单选题. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Part One of the interview.1.

单选题　　(1) Like many historical films, Amadeus is far from a faithful account of what is known about the period and the people that it portrays. Events are exaggerated, condensed and simplified, and the complexity of real characters is reduced to suit the needs of a dramatic contrast between good and evil. Such historical liberties are often bemoaned by experts, but few have seemed to mind the wayward story points of Amadeus. This is no doubt partly attributable to the film’s high entertainment value; it is an unusually lively and funny historical film. It revels in the boyish humor and high spirits of its main character, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 -1791), played with jubilant gusto by Tom Hulce. But the film’s appeal is also attributable to Mozart’s music. The composer’s vulgar hijinks (狂 欢作乐) serve as a contrast to the transcendent beauty of his music, beautifully performed on the soundtrack by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Thus, even the most stringent historical purists couldn’t help but find something to enjoy in Amadeus.　　(2) For all its liberties, the story is actually based on a real rumor that circulated in Vienna in the 1820s. While gravely ill, the rival composer Antonio Salieri (1750 -1825) confessed he had murdered Mozart decades earlier by poisoning him. Salieri was suffering from dementia (痴呆) at the time of this confession, and he later withdrew it, but some—including Mozart’s widow Constanze—chose to believe the claim. More than 150 years later, the English playwright Peter Shaffer based the story of Amadeus not just on Salieri’s confession but also the idea that Salieri had suffered from a deep and bitter jealousy of Mozart throughout the ten years that they both lived and worked as composers in Vienna. In the fun-loving Mozart, the story goes, Salieri saw a true genius—one who made his own talent and accomplishments appear mediocre—and this drove him on a vendetta (宿怨) that ultimately culminated in murder.　　(3) Shaffer’s story makes for great drama, but it is, of course, biased against Salieri. In fact, at the time, Salieri was regarded as the more accomplished musician and composer. From the 1770s through the 1790s, he composed dozens of operas, many of them proving popular and considered innovative. A mark of his prominence was his appointment to the influential post of Kapellmeister, or musical director, to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Salieri was also a teacher whose pupils included Ludwig Van Beethoven, Franz Liszt and Franz Schubert. In his private life, he may not have had Mozart’s exuberance but nor was he the lonely and celibate man played with such convincing severity by F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus. Salieri was married at the time he knew Mozart, and he fathered no fewer than eight children.　　(4) If Salieri had little reason to fear or resent Mozart’s success, there was naturally a degree of rivalry between two men working in the same profession and in the same city. Salieri (born near Verona) and Mozart (born in Salzburg) belonged to separate musical groups, and Italian and German opera fell into and out of favor during this period. The composers were therefore vying for work, including the prestigious post of musical tutor to the Princess of Wiirttemberg, which Salieri successfully attained. As composers, they saw their operas’ debut side by side, yet there is little evidence of any animosity between them. Mozart did complain in a letter to his father that Joseph II favored Salieri over all other composers, but that observation was an accurate one. Both Mozart and his father suspected that, behind the scenes, Salieri tried to undermine Mozart’s success, but these were hardly unusual suspicions in a field so reliant on patronage. In public, fellow composers reported that Mozart and Salieri were friendly with another. Shortly after the premiere of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Salieri attended a performance with Mozart, and applauded warmly and vigorously. Thus, any ill feeling between Mozart and Salieri was borne by the former rather than the latter—contrary to what is strongly depicted in Amadeus—and it stemmed from Salieri’s status and success rather than his perceived mediocrity.　　(5) Mozart’s resentments were those of a younger man struggling for position in the world. Although he had talent, he spent many years struggling to find a suitable post or patronage. He and his father travelled widely during his youth, seeking a distinguished appointment but finding mainly low pay and occasionally humiliating circumstances. It was in the period after 1781, when Mozart defied his father and decided to live and work independently in Vienna that his career flourished. In the space of ten years, he found great success with the operas The Abduction from Seraglio (1782), The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and The Magic Flute (1791). These were composed alongside his piano concertos, symphonies and chamber music, and together with his work as a performer and teacher, his success brought a high income. Mozart’s money troubles were the result of excessive spending, and his volatile temperament, rather than any malicious schemes against him. His death, at the age of 35, was not considered suspicious at the time as he had been ill for weeks with a fever. While it is true that he had a commoner’s funeral, in 18th-century Vienna this was not unusual for a man of non-aristocratic standing. It certainly was not a mark of his downfall or ignominy, as implied by the film. At his death, Mozart was second in stature only to Salieri as Vienna’s most prominent musician and composer.　　(6) The drama of Amadeus stems not from historical accuracies, but from our contemporary knowledge that Mozart’s music and reputation have survived for centuries—and continued to find new, zesty audiences—while Salieri’s name and work quickly faded. Mozart’s secondary status during his own lifetime thus appears unjust and unwarranted, and he is invested with the role of the struggling artist and unappreciated genius. This may be shaky history, but the film has enough laughter, conflict, romance and tragedy to please any opera lover, except perhaps for Salieri himself, who undoubtedly would have told the tale in an altogether different key.

