单选题Everyday each of us can renew our efforts to lead a healthier lifestyle so that we can remain free from illness and pain. Every health expert will advise that as part of any healthy living plan regular exercise should play an important part. For a large 30 of people enrolling at the local gym is the answer which will also produce results. There is one negative point however—upper back pain. What is the cause of upper back pain? In most instances bad posture is the chief 31 . This is often because we spend long periods of time sitting or standing in the same position, generally this tends to be in our place of work. Sitting at desk top computers is one source of this problem! By 32 the same position the muscles in the upper back which connect the shoulders and help to keep our back straight become tense, stiff and painful. If you find yourself 33 upper back pain it is highly likely that you have strained a muscle, this condition can be extremely painful but are easily treated by your doctor following an accurate 34 using X-rays. Keeping fit through physical exercise should not be stopped because of upper back pain, indeed it is an excellent method to prevent this painful problem and can help in relieving 35 . The use of weights as part of a gym workout may not be 36 , however if under close supervision of a trained professional it is still possible. There are 37 other types of exercise which can be continued whilst suffering upper back pain such as jogging or walking either using a treadmill (踏车) at home or out on the streets. The whole aim is to prevent stiffening of the muscles. The best way to avoid upper back pain is to try to avoid sitting or standing in the same position for 38 periods, if it is possible try to have a stretch break every hour or so. This may not be possible therefore, you should try to find ways of jogging your memory throughout the day to keep your posture correct—put little notes round your computer screen! It will 39 come naturally and hopefully the problem will disappear. A. eliminate I. exactly B. suffering J. majority C. extended K. sophisticated D. eventually L. diagnosis E. advisable M. symptoms F. criminal N. maintaining G. abandoning O. virtually H. numerous

单选题 What's the one word of advice a well-meaning professional would give to a recent college graduate? China? India? Brazil? How about trade? When the Commerce Department reported last week that the trade deficit in June approached $50 billion, it set off a new round of economic doomsaying. Imports, which soared to $200.3 billion in the month, are subtracted in the calculation of gross domestic product. The larger the trade deficit, the smaller the GDE Should such imbalances continue, pessimists say, they could contribute to slower growth. But there's another way of looking at the trade data. Over the past two years, the figures on imports and exports seem not to signal a double-dip recession—a renewed decline in the broad level of economic activity in the United States—but an economic expansion. The rising volume of trade—more goods and services shuttling in and out of the United States—is good news for many sectors. Companies engaged in shipping, trucking, rail freight, delivery, and logistics (物流) have all been reporting better than expected results. The rising numbers signify growing vitality in foreign markets—when we import more stuff, it puts more cash in the hands of people around the world, and US exports are rising because more foreigners have the ability to buy the things we produce and market. The rising tide of trade is also good news for people who work in trade-sensitive businesses, especially those that produce commodities for which global demand sets the price--agricultural goods, mining, metals, oil. And while exports always seem to lag, US companies are becoming more involved in the global economy with each passing month. General Motors sells as many cars in China as in America each month. While that may not do much for imports, it does help GM's balance sheet—and hence makes the jobs of US-based executives more stable. One great challenge for the US economy is slack domestic consumer demand. Americans are paying down debt, saving more, and spending more carefully. That's to be expected, given what we've been through. But there's a bigger challenge. Can US-based businesses, large and small, figure out how to get a piece of growing global demand? Unless you want to pick up and move to India, or Brazil, or China, the best way to do that is through trade. It may seem obvious, but it's no longer enough simply to do business with our friends and neighbors here at home. Companies and individuals who don't have a strategy to export more, or to get more involved in foreign markets, or to play a role in global trade, are shutting themselves out of the lion's share of economic opportunity in our world.

