问答题The greatest impact of LED-based lighting could be in developing countries, where it can be powered by batteries or solar panels. While trekking in Nepal in 1997, Dave Irvine-Halliday was struck by the plight of rural villagers having to rely on smelly, dim and dangerous kerosene lanterns to light their homes. Hoping to make a difference, Dr Irvine-Halliday, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary in Canada, founded the Light Up The World Foundation, The non-profit organisation has since helped to distribute low-power, white light-emitting diodes (LEDs), at low cost or free, to thousands of people around the globe. About 1.6 billion people worldwide are without access to electricity and have to rely on fuel- based sources for lighting. But burning fuel is not only extremely expensive—$40 billion is spent on off-the-grid lighting in developing countries a year—it is also highly inefficient and contributes to indoor air pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases. If people switched from using fuel-based lamps to solar-powered LEDs, carbon-dioxide emissions could be reduced by up to 190m tonnes per year, reckons Evan Mills, a staff scientist at America"s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That is equivalent to one-third of Britain"s annual carbon-dioxide emissions. LEDs are an ideal off-the-grid light source because they need so little power. They can be run on AA batteries, or batteries recharged using small solar arrays. Compared with kerosene lanterns, LEDs can deliver up to 100 times more useful light to a task, besides being extremely long-lasting. All this adds up to a life-changing impact for the lamps" owners, ranging from increased work productivity, more time to study at night and reduced health problems and fire hazards. Several firms are getting ready to tap into this underserved market. Cosmos Ignite Innovations, a spin-out from Stanford University that is now based in New Delhi, India, has developed the MightyLight, a solar-powered LED-based lamp that is waterproof, portable and runs for up to 12 hours. So far, Cosmos has sold nearly 5,000 of its $50 lamps to various charities. Another company, Better Energy Systems of Berkeley, California, is testing LED add-ons that might work well with its Solio, a portable solar array that can also be used to charge mobile phones and other devices. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector investment arm of the World Bank, recently secured $ 5.4m in financing for "Lighting the Bottom of the Pyramid", a four-year initiative that will engage lighting manufacturers with pilot projects in Kenya and Ghana. One task is to make LEDs affordable, says Dr Mills, who is a consultant on the IFC project. Households in rural Kenya, for example, spend an average of $7 a month on kerosene for lighting. Although the cost of a solar-powered LED lamp over its lifetime is much less than the cumulative cost of fuel, many people cannot afford the initial $25 to $50 outlay for such a lamp. If that hitch could be ironed out—via microfinance, perhaps—the payoff could be bright.

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问答题Although it may feel like it, a headache is most often not a pain in your brain. Your brain quickly tells you when other parts of your body hurt.

问答题Explain the sentence "successful presidents have all skillfully exploited the dominant medium of their times" (Para. 1), and give some examples.

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 Many animals and plants threatened with extinction could be saved if scientists spent more time talking with the native people whose knowledge of local species is dying out as fast as their languages are being lost. Potentially vital information about many endangered species is locked in the vocabulary and expressions of local people, yet biologists are failing to tap into this huge source of knowledge before it is lost for good, scientists said. "It seems logical that the biologists should go and talk to the indigenous people who know more about the local environment than anyone else," said David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. "Most of what humans know about ecosystems and species is not found in databases or libraries or written down anywhere. It's in people's heads. It's in purely oral traditions," Dr. Harrison told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. "About 80 percent of the animals and plants visible to the naked eye have not yet been classified by science. It doesn't mean they are unknown; it just means we have a knowledge gap." An estimated 7,000 languages are spoken in the world but more than half of them are dying out so fast that they will be lost completely by the end of the century as children learn more common languages, such as English or Spanish. He cited the example of a South American skipper butterfly, Astraptes fulgerator, which scientists thought was just one species until a DNA study three years ago revealed that it was in fact 10 different species whose camouflaged colouration made the adult forms appear "identical to one another". Yet if the scientists had spoken to the Tzeltal-speaking people of Mexico—descendants of the Maya—they might have learnt this information much sooner because Tzeltal has several descriptions of the butterflies based on the different kinds of caterpillar. "These people live on the territory of that butterfly habitat and in fact care very little about the adult butterfly but they have a very-fine grained classification for the larvae because the caterpillars affect their crops and their agriculture," Dr. Harrison said. "It's crucial for them to know which larva is eating which crop and at what time of year. Their survival literally depends on knowing that, whereas the adult butterfly has no impact on their crops," he said. "There was a knowledge gap on both sides and if they had been talking to each other they might have figured out sooner that they were dealing with a species complex," he said. "Indigenous people often have classification systems that are often more fine-grained and more precise than what Western science knows about species and their territories." Another example of local knowledge was shown by the Musqueam people of British Columbia in Canada, who have fished the local rivers for generations and describe the trout and the salmon as belonging to the same group. In 2003 they were vindicated when a genetic study revealed that the "trout" did in fact belong to the same group as Pacific salmon, Dr. Harrison said. "It seems obvious that knowing more about species and ecosystems would put us in a better position to sustain those species and ecosystems," he said. "That's my argument that the knowledge gap is vastly to the detriment of Western science. We know much less than we think we do."

