Section A Multiple-Choice Questions Text A SYDNEY—Several foreign owners of residential property across Australia have been ordered to sell as the government intensifies its crackdown on the abuse of homeownership laws by buyers from China and elsewhere. Treasurer Joe Hockey said foreign investors have been ordered to sell six properties in the cities of Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The homes are valued between 152,000 and 1.86 million Australian dollars (US$112,000 and US$1.37 million). The orders could be the tip of the iceberg , as Mr. Hockey said investigations have unearthed 462 possible breaches of foreign homeownership rules after the government ramped up its spending on enforcement in its May budget. The number of cases being investigated has more than doubled since the last estimate was given in June. The treasurer said he expects more divestment orders will be announced soon, and promised to increase penalties for those who break the rules. With skyrocketing house prices putting homeownership out of reach of many Australian citizens, the conservative government is under pressure to make housing more affordable, and rein in surging investor buying that some fear may push the market to unsustainable levels, causing a crash as the economy slows at the end of a long mining boom. The worry is that money from places such as China and Southeast Asia is fuelling the housing problem. In April, Australia"s Foreign Investment Review Board said China had overtaken the U.S. as the country"s biggest source of investment from overseas, with a total of A$27. 6 billion last year. Real estate accounted for almost half of the money. In March, the treasurer said he had ordered a Hong Kong-based buyer of an A$39 million Sydney mansion to sell the property after investigators said it was purchased illegally. The latest divestment orders relate to properties owned by five investors from four countries, including China. Some had purchased properties with Foreign Investment Review Board approval, but their circumstances changed and they failed to comply with divestment requirements, Mr. Hockey said. Others broke the rules at the outset by purchasing a property without approval, he said. The investors voluntarily came forward to take advantage of an amnesty (an official pardon) from criminal prosecution announced in May, Mr. Hockey said, and they now have 12 months to sell the properties. The treasurer said foreign investors had until Nov. 30 this year to voluntarily come forward under the amnesty if they had illegally purchased residential real estate in Australia. The treasurer said he plans to introduce new legislation into federal parliament in the next two weeks that will increase penalties for foreign investors who break the rules. Under the new regime, non-residents illegally acquiring established properties will face a maximum fine ofA$127,500 or three years imprisonment. They will also stand to lose the capital gain made on the property, 25% of the purchase price or 25% of the market value, whichever is greater. Third parties, such as real-estate agents and financial advisers, also may be prosecuted under the changes for assisting in an unlawful purchase. Rules on property buying by foreigners were strengthened about five years ago to restrict purchases to new dwellings that would boost the country"s housing stock, with the added benefit of spurring residential construction. Under those rules, temporary residents were allowed to buy established homes with approval from the foreign-investment regulator, but had to sell when their temporary visas expired. Last year, a government committee recommended changes to the rules, including a clean-up of procedures to help uncover illegal home buying, penalties for breaches of the framework, punishments for third-party rule breakers and tweaks to ensure the immigration department informs the foreign-investment watchdog when a person leaves. Text B The doctors wanted to prolong her life, but they also had to respect Li"s living will for a natural death, without machines to keep her alive. After half a day in a coma, Li died peacefully in her sleep. "Li"s family members were unwilling to go through with her plan at first, but after seeing Li pass away peacefully and dignified, they were relieved," said Zhang Huili, Secretary General of the Beijing Living Will Promotion Association and manager of the website, Choice and Dignity. Li signed a living will through the website in 2006. It"s a legal document signed by healthy or conscious people, declaring whether they would want life support, or what kind of medical treatment they would prefer in the final stage of their life when they can"t speak or are unconscious, and cannot express their final life wishes. The living will contains five important details: whether the person wants medical treatment of any kind, whether they want life support, how they wish other people to treat them, what information should be made available to family and friends, and who should come to the person"s aid. More people have been signing living wills in recent years. In 2011, when the website publicized statistics for the first time, only 198 people had signed a living will on the website. That number has now increased to 20,000 in 2015, said Zhang. Before signing a living will, Li had been suffering from rectal cancer for three years. She had undergone numerous surgeries. One day, she came across the Choice and Dignity website, and agreed upon the principle of making her own end-of-life arrangements. She requested when her condition worsened, she did not want to receive any traumatic life support treatment. She gave her per-mission to receive painkillers and sleeping pills. Li printed a copy of the online living will, signed it and asked her children to honor her wishes and to hand it to the doctor when the day came. Like Li, more people are gaining awareness of making their own end-of-life arrangements. According to research conducted by the Choice and Dignity website, 10.3 percent of 2,484 respondents had made their final life arrangements, while 67.1 percent of them think people should make their own