Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits. In recent years, scientists have begun to show that being bilingual makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
Researchers, educators and policy makers in 20 century considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development. There is ample evidence that in a bilingual' s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other.
But this interference isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise.
It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain' s so-called executive function. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind—like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. "Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often," says Albert Costa, a searcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. "It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving." In a study comparing Ger man-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Cost and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age, and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life.
Most people would be (1)_____ by the high quality of medicine (2)_____ to most Americans. There is a lot of specialization, a great deal of (3)_____ to the individual, a (4)_____ amount of advanced technical equipment, and (5)_____ effort not to make mistakes because of the financial risk which doctors and hospitals must (6)_____ in the courts if they (7)_____ things badly. But the Americans are in a mess. The problem is the way in (8)_____ health care is organized and (9)_____. (10)_____ to pubic belief it is not just a free competition system. The private system has been joined a large public system, because private care was simply not (11)_____ the less fortunate and the elderly. But even with this huge public part of the system, (12)_____ this year will eat up 84.5 billion dollars—more than 10 percent of the U.S. Budget—large number of Americans are left (13)_____. These include about half the 11 million unemployed and those who fail to meet the strict limits (14)_____ income fixed by a government trying to make savings where it can. The basic problem, however, is that there is no central control (15)_____ the health system. There is no (16)_____ to what doctors and hospitals charge for their services, other than what the public is able to pay. The number of doctors has shot up and prices have climbed. When faced with toothache, a sick child, or a heart attack, all the unfortunate persons concerned can do is (17)_____ up. Two thirds of the population (18)_____ covered by medical insurance. Doctors charge as much as they want (19)_____ that the insurance company will pay the bill. The rising cost of medicine in the U.S. A. is among the most worrying problems facing the country. In 1981 the country"s health bill climbed 15.9 percent—about twice as fast as prices (20)_____ general.
It does not alter the fact that he is the man responsible for the SARS.
Showing Concern Write an e-mail of about 100 words based on the following situation: You phoned your friend Mary several times yesterday but she didn't answer your call at all. Find out what happened and ask if she need your help. You should include the details you think necessary. Do not sign your own name at the end of the e-mail. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.
You are going to read a text about being a better friend, followed by a list of important ways. Choose the best way from the list A—F for each numbered subheading (41—45). There is one extra way which you do not need to use. Back when we were kids, the hours spent with friends were too numerous to count. There were marathon telephone conversations, all-night studying and giggling sessions. Even after boyfriends entered the picture, our best friends remained irreplaceable. And time was the means by which we nurtured those friendships. Now as adult women we never seem to have enough time for anything. Husbands, kids, careers and avocations—all require attention; too often, making time for our friends comes last on the list of priorities. And yet, ironically, we need our friends as much as ever in adulthood. A friendship network is absolutely crucial for our well-being as adults. We have to do the hard work of building and sustaining the network. Here are some important ways for accomplishing this. Let go of your less central friendships. Many of our friendships were never meant to last a lifetime. It"s natural that some friendships have time limits. Furthermore, now everyone has a busy social calendar, so pull back from some people that you don"t really want to draw close to and give the most promising friendship a fair chance to grow. (41) Be willing to "drop everything" when you"re truly needed. You may get a call from a friend who is really depressed over a certain problem when you are just sitting down to enjoy a romantic dinner with your husband. This is just one of those instances when a friend"s needs mattered more. (42) Take advantage of the mails. Nearly all of us have pals living far away—friends we miss very much. Given the limited time available for visits and the high price of phone calls, writing is a fine way to keep in touch—and makes both sender and receiver feel good. (43) Risk expressing negative feelings. When time together is tough to come by, it"s natural to want the mood during that time to be upbeat. And many people fear that others will think less of you if you express the negative feelings like anger and hurt. (44) Don"t make your friends" problems your own. Sharing your friend"s grief is the way you show deep friendship. Never underestimate the value of loyalty. Loyalty has always been rated as one of the most desired qualities in friends. True loyalty can be a fairly subtle thing. Some people feel it means that, no matter what, your friend will always take your side. But real loyalty is being accepting the person, not necessarily of certain actions your friend might take. (45) Give the gift of time as often as time allows. Time is what we don"t have nearly enough of, and yet, armed with a little ingenuity, we can make it to give it to our friends. The last but not the least thing to keep a friendship alive is to say to your friends "I miss you and love you". Saying that at the end of a phone conversation, or a visit, or writing it on a birthday card, can sustain your friendship for the times you aren"t together.A. But taking on your friend"s pain doesn"t make that pain go away. There"s a big difference between empathy or recognizing a friend"s pain, and over identification, which makes the sufferer feel even weaker. "I must be in worse pain than I even thought, because the person I"m confiding in is suffering so much!" Remember troubled people just need their friends to stay grounded in their own feelings.B. Remember honesty is the key to keeping a friendship real. Sharing your pain will actually deepen a friendship.C. Besides, letters, cards and postcards have the virtue of being tangible-friends can them and reread them for years to come.D. The trick is remembering that a little is better than none and that you can do two things at once. For instance, if you both go for a weekly aerobics, go on the same day. If you both want to go on vocation, schedule the same destination.E. Careful listening, clear writing, close reading, plain speaking, and accurate description, will be invaluable. In tomorrow"s fast-paced business environment there will be precious little time to correct any misunderstandings. Communications breakdown may well become a fatal corporate disease.F. Sometimes, because of our unbreakable commitments or other circumstances, we simply can"t give a needy friend the time we"d like. If you can"t be there at that given moment, say something like, "I wish I could be with you, I can hear that you"re in pain. May I call you tomorrow?" Be sure your friend knows she"s cared about.
