单选题 Money spent on advertising is money spent as well as any I know of. It serves directly to assist a rapid distribution of goods at reasonable prices, thereby establishing a firm home market and so making it possible to provide for export at competitive prices. By drawing attention to new ideas it helps enormously to raise standards of living. By helping to increase demand it ensures an increased need for labour, and is therefore an effective way to fight unemployment. It lowers the costs of many services: without advertisements your daily newspaper would cost four times as much, the price of your television license would need to be doubled, and travel by bus or tube would cost 20 percent more. And perhaps most important of all, advertising provides a guarantee of reasonable value in the products and services you buy. Apart from the fact that twenty-seven Acts of Parliament govern the terms of advertising, no regular advertiser dare promote a product that fails to live up to the promise of his advertisements. He might fool some people for a little while through misleading advertising. He will not do so for long, for mercifully the public has the good sense not to buy the inferior article more than once. If you see an article consistently advertised, it is the surest proof I know that the article does what is claimed for it, and that it represents good value. Advertising does more for the material benefit of the community than any other force I can think of. There is one more point I feel I ought to touch on. Recently I heard a well-known television personality declared that he was against advertising because it persuades rather than informs. He was drawing excessively fine distinctions. Of course advertising seeks to persuade. If its message was confined merely to information—and that in itself would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtly persuasive—advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention to. But perhaps that is what the well-known television personality wants.

单选题 Urbanization—migration away from the suburbs to the city center—will be the biggest real estate trend in 2015, according to a new report. The report says America's urbanization will continue to be the most significant issue affecting the industry, as cities across the country imitate the walkability and transit-oriented development making cities like New York and San Francisco so successful. As smaller cities copy the model of these '24-hour cities,' more affordable versions of these places will be created. The report refers to this as the coming of the '18-hour city,' and uses the term to refer to cities like Houston, Austin, Charlotte, and Nashville, which are 'positioning themselves as highly competitive, in terms of livability, employment offerings, and recreational and cultural facilities.' Another trend that looks significant in 2015 is that America's largest population group, Millennials (千禧一代), will continue to put off buying a house. Apartments will retain their appeal for a while for Millennials, haunted by what happened to home-owning parents. This trend will continue into the 2020s, the report projects. After that, survey respondents disagree over whether this generation will follow in their parents' footsteps, moving to the suburbs to raise families, or will choose to remain in the city center. Another issue affecting real estate in the coming year will be America's failing infrastructure. Most roads, bridges, transit, water systems, the electric grid, and communications networks were installed 50 to 100 years ago, and they are largely taken for granted until they fail. The report's writers state that America's failure to invest in infrastructure impacts not only the health of the real-estate market, but also our ability to remain globally competitive. Apart from the specific trends highlighted above, which cause some investors to worry, the report portrays an overall optimism borne by the recent healthy real-estate 'upcycle' and improving economy. Seventy-four percent of the respondents surveyed report a 'good to excellent' expectation of real-estate profitability in 2015. While excessive optimism can promote bad investment patterns, resulting in a real-estate 'bubble,' the report's writers downplay that potential outcome in that it has not yet occurred.

