单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.
单选题Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear several
short statements. These statements will be spoken ONLY ONCE,
and you will not find them written on the paper; so you must listen carefully.
When you hear a statement, read the answer choices and decide which one is
closest in meaning to the statement you have heard. Then write the letter
of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER
BOOKLET.
单选题WhattimedidMr.Gaoring?[A]8:00am[B]8:30am[C]3:00pm
单选题Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview.
单选题Not so long ago I found myself in characteristically pugnacious discussion with a senior human rights figure. The issue was privacy. Her view was that there was an innate and largely unchanging human need for privacy. My view was that privacy was a culturally determined concept. Think of those open multiseated Roman latrines in Pompeii, and imagine having one installed at work. The specific point was whether there was a generational difference in attitudes towards privacy, partly as a consequence of interact social networking. I thought that there was. As a teenager I told my parents absolutely nothing and the world little more. Some girls of that era might be photographed bare-breasted at a rock festival, but, on the whole, once we left through the front door, we disappeared from sight. My children--Generation Y, rather than the Generation X-ers who make most of the current fuss about privacy--seem unworried by their mother's capacity to track them and their social lives through Facebook. In fact, they seem unworried by anybody's capacity to see what they're up to-until, of course, it goes wrong. They seem to want to be in sight, and much effort goes into creating the public identity that they want others to see. Facebook now acts as a vast market place for ideas, preferences, suggestions and actings-out, extending far beyond the capacity of conventional institutions to influence. And the privacy issues it raises have little to do with the conventional obsessions such as CCTV or government data-mining. At a conference at the weekend I heard that some US colleges have taken to looking at the Facebook sites of applicants before they think to alter them before an interview. This may turn out to be apocryphal, but such a thing certainly could be done. In this era of supplementing exam grades with personal statements and character assessments, what could be more useful than an unguarded record of a student's true enthusiasms? My daughter's college friends, she says, are "pretty chilled" about it. There are the odd occasions when a vinous clinch is snapped on a mobile phone and makes the social rounds to the embarrassment of the clinchers, but what ever will be will be. An EU survey two years ago suggested that this is the pattern more generally. The researchers discovered what seemed to be a paradox: although half of their young respondents were confident in their own ability to protect their online privacy, only a fifth thought it a practical idea to give users in general "more control over their own identity data". Meanwhile, their elders try to get them concerned about issues such as internet data harvesting by private companies. A US news report last week concerned the work done to create "privacy nudges "--software that reminds users at certain moments that the information they are about to divulge has implications for privacy. I have to say, as someone who often elects to receive online mailshots from companies operating in areas in which I'm interested, that this seems to me to miss the main problem. As long as you have the right to say "no" to a company's blandishments, I don't see a huge problem. That's why the now notorious Italian bullying video seems much more relevant. At the end of last week three Google employees were sentenced in absentia for breaching the privacy of a handicapped boy, whose horrid treatment at the hands of his Turin schoolmates had been posted on Google Video. This clip spent several months in circulation before being taken down. Almost everyone agrees that the sentence was wrong, perverse and a kick in the teeth for free Speech, with implications that could (but won't) undermine the internet. And they are quite right. But look at it, for a moment, from the point of view of the boy's parent, or the boy himself. They must have felt powerless and damage& So how much control or ownership can one have over one's own image and reputation? The second great question, then, raised with regard to the net is what might be called "reputation management" What is it that you want people to know about you, and can you have control over it? Last weekend I was alerted to two new phenomena, both of which caused me to miss a heartbeat. The first was the possibility of using a program, or employing someone, to "suicide" you online. Recently a company in Rotterdam used its Facebook presence to advertise its "web 2. 0 suicide machine", which would act as "a digital Dr Kevorkian [and] delete your online presence" not just from your own sites but from everyone else's--leaving just a few "last words". Unfortunately Facebook chucked the suicide machine off its premises, so it then suicided itself, ending with the words "no flowers, no speeches". As a journalist I was horrified by the implications of online suiciding. In the first place it means the erasure of documentary history. And second it raises the possibility of routine doctoring of material on the internet to render it more palatable to the offended. The second phenomenon was worse. It was that some people, many perhaps, might seek to undermine any informational authority on the web by flooding it with false information, thus obliquely protecting their own identities. As an occasional target of such misinformation, playfully or maliciously, I know it can play merry hell With everyone's sense of reality. In other words it seemed to me that there was a threat much worse than that to privacy, and that was of privacy-induced attempts to bend or erase the truth that is essential to the value of the internet. Lack of privacy may be uncomfortable. Lack of truth is fatal.
单选题According to the passage, which of the following figures is LEAST likely to voice his or her support for the stem cell research?
