单选题 家庭是社会的基本单位，它的结构随着社会的发展而变化。在中国几千年的封建社会里，自给自足的(self-sufficient)经济占主导地位。家庭不仅是日常生活的基本单位，也是生产的基本单位。那时，理想的、令人羡慕的家庭是五世同堂，家里的大事由男人做主。近百年来，中国发生了巨大变化，中国社会经过漫长的封建时期进入了社会主义社会。这具有历史意义的变化使中国家庭的结构也改变了。人口众多的大家庭开始分成较小的家庭和直系家庭，总的趋势是出现了越来越多的核心家庭。

单选题 Less News, Much Better A. In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-colored candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be. B. News misleads. Take the following event (borrowed from Nassim Taleb). A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car? The person in the car? Where did he come from? Where did he plan to go? How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge? That's the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. C. But the car is flashy, it's dramatic, it's a person (non-abstract), and it's news that's cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated. D. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists—who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards—have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely. E. News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that—because you consumed it—allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. F. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognize what's relevant. It's much easier to recognize what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organizations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have. G. News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect. The more 'news factoids' you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. If more information leads to higher economic success, we'd expect journalists to be at the top of the pyramid. That's not the case. H. News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, and bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation. I. News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: 'What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.' News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. J. News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. K. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data. The path from short-term to long-term memory is a choke-point in the brain, but anything you want to understand must pass through it. If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension. L. News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. M. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers—even if they used to be avid book readers—have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It's not because they got older or their schedules became more onerous. It's because the physical structure of their brains has changed. N. News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind? O. News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is 'learned helplessness'. It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression. P. News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie—not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don't. Q. Society needs journalism—but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too. I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, and more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

单选题Everyday each of us can renew our efforts to lead a healthier lifestyle so that we can remain free from illness and pain. Every health expert will advise that as part of any healthy living plan regular exercise should play an important part. For a large 30 of people enrolling at the local gym is the answer which will also produce results. There is one negative point however—upper back pain. What is the cause of upper back pain? In most instances bad posture is the chief 31 . This is often because we spend long periods of time sitting or standing in the same position, generally this tends to be in our place of work. Sitting at desk top computers is one source of this problem! By 32 the same position the muscles in the upper back which connect the shoulders and help to keep our back straight become tense, stiff and painful. If you find yourself 33 upper back pain it is highly likely that you have strained a muscle, this condition can be extremely painful but are easily treated by your doctor following an accurate 34 using X-rays. Keeping fit through physical exercise should not be stopped because of upper back pain, indeed it is an excellent method to prevent this painful problem and can help in relieving 35 . The use of weights as part of a gym workout may not be 36 , however if under close supervision of a trained professional it is still possible. There are 37 other types of exercise which can be continued whilst suffering upper back pain such as jogging or walking either using a treadmill (踏车) at home or out on the streets. The whole aim is to prevent stiffening of the muscles. The best way to avoid upper back pain is to try to avoid sitting or standing in the same position for 38 periods, if it is possible try to have a stretch break every hour or so. This may not be possible therefore, you should try to find ways of jogging your memory throughout the day to keep your posture correct—put little notes round your computer screen! It will 39 come naturally and hopefully the problem will disappear. A. eliminate I. exactly B. suffering J. majority C. extended K. sophisticated D. eventually L. diagnosis E. advisable M. symptoms F. criminal N. maintaining G. abandoning O. virtually H. numerous

