赵州桥建于隋朝，公元605年左右，长50.82米，宽9.6米，跨度37.37米。天才建筑师李春设计并监督了桥的建设。赵州桥结构新颖、造型优美。桥有一个大拱，在大拱的两端各有两个小拱，帮助排泄洪水、减轻桥梁重量并节省石材。建成以来，该桥经受了多次洪水和地震，但其主体结构仍然完好无损，至今仍在使用。赵州桥是世界桥梁建筑史上的一次创举，是中国古代文明史上的一项杰出成就。类似设计的桥梁直到14世纪才在欧洲出现，比赵州桥晚了700多年。_____Part IV Translation（30 minutes）Directions：For this part，you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English.You should write your answer on Answer Sheet 2.

Suddenly, everywhere you look, everyone's taking cold showers. Not literally—that would be weird—but there's no mistaking a lifestyle trend when you see one. They're 27 in a new book, What Doesn't Kill Us, which 28 the exploits of the Dutch extreme-cold enthusiast (狂热者) Wim Hof, who once spent nearly two hours in an ice bath. In The New York Times, the novelist Ben Dolnick reports that cold showers changed his 'entire 29 toward the outside world'. The benefits include everything from 30 immunity to slowing ageing and fighting depression. It's environmentally better, too, so you'll feel the warm glow of being moral, which is fortunate, given that you're going to be extremely bloody cold. As someone who has always preferred the cold, and 31 the way hot days are considered 'good weather', I'm a natural candidate for the craze. Finding myself sleepy at 5 p.m.—having woken with the baby at 5 a.m.—I tried taking naps, 32 that plan, and then started jumping under icy water instead. It worked 33 , helping me squeeze out a few more hours of energy. When I took another cold shower before bed, I slept better, too. But I'll admit there's something a little 34 about this, as there is with many strategies for 'breaking out of your comfort zone'. What are we all trying to prove, exactly? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that behind the desire to 35 over extreme cold, there's a desire to somehow conquer yourself, since both participants in this wrestling match, as you may have noticed, are you. The far more likely result is just more 36 conflict. A. abandoned B. boosting C. brilliantly D. charts E. disposition F. exciting G. goal H. initial I. inner J. intelligently K. overcome L. recommended M. resents N. self-punishing O. triumph

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay related to the short passage given below. In your essay, you are to comment on the phenomenon described in the passage and suggest measures to address the issue. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Some parents in China are overprotective of their children. They plan everything for their children, make all the decisions for them, and do not allow them to explore on their own in case they make mistakes or get hurt.

Telecommunications is just one of the means by which people communicate and, as such, we need to look at telecommunications and any other communications technologies within the wider context of human communication activity. Early findings show that many people are uneasy and even fearful of information technology by avoiding it or by using it in minimal ways. To obtain this type of data we have spent time with individuals, watching how they communicate where they get confused, what they don't understand and the many mistakes they make. You can do this type of research yourself in an informal way. Just watch someone at the desk next to you trying to use a phone or trying to fill in a form. What you will quickly notice about people on the phone is that they use very few of the buttons available on the keypad, and they get quite anxious if they have to use any buttons outside their normal ones. Most will not use the instruction book, and those that do will not necessarily have a rewarding experience. Watch someone fill out a form—a good meaty one such as an application form or a tax form—and you will see a similar pattern of distressed behavior. The simple fact we can all observe from how people use these ordinary instruments of everyday communication is how messy, uncertain and confusing the experience can be. Now multiply these individual close encounters of the communicative kind to take account of the full range you may experience in a single day, from getting up in the morning until you go to bed at night and the world takes on a slightly different appearance. Even watching television which for many provides an antidote to the daily confusion is itself fraught with a kind of low level confusion. For example, if you ring people up five minutes after the evening news has finished and ask them what the news was about, many cannot remember, and those who do remember get some of it wrong. One of the reasons why this obvious confusion gone unnoticed is because 'communication' is a word we associate with success, and therefore we expect the process to work effectively most of the time. To suggest otherwise is to challenge one of our society's most deeply held beliefs.

