单选题 Questions17-20 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题 When Erik Robertson, an account executive at a San Francisco public relations agency, meets with conservative clients, he's always sure to wear a suit and tie. But with his video game client, short sleeves and an open-collar shirt are perfectly fine. His wardrobe choices aren't just based on what the clients will be wearing. Sometimes, he also wants to conceal the tattoos covering his arms and chest because he realizes they could alienate customers. 'You have to be smart and not risk offending current clients or new business prospects,' said Robertson, who is 29 years old. 'I'd also like to have my hands and neck tattooed, but I don't because I couldn't cover them. I'm just glad I didn't go overboard when I was in college. When the online jobs site CareerBuilder asked employers which personal appearance attributes would make them less likely to promote someone, piercings were named most often (37% of respondents), while visible tattoos ranked third (31%). However, this is not the case for many young workers today. A new Pew Research Center survey found that 38% of the respondents between the age of 18 to 29 in the US had at least one tattoo, and 23% had a piercing in a place other than their ear lobes. 'To attract and retain talent, businesses will have to overcome negative stereotypical views about body art,' said Barrie Gross, a human-resources consultant based in San Francisco. 'They need to ask whether it really matters to job performance and the company's reputation if someone has a nose ring or tattoo.' KPMG, the international accounting firm, advises its college recruits 'to remove visible body piercings and cover tattoos' at work. Similarly, Macy, the big US retailer, tells employees to avoid 'excessive' facial piercings and tattoos that distract or offend customers. A Macy's spokeswoman declined to explain what qualifies as 'excessive.' The degree of flexibility about body art may change with changing recruiting needs. When the US Army needed to attract more recruits for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, it relaxed its dress code to allow tattoos on the neck and hands. In interviewing hiring managers in Scotland, Andrew Timming, a reader in management at the University of St Andrews, found that they harbour mostly negative attitudes toward job candidates with visible tattoos. Even recruiters who were tattooed themselves held such views. But the hiring managers told Timming they wouldn't reject applicants because of their own bias, but rather because they believed customers would disapprove of body art.

单选题 The fridge is considered a necessity. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food first appeared with the label: 'store in the refrigerator.' In my fridgeless fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on food deliveries have ceased, flesh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country. The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed—natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling... What refrigeration did promote was marketing—marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the globe in search of a good price. Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house—while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge. The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been insignificant, If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

单选题 Questions17-19 are based on the recording yon have just heard.

单选题 Interactive television advertising, which allows viewers to use their remote controls to click on advertisements, has been pushed for years. Nearly a decade ago it was predicted that viewers of 'Friends', a popular situation comedy, would soon be able to purchase a sweater like Jennifer Aniston's with a few taps on their remote control. 'It's been the year of interactive television advertising for the last ten or twelve years,' says Colin Dixon of a digital-media consultancy. So the news that Cablevision, an American cable company, was rolling out interactive advertisements to all its customers on October 6th was greeted with some skepticism. During commercials, an overlay will appear at the bottom of the screen, prompting viewers to press a button to request a free sample or order a catalogue. Cablevision hopes to allow customers to buy things with their remote controls early next year. Television advertising could do with a boost. Spending fell by 10% in the first half of the year. The popularization of digital video recorders has caused advertisers to worry that their commercials will be skipped. Some are turning to the Internet, which is cheaper and offers concrete measurements like click-through rates—especially important at a time when marketing budgets are tight. With the launch of interactive advertising, 'many of the dollars that went to the Internet will come back to the TV,' says David Kline of Cablevision. Or so the industry hopes. In theory, interactive advertising can engage viewers in a way that 30-second spots do not. Unilever recently ran an interactive campaign for its Axe deodorant (除臭剂), which kept viewers engaged for more than three minutes on average. The amount spent on interactive advertising on television is still small. Magna, an advertising agency, reckons it will be worth about $138 million this year. That falls far short of the billions of dollars people once expected it to generate. But DirecTV, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have all invested in it. A new effort led by Canoe Ventures, a coalition of leading cable providers, aims to make interactive advertising available across America later this year. BrightLine iTV, which designs and sells interactive ads, says interest has surged: it expects its revenues almost to triple this year. BSkyB, Britain's biggest satellite-television service, already provides 9 million customers with interactive ads. Yet there are doubts whether people watching television, a 'lean back' medium, crave interaction. Click-through rates have been high so far (around 3-4%, compared with less than 0.3% online), but that may be a result of the novelty. Interactive ads and viewers might not go well together.

