单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} People who are extremely careful and "finish what they start" may have a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to a study involving Catholic nuns and priests. The most conscientious and self-disciplined individuals were found to be 89% less likely to develop this form of dementia—deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain—than their peers over the course of the 12-year study. Robert Wilson at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, US, and colleagues followed 997 healthy Catholic nuns, priests and Christian brothers between 1994 and 2006. Early on in the study, participants completed a personality test to determine how conscientious they were. Based on answers to 12 questions such as "I am a productive person who always gets the job done", they received a score ranging from 0 to 48. On average, volunteers scored 34 points in the test. Volunteers also underwent regular neurological examinations and cognitive tests. Over the lifetime of the study, 176 of the 997 participants developed Alzheimer's disease. However, those with the highest score on the personality test—40 points or above—had an 89% lower chance of developing the debilitating condition than participants who received 28 points or lower. "These are people who control impulses, and tend to follow norms and roles," Wilson told New Scientist. Previous studies suggest that exercise and intellectual stimulation can decrease the risk of Alzheimer's disease. But the link between self-discipline and a reduced risk of the illness remained strong even after researchers discounted these factors from their study. Subjects still had a 54% lower chance of developing the condition. Exactly why conscientiousness should have an impact on Alzheimer's risk remains unclear, says Wilson. He notes that brain autopsies conducted on 324 of the study's participants failed to resolve the mystery. Earlier work has linked the presence of plaques and protein tangles within the brain to Alzheimer. Yet, in general, the brains of those who scored highly on the conscientiousness test had as many plaques and protein tangles as those of subjects who scored lower. Wilson suggests that more careful and conscientious individuals may have more active frontal brain regions, an area that is responsible for decision-making and planning. Increased activity in this region may perhaps compensate for a decline in function in other brain regions, he speculates. Based on the new findings, doctors could perhaps consider certain patients at greater risk of dementia, says Ross Andel at the University of South Florida, US. "This is a study about identifying people at risk," he says.

单选题Whydoesthespeakerrecommendtravellingbybus?A.It'sfastandcomfortable.B.It'ssaferthantrains.C.Youcanseemoreofthecountry.D.Youcansleepinit.

单选题Throughout history there have been many unusual taxes levied on such things as hats, Beds, Baths, marriages, and funerals. At one time England levied a tax on sunlight by collection from every household with six or more windows. And according to legend, there was a Turkish ruler who collected a tax each time he dined with one of his subjects. Why? To pay for the wear and tear on his teeth! Different kinds of taxes help to spread the tax burden. Anyone who pays a tax is said to "bear the burden" of the tax. The burden of a tax may fall more heavily on some persons than on others. That is why the three levels of government in this country use several kinds of taxes. This spreads the burden of taxes among more people. From the standpoint of their use, the most important taxes are income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and estate, inheritance, and gift taxes. Some are used by only one level of government; others by two or even all three levels. Together these different taxes make up what is called our tax system. Income taxes are the main source of federal revenues. The federal government gets more than three-fourths of its revenue from income taxes. As its name indicated, an income tax is a tax on earnings. Both individuals and business corporations pay a federal income tax. The oldest tax in the United States today is the property tax. It provides most of the income for local governments. It provides at least a part of the income for all but a few states. It is not used by the federal government. A sales tax is a tax levied on purchases. Most people living in the United States know about sales taxes since they are used in all but four states. Actually there are several kinds of sales taxes, But only three of them are important. They are general sales taxes, excise taxes, and import taxes. Other three closely related taxes are estate, inheritance, and gift taxes. Everything a person owns, including both real and personal property, makes up his or her estate. When someone dies, ownership of his or her property or estate passes on to one or more individuals or organizations. Before the property is transferred, however, it is subject to an estate tax if its value exceeds a certain amount.

单选题The word "desalination" in the last sentence may mean______ .

单选题 Questions 17 to 20 are based on the following talk about American schools. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

单选题Which of the following is NOT an Irish writer? [A] George Bernard Shaw. [B] William Butler Yeats. [C] David Herbert Lawrence. [D] James Joyce.

