单选题 Who Pressed the Pause Button? A. Between 1998 and 2013, the Earth's surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04℃ a decade, far slower than the 0.18℃ increase in the 1990s. Meanwhile, emissions of carbon dioxide (which would be expected to push temperatures up) rose uninterruptedly. This pause in warming has raised doubts in the public mind about climate change. A few sceptics say flatly that global warming has stopped. Others argue that scientists' understanding of the climate is so flawed that their judgments about it cannot be accepted with any confidence. A convincing explanation of the pause therefore matters both to a proper understanding of the climate and to the credibility of climate science—and papers published over the past few weeks do their best to provide one. Indeed, they do almost too good a job. If all were correct, the pause would now be explained twice over. B. This is the opposite of what happened at first. As evidence piled up that temperatures were not rising much, some scientists dismissed it as a blip (暂时的问题). The temperature, they pointed out, had fallen for much longer periods twice in the past century or so, in 1880-1910 and again in 1945-1975, even though the general trend was up. Variability is part of the climate system and a 15-year hiatus (间断), they suggested, was not worth getting excited about. C. An alternative way of looking at the pause's significance was to say that there had been a slowdown but not a big one. Most records, including one of the best known (kept by Britain's Meteorological Office), do not include measurements from the Arctic, which has been warming faster than anywhere else in the world. Using satellite data to fill in the missing Arctic numbers, Kevin Cowtan of the University of York, in Britain, and Robert Way of the University of Ottawa, in Canada, put the overall rate of global warming at 0.12℃ a decade between 1998 and 2012—not far from the 1990s' rate. A study by NASA puts the 'Arctic effect' over the same period somewhat lower, at 0.07℃ a decade, but that is still not negligible. D. It is also worth remembering that average warming is not the only measure of climate change. According to a study just published by Sonia Seneviratne of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, in Zurich, the number of hot days, the number of extremely hot days and the length of warm periods all increased during the pause (1998-2012). A more stable average temperature hides wider extremes. E. Still, attempts to explain away that stable average have not been convincing, partly because of the conflict between flat temperatures and rising CO2 emissions, and partly because observed temperatures are now falling outside the range climate models predict. The models embody the state of climate knowledge. If they are wrong, the knowledge is probably faulty, too. Hence attempts to explain the pause. Chilling news. F. In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did so in terms of fluctuating solar output, atmospheric pollution and volcanoes. All three, it thought, were unusually influential. G. The sun's power output fluctuates slightly over a cycle that lasts about 11 years. The current cycle seems to have gone on longer than normal and may have started from a lower base, so for the past decade less heat has been reaching Earth than usual. Pollution throws aerosols (气溶胶) into the air, where they reflect sunlight back into space. The more there are, the greater their cooling effect—and pollution from coal-fired power plants, in particular, has been rising. Volcanoes do the same thing, so increased volcanic activity tends to reduce temperatures. H. Gavin Schmidt and two colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute quantify the effects of these trends in Nature Geoscience. They argue that climate models underplay the delayed and subdued solar cycle. They think the models do not fully account for the effects of pollution. And they claim that the impact of volcanic activity since 2000 has been greater than previously thought. Adjusting for all this, they find that the difference between actual temperature readings and computer-generated ones largely disappears. The implication is that the solar cycle and aerosols explain much of the pause. Blowing hot and cold. I. There is, however, another type of explanation. Much of the incoming heat is absorbed by oceans, especially the largest, the Pacific. Several new studies link the pause with changes in the Pacific and in the trade winds that influence the circulation of water within it. Trade winds blow east-west at tropical latitudes. In so doing they push warm surface water towards Asia and draw cooler, deep water to the surface in the central and eastern Pacific, which chills the atmosphere. Water movement at the surface also speeds up a giant churn (剧烈翻腾) in the ocean. This pulls some warm water downwards, sequestering (使隔绝) heat at greater depth. In a study published in Nature in 2013, Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego, argued that much of the difference between climate models and actual temperatures could be accounted for by cooling in the eastern Pacific. J. Every few years, as Dr Kosaka and Dr Xie