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问答题The economic system of the United States is principally one of private ownership. In this system, consumers, producers and government make economic decisions on a daily basis, mainly through the price system. The dynamic interaction of these three groups makes the economy function The market"s primary force, however, is the interaction of producers and consumers; hence the "market economy" designation As a rule, consumers look for the best values for what they spend while producers seek the best price and profit for what they have to sell. Government, at the federal, state, and local level, seeks to promote public security, assure reasonable competition, and provide a range of services believed to be better performed by public rather than private enterprises. Generally, there are three kinds of enterprises: single-owner operated businesses, partnerships and corporations. The first two are important, but it is the latter structure that best permits the amassing of large sums of money by combining the investments of many people who, as stockholders, can buy and sell their shares of the business at any time on the open market. Corporations make large-scale enterprises possible.

问答题In a slowing U. S economy, job opportunities are shaped by uncertainty. As president of a small college, I am keenly aware of the job market that awaits this year's graduates. The recent news that Bear Steams was nullifying a few hundred job offers to business school students fits a pattern of corporate downsizing that isn't lost on college campuses across the USA. But even with the darkening economic clouds, rays of good news await this year's graduates. Sure, companies are laying off workers, but many are also looking for new talent, especially at the entry level. As more than a million entrants flood the job market, students should know that in a global marketplace, language skills will go a long way. So will flexibility. If a grad is ready to accept an entry-level job, give a little on job requirements and move d the company asks, chances are he'll land a job. So despite the rising job losses, a new graduate should embrace the market as the first challenge of a long career.

问答题The Internet environment is not necessarily friendly for language learners, because they have to use their language appropriately in so many different real-life social situations.

问答题Questions 1～3 Friending wasn"t used as a verb until about five years ago, when social networks such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook burst onto the scene. Suddenly, our friends were something even better—an audience. If blogging felt like shouting into the void, posting updates on a social network felt more like an intimate conversation among friends at a pub. Inevitably, as our list of friends grew to encompass acquaintances, friends of friends and the girl who sat behind us in seventh-grade homeroom, online friendships became devalued. Suddenly, we knew as much about the lives of our distant acquaintances as we did about the lives of our intimates—what they"d had for dinner, how they felt about Tiger Woods and so on. Enter Twitter with a solution: no friends, just followers. These one-way relationships were easier to manage—no more annoying decisions about whether to give your ex boyfriend access to your photos, no more fussing over who could see your employment and contact information. Twitter"s updates were also easily searchable on the Web, forcing users to be somewhat thoughtful about their posts. The intimate conversation became a talent show, a challenge to prove your intellectual prowess in 140 characters or less. This fall, Twitter turned its popularity into dollars, inking lucrative deals to allow its users" tweets to be broadcast via search algorithms on Google and Bing. Soon, Facebook followed suit with deals to distribute certain real-time data to Google and Bing. (Recall that despite being the fifth most popular Web site in the world, Facebook is barely profitable. ) Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt says no money changed hands in the deals but says there was "probably an exchange of value. " Just one catch: Facebook had just "exchanged" to Google and Microsoft something that didn"t exist. The vast majority of Facebook users restrict updates to their friends, and do not expect those updates to appear in public search results. (In fact, many people restrict their Facebook profile from appearing at all in search results). So Facebook had little content to provide to Google"s and Bing"s real-time search results. When Google"s real-time search launched earlier this month, its results were primarily filled with Twitter updates. Coincidentally, Facebook presented its 350 million members with a new default privacy setting last week. For most people, the new suggested settings would open their Facebook updates and information to the entire world. Mr. Schnitt says the new privacy suggestions are an acknowledgement of "the way we think the world is going." Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg led by example, opening up his previously closed profile, including goofy photos of himself curled up with a teddy bear. Facebook also made public formerly private info such as profile pictures, gender, current city and the friends list. (Mr. Schnitt suggests that users are free to lie about their hometown or take down their profile picture to protect their privacy; in response to users" complaints, the friends" list can now be restricted to be viewed only by friends). Of course, many people will reject the default settings on Facebook and keep on chatting with only their Facebook friends. (Mr. Schnitt said more than 50% of its users had rejected the defaults at last tally). But those who want a private experience on Facebook will have to work harder at it: if you inadvertently post a comment on a friend"s profile page that has been opened to the public, your comment will be public too. Just as Facebook turned friends into a commodity, it has likewise gathered our personal data—our updates, our baby photos, our endless chirping birthday notes—and readied it to be bundled and sold. So I give up. Rather than fighting to keep my Facebook profile private, I plan to open it up to the public—removing the fiction of intimacy and friendship. But I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn"t want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You"d be smart to do the same. We"ll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends.