单选题 What's the one word of advice a well-meaning professional would give to a recent college graduate? China? India? Brazil? How about trade? When the Commerce Department reported last week that the trade deficit in June approached $50 billion, it set off a new round of economic doomsaying. Imports, which soared to $200.3 billion in the month, are subtracted in the calculation of gross domestic product. The larger the trade deficit, the smaller the GDE Should such imbalances continue, pessimists say, they could contribute to slower growth. But there's another way of looking at the trade data. Over the past two years, the figures on imports and exports seem not to signal a double-dip recession—a renewed decline in the broad level of economic activity in the United States—but an economic expansion. The rising volume of trade—more goods and services shuttling in and out of the United States—is good news for many sectors. Companies engaged in shipping, trucking, rail freight, delivery, and logistics (物流) have all been reporting better than expected results. The rising numbers signify growing vitality in foreign markets—when we import more stuff, it puts more cash in the hands of people around the world, and US exports are rising because more foreigners have the ability to buy the things we produce and market. The rising tide of trade is also good news for people who work in trade-sensitive businesses, especially those that produce commodities for which global demand sets the price--agricultural goods, mining, metals, oil. And while exports always seem to lag, US companies are becoming more involved in the global economy with each passing month. General Motors sells as many cars in China as in America each month. While that may not do much for imports, it does help GM's balance sheet—and hence makes the jobs of US-based executives more stable. One great challenge for the US economy is slack domestic consumer demand. Americans are paying down debt, saving more, and spending more carefully. That's to be expected, given what we've been through. But there's a bigger challenge. Can US-based businesses, large and small, figure out how to get a piece of growing global demand? Unless you want to pick up and move to India, or Brazil, or China, the best way to do that is through trade. It may seem obvious, but it's no longer enough simply to do business with our friends and neighbors here at home. Companies and individuals who don't have a strategy to export more, or to get more involved in foreign markets, or to play a role in global trade, are shutting themselves out of the lion's share of economic opportunity in our world.

单选题 If our solar system has a Hell, it's Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur, heaved from ancient volcanoes and feeding acid clouds above. Although the second planet is a step farther from the sun than Mercury, a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hotter indeed. It's the hottest of the nine plants, a toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit of baking rocky flats from equator to poles. All this under a crushing atmospheric pressure 90 times that of where you're sitting now. From the earthly perspective, a dead end. It must be lifeless. 'Venus has nothing,' is the blunt word from planetologist Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. 'We've written it off.' Yet a small group of advanced life-forms on Earth begs to differ, and theorizes that bizarre microbial ecosystems might have once populated Veuns and, in fact, may be there still. Members of this loose band of researchers suggest that their colleagues have water too much on the brain, and are, in a sense, H2O chauvinists (盲目的爱国者). 'Astrobiologists are neglecting Venus due more to narrow thinking than actual knowledge of the environment, or environments, where life can thrive,' says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geobiologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who recently co-authored a Venus-boosting paper in Astrobiology with colleague Louis Irwin. The bias against life on Venus is partly rooted in our own biology. Human experience instructs that liquid water, preferably lot of it, is essential for life. In search for extraterrestrial life, we obsess over small rivers in Mars' surface apparently carved by ancient gushes of water, and delight in hints of permafrost (永久冻结带) just underneath its surface. (By comparison, Venus isn't even that interesting to look at: A boring cue ball (台球的白色母球) for backyard astronomers, its clouds reflects 75% of visible light.) Attention and then funding follow the water: Three more landers will depart for Mars this spring, and serious plans for sample-return missions hover in the midterm future. 'If you have limited resources, you base exploration on what you know,' says Arizona State University planetary geologist Ronal Greeley. It's like losing your keys on the way home at night: The first place you look is under the streetlights not because they're more likely to be there, but because if they are, you'll spot them. For astrobiologists, the streetlights are the spectral (光谱的) lines for water, and they've spotted that potential on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, even Neptune's moon Triton. Not on the baking rocky flats of Venus.

单选题 Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven)simple rules. The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing; it even includes a bibliography of 'success studies'. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are 'measurable and actionable'—guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on 'calculating the elements of advantage' and 'detailed analysis'. The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 'exceptional companies', only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material. Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs. Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is 'the halo(光环)effect', whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche (隙缝市场) and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.

