单选题 Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you'll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women—the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female. You will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country. It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly this apparent diversity is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set of clones among the business leaders of the future. Diversity, it seems, has not helped to address fundamental weaknesses in business leadership. So what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programmes recruit their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of criteria such as prior academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities. This is then coupled to a school's picture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach—arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters. Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context. Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bullyboy chief executive of old may not have been eradicated completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management—at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those prevalent in Scandinavia, which seek to integrate the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility and accountability.

单选题 Questions24-26 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题 Why Teenagers Act Crazy A. Adolescence is practically synonymous in our culture with risk taking, emotional drama and all forms of strange behavior. Until very recently, the widely accepted explanation for adolescent angst has been psychological. Developmentally, teenagers face a number of social and emotional challenges, like starting to separate from their parents, getting accepted into a peer group and figuring out who they really are. It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to realize that these are anxiety-provoking transitions. B. But there is a darker side to adolescence that, until now, was poorly understood: a surge during teenage years in anxiety and fearfulness. Largely because of a quirk (古怪) of brain development, adolescents, on average, experience more anxiety and fear and have a harder time learning how not to be afraid than either children or adults. C. Different regions and circuits of the brain mature at very different rates. It turns out that the brain circuit for processing fear—the amygdala (杏仁核)—is precocious (早熟的) and develops way ahead of the prefrontal cortex (前额皮质), the seat of reasoning and executive control. This means that adolescents have a brain that is wired with an enhanced capacity for fear and anxiety, but is relatively underdeveloped when it comes to calm reasoning. D. You may wonder why, if adolescents have such enhanced capacity for anxiety, they are such novelty seekers and risk takers. It would seem that the two traits are at odds. The answer, in part, is that the brain's reward center, just like its fear circuit, matures earlier than the prefrontal cortex. That reward center drives much of teenagers' risky behavior. This behavioral paradox also helps explain why adolescents are particularly prone to injury and trauma. The top three killers of teenagers are accidents, homicide and suicide. The brain-development lag has huge implications for how we think about anxiety and how we treat it. It suggests that anxious adolescents may not be very responsive to psychotherapy that attempts to teach them to be unafraid, like cognitive behavior therapy, which is zealously prescribed for teenagers. E. What we have learned should also make us think twice—and then some—about the ever rising use of stimulants in young people, because these drugs may worsen anxiety and make it harder for teenagers to do what they are developmentally supposed to do: Learn to be unafraid when it is appropriate to do so. Of course, most adolescents do not develop anxiety disorders, but acquire the skill to modulate (调节) their fear as their prefrontal cortex matures in young adulthood, at around age 25. But up to 20 percent of adolescents in the United States experience a diagnosable anxiety disorder, like generalized anxiety or panic attacks, probably resulting from a mix of genetic factors and environmental influences. The prevalence of anxiety disorders and risky behavior (both of which reflect this developmental disjunction in the brain) have been relatively steady, which suggests to me that the biological contribution is very significant. F. One of my patients, a 32-year-old man, recalled feeling anxious in social gatherings as a teenager. 'It was viscerally (出自内心地) unpleasant and I felt as if I couldn't even speak the same language as other people in the room,' he said. It wasn't that he disliked human company; rather, socializing in groups felt dangerous, even though intellectually he knew that wasn't the case. He developed a strategy to deal with his discomfort: alcohol. When he drank, he felt relaxed and able to engage. Now treated and sober for several years, he still has a trace of social anxiety and still wishes for a drink in anticipation of socializing. G. Of course, we all experience anxiety. Among other things, it's a normal emotional response to threatening situations. The hallmark of an anxiety disorder is the persistence of anxiety that causes intense distress and interferes with functioning even in safe settings, long after any threat has receded. We've recently learned that adolescents show heightened fear responses and have difficulty learning how not to be afraid. In one study using brain M. R. I., researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College and Stanford University found that when adolescents were shown fearful faces, they had exaggerated responses in the amygdala compared with children and adults. H. The amygdala is a region buried deep beneath the cortex that is critical in evaluating and responding to fear. it sends and receives connections to our prefrontal cortex alerting us to danger even before we have had time to really think about it. Think of that split-second adrenaline (肾上腺素) surge when you see what appears to be a snake out on a hike in the woods. That instantaneous fear is your amygdala in action. Then you circle back, take another look and this time your prefrontal cortex tells you it was just a harmless stick. Fear learning lies at the heart of anxiety and anxiety disorders. This primitive form of learning allows us to form associations between events and specific cues and environments that may predict danger. Way back on the savanna (热带草原), for example, we would have learned that the rustle in the grass or the sudden flight of birds might signal a predator—and taken the cue and run to safety. Without the ability to identify such danger signals, we would have been lunch long ago. But once previously threatening cues or situations become safe, we have to be able to re-evaluate them and suppress our learned fear associations. I. Another patient I saw in consultation recently, a 23-year-old woman, described how she became anxious when she was younger after seeing a commercial about asthma (哮喘). 'It made me incredibly worried for no reason, and I had a panic attack soon after seeing it,' she said. As an older teenager, she became worried about getting too close to homeless people and would hold her breath when near them, knowing that 'this was crazy and made no sense'. B. J. Casey, a professor of psychology and the director of the Sackler Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College, has studied fear learning in a group of children, adolescents and adults. Subjects were shown a colored square at the same time that they were exposed to an aversive (令人反感的) noise. The colored square, previously a neutral stimulus, became associated with an unpleasant sound and elicited a fear response similar to that elicited by the sound. J. What Dr. Casey and her colleagues found was that there were no differences between the subjects in the acquisition of fear conditioning. But when Dr. Casey trained the subjects to essentially unlearn the association between the colored square and the noise—a process called fear extinction—something very different happened. With fear extinction, subjects are repeatedly shown the colored square in the absence of the noise. Now the square, also known as the conditioned stimulus, loses its ability to elicit a fear response. Dr. Casey discovered that adolescents had a much harder time 'unlearning' the link between the colored square and the noise than children or adults did. K. In effect, adolescents had trouble learning that a cue that was previously linked to something aversive was now neutral and 'safe'. If you consider that adolescence is a time of exploration when young people develop greater autonomy, an enhanced capacity for fear and a more persistent memory for threatening situations are adaptive and would confer survival advantage. In fact, the developmental gap between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that is described in humans has been found across mammalian species, suggesting that this is an evolutionary advantage. This new understanding about the neurodevelopmental basis of adolescent anxiety has important implications, too, in how we should treat anxiety disorders. One of the most widely used and empirically supported treatments for anxiety disorders is cognitive behavior therapy, a form of extinction learning in which a stimulus that is experienced as frightening is repeatedly presented in a nonthreatening environment. If, for example, you had a fear of spiders, you would be gradually exposed to them in a setting where there were no dire consequences and you would slowly lose your arachnophobia (蛛蛛恐惧症). The paradox is that adolescents are at increased risk of anxiety disorders in part because of their impaired ability to successfully extinguish fear associations, yet they may be the least responsive to desensitization (脱敏) treatments like cognitive behavior therapy precisely because of this impairment. L. But we do know this.. Adolescents are not just carefree novelty seekers and risk takers; they are uniquely vulnerable to anxiety and have a hard time learning to be unafraid of passing dangers. Parents have to realize that adolescent anxiety is to be expected, and to comfort their teenagers—and themselves—by reminding them that they will grow up and out of it soon enough.

