单选题 Thirst grows for living unplugged More people are taking breaks from the connected life amid the stillness and quiet of retreats like the Jesuit Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. A．About a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on 'Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.' Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began, was stillness and quiet. B．A few months later, I read an interview with the well-known cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? 'I never read any magazines or watch TV,' he said, perhaps with a little exaggeration. 'Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.' He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because 'I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.' C．Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I'm reliably told, lies in 'black-hole resorts,' which charge high prices precisely became you can't get online in their rooms. D．Has it really come to this? The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Internet rescue camps in Korea (ROK) and China try to save kids addicted to the screen. Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail) every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. E．The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen. Nicholas Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. F．The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new. Of course, and wiser sods have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, 'and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.' He also famously remarked that all of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. G．When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that 'the man whose horse trots (奔跑) a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.' Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, 'When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.' We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. H．So what to do? More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思), or tai chi (太极); these aren't New Age fads (时尚饰物) so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an 'Internet sabbath (安息日)' every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other friends take walks and 'forget' their cellphones at home. I．A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects 'exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.' More than that, empathy (同感，共鸣), as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are 'inherently slow.' J．I turn to eccentric measures to try to keep my mind sober and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I have yet to use a cellphone and I have never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot. None of this is a matter of asceticism (苦行主义); it is just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, or music. It is actually something deeper than mere happiness: it is joy, which the monk (僧侣) David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.' K．It is vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world. But it is only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it. For more than 20 years, therefore, I have been going several times a year—often for no longer than three days—to a Benedictine hermitage (修道院), 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don't attend services when I am there, and I have never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it is only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and Mends that I will have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to meet with a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old boy around his shoulders. L．'You're Pico, aren't you?' the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we had met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he had been living in the hermitage as an assistant to one of the monks. 'What are you doing now?' I asked. We smiled. No words were necessary. 'I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,' he went on. The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what is new, but what is essential.

单选题 Questions22-24 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题 It may seem ridiculous, but in the hunt for sources of alternative energy researchers have come up with fuel cells which are powered by cheese—or at least whey, a by-product in cheese making. Whey is rich in lactose, a sugar which Georgia Antonopoulou, a biochemical engineer at the University of Patras, Greece, says can be consumed by cultures of bacteria contained within a fuel cell to generate an electric current. Microbial fuel cells, as such devices are known, are not a new idea but they are attracting more attention. The organic contents of whey pose an environmental hazard and many governments now impose strict regulations requiring factories to pay for its treatment before disposal. Whey constitutes about 70% of the volume of the milk were used to make cheese. So, just one small feta facility will need to dispose of as such as 4,000 tonnes of whey in a single year, says Dr Antonopoulou. Microbial fuel cells could help, and not just in the cheese-making industry. Breweries, pig farms, food-processing plants and even sewage works could gain from the technology. Traditional fuel cells work by using a catalytic material to oxidize a fuel, such as hydrogen, and make an electric current flow between two electrodes. Microbial fuel cells function in much the same way except that the catalytic reactions are carried out by bacteria contained within the fuel-cell chamber. Under anaerobic conditions (where oxygen is absent), metabolising the fuel by feeding off it and in doing so produce natural chemical reactions that produce a current. In theory microbial fuel cells can run on almost any kind of organic matters, says Chris Melhuish, head of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, England. 'All you have to do is match the microbial culture with the type of stuff you want to use as fuel,' he says. Dr Melhuish has been trying to power robots on domestic waste-water, but it is tricky. Ideally you would want to use cheap raw-waste products, he says. But traditionally the fuel cells work best with a refined fuel in the form of solutions containing synthetic sugars, such as glucose. However, Dr Antonopoulou has now shown that, using a culture of bacteria obtained from her local waste-water plant, it is possible to get almost as much power from raw whey as from refined fuel, provided the whey is diluted. The trouble is the power output still only amounts to milliwatts, barely enough to trickle-charge a cellphone. And working with raw waste water also presents challenges. Initially Dr Antonopoulou and her colleagues found that the coulombic efficiency of their cells-a measure of how many electrons produced actually flow into a circuit-was particularly low, at around just 2%. This turned out to be because a second set of microbes, within the whey itself, was absorbing them. So, by sterilizing the whey first to kill these other bugs they have now boosted the coulombic efficiency to around 25%.

