单选题 文房四宝 “文房四宝”(Four Treasures of the Study)即笔、墨、纸、砚(ink stone)，是中国传统文化中独有的书写工具。“文房四宝”的称谓，起源于南北朝时期，在北宋时期已被广泛使用。毛笔是四宝中最重要的工具，可以用来书写或绘画，是传统的“中国笔”，有不同种类。纸是中国古代四大发明之一，古时候的纸轻薄柔软，能很快地吸收墨汁。墨和砚是古代书写中必不可缺的工具，两者一般一起使用。“文房四宝”不仅是极有价值的文具，也是融绘画、书法、雕刻为一体的艺术品。

单选题 Questions10-12 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 1．随着科技的发展，现代人的技能也随之变化 2．有人认为外语、计算机等技能很重要，也有人认为沟通技能更重要 3．在我看来……

单选题 What a waste of money! In return for an average of ￡44,000 of debt, students get an average of only 14 hours of lecture and tutorial time a week in Britain. Annual fees have risen from ￡1,000 to ￡9,000 in the last decade, but contact time at university has barely risen at all. And graduating doesn't even provide any guarantee of a decent job: six in ten graduates today are in non-graduate jobs. No wonder it has become fashionable to denounce many universities as little more than elaborate con-tricks (骗术). There's a lot for students to complain about: the repayment threshold for paying back loans will be frozen for five years, meaning that lower-paid graduates have to start repaying their loans; and maintenance grants have been replaced by loans, meaning that students from poorer backgrounds face higher debt than those with wealthier parents. Yet it still pays to go to university. If going to university doesn't work out, students pay very little—if any—of their tuition fees back: you only start repaying when you are earning ￡21,000 a year. Almost half of graduates—those who go on to earn less—will have a portion of their debt written off. It's not just the lectures and tutorials that are important. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. Students do not merely benefit while at university; studies show they go on to be healthier and happier than non-graduates, and also far more likely to vote. Whatever your talents, it is extraordinarily difficult to get a leading job in most fields without having been to university. Recruiters circle elite universities like vultures (兀鹰). Many top firms will not even look at applications from those who lack a 2.1, i.e., an upper-second class degree, from an elite university. Students at university also meet those likely to be in leading jobs in the future, forming contacts for life. This might not be right, but school-leavers who fail to acknowledge as much risk malting the wrong decision about going to university. Perhaps the reason why so many universities offer their students so little is they know studying at a top university remains a brilliant investment even if you don't learn anything. Studying at university will only become less attractive if employers shift their focus away from where someone went to university—and there is no sign of that happening anytime soon. School-leavers may moan, but they have little choice but to embrace university and the student debt that comes with it.