The US $ 3 -million Fundamental Physics Prize is indeed an interesting experiment, as Alexander Polyakov said when he accepted this year"s award in March. And it is far from the only one of its type. As a News Feature article in Nature discusses, a string of lucrative awards for researchers have joined the Nobel Prizes in recent years. Many, like the Fundamental Physics Prize, are funded from the telephone-number -sized bank accounts of Internet entrepreneurs. These benefactors have succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and they want to use their wealth to draw attention to those who have succeeded in science. What" s not to like? Quite a lot, according to a handful of scientists quoted in the News Feature. You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes, and these upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them, say scientists. They could distort the achievement-based system of peer-review-led research. They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund peer-reviewed research. They perpetuate the myth of the lone genius. The goals of the prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism. Some want to shock, others to draw people into science, or to better reward those who have made their careers in research. As Nature has pointed out before, there are some legitimate concerns about how science prizes—both new and old—are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, launched this year, takes an unrepresentative view of what the life sciences include. But the Nobel Foundation" s limit of three recipients per prize, each of whom must still be living, has long been outgrown by the collaborative nature of modern research—as will be demonstrated by the inevitable row over who is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Nobels were, of course, themselves set up by a very rich individual who had decided what he wanted to do with his own money. Time, rather than intention, has given them legitimacy. As much as some scientists may complain about the new awards, two things seem clear. First, most researchers would accept such a prize if they were offered one. Second, it is surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science rather than go elsewhere. It is fair to criticize and question the mechanism—that is the culture of research, after all—but it is the prize-givers" money to do with as they please. It is wise to take such gifts with gratitude and grace.
This week, a gaggle of girls in hot pants and miniskirts will go on a long and highly publicized strike against their employer. They will win their case, and in so doing, win a huge battle for working women everywhere—ushering in a new push for equal pay for women and striking a victorious blow for women' s rights the world over. But in real life, the news isn' t nearly that inspiring. On Wednesday, the U.S. senate failed to end debate on the paycheck fairness act. The so-called "commonsense law" would have strengthened anti-discriminatory law put in place by the Equal Pay Act, protected employees from being fired for asking about their colleagues' compensation, and created negotiation skills training programs for girls and women. The American Association of University Women recently compared men and women with the same education, same grades, same kinds of jobs, and made the same life choices and found that women earn 5% less in the first year out of school. Ten years later, even if the women gave up having children, they earn 12% less. In another study, Catalyst found that female first-year MBA students earn $4,600 less than their male peers in their first job. In fact, in the 47 years since the Equal Pay Act was first adopted, the pay gap has decreased from more than 40 cents to just under 25 cents. We are literally halfway there. The republican senators voting against the act, said the act would have been bad for business. And they have been right, but not for the stated reasons. This recession is frequently called the "mancession" and that it has led to 36% increase in the number of families depending on women's earning in the last year alone, sure, those businesses may be saving money by paying women less, but is it really in the interest of the American public to allow them to save at the expense of families? At 77 cents on the dollar, women will lose an average of $431,000 in pay over 40 years. Those losses could have been spent wisely. When you consider that women reinvest 90% of their income into their own community and family (just 30% to 40% that men invest), the impact could have been powerful. How is that for the common sense?