单选题 Questions6-8 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

单选题 唐朝早期和中期的统治开明、经济繁荣、社会安定。

单选题 All through the ages the bat has been a creature of great mystery. Bats have influenced the imagination of the Western World since the first Spaniards returned from the Americans. They told tales of hairy, winged creatures that flew from caves to feed on the blood of man and animals. The vampire bat, which became a well-known figure in the folk tales of many countries, exists only in the Americans. The vampire bat is not like the common bat. Its teeth have grown sharper. In the days before Columbus, bat fed on wild animals, but with the introduction of farm animals into the New World by the Spaniards, they were offered a new kind of food. They attacked the cattle which sickened and died and the colonists didn't know why. It was only in 1908 that farmers in Brazil discovered that the bite of the vampire bat could cause rabies and this was the disease that was killing their cattle. For the first time it was recognized that the bite of a vampire bat could carry the virus of rabies. The cattle of eastern Mexico were especially troubled by this disease. Many efforts were made by the farmers in Mexico to destroy the bats. They blew up their caves or covered the entrances to caves with nets. All these ways were too slow, too costly, or else didn't work. Since they could not remove the bats, the Mexican government and World Health Organization got together in 1952 to develop a cheap dependable supply of the vaccine against rabies at a factory in Mexico. A quarter of a million cattle have been vaccinated at a cost of fifty cents per animal to the owners. In one state alone, death among cattle has fallen from 56% to 1%. Control of the disease in animals seems to be in sight. This will reduce but not destroy the threat that bats may pass the disease to human beings. Vampire bats like human blood best. Whole villages in Guatemala have disappeared because of the frequency with which bats fed on sleeping children. A study made in Trinidad showed that in thirty houses checked in one village, twenty persons had been bitten by bats. Teachers reported that half of the children coming to school showed signs of having been bitten in the night. A health research office, which has been collecting information since 1949 about the home and movements of bats, has started work on a book about bats. Various other health organizations also are making new studies. It is hoped that answers to this health problem will soon be found.