单选题 Questions14-16 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 Directions: Nowadays, many universities offer mental health classes to their students. Write a composition entitled The Necessity of Mental Health Education for College Students. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Design the Prospective Patient Room A. There's very little that's sexy about the health care industry. Within the tangled threads connecting government regulation, opaque insurance policies, and the actual work of patient care itself, there's not a lot of room for glitz or style, and certainly very little time for those working within the health care machine to step back, take inventory of the larger system, and reflect on what's working, what's not, and what could be better if only someone would stop and think through certain problems. This aspect of health care ensures that virtually nobody in the industry has the time or the inclination to dwell on the role of design. B. According to a small group of architects and designers, this lack of design-thinking is precisely why the health care industry struggles to deliver on so many levels. Design, after all, isn't just about form. It's about function. 'We think that design has the power to revolutionize industries, just as it has in electronics, in cars, in everything else,' Salley Whitman says. 'But in health care we haven't tapped into that in a systematic way.' C. Whitman is the Executive Director of NXT Health, a non-profit health care design organization that she describes as something like the research and development shop that the health care industry has always lacked. NXT Health got its start back in 2006 via a Department of Defense grant asking the organization to lead a design collaboration in producing the hospital room of the future—not a futuristic operating theatre or a suite of new treatment technologies, but a patient room that could improve health care outcomes at the individual level. The room itself and the design principles underpinning it have undergone some changes and alterations in the interim, but fundamentally the objective has remained the same: to create better patient care strictly through better design—no game-changing technological breakthroughs or federal legislation required. D. The final product of that effort—christened Patient Room 2020—was unveiled this month at the DuPont Corian Design Studio in New York City. On its face the differences between the patient room of the present and the patient room of the future might appear largely cosmetic. But the NXT Health team and its collaborators—more than 30 industry partners kicked in technology, materials, and know-how to produce the prototype—insist that Patient Room 2020 not be taken at, well, face value. E. The streamlining and packaging of disparate technologies for patient and caregiver use might seem like obvious solutions, the redesign of the bathroom, a nice aesthetic touch. But what this really represents, the team says, is a wholesale rethinking of the patient environment, which has remained largely unchanged for decades. F. 'The health care industry itself is really at a crossroads, it's really being turned upside down from a clinical perspective,' says Andrew Quirk, senior vice president for the Health Care Centre of Excellence at the U.S. outpost of global construction firm Skanska (SKBSY), a collaborator on the Patient Room 2020 project. 'So when you turn to the built environment, you can't expect to deliver health care in the future the same way—and in the same space—as you did in the last few decades.'? G. What drew him to the project, Quirk says, was the idea that for the first time in the history of modern health care, a team of designers was being seriously challenged to integrate technology and architecture into a seamless environment rather than retrofit a handful of pre-existing health care technologies into a pre-existing space. 'Every other time I've heard, this is the patient room of the future, there's nothing new about it,' Quirk says. 'This project really took a leap of faith in integrating technology and architecture and really incorporating all of the activities that will typically go on in a patient room into the design.' H. Patient Room 2020 is indeed a highly integrated orchestration of technologies, materials, and plug-and-play capabilities, encompassing the customary technologies one would expect to find in a hospital room as well as wholly new ones aimed at enhancing patient comfort and care or caregiver efficiency. For instance, the so-called patient ribbon wraps all the way around the bed, from headwall to ceiling to footwall. The headwall contains the necessary machinery for capturing vital signs as well as any oxygen tanks or other hardware that might be necessary. I. The overhead panel contains patient-controlled lighting, while the footwall contains a display that can be used for everything from video-consulting with doctors to pulling up hospital information to viewing entertainment (all controlled from the bed via tablet computer). Caregiver tech in the room includes a hand-washing station, built-in RFID tech for tracking instruments, and simulated UV sanitation of workstations to cut down on the risk of hospital-acquired infection. J. The underlying technologies were provided by more than two dozen companies large and small—Osram Sylvania provided some of the lighting, fabrics-maker Milliken customized antibacterial textiles for linens and scrubs, Duracell chipped in charging technology—and largely packaged up in DuPont's (DD) Corian, a non-porous surface material selected by the design team for its ease of cleaning and the fact that it is thermoformable, leaving few seams or joints where bacteria might thrive. K. Taken altogether, Patient Room 2020 is designed to address some glaring shortcomings rife in the health care system today: a lack of patient engagement in his or her own treatment, hospital-acquired infections, caregiver inefficiency, and overall patient discomfort, which can distract from rehabilitation and generally can make hospital rooms miserable environments. L. That's why Patient Room 2020 isn't just technology for technology's sake, Whitman says. Each element was chosen for a reason and placed in the right location to enhance both patient engagement and caregiver performance and efficiency. It's a systems approach—something that has long been employed to boost efficiency in other industries but has been sorely lacking in basic patient care, where things are often still done piecemeal with pen and clipboard. M. Most importantly, its design influencing behaviours and outcomes, Whitman says, and in a health care environment where fixed costs and other inefficiencies are often beyond an individual hospital's control, enhanced human performance through design gives administrators a unique tool for cutting costs and improving care. N. 'I do not believe that building things the same way but at lower cost is going to help with things like readmission, with hospital-acquired infections,' Whitman says. 'These are some of the big issues we're dealing with payment reform, because you're paying for performance. Hospitals are going to get paid because their patients don't fall, because they don't get sicker while they're there, because they understand their care so when they leave they don't come back—these are all performance metrics the federal government is tracking. So this is not just about putting in technology so we can have fancier electronic medical records.' O. Rather it's about a value proposition for the industry. The kinds of technologies and materials integrated into Patient Room 2020 certainly aren't less expensive than the contemporary alternatives. But long-term they'll improve both patient outcomes and bottom lines. In the near term, converting patient rooms to something like Patient Room 2020 will likely remain somewhat cost-prohibitive for many hospitals, Quirk says, but over time costs will decline and ROI for these technologies will come more quickly. P. And besides, Whitman says, the idea behind Patient Room 2020 isn't for hospitals to graft this model directly onto their hospitals, but to inspire a paradigm shift in the way the health care industry thinks about the role of design in general. The prototype provides a practical model from which administrators and architects can directly borrow or simply draw inspiration. But more than that it provides a clear example of how meaningful good design can be, even in an industry as unsexy as health care. 'In the future there are going to be fewer hospitals, so when we build those hospitals we better build them right,' Whitman says. 'We need to build them in a highly engineered, highly technological way so that they are actually part of the care process, not just an appendage.'