observe, the trade winds slacken and the warm water in the western Pacific sloshes (晃荡) back to replace the cool surface layer of the central and eastern parts of the ocean. This weather pattern is called El Niño and it warms the whole atmosphere. There was an exceptionally strong Niño in 1997-1998, an unusually hot year. The opposite pattern, with cooler temperatures and stronger trade winds, is called La Niño. The 1997-98 Niño was followed by a series of Niñas, explaining part of the pause. K. Switches between El Niño and La Niño are frequent. But there is also a long-term cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (波动) (PDO), which switches from a warm (or positive) phase to a cool (negative) one every 20 or 30 years. The positive phase encourages more frequent, powerful Niños. According to Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of America's National Centre for Atmospheric Research, the PDO was positive in 1976-1998—a period of rising temperatures—and negative in 1943-1976 and since 2000, producing a series of cooling Niñas. L. But that is not the end of it. Laid on top of these cyclical patterns is what looks like a one-off increase in the strength of trade winds during the past 20 years. According to a study in Nature Climate Change, by Matthew England of the University of New South Wales and others, record trade winds have produced a sort of super-Niña. On average, sea levels have risen by about 3ram a year in the past 30 years. But those in the eastern Pacific have barely budged (挪动), whereas those near the Philippines have risen by 20cm since the late 1990s. A wall of warm water, in other words, is being held in place by powerful winds, with cool water rising behind it. According to Dr England, the effect of the trade winds explains most of the temperature pause. M. If so, the pause has gone from being not explained to explained twice over—once by aerosols and the solar cycle, and again by ocean winds and currents. These two accounts are not contradictory. The processes at work are understood, but their relative contributions are not. N. Nor is the answer to what is, from the human point of view, the biggest question of all, namely what these explanations imply about how long the pause might continue. On the face of it, if some heat is being sucked into the deep ocean, the process could simply carry on: The ocean has a huge capacity to absorb heat as long as the pump sending it to the bottom remains in working order. But that is not all there is to it. Gravity wants the western-Pacific water wall to slosh back; it is held in place only by exceptionally strong trade winds. If those winds slacken, temperatures will start to rise again. O. The solar cycle is already turning. And aerosol cooling is likely to be reined in by China's antipollution laws. Most of the circumstances that have put the planet's temperature rise on 'pause' look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.

单选题It's normal to think of a conversation as taking place between people who are in the same room, surrounded by the same set of physical objects and influences, and aware of each other's facial and bodily gestures. When this is not so, the difference is 25 by using another term for what is going on 'telephone conversation' for instance. As a consequence of their situation, conversationalists (交谈者) are able to place a great deal of 26 on the immediately surrounding bit of the world—what may be called the 'extra-linguistic context' in their 27 to communicate With each other: a raised eyebrow, a 28 movement, a glance towards some person or thing, may 'say' a great deal without the need for any words at all. Thus, to anyone listening at a keyhole, and so 29 of the contextual cues, the language being used may well sound 30 , incomplete, and probably difficult to hear at times, because of the great changes of speed and loudness that can so easily be used by people sitting or standing 31 close to each other. Conversationalists will also, as a rule, be relaxed and not unduly worried about the 32 they are creating unlike the lecturer, or the person 33 an interview. Slips and errors of grammar will be frequent, and will bother no-one: they certainly form an expected part of conversation, and perhaps even a welcome one, because to talk too smoothly and correctly is to run the risk of sounding like a book and no-one likes to talk to a book. Similarly, slight carelessness of pronunciation will be common, and few people will bother to go in for the 'tidying up' of speech, or the adoption of an unusually 'posh' accent that is sometimes 34 in circumstances where it is thought necessary to 'create impression'. A. straightforward B. noticeable C. deprived D. reference E. relatively F. recognized G. accused H. impression I. illustrating J. slight K. attempt L. undergoing M. reliance N. consequently O. inexplicit

