What we are doing today is more than donating some money.

Suppose you are Zhang Ying. Write a letter to Xiao Wang, a schoolmate of yours who is going to visit you during the week"s long holiday. You should write at least 100 words according to the suggestions given below. 1) Express your welcome. 2) Give some suggestions on the holiday. You should write about 100 words. You do not need to write the address.

BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B

Yesterday afternoon I met an old friend of mine, who said that he would go abroad next week.

TobaccoConsumptionWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthesetofpictures.Inyouressay,youshould1)interpretthepictures,2)predictthetendencyoftobaccoconsumptionandgiveyourreasons.

Quitting a Job Two months ago, you got a job as an editor for the magazine Design & Fashion. But now you find that the work is not what you expected. You decide to quit. Write a letter to your boss, Mr. Wang, telling him your decision, stating your reason(s), and making an apology. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter, use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Venture capital has now become a global phenomenon. Here is the (1)_____ status of each major region that has venture capital activity. (2)_____, the definition of venture capital, (3)_____ coined 50 years ago at Harvard Business School, meant (4)_____ capital for new or very young ventures. Over time, (5)_____, and especially outside the US and Canada, it has become a coverall name for any type of equity related financing for privately held companies. To make matters even more (6)_____, some US venture capital firms have begun delving into "transactional" finance more (7)_____ to the investment banking community. This is, however, a limited phenomenon. Indeed, the influx of (8)_____ fund money into the venture capital market has been both a curse and a blessing. Firms found themselves battling to place their newly (9)_____ funds with a (10)_____ number of specialized hi-tech firms. The result was a series of losses in the early 1990s. Venture capitalists then became immersed in transactional financing as a result of their (11)_____ in business acquisitions. Historically, the venture capitalists had sat at the end of the table representing the company being (12)_____. At some point, they began to see opportunities in financing such (13)_____ and in other investment banking type activities. In the long (14)_____, however, venture capitalists will back out of investment banking type activities and focus on what they are best at, risking capital investments in (15)_____ companies. What is required to place their capital and still realize their (16)_____ is a ramp up in staff. In the 1980s, many of the firms were quite small and (17)_____ on specific areas of technology where they had in (18)_____ knowledge. In the 1990s the successful firms have (19)_____ management staff, (20)_____ into more than one area of technology, and outsourced more of their technological analysis to very specialized experts.

The change met the technical requirement of the new age and prevented the decline in efficiency that so commonly spoiled the fortunes of family firms in the second and third generation after the energetic founders.

The city of Venice may not be the obvious place for a call for the moral revival of Europe. This is where Lord Byron used to swim naked down the Grand Canal between pink palaces and swaying gondolas in the early morning hours after nights of carousing. This is where Thomas Mann a century later celebrated the beauty of decline in "Death in Venice". For the past four years, however, Venice has also been home to the "Venice Colloquium", sponsored by the Fondazione Liberal, an Italian free-market group, headed by member of parliament Ferdinando Adornato. The purpose of the event is to bring likeminded Europeans and Americans together in an effort to bridge the transatlantic divide. It is a call to common values, mostly perhaps directed at Europeans, for whom values these days seem like archaic encumbrances. Americans are therefore a great puzzle to many Europeans. So are President Bush and his newly nominated secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. Many Europeans cannot get over the fact that 22 percent of American voters in the presidential election stated that they considered "moral values" their most important issue, and the reaction here has greatly resembled the hysterical hyperventilating of the Hollywood-New York elite after the US election. "In Europe, people are embarrassed to talk about moral values," says Tessa Keswick of the Center for Policy Studies in London. Or if they do, it is a new kind of moral value, closely identified with political correctness, which can be "frighteningly intolerant". The need for Europe to re-establish its moral identity is becoming evident to people here, even if this is still a minority view. While 40 percent of Americans attend church at least once a week, on average 4 percent of Europeans do. Outbreaks of anti-Semitism and xenophobia keep cropping up in large part because of growing Muslim immigrant populations that have not been socially integrated. And there is an overall reluctance to accept the global war on terror as an actual war. Europe"s resident troublemaker, French President Jacques Chirac, speaks of the European Union as a multilateral model for the world, yet this model is incapable of defeating terrorism. Therefore, politicians here, with the exception of Britain"s Tony Blair, like to pretend that police action is all we need to take care of al Qaeda. But not all Europeans are resigned to the decline in values and vigor that they see around them. If 70 percent of Frenchmen, for instance, would have preferred Sen. John Kerry to win the 2004 election, then 30 percent supported George Bush. What kind of values are we talking about? More than family values per se, many are worried about the fundamental values of the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition, from which spring our concepts of human, political and religious rights. The fact is that Europe needs the United States, more than the other way around, to exert global influence. And while the French love to talk about counterbalancing the United States on the world stage, the Italian government has no such desire.

BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

The right to pursue happiness is promised to Americans by the US Constitution, but no one seems quite sure which way happiness ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift conceived of happiness as "the state of being well-deceived", or of being "a fool among idiots", for Swift saw society as a land of false goals. It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of false goals. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess enough. And at the same time the forces of American business are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them—and to create them faster than anyone"s budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on addicting us to greed. We are even told it is our patriotic duty to support the national economy by buying things. Look at any of the magazines that cater to women. There advertising begins as art and slogans in the front pages and ends as pills and therapy in the back pages. The art at the front illustrates the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. This, the perfumed breath she must breathe out. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herself in order to display that perfect figure. This is the cream that restores skin, these are the tablets that melt away fat around the thighs, and these are the pills of perpetual youth. Obviously no reasonable person can be completely persuaded either by such art or by such pills and devices. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy this dream and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what is it they are trying to buy? Defining the meaning of "happiness" is a perplexing proposition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work towards the middle. To think of happiness as achieving superiority over others, living in a mansion made of marble, having a wardrobe with hundreds of outfits, will do to set the greedy extreme.

Is anti-white bias a problem? A new study says whites think discrimination against them is a bigger problem than anti-black bias. They feel threatened by "【C1】______racism". In what some have called the new post-racial era, what constitutes discrimination is【C2】______. A new study has found that Americans think significant progress has been made in the fight【C3】______anti-black bias. But white Americans【C4】______that progress as coming at their【C5】______and that anti-white bias has become a more【C6】______social problem than anti-black bias. White Americans see blacks' progress as a(n) 【C7】______of their status. Is this finding surprising? Do we see this view【C8】______in government policies or court decisions? If so, how? Our recent research【C9】______that white and black Americans agree that bias against blacks was【C10】______in the 1950's and 1960's. And many Americans support the march【C11】______full and equal rights for all.【C12】______when blacks see such racism as continuing, whites【C13】______to see it as a problem that has been more or less "solved". Many whites now believe that it's anti-white bias that's on a rise, to the point where it's even more【C14】______than anti-black bias. Why would the perception of anti-white bias have increased【C15】______among whites, particularly in recent years? The answer is still【C16】______. What is certain is that this【C17】______is a danger to the nation In fact, for all the gains of the civil rights movement, blacks【C18】______among the poorest, most isolated and most unemployed of all Americans. But such reality is【C19】______to white fellow citizens who are【C20】______instead by fantasies of competitive vic-timhood.

IsItaPromiseoraDuty?Studythecartooncarefullyandwriteanessayof160-200words.Youshould1)describethemessagesconveyedbythecartoon,and2)giveyourcomments.

How stupid does one need to be to get a job reading the television news? Is it actually beneficial for TV newsreaders to have, instead of a brain, a plate of lemon jelly? Last week the debate was raging once again about the controversial and important point as to whether the newsreaders write their own copy, read someone else"s or simply make it up as they go along. Angela Rippon reckoned that she had never heard of a newsreader writing stuff, but her modern counterpart, the beautiful Sophie Raworth, claims that they do the writing and adds that she has a postgraduate degree in journalism. This is the core of the issue: what on earth is there to learn about journalism at postgraduate level? The point and purpose of our lowly, occasionally useful, trade could be scribbled on the back of a postage stamp and would easily be comprehended by a 14-year-old boy with ADHD(attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Who has decided that it must be dignified with a doctoral thesis? Nor is reading the news even what one might call "journalism". It is an even simpler business called "reading". All that the BBC demands of its female newsreaders is an ability to read in an impartial way words like "Israel has murdered more Lebanese children again today" from the teleprompter without belching or lisping. It helps if they have the eminently presentable manner of a girl guide leader from Esher. They are forbidden to express an opinion. They are not required to go undercover, analyze the news or add witty asides. They are required to be that which they are known as in the trade— "a gob on a stick" . A penetrating intelligence is not merely unnecessary, it is counterproductive. Newsreaders who are too intelligent soon stop being newsreaders, much as John Humphrys did, stifled by the commonplace of their duties. Or they give the game away by doing what that German newsreader did and end the programme, shaking their heads sadly, muttering, "it"s all lies, all lies". Which is not to say BBC newsreaders are bad at their jobs: quite the reverse. But we should not confuse competence with intelligence. Newsreaders believe that because they are reading out serious stuff and everybody is listening to them, they must therefore be creatures possessed of a high IQ. They are confusing the message with the medium.