单选题 Can the PC Industry Resurrect Itself? A. Internet Data Center's (IDC) recent report stated that PC shipments declined 13.9% last quarter, the worst since IDC has been tracking PCs. It says a lot about the state of the PC industry. The role PCs are playing in people's lives is changing, and the growing demand for tablets and smartphones has taken its toll on the PC market. Last week my son Ben, in his column for TIME Tech entitled The iPad-Sized Nail in the PC's Coffin laid much of the blame on the iPad for deflating PC sales. Ben also made the point that people are either keeping their current PCs longer or if they buy a new PC or laptop, they buy cheaper models because they are 'good enough' to use for any computing needs that can't be accomplished on a tablet. B. But is the PC really dead? And if not, how will PC vendors respond to this challenge from tablets and smartphones? It turns out that people have found they can do as much as 80% on a tablet that they used to do on a PC. However, they have also found out that tablets by themselves cannot meet all of their digital computing needs, especially for handling things like media management, extensive photo editing, making complex home movies, doing their taxes and other similar tasks. This suggests that if they only need a PC 20% of the time, the need to buy an expensive PC does not make sense for most people. C. For the past 10 years, a good part of PC sales were for laptops and PCs in the $ 799- $ 999 range those which have higher-end processors, extended graphics capabilities and more on-board memory and hard drive space than laptops and PCs priced well below $ 699. We are hearing from consumers that if they only use a PC or laptop 20% of the time, the highest price they want to pay is $ 599, with most preferring price points of $ 399- $ 449. This is. why Ultrabook sales have been very disappointing for the PC vendors who hoped that their touch-based Ultrabooks priced from $ 799- $1 099 would be big sellers. D. While PC vendors are quite aware of the shift in consumer buying trends for PCs, they are not about to give up without a fight. Almost all are trying to do tablets of their own and some, like Lenovo, are even doing smartphones and have actually done quite well in the Asian and Chinese smartphone markets. I think that reality has sunk in for the vendors, and they now understand that the market for laptops and PCs in the $ 699- $ 999 price point is being marginalized. E. The good news is that there is still healthy demand for upscale laptops and PCs in the $1 099～ $1 499price range. But demand for these is mostly in the IT, business and SMB market, a much smaller market than the consumer sector. Even though volume in these is smaller than those that sell into the consumer market, the margins are good, so these vendors are happy with what they call the premium market for PCs. However, they are also shifting much of their efforts to creating low cost clamshell-based (翻盖式物品) laptops and tablets with very aggressive pricing, and hope to use these to lure millions of PC users who have tablets but still need a PC for some tasks to upgrade their current PCs to more up-to-date touch-based models. F. In fact, Intel CEO Paul Otellini gave us some indication of Intel and its PC partners' strategy last week when he spoke on a conference call regarding Intel's recent earnings announcement. He said, 'If you look at touch-enabled non-core Intel-based notebooks that are ultrathin... those prices are going to be down to as low as $ 200,' hinting perhaps at more affordable laptops and Windows 8tablets on the horizon. We are hearing that all of the PC vendors are working on what they call 'ultramobiles,' which are very low cost touch-based clamshells and convertible tablets for this holiday season. G. Key to understanding ultramobile designs is that while some will look like normal laptops or convertibles, to get this distinction, and to qualify for Microsoft's low cost license to use Windows Blue, they have to be systems that only use Intel's Atom chip or a similar competitive one from AMD. Ultimately, the vendors believe these ultramobiles could help drive PC sales higher due to consumers' demand to upgrade their laptops to touch-based systems. By the way, clamshell-based Chromebooks are in this ultramobile category too, even though they use Google's Chrome web browser as the operating system. H. Consumers have gotten very comfortable with touch interfaces on their smartphones and tablets and it is logical that they would want a similar interface on any new PC or laptop they upgrade to in the future. Indeed, this is what Intel, Microsoft and their PC partners are banking on. While they accept that users' primary computing tasks are shifting to smartphones and tablets, they are convinced that even if they use a PC for 20% of their digital computing needs, the next one they buy will be touch-based. While Intel, Microsoft and the vendors would prefer selling people touchscreen ultrabooks at higher prices, they are now realizing that consumers want really low priced touch-based laptops that are good enough to handle anything they can't get done on a tablet or smartphone. This is why ultramobile devices are being created. It does not mean that consumers will not have higher-end Intel touch-based Ultrabooks to choose from as well, but most of these will be at least $ 599 and higher. I. So what does this mean for consumers this fall? Although consumers have been able to buy what we call value notebooks well under $ 599 for some time, most of these use older processors, non-touch screens, and traditional hard drives and are bulky with poor battery life; their days are numbered. The industry will still offer some of these types of value notebooks for at least another year. But the push will be very strong from Intel, AMD and Microsoft to drive everyone to touch-based laptops in various price ranges, making it more likely that if a person needs to buy a new PC there will be a touch-based Windows 8 laptop they can afford. I suspect that within 12-18 months, non-touch-based laptops of any flavor will be hard to find. J. What consumers can expect this fall are ultramobiles using either Intel's Atom processor or the Temash version from AMD, with touchscreens, SSD drives, and thin and light designs. They will come in many flavors. Some will be traditional clamshells, sporting screens from 10.1 to 11.6inches. Some will be what we call convertibles, which are clamshells that look like a traditional laptops but the screens pop off to become tablets. Some models will be like Lenovo's Yoga, a laptop in which the screen folds back to make it a tablet, except the screen is not detachable. And some will be exactly like Microsoft's current Surface Pro or Surface RT models. More importantly, they will all be priced under $ 599 with some coming in as low as $ 399- $ 499 by the holidays. K. Vendors will also offer Ultrabooks that use Intel's dual-core processors, flash memory, touchscreens and also be thin and light but they will all be at least $ 599 and up. And of course if you really want a powerful PC or laptop, these will be available too, all in touch versions, starting from $ 999 and above. We also expect to see many new Windows Blue tablets in the 7″to 9″ screen sizes in time for the holidays. L. Although the PC market is changing, it is clear that for many people, a PC or laptop could still be important. The industry is ready to move these people to touch-based systems with the next generation of user interfaces, at all types of price ranges. PC makers will try and make themselves as relevant as possible to the business and consumer markets for as long as they can.