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》PASSAGE THREE1 It was delightful to be in such a place, after long weeks of daily and nightly familiarity with miners’ cabins—with all which this implies of dirt floor, never-made beds, tin

单选题. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen 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 (1)If you want to see what it takes to set up an entirely new financial center (and what is best avoided), head for Dubai. This tiny, sun-baked patch of sand in the midst of a war-torn and isolated region started with few advantages other than a long tradition as a hub for Middle Eastern trade routes. (2)But over the past few years Dubai has built a new financial center from nothing. Dozens of the world's leading financial institutions have opened offices in its new financial district, hoping to grab a portion of the $2 trillion-plus investment from the Gulf. Some say there is more hype than business, but few big firms are willing to risk missing out. (3)Dealmaking in Dubai centers around The Gate, a cube-shaped structure at the heart of the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). A brainchild of the ruling A1-Maktoum family, the DIFC is a tax-free zone for wholesale financial services. Firms licensed for it are not approved to serve the local financial market. The DIFC aims to become the leading wholesale financial centre in the Gulf, offering one-stop shopping for everything from stocks to sukuk (Islamic) bonds, investment banking and insurance. In August the Dubai bourse made a bid for a big stake in OMX, a Scandinavian exchange operator that also sells trading technology to many of the world's exchanges. (4)Dubai may have generated the biggest splash thus far, but much of the Gulf region has seen a surge of activity in recent years. Record flows of petrodollars have enabled governments in the area to spend billions on infrastructure projects and development. Personal wealth too is growing rapidly. According to Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, the number of people in the Middle East with more than $1m in financial assets rose by nearly 12% last year, to 300,000. (5)Qatar, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi also have big aspirations for their financial hubs, though they keep a lower profile than Dubai. They, too, are trying to learn from more established financial centers what they must do to achieve the magic mix of transparent regulation, good infrastructure and low or no taxes. Some of the fiercest competition among them is for talent. Most English-speaking professionals have to be imported. (6)Each of the Gulf hubs, though, has its own distinct characteristics. Abu Dhabi is trying to present itself as a more cultured, less congested alternative to neighboring Dubai, and is building a huge Guggenheim museum. Energy-rich Qatar is an important hub for infrastructure finance, with ambitions to develop further business in wealth management, private equity, retail banking and insurance. Bahrain is well established in Islamic banking, but it is facing new competition from London, Kuala Lumpur and other hubs that have caught on to Islamic finance. "If you've got one string to your bow and suddenly someone takes it away, you're in trouble," says Stuart Pearce of the Qatar Financial Centre about Bahrain. (7)Saudi Arabia, by far the biggest economy in the Gulf, is creating a cluster of its own economic zones, including King Abdullah City, which is aimed at foreign investors seeking a presence in the country. Trying to cut down on the number of "suitcase bankers" who fly in from nearby centers rather than live in the country, the Saudis now require firms working with them to have local business licenses. Yet the bulk of the region's money is still flowing to established financial centers in Europe, America and other parts of Asia. (8)The financial hubs there offer lessons for aspiring centers in other parts of the developing world. Building the confidence of financial markets takes more than new skyscrapers, tax breaks and incentives. The DIFC, for instance, initially suffered from suspicions of government meddling and from a high turnover among senior executives. Trading on its stock market remains thin, and the government seems unwilling to float its most successful companies there. Making the desert bloom was never easy. PASSAGE TWO (1)Most people have experienced the feeling, after a taxing mental work-out, that they cannot be bothered to make any more decisions. If they are forced to, they may do so intuitively, rather than by reasoning. Such apathy is often put down to tiredness, but a study published recently in Psychological Science suggests there may be more to it than that. Whether reason or intuition is used may depend simply on the decision-maker's blood-sugar level—which is, itself, affected by the process of reasoning. (2)E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University discovered this by doing some experiments on that most popular of laboratory animals, the impoverished undergraduate. They asked 121 psychology students who had volunteered for the experiment to watch a silent video of a woman being interviewed that had random words appearing in bold black letters every ten seconds along the perimeter of the video. This was the part of the experiment intended to be mentally taxing. Half of the students were told to focus