阅读理解Part BDirections:The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order

阅读理解Text 1Among the annoying challenges facing the middle class is one that will probably go unmentioned in the next presidential campaign: What happens when the robots come for their jobs?Dont dismiss that possibility entirely

阅读理解Text 4The U

阅读理解Text 3Any fair-minded assessment of the dangers of the deal between Britains National Health Service (NHS) and DeepMind must start by acknowledging that both sides mean well

阅读理解A. In December of 1869, Congress appointed a commission to select a site and prepare plans and cost estimates for a new State Department Building. The commission was also to consider possible arrangements for the War and Navy Departments. To the horror of some who expected a Greek Revival twin of the Treasury Building to be erected on the other side of the White House, the elaborate French Second Empire style design by Alfred Mullett was selected, and construction of a building to house all thre

单选题If you ask a Swiss person who their president is, they likely won't be able to tell you. And it's not because they are politically apathetic or uninformed. In Switzerland, citizens don't vote for their president. In this small alpine country, citizens elect a new Parliament every four years, and the Parliament chooses a group of seven councilors from different parties. They are the head of state. The presidency rotates among the members every year. But the keystone of Swiss democracy is the regular use of referendums, in which citizens vote on everything from their town's new sports center to the country's immigration policy. As Michael Bechtel, professor of political science at the University of St. Gallen, explains, in a direct democracy there is a stronger incentive for political elites to take into account citizen preferences when making choices. It might sound like a panacea for Occupy Wall Street types, but this is actually a complex system with both advantages and disadvantages. Voting in Switzerland is easy. With no need to register, every citizen receives a ballot for each vote, which can be returned by mail. And decisions aren't final. If a law has already been passed, people can still overturn it by getting 50,000 signatures in 100 days. The bill then has to be voted on by the public. And if that wasn't enough, Swiss citizens can also suggest their own laws by " popular initiative ." If 100,000 people ask for a change in the constitution, the Parliament is obligated to discuss it and submit the proposal to a popular vote. To be sure, there are pitfalls. Popular votes can lead to a tyranny of the majority, making it easy to discriminate against small groups. In 2009, a law was passed with 57 percent of the votes in favor of banning the construction of mosque towers even if the government emphatically opposed the ban. This system also slows down the law-making process and makes it more difficult to get on the same page with international rulings like those of the European Union. Could other nations benefit from direct democracy? Maybe, but the preconditions are high. Besides being a well-educated electorate with basic rights, they must be able to see past party lines." It comes down to how much you trust your fellow citizens," says Klaus Dingwerth, political scientist and fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute.

单选题Although the names on the list of SIFI are supposed to be secret. AIG and Prudential, two insurers, this week confirmed they are on it. So too did GE Capital, the conglomerate's financial arm. These firms, and perhaps others, have joined America's largest banks and clearing houses in being 【C1】______ "systemically important financial institutions" (SIFIs) by the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, a regulatory watchdog. What that means in practice is that 【C2】______ they are thought to be 【C3】______ enough to blow up America's economy, they should get special 【C4】______. An appeals process against being 【C5】______ a SIFI will last for 30 days, but discussions have been going on for years so it is hard to believe minds will be 【C6】______ now. The immediate 【C7】______ is that the firms will be regulated by the Fed and 【C8】______ to tougher capital and operational requirements. Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, said the designations would "protect taxpayers, reduce risk in the financial system, and 【C9】______ financial stability." Others are less 【C10】______. "This is a catastrophe," says Peter Wallison, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, and a former White House counsel. Putting these institutions under the 【C11】______ of the Fed will 【C12】______ undermine their ability to innovate, he argues. And joining the group of entities perceived to be too big to fail means they will enjoy an 【C13】______ government guarantee. That will put them at a funding advantage 【C14】______ smaller companies, he says, and 【C15】______ that their products are government-backed, a huge help for insurers in particular. Firms themselves appear to have 【C16】______ feelings about the SIFI label. AIG seems to approve; MetLife, an insurer that has not been designated, thinks that the higher capital requirements it brings could 【C17】______ the viability of some products. Much depends on whether SIFIs are now perceived to have an implicit guarantee, and on 【C18】______ that can be monetised. It also 【C19】______ how many other firms are designated SIFIs. Lots of financial firms in America are large: there are rumblings a-bout money-market funds, asset managers and private-equity firms. Risk can move around the financial system. The question today is which firms should be on the list. Eventually it might be which to 【C20】______.