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问答题Americans do not go in for envy. The gap between rich and poor is bigger than in any other advanced country, but most people are unconcerned. Whereas Europeans fret about the way the economic pie is divided, Americans want to join the rich, not soak them. Eight out of ten, more than anywhere else, believe that though you may start poor, if you work hard, you can make lots of money. It is a central part of the American Dream. The political consensus, therefore, has sought to pursue economic growth rather than the redistribution of income, in keeping with John Kennedy's adage that "a rising tide lifts all boats." The tide has been rising fast recently. Thanks to a jump in productivity growth after 1995, America's economy has outpaced other rich countries' for a decade. Its workers now produce over 30% more each hour they work than ten years ago. In the late 1990s everybody shared in this boom. Though incomes were rising fastest at the top, all workers' wages far outpaced inflation.

问答题1840年以前，中国总以为自己是天朝上国，那么文明，好得不得了，所有的“蛮夷”都是野蛮得不得了，所以，他们都是落后的。这种心态经过鸦片战争(the Opium War)，中国打了败仗，就完全改变了。中国有一批人开始觉悟了，他们在思考中国为什么打败仗呢，是中国的船、炮不行，洋人则船坚炮利。所以，最早一批思想比较开明、比较清醒的人，就提出来要学西方的这个长处。他们提出一个有名的口号，叫做“师夷之长技以制夷”。他们知道中国不能闭关自守，不能总是保守自己的一套传统旧东西，要学一点外来的新东西。

问答题中国赢得2010年世界博览会的举办权，靠的是国际社会对中国改革开放的支持和信心。这次博览会将是自1851年在英国伦敦第一次举办以来，首次在发展中国家举办的世界博览会，它表达了全世界人民对中国未来发展的期望。 2010年上海世博会的主题是“城市，让生活更美好”。未来的城市生活是全球关注的话题，与每一个国家及其人民息息相关。第一次以“城市”作为主题的2010世界博览会将吸引全球约 200个国家和国际组织参与盛会，国内外参访人数预计达7000万。