end-of-life arrangements. Zhang said the people who have signed the living wills are from different age groups. "Most of them are between 30 and 40 years old, who have a good educational background." Zhang thinks the main reason that more people have started to sign living wills is because they have only recently become familiar with the notion as a result of its promotion through various organizations and the media. The high rate of cancer and the rapidly aging Chinese population have also made people face and think more about death, Zhang said. "(People must decide) whether they want to use most of their savings on meaningless and traumatic treatment, or die naturally and make their final days peaceful." Doctors on the front lines have also noticed more patients are making their own final life arrangements. "On average, we have over 50 patients a month who are in their final stage of life. Around three of them will ask to forego treatment with the consent of their family members," said Zhuang Shaowei, a cardiologist from the Shanghai East Hospital. "I think it"s because people today have more knowledge about dying with dignity which is still more accepted in the West, and patients themselves and their children also tend to respect these decisions more." The US "Five Wishes" living will, created by the NGO, Aging with Dignity, has been widely applied in 42 states and the District of Columbia. The living will has also been largely recognized in Europe and Singapore, where governments take the lead in encouraging citizens to complete the standard living will document, and even have regulations to guarantee that it will be obeyed. Although the living will and the idea of dying in dignity are gaining momentum in China, doctors and organizers of the Choice and Dignity website say that they have encountered a unique problem when promoting the concept, due to social, cultural and legal issues. "One factor is that death is a taboo topic in China," Zhuang said. "Western people"s religious beliefs help them make peace with death, unlike in China, where most people don"t follow a religion, and death holds unknown fears." Another obstacle, said Zhuang, is the culture of filial piety in China. Zhuang has dealt with many cases in which even though the patient is in a lot of pain and deep down the children know the treatment is of no use, they are reluctant to agree to stop treatment, because they think it goes against filial piety. The tack of legal support also makes a living will difficult to enforce, said Liu Xiaohong, an oncologist at the Beijing Union Hospital. "We have received some patients with a living will in recent years, but there is no support in law to ensure its validity, so we still have to consult with the family members, and most of the time, the family doesn"t agree." Zhang said her organization is lobbying for a law through the justice department. They have submitted proposals to the legislature five times over the last five years, but there has been no feedback. "Many law professors around the country have given their support for such legislation." Text C What we learned about ourselves anew this week was something that, in truth, we knew already. We rediscovered a simple, human weakness: that we cannot conceive of an abstract problem, or even a concrete problem involving huge numbers, except through one individual. The old Stalinist maxim about a million deaths being a statistic, a single death a tragedy, was demonstrated afresh. The lesson was taught by a silent toddler washed ashore on a beach. Aylan Kurdi did not reveal a new horror. People in desperate search of European refuge have been drowning at sea for many months. The civilians of Syria, including children, have been dying in their hundreds of thousands for more than four years. So we can"t pretend we didn"t know. But somehow, it seems, we needed to see those little shoes and bare legs to absorb the knowledge, to let it penetrate our heads and hearts. The result has been a collective resolve to do better, a bellowed demand that something be done. Much of the talk has been of governments and quotas and policy changes. But it has not all been about what the government or "Europe" can do. There has been a parallel discussion, one that begins from the ground up, starting with a family, a household, a town. Just as it took the story of one boy to allow us to see the problem, maybe a scale that is small and human offers our best chance of glimpsing the solution. Witness the impact of the call-out by the Icelandic novelist Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir. She did not just write a letter to her country"s welfare minister, demanding a change in policy. She urged her fellow Icelanders to tell their government they were ready to open their doors to refugees, so long as the government opened the borders. Via Facebook she found 11,000 people willing to house Syrians fleeing for their lives. Give them the right papers, she urged, and we are willing to do the rest. Of course, this could never be a whole solution. Action for refugees means not only a welcome when they arrive, but also a remedy for the problem that made them leave. The people now running from Syria have concluded that it is a place where no one can live. They have come to that conclusion slowly, after four years of murderous violence. To make them think again would require an international effort to stop not just the killers of ISIS but also Bashar al-Assad"s barrel bombs. This is the business of geopolitics at the highest level. For those taking to the seas and risking the razor wire, it"s all too far away. They can"t wait for summits and treaties. They are clinging to their children and clinging to their lives. Urging your local council to find room won"t solve the whole problem, just as taking in the 10,000 Jewish children of the Kindertransport did nothing for the six million Jews who would perish in the Holocaust. But every life matters. As Shale Ahmed says: "You can take local action here, right where you are, and make a change." It"s an echo of an ancient Jewish teaching: whoever saves one life is considered to have saved the whole world.