单选题Management consultants, investment banks and big law firms are the Holy Trinity of white-collar careers. They recruit up to a third of the graduates of the world's best universities. They offer starting salaries in excess of $ 100,000 and a chance of making many multiples of that. They also provide a ladder to even better things. The top ranks of governments and central banks are sprinkled with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey veterans. Technology firms, though they are catching up fast, have nothing like the same grip on the global elite. Which raises a pressing question; how do you maximize your chances of joining such elite professional-services firms? Lauren Rivera of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management has spent a decade studying how these firms recruit. According to her, the best way to get into the tiny group of elite firms is to be studying at the tiny group of elite universities. The firms spend millions of dollars love-bombing these institutions with recruiting events: students can spend the recruitment season wining and dining at their expense. However, as Ms. Rivera notes, firms reject the vast majority of elite students they interview: so even the most pedigreed need to learn how to game the system. The most important tip is to look at who is doing the recruiting. The firms use revenue-generating staff rather than human-resources people to decide who has the right stuff. The interviewers are trying to juggle their day jobs with their recruiting duties. In the interview room they behave predictably: they follow a set script, starting with some ice-breaking chit-chat, then asking you about yourself, then setting a work-related problem. That makes them desperate for relief from the tedium. Be enthusiastic. Hang on their every word. And flatter their self-image as "the best of the best". The most important quality recruiters are looking for is "fit": for all their supposedly rigorous testing of candidates, they would sooner choose an easy-going person with a second-class mind than a Mark Zuckerberg-type genius who rubs people up the wrong way. Staff in professional-services firms spend most of their time dealing with clients; so looking the part is essential. They also expect their employees to spend extraordinary amounts of time together—learning the ropes in boot camps, working late in the office, having constant work dinners, getting stuck together in airports in godforsaken places. One candidate in Ms. Rivera's sample passed the interview by adopting the persona of a successful consultant that he knew at that firm. Even if you do not go that far, you must at all costs avoid appearing nerdy or eccentric. The old-fashioned belief still prevails that playing team sports, especially posh ones like rowing, makes for a rounded character. The final key to success is to turn your interviewer into a champion: someone who is willing to go to bat for you when the hiring committee meets to whittle down the list.

单选题[A] We don't make a commitment.[B] We get trapped by thinking fallacies.[C] We're motivated by negative emotions.[D] We try to change too much.[E] We try to eat the entire elephant.[F] We neglect the toolbox.[G] We forget that failure is usually a given. Changing our behavior is a self-engineering challenge with few equals. Whether the change involves diet, exercise, habits, dependencies or anything else, changing behavior is one of the hardest things any of us will ever try to do. This is a well-researched area and quite a lot is known about why sustained change is tremendously difficult. Here are five of the biggest reasons.【B1】______ While it's understandable to think that strongly felt negative emotions like regret, shame, fear and guilt should be able to catalyze lasting behavior change, the opposite is true. Negative emotion may trigger us to think about everything we're not doing, or feel like we're doing wrong, but it's horrible fuel for making changes that stick. One review of 129 behavior change studies found that the consistently least effective change strategies hinged on fear and regret. As much as this sounds like a platitude, real change needs a positive platform to launch from; we need positive, self-edifying reasons for taking on the challenge.【B2】______ Feeling overwhelmed by trying to change a behavior—any behavior—tends to foster all-or-nothing thinking. "I'm going to charge in and change, and if I fail that means I just can't do it." If you're up on your cognitive biases and distortions, you know that all-or-nothing thinking is a big one. It straps us into a no-win situation, because your odds of sustaining even the most impressive jolt of momentum to change any behavior just aren't very good. If we really want to change, one of the first things we have to do is take all-or-nothing off the table, and purge a few other thinking errors while we're at it.【B3】______ Behavior change is a big thing, no matter the behavior, and it's almost never possible to take all of it on all at once. We have to start somewhere with particular, measurable actions. Big and vague has to give way to small and specific. Rather than "I'm going to start exercising," it's "I'm going to start walking tonight after work for 30 minutes down Edgemont Road." Each specific action is one forkful of behavior change, and a set of those actions engaged over time results in cumulative change. And accompanying those cumulative actions, we need specific goals, which behavior change research suggests are essential to success because we need performance targets to measure ourselves against. And those, too, should be realistic and specific.【B4】______ If you can commit to changing one behavior long-term, and really make it stick, that's commendable change. But trying to take on multiple behaviors at once is a surefire way to send all of them into a ditch. The resources we rely on to make change happen are limited: attention, self-control, motivation, etc. Trying to change too much places unrealistic demands on those resources and dooms the efforts early on. We forget that the other areas of our lives keep spinning and also require those resources, so even just one additional behavior-change commitment is a big deal.【B5】______ Finally, but perhaps most importantly, what the best of behavior change research tells us is that if we haven't made a commitment to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish, it won't happen. We need a "commitment device" that firmly establishes what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. Everything else starts there.