on the woman, to try to understand what she was saying, and to ignore the words along the perimeter. The other half were given no instructions. Those that bad to focus were exerting considerable self-control not to look at the random words. (3)When the video was over, half of each group was given a glass of lemonade with sugar in it and haft was given a glass of lemonade with sugar substitute. Twelve minutes later, when the glucose from the lemonade with sugar in it bad had time to enter the students' blood, the researchers administered a decision-making task that was designed to determine if the participant was using intuition or reason to make up his mind. (4)The students were asked to think about where they wanted to live in the coming year and given three accommodation options that varied both in size and distance from the university campus. Two of the options were good, but in different ways: one was far from the campus, but very large; the other was close to campus, but smaller. The third option was a decoy, similar to one of the good options, but obviously not quite as good. If it was close to campus and small, it was not quite as close as the good close option and slightly smaller. If it was far from campus and large, it was slightly smaller than the good large option and slightly farther away. (5)Psychologists have known for a long time that having a decoy option in a decision-making task draws people to choose a reasonable option that is similar to the decoy. Dr. Masicampo and Dr. Baumeister suspected that students who had been asked to work hard during the video and then been given a drink without any sugar in it would be more likely to rely on intuition when making this decision than those from the other three groups. And that is what happened; 64% of them were swayed by the decoy. Those who had either not had to exert mental energy during the showing of the video or had been given glucose in their lemonade, used reason in their decision-making task and were less likely to be swayed by the decoy. (6)It is not clear why intuition is independent of glucose. It could be that humans inherited a default nervous system from other mammals that was similar to intuition, and that could make snap decisions about whether to fight or flee regardless of how much glucose was in the body. (7)Whatever the reason, the upshot seems to be that thinking is, indeed, hard work. And important decisions should not be made on an empty stomach. PASSAGE THREE (1)Considering how jazz is transcribed in Chinese (jueshi), you may be misled into assuming that it is an aristocratic cultural form. Nothing could be further from the truth. It originated among black Americans at the end of the 19th century, at a time when they occupied the very bottom of the American social heap. (2)So how has something that was created by a once downtrodden and despised minority acquired a central place in today's American culture? Perhaps the essence of America is that you could never get two Americans to agree on just what that might be. After thinking about it for a while, we might chuckle and say, "Hmm, seems like being American is a bit more complicated than we thought." Certainly things like individualism, success (the "American Dream"), innovation and tolerance stand out. But these things come together because of our ability to work with one another and find common purpose no matter how diverse we might be. (3)Some, like African-American writer Ralph Ellison, believe that jazz captures the essence of America. For good reason, for in jazz all of the characteristics I mentioned above come together. The solos are a celebration of individual brilliance that can't take place without the group efforts of the rhythm section. Beyond that, though, jazz has a connection to the essence of America in a much more fundamental way. It is an expression of the African roots of American culture, a musical medium that exemplifies the culture of the Africans that came to dominate much of what is American. (4)That's right, in many respects America's roots are in Africa. Read Ralph Ellison's perceptive description of the transformation of separate African and European cultures at the hands of the slaves: (5)"...the dancing of those slaves who, looking through the windows of a plantation manor house from the yard, imitated the steps so gravely performed by the masters within and then added to them their own special flair, burlesquing the white folks and then going on to force the steps into a choreography uniquely their own. The whites, looking out at the activity in the yard, thought that they were being flattered by imitation and were amused by the incongruity of tattered blacks dancing courtly steps, while missing completely the fact that before their eyes a European cultural form was becoming Americanized, undergoing a metamorphosis through the mocking activity of a people partially sprung from Africa." Jazz brought together elements from Africa and Europe, fusing them into a new culture, an expression unique to the Americas. (6)Out of this fusion came an idea that we Americans believe central to our identity: tolerance. Both cultures represented in Ellison's passage eventually came to realize each other's value. Americans acknowledge that in diversity is our strength. We learn every day that other cultures and peoples may make valuable contributions to our way of life. Jazz music is the embodiment of