You want to contribute to Project Hope by offering financial aid to a child in a remote area. Write a letter to the department concerned, asking them to help find a candidate. You should specify what kind of child you want to help and how you will carry out your plan. Write your letter in no less than 100 words. Write it neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)
Cambridge University closed down in the summer of 1665 when the plague broke out. Newton, a student there, went home to Lincolnshire. He stayed home for two years while the disease ran its course in the area around London. The 23-year-old Newton spent that time studying and laying the foundations for his greatest work, the Principia. One day he sat thinking in his garden, when anapple fell. Then he realized that the direction the apple fell, along with every other object on this round earth, was always toward Earth"s center. It wasn"t just that the apple fell, but that it tried to go to Earth"s center. That was Newton"s eureka moment. He realized that Earth had drawn the apple to it. He realized that every object in the universe draws every other object—probably in proportion to its mass. Newton didn"t publish his Principia until 20 years later. But he formulated the Law of Universal Gravitation (LUG) there in his Lincolnshire garden. He showed us that was true of planets and moons as well. Now enters a surprising character. The person who popularized the apple story was none other than the well-known French writer and philosopher Voltaire. Due to his outspoken views, in 1726 he was forcibly exiled to England where he spent the next three years. Newton died in 1727 so Voltaire would have been familiar with the many discoveries made by him. Voltaire was also acquainted with Newton"s niece, Catherine Barton. Newton was a bachelor and she had agreed to manage his London home; therefore she would have been familiar with the apple story, which she related to Voltaire. Voltaire sided with Newton in Newton"s bitter fights with Leibnitz. In Candide, Voltaire ridiculed Leibnitz. The character Dr. Pangloss, who went about insisting that we live in the "best of all possible worlds", was Voltaire"s version of Leibnitz. We might chalk Voltaire"s apple story up to "partisan license". But if you"ve ever done anything creative, you"ll recognize the plausibility of the apple story. You"ll remember your own moment when some small and commonplace event revealed a great truth to you. That"s the way creativity works.
Should you break the rule against staring at a stranger on an elevator, you will make the other person exceedingly uncomfortable, and you are likely to feel a bit strange yourself.
The first clue came when I got my hair cut. The stylist offered a complimentary nail-polish change while I waited for my hair to dry. Maybe she hoped this little amenity would slow the growing inclination of women to stretch each haircut to last four months.
Suddenly everything is on sale. The upside to the economic downturn is the immense incentive it gives retailers to treat you like a queen for a day. But now the customer rules, just for showing up. Finger the scarf, then start to walk away, and its price floats silkily downward. When the mechanic calls to tell you that brakes and a timing belt and other services will run close to $ 2,000,
it's time to break out the newly perfected art of the considered pause.
You really don't even have to say anything pitiful before he'll offer to knock a few hundred dollars off.
Restaurants are also caught in a fit of ardent hospitality, especially around Wall Street. New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni characterizes the new restaurant demeanor as "extreme solicitousness tinged with outright desperation."
Now everyone is hoping to restart the economy. But human nature is funny that way. In dangerous times, we clench and squint at the deal that looks too good to miss, suspecting that it must be too good to be true. Store owners will tell you horror stories about shoppers with attitude, who walk in demanding discounts and flaunt their new power at every turn. These store owners wince as they sense bad habit forming: Will people expect discounts forever? Will their hard-won brand luster be forever cheapened, especially for items whose allure depends on their being ridiculously priced?
There will surely come a day when things go back to "normal"; retail sales even inched up in January after sinking for the previous six months. Bargain-hunting can be addictive regardless of the state of the markets, and haggling is a low-risk, high-value contact sport. Trauma digs deep into habit, like my 85-year-old mother still calling her canned-goods cabinet "the bomb shelter." The children of the First Depression were saving string and preaching sacrifice long after the skies cleared. They came to be called the "greatest generation." As we learn to be decent stewards of our resources, who knows what might come of it? We have lived in an age of wanton waste, and there is value in practicing conservation that goes far beyond our own bottom line.
A Recommendation Write a recommendation of about 100 words based on the following situation: You are a professor, and your student Gloria has applied for a part-time job. Please write a recommendation for her to the company she applied to. Do not sign your own name at the end of the recommendation. Use "Professor Li" instead. Do not write the address.