单选题The made-for-TV movie about a tornado carrying man-eating sharks was a surprise hit in America. The preposterous plot of Sharknado may strike a chord with media bosses who have watched the Internet ravage their business over the past decade. Newspapers have lost readers and advertising to the Internet. Book and music shops have closed for good. Sales of DVDs and CDs have plummeted. The television industry has so far resisted big disruption but that has not stopped doomsayers predicting a flight of advertising and viewers. In 2008 Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC Universal, a big entertainment group, lamented the trend of " trading analogue dollars for digital pennies ". But those pennies are starting to add up. And even Mr. Zucker, now boss of CNN Worldwide, a TV news channel, has changed his tune. "Old media is well, well beyond digital pennies." he says. What has changed his mind? The surge in smartphones, tablet computers and broadband speeds has encouraged more people to pay for content they can carry around with them. And all-access services, which give unlimited content on mobile devices for a monthly fee, are promoting people to spend more on digital products. After years of wreaking havoc, the Internet is helping media companies to grow. Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm, reckons online licensing was responsible for about a third of the growth in revenues at CBS, an American media firm, in 2012. The most obvious change in the past few years is the decline of "physical" products, such as CDs, DVDs and print newspapers. In 2008 nearly nine-tenths of consumer cash went on them; by 2017 it will be a little over half, with digital grabbing the rest. Newspapers are trying to peddle digital subscriptions; the New York Times has nearly 700,000 online subscribers, but few others have done so well. So there is still a big question. Some wonder whether the prices that can be charged for computerized products "can support the underlying industries if they are not also physical businesses". Some media firms need to get bigger and trim costs. But new technology does provide opportunities for media industry. The value of archives is growing in the Internet age; owners can profit from older programs that are rarely broadcast. The Internet can also help firms become cleverer. Concerts have become the lifeblood of the music industry and make up more than half of revenues. Acts used to go on tour to sell albums. Now they put out albums so they can make their living on the road. Publishers are releasing books electronically to test sales before putting them in print, and to adjust prices to drive demand. Experiments that were once impossibly expensive now cost peanuts. The trade of dollars for digital pennies doesn't always hurt.