this ideal, combining elements from African and European culture into a distinctly American music. (7)Jazz reflects two contradictory facets of American life. On the one hand it is a team effort, where every musician is completely immersed in what the group does together, listening to each of the other players and building on their contributions to create a musical whole. On the other hand, the band features a soloist who is an individual at the extreme, a genius like Charlie Parker who explores musical territory where no one has ever gone before. In the same sense, American life is also a combination of teamwork and individualism, a combination of individual brilliance with the ability to work with others. PASSAGE FOUR (1)The first intimation, apparently, was when three-year-old Yves told his mother that her shoes did not go with her dress. They were at home in Oran, a dull commercial town in French-ruled Algeria, where Yves's father sold insurance and ran a chain of cinemas, and Mrs. Mathieu-Saint-Laurent cut an elegant figure in colonial society. Oran had once enjoyed some small renown as the westernmost outpost of the Ottoman empire, and was to gain more later as the setting for Albert Camus's "The Plague". But after 1936 it had a genius in the making. (2)So, at any rate, the tribute-payers are saying. "Pure genius", "the world's greatest fashion designer", "the most important designer of the 20th century": such superlatives have been lavished on Yves Saint Laurent for years, and perhaps they are not meant to be taken at face value. The fashion business is, after all, a part of the entertainment industry, where sycophancy, exaggeration and gushing insincerity are not unknown. Mr. Saint Laurent fitted perfectly into it. (3)He was, for a start, quite literally a showman, a shy and stage-frightened one, but what shows he could put on! Dazzling girls strutted down the catwalk, wearing startling creations of gauze, or velvet, or feathers, or not much at all. He was an artist, a delicate, attenuated figure who drew his inspiration from the pages of Marcel Proust, the paintings of Braque, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh, and the counsels of his assistant, Loulou de la Falaise. And he was troubled: by drink, by drugs and by physical frailty. He teetered perpetually on the brink of emotional collapse and sometimes fell over it. (4)In 1961, when Mr. Saint Laurent set up shop in Paris under his own name, most couturiers were not quite like this. But the times were propitious for something new. He had by then done a stint at the House of Dior, whose reputation he had restored with some dramatic designs and, in 1958, after the famous founder had died, an iconoclastic collection of his own. The summons to do military service, a ghastly mental dégringolade and dismissal from Dior then intervened, and might have cut short a great career had he not gone into partnership with Mr. Bergé. As it was, a series of innovations followed, with Mr. Saint Laurent responsible for the designs, Mr. Bergé for the business, including the scents, scarves, unguents and over 100 other products marketed with a YSL label. (5)The dress designs now started flying off Mr. Saint Laurent's drawing board, though increasingly of ten with the aid of helpers. Many were short-lived, this being fashion and fashion being, by definition, ephemeral. But two departures were to last. One was that haute couture, hitherto available only to the very rich or vicariously through magazines and newspapers, should be sold worldwide in ready-to-wear shops at a fraction of the posh price. The other was that women should be put into men's clothes—safari outfits, smoking jackets, trench coats and, most enduringly, trouser suits. Women, for some reason, saw this as liberation. (6)He was always imaginative, talking inspiration not just from artists like Mondrian but also from Africa and Russian ballet. He was also capable of creating the absurd, producing, for example, a dress with conical bosoms more likely to impale than to support. But his clothes, however outré, were usually redeemed by wonderful colors and exquisite tailoring. Above all, they were stylish, and the best have certainly stood the test of time. (7)That is no doubt because most were unusually wearable, even comfortable. At a reverential extravaganza in (and outside) the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2002, soon after Mr. Saint Laurent had announced his retirement, many of the guests wore a lovingly preserved YSL garment. The　"anarchist", as Mr. Bergé recently called him, had by now become more conservative, seeing the merits of "timeless classics" and lamenting the banishment of "elegance and beauty" in fashion. He believed, he said, in "the silence of clothing". Yet perhaps he must take some of the blame for the new cacophony. The trouser suit prepared the way for the off-track track suit; and lesser designers, believing they share his flair and originality, now think they have a license to make clothes that are merely idiotic. Perhaps it would have happened without him. In an industry largely devoid of any sense of the ridiculous, he was usually an exception. He believed in beauty, recognized it in women and, amid the meretricious, created his share of it.1. According to the passage, Dubai has built a new financial center ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on the second interview.6.