单选题 The Touch-Screen Generation A. On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children's apps (应用程序) for phones and tablets (平板电脑) gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off their games. The gathering was organized by Warren Buckleitner, a longtime reviewer of interactive children's media. Buckleitner spent the breaks testing whether his own remote-control helicopter could reach the hall's second story, while various children who had come with their parents looked up in awe (敬畏) and delight. But mostly they looked down, at the iPads and other tablets displayed around the hall like so many open boxes of candy. I walked around and talked with developers, and several quoted a famous saying of Maria Montessori's 'The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence'. B. What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking (戳) their fingers in the sand or running them along stones or picking seashells. Instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. C. In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy on very young children and media. In 1999, the group had discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, citing research on brain development that showed this age group's critical need for 'direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers'. The updated report began by acknowledging that things had changed significantly since then. In 2006, 90% of parents said that their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Nevertheless, the group took largely the same approach it did in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids. (For older children, the academy noted, 'high-quality programs' could have 'educational benefits'.) The 2011 report mentioned 'smart cell phone' and 'new screen' technologies, but did not address interactive apps. Nor did it bring up the possibility that has likely occurred to those 90% of American parents that some good might come from those little swiping(在电子产品上刷) fingers. D. I had come to the developers' conference partly because I hoped that this particular set of parents, enthusiastic as they were about interactive media, might help me out of this problem, that they might offer some guiding principle for American parents who are clearly never going to meet the academy's ideals, and at some level do not want to. Perhaps this group would be able to express clearly some benefits of the new technology that the more cautious doctors weren't ready to address. E. I fell into conversation with a woman who had helped develop Montessori Letter Sounds, an app that teaches preschoolers the Montessori methods of spelling. She was a former Montessori teacher and a mother of four. I myself have three children who are all fans of the touch screen. What games did her kids like to play, I asked, hoping for suggestions I could take home. 'They don't play all that much'. Really? Why not? 'Because I don't allow it. We have a rule of no screen time during the week, unless it's clearly educational'. No screen time? None at all? That seems at the outer edge of restrictive, even by the standards of overcontrolling parenting. 'On the weekends, they can play. I give them a limit of half an hour and then stop. Enough'. F. Her answer so surprised me that I decided to ask some of the other developers who were also parents what their domestic ground rules for screen time were. One said only on airplanes and long car rides. Another said Wednesdays and weekends, for half an hour. The most permissive said half an hour a day, which was about my rule at home. At one point I sat with one of the biggest developers of e-book apps for kids, and his family. The small kid was starting to fuss in her high chair, so the mom stuck an iPad in front of her and played a short movie so everyone else could enjoy their lunch. When she saw me watching, she gave me the universal tense look of mothers who feel they are being judged. 'At home,' she assured me. 'I only let her watch movies in Spanish'. G. By their reactions, these parents made me understand the problem of our age: as technology becomes almost everywhere in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, distrustful of what it might be doing to their children. Technological ability has not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate(航行) all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets as precision surgical (外科的) instruments, devices that might perform miracles for their child's IQ and help him win some great robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can't make eye contact and has a girlfriend who lives only in the virtual world. H. Norman Rockwell, a 20th-century artist, never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen, and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never been adjusted to accommodate that now-common scene. Add to that our modem fear that every parenting decision may have lasting consequences—that every minute of enrichment lost or mindless entertainment indulged (放纵的) will add up to some permanent handicap (障碍) in the future—and you have deep guilt and confusion. To date, no body of research has proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rest her nervous system—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what is a parent to do?

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled On College Students' Career Planning following the outline given below. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. On College Students' Career Planning 1．近年来，大学生职业生涯规划越来越受重视 2．分析产生这种现象的原因 3．大学生应该如何规划自己的职业生涯