单选题In the current immigration wave, something markedly different is happening here in the middle of the great American "melting pot". 【F1】 There is a sense that, especially as immigrant populations reach a critical mass in many communities, it is no longer the melting pot that is transforming them, but they who are transforming American society. American culture remains a powerful force—for better or worse—that influences people both here and around the world in countless ways. But several factors have combined in recent years to allow immigrants to resist, if they choose, the Americanization that had once been considered irresistible. In fact, the very concept of assimilation is being called into question as never before. 【F2】 Some sociologists argue that the melting pot often means little more than "Anglo conformity" and that assimilation is not always a positive experience for either society or the immigrants themselves. And with today's emphasis on diversity and ethnicity, it has become easier than ever for immigrants to avoid the melting pot entirely. Even the metaphor itself is changing, having fallen out of fashion completely with many immigration advocacy and ethnic groups. They prefer such terms as the "salad bowl" and the "mosaic" ,metaphors that convey more of a sense of separateness in describing this nation of immigrants. 【F3】 Among socially conservative families such as the Jacintos, who initially moved to California from their village in Mexico's Guanajuato state, then migrated here in 1988 to find jobs in the meatpacking industry, bad influences are a constant concern. They see their children assimilating, but often to the worst aspects of American culture. Their concerns reflect some of the complexities and ambivalence that mark the assimilation process these days. Immigrants such as the Jacintos are here to stay but remain wary of their adoptive country. According to sociologists, they are right to be concerned. "If assimilation is a learning process, it involves learning good things and bad things." said Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociology professor at Michigan State University. "It doesn't always lead to something better." The ambivalence of assimilation can cut both ways. Many native-born-Americans also seem to harbor mixed feelings about the process. 【F4】 As a nation, the United States increasingly promotes diversity, but there are underlying concerns that the more emphasis there is on the factors that set people apart, the more likely that society will end up divided. With Hispanics, especially Mexicans, accounting for an increasing proportion of U.S. population growth, it is this group, more than any other, that is redefining the melting pot. Hispanics now have overtaken blacks as the largest minority group in Nebraska and will become the biggest minority in the country within the next seven years, according to Census Bureau projections. 【F5】 The nation's 29 million Hispanics, the great majority of them from Mexico, have thus become the main focus for questions about how the United States today is assimilating immigrants, or how it is being transformed.

单选题For more than a decade, the prevailing view of innovation has been that little guys had the edge. Innovation bubbled up from the bottom, from upstarts and insurgents. Big companies didn't innovate, and government got in the way. In the dominant innovation narrative, venture-backed start-up companies were cast as the nimble winners and large corporations as the sluggish losers. There was a rich vein of business-school research supporting the notion that innovation comes most naturally from small-scale outsiders. That was the headline point that a generation of business people, venture investors and policy makers took away from Clayton M. Christensen's 1997 classic, The Innovator's Dilemma, which examined the process of disruptive change. But a shift in thinking is under way, driven by altered circumstances. In the United States and abroad, the biggest economic and social challenges—and potential business opportunities—are problems in multifaceted fields like the environment, energy and health care that rely on complex systems. Solutions won't come from the next new gadget or clever software, though such innovations will help. Instead, they must plug into a larger network of change shaped by economics, regulation and policy. Progress, experts say, will depend on people in a wide range of disciplines, and collaboration across the public and private sectors. "These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game," said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations. In its economic recovery package, the Obama administration is financing programs to generate innovation with technology in health care and energy. The government will spend billions to accelerate the adoption of electronic patient records to help improve care and curb costs, and billions more to spur the installation of so called smart grids that use sensors and computerized meters to reduce electricity consumption. In other developed nations, where energy costs are higher than in the United States, government and corporate projects to cut fuel use and reduce carbon emissions are further along. But the Obama administration is pushing environmental and energy conservation policy more in the direction of Europe and Japan. The change will bolster demand for more efficient and more environmentally friendly systems for managing commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. These systems are animated by inexpensive sensors and ever-increasing computing power but also require the skills to analyze, model and optimize complex networks, factoring in things as diverse as weather patterns and human behavior. Big companies like General Electric and IBM that employ scientists in many disciplines typically have the skills and scale to tackle such projects.

完形填空Trust is a tricky business

写作题Part ADirections：Write an email to all international experts on campus inviting them to attend the graduation ceremony

写作题PartBDirections：Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthepicturebelow.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethepicturesbriefly.2)interpretthemeaning,and3)giveyoucomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

问答题Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

问答题You stayed at a friend's home during your visit in America. Write a letter of about 100 words to your friend to express your thanks for his or her hospitality.You should include the details you think necessary.You should write neatly 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.

问答题Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.

翻译题Shakespeares life time was coincident with a period of extraordinary activity and achievement in the drama

单选题The past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government funding, among other ills, have aroused the anger of the media and public—and created unexpected gain for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry's status. "We used to be the tail on the dog," says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman. But now, he continues, PR is "the organizing principle" behind many business decisions. PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favorable reporting in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to expand into territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing influence. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and organize live events, web launches and the like. "When you look at advertising versus public relations, it's not going to be those clearly different," says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The declining of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists' attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and spread news by posting press releases on their websites, for example. The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, watched and directed by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative comments. Perhaps the best indication of PR's growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent comments on blogs and social networks. In October America's Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR's growth. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.