us had a good sense of direction. After that, we knew not to plan another hiking trip!" Another wife might tell it a different way: "He lost the map, and it took hours to find our way back. After that, I never wanted to go hiking again. " The keeper marriage? The one in which the positive is accentuated and the problems laughed off. Research shows that it's not what you say but how you say it: Your emphasis will correctly predict the success or failure of your marriage about 90 percent of the time. To size up your relationship, ask yourself these questions. Do you: Avoid arguments? Studies show it's a mistake to judge a relationship by the amount of time you argue, especially early on. When I was first married, I felt lucky that my husband and I rarely fought. A University of Washington study of newly wed couples appeared to confirm my belief: It showed that couples who argued relatively little were happier than combative ones. When the same couples were checked three years later, however, those with an early history of bickering were more likely to have found stability in their marriages, whereas couples who prided themselves on their equanimity were in troubled relationships or already divorced. Of course, violence or verbal abuse is never acceptable. Roll your eyes? This seemingly harmless gesture is a clear sign of marital discord. The same researchers at the University of Washington found that eye rolling, even when accompanied by a laugh or smile, indicates some degree of contempt—poison to a relationship. "This kind of sarcastic gesture doesn't clearly state an objection, which makes it difficult for the other person to respond," says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. "The obvious first step is to stop the behavior. But the second is to explore the reasons behind it. " Duck decisions? I often deferred to my husband when it came to making weekend or vacation plans. Later I realized our social life didn't reflect my favourite activities—a relationship red flag. Psychologist Howard Markman, a professor at the University of Denver, agrees. It's risky for your relationship when one of you controls the social agenda, he says.

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{{B}}SECTION 1 LISTENING TEST{{/B}}

Around the world, rumbles of complaint about globalization are growing louder—and these rumbles are not confined to activist movements. In East Asia, the financial crisis of 1997 left a jaundiced sense of what globalization entails, though robust economic recovery has tempered that. Globalization's standing has also been badly damaged in Latin America by the meltdown of the Argentine economy in 2000 and financial crises in Brazil in 1999 and 2001. New fears about globalization are surfacing in Europe, too. In Poland these have taken the form of concern about foreign capital taking over the Polish banking system; takeover fears also permeate France and Italy. In France and Germany, working people link globalization with pressures to dismantle the social democratic state. Among Americans, outsourcing of service-sector jobs has become a leading concern. Opposition to free trade has crept up the income and social-strata ladder to include educated white-collar workers. This new opposition comes on top of existing resentments among blue-collar workers at the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs. These developments have raised concerns about the durability of globalization even among its supporters. In the final section of his new book Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the 20th Century, the Harvard professor Jeffiy Frieden—who is in favor of globalization—ruminates on the possibility that today's globalization, like that of the 19th century, might falter. It can be highly instructive to look back at what some historians call the first globalization. When people do so, however, they often tend to identify its end as the beginning of World War I in 1914. This is wrong, and leads to misunderstandings about today's globalization. The first globalization ended with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. The world's response to the crash, however, was profoundly affected by the political conditions that World War I had created. In the United States, Britain and France, the war created political and social conditions that fostered a turn to social democracy. In Germany, the onerous economic burdens of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles fostered a turn to Nazism. This history has enormous significance for understanding today's predicament. The first lesson is that the economic crisis of 1929—not politics—brought down the first globalization, suggesting that an economic crisis, and not politics, will bring down today's globalization.The second lesson is that while political developments before 1929 did not cause the crash, they mattered enormously for the international response. After World War I, governments substantially recreated the prewar economic system, but the reconstructed system distributed prosperity extremely unevenly. In the United States, wealth and income inequality grew during the "Roaring Twenties". In Britain, the industrial midlands and the north suffered from persistent stagnation because of an overvalued exchange rate. And prosperity simply bypassed Germany. Additionally, there was a popular turn to isolationism in response to the carnage wrought by the war. The global economic system was therefore unpopular, and consequently it had few defenders when the crash came. That lesson holds for the current globalization, which is also unpopular and feared. After the first globalization crashed because of inherent financial fragility, the ensuing New Deal era created a system that remedied that fragility by restricting private ownership of bullion, and creating deposit insurance and lenders of last resort. The New Deal era also created a social democratic, mass-consumption economy in which income was more broadly shared because of unionization, minimum wages and social security provisions. But such an economy is expensive for individual capitalists, giving them an incentive to evade its costs. That has been a driving force behind globalization since 1980, and that is the contradiction in today's system. Business has an incentive to move to countries with lower costs—yet it still needs mass consumption. Today's global economic system needs a solid middle class, but is also driven to hollow out that middle class. This contradiction has been papered over by consumer-borrowing provided by deregulated financial markets and a 25-year asset price boom. The problem is that such borrowing risks prove unsustainable if incomes are hollowed out, and that could stop the economic merry-go-round. If that stoppage produces an economic crash, globalization may crash, too. Globalization will lack political support, after being a primary cause of a hollowed-out middle class. The pattern of retreat is difficult to predict. One possibility is a return to a world of tariffs and quotas. A second response may be the emergence of regional trade and investment blocs. A third response that would preserve globalization would be the establishment of new domestic and international rules that support a social democratic, mass-consumption economy. All three scenarios challenge the international economic system that is supported by today's global elites.

Talk about fanciful thinking. One might as well ask if there will be a war that will end all wars, or a pill that will make us all good-looking. It is also a perfectly understandable question, given that half a million Americans will die this year of a disorder that is often discussed in terms that make it seem less like a disease than an unconquerable enemy. What tuberculosis was to the 19th century, cancer is to the 20th: an malevolent force that frightens people beyond all reason far more than, say, diabetes or high blood pressure. The welcome boom in cancer drugs owes its beginning to one of the 20th century's greatest scientific insights: that cancer is caused not by depression or deteriorating environment or sexual repression, but by faulty genes. Every tumor begins with just one errant cell that has been unlucky enough to suffer at least two, but sometimes several, genetic mutations. Those mutations cause the cell to replicate wildly, allowing it to escape the control that genes normally maintain over the growth of new tissue. This realization has transformed cancer, in little more than a decade, from an utterly mysterious disease into a disorder whose molecular machinery is largely understood. This new view has sparked innovations that will manage the process and keep it from killing large numbers of people.