单选题 For most of us, work is the central, dominating fact of life. We spend more than half our conscious hours at work, preparing for work, traveling to and from work. What we do there largely determines our standard of living and to a considerable extent the status we are accorded by our fellow citizens as well. It is sometimes said that because leisure has become more important the indignities and injustices of work can be pushed into a comer, that because most work is pretty intolerable, the people who do it should compensate for its boredom, frustrations and humiliations (羞耻) by concentrating their hopes on the other parts of their lives. I reject that as a counsel of despair. For the foreseeable future the material and psychological rewards which work can provide, and the conditions in which work is done, will continue to play a vital part in determining the satisfaction that life can offer. Yet only small minority can control the pace at which they work or the conditions in which their work is done; only for a small minority does work offer scope for creativity, imagination, or initiative. Inequality (不平等) at work and in work is still one of the cruelest and most glaring forms of inequality in our society. We cannot hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise directly or indirectly from the frustrations created by inequality at work, unless we tackle it head-on (迎面地). Still less can we hope to create a decent and humane society. The most glaring inequality is that between managers and the rest. For most managers, work is an opportunity and a challenge. Their jobs engage their interest and allow them develop their abilities. They are constantly learning; they are able to exercise responsibility; they have a considerable degree of control over their own—and others'—working lives. Most important of all, they have opportunity to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, and for a growing number of white-collar workers, work is a boring, dull even painful experience, They spend all their working lives in conditions which would be regarded as intolerable for themselves—by those who make the decisions which let such conditions continue. The majority has little control over their work; it provides them with no opportunity for personal development. Often production is so designed that workers are simply part of the technology. In offices, many jobs are so routine that workers justifiably feel themselves to be mere cogs in the bureaucratic (官僚的) machine. As a direct consequence of their work experience, many workers feel alienated from their work and their firm, whether it is in public or in private ownership.

单选题 Now listen to the following recording and answer questions22-24.

单选题 Of 100 billion nerve cells in the human brain, how many form after birth? For years, the official answer was 'zero'. Scientists thought people were born with all the neurons they'd ever have. But from 1980s, biologists overturned that doctrine, finding a reservoir of stem cells that became fresh neurons in two parts of the brains of adult birds, monkeys and humans. Those discoveries were stunning, but the next seemed to top them all. In 1999, psychologist Elizabeth Gould reported large numbers of new nerve cells in a third of the monkey brain, hinting that the same part in humans—the neocortex, which lets us reason and remember—was regenerating, too. If she was right, scientists would have to revise almost all their ideas about human memory, and doctors might someday find a way to treat Alzheimer's patients by simply turning on the neural-construction equipment. The birth of new nerve cells, or 'neurogenesis', is now confirmed in the original two parts of human brain, the hippocampus and olfactory bulb. But for the neocortex, the no-neurons theory lives— and it's just gotten major boost. Until December, Gould's study stood alone and unverified. Two neuroscientists have repeated her work in Science, but not her results. Where Gould saw new nerve cells in the neocortex, Rakic and Konnack see only glial cells, the 'glue' that supports neurons. But they do spot new nerve cells in the other two areas. In a January review in Nature Neuroscience, Rakic charges Gould's work with technical problems. Focusing on what appeared to be 100 new neurons, Rakic and Kornack found that every one was merely a new glial cell hiding behind an old neuron. Gould has a cross-sectioned image from her own study that she says shows one cell marked as new—and it's clearly a neuron. But Rakic has an answer for that, too. The method that identified the cells as 'new' finds DNA synthesis, which can happen in cells that aren't actually dividing. Rakic says Gould's tests were too sensitive, tagging 'new' neurons that weren't. Gould responses that Rakic's methods just weren't sensitive enough. But even she can't explain why that might be. Rakic's study squares with the idea that memory cornes not from new nerve cells but from chemicals in the spaces between old ones. Gould's team are circulating response to Rakic and Kornack and recreating two studies side by side to see if small differences in methods are to blame. Others are also redoing the tests; a Japanese team's unpublished results echoes Rakic's, while another team's support Gould's. Meanwhile work on less controversial new neurons marches forward. Neuroscientist Fred Gage, who's just wrapped up a study of the function of new hippocampus nerve cells, says that's as it should be. Still, until more studies confirm Rakic and Komack, he'll keep a close eye on the neocortex debate.