{{I}} Question 28 is based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 5 seconds to answer the question. Now, Listen to the news.{{/I}}

{{I}}Questions 26 to 28 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 15 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.{{/I}}

SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C, and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE "Mirrorworlds" is only one of David Gelernter"s big ideas. Another is "lifestreams"—in essence, vast electronic diaries. "Every document you create and every document other people send to you is stored in your lifestream," he wrote in the mid-1990s together with Eric Freeman, who produced a doctoral thesis on the topic. Putting electronic documents in chronological order, they said, would make it easier for people to manage all their digital output and experiences. Lifestreams have not yet replaced the desktop on personal computers, as Mr. Gelernter had hoped. Indeed, a software start-up to implement the idea folded in 2004. But today something quite similar can be found all over the web in many different forms. Blogs are essentially electronic diaries. Personal newsfeeds are at the heart of Facebook and other social networks. A torrent of short text messages appears on Twitter. Certain individuals are going even further than Mr. Gelernter expected. Some are digitising their entire office, including pictures, bills and correspondence. Others record their whole life. Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, puts everything he has accumulated, written, photographed and presented in his "local cyberspace". Yet others "log" every aspect of their lives with wearable cameras. The latest trend is "life-tracking". Practitioners keep meticulous digital records of things they do: how much coffee they drink, how much work they do each day, what books they are reading, and so on. Much of this is done manually by putting the data into a PC or, increasingly, a smartphone. But people are also using sensors, mainly to keep track of their vital signs, for instance to see how well they sleep or how fast they run. The first self-trackers were mostly über-geeks fascinated by numbers. But the more recent converts simply want to learn more about themselves, says Gary Wolf, a technology writer and co-founder of a blog called "The Quantified Self". They want to use technology to help them identify factors that make them depressed, and keep them from sleeping or affect their cognitive performance. One self-tracker learned, for instance, that eating a lot of butter allowed him to solve arithmetic problems faster. A market for self-tracking devices is already emerging. Fitbit and Greengoose, two start-ups, are selling wireless accelerometers that can track a user"s physical activity. Zeo, another start-up, has developed an alarm clock that comes with a headband to measure people"s brainwave activity at night and chart their sleep on the web. As people create more such self-tracking data, firms will start to mine them and offer services based on the result. Xobni, for example, analyses people"s inboxes ("xobni" spelled backwards) to help them manage their e-mail and contacts. It lists them according to the intensity of the electronic relationship rather than in alphabetical order. Users are sometimes surprised by the results, says Jeff Bonforte, the firm"s boss: "They think it"s creepy when we list other people before their girlfriend or wife." PASSAGE TWO A paradox of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition , by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text convey the information harder to read. Dr. Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three "species" of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge. Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read. Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as "What is the diet of the Pangerish?" and "What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?" The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time. The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom? It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier. PASSAGE THREE This is the 12th book of poems in about 50 years of writing by a great Northern Irish poet who is now in his eighth decade, and who recently recovered from a serious illness. Ageing and that brush with death have profoundly marked this new collection by Seamus Heaney. The change has stripped the poetry back to spare concentration on the small things of life—an old suit, the filling of a fountain pen, the hug that didn"t happen—which then open up to ever fuller significance, the more closely they are examined. It has also made the poems easier to engage with: there are no puzzling Ulsterisms, for instance. Complications have been tossed aside. Words are no longer delved into for their etymological significance as they were in the 1970s. Now they are caressed for their mellifluousness. The collection feels personal—as if it had a compelling need to be written. A decade and a half ago Mr. Heaney told that once the evil banalities of sectarianism seemed to be receding, his verse was able to admit the "big words" with which poetry had once abounded: soul and spirit, for example. In this collection both are present, at some level. The words describing a simple act—the passing of meal in sacks by aid workers onto a trailer—in the title poem, "Human Chain", transform this 12-line poem into a kind of parable. There is the collective, shared human burden of the act itself—the "stoop and drag and drain" of the heavy lifting—and then there is the wonderful letting go: "Nothing surpassed/That quick unburdening." Is the poet talking about the toil of life, and the aftermath of that toil? The poems snatch precious remembered moments. They linger over the sweetness of particulars—vetch, the feel of an eel on a line. They pay attention to the heightened ritual of everyday things. The lines are short but move at a gentle pace and need to be read slowly, as the verse drifts back and forth over its country setting like a long-legged fly on a stream. Above all, and this is an odd thing to say of words on a page, the book feels like handcrafted work. Time and again Mr. Heaney returns to the image of the pen. He began his long career writing of such a pen, nestling snug as a gun between finger and thumb. The gun, we hope, is history. The pen still nestles, fruitfully. PASSAGE FOUR In the digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digital catalogue, a group of national libraries has begun saving what the online giant leaves behind. For although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest. Adam Farquhar, in charge of digital projects for the British Library, points out that the world has in some ways a better record of the beginning of the 20th century than of the beginning of the 21st. In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and the Internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web. They started to pay attention when several elections produced interesting material that never touched paper. In 2003 eleven national libraries and the Internet Archive launched a project to preserve "born-digital" information: the kind that has never existed as anything but digitally. Called the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), it now includes 39 large institutional libraries. But the task is impossible. One reason is the sheer amount of data on the web. The groups have already collected several petabytes of data (a petabyte can hold roughly 10 trillion copies of this article). Another issue is ensuring that the data is stored in a format that makes it available in centuries to come. Ancient manuscripts are still readable. But much digital media from the past is readable only on a handful of fragile and antique machines, if at all. The IIPC has set a single format, making it more likely that future historians will be able to find a machine to read the data. But a single solution cannot capture all content. Web publishers increasingly serve up content-rich pages based on complex data sets. Audio and video programmes based on proprietary formats such as Windows Media Player are another challenge. What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210? The biggest problem, for now, is money. The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one. But there are a lot more digital ones. America"s Library of Congress enjoys a specific mandate, and budget, to save the web. The British Library is still seeking one. So national libraries have decided to split the task. Each has taken responsibility for the digital works in its national top-level domain (web-address suffixes such as ".uk" or ".fr"). In countries with larger domains, such as Britain and America, curators cannot hope to save everything. They are concentrating on material of national interest, such as elections, news sites and citizen journalism or innovative uses of the web. The daily death of countless websites has brought a new sense of urgency—and forced libraries to adapt culturally as well. Past practice was to tag every new document as it arrived. Now precision must be sacrificed to scale and speed. The task started before standards, goals or budgets are set. And they may yet change. Just like many websites, libraries will be stuck in what is known as "permanent beta".

How many people were homeless due to the earthquake and tsunami?

{{I}} Questions 26 and 27 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.{{/I}}