单选题In a sense, the new protectionism is not protectionism at all, at least not in the 27 sense of the term. The old protectionism referred only to trade restricting and trade expanding devices, such as the tariff or export subsidy. The new protectionism is much 28 than this: it includes 29 into foreign trade but is not limited to them. The new protectionism, in fact, 30 to how the whole of government intervention into the private economy affects international trade. The emphasis on trade is still there, thus came the term 'protection'. But what is new is the realization that virtually all government activities can affect international economic relations. The 31 of the new protectionism in the Western world reflects the victory of the interventionist, or welfare economy over the market economy. Jab Tumiler writes, 'The old protectionism...coexisted, without any apparent intellectual difficulty with the acceptance of the market as a 32 as well as an international economic distribution mechanism—indeed, protectionists as well as (if not more than) free traders stood for laissez faire (放任政策). Now, as in the 1930s, protectionism is an expression of a profound scepticism as to the ability of the market to 33 resources and incomes to societies' satisfaction.' It is 34 this profound scepticism of the market economy that is responsible for the protectionism. In a 35 economy, economic change of various colours implies redistribution of resources and incomes. The same opinion in many communities apparently is that such redistributions often are not proper. 36 , the government intervenes to bring about a more desired result. A. market B. welfare C. traditional D. national E. narrow F. refers G. security H. distribute I. interventions J. Therefore K. emergence L. broader M. significantly N. insurance O. precisely

单选题 知识和人才是创新型经济最重要的要素，知识是创新的源泉，人才是创新的主体。

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 26 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 27 . 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 28 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 29 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 30 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 31 . The use of weights as part of a gym workout may not be 32 , however if under close supervision of a trained professional it is still possible. There are 33 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 34 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 35 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 故宫 故宫，又名紫禁城(Forbidden City)，位于北京市中心，今天人们称它为故宫，意为“过去的皇宫”。它是无与伦比的古代建筑杰作，世界现存的最大、最完整的古建筑群，被誉为世界五大宫[北京故宫、法国凡尔赛宫(Versailles Palace)、英国白金汉宫(Buckingham Palace)、美国白宫(White House)、俄罗斯克里姆林宫(Kremlin)]之首。故宫建成于明代。在当时落后的社会生产条件下，能建造这样宏伟高大的建筑群，充分反映了中国古代劳动人民的高度智慧和创造才能。

单选题 When you see a corporate scoundrel go unpunished, or a puppy die of cancer, or Rashida Jones gifted with talent, beauty, and smarts, you might be forgiven for asking: Is life fair? And yet most of us cling to the idea that people generally get what they deserve. Our belief in the world's fairness can veer into magical thinking. For example, one study found that people who frequently patronize a business believe they are more likely than other customers to win a given prize drawing by that business—a phenomenon the researchers called the 'lucky loyalty' effect. A similar logic leads people to invest in karma. In one experiment, people at a job fair who were led to think that the job-search process was beyond their control offered to donate more money to an unrelated charity than did those who were led to believe the opposite. In a follow-up study, job seekers who were encouraged to see their job search as beyond their control were more optimistic about their employment prospects when they gave money to charity than when they didn't. Faith in fairness does have a dark side. One study found that women who believe strongly that the world is fair are more likely than other women to blame the victim of a hypothetical stranger rape. And people who believe in a just world are less likely to hire a job candidate who's been laid off. When bad things happen to good people, we sometimes convince ourselves that the bad things are in fact good things—blessings in disguise. After people's appetite for justice was deliberately stoked, they tended to see a 30-year-old who had suffered a debilitating accident in childhood as enjoying a more meaningful life than one who hadn't. Such thoughts may ease the pain associated with injustice, and even lead to support for the status quo: Researchers found that when people felt powerless, they were more likely to say that race, class, and gender disparities were justified. Certain social institutions and ideologies, including religion and political conservatism, may further increase our complacence. In a series of surveys, respondents' religiosity correlated with belief in a just world, belief that capitalism is fair, social and economic conservatism, acceptance of income inequality, and belief in the fairness of the American social system.