单选题 Questions6-9 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled The Importance of Communication by commenting on the remark 'An argument may be a shortcut between two hearts.' You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Modern technology has put men on the moon and deciphered the human genome. But when it comes to brewing up flu to make vaccines, science still turns to the incredible edible egg. Ever since the 1940s, vaccine makers have grown large batches of virus inside chicken eggs. New cell-based technologies are in the pipeline, and may finally get the support they need now that the United States is faced with a critical shortage of flu vaccine. Although experts disagree on whether new ways of producing vaccine (疫苗) could have prevented a shortage like the one happening today, there is no doubt that the existing system has serious flaws. Each year, vaccine manufacturers place advance orders for millions of specially grown chicken eggs. Meanwhile, Public Health officials monitor circulating strains of flu, and each March they recommend three strains—two influenza A strains and one B strain—for manufacturers to include in vaccines. In the late spring and summer, automated machines inject virus into eggs and later suck out the influenza-rich goop. Virus from the eggs' innards gets killed and processed to remove egg proteins and other contaminants before being packaged into vials for fall shipment. Why has this egg method persisted for six decades? The main reason is that it's reliable. But even though the eggs are reliable, they have serious drawbacks. One is the long lead time needed to order the eggs. That means it's hard to make more vaccine in a hurry, in case of a shortage or unexpected outbreak. And eggs may simply be too cumbersome (大量的) to keep up with the hundreds of millions of doses required to handle the demand for flu vaccine. What's more, some flu strains don't grow well in eggs. Last year, scientists were unable to include the Fujian strain in the vaccine formulation. It was a relatively new strain, and manufacturers simply couldn't ind a quick way to adapt it so that it grew well in eggs. 'We knew the strain was out there,' recalls Theodore Eickhoff of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, 'but public-health officials were left without a vaccine—and, consequently, a more severe flu season.' Worse, the viruses that pose the greatest threat might be hardest to grow in eggs. That's because global pandemics like the one that killed over 50 million people between 1918 and 1920 are thought to occur when a bird influenza changes in a way that lets it cross the species barrier and infect humans. Since humans haven't encountered the new virus before, they have little protective immunity. The deadly bird flu circulating in Asia in 1997 and 1998, for example, worried Public Health officials because it spread to some people who handled birds and killed them—although the bug never circulated among humans. But when scientists tried to make vaccine the old-fashioned way, the bird flu quickly killed the eggs. (选自Time)

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the topic On Fabricating Academic Credentials. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words following the outline given below. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1. 1)现在学历造假现象非常猖獗； 2)分析这一现象的原因； 3)如何根除这一现象。

单选题 齐白石的艺术特色 齐白石是中国当代最伟大的艺术家之一。通过长期的实践，齐白石发展了一套具有个人特色的艺术形式。他的绘画作品涉猎广泛，他画的花、鸟、鱼、虾和虫受到广泛赞誉。为了提高画虾技巧，他曾经在家里养了一些虾，经常观察它们的动作，并且将自己为什么改变画虾的方法都写到日记中。齐白石的作品以笔墨雄浑滋润、色彩浓艳明快、造型简练生动、意境醇厚朴实著称。他将中国画的精神与时代精神统一得完美无瑕，使中国画得到了全世界的重视。

单选题 微信 微信(WeChat)作为时下最热门的社交信息平台，是一个为智能终端提供即时通讯服务的免费应用程序。微信支持单人、多人参与，人们通过手机网络发送语音、图片、视频和文字。截止到2015年第一季度，微信已经覆盖中国90%以上的智能手机，月活跃用户达到5.49亿，用户覆盖200多个国家、超过20种语言。此外，各品牌的微信公众账号总数已经超过800万个，微信支付用户则达到了4亿左右。

单选题Directions:Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteanessaybasedonthepicturebelow.YoushouldstartyouressaywithabriefdescriptionofthepictureandthendiscusswhypeoplelikemakingfriendsontheInternet.Youshouldgivesoundargumentstosupportyourviewsandwriteatleast150wordsbutnomorethan200words.'I'vemadethreenewfriendsontheInternet.'