Will the European Union make it? The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project"s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent facing a "Bermuda triangle" of debt, population decline and lower growth. As well as those chronic problems, the EU face an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone" s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation. Yet the debate about how to save Europe" s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone"s dominant powers, France and Germany, agree on the need for greater harmonisation within the euro zone, but disagree about what to harmonise. Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrow spending and competitiveness, barked by quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects, and even the suspension of a country" s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economic co-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom there is a small majority for free-market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone, Germany fears, a small majority favour French interference. A "southern" camp headed by French wants something different: "European economic government" within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Eurobonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the France government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonisation: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs. It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world" s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal: built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.

For Tony Blair, home is a messy sort of place, where the prime minister"s job is not to uphold eternal values but to force through some unpopular changes that may make the country work a bit better. The area where this is most obvious, and where it matters most, is the public services. Mr. Blair faces a difficulty here which is partly of his own making. By focusing his last election campaign on the need to improve hospitals, schools, transport and policing, he built up expectations. Mr. Blair has said many times that reforms in the way the public services work need to go alongside increases in cash. Mr. Blair has made his task harder by committing a classic negotiating error. Instead of extracting concessions from the other side before promising his own, he has pledged himself to higher spending on public services without getting a commitment to change from the unions. Why, given that this pledge has been made, should the health unions give ground in return? In a speech on March 20th, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, said that "the something-for-nothing days are over in our public services and there can be no blank cheques". But the government already seems to have given health workers a blank cheque. Nor are other ministries conveying quite the same message as the treasury. On March 19th, John Hutton, a health minister, announced that cleaners and catering staff in new privately-funded hospitals working for the National Health Service will still be government employees, entitled to the same pay and conditions as other health-service workers. Since one of the main ways in which the government hopes to reform the public sector is by using private providers, and since one of the main ways in which private providers are likely to be able to save money is by cutting labor costs, this move seems to undermine the government"s strategy. Now the government faces its hardest fight. The police need reforming more than any other public service. Half of them, for instance, retire early, at a cost of ￡1 billion ($1.4% billion) a year to the taxpayer. The police have voted 10—1 against proposals from the home secretary, David Blunkett, to reform their working practices. This is a fight the government has to win. If the police get away with it, other public-service workers will reckon they can too. And, if they all get away it, Mr. Blair"s domestic policy—which is what voters are most likely to judge him on a the next election—will be a failure.

Restoring the world's fisheries is really a no-brainer, says a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A team of scientists from the University of California compiled a database of over 4,500 fisheries around the world, and after using various bioeconomic models, the authors found that health and productivity are not mutually exclusive when it comes to the world's fisheries. "It is not a tradeoff between the needs of fishermen and the needs of fish," Douglas Rader, chief oceans scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview Monday. "To have our fish and eat them too—it's remarkable." "Applying sound management reforms to global fisheries in our dataset could generate annual increases exceeding 16 million metric tons (MMT) in catch, $ 53 billion in profit, and 619 MMT in biomass relative to business as usual," the authors explain in their study. "We also find that, with appropriate reforms, recovery can happen quickly, with the median fishery taking under 10 [years] to reach recovery targets. Our results show that commonsense reforms to fishery management would dramatically improve overall fish abundance while increasing food security and profits." Rights-based fishery management (RBFM) optimizes economic value. In this approach, fishing quotas are set to ensure healthy population levels, and then in turn product prices increase (because of higher quality and demand) and fishing costs decrease (because of a reduced race to fish). And RBFM is realized through approaches like cooperatives, territorial rights, and individual transferable quotas. All of these approaches give fishermen secure fishing rights. Under most current management systems, fisherman practice a "race to fish" competing with one another to catch as many fish as possible, taking fish at a faster rate than they can reproduce. Some governments have instituted individual quotas, but this creates a tense relationship between fisherman and regulators, and the men and women on the water lack a financial incentive to preserve the overall ecosystem. "In contrast, in a catch share system (also called a fishing rights system) , each fisherman is entitled to a percentage of the total allocated haul," explains National Geographic's Brian Clark Howard after his conversation with study author Amanda Leland. " If the number of fish in the ocean rises, the number that can be caught can quickly be revised. That gives all fishermen an incentive to use best practices and patrol their own waters, says Leland, so everyone' s piece of the pie gets bigger." And this isn't exactly a new concept, says Rader. We've known the fates of fisheries and fisherman are interconnected, but this study proves that both financial and reproductive success, respectively, are possible.