单选题 中国人的英语学习 中国学习英语的人口数量全球最多。数据显示，中国有4亿多人在学英语，约占全国总人口的1/3。目前，中国的小学，甚至幼儿园都开设英语课程。英语学习贯穿中国学生的整个学习生涯，英语是中国学生必须学习的一门科目。中国是世界上对英语学习最狂热的国家之一，“英语热”在中国的持续也引发了激烈的争论。很多人认为应该在高考中降低英语考试的分值，突出语文的重要性，让更多的人关注自己的母语。

单选题 When most people think of the word 'education', they think of a pupil as a sort of animate (有生命的) sausage container. Into this empty container, the teachers are supposed to stuff 'education'. But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind. 'The most important part of education,' once wrote William Ernest Hocking, the distinguished Harvard philosopher, 'is this instruction of a man in what he has inside of him.' And, as Edith Hamilton has reminded us, Socrates never said, 'I know, learn from me.' He said, rather, 'Look into your own selves and find the spark of truth that God has put into every heart and that only you can develop to flame.' In the dialogue called the 'Meno', Socrates takes an ignorant slave boy, without a day of schooling, and proves to the amazed observers that the boy really 'knows' geometry—because the principles of geometry are already in his mind, waiting to be called out. So many of the discussions and controversies about the content of education are useless and inconclusive because they are concerned with what should 'go into' the student rather than with what should be 'taken out', and how this can best be done. The college student who once said to me, after a lecture, 'I spend so much time studying that I don't have a chance to learn anything,' was expressing his dissatisfaction with sausage-container view of education. He was being so stuffed with varied facts, with such an indigestible mass of material, that he had no time (and was given no encouragement) to draw on his own resources, to use his own mind for analysing and synthesizing and evaluating this material. Education, to have any meaning beyond the purpose of creating well-informed dunces (劣学生), must elicit from the pupil what is potential in every human being—the rules of reason, the inner knowledge of what is proper for men to be and do, the ability to assess evidence and come to conclusions that can generally be agreed on by all open minds and worm hearts. Pupils are more like oysters (牡蛎) than sausages. The job of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within. There are pearls in each of us, if only we knew how to cultivate them with enthusiasm and insistence.

单选题 Inequality Is Not Inevitable A. A dangerous trend has developed over this past thirty of a century. A country that experienced shared growth after World War Ⅱ began to tear apart, so much so that when the Great Recession hit in late 2007, one could no longer ignore the division that had come to define the American economic landscape. How did this 'shining city on a hill' become the advanced country with the greatest level of inequality? B．Over the past year and a haft, The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times, has Dresented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn't apply in the democracies of the 21st. We don't need to have this much inequality in America. C. Our current brand of capitalism is a fake capitalism. For proof of this go back to our response to the Great Recession, where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but we have monopolies making persistently high profits. CEOs enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity. D. If it is not the cruel laws of economics that have led to America's great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics. People get tired of hearing about Scandinavian success stories, but the fact of the matter is that Sweden, Finland and Norway have all succeeded in having about as much or faster growth in per capita (人均的) incomes than the United States and with far greater equality. E. So why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of the answer is that as World War Ⅱ faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had created. As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn't seem to be a real competitor to our economic model. Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that our system could deliver for most of our citizens. F. Ideology and interests combined viciously. Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here. Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations, even when those regulations had done so much to protect and improve our environment, our safety, our health and the economy it-self. G. But this ideology was hypocritical(虚伪的). The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire(自由放任的)economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government in the aid programs that have been a recurring feature of the global economy since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era of 'free' markets and deregulation. H. The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality. So corporate welfare increases as we reduce welfare for the poor. Congress maintains subsidies for rich farmers as we cut back on nutritional support for the needy. Drug companies have been given hundreds of billions of dollars as we limit Medicaid benefits. The banks that brought on the global financial crisis got billions while a tiny bit went to the homeowners and victims of the same hanks' predatory(掠夺性的) lending practices. This last decision was particularly foolish. There were alternatives to throwing money at the banks and hoping it would circulate through increased lending. I. Our divisions are deep. Economic and geographic segregation have immunized those at the top from the problems of those down below. Like the kings of ancient times, they have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right. J. Our economy, our democracy and our society have paid for these gross inequities. The true test of an economy is not how much wealth its princes can accumulate in tax havens(庇护所), but how well off the typical citizen is. But average incomes are lower than they were a quarter-century ago. Growth has gone to the very, very top, whose share has almost increased four times since 1980. Money that was meant to have trickled(流淌) down has instead evaporated in the agreeable climate of the Cayman Islands. K. With almost a quarter of American children younger than 5 living in poverty, and with America doing so little for its poor, the deprivations of one generation are being visited upon the next. Of course, no country has ever come close to providing complete equality of opportunity. But why is America one of the advanced countries where the life prospects of the young are most sharply determined by the income and education of their parents? L. Among the most bitter stories in The Great Divide were those that portrayed the frustrations of the young, who long to enter our shrinking class. Soaring tuitions and declining incomes have resulted in larger debt burdens. Those with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes decline by 13 percent over the past 35 years. M. Where justice is concerned, there is also a huge divide. In the eyes of the rest of the world and a significant part of its own population, mass imprisonment has come to define America—a country, it bears repeating, with about 5 percent of the world's population but around a fourth of the world's prisoners. N. Justice has become a commodity, affordable to only a few. While Wall Street executives used their expensive lawyers to ensure that their ranks were not held accountable for the misdeeds that the crisis in 2008 so graphically revealed, the banks abused our legal system to foreclose(取消赎回权) on mortgages and eject tenants, some of whom did not even owe money. O. More than a half-century ago, America led the way in advocating for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Today, access to health care is among the most universally accepted rights, at least in the advanced countries. America, despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is the exception. In the relief that many felt when the Supreme Court did not overturn the Affordable Care Act, the implications of the decision for Medicaid were not fully appreciated. Obamacare's objective—to ensure that all Americans have access to health care—has been blocked: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid pro-gram, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest. P. We need not just a new war on poverty but a war to protect the middle class. Solutions to these problems do not have to be novel. Far from it. Making markets act like markets would be a good place to start. We must end the rent-seeking society we have gravitated toward, in which the wealthy obtain profits by manipulating the system. Q. The problem of inequality is not so much a matter of technical economics. It's really a problem of practical politics. Inequality is not just about the top marginal tax rate but also about our children's access to food and the right to justice for all. If we spent more on education, health and infrastructure(基础设施), we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.

