A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding A. From the time they met in kindergarten until they were 15, Robin Shreeves and her friend Penny were inseparable. They rode bikes, played kickball in the street, swam all summer long and listened to music on the stereo. They told each other secrets like which boys they thought were cute, as best friends always do. B. Today, Ms. Shreeves, of suburban Philadelphia, is the mother of two boys. Her 10-year-old has a best friend. In fact, he is the son of Ms. Shreeves's own friend, Penny. But Ms. Shreeves's younger son, 8, does not. His favorite playmate is a boy who was in his preschool class, but Ms. Shreeves says that the two don't get together very often because scheduling play dates can be complicated; they usually have to be planned a week or more in advance. 'He'll say, 'I wish I had someone I can always call,'' Ms. Shreeves said. C. One might be tempted to feel some sympathy for the younger son. After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood 'best friend' has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture—not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults. D. But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend? E. Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans aged 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond—the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who attract each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school—signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints at exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques (帮派) and bullying. F. 'I think it is kids' preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults—teachers and counselors—we try to encourage them not to do that,' said Christine Laycob, the director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. 'We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not to be so possessive about friends.' 'Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,' she continued. 'We say he doesn't need a best friend.' G. For many child-rearing experts, the ideal situation might well be that of Matthew and Margaret Guest, 12-year-old twins in suburban Atlanta, who almost always socialize in a pack. One typical Friday afternoon, about 10 boys and girls filled the Guest family backyard. Kids were jumping on the trampoline (蹦床), shooting baskets and playing hide-and-seek. Neither Margaret nor Matthew has ever had a best friend. 'I just really don't have one person I like more than others,' Margaret said. 'Most people have lots of friends.' Matthew said he considers 12 boys to be his good friends and he sees most of them 'pretty much every weekend.' Their mother, Laura Guest, said their school tries to prevent bullying through workshops and posters. And extracurricular activities keep her children group-oriented—Margaret is on the swim team and does gymnastics; Matthew plays football and baseball. H. As the calendar moves into summer, efforts to manage friendships don't stop with the closing of school. In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N. Y., has started employing 'friendship coaches' to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven't yet gotten to know. 'I don't think it's particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,' said Jay Jacobs, the camp's director. 'If something goes wrong, it can be devastating. It also limits a child's ability to explore other options in the world.' I. But such an attitude worries some psychologists who fear that children will be denied the strong emotional support and security that comes with intimate friendships. 'Do we want to encourage kids to have all sorts of superficial relationships? Is that how we really want to rear our children?' asked Brett Laursen, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University whose specialty is peer relationships. 'Imagine the implication for romantic relationships. We want children to get good at leading close relationships, not superficial ones.' Many psychologists believe that close childhood friendships not only increase a child's self-esteem and confidence, but also help children develop the skills for healthy adult relationships—everything from empathy, the ability to listen and console, to the process of arguing and making up. If children's friendships are designed and cleaned by adults, the argument goes. How is a child to prepare emotionally for both the affection and rejection likely to come later in life? J. 'No one can teach you what a great friend is, what a fair-weather friend is, what a betraying friend is except to have a great friend, a fair-weather friend or a betraying friend,' said Michael Thompson, a psychologist who is an author of the book Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children. 'When a teacher is trying to tone down a best-friend culture, I would like to know why,' Dr. Thompson said. 'Is it causing misery for the class? Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can't bear the thought that she doesn't have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain. If you're intervening in the lives of kids who are just experiencing normal social pain, you shouldn't be.' K. Schools insist they don't intend to break up close friendships but rather to encourage courtesy, respect and kindness to all. 'I don't see schools really in the business of trying to prevent friendships as far as they are trying to give students an opportunity to interact socially with other students in a variety of different ways,' said Patti Kinney, who was a teacher and a principal in an Oregon middle school for 33 years and is now an official at the National Association of Secondary School Principals. L. Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. 'When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,' said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. 'However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.'