The obesity epidemic is being fueled still further by a growing trend among kids to eat out and bring takeout food home, University of North Carolina researchers say. Such foods are high in sugar and calories, and their increasing popularity means youngsters are getting more calories than they need, the researchers noted. Since 1994, this trend has been growing rapidly and reflects the availability of fast food restaurants and foods prepared in supermarkets and other food stores, the researchers say. In fact, calories eaten away from home increased from 23.4% to 33.9% between 1977 and 2006. "We found that kids eat a relatively maintained level of calories at home, but in addition kids also eat an increasing number of calories outside the home," says study author Jennifer Poti, from the university's Gillings School of Global Public Health. "Eating outside the home is actually fueling the increased energy intake for kids." Poti says much of the foods children eat outside the home come from prepared meals sold in supermarkets and convenience stores, as well as fast food restaurants. Much of the fast food that children eat is actually consumed at home, Poti said. In 2006, almost half of the fast foods children ate were eaten at home, she noted. Although the reasons for this increase in eating prepared meals isn't known, Poti speculates it's a combination of factors including convenience, cost and time pressures. This trend is adding to the obesity epidemic, Poti says. "Parents need to be interested in both the food source and location where it is eaten, which both significantly influence energy intake," she says. The report is published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. For the study, Poti's team collected data on 29,217 children ages 2 to 18. They had taken part in Nationwide Food Consumption Survey, the Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals or one of another two nationally representative surveys of food intake in the United States. These surveys collected data at different times from 1977 to 2006, the study noted. The researchers found that from 1977 to 2006, the number of calories children got from foods eaten away from home increased significantly. In fact, the percentage of calories children got from fast food was greater than those they got at school. Samantha Heller, a dietitian, nutritionist, exercise physiologist and clinical nutrition coordinator at the Center for Cancer Care at Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn., says that "in our fast-paced, time-challenged world, parents are convinced that it is easier and less expensive to eat takeout, fast food and in restaurants." Unfortunately, these foods are usually high in sodium, fat, sugar and calories, and low in healthy nutrients, she says, "We cannot control where these eateries are located or how they prepare their foods, but we can decide to cook more at home, which will ultimately save money and help keep our families healthy. More important, research suggests that family meals enhance the health and well-being of children on many levels./

{{B}}TEXT H{{/B}} Cruise Itinerary Highlights* 24-hour room service* Fine dining* Fully-equipped health spa* Live music and comedy shows* Fitness classes* Adventure Ocean youth activities* Port-of-call lectures* Creative theme parties* Top 40 and Big Band lounges* Casino with Caribbean stud poker* Cooking demonstrations* Broadway/Las Vegas-style entertainment* Thousands of balcony cabins* Sumptuous midnight buffets* Up to a dozen bars and lounges* Rock climbing wall, some ships* Ice skating rink, some ships* Johnny Rocket's 50's dinner, some ships 10-day Europe - Northern cruise aboard Cruise Itinerary{{U}}Day Ports of Call Arrival Departure {{/U}}1 Copenhagen --- 11:002 At Sea --- ---3 Stockholm 7:00 a.m. 5:30 p.m.4 Helsinki 8:30 a.m. 5:00 p.m.5 St. Petersburg 6:30 a.m. ---6 St. Petersburg --- 5:30 p.m.7 Tallinn 7:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m.8 Gdansk 10:00 a.m. 7:00 p.m.9 At Sea --- ---10 Oslo 7:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m.11 Copenhagen 5:00 a.m. 1:00 p.m.

According to the news, what is most likely the cause for Abdelal's resignation?

Section A Multiple-Choice Questions Text A Many great inventions are greeted with ridicule and disbelief. The invention of the airplane was no exception. Although many people who heard about the first powered flight on December 17, 1903, were excited and impressed, others reacted with peals of laughter. The idea of flying an aircraft was repulsive to some people. Such people called Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of the first flying machine, impulsive fools. Negative reactions, however, did not stop the Wrights. Impelled by their desire to succeed, they continued their experiments in aviation. Orville and Wilbur Wright had always had a compelling interest in aeronautics and mechanics. As young boys they earned money by making and selling kites and mechanical toys. Later, they designed a newspaper-folding machine, built a printing press, and operated a bicycle-repair shop. In 1896, when they read about the death of Otto Lilienthal, the brother"s interest in flight grew into a compulsion. Lilienthal, a pioneer in hang-gliding, had controlled his gliders by shifting his body in the desired direction. This idea was repellent to the Wright brothers, however, and they searched for more efficient methods to control the balance of airborne vehicles. In 1900 and 1901, the Wrights tested numerous gliders and developed control techniques. The brothers" inability to obtain enough lift power for the gliders almost led them to abandon their efforts. After further study, the Wright brothers concluded that the published tables of air pressure on curved surfaces must be wrong. They set up a wind tunnel and began a series of experiments with model wings. Because of their efforts, the old tables were repealed in time and replaced by the first reliable figures for air pressure on curved surfaces. This work, in turn, made it possible for them to design a machine that would fly. In 1903 the Wrights built their first airplane, which cost less than one thousand dollars. They even designed and built their own source of propulsion—a lightweight gasoline engine. When they started the engine on December 17, the airplane pulsated wildly before taking off. The plane managed to stay aloft for twelve seconds, however, and it flew one hundred twenty feet. By 1905 the Wrights had perfected the first airplane that could turn, circle, and remain airborne for half an hour at a time. Others had flown in balloons or in hang gliders, but the Wright brothers were the first to build a full-size machine that could fly under its own power. As the contributors of one of the most outstanding engineering achievements in history, the Wright brothers are accurately called the fathers of aviation. Text B The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in southern Japan is the world"s longest bridge. The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge spans the Akashi Strait, connecting Awaji Island to Kobe, an important industrial center. The bridge has a span of 5973 feet (1991 meters), making it over 25% longer than its nearest competition: the Humber Bridge in England. Strangely, there may be longer bridges in the world, but the Guinness Book of World Records measures the longest bridges according to their record-breaking spans. The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge is a suspension bridge. This means that the roadway is suspended from pillars by cables. The concrete pillars have to be tall enough to support the whole weight of the bridge. The pillars on the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge are 900 feet tall. These pillars had to be built to withstand not only huge waves but also high-speed winds, and possibly even violent earthquakes, which are not uncommon in the area. The bridge has survived one earthquake already: its span was extended by more than 3 feet by the Kobe earthquake of 1995. The cables weigh 50,000 tons and have a diameter of almost four feet each. Each cable contains 290 hexagonal strands; each strand is composed of 127 steel wires. The total length of the wire used is more than 200,000 miles, enough to circle the Earth 7.5 times! The first plans to connect Kobe to Naruto via Awaji Island were voiced in 1955, but it took the government thirty years to decide to really build the bridge. The next three years were spent surveying the site and construction commenced in 1988. In designing the bridge, special consideration was given to its effect on the surroundings, great emphasis was placed on a "pleasing balance between light and shade" and also on the choice of the perfect color. The construction of the bridge was a very complicated and technologically draining process, which took ten years to complete. Casting concrete in 300 feet of water, installing special pilot ropes over the strait by helicopter, and finally stretching the gigantic steel cables surely wasn"t an easy job. Ten years after construction commenced in 1988, the bridge was finished and the six-lane highway finally opened to traffic. The bridge has made the transportation from island to island much easier, so in addition to breaking a record, the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge achieves the main goal of a bridge: to connect two places. Text C The life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger"s career—consisting of a long short story called "Hapworth 16, 1924" that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods—overshadow the achievements of the first half. The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naive youthful narrator. But in " The Catcher in the Rye " Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers. Nearly everybody loves " The Catcher in the Rye ," and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger"s first collection of short stories, "Nine Stories." But the work that followed, such as " Franny and Zooey " and " Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction ," were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude. These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn"t "get it." The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of "Catcher"—highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader—but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality. The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel " The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ," by Laurence Sterne. There is the same close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading. This cultural and spiritual elitism got up the noses of many critics, but I think they overlooked the fact that Mr. Salinger was playing a game with his readers. The more truth-telling and pseudo-historical the stories became in form, the less credible became the content.

SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are four passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. PASSAGE ONE Conservationists on Tuesday appealed to countries to urgently address new threats to whales, dolphins and other cetaceans(鲸类动物) as climate change opens up previously inaccessible areas of the Arctic and industries move in to new areas. As emotional arguments broke out in the annual International Whaling Commission"s (IWC) conference between pro- and anti- whaling nations over the right of small, aboriginal groups to hunt a few whales each year, WWF appealed to countries to better regulate fishing and stop the oil and gas industries devastating populations. "A few thousand whales are killed each year because of whaling but 300000 whales, dolphins and other cetaceans are killed just in fishing gear. Now the greater threat is from the oil and gas industries. Cetaceans have so far been lucky because the Arctic has been mostly inaccessible but as climate change develops, new areas are opening up. These are some of the most important areas left for whales and cetaceans," said Wendy Eliott, head of the WWF delegation to the meeting in Panama. "It is essential these issues are addressed by the IWC. But whaling governments like Norway, Iceland and Japan refuse to acknowledge the conservation committee of the IWC and do not participate." Shell plans to begin drilling operations in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska as early as this month, and other oil companies are planning new off-shore drilling platforms in the Russian far east near the feeding area of critically endangered western gray whales. There are only an estimated 26 breeding females remaining and the oil-rich zone off Sakhalin Island is the only place where they can teach their calves to feed, said Elliott. "This could mark the beginning of a massive oil exploration effort," she said. The IWC, which is regularly torn by disputes, grants five-year permits to communities with a strong tradition of subsistence whaling. This year, several Caribbean countries, including St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as the U.S. A, Russia and Denmark are asking approval from the com-mission for their annual quota of whales to be renewed. Most whaling opponents do not try to block small-scale aboriginal hunts as they do not threaten larger whale populations. While governments argue that the use of whales and dolphins contributes to national food security, cultural preservation and sustainable livelihoods, some are seen by conservationists as ill-disguised commercial whaling. On Monday, pro-whaling countries led by Japan shot down a Latin American-led proposal to create a no-kill zone for whales in the southern Atlantic Ocean. Argentina, Brazil, South Africa and Uruguay put forward a proposal to declare the southern Atlantic a no-kill zone for whales, a largely symbolic measure as whaling ended there long ago. Thirty-eight countries voted in favor of the measure and 21 voted against, with two abstentions. Under commission rules, proposals need to enjoy a "consensus" of 75% support for approval. PASSAGE TWO While the 1970s pop psychotherapy movement focused on the importance of letting anger out, more recent research suggests that there"s a smarter, healthier way to react to life"s slings and arrows; with forgiveness. In a recent study, it was found that when individuals were about to forgive, they experienced greater joy, a more profound sense of control over life and less depression. Sound appealing. a) Why holding a grudge can be harmful? Your boyfriend blows you off for an important date. If you stay angry at him, you"ll probably get fresh flowers on your doorstep and maybe a fancy meal or two. But grudge-holding only gives us the illusion of power. If you hold on to that anger on a chronic basis, then it has power over you, eating away at your peace of mind and perhaps even your immune system. A study by Kathleen Lawler, Ph. D., a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee, confirms that people who are unable to forgive report more stress in their lives, more illness and more visits to the doctor than do forgiving folk. b) Going from a grudge to forgiveness A few ways to develop your capacity to turn the other cheek—Try writing a daily "forgiveness" reminder in your journal; it may sound corny, but it"s a great way to help gain control over your emotional life. —Write a letter to your offender, detailing exactly what"s bothering you. Then toss it. You"ll feel better, even if your message never reaches its intended target. —What, exactly, makes your blood boil? Forgiveness isn"t about swallowing anger or being a doormat. It"s not about forgetting, either. On the contrary, it"s about acknowledging an offence with your eyes wide open—and then releasing the anger. That means conjuring unempathy toward the person who hurt you, then focusing on the good parts of your life. c) An act of courage Still not convinced that it"s worth it to put your energies toward forgiving? Besides the benefits to your psyche and physical health, true forgiveness is a sign of strength and soulfulness. "It takes a lot of moral muscle to forgive," says Dr. Witvleit of Hope College in Michigan. The bottom line: forgiving ultimately benefits the forgiver more than the person who has done wrong. So start putting your own well-being first, and live life with as much interest and love as you can. PASSAGE THREE The theory of stellar evolution predicts that when the core of a star has used up its nuclear fuel, the core will collapse. If the star is about the size of the sun, it will turn into a degenerate dwarf star. If it is somewhat larger, it may undergo a supernova explosion that leaves behind a neutron star. But if the stellar core has a mass greater than about three solar masses, gravitational forces overwhelm nuclear forces and the core collapses. Since nuclear forces are the strongest repulsive forces known, nothing can stop the continued