单选题 Can Burglars Jam Your Wireless Security System? A. Any product that promises to protect your home deserves careful examination. So it isn't surprising that you'll find plenty of strong opinions about the potential vulnerabilities of popular home-security systems. B. The most likely type of burglary (入室盗窃) by far is the unsophisticated crime of opportunity, usually involving a broken window or some forced entry. According to the FBI, crimes like these accounted for roughly two-thirds of all household burglaries in the US in 2013. The wide majority of the rest were illegal, unforced entries that resulted from something like a window being left open. The odds of a criminal using technical means to bypass a security system are so small that the FBI doesn't even track those statistics. C. One of the main theoretical home-security concerns is whether or not a given system is vulnerable to being blocked from working altogether. With wired setups, the fear is that a burglar (入室盗窃) might be able to shut your system down simply by cutting the right cable. With a wireless setup, you stick battery-powered sensors up around your home that keep an eye on windows, doors, motion, and more. If they detect something wrong while the system is armed, they'll transmit a wireless alert signal to a base station that will then raise the alarm. That approach will eliminate most cord-cutting concerns—but what about their wireless equivalent, jamming? With the right device tuned to the right frequency, what's to stop a thief from jamming your setup and blocking that alert signal from ever reaching the base station? D. Jamming concerns are nothing new, and they're not unique to security systems. Any device that's built to receive a wireless signal at a specific frequency can be overwhelmed by a stronger signal coming in on the same frequency. For comparison, let's say you wanted to 'jam' a conversation between two people all you'd need to do is yell in the listener's ear. E. Security devices are required to list the frequencies they broadcast on—that means that a potential thief can find what they need to know with minimal Googling. They will, however, need to know what system they're looking for. If you have a sign in your yard declaring what setup you use, that'd point them in the right direction, though at that point, we're talking about a highly targeted, semi-sophisticated attack, and not the sort of forced-entry attack that makes up the majority of burglaries. It's easier to find and acquire jamming equipment for some frequencies than it is for others. F. Wireless security providers will often take steps to help combat the threat of jamming attacks. SimpliSafe, winner of our Editors' Choice distinction, utilizes a special system that's capable of separating incidental RF interference from targeted jamming attacks. When the system thinks it's being jammed, it'll notify you via push alert (推送警报). From there, it's up to you to sound the alarm manually. G. SimpliSafe was singled out in one recent article on jamming, complete with a video showing the entire system being effectively bypassed with handheld jamming equipment. After taking appropriate measures to contain the RF interference to our test lab, we tested the attack out for ourselves, and were able to verify that it's possible with the right equipment. However, we also verified that SimpliSafe's anti-jamming system works. It caught us in the act, sent an alert to my smartphone, and also listed our RF interference on the system's event log. The team behind the article and video in question make no mention of the system, or whether or not it detected them. H. We like the unique nature of that software. It means that a thief likely wouldn't be able to Google how the system works, then figure out a way around it. Even if they could, SimpliSafe claims that its system is always evolving, and that it varies slightly from system to system, which means there wouldn't be a universal magic formula for cracking it. Other systems also seem confident on the subject of jamming. The team at Frontpoint addresses the issue in a blog on its site, citing their own jam protection software and claiming that there aren't any documented cases of a successful jam attack since the company began offering wireless security sensors in the 1980s. I. Jamming attacks are absolutely possible. As said before, with the right equipment and the right knowhow, it's possible to jam any wireless transmission. But how probable is it that someone will successfully jam their way into your home and steal your stuff? J. Let's imagine that you live in a small home with a wireless security setup that offers a functional anti-jamming system. First, a thief is going to need to target your home, specifically. Then, he's going to need to know the technical details of your system and acquire the specific equipment necessary for jamming your specific setup. Presumably, you keep your doors locked at night and while you're away, so the thief will still need to break in. That means defeating the lock somehow, or breaking a window. He'll need to be jamming you at this point, as a broken window or opened door would normally release the alarm. So, too, would the motion detectors in your home, so the thief will need to continue jamming once he's inside and searching for things to steal. However, he'll need to do so without tripping the anti-jamming system, the details of which he almost certainly does not have access to. K. At the end of the day, these kinds of systems are primarily designed to protect against the sort of opportunistic smash-and-grab attack that makes up the majority of burglaries. They're also only a single layer in what should ideally be a many-sided approach to securing your home, one that includes common sense things like sound locks and proper exterior lighting at night. No system is impenetrable, and none can promise to eliminate the worst case completely. Every one of them has vulnerabilities that a knowledgeable thief could theoretically exploit. A good system is one that keeps that worst-case setting as improbable as possible while also offering strong protection in the event of a less-extraordinary attack.