The Ebro Delta, in Spain, famous as a battleground during the Spanish Civil War, is now the setting for a different contest, one that is pitting rice farmers against two enemies: the rice-eating giant apple snail, and rising sea levels. What happens here will have a bearing on the future of European rice production and the overall health of southern European wetlands. Located on the Mediterranean just two hours south of Barcelona, the Ebro Delta produces 120 million kilograms of rice a year, making it one of the continent's most important rice-growing areas. As the sea creeps into these fresh-water marshes, however, rising salinity (盐分) is hampering rice production. At the same time, this sea-water also kills off the greedy giant apple snail, an introduced pest that feeds on young rice plants. The most promising strategy has become to harness one foe against the other. The battle is currently being waged on land, in greenhouses at the University of Barcelona. Scientists working under the banner 'Project Neurice' are seeking varieties of rice that can withstand the increasing salinity without losing the absorbency that makes European rice ideal for traditional Spanish and Italian dishes. 'The project has two sides,' says Xavier Serrat, Neurice project manager and researcher at the University of Barcelona, 'the short-term fight against the snail, and a mid-to long-term fight against climate change. But the snail has given the project greater urgency.' Originally from South America, the snails were accidentally introduced into the Ebro Delta by Global Aquatic Technologies, a company that raised the snails for fresh-water aquariums (水族馆), but failed to prevent their escape. For now, the giant apple snail's presence in Europe is limited to the Ebro Delta. But the snail continues its march to new territory, says Serrat. 'The question is not whether it will reach other rice-growing areas of Europe, but when.' Over the next year and a half investigators will test the various strains of salt-tolerant rice they've bred. In 2018, farmers will plant the varieties with the most promise in the Ebro Delta and Europe's other two main rice-growing regions—along the Po in Italy, and France's Rhône. A season in the field will help determine which, if any, of the varieties are ready for commercialization. As an EU-funded effort, the search for salt-tolerant varieties of rice is taking place in all three countries. Each team is crossbreeding a local European short-grain rice with a long-grain Asian variety that carries the salt-resistant gene. The scientists are breeding successive generations to arrive at varieties that incorporate salt tolerance but retain about 97 percent of the European rice genome (基因组).

Peer Pressure Has a Positive Side A. Parents of teenagers often view their children's friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to push its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult. B. In a 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, divided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on. C. Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. 'The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,' Steinberg and Gardner concluded. D. Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education. E. In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI (磁共振) to investigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain. They scanned the brains of 40 teens and adults who were playing a virtual driving game designed to test whether players would brake at a yellow light or speed on through the crossroad. F. The brains of teenagers, but not adults, showed greater activity in two regions associated with rewards when they were being observed by same-age peers than when alone. In other words, rewards are more intense for teens when they are with peers, which motivates them to pursue higher-risk experiences that might bring a big payoff (such as the thrill of just making the light before it turns red). But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have its advantages. In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleagues used a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate how the presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information. G. The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescents engaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negative outcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in solitude. 'What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively when their peers are present than when they're on their own,' Steinberg says. And this finding could have important implications for how we think about educating adolescents. H. Matthew D. Lieberman, a social cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the 2013 book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, suspects that the human brain is especially skillful at learning socially significant information. He points to a classic 2004 study in which psychologists at Dartmouth College and Harvard University used functional MRI to track brain activity in 17 young men as they listened to descriptions of people while concentrating on either socially relevant cues (for example, trying to form an impression of a person based on the description) or more socially neutral information (such as noting the order of details in the description). The descriptions were the same in each condition, but people could better remember these statements when given a social motivation. I. The study also found that when subjects thought about and later recalled descriptions in terms of their informational content, regions associated with factual memory, such as the medial temporal lobe, became active. But thinking about or remembering descriptions in terms of their social meaning activated the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—part of the brain's social network—even as traditional memory regions registered low levels of activity. More recently, as he reported in a 2012 review, Lieberman has discovered that this region may be part of a distinct network involved in socially motivated learning and memory. Such findings, he says, suggest that 'this network can be called on to process and store the kind of information taught in school—potentially giving students access to a range of untapped mental powers.' J. If humans are generally geared to recall details about one another, this pattern is probably even more powerful among teenagers who are very attentive to social details: who is in, who is out, who likes whom, who is mad at whom. Their desire for social drama is not—or not only—a way of distracting themselves from their schoolwork or of driving adults crazy. It is actually a neurological (神经的) sensitivity, initiated by hormonal changes. Evolutionarily speaking, people in this age group are at a stage in which they can prepare to find a mate and start their own family while separating from parents and striking out on their own. To do this successfully, their brain prompts them to think and even obsess about others. K. Yet our schools focus primarily on students as individual entities. What would happen if educators instead took advantage of the fact that teens are powerfully compelled to think in social terms? In Social, Lieberman lays out a number of ways to do so. History and English could be presented through the lens of the psychological drives of the people involved. One could therefore present Napoleon in terms of his desire to impress or Churchill in terms of his lonely gloom. Less inherently interpersonal subjects, such as math, could acquire a social aspect through team problem solving and peer tutoring. Research shows that when we absorb information in order to teach it to someone else, we learn it more accurately and deeply, perhaps in part because we are engaging our social cognition. L. And although anxious parents may not welcome the notion, educators could turn adolescent recklessness to academic ends. 'Risk taking in an educational context is a vital skill that enables progress and creativity,' wrote Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, in a review published last year. Yet, she noted, many young people are especially unwilling to take risks at school—afraid that one low test score or poor grade could cost them a spot at a selective university. We should assure such students that risk, and even peer pressure, can be a good thing—as long as it happens in the classroom and not the car.