The Amazon-Walmart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy A. With Amazon buying the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, something retail analysts have known for years is now apparent to everyone: The online retailer is on a collision course with Walmart to try to be the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy. Each one is trying to become more like the other—Walmart by investing heavily in its technology, Amazon by opening physical bookstores and now buying physical supermarkets. But this is more than a battle between two business titans. Their rivalry sheds light on the shifting economics of nearly every major industry. B. That in turn has been a boon (福音) for consumers but also has more worrying implications for jobs, wages and inequality. To understand this epic shift, you can look not just to the grocery business, but also to my closet, and to another retail acquisition announced Friday morning. C. Men's dress clothing, mine included, can be a little boring. Like many male office workers, I lean toward clothes that are sharp but not at all showy. Nearly every weekday, I wear a dress shirt that is either light blue, white or has some subtle check pattern, usually paired with slacks and a blazer. The description alone could make a person doze. I used to buy my dress shirts from a Chinese tailor. They fit perfectly, but ordering required an awkward meeting with a visiting salesman in a hotel suite. They took six weeks to arrive, and they cost around $120 each, which adds up fast when you need to buy eight or 10 a year to keep up with wear and tear (破损). Then several years ago I realized that a company called Bonobos was making shirts that fit me nearly as well, that were often sold three for $220, or $73 each, and that would arrive in two days. D. Bonobos became my main shirt provider, at least until recently, when I learned that Amazon was trying to get into the upper-end men's shirt game. The firm's 'Buttoned Down' line, offered to Amazon Prime customers, uses high-quality fabric and is a good value at $40 for basic shirts. I bought a few; they don't fit me quite as well as the Bonobos, but I do prefer the stitching (针脚). I'm on the fence as to which company will provide my next shirt order, and a new deal this week makes it interesting: Walmart is buying Bonobos. Walmart's move might seem a strange decision. It is not a retailer people typically turn to for $88 summer weight shirts in Ruby Wynwood Plaid or $750 Italian wool suits. Then again, Amazon is best known as a reseller of goods made by others. E. Walmart and Amazon have had their sights on each other for years, each aiming to be the dominant seller of goods—however consumers of the future want to buy them. It increasingly looks like that 'however' is a hybrid of physical stores and online-ordering channels, and each company is coming at the goal from a different starting point. F. Amazon is the dominant player in online sales, and is particularly strong among affluent consumers in major cities. It is now experimenting with physical bookstores and groceries as it looks to broaden its reach. Walmart has thousands of stores that sell hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of goods. It is particularly strong in suburban and rural areas and among low- and middle-income consumers, but it's playing catch-up with online sales and affluent urbanites. G. Why are these two mega-retailers both trying to sell me shirts? The short answer is because they both want to sell everything. More specifically, Bonobos is known as an innovator in exactly this type of hybrid of online and physical store sales. Its website and online customer service are excellent, and it operates stores in major cities where you can try on garments and order items to be shipped directly. Because all the actual inventory is centralized, the stores themselves can occupy minimal square footage. So the acquisition may help Walmart build expertise in the very areas where it is trying to gain on Amazon. You can look at the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods through the same lens. The grocery business has a whole different set of challenges from the types of goods that Amazon has specialized in; you can't store a steak or a banana the way you do books or toys. And people want to be able to make purchases and take them home on the spur of the moment. H. Just as Walmart is using Bonobos to get access to higher-end consumers and a more technologically savvy way of selling clothes, Amazon is using Whole Foods to get the expertise and physical presence it takes to sell fresh foods. But bigger dimensions of the modern economy also come into play. I. The apparel business has long been a highly competitive industry in which countless players could find a niche (商机). Any insight that one shirt-maker developed could be rapidly copied by others, and consumer prices reflected the retailer's real estate costs and branding approach as much as anything. That helps explain why there are thousands of options worldwide for someone who wants a decent-quality men's shirt. In that world, any shirt-maker that tried to get too big rapidly faced diminishing returns. It would have to pay more and more to lease the real estate for far-flung stores, and would have to outbid competitors to hire all the experienced shirt-makers. The expansion wouldn't offer any meaningful cost savings and would entail a lot more headaches trying to manage it all. J. But more and more businesses in the modern economy, rather than reflecting those diminishing returns to scale, show positive returns to scale: The biggest companies have a huge advantage over smaller players. That tends to tilt markets toward a handful of players or even a monopoly, rather than an even playing field with countless competitors. K. The most extreme example of this would be the software business, where a company can invest bottomless sums in a piece of software, but then sell it to each additional customer for practically nothing. The apparel industry isn't that extreme—the price of making a shirt is still linked to the cost of fabric and the workers to do the stitching—but it is moving in that direction. And that helps explain why Walmart and Amazon are so eager to put a shirt on my back. L. Already, retailers need to figure out how to manage sophisticated supply chains connecting Southeast Asia with stores in big American cities so that they rarely run out of product. They need mobile apps and websites that offer a seamless user experience so that nothing stands between a would-be purchaser and an order. Larger companies that are good at supply chain management and technology can spread those more-or-less fixed costs around more total sales, enabling them to keep prices lower than a niche player and entrench their advantage. M. These positive returns to scale could become even more pronounced. Perhaps in the future, rather than manufacture a bunch of shirts in Indonesia and Malaysia and ship them to the United States to be sold one at a time to urban office workers, a company will have a robot manufacture shirts to my specifications somewhere nearby. N. If that's the future of clothing, and quite a few companies are working on just that, apparel will become a landscape of high fixed costs and enormous returns to scale. The handful of companies with the very best shirt-making robots will win the market, and any company that can't afford to develop shirt-making robots, or isn't very good at it, might find itself left in the cold.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled How to Avoid Staying up Too Late? You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1. 1．现在许多学生养成了熬夜的习惯； 2．熬夜坏处多，如何改掉这一坏习； 3．我的观点。