单选题. Section A In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen 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 If Shakira, a Colombian pop star, marries her boyfriend, the Spanish national footballer Gerard Piqué, the only unusual things about it would be that she is even more famous than he is and ten years older. Otherwise, theirs would be just a celebrity example of one of the world's biggest social trends: the rise of international marriages—that is, involving couples of different nationalities. A hundred years ago, such alliances were confined to the elite of the elite. When Randolph Churchill married Jennie Jerome of New York, it seemed as if they had stepped from the pages of a Henry James novel: brash, spirited American heiress peps up the declining fortunes of Britain's aristocracy. Now, such alliances have become almost commonplace. To confine examples to politicians only: the French President Nicolas Sarkozy is married to the Italian-born Carla Bruni and his Prime Minister Francois Fillon has a Welsh wife, Penelope Clarke. Nelson Mandela is married to Graca Machel (from Mozambique). Denmark's new Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is married to a Briton, Stephen Kinnock. And two leading female politicians of Asian countries, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and India's Sonia Gandhi, are both widows from international marriages. In rich countries alone such unions number at least 10 million. International marriages matter partly because they reflect—and result from—globalisation. As people holiday or study abroad, or migrate to live and work, the visitors meet and marry locals. Their unions are symbols of cultural integration, and battlefields for conflicts over integration. Few things help immigrants come to terms with their new country more than becoming part of a local family. Though the offspring of such unions may struggle with the barriers of prejudice, at their best international marriages reduce intolerance directly themselves, and indirectly through their offspring. Defining what counts as international is tricky too. A wedding of a local man and a foreign-born bride is easy. But the marriage of two foreigners in a third country sometimes counts and sometimes doesn't. Trickiest of all is how to treat the marriage of a second-generation immigrant who has citizenship of a host country (say, the child of a Moroccan in France or a Mexican in America). If such a person marries a native Frenchwoman or an American, that usually does not count as international, even though it is an alliance across ethnic lines. Conversely, if he marries a girl from his parents' country of origin, that does count as international—but this is not a marriage across an ethnic divide and may indicate isolation not assimilation. Belatedly, answers to these questions of scale and definition are coming, chiefly thanks to the efforts of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), a professional association of demographers, and, especially, of Doo-Sub Kim, a professor at Hanyang University in Seoul who chairs its panel on cross-border marriages. Global figures remain sketchy, but marriage patterns in Asia and Europe, at least, are becoming clearer. Some tentative, often surprising, conclusions are emerging. Asia is the part of the world where cross-border marriages have been rising most consistently. According to Gavin Jones of the National University of Singapore, 5% of marriages in Japan in 2008-2009 included a foreign spouse (with four times as many foreign wives as husbands). Before 1980, the share had been below 1%. In South Korea, over 10% of marriages included a foreigner in 2010, up from 3.5% in 2000. In both countries, the share of cross-border marriages seems to have stabilised lately, perhaps as a result of the global economic slowdown. International marriages have played a significant role in modifying the ethnic homogeneity of East Asian countries. International marriages are common in much of Europe, too. Calculations by Giampaolo Lanzieri, an Italian demographer, show that in France the proportion of international marriage rose from about 10% in 1996 to 16% in 2009. In Germany, the rise is a little lower, from 11.3% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2010. Some smaller countries have much higher levels. Nearly half the marriages in Switzerland are international ones, up from a third in 1990. Around one in five marriages in Sweden, Belgium and Austria involves a foreign partner. (此文选自 The Economist) Passage Two In June of 1836, Nathan Rothschild left London for Frankfurt to attend the wedding of his son Lionel to his niece (Lionel's cousin Charlotte), and to discuss with his brothers the entry of Nathan's children into the family business. Nathan was probably the richest man in the world, at least in liquid assets. He could, needless to say, afford whatever he pleased. Then 59 years old, Nathan was in good health if somewhat portly, a bundle of energy, untiring in his devotion to work and indomitable of temperament. When he left London, however, he was suffering from an inflammation on his lower back, toward the base of his spine. (A German physician diagnosed it as a boil, but it may have been an abscess. ) In spite of medical treatment, this festered