单选题 University of York biologist Peter Mayhew recently found that global warming might actually increase the number of species on the planet, contrary to a previous report that higher temperatures meant fewer life forms—a report that was his own. In Mayhew's initial 2008 study, low biodiversity among marine invertebrates (无脊椎动物) appeared to coincide with warmer temperatures on Earth over the last 520 million years. But Mayhew and his colleagues decided to reexamine their hypothesis, this time using data that were 'a fairer sample of the history of life'. With this new collection of material, they found a complete reversal of the relationship between species richness and temperature from what their previous paper argued: The number of different groups present in the fossil record was higher, rather than lower, during 'greenhouse phases'. Their previous findings rested on an assumption that fossil records can be taken to represent biodiversity changes throughout history. This isn't necessarily the case, because there are certain periods with higher-quality fossil samples, and some that are much more difficult to sample well. Aware of this bias, Mayhew's team used data that standardized the number of fossils examined throughout history and accounted for other variables like sea level changes that might influence biodiversity in their new study to see if their old results would hold up. Two years later, the results did not. But then why doesn't life increasingly emerge on Earth as our temperatures get warmer? While the switch may prompt some to assert that climate change is not hazardous to living creatures, Mayhew explained that the timescales in his team's study are huge—over 500 million years—and therefore inappropriate for the shorter periods that we might look at as humans concerned about global warming. Many global warming concerns are focused on the next century, he said—and the lifetime of a species is typically one to 10 million years. 'I do worry that these findings will be used by the climate skeptic community to say 'Look, climate warming is fine',' he said. Not to mention the numerous other things we seem to do to create a storm of threats to biodiversity—think of what habitat (栖息地) destruction, overfishing, and pollution can do for a species' viability (生存能力). Those things, Mayhew explained, give the organisms a far greater challenge in coping with climate change than they would have had in the absence of humans. 'If we were to relax all these pressures on biodiversity and allow the world to recover over millions of years in a warmer climate, then my prediction is it would be an improvement in biodiversity,' he said. So it looks like we need to curb our reckless treatment of the planet first, if we want to eventually see a surge in the number of species on the planet as temperatures get warmer. We don't have 500 million years to wait.