A. I just don't know how to motivate them to do a better job

Directions: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following drawing. In your essay

In his book The Tipping Point

Think of those fleeting moments when you look out of an aeroplane window and realise that you are

Directions: Write a letter to the personnel department of a foreign company

To function well in the world

It amazes me when people proclaim that they are bored. Actually, it amazes me that I am ever bored

Ellie is a psychologist

Recalculating the global use of phosphorus

You can save money

One of the most pressing challenges the world will face in the next few decades is how to alleviate the growing stress that human activities are placing 21 the environment. The consequences are just too great to 22 . Wildlife habitats are being degraded or disappearing altogether as new developments 23 more land. Plant and animal species are becoming 24 at a greater rate now than at any time in Earth's history. 25 many as 30 percent of the world's fish stocks are over-exploited. And the list goes on. 26 , there is reason to have hope for the future. Advances in computing power and molecular biology are among the tremendous increases in scientific capability that 27 helping researchers 28 a better understanding of these problems. Recent development in science and technology could provide the 29 for some major and timely actions that would 30 our understanding of how human activities affect the environment. One priority for research is improving hydrological forecasting. It has been 31 that the world's water use would triple in the next two decades. Already, widespread water 32 have occurred in parts of China, India, and North Africa. The need for water also is taking its toll on fresh water ecosystems in the United States. Only 2 percent of the nations' stream are considered in good 33 , and 34 to 40 percent of native fish species are rare to extinct. To prevent outbreaks of 35 diseases in plants, animals and human, more study is needed on how parasites and disease-carrying species—as 36 as humans and other species they 37 — are affected by changes in the environment. The overuse of antibiotics both in humans and in farm animals has 38 to the growth of antibiotic-resistant micro organism. Researchers can take 39 of new technologies in genetics and computing to better monitor and 40 the effects that environment changes might have on diseases outbreaks.

Amtrak—the largest railway company in the U.S

Americans today don't place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not scholars. Even our schools are where we send our children to get a practical education—not to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Symptoms of pervasive anti-intellectualism in our schools aren't difficult to find. "Schools have always been in a society where practical is more important than intellectual," says education writer Diane Ravitch. "Schools could be a counterbalance." Ravitch's latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, traces the roots of anti-intellectualism in our schools, concluding they are anything but a counterbalance to the American distaste for intellectual pursuits. But they could and should be. Encouraging kids to reject the life of the mind leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and control. Without the ability to think critically, to defend their ideas and understand the ideas of others, they cannot fully participate in our democracy. Continuing along this path, says writer Earl Shorris, "We will become a second-rate country. We will have a less civil society." "Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege," writes historian and professor Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book on the roots of anti-intellectualism in US politics, religion, and education. From the beginning of our history, says Hofstadter, our democratic and populist urges have driven us to reject anything that smells of elitism. Practicality, common sense, and native intelligence have been considered more noble qualities than anything you could learn from a book. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist philosophers thought schooling and rigorous book learning put unnatural restraints on children: "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn exemplified American anti-intellectualism. Its hero avoids being civilized—going to school and learning to read—so he can preserve his innate goodness. Intellect, according to Hofstadter, is different from native intelligence, a quality we reluctantly admire. Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind. Intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, while intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes and imagines. School remains a place where intellect is mistrusted. Hofstadter says our country's educational system is in the grips of people who "joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise." What do American parents expect their children to acquire in school?

The main purpose of a resume is to convince an employer to grant you an interview

The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media—such as television commercials and print advertisements—still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing's impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media. Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users' responses. But in some cases, one marketer's owned media become another marketer's paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies' marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned. The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more (and more diverse) communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company's response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg. Consumers may create "earned" media when they are ______.

What happens to human cells if you douse them in a Petri dish full of public shame, official reprimands and months of intense stress? An answer came this week when Yoshiki Sasai, a distinguished stem-cell biologist at the R/KEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, hanged himself after being blamed over the fabrication of research. Dr. Sasai had been an author, with Haruko Obokata, a younger, female colleague whose work he was supervising and promoting, of two papers published in January in em>Nature/em>. These promised a leap forward in the much-hyped field of regenerative medicine. They purported to show that applying stress to ordinary mouse cells—squeezing them, or dipping them into a bath of mild acid—could turn them into pluripotent stem cells, capable of forming new animal tissue. Many other scientists therefore tried to replicate it in the months following publication. But they could not, and doubts grew. Blogs and websites pointed out irregularities in the images and diagrams in the original papers. Finally, in April, an investigative panel at the RIKEN Centre slammed Dr. Obokata for fabrication and plagiarism, and in July em>Nature/em> retracted the papers. The panel did clear Dr. Sasai of misconduct, but it laid upon him a "heavy responsibility" for failing to verify his star researcher's study. He was a keen fundraiser for stem-cell research at R/KEN, which is one of Japan's biggest research organisations, with laboratories all around the country, and that motive may explain his failure to scrutinise her work properly, according to another probe, by outside experts. Disciplinary action against him was expected, and the outsiders called for the Centre for Developmental Biology to be shut down. In April Dr. Sasai told the em>Wall Street Journal/em> that he was "overwhelmed with shame". But some shame surely also attaches to the scientific establishment's handling of the scandal—particularly in a country where suicide is common. The Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog, a website which has followed the implosion of the papers closely, called this week for all scientists to reflect on the pressure researchers are under to make transformative discoveries. Dr. Sasai became a scapegoat, taking too much responsibility for the troubles, it said. Having been briefly in hospital for stress, and on powerful drugs, he had reportedly asked to step aside from his job, only to be turned down. Suicide, unfortunately, is a response that cannot be gainsaid. The assumption in the first paragraph may indicate ______.

Directions: You are going to recruit three volunteers to work as assistants in the library

A

Climate science is famously complicated

Whether to teach young children a second language is disputed among teachers, researchers and pushy parents. On the one hand, acquiring a new tongue is said to be far easier when young. On the other, teachers complain that children whose parents speak a language at home that is different from the one used in the classroom sometimes struggle in their lessons and are slower to reach linguistic milestones. Would a 15-month-old child, they wonder, not be better off going to music classes? A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the point of what is going on in a bilingual child's brain, how a second language affects the way he thinks, and thus in what circumstances being bilingual may be helpful. Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with. The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain's "executive function". This allows people to organise, plan, prioritise activity, shift their attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses. Bilingualism is common in Trieste which, though Italian, is almost surrounded by Slovenia. So Dr. Kovacs and Dr. Mehler looked at 40 "preverbal" seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function. First, the babies were trained to expect the appearance of a puppet on a screen after they had heard a set of meaningless words invented by the researchers. Then the words, and the location of the puppet, were changed. When this was done, the babies who speak only one language had difficulty overcoming their learnt response, even when the researchers gave them further clues that a switch had taken place. The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention—counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response. Monitoring languages and keeping them separate is part of the brain's executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function's development. Before rushing your offspring into bilingual kindergartens, though, there are a few cautions. For one thing, these extraordinary cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in "crib" bilinguals—those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits apply to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear. Who are probably pushing young children to study a new language?