The U. K.'s rapid shift to renewable energy, which has helped it cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 44% in the past 30 years, is lauded by many in the industry. But the country's experiences offer a reminder that decarbonizing (脱碳) an economy must be carefully managed. U.K. natural-gas prices have risen more than fivefold over the past year, which is slightly lower than the price in the Netherlands—the benchmark for continental Europe—but more than four times the price in the U.S. But the U.K. is more vulnerable than most to gas shortages, some analysts say. High reliance on renewable energy, mainly wind, and low coal use has left the country heavily dependent on imported natural gas for electricity generation when the wind doesn't blow. A jump in energy prices leaves the U.K. a victim of its own progress on lowering emissions. Lack of storage follows a decision back in 2013 by the U.K. government not to subsidize loss-making gas-storage facilities. Output from the North Sea gas fields was declining, leaving the country more dependent on imports, at the same time as a transition from coal-powered electricity to renewables was under way. At a meeting with the then climate-change minister, energy-company lobbyists had urged the government to subsidize storage. After a consultation, the government said no. By 2020, the U.K. relied on wind for 24% of its power-generation mix but didn't have a backup plan when it fell to 2% of supplies in late summer this year. Meanwhile, a series of local mishaps (小事故) curtailed other sources of energy. A fire disrupted the flow of electricity through a subsea electricity cable linking the U. K. and France. Some nuclear plants in Britain were offline while undergoing maintenance. In late summer, it was less windy than normal, resulting in turbines (涡轮机) sitting idle. Britain's gas policy is based on faith that the market would produce a robust supply. But the government has intervened, imposing a moratorium (暂停) on fracking projects and capping domestic energy prices to protect consumers from higher bills. A British government spokeswoman said domestic storage had little bearing on the price of gas and that the U.K. 'benefits from access to gas reserves in British territorial waters and secure sources from reliable import partners.' As a result, the country doesn't have to rely on natural gas storage, the government added. British customers will pay more for energy in October after the market regulator announced it would increase a price cap on gas and electricity prices. Some smaller consumer-energy providers have gone bust after failing to hedge against rising wholesale prices. 'The energy system is not a light switch,' said Daniel Yergin, an author and vice chairman of consulting firm IHS Markit. 'When you go too fast, you hit the bumps.'

The Sun Is Also a Star is a truly lovely story of love, romance, fate, and destiny. Natasha is a Jamaican-born immigrant living 27 in America, not by choice exactly. Her parents brought her over and created the situation she 28 to be out of. Daniel is an American born of Korean immigrants. He believes in true love, fate, and all that other nonsense that Natasha 29 through scientific reasoning. Daniel and Natasha meet by 30 on the streets of New York on the day that she is to be 31 . She doesn't tell him that but does allow him to keep her company while he tries to get her to fall in love with him over the course of the day. Natasha is me. I found her so similar to myself. She's scientifically-minded, practical, somewhat cynical, and always 32 . Her obsession with the universe through a scientific lens is infectious and I 33 Daniel seeing that too. Daniel is charming and passionate and has a way with words that even 34 Natasha's tough outer shell. By the end of the book I fell in love with both of them. I used to find romance stories to always be cheap or laughable. I think now I can see the value in escaping into a story of pure optimism. I got 35 in The Sun Is Also a Star and finished it cover to cover in a weekend. I couldn't wait to get to what I hoped would be a happy ending. It's nice every once in a while to give in to magic. It doesn't have to be a hard fantasy novel with actual spells, it can be the magic found between two people who just have that special something. That 36 that causes them to react and spark when they're near each other. A. adore B. appraise C. assaults D. chemistry E. coincidence F. cracks G. deported H. dismisses I. illegally J. lost K. perpetually L. prescribed M. shrewd N. skeptical O. strives

