单选题 农家乐 在城市里生活久了，感觉走到哪里都一样，一样的钢筋水泥，一样的汽车尾气，一样无休止的工作。于是，有人开始幻想“桃花源”式的生活：累了一周，要是有个清静的小农舍休整两天就好了。于是，“农家乐(agritainment)”就诞生了。农家乐是指农村旅游，包括走玉米田迷宫(maze)、搭乘干草(hay)车、亲手摘南瓜等活动。这种日渐兴盛的旅游形式在帮助农民增加收入的同时也让城市的人们有机会品味乡间生活。

单选题 They put on their headphones, drape a hood over their head and drift off into the world of 'digital highs.' Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out and leaping up in fear, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress. This is the world of 'i-Dosing, ' the new craze sweeping the Internet in which teenagers used so-called 'digital drugs' to change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics (毒品). They believe the repetitive drone-like music will give them a 'high' that takes them out of reality, only legally available and downloadable on the Internet. Those who come up with the 'doses' claim different tracks mimic different sensations you can feel by taking drugs like Ecstasy (迷幻药). The reactions have been partially sceptical but some songs have become wildly popular, receiving nearly half a million hits on YouTube. There has been such alarm in the US that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it. 'Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, ' spokesman Mark Woodward said. He added that parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since i-Dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs. Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads. I-Dosing tracks have imposing names such as 'Gates of Hades' or 'Hand of God' which are ten minutes long—some sound like a ship's horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more rough and resemble cheap synthesizers (电声合成器) being played very fast. But although they use a very modern method of spreading themselves, i-Dosing is actually a variation on a very old method of achieving an altered state. In 1839 German physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove found that two tones played at slightly different frequencies in each ear makes the listener think they are hearing a quick beat. He called the phenomenon 'binaural beats,' and it has been the subject of research in the two centuries since. This therapy is used in clinical settings to research hearing and sleep cycles, to induce various brain wave states, and treat anxiety. Dr. Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: 'Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves. And normally, the difference in sound between each ear helps people get directional information about the source of the sound. But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head.'

单选题 Gender-Neutral Language A. The practice of assigning masculine gender to neutral terms comes from the fact that every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved, and English evolved through most of its history in a male-centered, patriarchal society. Like any other language, however, English is always changing. One only has to read aloud sentences from the 19th century books assigned for this class to sense the shifts that have occurred in the last 150 years. When readers pick up something to read, they expect different conventions depending on the time in which the material was written. As writers in 1995, we need to be not only aware of the conventions that our readers may expect, but also conscious of the responses our words may elicit. In addition, we need to know how the shifting nature of language can make certain words awkward or misleading. 'Man' B. Man once was a truly generic word referring to all humans, but has gradually narrowed in meaning to become a word that refers to adult male human beings. Anglo-Saxons used the word to refer to all people. One example of this occurs when an Anglo-Saxon writer refers to a seventh-century English princess as 'a wonderful man'. Man paralleled the Latin word homo, 'a member of the human species' not 'an adult male of the species'. The Old English word for adult male was waepman and the old English word for adult woman was wifman. In the course of time, wifman evolved into the word 'woman'. 'Man' eventually ceased to be used to refer to individual women and replaced waepman as a specific term distinguishing an adult male from an adult female. But man continued to be used in generalizations about both sexes. C. By the 18th century, the modern, narrow sense of man was firmly established as the predominant one. When Edmund Burke, writing of the French Revolution, used men in the old, inclusive way, he took pains to spell out his meaning: 'Such a deplorable havoc is made in the minds of men (both sexes) in France...' Thomas Jefferson did not make the same distinction in declaring that 'all men are created equal' and 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' In a time when women, having no vote, could neither give nor withhold consent, Jefferson had to be using the word men in its principal sense of 'males', and it probably never occurred to him that anyone would think otherwise. Looking at modern dictionaries indicates that the definition that links 'man' with males is the predominant one. Studies of college students and school children indicate that even when the broad definitions of 'man' and 'men' are taught, they tend to conjure up images of male people only. We would never use the sentence 'A girl grows up to be a man', because we assume the narrower definition of the word man. The Pronoun Problem D. The first grammars of modern English were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were mainly intended to help boys from upper class families prepare for the study of Latin, a language most scholars considered superior to English. The male authors of these earliest English grammars wrote for male readers in an age when few women were literate. The masculine-gender Pronouns (代词) did not reflect a belief that masculine pronouns could refer to both sexes. The grammars of this period contain no indication that masculine pronouns were sex-inclusive when used in general references. Instead these pronouns reflected the reality of male cultural dominance and the male-centered world view that resulted. E. 