St. Paul didn"t like it. Moses warned his people against it. Hesiod declared it "mischievous" and "hard to get rid of it", but Oscar Wilder said, "Gossip is charming." "History is merely gossip," he wrote in one of his famous plays. "But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality." In times past, under Jewish law, gossipmongers might be fined or flogged. The Puritans put them in stocks or ducking stools, but no punishment seemed to have the desired effect of preventing gossip, which has continued uninterrupted across the back fences of the centuries. Today, however, the much-maligned human foible is being looked at in a different light, Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, even evolutionary biologists are concluding that gossip may not be so bad after all. Gossip is "an intrinsically valuable activity", philosophy professor Aaron Ben-Ze"ev states in a book he has edited, entitled Good Gossip. For one thing, gossip helps us acquire information that we need to know that doesn"t come through ordinary channels, such as; "What was the real reason so-and-so was fired from the office?" Gossip also is a form of social bonding, Dr. Ben-Ze"ev says. It is "a kind of sharing" that also "satisfies the tribal need namely, the need to belong to and be accepted by a unique group". What"s more, the professor notes, "Gossip is enjoyable." Another gossip groupie, Dr. Ronald De Souse, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, describes gossip basically as a form of indiscretion and a "saintly virtue", by which be means that the knowledge spread by gossip will usually end up being slightly beneficial. "It seems likely that a world in which all information were universally available would be preferable to a world where immense power resides in the control of secrets," he writes. Still, everybody knows that gossip can have its iii effects, especially on the poor wretch being gossiped about. And people should refrain from certain kinds of gossip that might be harmful, even though the ducking stool is long out of fashion. By the way, there is also an interesting strain of gossip called medical gossip, which in its best form, according to researchers Jerry M. Suls and Franklin Goodkin, can motivate people with symptoms of serious illness, but who are unaware of it, to seek medical help. So go ahead and gossip. But remember, if (as often is the case among gossipers) you should suddenly become one of the gossipees instead, it is best to employ the foolproof defense recommended by Plato, who may have learned the lesson from Socrates, who as you know was the victim of gossip spread that he was corrupting the youth of Athens; When men speak ill of thee, so live that nobody will believe them. Or, as Will Rogers said, "Live so that you wouldn"t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip."

As the baby-boomer generation contemplates the prospect of the Zimmer frame there has never been more interest in delaying the process of ageing. One consequence has been a(n) 【C1】______rise in the popularity of brain-training games. But how【C2】______ really is a daily dose of cryptic crossword? Robert Wilson, a neuropsychologist at Rush University in Chicago, and his colleagues decided to【C3】______out, 【C4】______following a group of people without dementia. Participants were asked to【C5】______ how frequently they engaged in cognitively【C6】______activities. The researchers were looking for such things as reading newspapers, books and magazines,【C7】______ challenging games like chess, listening to the radio and watching television, and【C8】______museums. The good news, as they report in Neurology, is that 【C9】______ activity of this sort seems to slow the rate of 【C10】______decline in those without cognitive【C11】______ . The bad news is that in those who do then develop Alzheimer" s disease it is associated with a more rapid【C12】______decline. What seems to be happening is that cognitive stimulation helps 【C13】______the effect of the neurodegenerative lesions associated with dementia. It does not, 【C14】______, make them go away. They continue to【C15】______ , so that when the disease does eventually take【C16】______ there are more of them around than there otherwise would be, which results in a more 【C17】______cognitive fall off. That is not a message of despair, 【C18】______, because the length of time someone suffers from dementia is thus【C19】______and their healthy life prolonged. So the message is,【C20】______on with the crosswords.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B