A Pioneering Woman of Science Re-emerges after 300 Years A. Maria Sibylla Merian, like many European women of the 17th century, stayed busy managing a household and rearing children. But on top of that, Merian, a German-born woman who lived in the Netherlands, also managed a successful career as an artist, botanist, naturalist and entomologist (昆虫学家). B. 'She was a scientist on the level with a lot of people we spend a lot of time talking about,' said Kay Etheridge, a biologist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania who has been studying the scientific history of Merian's work. 'She didn't do as much to change biology as Charles Darwin, but she was significant.' C. At a time when natural history was a valuable tool for discovery, Merian discovered facts about plants and insects that were not previously known. Her observations helped dismiss the popular belief that insects spontaneously emerged from mud. The knowledge she collected over decades didn't just satisfy those curious about nature, but also provided valuable insights into medicine and science. She was the first to bring together insects and their habitats, including food they ate, into a single ecological composition. D. After years of pleasing a fascinated audience across Europe with books of detailed descriptions and life-size paintings of familiar insects, in 1699 she sailed with her daughter nearly 5,000 miles from the Netherlands to South America to study insects in the jungles of what is now known as Suriname. She was 52 years old. The result was her masterpiece, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. E. In her work, she revealed a side of nature so exotic, dramatic and valuable to Europeans of the time that she received much acclaim. But a century later, her findings came under scientific criticism. Shoddy (粗糙的) reproductions of her work along with setbacks to women's roles in 18th-and 19th-century Europe resulted in her efforts being largely forgotten. 'It was kind of stunning when she sort of dropped off into oblivion (遗忘),' said Dr. Etheridge. 'Victorians started putting women in a box, and they're still trying to crawl out of it.' F. Today, the pioneering woman of the sciences has re-emerged. In recent years, feminists, historians and artists have all praised Merian's tenacity (坚韧), talent and inspirational artistic compositions. And now biologists like Dr. Etheridge are digging into the scientific texts that accompanied her art. Three hundred years after her death, Merian will be celebrated at an international symposium in Amsterdam this June. G. And last month, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium was republished. It contains 60 plates (插图) and original descriptions, along with stories about Merian's life and updated scientific descriptions. Before writing Metamorphosis, Merian spent decades documenting European plants and insects that she published in a series of books. She began in her 20s, making textless, decorative paintings of flowers with insects. 'Then she got really serious,' Dr. Etheridge said. Merian started raising insects at home, mostly butterflies and caterpillars. 'She would sit up all night until they came out of the pupa (蛹) so she could draw them,' she said. H. The results of her decades' worth of careful observations were detailed paintings and descriptions of European insects, followed by unconventional visuals and stories of insects and animals from a land that most at the time could only imagine. It's possible Merian used a magnifying glass to capture the detail of the split tongues of sphinx moths (斯芬克斯飞蛾) depicted in the painting. She wrote that the two tongues combine to form one tube for drinking nectar (花蜜). Some criticized this detail later, saying there was just one tongue, but Merian wasn't wrong. She may have observed the adult moth just as it emerged from its pupa. For a brief moment during that stage of its life cycle, the tongue consists of two tiny half-tubes before merging into one. I. It may not have been ladylike to depict a giant spider devouring a hummingbird, but when Merian did it at the turn of the 18th century, surprisingly, nobody objected. Dr. Etheridge called it revolutionary. The image, which also contained novel descriptions of ants, fascinated a European audience that was more concerned with the exotic story unfolding before them than the gender of the person who painted it. J. 'All of these things shook up their nice, neat little view,' Dr. Etheridge said. But later, people of the Victorian era thought differently. Her work had been reproduced, sometimes incorrectly. A few observations were deemed impossible. 'She'd been called a silly woman for saying that a spider could eat a bird,' Dr. Etheridge said. But Henry Walter Bates, a friend of Charles Darwin, observed it and put it in book in 1863, proving Merian was correct. K. In the same plate, Merian depicted and described leaf-cutter ants for the first time. 'In America there are large ants which can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night,' she wrote in the description. Merian noted how the ants took the leaves below ground to their young. And she wouldn't have known this at the time, but the ants use the leaves to farm fungi (功类) underground to feed their developing babies. L. Merian was correct about the giant bird-eating spiders, ants building bridges with their bodies and other details. But in the same drawing, she incorrectly lumped together army and leaf-cutter ants. And instead of showing just the typical pair of eggs in a hummingbird nest, she painted four. She made other mistakes in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium as well: not every caterpillar and butterfly matched. M. Perhaps one explanation for her mistakes is that she cut short her Suriname trip after getting sick, and completed the book at home in Amsterdam. And errors are common among some of history's most-celebrated scientific minds, too. 'These errors no more invalidate Ms. Merian's work than do well-known misconceptions published by Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton,' Dr. Etheridge wrote in a paper that argued that too many have wrongly focused on the mistakes of her work. N. Merian's paintings inspired artists and ecologists. In an 1801 drawing from his book, General Zoology Amphibia, George Shaw, an English botanist and zoologist, credited Merian for describing a frog in the account of her South American expedition, and named the young tree frog after her in his portrayal of it. It wouldn't be fair to give Merian all the credit. She received assistance naming plants, making sketches and referencing the work of others. Her daughters helped her color her drawings. O. Merian also made note of the help she received from the natives of Suriname, as well as slaves or servants that assisted her. In some instances she wrote moving passages that included her helpers in descriptions. As she wrote in her description of the peacock flower, 'The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.' P. Londa Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, called this passage rather astonishing. It's particularly striking centuries later when these issues are still prominent in public discussions about social justice and women's rights. 'She was ahead of her time,' Dr. Etheridge said.

