单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled The Courage of Making Mistakes by commenting on the saying 'The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.' You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 America's recent history has been a persistent tilt to the West—of people, ideas, commerce and even political power. California and Texas are the twin poles of the West, but very different ones. For most of the 20th century the home of Silicon Valley and Hollywood has been the brainier and trendier of the two. Texas has trailed behind: its stereotype has been a conservative Christian in cowboy boots. But twins can change places. Is that happening now? It is easy to find evidence that California is in a panic. At the start of this month the once golden state started paying creditors in IOUs (欠条). The gap between projected outgoings and income for the current fiscal (财政的) year has leapt to a horrible $ 26 billion. With no sign of a new budget to close this gulf, one credit agency has already downgraded California's debt. As budgets are cut, universities will let in fewer students, prisoners will be released early and schemes to protect the vulnerable will be rolled back. By contrast, Texas has coped well with the recession, with an unemployment rate two points below the national average and one of the lowest rates of housing repossession. In part this is because Texan banks, hard hit in the last property bust, did not overexpand this time. Texas also clearly offers a different model, based on small government. It has no state capital-gains or income tax, and a business-friendly and immigrant-tolerant attitude. It is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state. Despite all this, it still seems too early to hand over America's future to Texas. To begin with, that lean Texan model has its own problems. It has not invested enough in education, and many experts rightly worry about a 'lost generation' of mostly Hispanic Texans with insufficient skills for the demands of the knowledge economy. Second, it has never paid to bet against a state with as many inventive people as California. Even if Hollywood has gone into depression, it still boasts an unequalled array of sunrise industries and the most brisk venture-capital industry on the planet. The state also has an awesome ability to reinvent itself—as it did when its defence industry collapsed at the end of the cold war. The truth is that both states could learn from each other. Texas still lacks California's great universities and lags in terms of culture. California could adopt not just Texas's leaner state, but also its more bipartisan (两党的) approach to politics. There is no perfect model of government; it is America's genius to have 50 public-policy laboratories competing to find out what works best.

单选题 Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt. Volcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world's first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometers of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust. What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapor from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world's atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need. Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack—like an archipelago of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much hotter. Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly 'flow' like thick treacle. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the 'eggshell' of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimeters a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.

单选题 Results showed that at least a tenth of the Harvard first-year undergraduates polled admitted to having cheated on an exam prior to starting at the university, while almost half admitted to cheating on their homework. An anonymous survey by Harvard's newspaper has revealed a surprising pattern of academic dishonesty among students entering the US universities. The survey by The Harvard Crimson was emailed to the incoming first year undergraduates; 1,600 students responded. Results showed that at least a tenth of the students polled admitted to having cheated on an exam prior to starting at the university, while almost half admitted to cheating on their homework. Athletes were apparently the most prone to cheating. 20 percent of students who played a university sport admitted to cheating on an exam compared to 9 percent of students who did not. The survey also revealed that men were not only more likely to cheat but were also more likely to admit to it. The results, compared to a previous survey done on the class of 2013, suggested that cheating may be becoming more commonplace. Of the outgoing seniors only 7 percent admitted to cheating in an exam and another 7 percent said they had been dishonest on a take-home test. 32 percent of the seniors said they had cheated on homework during their undergraduate years... The surveys come in the wake of a cheating scandal at the university which saw 120 students investigated for sharing answers on an exam in 2012. One recent graduate stated: 'Cheating was commonplace when I was at Harvard, especially with students in their first year or two. I would say as many as 60 percent of students took notes into some exams. No one really cared the faculty, well some of them at least, seemed to recognize and yet ignore the problem.' In an email to NBC News, Jeff Neal, a Harvard representative, explained that a committee, made up of faculty, staff and students had been established to tackle cheating, which 'is a national problem in American education'. He added: 'While the vast majority of Harvard and other students do their work honestly, beginning this year Harvard College has implemented a new, more robust strategy of communicating with all students, particularly first-year students, about the importance—and the ways to achieve—academic integrity.' In a rebuff to critics who say university has become little more than an expensive party, 84 percent of the responding undergraduates fully expected to prioritize their academics over extracurricular activities, sport, employment and their social lives. Not a single student put academics at the bottom of their list. Not content with confining themselves to their degree subject, 59 percent of incoming students expressed a desire to pursue a secondary field of study, and 36 percent hoped to learn a language.