单选题 Don't Fear the Male Babysitter For decades, boys, not girls, were seen as the ideal people to take care of children. Why did that change? A. The very thought of a male babysitter (保姆) is enough to make some parents anxious. Every online parenting forum seems to have a thread on the issue of male babysitters, such as 'Hiring a Male Babysitter (or Manny)' on the site Park Slope Parents. In a satire (讽刺作品) on The Onion titled 'Desperate Morn Okays Male Babysitter,' the morn normally wouldn't hire a male babysitter and knew it wasn't ideal, but she really needed the night off. B. In an article for the Washington Post earlier this year, author Petula Dvorak hires a male babysitter and realizes it 'is apparently something few parents would do.' She said she received raised eyebrows from other parents at the playground when she introduced the new sitter and felt compelled to explain how long she's known him and how much she likes him to anyone who would listen. 'When it comes to kids, we are pretty close to being a society that has demonized (妖魔化) men,' Dvorak writes, noting that a government study found that in 96 percent of sexual assaults on children the offenders were male. C. This anxiety about male babysitters is remarkable when you look at the history of babysitting. Throughout the twentieth century, boys were not only as accepted as babysitters, they were often preferred over girls. The reason is twofold: Teenage girls were dismissed as flighty (轻浮的) and selfish; and young boys needed male role models as their fathers were unemployed during the Great Depression or gone all week at work in the latter half of the century. D. According to Miriam Forman-Brunell, a history professor and the author of Babysitter: An American History., babysitting in its modern incarnation (化身) came about in the 1920s, with 'the expansion of suburbs for the first time.' Parents were more likely to be separated from extended family members that once were relied on to watch children. Coincidentally, the 1920s also gave rise to the notion of a modem teenage girl who cared more about boys, movies and makeup than taking care of kids. To adults, the rise of the teenage girl signaled disorder and fueled anxieties. E. As Forman-Brunell writes, because adolescent girls 'attended sports events and flirted with men on the street comers, especially in front of the innocent babies they took care of,' the authors of a popular mid-1920s child-rearing manual criticized adolescent girls and dismissed them as acceptable child-care providers. F. Although babysitting first appeared in the 1920s, it didn't flourish as a cultural phenomenon until after World War Ⅱ. The baby boom created plentiful jobs for babysitters. Still, though women had enjoyed greater employment opportunities during World War Ⅱ, parents were hesitant to use a female babysitter. During this period, 'parents were very anxious about hiring the girl next door, as has always been the case. It just has so much to do with their perception of teenage girls,' says Forman-Brunell. G. Even as teenage girls were provoking anxiety in parents, male babysitters were idealized as the perfect solution. During the Great Depression, Forman-Brunell says, unemployed adolescent boys became 'saviours (救星) to upset mothers and tired housewives unsatisfied with neighborhood girls.' H. In glowing descriptions in Parents Magazine from the 1930s, it seemed as if there was nothing boy helpers couldn't do. Some child-rearing experts during the Great Depression believed that male babysitters could go so far as to 'restore boyhood' for their young charges. While husbands became depressed due to unemployment or deserted their families, Parents Magazine reassured readers that boys were up to the task of babysitting. I. 'It's surprising that you would find the entrepreneurial, perfect male babysitter in popular culture, but he's everywhere,' says Forman-Brunell, 'and he's not burdened by the same expectations that girls are.' Being smart, competitive, and business-oriented were all considered positive characteristics of a male babysitter. J. By the late 1940s, some Ivy-League schools institutionalized babysitting for male college students. For example, Forman-Brunell writes, male undergraduates at Princeton organized the 'Tiger Tot Tending Agency' where, beginning in 1946, 'college boys babysat for the children of faculty members and married students for thirty-five cents an hour.' One mother who hired male babysitters through the Tiger Tot agency told Princeton Alumni Weekly, 'I loved the idea of four tall and strong young men watching over my baby daughter. Diapers (尿布) were changed with efficiency and calmness.' Four men came for the price of one babysitter so they could have enough people for a bridge