单选题 If our solar system has a Hell, it's Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur, heaved from ancient volcanoes and feeding acid clouds above. Although the second planet is a step farther from the sun than Mercury, a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hotter indeed. It's the hottest of the nine plants, a toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit of baking rocky flats from equator to poles. All this under a crushing atmospheric pressure 90 times that of where you're sitting now. From the earthly perspective, a dead end. It must be lifeless. 'Venus has nothing,' is the blunt word from planetologist Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. 'We've written it off.' Yet a small group of advanced life-forms on Earth begs to differ, and theorizes that bizarre microbial ecosystems might have once populated Veuns and, in fact, may be there still. Members of this loose band of researchers suggest that their colleagues have water too much on the brain, and are, in a sense, H2O chauvinists (盲目的爱国者). 'Astrobiologists are neglecting Venus due more to narrow thinking than actual knowledge of the environment, or environments, where life can thrive,' says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geobiologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who recently co-authored a Venus-boosting paper in Astrobiology with colleague Louis Irwin. The bias against life on Venus is partly rooted in our own biology. Human experience instructs that liquid water, preferably lot of it, is essential for life. In search for extraterrestrial life, we obsess over small rivers in Mars' surface apparently carved by ancient gushes of water, and delight in hints of permafrost (永久冻结带) just underneath its surface. (By comparison, Venus isn't even that interesting to look at: A boring cue ball (台球的白色母球) for backyard astronomers, its clouds reflects 75% of visible light.) Attention and then funding follow the water: Three more landers will depart for Mars this spring, and serious plans for sample-return missions hover in the midterm future. 'If you have limited resources, you base exploration on what you know,' says Arizona State University planetary geologist Ronal Greeley. It's like losing your keys on the way home at night: The first place you look is under the streetlights not because they're more likely to be there, but because if they are, you'll spot them. For astrobiologists, the streetlights are the spectral (光谱的) lines for water, and they've spotted that potential on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, even Neptune's moon Triton. Not on the baking rocky flats of Venus.

单选题 Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven)simple rules. The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing; it even includes a bibliography of 'success studies'. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are 'measurable and actionable'—guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on 'calculating the elements of advantage' and 'detailed analysis'. The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 'exceptional companies', only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material. Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs. Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is 'the halo(光环)effect', whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche (隙缝市场) and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.

单选题 Questions6-9 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled The Importance of Communication by commenting on the remark 'An argument may be a shortcut between two hearts.' You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Modern technology has put men on the moon and deciphered the human genome. But when it comes to brewing up flu to make vaccines, science still turns to the incredible edible egg. Ever since the 1940s, vaccine makers have grown large batches of virus inside chicken eggs. New cell-based technologies are in the pipeline, and may finally get the support they need now that the United States is faced with a critical shortage of flu vaccine. Although experts disagree on whether new ways of producing vaccine (疫苗) could have prevented a shortage like the one happening today, there is no doubt that the existing system has serious flaws. Each year, vaccine manufacturers place advance orders for millions of specially grown chicken eggs. Meanwhile, Public Health officials monitor circulating strains of flu, and each March they recommend three strains—two influenza A strains and one B strain—for manufacturers to include in vaccines. In the late spring and summer, automated machines inject virus into eggs and later suck out the influenza-rich goop. Virus from the eggs' innards gets killed and processed to remove egg proteins and other contaminants before being packaged into vials for fall shipment. Why has this egg method persisted for six decades? The main reason is that it's reliable. But even though the eggs are reliable, they have serious drawbacks. One is the long lead time needed to order the eggs. That means it's hard to make more vaccine in a hurry, in case of a shortage or unexpected outbreak. And eggs may simply be too cumbersome (大量的) to keep up with the hundreds of millions of doses required to handle the demand for flu vaccine. What's more, some flu strains don't grow well in eggs. Last year, scientists were unable to include the Fujian strain in the vaccine formulation. It was a relatively new strain, and manufacturers simply couldn't ind a quick way to adapt it so that it grew well in eggs. 'We knew the strain was out there,' recalls Theodore Eickhoff of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, 'but public-health officials were left without a vaccine—and, consequently, a more severe flu season.' Worse, the viruses that pose the greatest threat might be hardest to grow in eggs. That's because global pandemics like the one that killed over 50 million people between 1918 and 1920 are thought to occur when a bird influenza changes in a way that lets it cross the species barrier and infect humans. Since humans haven't encountered the new virus before, they have little protective immunity. The deadly bird flu circulating in Asia in 1997 and 1998, for example, worried Public Health officials because it spread to some people who handled birds and killed them—although the bug never circulated among humans. But when scientists tried to make vaccine the old-fashioned way, the bird flu quickly killed the eggs. (选自Time)