单选题Why do you listen to music? If you should put this question to a number of people, you might receive answers like these: "I like the beat of music," "I look for attractive tunefulness," "I am moved by the sound of choral singing," "I listen to music for many reasons but I could not begin to describe them to you clearly." Answers to this question would be many and diverse, yet almost no one would reply, "Music means nothing to me". To most of us, music means something; it evokes some response. We obtain some satisfaction in listening to music. For many, the enjoyment of music does not rein at a standstill. We feel that we can get more satisfaction from the musical experience. We want to make closer contact with music in order to learn more of its nature; thus we can range broadly and freely in the areas of musical style, form, and expression. This book explores ways of achieving these objectives. It deals, of course, with the techniques of music, but only in order to show how technique is directed toward expressive aims in music and toward the listener ~s musical experience. In this way, we may get an idea of the composer's intentions, for indeed, the composer uses every musical device for its power to communicate and for its contribution to the musical experience. Although everyone hears music differently, there is a common ground from which all musical experiences grow. That source is sound itself. Sound is the raw material of music. It makes up the body and substance of all musical activity. It is the point of departure in the musical experience. The kinds of sound that can be used for musical purposes are amazingly varied. Throughout the cultures of the world, East and West, a virtually limitless array of sounds has been employed in the service of musical expression. Listen to Oriental theatre music, then to an excerpt from a Wagner work; these two are worlds apart in their qualities of sound as well as in almost every other feature, yet each says something of importance to some listeners. Each can stir a listener and evoke a response in him. All music, whether it is the pulsation of primitive tribal drums or the complex coordination of voices and instruments in an opera, has this feature: it is based upon the power of sound to stir our senses and feelings. Yet sound alone is not music. Something has to happen to the sound: it must move forward in time. Everything that takes place musically involves the movement of sound. If we hear a series of drumbeats, we receive an impression of movement from one stroke to the next. When sounds follow each other in a pattern of melody, we receive an impression of movement from one tone to the next. All music moves; and because it moves, it is associated with a fundamental truth of existence and experience. We are stirred by impressions of movement because our very lives are constantly in movement. Breathing, the action of the pulse, growth, decay, the change of day and night, as well as the constant flow of physical action—these all testify to the fundamental role that movement plays in our lives. Music appeals to our desires and our need for movement.
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单选题What, can rigid, cold calculating mathematics possibly have in common with subtle, creative, lofty, imaginative art? This question faithfully mirrors the state of mind of most people, even of most educated people, when they regard the numbers and symbols that populate the world of mathematics. But the great leaders of mathematics thought have frequently and repeatedly asserted that the object of their pursuit is just as much an art as it is a science, and perhaps even a fine art. Maxime Bocher, an eminent mathematician living at the beginning of this century, wrote: "I like to look at mathematics almost more as an art than as a science; for the activity of the mathematician, constantly creating as he is, guided although not controlled by the external world of the senses, bears a resemblance, not fanciful, I believe, but real, to the activities of the artist—of a painter, let us say." Rigorous deductive reasoning on the part of the mathematician may be likened here to the technical skill in drawing on the part of the painter. Just as one cannot become a painter without a certain amount of skill, so no one can become a mathematician without the power to reason accurately up to a certain point.
"Yet these qualities, fundamental though they are, do not make a painter or a mathematician worthy of the name, nor indeed are they the most important factors in the case. Other qualities of a far more subtle sort, chief among which in both cases is imagination, go into the making of a good artist or a good mathematician."
If mathematics wants to lay claim to being an art, however, it most shows that it possesses and makes use of at least some of the elements that go to make up the things of beauty. Is not imagination, creative imagination, the most essential element of an art? Let us take a geometric object, such as the circle. To the ordinary man, this is the rim of a wheel, perhaps with spokes in it. Elementary geometry has crowded this simple figure with radii, chords, sectors, tangents, diameters, inscribed and circumscribed polygons, and so on.
Here you have already an entire geometrical world created from a very rudimentary beginning. These and other miracles are undeniable proof of the creative power of the mathematieian; and, as if this were not enough, the mathematician allows the whole circle to "vanish", declares it to be imaginary, then keeps on toying with his new creation in much the same way and with much the same gusto as he did with the innocent little thing you allowed him to start out with. And all this, remember please, is just elementary plane geometry. Truly, the creative imagination displayed by the mathematician has nowhere been exceeded, not even paralleled, and, I would make bold to say, now even closely approached anywhere else.
In many ways mathematics exhibits the same elements of beauty that are generally acknowledged to be the essence of poetry. First let us consider a minor point: the poet arranges his writings on the page in verses. His poem first appeals to the eye before it reaches the ear or the mind; and similarly, the mathematician lines up his "formulas and equations so that their form may make an aesthetic impression. Some mathematicians are given to this love of arranging and exhibiting their equations to a degree that borders on a fault. Trigonometry, a branch of elementary mathematics particularly rich in formulas, offers some curious groups of them, curious in their symmetry and their arrangement.