collapse of the star. A black hole in space is formed. Because of the intense gravitational forces near the black hole, nothing can escape from it, not even light. If we were to send a probe toward an isolated black hole, the probe would detect no radiation from the black hole. It would, however, sense a gravitational field like the one that would be produced by a normal star of the same mass. As the probe approached the black hole, the gravitational forces would increase inexorably(不可阻挡地). At a distance of a few thousand kilometers, the gravitational forces would literally be torn away from the side furthest away from the black hole. Eventually, at a distance of a few kilometers from the black bole, the particles that made up the probe would pass the point of no return, and the particles would be lost forever down the black hole. This point of no return is called the gravitational radius of the black hole. But how can we hope to observe such an object? Nature, herself, could conceivably provide us with a "probe" of a black hole: a binary star system in which one of the stars has become a black hole and is absorbing the mass of its companion star. As the matter of the companion star felt into the black hole, it would accelerate. This increased energy of motion would be changed into heat energy. Near the gravitational radius the matter would move at speeds close to the speed of light, and temperatures would range from tens of millions of degrees to perhaps as much as a billion degrees. At these temperatures, X and gamma radiation are produced. Further, since the matter near the gravitational radius would be orbiting the black hole about once every millisecond, the X radiation should show erratic, short-term variability unlike the regular or periodic variability associated with neutron stars and degenerate dwarfs. The X-ray source Cygnus X-1 fulfills these "experimental" conditions. It is part of a binary star system in which a blue superstar is orbiting an invisible companion star. This invisible companion has a mass greater than about nine times the mass of the Sun, and it is a strong X-ray source that shows rapid variations in the intensity of its X-ray flux. Most astronomers believe that Cygnus X-1 is a black hole but this belief is tempered(使缓和) with a dose of caution. The idea of a black hole is still difficult to swallow, but theorists can think of no other object that could explain the phenomenon of Cygnus X-1. For this reason, in most scientific papers, Cygnus X-1 is referred to simply as a black hole "candidate". PASSAGE FOUR Archaeologists using DNA testing said they have identified a mummy discovered more than a century ago as Queen Hatshepsut, Egypt"s most powerful female pharaoh. The discovery has not been independently reviewed by other experts. The mummy was discovered in 1903 in the Valley of the Kings, but it was left in place until two months ago. Archaeologists then took the mummy to the Cairo Museum for testing, said Egypt"s antiquities chief Zahi Hawass. Hawass has been searching for the queen for about a year, setting up a DNA lab in the basement of the Cairo Museum. The study was funded by The Discovery Channel, which is set to air an exclusive documentary on the find in July. Hawass said the key clue was a molar. It was found in a jar bearing the queen"s emblem and containing some of her well-preserved organs. The tooth fit a gap in the mummy"s jaw. Hawass" team is still conducting DNA testing that they hope could help confirm the find. "We are 100 percent certain" that the mummy is that of Hatshepsut, Hawass told The Associated Press. Hatshepsut ruled Egypt in the 15th century B.C. and was known for dressing like a man and wearing a false beard. When her reign ended, all traces of her disappeared. Her 22-year rule ended in 1453 B.C. and was the longest among ancient Egyptian queens. The mummy identified as Hatshepsut died in her 50s, Hawass said. He said she was obese and probably had diabetes and liver cancer. When the mummy was discovered, the left hand was positioned against her chest, which is a traditional sign of royalty in ancient Egypt. But other Egyptologists are not as certain that the mummy is Hatshepsut. Molecular biologist Scott Woodward, director of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Salt Lake City, was cautious about the announcement. "It"s a very difficult process to obtain DNA from a mummy," Woodward said. "To make a claim as to a relationship, you need other individuals from which you have obtained DNA, to make a comparison between the DNA sequences." Such DNA material would typically come from parents or grandparents. With female mummies, the most common type of DNA to look for is the mitochondrial DNA that reveals maternal lineage, Woodward said. Molecular geneticist Yehia Zakaria Gad, who is part of Hawass" team, said DNA samples were taken from the mummy"s pelvis and femur, so that more genetic tests can be run that compare the mummy to the queen"s grandmother, Amos Nefreteri, who was previously identified. Gad said preliminary results are "very encouraging." Molecular biologist Paul Evans of the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the discovery would be remarkable if the mummy is indeed Hatshepsut. "Hatshepsut is an individual who has a unique place in Egypt"s history. To have her identified is on the same magnitude as King Tut"s discovery," Evans said. Hatshepsut is believed to have stolen the throne from her young stepson, Thutmose Ⅲ. Hatshepsut"s funerary temple is located in ancient Thebes on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, a multicolumn sandstone temple built to serve as tribute to her power. But after her death, her name was erased from the records in what is believed to have been her stepson"s revenge. She was one of the most prolific builder pharaohs of ancient Egypt, commissioning hundreds of projects throughout both Upper and Lower Egypt. Almost every major museum in the world today has a collection of Hatshepsut statues.

SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section, there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each questions, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE Executive coaching is primarily concerned with confidential one-to-one discussions between the coach and the executive. It is aimed at performance improvement. Primary needs are diagnosed and agreed upon, a "developmental-action plan" is drawn up, the skill base of the executive is broadened by coaching, and then the new skill sets are tested in the workplace under the guidance of the coach. Sometimes, these needs involve team coaching, but individual coaching is the normal starting point. The coach needs to guide the executive outside his or her comfort zone in order to improve performance. A coaching assignment normally focuses on two or three developmental needs of the individual, and lasts for 6 to 12 months. However, it sometimes involves multiple assignments aimed at bringing about cultural change in an organization. For example, a new chief executive may want to change the culture of his organization. He could then hire a coach, and brief him or her to change the mindset of his direct subordinates on a one-to-one basis. Compared with traditional management training, which is typically related to broadbased organizational change, sometimes of a technical nature, executive coaching is targeted to individual and small-group change. The primary focus of coaching is often behavioral and leadership change, and is rarely of a technical nature. The difference between coaching and training is that coaching is one-to-one, highly confidential and over 6—12 months, whereas training is typically of a short-term, group-work-shop nature. Referring to the key ingredients for enhanced performance and team success, business coaching has a lot to learn from sports. According to sports coaches, a coach is a catalyst for change, and is not paid to preserve the status quo, but to lift people out of their comfort zone, so that they grow and develop. The coach must stay in touch with the state of the art and extract from it what is relevant. All sports coaches believe passionately in the power of the team to lift performance not by just a little, but by 100%. Considerable energy is devoted to defining goals, roles, a code of conduct and to fostering group dynamics in order to optimize team productivity. Both success and failure are learning opportunities, and there is a severity in their cold-eyed, weekly analysis, which business has yet to develop. Top athletes scrutinize both success and failure with their coach to extract lessons from them, but they are never distracted from longer-term goals. To be a champion athlete means developing an elitist attitude—not involving arrogance, but rather an unceasing desire to learn and improve. They never accept second best, but always strive for what has not yet been achieved. There must be a sport/life balance, so that athletes are not obsessed by their goals, and thus lack a sense of perspective to cope with inevitable failure or occasional success, or the ability to recharge their batteries outside the sporting arena. PASSAGE TWO More and more young athletes are taking part in risky, adventurous activities called "extreme sports", or "X-sports". Its philosophy is to get as close to the edge as possible. In the past, young athletes would play hockey or baseball. Today, they want risk and excitement—the closer to the edge the better. They snowboard over cliffs and mountain-bike down steep mountains. They windsurf near hurricanes, go white-water rafting through rapids, and bungee-jump from towers. Extreme sports started as an alternative to more expensive sports. A city kid who didn"t have the money to buy expensive sports equipment could get a skateboard and have fun. But now it has become a whole new area of sports, with specialized equipment and high levels of skill. There"s even a special Olympics for extreme sports, called the Winter X-Games, which includes snow mountain biking and ice climbing. An Extreme Games competition is held each summer in Rhode Island. It features sports such as sky surfing, where people jump from airplanes with surfboards attached to their feet. What makes extreme sports so popular? "People love the excitement," says Murray Nussbaum, who sells sports equipment. "City people want to be outdoors on the weekend and do something challenging. The new equipment is so much better that people can take more risks without getting hurt." An athlete adds, "Sure there"s a risk, but that"s part of the appeal. Once you go mountain biking or snowboarding, it"s impossible to go back to bike riding or skiing. It"s just too boring." Now even the older crowd is starting to join in. Every weekend a group of friends in their early 30s get together. During the week they work as computer programmers in the same office. On Sundays they rent mountain bikes that cost $2,000 each and ride down steep mountains together. Extreme sports are certainly not for everyone. Most people still prefer to play baseball or basketball or watch sports on TV. But extreme sports are definitely gaining in popularity. PASSAGE THREE People have been painting pictures for at least 30,000 years. The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals. They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill. Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain. No one knows why they were painted there. Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals. Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures. About 5,000 years ago the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as a kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet. The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture-writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was buried. Some of these pictures are like modern comic-strip (连环漫画) stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it. By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world. These days, we can write down a story, or record information, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawings, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting. PASSAGE FOUR One August afternoon, Peaches gave birth to 14 puppies. The kids were thrilled. But it crossed my mind once or twice that I had no idea how we"d find good homes for so many adorable mutts. The father was a purebred golden retriever (寻回猎犬). And not until now had I wondered why Roberta, who gave Peaches to us, had named her in the plural. Peaches didn"t resemble a peach, either. She was jet black with long retriever hair, an agreeable blend of many breeds. But she was indeed a peach, although once when her round pups were lined against her tummy, we affectionately called her "Pea Pod," and that name pretty much stuck. The kids and I had a blast with the pups , but as our cuddly friends grew, the cleanup job on the backyard lawn increased as well. I usually ended up with the chore after the kids had left for school in the morning, and after eight weeks the job was getting old. Besides, the time had come to start to get them settled into permanent homes. So one weekend the kids and I piled into the van, puppies in the rear, playfully biting each other"s ears and tails, and we headed for the local humane society. But in northern California at that time, shelters were full of animals, and if they weren"t adopted quickly they were put to sleep. I tried stifling that bit of information, but it wouldn"t stay submerged; I cried the whole way. When we arrived at the shelter, I dried my tears and smoothed my puffy eyes. I walked alone up to the counter and cheerfully announced I had 14 wonderful puppies for them. The woman, without looking up from her paperwork, roared, "We don"t take puppies." I cried all the way home, this time with tears of relief. So I placed an ad for "free puppies" in the newspaper. I don"t think we got a single phone call. In the meantime, the kids and pups grew more inseparable. Only Happy and Callie, our two cats, were allowed to spend the nights inside, but from the giggling and the look of the blankets in the morning, some pups had been overlooked at bedtime. The gate on our backyard fence opened onto the elementary school"s grass field. Every afternoon, scores of kids arrived to play soccer. The children loved it when their games were over, for then I would open the floodgate, releasing 14 roly-poly, tail-wagging puppies for them to play with. Surely a parent wouldn"t mind taking one or two home? The parents loved the pups, too; but their disciplined ability to decline our offering amazed me. Certainly the divine plan could not have been for us to keep all 14 puppies, even if they had been given perfect names. I desperately searched the heavens for a solution. The odd idea came to put another ad in the paper, this time asking $10 for each puppy. It worked. Placing a value on the mutts somehow had an effect. I made a deal with the kids: If they would prepare the puppy food and clean up the yard every day until all the puppies had homes, I would give them each, in turn, $10 for every pup sold. When he was about 11 weeks old, the last puppy—Boots, with four white socks—had gone. It was a sad day; the yard was much too quiet. So Saturday morning I had the kids get their money jars out. They proudly carried their savings as I drove them to their favorite place—the toy store. The dog pound might have seemed easier. But I liked this ending much better.