单选题 The U.S. Department of Labor statistics indicate that there is an oversupply of college-trained workers and that this oversupply is increasing. Already there is an overabundance of teachers, engineers, physicists, aerospace experts, and other specialists. Yet colleges and graduate schools continue every year to turn out highly trained people to compete for jobs that aren't there. The result is that graduates cannot enter the professions for which they were trained and must take temporary jobs which do not require a college degree. On the other hand, there is a tremendous need for skilled workers of all sorts: carpenters, electricians, mechanics, plumbers, TV repairmen. These people have more work than they can handle, and their annual incomes are often higher than those of college graduates. The old distinction that white-collar workers make a better living than blue-collar workers no longer holds true. The law of supply and demand now favors the skilled workmen. The reason for this situation is the traditional myth that college degree is a passport to a prosperous future. A large segment of American society equates success in life with a college degree. Parents begin indoctrinating (灌输) their children with this myth before they are out of grade school. High school teachers play their part by acting as if high school education were a preparation for college rather than for life. Under this pressure the kids fall in line. Whether they want to go to college or not doesn't matter. Everybody should go to college, so of course they must go. And every year college enrollments go up and up, and more and more graduates are overeducated for the kinds of jobs available to them. One result of this emphasis on a college education is that many people go to college who do not belong there. Of the sixty percent of high school graduates who enter college, half of them do not graduate with their class. Many of them drop out within the first year. Some struggle on for two or three years and then give up.

单选题 New research has found that those who work 11-hour days or more increase their chance of a heart attack by two thirds. If you're about to embark on your usual 12-hour day at the office, you might want to pause a while—a few hours, actually. A study has found that those who spend more than 11 hours at work increase their chance of having a heart attack by two thirds. The team from University College London looked at more than 7,000 civil servants working in Whitehall over a period of 11 years and established how many hours they worked on average a day. They also collected information including the condition of their heart from medical records and health checks. Over the period, a total of 192 had suffered a heart attack. Then the study was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, reporting that those who worked more than 11 hours a day were 67 percent more likely to have one than those who had a 'nine to five' job. Professor Mika Kivimki, who led the study, said: 'We have shown that working long days is associated with a remarkable increase in risk of heart disease. Considering that including a measurement of working hours in a GP interview is so simple and useful, our research presents a strong case that it should become standard practice. This new information should help improve decisions regarding medication for heart disease.' 'It could also be a wake-up call for people who over-work themselves, especially if they already have other risk factors,' Professor Kivimki added. Around 2.6 million Britons have heart disease, where the organ's blood supply is blocked by the build-up of fatty deposits in the coronary arteries (冠状动脉). It is the nation's biggest killer, claiming 101,000 lives in this country every year. Heart attacks occur when a coronary artery becomes completely blocked; if the blood supply is not restored, the section of the heart being supplied by the artery will die.

单选题 Doctors are to begin a trial of a drug treatment that could double the time transplanted organs survive in the body. The 20-minute procedure effectively coats donor organs in a protective shield that stops them being rejected by the patient's immune system. The treatment is expected to prolong the time that organs remain healthy in patients' bodies and also increase their shelf-life (保存期限), so they can be stored for longer or transported further before being used. If the treatment works, it could ease the burden on organ transplant services, which face an increasing gap between the supply and demand for donor organs. People who receive transplants must take drugs to suppress their immune systems, but the body still reacts enough to cause transplants to fail sooner than they should. A healthy transplanted kidney lasts on average only 10 years, around one third of the time it should last. Organs such as hearts and livers fail even sooner. The consequence is that patients who have had one donor organ often need another. The new treatment, developed by researchers at King's College London, is based on the defense mechanism healthy organs use to shield themselves from immune system. Studies suggest the procedure could extend the life of an implanted kidney by around seven years. The scientists believe the treatment will also extend the shelf-life of donor organs, increasing the time they survive outside the body from no more than 24 hours to several days. This could reduce wastage and double the number of organs that work properly once they are transplanted, doctors said. In early tests, only a fifth of organs worked properly after being stored on ice for 16 hours, compared with 50% of those treated with mirococept (药物：米罗西普). A recent pilot study of the treatment on 16 patients found it was safe to use. Patients who receive donated organs treated with mirococept will still need to take drugs to suppress their immune systems, but doctors said an aim of their research was to see if the use of current drugs, which can increase a patient's risk of cancer, can be reduced.