and grew painful. No matter. Nathan got up from his sickbed and attended the wedding. Had he been bedridden, the wedding would have been celebrated in the hotel. For all his suffering, Nathan continued to deal with business matters, with his wife taking dictation. Meanwhile the great Dr. Travers was summoned from London, and when he could not cure the problem, a leading German surgeon was called in, presumably to open and clean the wound. Nothing availed; the poison spread; and on 28 July 1836, Nathan died. We are told that the Rothschild pigeon post took the message back to London. He is dead. Nathan Rothschild died probably of staphylococcus or streptococcus septicemia—what used to be called blood poisoning. In the absence of more detailed information, it is hard to say whether the boil (abscess) killed him or secondary contamination from the surgeons' knives. This was before the germ theory existed, hence before any notion of the importance of cleanliness. No bactericides then, much less antibiotics. And so the man who could buy anything died, of a routine infection easily cured today for anyone who could find his way to a doctor or a hospital, even a pharmacy. Medicine has made enormous strides since Nathan Rothschild's time. But better, more efficacious medicine—the treatment of illness and repair of injury—is only part of the story. Much of the increased life expectancy of these years has come from gains in prevention, cleaner living rather than better medicine. Clean water and expeditious waste removal, plus improvements in personal cleanliness, have made all the difference. For a long time the great killer was gastrointestinal infection, transmitted from waste to hands to food to digestive tract; and this unseen but deadly enemy, ever present, was reinforced from time to time by epidemic microbes such as the vibrio of cholera. The best avenue of transmission was the common privy, where contact with wastes was fostered by want of paper for cleaning and lack of washable underclothing. Who lives in unwashed woolens—and woolens do not wash well—will itch and scratch. So hands were dirty, and the great mistake was failure to wash before eating. This was why those religious groups that prescribed washing—the Jews, the Muslims—had lower disease and death rates; which did not always count to their advantage. People were easily persuaded that if fewer Jews died, it was because they had poisoned Christian wells. The answer was found, not in changed religious belief or doctrine, but in industrial innovation. The principal product of the new technology that we know as the Industrial Revolution was cheap, washable cotton; and along with it mass-produced soap made of vegetable oils. For the first time, the common man could afford underwear, once known as body linen because that was the washable fabric that the well-to-do wore next to their skin. He (or she) could wash with soap and even bathe, although too much bathing was seen as a sign of dirtiness. Why would clean people have to wash so often? No matter. Personal hygiene changed drastically, so that commoners of the late 19th and early 20th century often lived cleaner than the kings and queens of a century earlier. The third element in the decline of disease and death was better nutrition. This owed much to increases in food supply, even more to better, faster transport. Famines, often the product of local shortages, became rarer; diet grew more varied and richer in animal protein. These changes translated among other things into taller, stronger physiques. This was a much slower process than those medical and hygienic gains that could be instituted from above, in large part because it depended on habit and taste as well as income. As late as World War Ⅰ, the Turks who fought the British expeditionary force at Gallipoli were struck by the difference in height between the steak- and mutton- fed troops from Australia and New Zealand and the stunted youth of British mill towns. And anyone who follows immigrant populations from poor countries into rich will note that the children are taller and better knit than their parents. (此文选自 The New York Times) Passage Three The Japanese say they suffer from an economic disease called "structural pessimism" Overseas too, there is a tendency to see Japan as a harbinger of all that is doomed in the economies of the euro zone and America—even though figures released on November 14th show its economy grew by an annualised 6% in the third quarter, rebounding quickly from the March tsunami and nuclear disaster. Look dispassionately at Japan's economic performance over the past ten years, though, and "the second lost decade", if not the first, is a misnomer. Much of what tarnishes Japan's image is the result of demography—more than half its population is over 45—as well as its poor policy in dealing with it. Even so, most Japanese have grown richer over the decade. In aggregate, Japan's economy grew at half the pace of America's between 2001 and 2010. Yet if judged by growth in GDP per person over the same period, then Japan has outperformed America and the euro zone. In part this is because its population has shrunk whereas America's population has increased. Though growth in labour productivity fell slightly short of America's from 2000 to 2008, total