game. K. A 1940s New Yorker article reported that the Columbia University football coach—a former babysitter himself—created a sitting service for his players and was just as proud of their babysitting accomplishments as their hard work on the football field. The strong babysitters were able to maintain their manliness while caring for children. While tales of hellish babysitter experiences with teenage girls who racked up phone bills and ignored screaming children in order to be with their boyfriends continued to populate the media, so did accounts of capable, responsible male babysitters. L. When fathers were away at work in the 1950s, it was up to male sitters to instill manliness in young boys and turn boys into hardy men. A Life Magazine cover story reported that 23 percent of the 7.9 million boys in the United States worked as babysitters in 1957, collectively earning an estimated $319 million. M. Even as gender differences began to blur in the 1970s, male babysitters were still seen as an ideal, as is apparent in the children's book George the Babysitter (1977). Long-haired George would cook and clean each day for the kids he babysat, and at the end of the day liked to sit and read a football magazine. The book made teenage boy babysitters seem both domestic and masculine. Up until the end of the 20th century, popular culture and children's books such as Arthur Babysits (1992) and Jerome the Babysitter (1995) boosted the reputation of teenage boys as smart, dependable babysitters. N. But today babysitting is most commonly viewed as a woman's domain. A Red Cross Babysitter Training Course video shows two women, one white and one black, babysitting. But there are no male sitters in the video. According to a Wall Street Journal article published earlier this year, Sittercity.com, an online marketplace for babysitting, has 94 percent female sitters, while SmartSitting.com, an agency that matches highly educated sitters with New York families reports that 87 percent of its sitters are female. O. Men have been so erased from the history of babysitting that the same Wall Street Journal article wrongly compares babysitting with cooking, saying, 'Could childcare someday go the way of cooking? In the 1950s everyone assumed that women were better in the kitchen...these days, of course, cooking is gender neutral.' The writer imagines a time in the future when babysitting 'is no longer considered a girl's job.' Little does she know that up until about 20 years ago, it wasn't a girl's job.

单选题 For about three centuries we have been doing science, trying science out, using science for the construction of what we call modern civilization. Every dispensable item of contemporary technology, from canal locks to dial telephones to penicillin, was pieced together from the analysis of data provided by one or another series of scientific experiments. Three hundred years seems a long time for testing a new approach to human interaction, long enough to settle back for critical appraisal of the scientific method, maybe even long enough to vote on whether to go on with it or not. There is an argument. Voices have been raised in protest since the beginning, rising in pitch and violence in the nineteenth century during the early stages of the industrial revolution, summoning urgent crowds into the streets any day on the issue of nuclear energy. The principal discoveries in this century, all in all, are the glimpses of the depth of our ignorance about nature. Things that used to seem clear and rational, matters of absolute certainty—Newtonian mechanics, for example—have slipped through our fingers, and we are left with a new set of gigantic puzzles, cosmic uncertainties, ambiguities; some of the laws of physics are amended every few years, some are canceled outright, some undergo revised versions of legislative intent as if they were acts of Congress. Just thirty years ago we call it a biological revolution when the fantastic geometry of the DNA molecule was exposed to public view and the linear language of genetics was decoded. For a while, things seemed simple and clear, the cell was a neat little machine, a mechanical device ready for taking to pieces and reassembling, like a tiny watch. But just in the last few years it has become almost unbelievably complex, filled with strange parts whose functions are beyond today's imagining. It is not just that there is more to do; there is everything to do. What lies ahead, or what can lie ahead if the efforts in basic research are continued, is much more than the conquest of human disease or the improvement of agricultural technology or the cultivation of nutrients in the sea. As we learn more about fundamental processes of living things in general we will learn more about ourselves.