问答题To date, the bulk of the public debate about copyright and new technology has focused on an issue that I consider to be secondary, the issue of how new technology alters the balance of power between consumers and a relatively narrow group of producers, primarily the producers of certain types of music and film. By focusing so narrowly on that issue, and framing that issue as being about "kids' stealing music," we run the risk of overlooking how bad copyright laws are increasingly affecting a much more important group of cultural producers. I am the founder of Wikipedia, a charitable effort to organize thousands of volunteers to write a high-quality encyclopedia in every language of the world. We the Wikipedians have achieved remarkable success in our five-year history, and we've done it as volunteers freely sharing our knowledge. And yet, strangely enough, in addition to researching facts on hundreds of thousands of topics, we are forced to become copyright experts, because so much of our cultural heritage is being threatened by absurd limits on fair use of information in the public domain. I get two to three threatening lawyergrams each week; one I just received from a famous London museum begins, typically. "We notice you have a number of images on your website which are of portraits in the collection of [our museum] ... Unauthorized reproduction of such content may be an infringement ... " I now respond with a two-part letter. First, I patiently and tediously explain that museums do not and cannot own the copyrights to paintings that have been in the public domain for hundreds of years. And then I simply say: "You should be ashamed of yourselves." Museums exist to educate the public about our shared cultural heritage. The abuse of copyright to corner that heritage is a moral crime. The excuse normally given, that producing digital reproductions is costly and time-consuming, and museums need to be able to recoup that cost, is entirely bogus. Just give us permission, and Wikipedians will go to any museum in the world immediately to make high-quality digital images of any artwork. The solution to preserving our heritage and communicating it in a digital form is not to lock it up, but to get out of our way. This issue, public-domain artworks, is about an abuse of existing law. But the law itself is also a problem. Copyrights have been repeatedly extended to absurd lengths for all kinds of works, whether the author aims to protect them or not. Even works that have no economic value are locked away under copyright, preventing Wikipedians from rewriting and updating them. Every school system in the world faces the problem of expensive texts. Wikipedia shows a way to a solution, and we have founded a supporting project called Wikibooks to implement that solution. Here, thousands of volunteers are working to write textbooks. If we still lived in an era of reasonable copyright lengths (14 to 28 years, with registration), it would be no problem for us to seek out works of lapsed copyright, abandoned by their owners, and update them quickly. We could cut the costs of textbooks in schools radically, not just in the United States and other wealthy countries, but in the developing world as well. And finally, the example set by Wikipedia and Wikibooks is beginning to spread, in an explosion of creativity. Another of my projects, the for-profit Wikicities, allows communities to form and build knowledge bases or other works on any topic of interest. Again, thousands of people are working to write the definitive guides to humor, films, books, etc., and they are doing this work voluntarily and placing it all under free licenses as a gift to the world. And, of course, here we have again all the same problems of abusive application of copyright law as at Wikipedia and Wikibooks. We obey the law; we are not about civil disobedience. We want only to be good, to do good and to share knowledge in a million different ways. We have the people to do it. We have the technology to do it. And we will do it, bad law or no. But good law, law that recognizes a new paradigm of collaborative creativity, will make our job a lot easier. Copyright reform is not about kids' stealing music. It is about recognizing the astounding possibilities inherent in the honest and intelligent use of new technologies.

问答题This book may not change your life. But if you have a tendency to be messy and have already broken your new year resolutions to be neater in future, it will certainly make you feel better about your natural inclinations. Untidiness, hoarding, procrastination and improvisation are not bad habits, the authors argue, but often more sensible than meticulous planning, storage and purging of possessions. That is because the tidiness lobby counts the benefits of neatness, but not its costs. A rough storage system (important papers close to the keyboard, the rest distributed in loosely related piles on every flat surface) takes very little time to manage. Filing every bit of paper in a precise category, with colour-coded index tabs and a neat system of cross-referencing, will certainly take longer. And by the end, it may not save any time. Your reviewer"s office is easily the most untidy in The Economist (not entirely his own work, it should be said, thanks to the heroic efforts of his even untidier office-mate). But when it comes to managing information, there seems to be no discernible difference in the end result. The authors of this book trawl the furthest reaches of psychology, management studies, biology and physics to show why a bit of disorder is good for you. Chiefly, it creates much more room for coincidence and serendipity. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he was notoriously untidy, and didn"t clean a Petri dish, thus allowing fungal spores to get to work on bacteria. He remarked wryly on visiting a colleague"s spotless lab: "no danger of mould here". It can also help make sense of things. Hearing depends on random movement of molecules: when they coincide with sounds from outside, they are strong enough to stimulate the inner ear. A bit of background noise on the phone enables our ears to filter out echoes. A slightly mushy photograph can be easier to understand. Music and art depend on mess. Procrastination makes sense too. America’s Marine Corps, the authors repeat (several times), never makes detailed plans in advance. Leaving important things to the last minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things that may ultimately prove not important at all. The authors are witheringly contemptuous of the bogus equation of tidiness and morality—for example in corporate "clean desk" policies. Disorder and creativity are so closely linked that any employer who penalizes the first sacrifices the second, they argue. America"s professional organizers, a thriving and lucrative cult of tidiness coaches, are merchants of guilt, not productivity boosters. It"s all fine, up to a point. But the book has two weaknesses. One is that it overstates the case. The case for tidiness in some environments—surgery, a dinner table or income tax returns—is really overwhelming. The other is that the book is a bit repetitive and disorganized. Even readers who love mess in their own lives don"t necessarily like it in others.