单选题 On a clear, cold day in early March 2019, Justin Jordan, a fifth-generation grower in Lacona, Iowa, reads attentively old maps spread across his dining-room table. One creased, yellowing chart shows a soil-conservation plan his grandfather created with the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) in the 1950s, including terraces for controlling erosion and areas designated for tree planting. The agency was working to reverse critical topsoil loss from decades of mass-scale plowing. His grandfather implemented part of the scheme. But new synthetic fertilizers, which could boost yields by 50 percent, made the situation less terrible, so he continued cultivating their corn and soybean fields each year. As did Jordan's dad, and most other farmers. Over the past 150 years, cultivation has chewed up about half of Earth's topsoil. Jordan, an polite, soft-spoken man in his late 30s, stopped plowing and began planting cover crops when he took over in the early 2000s. 'I was eager to do things in a different way,' he says. 'It just seemed like every year the topsoil was getting thinner.' Jordan tends 410 acres—larger than most farms selling vegetables at Saturday markets, but tiny compared with 10,000-acre corporate operations. Aerial photos show the contrast between his land and that of other farmers, most of whom continue deep cultivation. His soil is dark and rich, but from the air, his fields appear lighter, covered in accumulated mulch (胡根物). Strips of hay grass (for his cattle) and native prairie species cover across the slopes—year-round plants that pump carbon into the soil. Neighboring barren fields steadily release it. Once Jordan brings in his corn in October, he sows a cover of rye (黑麦) among the drying stalks that stays green through the following spring, when he cuts it down and seeds next year's crop in the mulch. He sprinkles his soybean fields before the September harvest with a cocktail of rye, radishes, and oats, creating a mini forest beneath the knee-high cash crop. With all these changes, his yields have remained roughly the same as his neighbors'. Soon, folks like Jordan might gain a financial edge. The Terraton Initiative, the nation's first carbon market dedicated to agriculture, launched in June 2019 out of the farm-tech startup Indigo Ag. Companies that want to offset their emissions purchase credits; Terraton then pays growers $15 per ton for the carbon their land captures. Within six months, farmers tending a total of 10 million acres worldwide expressed interest in signing up. More cash would be nice, but climate change is the motivating factor for Jordan—out of global concern, and to keep his harvest from washing away.