'He' started to be used as a generic pronoun by grammarians who were trying to change a long-established tradition of using 'they' as a singular pronoun. In 1850 an Act of Parliament gave official sanction (批准) to the recently invented concept of the 'generic' he. In the language used in acts of Parliament, the new law said, 'words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females'. Although similar language in contracts and other legal documents subsequently helped reinforce this grammatical edict in all English-speaking countries, it was often conveniently ignored. In 1879, for example, a move to admit female physicians to the all-male Massachusetts Medical Society was effectively blocked on the grounds that the society's by-laws describing membership used the pronoun he. F. Just as 'man' is not truly generic in the 1990s, 'he' is not a true generic pronoun. Studies have confirmed that most people understand 'he' to refer to men only. Sentences like 'A doctor is a busy person; he must be able to balance a million obligations at once' imply that all doctors are men. As a result of the fact that 'he' is read by many as a masculine pronoun, many people, especially women, have come to feel that the generic pronouns excludes women. This means that more and more people find the use of such a pronoun problematic. Solving the Pronoun Problem G. They as a singular—most people, when writing and speaking informally, rely on singular they as a matter of course: 'If you love someone, set them free' (Sting). If you pay attention to your own speech, you'll probably catch yourself using the same construction yourself. 'It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses' (George Bernard Shaw). 'I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even ii they'd done me wrong' (George Eliot). Some people are annoyed by the incorrect grammar that this solution necessitates, but this construction is used more and more frequently. H. He or She—Despite the charge of clumsiness, double-pronoun constructions have made a comeback: 'To be black in this country is simply too pervasive an experience for any writer to omit from her or his work', wrote Samuel R. Delany. Overuse of this solution can be awkward, however. I. Pluralizing—A writer can often recast material in the plural. For instance, instead of 'As he advances in his program, the medical student has increasing opportunities for clinical work,' try 'As they advance in their program, medical students have increasing opportunities for clinical work'. J. Eliminating Pronouns—Avoid having to use pronouns at all; instead of 'a first grader can feed and dress himself', you could write, 'a first grader can eat find get dressed without assistance'. K. Further Alternatives—He/she or she/he, using one instead of he, or using a new generic pronoun.

单选题 Here's a question about chickens and eggs you may not have heard before: How is it that an egg can be so hard to break from the outside, yet so easy for a weak little chick to peck through from the inside? It's a tough question to crack. Eggshells are thought to change as the chick grows inside. As the creature develops, parts of the inner eggshell dissolve and the fuzzy little bird incorporates some of that calcium into its bones. But it remained unclear how this process influenced eggshell microstructure. Now, As Nicola Davis at The Guardian reports, a new study in Science Advances suggests that it's all about the structure of the egg and how it develops with the growing creature inside. To solve the mystery and study egg structures, researchers at McGill University used a new method that allowed them to cut extremely thin sections of shell. They then analyzed these thin sections using a microscope to study shell structure. The team examined the shell of fertilized (受精的)eggs and compared that to unfertilized eggs. As Laurel Hamers at ScienceNews reports, they discovered that the key to the eggs' toughness appeared to be the formation of microstructures, guided into place by proteins. They focused their analysis on one particular protein, which is found throughout the shell and is believed to be vital in the organization of mineral structure. As Davis explains, the special protein seems to act as a 'scaffold (脚手架)' that guides the structure and density of minerals in the shell, in particular calcium. In a developed egg, the minerals in the outer layer of the shell are densely packed and rich with such special protein. But inner egg layers have a different structure, which has less of such special protein and lower density of mineral packing. In non-incubated eggs, the nanostructure didn't change. But in the fertilized eggs, the structure of the inner egg appeared to shift over time. Calcium was transferred to the chicks and the inside of the shell grew weaker, making it easier for the chick to crack through. The inner shell also became bumpier (更崎岖不平的), which the researchers believe provides more surface area for chemical reactions that release calcium to the chicks. Knowing the structure of the egg could lead to new types of materials, says Lara Estroff, a Cornell engineer who was not involved in the study, Hamers reports. The researchers think it could even improve food safety for eggs. About 10 to 20 percent of chicken eggs crack in transport, which could lead to contamination. Understanding why some eggs are stronger than others could help breed chickens with tougher eggs.