The superiority of poetry over other forms of verbal expression lies first in the symbolism used in poetry, and secondly in its extreme condensation and economy of words. Take a poem of universally acknowledged merit, say, Shelley"s poem "To Night". Here is the second stanza: Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, star-in wrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out; Then wander oer city, and sea, and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand—Come, long-sought !
Taken literally, all this is, of course, sheer nonsense and nothing else. Night has no hair, night does not wear any clothes, and night is not an illicit peddler of narcotics. But is there anybody balmy enough to take the words of the poet literally? The words here are only comparisons, only symbols. For the sake of condensation the poet doesn"t bother stating that his symbols mean such and such, but goes on to treat them as if they were realities.
The mathematician does these things precisely as the poet does. Take numbers, for example, the very idea of which is an abstraction, or symbol. When you write the figure 3, you have created a symbol for a symbol, and when you say in algebra that is a number, you have condensed all the symbols for all the numbers into one all-embracing symbol. These, like other mathematical symbols, and like the poets symbols, are a condensed, concentrated way of stating a long and rather complicated chain of simple geometrical, algebraic, or numerical relations.
单选题
单选题The early retirement of experienced workers is seriously harming the U.S. economy, according to a new report from the Hudson Institute, a public policy research organization. Currently, many older experienced workers retire at an early age. According to the recently issued statistics, 79 percent of qualified workers begin collecting retirement benefits at age 62; if that trend continues, there will be a labor shortage that will hinder the economic growth in the twenty-first century.
Older Americans constitute an increasing proportion of the population, according to the US. Census Bureau, and the population of those over age 65 will grow by 60% between 2001 and 2020. During the same period, the group aged 18 to 44 will increase by only 4%. Keeping older skilled workers employed, even part time, would increase U.S. economic output and strengthen the tax base; but without significant policy reforms, massive early retirement among baby boomers seems more likely.
Retirement at age 62 is an economically rational decision today. Social Security and Medicaid earnings limits and tax penalties subject our most experienced workers to marginal tax rates as high as 67%. Social Security formulas encourage early retirement. Although incomes usually rise with additional years of work, any pay increases after the 35-year mark result in higher Social Security taxes but only small increases in benefits.
Hudson Institute researchers believe that federal tax and benefit policies are at fault and reforms are urgently needed, but they disagree with the popular proposal that much older Americans will have to work because Social Security will not support them and that baby boomers are not saving enough for retirement. According to the increase in 401 (k) and Keogh retirement plans, the ongoing stock market on Wall Street, and the likelihood of large inheritances, them is evidence that baby boomers will reach age 65 with greater financial assets than previous generations.
The Hudson institute advocates reforming government policies that now discourage work and savings, especially for older worker. Among the report"s recommendations: tax half of all Social Security benefits, regardless of other income; provide 8% larger benefits for each year beyond 65; and permit workers nearing retirement to negotiate compensation packages that may include a lower salary but with greater healthcare benefits. However, it may take real and fruitful planning to find the right solution to the early retirement of older experienced workers; any measures taken must be allowed to prolong the service ability of older experienced workers.
单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.
问答题______
问答题Directions:
In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. After you have heard each paragraph, interpret it into Chinese. Start interpreting at the signal...and stop it at the signal...You may take notes while you are listening. Remember you will hear the passages only once. Now let us begin Part A with the first passage.
问答题中华民族的传统文化博大精深,源远流长。早在2000多年前,就产生了以孔孟为代表的儒家学说和以老庄为代表的道家学说,以及其他许多也在中国思想史上有地位的学说和学派。这就是有名的诸子百家。 从孔夫子到孙中山,中华民族的传统文化有它的许多珍品,许多人民性和民主性的好东西。比如,强调仁爱、强调群体、强调天下为公,特别是“天下兴亡,匹夫有责”的爱国情操和吃苦耐劳、勤俭持家、尊师重教的传统美德。所有这些,对家庭、对国家和社会都起到了巨大的维系和调节作用。
问答题In the coming decades, Europe’s influence on affairs beyond its borders will be sharply limited, and it is in other regions, not Europe, that the 21st century will be most clearly forged and defined. Certainly, one reason for NATO’s increasing marginalization stems from the behavior of its European members. With NATO, critical decisions are still made nationally; much of the talk about a common defense policy remains just that — talk. There is little specialization or coordination. Missing as well are many of the logistical and intelligence assets needed to project military force on distant battlefields. With the Cold War and the Soviet threat a distant memory, there is little political willingness, on a country-by-country basis, to provide adequate public funds to the military.