A UK supermarket has become the first in the world to let shoppers pay for groceries using just the veins in their fingertips. Customers at the Costcutter store, at Brunel University in London, can now pay using their unique vein pattern to identify themselves. The firm behind the technology, Sthaler, has said it is in 'serious talks' with other major UK supermarkets to adopt hi-tech finger vein scanners at pay points across thousands of stores. It works by using infrared (红外线) to scan people's finger veins and then links this unique biometric (生物特征识别的) map to their bank cards. Customers' bank details are then stored with payment provider Worldpay, in the same way you can store your card details when shopping online. Shoppers can then turn up to the supermarket with nothing on them but their own hands and use it to make payments in just three seconds. It comes as previous studies have found fingerprint recognition, used widely on mobile phones, is vulnerable to being hacked and can be copied even from finger smears left on phone screens. But Sthaler claims vein technology is the most secure biometric identification method as it cannot be copied or stolen. Sthaler said dozens of students were already using the system and it expected 3,000 students out of 13,000 to have signed up by November. Vein scanners are also used as a way of accessing high-security UK police buildings and authorising internal trading at least one major British investment bank. The firm is also in discussions with nightclubs, gyms about using the technology to verify membership and even Premier League football clubs to check people have the right access to VIP hospitality areas. The technology uses an infrared light to create a detailed map of the vein pattern in your finger. It requires the person to be alive, meaning in the unlikely event a criminal hacks off someone's finger, it would not work. Sthaler said it takes just one minute to sign up to the system initially and, after that, it takes just seconds to place your finger in a scanner each time you reach the supermarket checkout. Simon Binns, commercial director of Sthaler, told the Daily Telegraph: 'This makes payments so much easier for customers. They don't need to carry cash or cards. They don't need to remember a pin number. You just bring yourself. This is the safest form of biometrics. There are no known incidences where this security has been breached. When you put your finger in the scanner it checks you are alive, it checks for a pulse, and it checks for haemoglobin (血红蛋白). Your vein pattern is secure because it is kept on a database in an encrypted form, as binary numbers. No card details are stored with the retailer or ourselves; it is held with Worldpay, in the same way it is when you buy online.'

rections: Nowadays more and more people keep learning new skills to adapt to a fast-changing world.you can make comments,use examples,or use your personal experiences to develop your essay. You will have 30 minutes to write the proposal. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.__________