单选题 Should Old People Stay at Home or Be Placed in Nursing Homes? Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Old People Stay at Home or Be Placed in Nursing Homes? You should analyze the for-and-against views on it and state your own opinion. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Call it the 'learning paradox' : the more you struggle and even fail while you're trying to learn new information, the better you're likely to recall and apply that information later. The learning paradox is at the heart of 'productive failure,' a phenomenon identified by researcher Manu Kapur. Kapur points out that while the model adopted by many teachers when introducing students to new knowledge - providing lots of structure and guidance early on, until the students show that they can do it on their own - makes intuitive sense, it may not be the best way to promote learning. Rather, it's better to let the learners wrestle (较劲) with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start. In a paper published recently, Kapur applied the principle of productive failure to mathematical problem solving in three schools. With one group of students, the teacher provided strong 'scaffolding' - instructional support - and feedback. With the teacher's help, these pupils were able to find the answers to their set of problems. Meanwhile, a second group was directed to solve the same problems by collaborating with one another, without any prompts from their instructor. These students weren't able to complete the problems correctly. But in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when the two groups were tested on what they'd learned, the second group 'significantly outperformed' the first. The apparent struggles of the floundering (挣扎的) group have what Kapur calls a 'hidden efficacy' : they lead people to understand the deep structure of problems, not simply their correct solutions. When these students encounter a new problem of the same type on a test, they're able to transfer the knowledge they've gathered more effectively than those who were the passive recipients of someone else's expertise. In the real world, problems rarely come neatly packaged, so being able to discern their deep structure is key. But, Kapur notes, none of us like to fail, no matter how often Silicon Valley entrepreneurs praise the beneficial effects of an idea that fails or a start-up company that crashes and burns. So we need to ' design for productive failure' by building it into the learning process. Kapur has identified three conditions that promote this kind of beneficial struggle. First, choose problems to work on that 'challenge but do not frustrate. ' Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they're doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions to the problems. And to those students who protest this tough-love teaching style: you'll thank me later.