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the topic On Fabricating Academic Credentials. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words following the outline given below. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1. 1)现在学历造假现象非常猖獗； 2)分析这一现象的原因； 3)如何根除这一现象。

单选题 齐白石的艺术特色 齐白石是中国当代最伟大的艺术家之一。通过长期的实践，齐白石发展了一套具有个人特色的艺术形式。他的绘画作品涉猎广泛，他画的花、鸟、鱼、虾和虫受到广泛赞誉。为了提高画虾技巧，他曾经在家里养了一些虾，经常观察它们的动作，并且将自己为什么改变画虾的方法都写到日记中。齐白石的作品以笔墨雄浑滋润、色彩浓艳明快、造型简练生动、意境醇厚朴实著称。他将中国画的精神与时代精神统一得完美无瑕，使中国画得到了全世界的重视。

单选题 微信 微信(WeChat)作为时下最热门的社交信息平台，是一个为智能终端提供即时通讯服务的免费应用程序。微信支持单人、多人参与，人们通过手机网络发送语音、图片、视频和文字。截止到2015年第一季度，微信已经覆盖中国90%以上的智能手机，月活跃用户达到5.49亿，用户覆盖200多个国家、超过20种语言。此外，各品牌的微信公众账号总数已经超过800万个，微信支付用户则达到了4亿左右。

单选题Directions:Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteanessaybasedonthepicturebelow.YoushouldstartyouressaywithabriefdescriptionofthepictureandthendiscusswhypeoplelikemakingfriendsontheInternet.Youshouldgivesoundargumentstosupportyourviewsandwriteatleast150wordsbutnomorethan200words.'I'vemadethreenewfriendsontheInternet.'

单选题Imagine that the Spanish-speaking world was a single country which is called Hispanidad. It covers a 28 perhaps one-and-a-half times the size of China. Its population is nearly 500m, making it the world's third most 29 country, behind China and India. Among these people, the number of native Spanish-speakers is rising towards 400m; as a 30 , only 31 is bigger. Only English and Chinese are more widely used on the internet than Spanish. So if you are in business, into the arts or just want to join a conversation, the 32 size of Hispanidad is a powerful reason to learn Spanish. But Hispanidad is not a single country. The fact that it 33 across the Americas, Spain and even parts of Africa and Asia makes the case for Spanish stronger still. After English, it is the most used 34 language. For tourists it 35 and enriches travel in the 20-plus countries where Spanish is a main language. Not forgetting the United States, the country with the second-largest number of Spanish-speakers (about 50m and rising) after Mexico. Latinos (拉丁美裔) are growing in influence culturally, 36 and politically. Nowadays, would-be presidents make sure to advertise in Spanish. Even for those with no political ambitions, there is another 37 reason to pick Spanish as your second language: it's easy (certainly compared with, say, Mandarin). And once you've got Spanish, you're half-way to Italian, French and Portuguese too. A. territory B. sheer C. populous D. vast E. mother tongue F. spreads G. Mandarin Chinese H. conquer I. economy J. commercially K. defending L. compelling M. eases N. causes O. international