单选题 The poor old consumer! We'd have to pay a great deal more if advertising didn't create mass markets for products. It is precisely because of the heavy advertising that consumer goods are so cheap. But we get the wrong idea if we think the only purpose of advertising is to sell goods. Another equally important function is to inform. A great deal of the knowledge we have about household goods derives largely from the advertisements we read. Advertisements introduce us to new products or remind us of the existence of ones we already know about. Supposing you wanted to buy a washing machine, it is more than likely you would obtain details regarding performance, price, etc., from an advertisement. Lots of people pretend that they never read advertisements, but this claim may be seriously doubted. It is hardly possible not to read advertisements these days. And what fun they often are, too! Just think what a railway station or a newspaper would be like without advertisements. Would you enjoy gazing at a blank wall or reading railway bylaws while waiting for a train? Would you like to read only closely-printed columns of news in your daily paper? A cheerful, witty advertisement makes such a difference to a dull wall or a newspaper full of the daily ration of calamities. We must not forget, either, that advertising makes a positive contribution to our pockets. Newspapers, commercial radio station and television companies could not survive without this source of revenue. The fact that we pay so little for our daffy paper, or can enjoy so many broadcast programs is due entirely to the money spent by advertisers. Just think what a newspaper would cost if we had to pay its full price! Another thing we mustn't forget is the 'small ads', which are in virtually every newspaper and magazine. What a tremendously useful service they perform for the community! Just about anything can be accomplished through these columns. For instance, you can find a job, buy or sell a house, announce a birth, marriage or death in what used to be called the 'hatch, match and dispatch' column but by far the most fascinating section is the personal or 'agony' column. No other item in a newspaper provides such entertaining reading or offers such a deep insight into human nature. It's the best advertisement for advertising there is!

单选题 重阳节 重阳节(the Double Ninth Festival)，在每年的农历九月初九，是中国的传统节日。早在战国时期(the Warring States Period)人们就开始过重阳节，到了唐代，重阳成为全国性的民间节日。攀登高山是重阳节一项重要的习俗，据说这样可以避免灾难，并且带来好运。“九九”和“久久”在汉语中同音，因此，人们把重阳节与祝福老人长寿联系在一起。1989年，中国把重阳节定为“老人节”(Senior's Day)，使之成为一个全国性的尊老、爱老、助老的节日。在节日这天会组织各种活动，以帮助老人们交流感情、强身健体。

单选题Spending time and mental energy on something entirely unrelated to work— Whether it's painting or playing video games—makes you feel more refreshed and ready to tackle your to-do list. As it turns out, this is a real 25 , and it can be a big benefit to your career. New scientific research finds proof that tackling your own personal creative 26 actually improves your productivity at work. Don't feel bad about taking some downtime doing something creative—it could actually 27 the results of your next task. A team of researchers led by organizational psychologist Kevin Eschleman of San Francisco State University surveyed more than 400 workers in all 28 of jobs to find out if pursuing creative hobbies helps workers' on- the-job 29 by giving them some 'breathing room', so to speak. Survey respondents who told researchers they regularly engage in a creative pastime not only 30 back from the demands of their jobs better, but were more creative and more 31 to pitch in and help out their co-workers when they were back on the clock. 'Organizations may benefit from encouraging employees to consider creative activities in their efforts to 32 from work,' Eschleman writes. 'Creative activities are likely to provide valuable experiences of mastery and control, but may also provide employees experiences of discovery that 33 influence performance-related outcomes.' He points out that some companies actively encourage their people to do this; at Amazon-owned online shoe store Zappos, for instance, staffers bring in their own personal artwork to 34 their offices. A. active I. kindly B. addictions J. performance C. boost K. phenomenon D. bounced L. pursuits E. decorate M. recover F. disturb N. sorts G. domination O. uniquely H. inclined