Everyone remembers the whitewashing scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But how many recall the scene that precedes it? Having escaped from Aunt Polly, Tom is teaching himself to whistle when he spies a 'newcomer' in his village—a newcomer with 'a citified air.' They quarrel and wrestle in the dirt. Tom wins the battle but returns home late and is thus commanded to whitewash the famous fence. After this incident, the reader's sympathies are meant to lie with Tom. But imagine how a boy like Tom Sawyer would be regarded today. As far as I can tell, that fight is not just 'inappropriate behavior,' to use current educational terminology (术语), but is also one of the many symptoms of 'oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) ,' a condition that Tom manifests throughout the book. And Tom is not merely ODD: He clearly has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well, judging by his inability to concentrate in school. In fact, Tom manifests many disturbing behaviors. He blames his half-brother for his poor decisions, demonstrating an inability to take responsibility for his actions. He provokes his peers, often using aggression. He deliberately ignores rules and demonstrates defiance toward adults. He is frequently dishonest, at one point even pretending to be dead. Worst of all, he skips school—a behavior that might, in our time, lead him to be diagnosed with conduct disorder. I am not being entirely sarcastic here: I have reread 'Tom Sawyer' several times in recent years, precisely because Twain draws such fascinating portraits of children whose behavior is familiar, even if we now describe it differently. As a mother of boys, I find this weirdly reassuring: Although ADHD and ODD are often dismissed as recently 'invented' disorders, they describe personality types and traits that have always existed. A certain kind of boy has always had trouble paying attention in school. But if the behavior or actions of the children and the parents are familiar, the society surrounding them is not. Tom Sawyer turns out fine in the end. In 19th-century Missouri, there were still many opportunities for impulsive kids who were bored and fidgety (坐立不安的) in school: The very qualities that made him so tiresome—curiosity, hyperactivity, recklessness—are precisely the ones that get him the girl, win him the treasure and make him a hero. Nothing like that is available to children who don't fit in today. Instead of striking out into the wilderness, they get sent to psychologists and prescribed medication—if they are lucky enough to have parents who can afford that sort of thing. Every effort will be made to help them pay attention, listen to the teacher, stop picking fights in the playground. Nowadays, there aren't any other options.

Just as humans have their own individual personalities, new research in the Journal of Comparative Psychology shows that elephants have personalities, too. Moreover, an elephant's personality may play an important role in how well that elephant can solve novel problems. The article was written by Lisa Barrett and Sarah Benson-Amram in the University of Wyoming's Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab. The authors of the paper tested 15 Asian elephants and three African savanna (稀树草原) elephants in three zoos across the country. Previous work demonstrated that Asian elephants can use water as a tool to solve a novel problem—and reach a tasty marshmallow reward—in what's called the floating object task. This time, the authors designed new novel tasks, as well as personality tests, for the elephants. 'We took a comprehensive approach by using three different problem-solving tasks and three types of personality assessments to determine if individual personality played a role in which elephants were able to solve these tasks,' Barrett says. Those assessments demonstrated that the surveys and observations were the most reliable methods to get at elephant personality. Overall, Barrett and Benson-Amram measured traits such as active, affectionate, aggressive, defiant, excitable, mischievous, shy and sociable, which have been studied in other animals as well. 'We were eager to see if the personality traits we uncovered through the surveys and observations predicted success on novel problem-solving tasks,' Benson-Amram says. The three problem-solving tasks included the trap tube task, which is a common test used with primates (灵长目动物) but which had never been presented outside of primates before. Barrett and Benson-Amram found that elephants did learn to solve two out of the three tasks faster over time, even though the elephants only received three trials on each task. Traits including aggressiveness and activity were important predictors of problem-solving overall, but the personality traits measured did not significantly predict learning ability. This study makes connections between two sources of individual variation, personality and cognition, in threatened species. One reason it is important to examine problem-solving in elephants is that they are faced with new problems that they need to solve regularly in the wild. For example, if certain traits enable elephants to overcome novel problems, elephants may be more likely to invade farmland and contribute to human-elephant conflict. With more research, managers can predict which elephants might overcome or habituate to deterrents (威慑力量), and managers can devote more resources to tracking elephants. The authors call for more work on different forms of personality assessments to determine which methods would be best for management of zoo and wild elephants. 'Research with free-ranging elephants can extend this study to determine which personality traits are most important for solving novel problems that elephants experience in the wild,' says Barrett.