单选题{{B}}Text3{{/B}} On Monday the United Nations Security Council, for the first time in its history, will convene to discuss actions on a health issue. The health issue in question is the spread of the HIV virus. Since AIDS, the disease to which the virus leads, is killing far more people than war, it richly deserves the Security Council's attention. The question is what to do about it. The first answer is to resist the temptation to place excessive hope in the wonder drugs that have cut mortality from AIDS in rich countries. These drugs cost around $ 20,000 per person per year. Many of the poor countries that bear the brunt of AIDS have annual health budgets of less than $ 20 per person. There have been welcome efforts to reduce the cost of treatment. Last year the pharmaceutical industry allowed firms in South Africa to distribute cheaper copies of their products. But even if the cost of treatment could be radically reduced, it would remain impractical in much of the developing world. Anti-HIV drugs need to be administered with a precision that rudimentary health infrastructures cannot aspire to. The second answer is to invest in the development of a cheap, easily-delivered vaccine —but not to expect a quick victory. Even if a vaccine were discovered tomorrow, its efficacy could not be known until it was tested, and tests involve monitoring large groups of people over extended periods. There are plans afoot for the world' s eight leading countries to promise $ 500 million each toward the future cost of delivering a vaccine to the poor world. This would give the drug companies a powerful incentive to come up with one. But that excellent scheme cannot save the millions likely to become infected over the next half-decade. In sub-Saharan Africa, 10 people are infected every minute. Since science is unlikely to provide a silver bullet in the medium term, there is no option but to change human behavior. That sounds like a hopeless task. There have been calls for safe sex in the developing world for more than a decade, and yet the epidemic has progressed monstrously. But changing behavior is not in fact impossible. The countries that have tried it seriously have managed. Thailand, for example, has succeeded in getting prostitutes to insist on condoms. Senegal has kept the incidence of HIV infection below 2 percent. Uganda' s education campaign, focusing both on values and on practical information, has persuaded its youth to delay the first sexual experience by an average of two years; the infection rate among pregnant women in towns fell from 37 percent to around 15 percent during the 1990s. Other developing countries need to follow this example.

单选题Patients tend to feel indignant and insulted if the physician tells them he can find no organic cause for the pain. They tend to interpret the term "psychogenic" to mean that they are complaining of nonexistent symptoms. They need to be educated about the fact that many forms of pain have no underlying physical cause but are the result, as mentioned earlier, of tension, stress, or hostile factors in the general environment. Sometimes a pain may be a manifestation of "conversion hysteria". Obviously, it is folly for an individual to ignore symptoms that could be a warning of a potentially serious illness. Some people are so terrified of getting news from a doctor that they allow their malaise to worsen, sometimes past the point of no return. Total neglect is not the answer to hypochondria. The only answer has to be increased education about the way the human body works; so that more people will be able to steer an intelligent course between promiscuous pill popping and irresponsible disregard of genuine symptoms. Of all forms of pain, none is more important for the individual to understand than the "threshold" variety. Almost everyone has a telltale ache that is triggered whenever tension or fatigue reaches a certain point. It can take the form of a migraine-type headache or a squeezing pain deep in the abdomen or cramps or a pain in the lower back or even in the joints. The individual who has learned how to make the correlation between such threshold pains and their cause doesn't panic when they occur; he or she does something about relieving the stress and tension. Then, if the pain persists despite the absence of apparent cause, the individual will telephone the doctor.

单选题We are told that the mass media are the greatest organs for enlightenment that the world has yet seen; that in Britain, for instance, several million people see each issue of the current affairs program, Panorama. It is true that never in human history were so many people so often and so much exposed to so many intimations about societies, forms of life, attitudes other than those which obtain in their own local societies. This kind of exposure may well be a point of departure for acquiring certain important intellectual and imaginative qualities, width of judgment, a sense of the variety of possible attitudes. Yet in itself such exposure does not bring intellectual or imaginative development. It is no more than the masses of a stone which lie around in a quarry and which may, conceivably, go to the making of a cathedral. The mass media cannot build the cathedral, and their way of showing the stones does not always prompt others to build. For the stones are presented within a self-contained and self-sufficient world in which, it is implied, simply to look at them, to observe — fleetingly — individually interesting points of difference between them, is sufficient in itself. Life is indeed full of problems on which we have to — or feel we should try to — make decisions, as citizens or as private individuals. But neither the real difficulty of these decisions, nor their true and disturbing challenge to each individual, can often be communicated through the mass media. The ''disinclination'' to suggest real choice, individual decision, which is to be found in the mass media is simply the product of a commercial desire to keep the customers happy. It is within the grain of mass communications. The organs of the Establishment, however well-intentioned they may be and whatever their form (the State, the Church, voluntary societies, political parties) , have a vested interest in ensuring that the public boat is not violently rocked, and will so affect those who work within the mass media that they will be led insensibly towards forms of production which, though the skin to where such enquiries might really hurt. They will tend to move, when exposing problems, well within the accepted cliché — clich6 not to make a disturbing application of them to features of contemporary agitation of problems for the sake of the interest of that agitation in itself; they will therefore, again, assist a form of acceptance of the status quo. There are exceptions to this tendency, but they are uncharacteristic. The result can be seen in a hundred radio and television programs as plainly as in the normal treatment of public issues in the popular press. Different levels of background in the readers or viewers may be assumed, but what usually takes place is a substitute for the process of arriving at judgment. Programs such as this are noteworthy less for the "stimulation" they offer than for the fact that that stimulation (repeated at regular intervals ) may become a substitute for, and so a hindrance to, judgments carefully arrived at and tested in the mind and on the pulses. Mass communications, then, do not ignore intellectual matters; they tend to castrate them, to allow them to sit on the side of the fireplace, sleek and useless, a family plaything.