单选题 Questions14-17 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a composition entitled People Are Becoming Isolated from Each Other. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words and you should base your composition on the outline below. 1.尽管科技的发展使世界变小，人与人之间的关系却越来越疏远。 2.人们彼此疏远的原因。 3.你的结论。

单选题 For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay on the topic Should Children Start Primary School Early? You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. 主要内容如下： 1.陈述现象：目前很多孩子很早就开始上幼儿园。 2.有些人认为这不利于孩子的发展，对此现象陈述个人观点。 3.结论。

单选题 The Advantages of Being Helpless A. At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can walk slowly across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its human counterpart takes months to make her first step, and years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope. Yet, in the cognitive race, human babies turn out to be much like the tortoise (乌龟) in Aesop's fable: emerging triumphant after a slow and steady climb to the finish. B. Yet, this victory seems puzzling. In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless. They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end? C. In a recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Michael Ramscarand Evangelia Chrysikou make the case that this very helplessness is what allows human babies to advance far beyond other animals. They propose that our delayed cortical development (皮质发育) is precisely what enables us to acquire the cultural building blocks, such as language, that make up the foundations of human achievement. In the same way, they suggest, our ability to learn language comes at the price of an extended period of cognitive immaturity. D. This claim hinges on a peculiar and unique feature of our cognitive architecture: the stunningly slow development of the prefrontal cortex (前额皮质), or PFC. The PFC is often referred to as the 'control' center of the brain. One of its main functions is of selectively filtering information from the senses, allowing us to attend to specific actions, goals, or tasks. For this reason, cognitive 'control' tasks are thought to be one of the best assessors of PFC function and maturity. E. The Stroop task (斯特鲁普任务) serves as a simple assessor of PFC function in adults. The task involves naming the ink color of a contrasting color word: for example, you might see the word 'red' written in green ink, in which case you have to say 'green'. Tricky or not, healthy adults can successfully complete the task with only minor hesitation. Children, with their immature PFC's, are a different story. Typically, the younger children are, the worse they are at solving Stroop-like tasks, and under the age of four, they outright fail them. While young children are sensitive, apt learners, and often appear to fully understand what is being asked of them, they are unable to mediate the conflicting demands present in these sorts of tasks, and thus fail them, time and time again. Three-year olds simply cannot direct how they attend to or respond to the world. F. Thompson-Schill and her colleagues suggest that this inability to direct attention has important consequences when it comes to learning about uncertain events. For example, imagine you are playing a guessing game: You have to choose one of two options, either A or B, one of which leads to a prize, and the other does not. After a few rounds, you notice that about 3/4 of the time the prize is at A, and the rest of the time it is at B, so you decide to guess 'A' 75 percent of the time and 'B' 25 percent of the time. This is called probability matching, and it is the response pattern most adults tend to adopt in these circumstances. However, if the goal is to win the most prizes, it is not the best strategy. In fact, to maximize the number of correct predictions, you should always pick the more frequent outcome (or, in this case, always pick 'A'). G. Interestingly, if you were playing this kind of guessing game with a kid, you would see that he would employ the maximization strategy almost immediately because they lack the cognitive flexibility that would allow them to alternate between A and B. Fortunately for them, in this guessing game scenario, maximization is the right choice. H. While it may not be immediately obvious what this has to do with language learning, it just might have everything to do with it, because language relies on conventions. In order for language to work, speakers and listeners have to have the same idea about what things mean, and they have to use words in similar ways. This is where children come in. Young children, as it turns out, act like finely tuned antennas (天线), picking up the dominant frequency in their surroundings and ignoring the static. Because of this—because children tend to pick up on what is common and consistent, while ignoring what is variable and unreliable—they end up homing in on and reproducing only the most frequent patterns in what they hear. In doing so they fail to learn many of the subtleties and characteristics present in adult speech (they will come to learn or invent those later). However, this one-track learning style means that what they do learn is highly conventionalized. I. The superiority of children's convention learning has been revealed in a series of ingenious studies by psychologists Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport, who tested how children and adults react to variable and inconsistent input when learning an artificial language. Strikingly, Hudson—Kam and Newport found that while children tended to ignore 'noise' in the input, systematizing any variations they were exposed to, adults did just the opposite, and reproduced the variability they encountered. Children's inability to filter their learning allows them to impose order on variable, inconsistent input, and this appears to play a crucial part in the establishment of stable linguistic norms. Studies of deaf children have shown that even when parental attempt sat sign are error-prone and inconsistent, children still extract the conventions of a standard sign language from them. Indeed, the variable patterns produced by parents who learn sign language offers insight into what might happen if children did not maximize in learning: language, as a system, would become less conventional. What words meant and the patterns in which they were used would become more unstable, and all languages would begin to resemble pidgins (混杂语言). J. While no language is completely stable, there is a balance to be struck between an individual's expressivity and the conventions that underpin it, and children clearly play an important role in maintaining this balance. Children may learn the established characteristics of their community, but they do so only because these forms are stable in their input. They are unlikely to adopt highly unusual or characteristic forms or sequences that they've heard only rarely, and when they themselves make errors, they are similarly unlikely to incorporate these errors into their language use over the long run. K. Individual societies are built upon these kinds of cultural and linguistic conventions, and a vast array of them. As social animals, human babies must somehow master not just 'culture and language,' but the specifics of their culture, and their language. Explaining how babies manage to learn all of this information is a formidable task. The research reviewed here reveals one advantage that nature may have conferred on human infants: when it comes to conventionlearning, children' sinability to think unconventionallyor flexibly may be of huge benefit. Indeed, a number of neurological studies suggest that children who often exhibit marked language delays and characteristic language development experience a massive overgrowth of the prefrontal cortex over the first two years of life.