The Different Engine: Rewiring the Brain A. It's a question that's bothered cultural critics for decades: while we know more than ever, are we getting dumber as a result of the increasing amount of technology at our disposal? Reading historical debates, and hearing of the attention paid to them by a thoughtful person, certainly makes one wonder. Speaking in the 1820s of the mechanical Difference Engine he had devised for computing polynomial functions, Charles Babbage, the father of the programmable computer, told the House of Commons: B. 'On two occasions I have been asked by Members of Parliament, Tray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.' C. Sharp-tongued eloquence—in Latin and Greek as well as their mother tongue—was common fare among Georgians and Victorians lucky enough to have had at least a dozen years of schooling. One wonders how the founders of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube might respond to similarly stale queries tossed at them during congressional testimony. D. The current debate about intelligence, sparked by Nicholas Carr's recent and eminently readable 'The Shallows,' asks what is the Internet doing to our brains? Like Susan Jacoby's 'The Age of American Unreason' and Adam Winer's 'How Dumb Are You?' earlier in the decade, Mr. Carr taps into the sense of despair among American intellectuals about the country's poor educational showing when compared with other countries. E. In reading, mathematics and science, American 15-year-olds suffer in the lower half of the OECD rankings for the 30 wealthiest countries. Other English-speaking nations such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and even Britain are all in the upper quartile (四分之一). South Korea and Japan are in the top decile (十分之一). F. Such indisputable facts are rightly a concern for policy-makers and parents throughout the United States. But the reasons for the crushing failure of American education—especially at middle- and high-school levels—are well understood, and the corrective measures widely accepted. Implementing them, however, remains as politically tricky as ever. G. But it is not just the disappointment of seeing a nation's youth so poorly served. Even more so, an unspoken nostalgic mood for an age when book-learning was the noblest of pursuits has animated the debate about the dumbing down of America. Tellingly, the sharpest critics are always middle-aged or older. H. Among other things, Ms. Jacoby blames a rising tide of anti-intellectualism. She notes that the reading of books, newspapers and magazines has declined across the board. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing whatsoever (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004—a period that oversaw the rise of personal computers, the Internet and video games. She sighs that the way electronic media, with their demand for spectacle and conciseness, have shortened our attention spans. Sound bites by presidential candidates, she points out, dropped from 42 seconds in 1968 to less than eight seconds by 2000. I. But things are rarely as they seem. For one thing, e-books barely existed a decade ago, but have exploded in popularity since Amazon introduced its Kindle a few short years back, and a host of rivals rushed in with copycat versions. For many readers, the ability to interact with e-books digitally—searching them automatically, inserting digital bookmarks, zooming in on the small type—has rendered hardcovers and paperbacks outdated. So much so, e-books are now outselling hardcovers. Perhaps we are witnessing not a decline in book reading but a renaissance. The irony is that had computers been invented before books, we would now be wringing our hands over the loss of multi-media, multi-tasking, computer-gaming skills as our children wasted their time by burying their noses in single-topic paper books. J. To the specific question that Mr. Carr asks about what the Internet is doing to our brains, the simple answer is that it is making us think and behave differently. Of that, there is no doubt. But that does not mean we are getting dumber in the process. What makes people intelligent is their ability to learn and reason--in short, to adapt and thrive within their environment. That fundamental capacity has not changed in thousands of years, and is unlikely to do so because some new technology comes along, whether television, mobile phones or the Internet. K. Adaptation to one's changing surroundings is a different matter. Every new medium introduced since the invention of the printing press has molded our minds in different ways. It would be alarming if it didn't. Today, confronted with the popularity of the Internet, we need a whole new set of skills to navigate the information-loaded environment we inhabit. In other words, each new set of skills we learn and memories we create builds on our existing mental capacities without changing them in any fundamental way. L. Still, the Jeremiahs have a point. Their concern is that prolonged use of the Internet—with its buffet of mouthwatering delicacies of information—is producing a generation of magpie minds, as users hop from one small bright ornament to another, rarely focusing long enough on any one topic to comprehend it thoroughly. According to this view of the brain, the lack of 'deep thinking' lies at the heart of the present generation's inability to sweat the hard stuff. M. The problem, says Mr. Carr, is that most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours a day online—and sometimes much more. During that time, we tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over again. As we go through these motions, the net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory (体觉的) and auditory cortices (皮层). There is evidence, the author affirms, that the Internet is damaging people's long-term memory consolidation that he singles out as the true basis of intelligence. N. As reasonable as it may sound, such an explanation is markedly different from anything your correspondent has experienced. Perhaps that's because he, like so many other computer users, spends far less time online than social critics imagine. According to Nielsen, a media research company, Americans with access to the Internet devote around 26 hours a month to online activity—in other words, just 5% of their waking hours. Even then, half that time is taken up with proactive, even creative, activities—social networking, playing games, e-mailing, and instant messaging. Pecking at the despised low-hanging fruit found on Google and other search engines accounts for a tiny 3.5% of the average user's online time.