单选题Ideas about 'spoiling' children have always involved consideration of just what is a spoiled child, how does spoiling occur, and what are the consequences of spoiling; they have always included 27 of a child's nature, the ideal child and the ideal adult. The many mothers of 1820 who belonged to the early 'maternal (母亲的) associations' struggled to 28 the ideas about child raising that had been 29 in the 18th century. They had always been told that the spoiled child stood in danger of having trouble later in life (when exposed to all the 30 of the world) and, more importantly, stood in danger of 31 ruin. The approach these mothers knew was to 'break the will' of the child. This approach, coming 32 from the theology (神学) of Calvin, the French protestant reformer, was 33 from the stern outlook of the Puritans. As one mother wrote, 'No child has even been known, since the earliest period of the world, destitute (缺乏的) of an evil disposition however sweet it appears. 'Infant depravity (堕落), by which meant the child's 34 , could be curbed only by breaking the will so that the child 35 implicitly to parental guidance. By freeing the child from its evil nature, parents believed they could then guide the child into acquiring the right character traits, such as honesty, industriousness, and society. These moral 36 , fixed in the child's character, were to govern it throughout life, in a society where free enterprise, individual effort, and competition were believed to be the ruling forces. A. spiritual B. impulses C. eventually D. principles E. denounce F. prevalent G. temptations H. initially I. concepts J. segregated K. uphold L. authentic M. submitted N. descriptions O. inherited

单选题 闻名于世的丝绸之路是一系列连接东西方的路线。丝绸之路延伸6000多公里，得名于古代中国的丝绸贸易。丝绸之路上的贸易在中国、南亚、欧洲和中东文明发展中发挥了重要作用。正是通过丝绸之路，中国的造纸、火药、指南针、印刷术等四大发明才被引介到世界各地。同样，中国的丝绸、茶叶和瓷器(porcelain)也传遍全球。物质文化的交流是双向的，欧洲也通过丝绸之路出口各种商品和植物，满足中国市场的需求。

单选题To some extent, our intelligence is given to us at birth, and no amount of special education can make a genius out of a child born with low intelligence. On the other hand, a child who lives in a boring environment will develop his intelligence less than one who lives in 27 and varied surroundings. Thus the limits of a person's intelligence are 28 at birth, but whether or not he reaches those limits will depend on his environment. This view, now held by most experts, can be 29 in a number of ways. It is easy to show that intelligence is to some extent something we are born with. The closer the blood relationship between two people, the closer they are likely to be in 30 . Thus if we take two unrelated people at random (随意) from the population, it is likely that their degrees of intelligence will be 31 different. Relations, on the other hand, like brothers and sisters, parents and children, usually have similar intelligence, and this clearly suggests that intelligence 32 on birth. Imagine now that we take two 33 twins and put them in different environments. We might send one, for example, to a university and the other to a factory where the work is boring. We would soon find differences in intelligence 34 and this indicates that environment as well as birth plays a part. This 35 is also suggested by the fact that people who live in close 36 with each other, but who are not relations at all, are likely to have the similar degree of intelligence. A. development B. slightly C supported D. depends E. contact F. lively G. focuses H. conclusion I. examined J. rich K. ielligence L. fixed M. complely N. identical O. distance

单选题 Questions19-21 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, beliefs, and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this 27 , every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us. To the professional anthropologist (人类学家), there is no intrinsic 28 of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy (等级制度) among languages. People once thought of the languages of backward groups as 29 and undeveloped forms of speech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of 'backward' languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery for the 30 of ideas. They fall behind our Western languages not in their sound patterns or 31 structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which 32 the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to be noted: 1. All languages seem to 33 the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2. The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in 'backward' languages, while different from ours, are often surprisingly 34 and complicated. This study of language, in turn, 35 a new light upon the claim of the anthropologists that all cultures are to be viewed 36 , and without ideas of rank or hierarchy. A. savage B. superiority C. conceive D. transfer E. identification F. grammatical G. reflect H. reveals I. numerous J. independently K. exclusive L. casts M. sense N. confidentially O. possess

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on perseverance by referring to the saying 'What you do every day matters more than what you do every once in a while.' You can cite examples to illustrate your point and then explain what you will do to enhance your perseverance. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.