As ever, it's not what you know, but who: the structure of social networks, both online and off, seems to confer leadership on those with the most friends. Chains of command can form without members of a group—including the leader—ever needing to know who's on top. It is often suggested that the most 27 individuals are also the best connected, but the idea has been difficult to test in a real-world 28 . Cedric Sueur of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium, and colleagues instead looked at how two species of macaque (猕猴)—Macaca tonkeana and Macaca mulatta—reach group decisions, such as when and where to move on. They found that the leadership hierarchy in both species 29 via a simple rule-of-thumb: individuals followed the lead of their closest affiliates. The individual with the most social connections, 30 , becomes the leader in a self-reinforcing hierarchy. There seem to be 31 to following the most socially connected individual. 'If others in the group happen upon a bit of information then maybe the socially connected leader will have better 32 to that as well,' says co-author Andrew King. That means the leader will 33 to make better-informed decisions. 'From a very simple rule of following your mates, you get these decisions that seem to be best,' he says. George Sugihara, who was not 34 in the study, suggests that such structures may indeed be common. He also 35 the importance of identifying similar patterns of connectivity in human society. A recent study of Facebook connections suggests that when it comes to people, more variables come into play. Gender, age and relationship status all help determine our level of influence over 36 . A. access B. acquaintances C. advantages D. boastful E. consequently F. distorted G. emerged H. evolve I. highlights J. influential K. involved L. reinforcement M. roamed N. setting O. tend

When a group of Australians was asked why they believed climate change was not happening，about 36% said it was "common sense", according to a report published last year by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. This was the most popular reasonfor their opinion, with only 11% saying their belief that climate change was not happening wasbased on scientific research.But what do we mean by an appeal to common sense? Presumably its an appeal to rationality of some sort that forms the basis of more complex reasoning. The appeal to common sense, however, is usually nothing more than an appeal to thinking that just feels right, but what feels right to one person may not feel right to another. Whether it feels right is usually a reflection of the world view and ideologies we have internalised, and that frames how we interact with new ideas. When new ideas are in accord with what we already believe, they are more readily accepted.When they are not, they, and the arguments that lead to them, are more readily rejected.We often mistake this automatic compatibility testing of new ideas with existing beliefs as an application of common sense. But, in reality, it is more about judging than thinking. As nobelist Daniel Kahneman notes in Thinking Fast and Slow, when we arrive at conclusions in this way, the outcomes also feel true, regardless of whether they are. We are not psychologically well equipped to judge our own thinking.We are also highly susceptible to a range of cognitive biases, such as giving preference to the first things that come to mind when making decisions or giving weight to evidence. One way we can check our internal biases and inconsistencies is through the social verification of knowledge, in which we test our ideas in a rigorous and systematic way to see if they make sense not just to us, but to other people. The outstanding example of this socially shared cognition is science.That does not mean that individuals are not capable of excellent thinking, nor does it mean no individual is rational. But the extent to which individuals can do this on their own is a function of how well integrated they are with communities of systematic inquiry in the first place. You cant learn to think well by yourself.In matters of science at least, those who value their common sense over methodological, collaborative investigation imagine themselves to be more free in their thinking, unbound by involvement with the group, but in reality they are tightly bound by their capabilities and perspectives. We are smarter together than we are individually, and perhaps thats just common sense.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay that begins with the sentence 'Today there is a growing awareness that mental well-being needs to be given as much attention as physical health.' You can make comments, cite examples or use your personal experiences to develop your essay. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

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Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay that begins with the sentence 'It is widely accepted that an important goal of education is to help students learn how to learn.' You can make comments, cite examples or use your personal experiences to develop your essay. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

听力题Questions 11 to 14 are based on the conversation you have just heard

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听力题Questions 31 to 33 are based on the passage you have just heard

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听力题Questions 1 to 3 are based on the passage you have just heard

听力题Questions 14 to 17 are based on the passageyou have just heard

听力题Questions 8 to 10 are based on the conversation you have just heard

听力题Questions 8 to 10 are based on the conversation you have just heard