Some families in America and elsewhere have started buying child friendly mobile phones outfitted with GPS (Global Positioning System) technology. These phones and their related tracking services allow parents to pinpoint the location of their children with ease. Parents agree to pick up the phone bill in return for the reassurance of knowing where their children are; children areprepared to put up with the watching if they are allowed to have a phone. Mobile operators in America are now launching tracking services. Under a federal decree known as E911, they had to upgrade their networks to ensure that anyone dialing the 911 emergency number could be located to within 100 metres. Some operators opted for triangulation technology, which determines the location of the handset by comparing the signals received by different base stations. But Verizon and Sprint chose to adopt the more expensive but more accurate GPS technology instead, and are now looking for ways to make money from it. Verizon calls its service "Chaperone". For $10 a month, parents can call up the location of their child"s LG Migo handset from their own mobile phones, or from a PC.The child receives a message saying that the handset"s position has been requested, and the parents receive an address, or a marker on a web-based map, giving the child"s location. For an extra $10 per month, they can sign up for Child Zone, a service that, among other things, fires off an alert when a youngster (or, at least, the youngster"s handset) strays outside a specified area For its part, Sprint has launched a similar service that can also let parents know when a child arrives at a particular location. Another location service is available from Nextel, a mobile operator that was taken over by Sprint in 2005.Nextel opened up some of its systems to enable other firms to build their own software and services on top of its GPS technology. One example is AccuTracking, a small company which offers a tracking service for $6 a month and boasts that it is "ideal for vehicle tracking" or to keep "virtual eyes on kids". Some customers are also using the service to track their spouses, by hiding phones in their cars. "Mine is hidden under the hood, hot-wired to the battery—it works very well and it is easy to hook up continuous power, " writes one customer on AccuTracking"s message board. Start-ups are working on everything from city-wide games of hide-and-seek to monitoring the locations of Alzheimer"s patients. Services that monitor jogging routes, and work out distance travelled and calories consumed, might also prove popular. As a result, mobile operators, handset-makers and start-ups could transform and expand a small, specialist market so far dominated by expensive, dedicated tracking systems.
If you see a diamond ring on the fourth finger of a woman"s left hand, you probably know what it means: in America, this has long been the digit of choice for betrothal jewelry, and the lore of the trade traces the symbolism back to ancient times. But if you see a diamond ring on the fourth finger of a woman"s right hand, you may or may not know that it signifies an independent spirit, or even economic empowerment and changing gender mores. "A lot of women have disposable income," Katie Couric said recently on the "Today" show after showing viewers her Change right-hander. "Why wait for a man to give her a diamond ring?" This notion may be traced back, approximately, to September. That"s when the Diamond Information Center began a huge marketing campaign aimed at articulating the meaning of right-hand rings-and thus a rationale for buying them. "Your left hand says "we"," the campaign declares. "Your right hand says "me"." The positioning is brilliant: the wearer may be married or unmarried and may buy the ring herself or request it as a gift. And while it can take years for a new jewelry concept to work itself thoroughly into the mainstream, the tight-band ring already has momentum. At the higher end of the scale, the jewelry maker Kwiat, which supplies stores like Saks, offers a line of Kwiat Spirit Rings that can retail for as much as $5,000, and "we"re selling it faster than we"re manufacturing it," says Bill Gould, the company"s chief of marketing. At the other end of the stale, mass-oriented retailers that often take a wait-and-see attitude have already jumped on the bandwagon. Firms like Kwiat were given what Gould calls "direction" from the Diamond information Center about the new ring"s attributes-multiple diamonds in a north-south orientation that distinguishes it from the look of an engagement ring, and so on. But all this is secondary to the newly minted meaning. "The idea," Morrison says, "is that beyond a trend, this could become a sort of cultural imperative." A tall order? Well, bear in mind that "a diamond is forever" is not a saying handed down from imperial Rome. It was handed down from an earlier generation of De Beers marketers. Joyce Jonas, a jewelry appraiser and historian, notes that De Beers, in the 40"s and 50"s, took advantage of a changing American class structure to turn diamond rings into an (attainable) symbol for the masses. By now, Jonans observes, the stone alone "is just a commodity". And this, of course, is what makes its invented significance more Crucial than ever.
BPart ADirections: Write a composition/letter of no less than 100 words on the following information./B
城市对人类生活的重要性及面临的问题
——1987年英译汉及详解
Have there always been cities?【F1】
Life without large urban areas may seem inconceivable to us, but actually cities are relatively recent development.
Groups with primitive economics still manage without them. The trend, however, is for such groups to disappear, while cities are increasingly becoming the dominant mode of man"s social existence.【F2】
Historically, city life has always been among the elements which form a civilization.