延安位于陕西省北部，地处黄河中游，是中国革命的圣地。毛泽东等老一辈革命家曾在这里生活战斗了十三个春秋，领导了抗日战争和解放战争，培育了延安精神，为中国革命做出了巨大贡献。延安的革命旧址全国数量最大、分布最广、级别最高。延安是全国爱国主义、革命传统和延安精神教育基地。延安有9个革命纪念馆，珍藏着中共中央和老一辈革命家在延安时期留存下来的大量重要物品，因此享有“中国革命博物馆城”的美誉。

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on how to balance work and leisure. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

A rainbow is a multi-colored, arc-shaped phenomenon that can appear in the sky. The colors of a rainbow are produced by the reflection and 27 of light through water droplets (小滴) present in the atmosphere. An observer may 28 a rainbow to be located either near or far away, but this phenomenon is not actually located at any specific spot. Instead, the appearance of a rainbow depends entirely upon the position of the observer in 29 to the direction of light. In essence, a rainbow is an 30 illusion. Rainbows present a 31 made up of seven colors in a specific order. In fact, school children in many English-speaking countries are taught to remember the name 'Roy G. Biv' as an aid for remembering the colors of a rainbow and their order. 'Roy G. Biv' 32 for: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The outer edge of the rainbow arc is red, while the inner edge is violet. A rainbow is formed when light (generally sunlight) passes through water droplets 33 in the atmosphere. The light waves change direction as they pass through the water droplets, resulting in two processes: reflection and refraction (折射). When light reflects off a water droplet, it simply 34 back in the opposite direction from where it 35 . When light refracts, it takes a different direction. Some individuals refer to refracted light as 'bent light waves.' A rainbow is formed because white light enters the water droplet, where it bends in several different directions. When these bent light waves reach the other side of the water droplet, they reflect back out of the droplet instead of 36 passing through the water. Since the white light is separated inside of the water, the refracted light appears as separate colors to the human eye. A. bounces B. completely C. dispersion D. eccentric E. hanging F. optical G. originates H. perceive I. permeates J. ponder K. preceding L. recklessly M. relation N. spectrum O. stands

The Doctor Will Skype You Now [A].Fazila is a young woman that has been dealing with eczema (湿疹), a common skin condition, for the past five years, but never got it treated. The nearest hospital is an hour away, by boat and bus, and her skin condition didnt seem serious enough to make the trek, so she ignored it—until a new technology brought the doctor to her. Fazila lives on one of the remote river islands in northern Bangladesh. These islands are low-lying, temporary sand islands that are continuously formed and destroyed through sand buildup and erosion. They are home to over six million people, who face repeated displacement from flooding and erosion—which maybe getting worse because of climate change —and a range of health risks, including poor nutrition, malaria (疟疾) and other water-bome diseases. [B].The most dangerous thing for these remote island dwellers island erosion. The second is lack of access to medical supplies and doctors. There are no doctors within miles, and while childmortality and maternal death have gone down in the rest of the country, this is not the case for the islands. The medical situation is so bad that it really takes away from the quality oftheir life. Yet for many island inhabitants -some of Bangladeshs poorest -paying for health care is a costly ordeal. Victims of erosion lose their houses, agricultural land and jobs as farmers, fishermen and day laborers. Though government hospitals are free, many people hesitate to go, citing long commutes, endless lines and questionable diagnoses. For conveniences sake, one-third of rural households visit unqualified village doctors, who rely on unscientific methods of treatment, according to a 2016 study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Heath Action. [C].On the islands, theres even a colloquial (口头的) expression for the idea of making medical care your lowest priority：Its known as"rog pushai rakha"in Bengali，which roughly translates to"stockpiling their diseases"-waiting to seek medical attention until a condition becomes extremely serious.Now，a new virtual medical service called Teledaktar（TD）is trying to make heath care more easily accessible.Every week，TDs medical operators travel to the islands by boat，carrying a laptop，a portable printer for prescriptions and tools to run basic medical screenings such as blood pressure，blood sugar，body temperature and weight. They choose an area of the island with the best Internet reception and setup a makeshift（临凑合的）medical center which consists of plastic stools and small tables borrowed from the localshomes，a tent in case of rain and a sheet that is strung up to give the patients privacy during their session. [D].Launched in October 2018，TD has eight centers in towns and villages across ruralBangladesh and on three islands.It is funded by a nonprofit organization founded by Bangladeshi entrepreneurs，finance and technology professionals.Inside the center，the laptop screen lights up to reveal Dr.Tina Mustahid，TDs head physician，live-streamed（网络直播）from the capital city of Dhaka for free remote medical consultations.Affectionately called Doctor Apa—“older sister"in Bengali—by her patients，she is one of three volunteer doctors at TD. [E]."I diagnose them through conversation，"says Dr.Mustahid."Sometimes its really obvious things that local doctors dont have the patience to talk through with their patients.For example，a common complaint mothers come in with is that their children refuse to eat their meals.The mothers are concermed they are dealing with indigestion，but its because they are feeding the children packaged chips which are cheap and convenient. I tell them it is ruining their appetite and ask them to cut back on unhealthy snacks."Dr. Mustahid says building awareness about health and nutrition is important for island patients who are cut off from mainland resources. [F].Even off the islands, Bangladesh faces a critical deficit of health services. The country has half the doctors-per-person ratio recommended by the World Health Organization: roughly one doctor per 2,000 people, instead of one doctor per 1,000 people. And of those physicians, many are concentrated in cities: 70% of the countrys population live in rural areas, yet less than 20% of health workers practice there. Over 70% of TDs 3,000 patients are female, in part because many are not comfortable speaking with local doctors who tend to be male. The rural women are mostly not literate or confident enough to travel on their own to the nearest town to visit medical facilities. Many have spent their entire lives rebuilding their homes when the islands flood.Early marriage and young motherhood，which are prevalent in these parts of Bangladesh，also contribute to the early onset of health problems. [G].For most TD patients on the islands，Dr.Mustahid is the first big-city doctor that theyve ever consulted.TD doctors are not meant to treat serious illnesses or conditions that require a doctor to be physically present，such as pregnancy.But they can write prescriptions，diagnose common ailments-including digestive issues，joint pain，skin diseases，fever and the common cold-and refer patients to doctors at local hospitals.The visit is also an opportunity for the patients，especially women to air their concerns about aging，motherhood and reproductive health according to Dr.Mustahid.The doctors also offer health，dietary and lifestyle advice where necessary，including insight on everything from recognizing postnatal（产后的）depression to daily exercise.Dr.Mustahid regularly recommends her patients to take a daily thirty-minute morning walk before the sun gets too intense. [H].After a few sessions about general health issues Fazila finally opened up about something else that was bothering her: persistent skin condition. It can get expensive to travel to the doctor, so usually the women living on the islands describe their illness to their husbands.The husbands then go to the pharmacy, tell them what is the issue and return home with some random medicines. Nothing worked for Fazila until she started seeing Doctor Apa. [I].Other nonprofits are also starting to provide health services in the islands. A local non-governmental organization called Friendship operates floating boat hospitals that providehealth services to islands all over Bangladesh, docking at each for two months at a time. Friendship also runs satellite clinics in which one doctor and one clinic aide who are residents of the community disperse health and hygiene information. [J]. TD still has a few major challenges. Many patients complain the medicine they are prescribed are sometimes unaffordable, but the government isnt doing enough for them.Patients often ask why the medicine isnt free along with the consultations from the doctors.The originations are linked to local pharmacies and offer discounts to the patients and make sure to prescribe the most cost-effective brands, but still, many residents cant afford even that. [K].Nevertheless, TDs remote consultations seem to be popular: Of 3,000 patients at least 200 have returned for follow-ups, according to TD. The reason, explains one resident might be the simple gesture of treating the island inhabitants with respect. "Doctor Apa is patient,"he says. "At government hospitals, the doctors treat us very badly, but here they listen to us, I can repeat myself many times and no one gets annoyed."