factor productivity, a measure of how a country uses capital and labour, grew faster, according to the Tokyo-based Asian Productivity Organisation. Japan's unemployment rate is higher than in 2000, yet it remains about half the level of America and Europe. Besides supposed stagnation, the two other curses of the Japanese economy are debt and deflation. Yet these also partly reflect demography and can be overstated. People often think of Japan as an indebted country. In fact, it is the world's biggest creditor nation, boasting ￥253 trillion ($ 3.3 trillion) in net foreign assets. To be sure, its government is a large debtor; its net debt as a share of GDP is one of the highest in the OECD. However, the public debt has been accrued not primarily through wasteful spending or "bridges to nowhere", but because of ageing, says the IMF. Social-security expenditure doubled as a share of GDP between 1990 and 2010 to pay rising pensions and health-care costs. Over the same period tax revenues have shrunk. Falling tax revenues are a problem. The flip side, though, is that Japan has the lowest tax take of any country in the OECD, at just 17% of GDP. That gives it plenty of room to manoeuvre. Takatoshi Ito, an economist at the University of Tokyo, says increasing the consumption tax by 20 percentage points from its current 5%—putting it at the level of a high-tax European country—would raise ￥50 trillion and immediately wipe out Japan's fiscal deficit. That sounds draconian. But here again, demography plays a role. Officials say the elderly resist higher taxes or benefit cuts, and the young, who are in a minority, do not have the political power to push for what is in their long-term interest. David Weinstein, professor of Japanese economy at Columbia University in New York, says the elderly would rather give money to their children than pay it in taxes. Ultimately that may mean that benefits may shrink in the future. "If you want benefits to grow in line with income, as they are now, you need a massive increase in taxes of about 10% of GDP," he says. Demography helps explain Japan's stubborn deflation, too, he says. After all, falling prices give savers—most of whom are elderly—positive real yields even when nominal interest rates are close to zero. Up until now, holding government bonds has been a good bet. Domestic savers remain willing to roll them over, which enables the government to fund its deficits. Yet this comes at a cost to the rest of the economy. In short, Japan's economy works better for those middle-aged and older than it does for the young. But it is not yet in crisis, and economists say there is plenty it could do to raise its potential growth rate, as well as to lower its debt burden. (此文选自 The Economist) Passage Four You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr. Wrangham's opinion is that its food is so often cooked. Cooking is a human universal. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body's energy) could not keep running. Dr. Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval. In fact, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity's "killer app" : the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals. Humans became human with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man's—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man's apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain. Dr. Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern "raw foodists", members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved. Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It "denatures" protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it. In support of his thesis, Dr. Wrangham, who is an anthropologist, has ransacked other fields and come up with an impressive array of material. Cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, where it can be absorbed, from 50% to 95%. Previous studies had suggested raw food was digested equally well as cooked food because they looked at faeces as being the end product. These, however, have been exposed to the digestive mercies of bacteria in the large intestine, and any residual goodies have been removed from them that way. Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr. Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is. The archaeological evidence for ancient cookery is equivocal. Digs show that both modern humans and Neanderthals controlled fire in a way that almost certainly means they could cook, and did so at least 200,000 years ago. Since the last common ancestor of the two species lived more than 400,000 years ago, fire-control is probably at least as old as that, for they lived in different parts of the world, and so could not have copied each other. Older alleged sites of human fires are more susceptible to other interpretations, but they do exist. And traces of fire are easily wiped out, so the lack of direct evidence for them is no surprise. Instead, Dr. Wrangham is relying on a compelling chain of logic. And in doing so he may have cast light not only on what made humanity, but on one of the threats it faces today. (此文选自 The Economist)1. The author gives examples of international marriages in politicians to ______.(Passage One)

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