单选题Aristotle defined a friend as 'a single soul dwelling in two bodies'. How many friends we have, and how easily we make, maintain and lose them, has a significant impact on our emotional well-being. It's no surprise, 27 , that friends can improve just about every aspect of our life. Friends can protect us from the 28 of bereavement (丧失亲人) or divorce. They don't even have to be great friends—some of the positive effect is 29 down to the company: have a pint with a mate and you're by definition not socially 30 . 'There are friends you're just more 31 with. Others may be more interesting, but they may be more offended. Really good friends don't take offence. Friendships can end because they stop being equal. You may take different 32 , have different experiences, which make it harder to maintain a friendship.' says educational psychologist Karen Majors. We first recognise the importance of friends in childhood. While some of us may retain a few childhood friends, the biggest opportunity for friendship comes in higher education. A study of long-term friendships found that friendships formed during college years stayed close 20 years later, if they scored highly in closeness as well as 33 to begin with. 'At college you can 34 close friendships because you're in such close 35 for sustained periods,' says Glenn Sparks, Purdue's professor of communication. 'These relationships are rare and hard to 36 ; they're very unusual outside family relationships. A. proximity B. rather C. routes D. then E. cultivate F. aftershocks G. preferable H. connected I. compromising J. comfortable K. replicate L. simply M. isolated N. communication O. possibility

单选题 There was a time when big-league university presidents really mattered. The New York Times covered their every move. Presidents, the real ones, sought their counsel. For Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower, being head of Princeton and Columbia, respectively, was a stepping-stone to the White House. Today, though, the job of college president is less and less removed from that of the Avon lady (except the house calls are made to the doorsteps of wealthy alums). Ruth Simmons, the newly installed president of Brown University and the first African American to lead an Ivy League school, is a throwback to the crusading campus leaders of the old. She doesn't merely marshal funds; she invests them in the great educational causes of our day. With the more than $300 million she raised as president of Smith College from 1995 to 2001, Simmons established an engineering program (the first at any women's school) and added seminars focused on public speaking to purge the ubiquitous 'likes' and 'urns' from the campus idiom. At a meeting to discuss the future of Smith's math department, one professor timidly requested two more discussion sections for his course. Her response: 'Dream bigger.' Her own dream was born in a sharecropper's shack in East Texas where there was no money for books or toys—she and her 11 siblings each got an apple, an orange and 10 nuts for Christmas. Though she was called Negro on her walk to school, entering the classroom, she says, 'was like waking up.' When Simmons won a scholarship to Dillard University, her high school teachers took up a collection so she'd have a coat. She went on to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in Romance languages. Simmons has made diversity her No. 1 campus crusade. She nearly doubled the enrolment of black freshmen at Smith, largely by travelling to high schools in the nation's poorest ZIP codes to recruit. Concerned with the lives of minority students once they arrived at school, she has fought to ease the racial standoffs that plague so many campuses. At Smith she turned down a request by students to have race-specific dorms. In 1993, while vice provost at Princeton, she wrote a now famous report recommending that the university establish an office of conflict resolution to defuse racial misunderstandings before they boiled over. Her first task at Brown will be to heal one such rupture last spring after the student paper published an incendiary ad by conservative polemicist David Horowitz arguing that blacks economically benefited from slavery. 'There's no safe ground for anybody in race relations, but campuses, unlike any other institution in our society, provide the opportunity to cross racial lines,' says Simmons. 'And even if you're hurt, you can't walk away. You have to walk over that line.'