单选题 The Birth of Scientific English A. World science is dominated today by a small number of languages, including Japanese, German and French, but it is English which is probably the most popular global language of science. This is not just because of the importance of English-speaking countries such as the USA in scientific research; the scientists of many non-English-speaking countries find that they need to write their research papers in English to reach a wide international audience. B. Given the prominence of scientific English today, it may seem surprising that no one really knew how to write science in English before the 17th century. Before that, Latin was regarded as the lingua franca for European intellectuals. C. The European Renaissance (c. 14th～16th century) is sometimes called the 'revival of learning', a time of renewed interest in the 'lost knowledge' of classical times. At the same time, however, scholars also began to test and extend this knowledge. D. The emergent nation states of Europe developed competitive interests in world exploration and the development of trade. Such expansion, which was to take the English language west to America and east to India, was supported by scientific developments such as the discovery of magnetism (and hence the invention of the compass), improvements in cartography and—perhaps the most important scientific revolution of them all—the new theories of astronomy and the movement of the Earth in relation to the planets and stars, developed by Copernicus (1473-1543). E. England was one of the first countries where scientists adopted and publicized Copernican ideas with enthusiasm. Some of these scholars, including two with interests in language—John Wall's and John Wilkins—helped Found the Royal Society in 1660 in order to promote empirical scientific research. F. Across Europe similar academies and societies arose, creating new national traditions of science. In the initial stages of the scientific revolution, most publications in the national languages were popular works, encyclopaedias, educational textbooks and translations. G. Original science was not done in English until the second half of the 17th century. For example, Newton published his mathematical treatise, known as the Principia, in Latin, but published his later work on the properties of light—Opticks—in English. H. There were several reasons why original science continued to be written in Latin. The first was simply a matter of audience. Latin was suitable for an international audience of scholars, whereas English reached a socially wider, but more local, audience. Hence, popular science was written in English. I. A second reason for writing in Latin may, perversely, have been a concern for secrecy. Open publication had dangers in putting into the public domain preliminary ideas which had not yet been fully exploited by their 'author'. This growing concern about intellectual properly rights was a feature of the period—it reflected both the humanist notion of the individual, rational scientist who invents and discovers through private intellectual labour, and the growing connection between original science and commercial exploitation. J. There was something of a social distinction between 'scholars and gentlemen' who understood Latin, and men of trade who lacked a classical education. And in the mid-17th century it was common practice for mathematicians to keep their discoveries and proofs secret, by writing them in cipher, in obscure languages, or in private messages deposited in a sealed box with the Royal Society. Some scientists might have felt more comfortable with Latin precisely because its audience, though international, was socially restricted. Doctors clung the most keenly to Latin as an 'insider language'. K. A third reason why the writing of original science in English was delayed may have been to do with the linguistic inadequacy of English in the early modern period. English was not well equipped to deal with scientific argument. First, it lacked the necessary technical vocabulary. Second, it lacked the grammatical resources required to represent the world in an objective and impersonal way, and to discuss the relations, such as cause and effect, that might hold between complex and hypothetical entities. L. Fortunately, several members of the Royal Society possessed an interest in language and became engaged in various linguistic projects. Although a proposal in 1664 to establish a committee for improving the English language came to little, the society's members did a great deal to foster the publication of science in English and to encourage the development of a suitable writing style. M. Many members of the Royal Society also published monographs in English. One of the first was by Robert Hooke, the society's first curator of experiments, who described his experiments with microscopes in Micrographia (1665). This work is largely narrative in style, based on a transcript of oral demonstrations and lectures. N. In 1665 a new scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, was inaugurated. Perhaps the first international English-language scientific journal, it encouraged a new genre of scientific writing, that of short, focused accounts of particular experiments. O. The 17th century was thus a formative period in the establishment of scientific English. In the following century much of this momentum was lost as German established itself as the leading European language of science. It is estimated that by the end of the 18th century 401 German scientific journals had been established as opposed to 96 in France and 50 in England. However, in the 19th century scientific English again enjoyed substantial lexical growth as the industrial revolution created the need for new technical vocabulary, and new, specialised, professional societies were instituted to promote and publish in the new disciplines.