单选题Questions 4--7 Answer the following questions by using NO MORE THAN three words.

单选题When school officials in Kalkaska, Michigan, closed classes last week, the media flocked to the story, portraying the town''s 2,305 students as victims of stingy taxpayers. There is some truth to that; the property-tax rate here is one-third lower than the state average. But shutting their schools also allowed Kalkaska''s educators and the state''s largest teachers'' union, the Michigan Education Association, to make a political point. Their aim was to spur passage of legislation Michigan lawmakers are debating to increase the state''s share of school funding. It was no coincidence that Kalkaska shut its schools two weeks after residents rejected a 28% property-tax increase. The school board argued that without the increase it lacked the $1.5 million needed to keep schools open. But the school system had not done all it could to keep the schools open. Officials declined to borrow against next year''s state aid, they refused to trim extracurricular activities and they did not consider seeking a smaller — perhaps more acceptable — tax increase. In fact, closing early is costing Kalkaska a significant amount, including $600,000 in unemployment payments to teachers and staff and $250,000 in lost state aid. In February, the school system promised teachers and staff two months of retirement payments in case schools closed early, a deal that will cost the district $275 ,000 more. Other signs suggest school authorities were at least as eager to make a political statement as to keep schools open. The Michigan Education Association hired a public relations firm to stage a rally marking the school closings, which attracted 14 local and national television stations and networks. The president of the National Education Association, the MEA''s parent organization, flew from Washington, D. C. , for the event. And the union tutored school officials in the art of television interviews. School supervisor Doyle Disbrow acknowledges the district could have kept schools open by cutting programs but denies the moves were politically motivated. Michigan lawmakers have reacted angrily to the closing. The state Senate has already voted to put the system into receivership and reopen schools immediately; the Michigan House plans to consider the bill this week.

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单选题Questions 14 to 16 are based on the following talk on how universities can help to make global-ready students. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.

单选题 {{B}}{{I}} Questions 14 to 16 are based on the following talk about the biggest movie event, Oscars. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.{{/B}}{{/I}}

单选题 {{B}} Questions 17 to 20 are based on the following news about Wal-Mart's report. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.{{/B}}

单选题When the author refers to professions as no longer being "closed guilds", he means that______.

单选题Whatistrueaboutorganicallygrownfoods?A．Thereisnodoubtthattheyarethebestfoods.B．Somepeopleholdoppositeopinionstowardtheabsoluteadvantagesofthefoods.C．Somepeopledon'tlikethefoodsatall.D．Themarketfoodproductsareassafeandnutritiousastheorganicfoods.

单选题 {{B}} Questions 17～20 are based on the following talk. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17～20.{{/B}}

单选题 Text 3 Large companies need a way to reach the savings of the public at large. The same problem, on a smaller scale, faces practically every company trying to develop new products and create new jobs. There can be little prospects of raising the sort of sums need from friends and people we know, and while banks may agree to provide short term finance, they are generally unwilling to provide money on permanent basis for long-term project. So companies turn to the public, inviting people to lend them money, or take a share in the business through the Stock Exchange. By doing so they can put into circulation the savings of individuals and institutions, both at home and overseas. When the saver needs his money back, he does not have to go to the company with whom he originally placed it. Instead, he sells his shares through a stockbroker to some other saver who is seeking to invest his money. Many of the services needed both by industry and by each of us are provided by the Government or by local authorities. Without hospitals, roads, electricity, telephones, railways, this country could not function. All these require continuous spending on new equipment and new development if they are to serve us properly, requiring more money than is raised through taxes alone. The Government, local authorities, and nationalized industries therefore frequently need to borrow money to Finance major capital spending, and they, too, come to the Stock Exchange. There is hardly a man or woman in this country whose standard of living does not depend on the ability of his or her employers to raise money to finance new development. In one way or another this new change exists to provide a channel through which these savings can reach those who need finance.

单选题{{I}} Questions 17 to 20 are based on the following introduction of American students. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.{{/I}}