南京长江大桥是长江上首座由中国设计、采用国产材料建造的铁路、公路两用桥，上层的4车道公路桥长4589米，下层的双轨道铁路桥长6772米。铁路桥连接原来的天津——浦口和上海——南京两条铁路线，使火车过江从过去一个半小时缩短为现在的2分钟。大桥是南北交通的重要枢纽，也是南京的著名景点之一。南京长江大桥的建成标志着中国桥梁建设的一个飞跃，大大方便了长江两岸的物资交流和人员往来，对促进经济发展和改善人民生活起到了巨大作用。_____Part IV Translation（30 minutes）Directions：For this part，you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English.You should write your answer on Answer Sheet 2.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on Why should we trust each other at work? You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

Tiny pieces of gold could be used in the fight against cancer, new research has suggested. Scientists at Edinburgh University have just completed a study which shows the 27 metal increased the effectiveness of drugs used to treat lung cancer cells. Minute fragments, known as gold nanoparticles (纳米粒子), were 28 in a chemical device by the research team. While this has not yet been tested on humans, it is hoped such a device could one day be used to reduce side effects of current chemotherapy treatments by 29 targeting diseased cells without damaging healthy tissue. Gold is a safe chemical element and has the ability to 30 chemical reactions. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh discovered properties of the metal that allow these catalytic abilities to be accessed in living things without any side effects. The device was shown to be effective after being 31 in the brain of a zebrafish, suggesting it can be used in living animals. The study was carried out in 32 with researchers at the University of Zaragoza's Institute of Nanoscience of Aragon in Spain, with funding coming from Cancer Research UK (CRUK). Dr. Asier, from the University of Edinburgh's CRUK Edinburgh Centre, said: 'We have discovered new 33 of gold that were previously unknown and our findings suggest that the metal could be used to 34 drugs inside turnouts very safely. There is still work to do before we can use this on 35 , but this study is a step forward. We hope that a similar device in humans could one day be implanted by surgeons to activate chemotherapy directly in tumours and reduce harmful effects to healthy organs.' The next steps will be to see if this method is 36 to use in people, what its long- and short-term side effects are, and if it's a better way to treat some cancers. A. accelerate B. cautiously C. collaboration D. elaboration E. encased F. implanted G. patients H. precious I. precisely J. previous K. properties L. release M. relieve N. safe O. unsafe