Any high degree of human endeavor and achievement has been closely linked to life in an urban environment.【F3】
It is virtually impossible to imagine that universities, hospitals, large businesses or even science and technology could have come into being without cities to support them.
To most people, cities have traditionally been the areas where there was a concentration of culture as well as of opportunity.【F4】
In recent years, however, people have begun to become aware that cities are also areas where there is a concentration of problems.
What has happened to the modern American city? Actually, the problem is not such a new one. Long before this century started, there had begun a trend toward the concentration of the poor of the American society into the cities. Each great wave of immigration from abroad and from the rural areas made the problem worse. During this century, there has also been the development of large suburban areas surrounding the cities, for the rich prefer to live in these areas. Within the cities, sections may be sharply divided into high and low rent districts, the "right side of town" and the slums.
Of course, everyone wants to do something about this unhappy situation. But there is no agreement as to goals. Neither is there any systematic approach or integrated program. Opinions are as diverse as the people who give them.【F5】
But one basic difference of opinion concerns the question of whether or not the city as such is to be preserved.
Perhaps transportation and the means of communication have really made it possible for there to be an end to the big cities. Of course, there is the problem of persuading people to move out of them of their own free will.【F6】
And there is also the objection that the city has always been the core from which cultural advancement has radiated.
Is this, however, still the case today in the presence of easy transportation and communication? Does culture arise as a result of people living together communally, or is it too the result of decisions made at the level of government and the communications industry?
It is probably true to say that most people prefer to preserve the cities. Some think that the cities could be cleaned up or totally rebuilt. This is easy to say; it would not be so easy to do.【F7】
To be sure, a great rebuilding project would give jobs to many of those people who need them.
Living conditions could not help but improve, at least for a while. But would the problems return after the rebuilding was completed?
Nevertheless, with the majority of the people living in urban areas, the problem of the cities must be solved.【F8】
From agreement on this general goal, we have, unfortunately, in the past proceeded to disagreement on specific goals, and from there to total inaction.
At the basis of much of this inaction is an old-fashioned concept—the idea human conditions will naturally tend to regulate themselves for the general goal.
"It keeps you grounded, puts you in a situation that keeps you out of trouble, and puts you with a group that has the same mind-set," says Molly Skinner, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, appraising the nonathletic benefits she experienced while playing soccer in high school. According to one new study, suiting up for the high school team does seem to give girls a boost when it comes to getting a college diploma. The recent study, conducted by professors from Brigham Young University(BYU)and West Chester University of Pennsylvania(WCUP), found that women who played sports in high school were 73 percent more likely to earn a bachelor's degree within six years of graduating from high school than those who did not.(The study did not look at male athletes.)Their analysis of data from 5,103 women collected as part of a U.S. Department of Education study found that even among girls who face statistical challenges finishing college based on socioeconomic background, the athletes still had more than 40 percent higher college completion rates than nonathletes, regardless of whether they played at the college level. "In times when we worry about improving academic performance or outcomes, we wonder should we be devoting time and money to extracurricular activities?" asks BYU Prof. Mikaela Dufur, one of the study's authors. "These are important arenas for—in our case—girls to make connections with others and adults who help encourage them to succeed." At the collegiate level, though, the measure of women's sports remains as murky(unclear)as ever, thanks to the politics of Title IX. Enacted in 1972, Title IX guarantees women equal opportunity in collegiate sports, but its critics contend that many schools reach that balance by cutting men's teams rather than adding women's. A July report on Title IX from the Government Accountability Office(GAO)has done little to settle the debate. That study found increases in student participation in college athletics on both sides of the gender line, though the growth rate was higher for women's teams and female athletes. Title IX critics say that the GAO report relies too heavily on National Collegiate Athletic Association(NCAA)data, which can obscure the number of men's teams cut from particular schools as more colleges join the NCAA overall. While the political debate continues, female athletes themselves seem to be focusing on the finish line. "I think that sports teaches you to persevere," says Virginia Tech-bound Rachel Plumb, who raced on her high school's cross country team. "It teaches you to keep an eye on a goal."
BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./B
The Students " Union of your department is planning an English Speech Contest. Write an announcement which covers the following information: 1) the purpose of the contest, 2) time and place of the contest, 3) what is required of the candidates, 4) details of the awards. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Department of English" at the end of the announcement.
You have received a letter from Sophia. She expressed her admiration for micro-blogging and wondered whether it can replace books as the main learning resources. Write a reply letter to explain your opinions. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)