单选题 Questions10-13 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was just as gloomy as anticipated. Unemployment in January lumped to a 16-year high of 7.6 percent, as 598 000 jobs were slashed from US payrolls in the worst single-month decline since December, 1974. With 1.8 million jobs lost in the last three months, there is urgent desire to boost the economy as quickly as possible. But Washington would do well to take a deep breath before reacting to the grim numbers. Collectively, we rely on the unemployment figures and other statistics to frame our sense of reality. They are a vital part of an array of data that we use to assess if we're doing well or doing badly, and that in turn shapes government policies and corporate budgets and personal spending decisions. The problem is that the statistics aren't an objective measure of reality; they are simply a best approximation. Directionally, they capture the trends, but the idea that we know precisely how many are unemployed is a myth. That makes finding a solution all the more difficult. First, there is the way the data is assembled. The official unemployment rate is the product of a telephone survey of about 60 000 homes. There is another survey, sometimes referred to as the 'payroll survey, ' that assesses 400 000 businesses based on their reported payrolls. Both surveys have problems. The payroll survey can easily double-count someone: if you are one person with two jobs, you show up as two workers. The payroll survey also doesn't capture the number of self-employed, and so says little about how many people are generating an independent income. The household survey has a larger problem. When asked straightforwardly, people tend to lie or shade the truth when the subject is sex, money or employment. If you get a call and are asked if you're employed, and you say yes, you're employed. If you say no, however, it may surprise you to learn that you are only unemployed if you've been actively looking for work in the past four weeks; otherwise, you are 'marginally attached to the labor force' and not actually unemployed. The urge to quantify is embedded in our society. But the idea that statisticians can then capture an objective reality isn't just impossible. It also leads to serious misjudgments. Democrats and Republicans can and will take sides on a number of issues, but a more crucial concern is that both are basing major policy decisions on guesstimates rather than looking at the vast wealth of raw data with a critical eye and an open mind.

单选题 The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation's most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus. Robert Putnam is a former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of Bowling Alone (2000), an influential work that lamented the decline of social capital in America. In his new book, Our Kids, he describes the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children. Among the educated elite the traditional family is thriving: fewer than 10% of births to female college graduates are outside marriage—a figure that is barely higher than it was in 1970. In 2007 among women with just a high-school education, by contrast, 65% of births were non-marital. Race makes a difference: only 2% of births to white college graduates are out-of-wedlock, compared with 80% among African-Americans with no more than a high-school education, but neither of these figures has changed much since the 1970s. However, the non-marital birth proportion among high-school-educated whites has quadrupled, to 50%, and the same figure for college-educated blacks has fallen by a third, to 25%. Thus the class divide is growing even as the racial gap is shrinking. Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer (with two professional incomes) and more stable; they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s, there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr. Putnam calls 'Goodnight Moon' time (after a popular book for infants). Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time; in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organize their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase. Stunningly, Mr. Putnam finds that family background is a better predictor of whether or not a child will graduate from university than 8th-grade test scores. Kids in the richest quarter with low test scores are as likely to make it through college as kids in the poorest quarter with high scores. Mr. Putnam suggests a grab-bag of policies to help poor kids reach their potential, such as raising subsidies for poor families, teaching them better parenting skills, improving nursery care and making after-school baseball clubs free. He urges all 50 states to experiment to find out what works. A problem this complex has no simple solution.