单选题 Nothing More Than Feelings A. First, you realise it's a gorilla. The opening strains of Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight' are playing; the beast is enraptured (陶醉的). As the camera pulls back, you see that he's seated at a drum kit. He raises his drumsticks (鼓槌), then brings them resoundingly down. Only in the final frames do you discover that the gorilla is pitching (竭力推销) Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate. B. This advertisement, released in 2007, should not have worked. Conventional wisdom doubted that a jerk of joy from a drumming gorilla, however rhythmically gifted, would spur sales of chocolate bars. A member of the team that developed the ad says that when it was passed to Millward Brown, the world's biggest tester of adverts, the firm found that it scored poorly among women on its measures of 'awareness' and 'brand appeal' and about average among men (Millward Brown says it did better on other measures). Yet Cadbury went ahead, and was rewarded with millions of online views, better perceptions of its brand and higher sales. Return on investment was three times the average for packaged-goods marketing campaigns. C. Behind Cadbury's gorilla success was an unlikely inspiration: Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for showing that people are not the rational agents that economists had thought they were. He argues, most famously in Thinking, Fast and Slow, a 2011 book popularising his work, that the mind (human, that is, not gorilla) incorporates two systems: an intuitive 'system one', which makes many decisions automatically, and a calculating but lazy 'system two', which rationalises system one's ideas and sometimes overrules them. For Mr Kahneman's disciples advertising is above all a way to groom system one, to spur consumers towards a buy. D. Kahnemanite advertising prizes emotion over information and pays more attention to a brand's 'purpose' than to its products. It exploits system one's tendency to react to subtle cues. In a print advert for a Betty Crocker pie, a version with the fork placed on the right triggered a 20% higher 'purchase intent' than one with the fork on the left (because most people eat with their right hands). This demands not just new ways of making adverts but new methods for judging if they will work. Researchers must 'laser in on measuring emotion as almost the single metric' that predicts success, says John Kearon of BrainJuicer, a market-research firm. E. This season's crop of televisual tear-jerkers (催人泪下的事物) reflects such thinking. A sweaty game of wheelchair basketball ends with all the players but one walking out of the gym. 'The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character,' intones the voice-over (解说), in the hope that one of those choices will be to drink Guinness stout. In the Christmas offering of Britain's Royal Mail, posties of many colours deliver parcels in all weathers, accompanied by an a cappella rendition (表演) of the Beatles' 'All You Need is Love'. F. Of course, admen (广告人) were aiming at system one long before they had heard of it: 'Sex sells' is one of the oldest mottos in the business, after all. Even information-packed adverts that seem to be appealing to reason are really playing on emotions, points out Mr Kahneman, who does not give advice to marketers. G. His followers are inclined to dispense with system two altogether. Marketers at Procter Gamble, maker of Tide detergent and Pampers nappies, were trained to get across the 'single benefit' that a product would give its purchaser, says Jim Stengel, a former marketing chief at the firm, now a consultant. 'There was not a whole lot of recognition of emotional connection with a brand or company.' But that has changed. PG's tribute to athletes' mothers during the Olympics was aimed directly at system one. H. Rare is the marketer today who does not spout (喋喋不休地说) systemic terminology, but there are disagreements over how to tell what system one is feeling, and over the role of system two. In testing an advert before it goes to market, Brain Juicer asks subjects to say which of eight faces, each expressing a different emotion, best reflects the feeling it arouses and how intense it is. The firm tested the gorilla advert after its release. It scored the highest emotional-intensity marks (viewers felt happiness and surprise) of any advert to that point. I. Decode, a rival, uses 'implicit association', in which subjects associate images (say of a chocolate bar) with concepts (perhaps 'comfort') and their reactions are timed. The faster the response, the deeper the link between the two. Decode found that the gorilla advert invoked 'security' and 'enjoyment' better than a less-popular successor involving drag-racing trucks, which had unchocolatey overtones of 'adventure'. J. Some say the most telling signals are biological. Neuro-Insight, an Australian outfit, monitors electrical activity in viewers' brains. When viewers watched the Cadbury advert, signals that suggested images were being stored in long-term memory peaked three times: when subjects recognised a gorilla, when they saw the drums and when the brand appeared. K. Everyone gangs up on Millward Brown, perhaps in part because its losses could be their gains. Its surveys tease out such things as how 'engaging' an advert is by asking viewers to answer a series of questions, a system-two task that masks system one's reactions, say critics. Admen resent its emphasis on 'persuasion', which predicts short-term sales but seems deadeningly rational. For such 'creatives', permission to pack a purely emotional wallop (猛击) feels liberating. L. Millward Brown has always probed for emotional responses, insists Graham Page, its head of consumer neuroscience. People are aware of their feelings, so it is legitimate to discover them by asking questions. The new biometric techniques are useful for finding out how people came to feel as they do. Mr Page says Millward Brown has worked more with them than any other firm. M. Furthermore, he says, do not underrate system two. It usually interacts with the system-one response to reach a decision. That is why passengers overcome their reflexive aversion to some budget airlines; guided by hard-headed system two, they buy the cheap tickets. Still, Mr Page admits, researchers used to focus too much on thinking. Now Millward Brown is as keen as anyone to explore consumers' instincts. N. There is an irony in this. Most readers of Mr Kahneman's bestseller will end up mistrusting system one for its tendency to mislead. Not marketing folk. System one craves chocolate.

单选题 Questions12-14 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 Questions17-19 are based on the recording you have just heard.