单选题 In 2011, many shoppers chose to avoid the frantic crowds and do their holiday shopping from the comfort of their computer. Sales at online retailers gained by more than 15%, making it the biggest season ever. But people are also returning those purchases at record rates, up 8% from last year. What went wrong? Is the lingering shadow of the global financial crisis making it harder to accept extravagant indulgences? Or that people shop more impulsively—and therefore make bad decisions—when online? Both arguments are plausible. However, there is a third factor: a question of touch. We can love the look but, in an online environment, we cannot feel the quality of a texture, the shape of the fit, the fall of a fold or, for that matter, the weight of an earring. And physically interacting with an object makes you more committed to your purchase. When my most recent book Brand washed was released, I teamed up with a local bookstore to conduct an experiment about the differences between the online and offline shopping experience. I carefully instructed a group of volunteers to promote my book in two different ways. The first was a fairly hands-off approach. Whenever a customer would inquire about my book, the volunteer would take them over to the shelf and point to it. Out of 20 such requests, six customers proceeded with the purchase. The second option also involved going over to the shelf but, this time, removing the book and then subtly holding onto it for just an extra moment before placing it in the customer's hands. Of the 20 people who were handed the book, 13 ended up buying it. Just physically passing the book showed a big difference in sales. Why? We feel something similar to a sense of ownership when we hold things in our hand. That's why we establish or reestablish connection by greeting strangers and friends with a handshake. In this case, having to then let go of the book after holding it might generate a subtle sense of loss, and motivate us to make the purchase even more. A recent study also revealed the power of touch, in this case when it came to conventional mail. A deeper and longer-lasting impression of a message was formed when delivered in a letter, as opposed to receiving the same message online. Brain imaging showed that, on touching the paper, the emotional center of the brain was activated, thus forming a stronger bond. The study also indicated that once touch becomes part of the process, it could translate into a sense of possession. This sense of ownership is simply not part of the equation in the online shopping experience.

单选题 Thirst grows for living unplugged More people are taking breaks from the connected life amid the stillness and quiet of retreats like the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. A. About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on 'Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.' Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began, was stillness and quiet. B. A few months later, I read an interview with the well-known cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? 'I never read any magazines or watch TV, ' he said, perhaps with a little exaggeration. 'Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.' He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because 'I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.' C. Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $ 2 285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I'm reliably told, lies in 'black-hole resorts, ' which charge high prices precisely because you can't get online in their rooms. D. Has it really come to this? The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail) every Tuesday morning on 300engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. E. The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen. Nicholas Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10 000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. F. The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. 'Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, 'the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, 'and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.' He also famously remarked that all of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. G. When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that 'the man whose horse trots (奔跑) a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.' Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, 'When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.' We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. H. So what to do? More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思), or tai chi (太极); these aren't New Age fads (时尚的事物) so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an 'Internet sabbath (安息日)' every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other friends take walks and 'forget' their cellphones at home. I. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects 'exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.' More than that, empathy (同感，共鸣), as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are 'inherently slow.' J. I turn to eccentric measures to try to keep my mind sober and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I have yet to use a cellphone and I have never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot. None of this is a matter of asceticism (苦行主义) ; it is just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, or music, it is actually something deeper than mere happiness: it is joy, which the monk (僧侣) David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.' K. it is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world. But it is only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20years, therefore, I have been going several times a year—often for no longer than three days—to a Benedictine hermitage (修道院), 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don't attend services when I am there, and I have never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it is only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I will have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to meet with a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old boy around his shoulders. L. 'You're Pico, aren't you?' the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we had met, I gathered, 19years before, when he had been living in the hermitage as an assistant to one of the monks. 'What are you doing now?' I asked. We smiled. No words were necessary. 'I try to bring my kids here as often as I can, ' he went on. The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what is new, but what is essential.