单选题 亚投行(AIIB)是亚洲基础投资银行(Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank)的简称，这是一个政府间性质的亚洲区域多边开发机构，重点支持亚洲地区的基础设施建设，总部设在北京。 亚投行旨在为亚洲的基础设施和其他生产类项目提供资金支持，这些项目包括：能源、电力、交通、通讯等等。亚投行计划设立理事会、董事会和管理层三层(three-tier)管理架构，并将建立有效的监督机制，确保决策的高效、公开和透明。 该机构最初由中国国家主席习近平提议成立，它将有助于增加中国的地区影响力。

单选题 农历正月(the first lunar month)十五是中国的元宵节(Lantern Festival)，人们习惯在门外悬挂大红灯笼，孩子们提着彩色的灯笼玩，大人们则上街观赏各式各样的灯笼。据记载，灯笼早在约3 000年前就出现在了元宵节上。到了唐代，朝廷将灯笼与佛教(Buddhism)联系起来，从此点灯笼就成为了元宵节官方礼议的一部分。不同地区的彩灯风格迥异，陕北的农民用南瓜做灯笼，用棉花等材料做成羊头形状。而北京因为是帝王之都，灯笼一般都做成宫廷(imperial palace)灯笼的样子。

单选题 重庆 重庆位于中国西南部，长江上游。它是一座举世闻名的山城，最突出的特点是地形起伏有致，立体感强。重庆凭借长江“黄金水道”之便，依托丰富的资源和广阔的市场，从汉代起就是长江上游的工商业重镇，如今更发展为集重工业、轻工业、贸易等为一体的经济、政治和文化中心。重庆处处都有中国传统文化的印痕，历代诗人如李白、陆游等，都在这里写有许多脍炙人口的名篇佳句。此外，重庆还是川菜的主要代表地域之一。

单选题 Now listen to the following recording and answer questions16-18.

单选题 The pharmaceutical (制药的) giant Bayer has made a remarkable—and lucrative—discovery. Allergies are on the rise. The company's eye and nose ointment Bepanthen, already good for more than $ 200 million in annual sales, could soon be in even higher demand. Bayer mentions this in its annual response to the watchdog CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, which surveys the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's largest corporations. The CDP celebrates companies that cut carbon, of course, but also celebrates brutal honesty, awarding prizes and A rankings to those that give a true and full accounting of how climate change could affect their bottom lines. Bayer is a winner on both counts. Though still high, its emissions are down nearly 40% from 1990 levels. And the company is transparent about what it believes a warming world will bring. One of Bayer's latest products is 'a new generation of mosquito net,' the LifeNet. It also has two advanced bug sprays in the pipeline. These will be lucrative because mosquitoes and the disease they carry are expected to thrive in a warmer world, leaving another 40 to 60 million people at risk of malaria in Africa alone. 'In light of an expected climate-change-related increase of malaria incidents in further regions of the world (e.g., Northern Europe), we expect a growing demand for Bayer mosquito nets,' the company writes. Americans often frame climate change as a tragedy of the commons: We all pursue our selfish lives, we all emit, and together we all will someday pay. But this is a dangerous way to understand the future and our responsibilities to it. That some are planning to get rich from the warming world only underscores the reality of climate change: Its impacts, though mostly bad for most people in most places, are deeply uneven. It happens that those largely responsible for the historic emissions that got us here—wealthy North Americans and Europeans—are the most likely to stay relatively prosperous, because we have our northerly geographies and we have enough money in our wallets for, say, high-performance polycarbonate building materials. It happens that those least responsible for historic emissions, the equatorial and the poor, are the most likely to see the worst impacts, likely to get poorer faster. This unevenness suggests that self-interest, however rational, may never be enough to jumpstart real climate action in the wealthy countries where it's most needed. It's hard to scare people into cutting emissions if they're not actually all that scared. There's nothing wrong with selling mosquito nets, and there's nothing wrong with buying them. But there's something wrong if we ignore the true ethical stakes as an ever more imbalanced world keeps lurching ahead, blithely thinking, 'At least we're all in this together.'