Who spilled the drink all over David?

{{B}}TEXT I{{/B}} {{B}} Table Manners{{/B}} A Westerner doesn't leave his napkin (paper or cloth) on the table. He puts it on his lap where it's supposed to protect his clothes from spilled food or used to wipe his hands or mouth when necessary. A Westerner doesn't put his own utensils (fork, knife, spoon) into a serving bowl. He uses the utensil in the bowl (generally a large spoon or fork) to put some of the food on his own plate, and then returns the serving utensil to the bowl. A Westerner doesn't spit food anywhere. If he has bones in his mouth, he takes them out with his fingers and places them on the edge of his plate, never on the table. A Westerner doesn't drink soup or other liquids out of a bowl. He uses a spoon. A Westerner doesn't reach across the table or in front of another person. He asks someone to pass whatever he wants. A Westerner doesn't put nut shells, fruit peelings, etc., on the floor. He puts them in a plate or ashtray or, lacking these, on a table top.

{{I}} Questions 29 and 30 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.{{/I}}

What is the most likely reason for Tony to visit Jane?

Decide which of the choices given below would best complete the passage if inserted in the corresponding blanks. Mark the best choice for each blank on your ANSWER SHEET. If you were to begin a new job tomorrow, you would bring with you some basic strengths and weaknesses. Success or{{U}} (31) {{/U}} in your work would depend, to{{U}} (32) {{/U}}great extent,{{U}} (33) {{/U}}your ability to use your strengths and weaknesses to the best{{U}} (34) {{/U}}. Of the utmost importance is your attitude. A person{{U}} (35) {{/U}} begins a job convinces that he isn't going to like it or is{{U}} (36) {{/U}}that he is going to fail is exhibiting a weakness which can only hinder his success. On the other hand, a person who is secure{{U}} (37) {{/U}} his belief that he is probably as capable of doing the work as anyone else{{U}} (38) {{/U}} who is willing to make a cheerful{{U}} (39) {{/U}}at it possesses a certain strength of purpose. The chances are that he will do well.{{U}} (40) {{/U}}the prerequisite skills for a particular job is strength. Lacking those skills is obviously a weakness. A bookkeeper who can't add or a carpenter who can't cut a straight line with a saw{{U}} (41) {{/U}}hopeless eases. This book has been designed to help you capitalize{{U}} (42) {{/U}}the strength and overcome the{{U}} (43) {{/U}}that you bring to the job of learning. But in order to measure your development, you must first{{U}} (44) {{/U}}stock of where you stand now. {{U}}(45) {{/U}} we get further along in the book, we'll be{{U}} (46) {{/U}}in some detail with specific processes for developing and strengthening{{U}} (47) {{/U}}skills. However,{{U}} (48) {{/U}} begin with, you should pause to{{U}} (49) {{/U}}your present strengths and weaknesses in three areas that are critical to your success or failure in school: your {{U}}(50) {{/U}}, your reading and communication skills, and your study habits.

{{I}}Questions 21 and 22 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.{{/I}}

{{I}} Questions 27 and 28 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.{{/I}}

{{B}}TEXT E{{/B}} Democrats following the presidential campaign are divided into two factions these days: people who are frustrated that John Kerry isn't crushing President Bush in polls, and people who say Kerry is in great shape compared to past challengers. "Gas prices are up, the stock market is down, Iraq is a mess, and John Kerry is saying to himself, 'How am I going to beat this guy?'" David Letterman joked Monday night on CBS, summing up the sentiments of the first group. Kerry's team says it's amazing that he's fled with a wartime president after a $60 million ad campaign against him. "They (the Bush campaign) thought they would unleash this and we would be standing before you dead. That is not the case," Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, said in an interview Tuesday. Bush has been under siege for weeks over violence against Americans in Iraq and the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal. Despite Bush's difficult stretch, most polls show the presidential race tied. Kerry's inability to break away, along with perceived missteps by him and his campaign, has fueled so many critiques that online commentator Mickey Kaus of Slate has started a "Dem Panic Watch" — a catalog of columns and stories about everything from Kerry team infighting to advice to lighten up. "I've always thought Kerry was a terrible candidate," Kaus, a Democrat, said in an interview. "I think he is proving that ... now. Democrats are definitely panicking." But Paul Begala, an architect of Bill Clinton's 1992 victory, said Democrats "whining about Kerry have no sense of history, no sense of strategy." Case in point: Clinton was in third place behind President George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot at this point in 1992.