单选题 How Marketers Target Kids A. Kids represent an important demographic to marketers because they have their own purchasing power, they influence their parents' buying decisions and they are the adult consumers of the future. Industry spending on advertising to children has exploded in the past decade, increasing from a mere $100 million in 1990 to more than $2 billion in 2000. B. Parents today are willing to buy more for their kids because trends such as smaller family size, dual incomes and postponing children until later in life mean that families have more disposable income. As well, guilt can play a role in spending decisions as time-stressed parents substitute material goods for time spent with their kids. Here are some of the strategies marketers employ to target kids: Pester (纠缠) Power C. Today's kids have more autonomy and decision-making power within the family than in previous generations, so it follows that kids are vocal about what they want their parents to buy. 'Pester power'refers to children's ability to nag their parents into purchasing items they may not otherwise buy. Marketing to children is all about creating pester power, because advertisers know what a powerful force it can be. D. According to the 2001 marketing industry book Kidfluence, pestering or nagging can be divided into two categories—'persistence' and 'importance'. Persistence nagging (a plea, that is repeated over and over again) is not as effective as the more sophisticated 'importance nagging'. This latter method appeals to parents' desire to provide the best for their children, and plays on any guilt they may have about not having enough time for their kids. The Marriage of Psychology and Marketing E. To effectively market to children, advertisers need to know what makes kids tick. With the help of well-paid researchers and psychologists, advertisers now have access to in-depth knowledge about children's developmental, emotional and social needs at different ages. Using research that analyzes children's behaviour, fantasy lives, art work, even their dreams, companies are able to craft sophisticated marketing strategies to reach young people. F. The issue of using child psychologists to help marketers target kids gained widespread public attention in 1999, when a group of U.S. mental health professionals issued a public letter to the American Psychological Association (APA) urging them to declare the practice unethical. The APA is currently studying the issue. Building Brand Name Loyalty G. Canadian author Naomi Klein tracks the birth of'brand' marketing in her 2000 book No Logo. According to Klein, the mid-1980s saw the birth of a new kind of corporation—Nike, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, to name a few—which changed their primary corporate focus from producing products to creating an image for their brand name. By moving their manufacturing operations to countries with cheap labour, they freed up money to create their powerful marketing messages. It has been a tremendously profitable formula, and has led to the creation of some of the most wealthy and powerful multi-national corporations the world has seen. H. Marketers plant the seeds of brand recognition in very young children, in the hopes that the seeds will grow into lifetime relationships. According to the Center for a New American Dream, babies as young as six months of age can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Brand loyalties can be established as early as age two, and by the time children head off to school most can recognize hundreds of brand logos. While fast food, toy and clothing companies have been cultivating brand recognition in children for years, adult-oriented businesses such as banks and automakers are now getting in on the act. Buzz or Street Marketing I. The challenge for marketers is to cut through the intense advertising clutter (杂乱) in young people's lives. Many companies are using 'buzz marketing' —a new twist on the Ned-and-true 'word of mouth' method. The idea is to find the coolest kids in a community and have them use or wear your product in order to create a buzz around it. Buzz, or 'street marketing', as it's also called, can help a company to successfully connect with the elusive (难找到) teen market by using trendsetters to give them products 'cool' status. J. Buzz marketing is particularly well-suited to the Internet, where young 'Net promoters' use chat rooms and blogs to spread the word about music, clothes and other products among unsuspecting users. Commercialization in Education K. School used to be a place where children were protected from the advertising and consumer messages that permeated their world—but not anymore. Budget shortfalls (亏空，差额) are forcing school boards to allow corporations access to students in exchange for badly needed cash, computers and educational materials. L. Corporations realize the power of the school environment for promoting their name and products. A school setting delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers are eagerly exploiting this medium in a number of ways, including: 1)sponsored educational materials; 2)supplying schools with technology in exchange for high company visibility; 3)advertising posted in classrooms, school buses, on computers in exchange for funds; 4)contests and incentive programs: for example, the Pizza Hut reading incentives program in which children receive certificates for flee pizza if they achieve a monthly reading goal; 5)sponsoring school events. The Internet M. The Internet is an extremely desirable medium for marketers wanting to target children. It's part of youth culture. This generation of young people is growing up with the Internet as a daily and routine part of their lives. Kids are often online alone, without parental supervision. Unlike broadcasting media, which have codes regarding advertising to kids, the Internet is unregulated. Sophisticated technologies make it easy to collect information from young people for marketing research, and to target individual children with personalized advertising. Marketing Adult Entertainment to Kids N. Children are often aware of and want to see entertainment meant for older audiences because it is actively marketed to them. In a report released in 2000, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revealed how the movie, music and video games industries routinely market violent entertainment to young children. O. The FTC studied 44 films rated 'Restricted', and discovered that 80 per cent were targeted to children under 17. Marketing plans including TV commercials run during hours when young viewers were most likely to be watching. The FTC report also highlighted the fact that toys based on characters from mature entertainment are often marketed to young children. Mature rated video games are advertised in youth magazines; and toys based on 'Restricted' movies and M-rated video games are marketed to children as young as four.

单选题Directions:Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteanessaybasedonthepicturebelow.Youshouldstartyouressaywithabriefdescriptionofthepictureandthendiscussteenagers'smokinghabit.Youshouldgivesoundargumentstosupportyourviewsandwriteatleast150wordsbutnomorethan200words.'Smokingisjustforfun.Don'tyouthinkIlooksocool?'