单选题 The Alzheimer's Association and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimate that men make up nearly 40 percent of family care providers now, up from 19 percent in a 1996 study by the Alzheimer's Association. About 17 million men are caring for an adult. Women still provide the bulk of family care, especially intimate tasks like bathing and dressing. Many complain that their brothers are treated like heroes just for showing up. But with smaller families and more women working full-time, many men have no choice but to take on roles that would have been alien to their fathers. Often they are overshadowed by their female counterparts and faced with employers, friends, support organizations and sometimes even parents who view caregiving as an essentially female role. Male caregivers are more likely to say they feel unprepared for the role and become socially isolated, and less likely to ask for help. 'Isolation affects women as well, but men tend to have fewer lifeline. They are less likely to have friends going through similar experiences, and depend more on their jobs for daily human contact,' Dr. Donna Wagner, the director of gerontology (老年学) at Towson University and one of the few researchers who has studied sons as caregivers, said. In past generations, men might have pointed to their accomplishments as breadwinners or fathers. Now, some men say they worry about the conflict between caring for their parents and these other roles. In a 2003 study at three Fortune 500 companies, Dr. Donna Wagner found that men were less likely to use employee-assistance programs for caregivers because they feared it would be held against them. 'Even though the company has endorsed the program, your supervisors may have a different opinion,' Dr. Wagner said. Matt Kassin, 51, worked for a large company with very generous benefits, and his employer had been understanding. But he was reluctant to talk about his caregiving because he thought 'when they hire a male, they expect him to be 100 percent focused.' And he didn't want to appear to be someone who had distractions that detracted (破坏) from performance. For many men, the new role means giving up their self-image as experts, said Louis Colbert, director of the office of services for the aging in Delaware County, Pa., who has shared care of his 84-year-old mother with his siblings since her Alzheimer's made it necessary. Once a year, Mr. Colbert organizes a get-together for male caregivers. The concerns they raise, he said, are different from those of women in support groups. 'Very clearly, they said they wanted their role as caregivers validated, because in our society, as a whole, men as caregivers have been invisible,' he said.

单选题The British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first webpage. It is worth 22 the extraordinary impact that his invention has had on the English language. Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn't exist in 1990. Even more words have had unexpected 23 in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting (小鸟的啁啾声) to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have 24 you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging (微博) site Twitter. Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent every 25 minute on the Internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network. And wireless still means, to anyone of a certain age, a radio—not the system for 26 Internet pages without wires. 'The Internet is an amazing 27 for languages,' said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. 'Language itself changes slowly but the Internet has 28 the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.' English is a remarkably 29 language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary. But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have 30 among some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption that 31 a picture of a cat, like 'I'm in your bed sleeping.' But according to Prof. Crystal, they are all little developments used by a very small number of people—thousands rather than millions. 'Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised.'

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 composition on the topic Cyber Crimes. You should write at least 150 words, and base your composition on the outline (given in Chinese) below. 1)随着互联网的普及和应用，网络犯罪开始摆在世人面前； 2)应该如何来打击和预防网络犯罪越来越成为人们必须要解决的一个难题； 3)作为大学生，你应该怎么做?

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled Man and Computer by commenting on the saying, The real danger is not that the computer will begin to think like man, but that man will begin to think like the computer.' You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Most of us tend to think that attractive people are always at an advantage in life and enjoy far more opportunities than average-looking or unattractive people, especially when it comes to employment. But a new study suggests this perception is actually not the case for all jobs. Beautiful people are less likely to land menial jobs or positions that involve uninteresting work. The study published Tuesday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds being beautiful is a liability when it comes to seeking out less desirable positions, which is proof that attractive people don't get everything they want. The researchers found people interviewing and hiring for these jobs favor unattractive candidates because they perceived attractive candidates would be dissatisfied with the pay and the work. The findings are based on a series of experiments that involved more than 750 people. They included university students and hiring managers. The researchers showed the hiring managers profiles that included photos of potential candidates (one attractive and one not so much). The researchers asked the hiring managers a series of questions that were meant to assess their perceived attractiveness. They also asked the participants which candidate they were more likely to hire for the low-paying positions that included warehouse worker, customer service representative and housekeeper versus more appealing jobs such as manager, project director and an IT internship (实习生). The researchers found that the hiring managers' decisions were driven by their belief that the nice-looking candidates would be unhappy and unsatisfied with the menial jobs and maybe even less likely to do the work. The researchers were surprised by this, since previous research has shown that attractive people always have an edge with employment, such as a study in which researchers sent 1100 fake resumes to employers to fill advertised vacancies. They found 54 percent of attractive women were contacted while 47 percent of attractive men received calls, according to the Independent. On the other hand, only 7 percent of unattractive women and 26 percent of unattractive men were contacted by potential employers. The authors of the new study suggest their findings should be considered when it comes to creating policies about job discrimination. This conclusion is likely to be laughable to unattractive people who have landed jobs but didn't win the genetic lottery.

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