单选题 A sharply divided federal appeals court on Monday exposed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to billions of dollars in legal damages when it ruled a massive lawsuit alleging gender discrimination over pay for female workers can go to trial. The Court said the world's largest private employer will have to face charges that it pays women less than men for the same jobs and that female employees receive fewer promotions and have to wait longer for those promotions than male counterparts. Wal-Mart successfully convinced the court that women who allege discrimination should file individual lawsuits. Wal-Mart employs 2.1 million workers in 8,000 stores worldwide and argued that the conventional rules of class action suits should not apply because each outlet operates as an independent business. Since it doesn't have a company-wide policy of discrimination, Wal-Mart argued that women alleging gender bias should file individual lawsuits against individual stores. The ruling was a 'big black eye for Wal-Mart, and it's not going to heal anytime in the near lucre,' said retail consultant Burt P. Flickinger. Flickinger said the ruling could turn off women shoppers—the company's critical base—at a time it faces increased pressure from a host of competitors, ranging from Kroger to J.C. Penney. Wal-Mart's fourth-quarter results, announced in February, showed that total sales at its US Wal-Mart stores fell for the first time since the company went public In 1969. The company also reported its third consecutive quarter of declines in sales at stores opened at least a year. Sales at stores opened at least a year are considered a key indicator of a retailer's health. Wal-Mart's top lawyer Jeff Gearhart said the company disagreed with the ruling and was considering its next step, which could include an appeal to the US Supreme Court. 'We do not believe the claims alleged by the six individuals who brought this suit are representative of the experiences of our female associates,' said Gearhart, an executive vice president. 'Wal-Mart is an excellent place for women to work and fosters female leadership among our associates and in the larger business world.' Unions and other critics have long complained that Wal-Mart's workplace practices needed improvement, especially in the areas of diversity and career advancement. The company employs 1.4 million workers in the United States and the unions claim the company's labor practices are widely followed. Wal-Mart responded to the pressure last year at its annual shareholders' meeting by announcing a plan to address the issue of promoting women, creating a 'global council' comprised of 14 Wal-Mart female executives. 'We are proud of the strides we have made to advance and support our female associates and have been recognized for our efforts to advance women through a number of awards and accolades (荣誉),' Gearhart said.

单选题 A recurring criticism of the U. K.'s university sector is its perceived weakness in translating new knowledge into new products and services. Recently, the U. K. National Stem Cell Network warned the U. K. could lose its place among the world leaders in stem cell research unless adequate funding and legislation could be assured. We should take this concern seriously as universities are key in the national innovation system. However, we do have to challenge the unthinking complaint that the sector does not do enough in taking ideas to market. The most recent comparative data on the performance of universities and research institutions in Australia, Canada, U. S.A. and U.K. shows that, from a relatively weak starting position, the U. K. now leads on many indicators of commercialisation activity. When viewed at the national level, the policy interventions of the past decade have helped transform the performance of U. K. universities. Evidence suggests the U. K.'s position is much stronger than in the recent past and is still showing improvement. But national data masks the very large variation in the performance of individual universities. The evidence shows that a large number of universities have fallen off the back of the pack, a few perform strongly and the rest chase the leaders. This type of uneven distribution is not peculiar to the U. K. and is mirrored across other economies. In the U. K., research is concentrated: less than 25% of universities receive 75% of the research funding. These same universities are also the institutions producing the greatest share of PhD graduates, science citations, patents and license income. The effect of policies generating long-term resource concentration has also created a distinctive set of universities which are research-led and commercially active. It seems clear that the concentration of research and commercialisation work creates differences between universities. The core objective for universities which are research-led must be to maximise the impact of their research efforts. These universities should be generating the widest range of social, economic and environmental benefits. In return for the scale of investment, they should share their expertise in order to build greater confidence in the sector. Part of the economic recovery of the U.K. will be driven by the next generation of research commercialisation spilling out of our universities. There are three dozen universities in the U. K. which are actively engaged in advanced research training and commercialisation work. If there was a greater coordination of technology transfer offices within regions and a simultaneous investment in the scale and functions of our graduate schools, universities could, and should, play a key role in positioning the U. K. for the next growth cycle.