问答题中文是世界上最古老的文字之一。传说中的仓颉造字让中国人有了共同的根。从甲骨文到简体汉字,中文伴随着中华民族绵延至今。中文铸造类中华民族的精神品格。比如说,中文书写各笔每画都要伸缩有度,相互映衬,取长补短,以使整个字浑然一体。这体现了中国人谦让包容、合作共赢的处事风格。
中文富有哲理,很多字由意生字,寓意丰富。中文的“信”字由“人”和“言”组成,意思就是“人要言而有信”。这是中国人的做人原则,也是中国与世界各国的相处之道。中文的优美、简练举世公认。中文是从象形字演变而来,逐步发展成一种可以欣赏的书写艺术。这是世界上是独特的。
问答题Last week"s news that scientists had cloned a sheep sent academics and the public into a panic at the prospect that humans might be next. That"s an understandable reaction. Cloning is a radical challenge to the most fundamental laws of biology, so it"s not unreasonable to be concerned that it might threaten human society and dignity. Yet much of the ethical opposition seems also to grow out of an unthinking disgust—a sort of "yuk factor. " And that makes it hard for even trained scientist sand ethicists to see the matter clearly. While human cloning might not offer great benefits to humanity, no one has yet made a persuasive case that it would do any real harm, either.
Theologians contend that to clone a human would violate human dignity. That would surely be true if a cloned individual were treated as a lesser being, with fewer rights or lower stature. But why suppose that cloned person wouldn"t share the same rights and dignity as the rest of us? A leading lawyer-ethicist has suggested that cloning would violate the "right to genetic identity." Where did he come up with such a right? It makes perfect sense to say that adult persons have a right not to be cloned without their voluntary, informed consent. But if such consent is given, whose "right" to genetic identity would be violated?
Many of the science-fiction scenarios prompted by the prospect of human cloning turn out, upon reflection, to be absurdly improbable. There"s the fear, for instance, that parents might clone a child to have "spare parts" in case the original child needs an organ transplant. But parents of identical twins don"t view one child as an organ farm for the other. Why should cloned children"s parents be any different?
Another disturbing thought is that cloning will lead to efforts to breed individuals with genetic qualities perceived as exceptional (math geniuses, basketball players). Such ideas are repulsive, not only because of the "yuk factor" but also because of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. But there"s a vast difference between "selective breeding" as practiced by totalitarian regimes (where the urge to propagate certain types of people leads to efforts to eradicate other types) and the immeasurably more benign forms already practiced in democratic societies (where, say, lawyers freely choose to marry other lawyers ). Banks stocked with the frozen sperm of geniuses already exist. They haven"t created a master race because only a tiny number of women have wanted to impregnate themselves this way. Why think it will be different if human cloning becomes available?
So who will likely take advantage of cloning? Perhaps a grieving couple whose child is dying. This might seem psychologically twisted. But a cloned child born to such dubious parents stands no greater or lesser chance of being loved, or rejected, or warped than a child normally conceived. Infertile couples are also likely to seek out cloning. That such couples have other options (in vitro fertilization or adoption) is not an argument for denying them the right to clone. Or consider an example raised by Judge Richard Posner: a couple in which the husband has some tragic genetic defect. Currently, if this couple wants a genetically related child, they have four not altogether pleasant options. They can reproduce naturally and risk passing on the disease to the child. They can go to a sperm bank and take a chance on unknown genes. They can try in vitro fertilization and dispose of any afflicted embryo—though that might be objectionable, too. Or they can get a male relative of the father to donate sperm, if such a relative exists. This is one case where even people unnerved by cloning might see it as not the worst option.
Even if human cloning offers no obvious benefits to humanity, why ban it? In a democratic society we don"t usually pass laws outlawing something before there is actual or probable evidence of harm. A moratorium on further research into human cloning might make sense, in order to consider calmly the grave question it raises. If the moratorium is then lifted, human cloning should remain a research activity for an extended period. And if it is ever attempted, it should — and no doubt will — take place only with careful scrutiny and layers of legal oversight. Most important, human cloning should be governed by the same laws that now protect human rights. A world not safe for cloned humans would be a world not safe for the rest of us.
问答题____________________________________________________________
问答题Traditional medicine is the sum total of knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures that are used to maintain health, as well as to prevent, diagnose or treat physical and mental illnesses. Traditional medicine that has been adopted by other populations (outside its indigenous culture) is often termed alternative or complementary medicine. Herbal medicines include herbs, herbal preparations, and finished herbal products that contain parts of plants as active ingredients. In some Asian and African countries, 80% of the population depend on traditional medicine for primary health care. In many developed countries, 70% to 80% of the population has used some form of alternative or complementary medicine, such as acupuncture.