单选题 Five Problems Financial Reform Doesn't Fix A. The legislation concerning financial reform focuses on helping regulators detect and defuse (减少……的危险性) the next crisis. But it doesn't address many of the underlying conditions that can cause problems. B. The legislation gives regulators the power to oversee shadow banks and take failing firms apart, convenes a council of superregulators to watch the megafirms that pose a risk to the full financial system, and much else. C. But the bill does more to help regulators detect the next financial crisis than to actually stop it from happening. In that way, it's like the difference between improving public health and improving medicine: The bill focuses on helping the doctors who figure out when you're sick and how to get you better rather than on the conditions (sewer systems and air quality and hygiene standards and so on) that contribute to whether you get sick in the first place. D. That is to say, many of the weaknesses and imbalances that led to the financial crisis will survive our regulatory response, and it's important to keep that in mind. So here are five we still have to watch out for: 1. The Global Glut (供过于求) of Savings E. 'One of the leading indicators of a financial crisis is when you have a sustained surge in money flowing into the country which makes borrowing cheaper and easier,' says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. Our crisis was no different: Between 1987 and 1999, our current account deficit—the measure of how much money is coming in versus going out—fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of gross domestic product. By 2006, it had hit 6 percent. F. The sharp rise was driven by emerging economies with lots of growth and few investment opportunities—think China—funneling their money to developed economies with less growth and lots of investment opportunities. But we've gotten out of the crisis without fixing it. China is still growing fast, exporting faster, and sending the money over to US. 2. Household Debt—and Why We Need It G. The fact that money is available to borrow doesn't explain why Americans borrowed so much of it. Household debt as a percentage of GDP went from a bit less than 60 percent at the beginning of the 1990s to a bit less than 100 percent in 2006. 'This is where I come to income inequality,' says Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago. 'A large part of the population saw relatively stagnant incomes over the 1980s and 1990s. Credit was so welcome because it kept people who were falling behind reasonably happy. You were keeping up, even if your income wasn't.' H. Incomes, of course, are even more stagnant now that unemployment is at 9 percent. And that pain isn't being shared equally: inequality has actually risen since before the recession, as joblessness is proving sticky among the poor, but recovery has been swift for the rich. Household borrowing is still more than 90 percent of GDP, and the conditions that drove it up there are, if anything, worse. 3. The 'Shadow Banking' Market I. The financial crisis started out similarly severe, but it wasn't, at first, a crisis of consumers. It was a crisis of banks. It never became a crisis of consumers because consumer deposits are insured. But large investors—pension funds, banks, corporations, and others—aren't insured. But when they hear that their collateral (附属担保品) is dropping in value, they demand their money back. And when everyone does that at once, it's like an old-fashioned bank run: The banks can't pay everyone off at once, so they unload all their assets to get capital, the assets become worthless because everyone is trying to unload them, and the banks collapse. J. 'This is an inherent problem of privately created money,' says Gary Gorton, an economist at Princeton University. 'It is vulnerable to these kinds of runs.' This year, we're bringing this shadow banking system under the control of regulators and giving them all sorts of information on it and power over it, but we're not doing anything like deposit insurance, where we simply make the deposits safe so runs become an anachronism. 4. Rich Banks K. In the 1980s, the financial sector's share of total corporate profits ranged from about 10 to 20 percent. By 2004, it was about 35 percent. Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT, recalls a conversation he had with a fund manager. 'The guy said to me, 'Simon, it's so little money! You can sway senators for $10 million!?'' Johnson laughs ruefully (后悔地). 'These guys [big investors] don't even think in millions. They think in billions.' L. What you get for that money is favors. The last financial crisis fades from memory and the public begins to focus on other things. Then the finance guys begin nudging(游说). They hold some fundraisers for politicians, make some friends, explain how the regulations they're under are onerous and unfair. And slowly, surely, those regulations come undone. This financial crisis will stick in our minds for a while, but not forever. And after briefly dropping to less than 15 percent of corporate profits, the financial sector has rebounded to more than 30 percent. They'll have plenty of money with which to help their friends forget this whole nasty affair. 5. Lax (不严格的) Regulators M. The most troubling prospect is the chance that this bill, if we'd passed it in 2000, wouldn't even have prevented this financial crisis. That's not to undersell it: It would've given regulators more information with which to predict the crisis. But they had enough information, and they ignored it. They get caught up in boom times just like everyone else. A bubble, almost by definition, affects the regulators with the power to pop it. N. In 2005, with housing prices running far, far ahead of the historical trend, Bernanke said a housing bubble was 'a pretty unlikely possibility'. In 2007, he said Fed officials 'do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy.' Alan Greenspan, looking back at the financial crisis, admitted in April that regulators 'have had a woeful record of chronic failure. History tells us they cannot identify the timing of a crisis, or anticipate exactly where it will be located or how large the losses and spillovers will be.'