ThetablesandpiechartshowinpercentagetermstheresultsofasurveyofanewshoppingcomplexinLondon.Summarizetheinformationbyselectingandreportingthemainfeatures,andmakecomparisonswhererelevant.Youshouldwriteabout150wordsontheANSWERSHEET.(15points)

Just seven years ago, the Texas Legislature prescribed that all high schoolers must pass two math courses and geometry to graduate. This summer, the state reversed course, easing its【C1】______math, science, and social-studies requirements to【C2】______class time for job training. Texas legislators want to create a more【C3】______system that helps students who aren"t headed to four-year colleges enter the workforce. But that【C4】______carries some risks.【C5】______it"s true that not all students will go on to college, pulling back on college preparatory coursework has to be【C6】______carefully in a state like Texas, with its hundreds of thousands of low-income and【C7】______students. They"re the students who would benefit from college the most. New laws in Texas, as well as in Florida, de-emphasize the math class required for【C8】______to four-year colleges. Knowledge of these subjects is considered an indicator of college readiness【C9】______the Common Core standards, which have been【C10】______by 45 states, including Florida. More than half of public-school students in both states are nonwhite and from low-income families. It"s particularly【C11】______that these Hispanic and African-American students leave high school qualified to further their e-ducation—【C12】______they don"t plan on doing so right away. A college【C13】______is the most important driver of social mobility. By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs will require some kind of postsecondary education according to surveys. 【C14】______speaking, Texas"s earlier college-prep course-work recommendations didn"t fit reality.【C15】______the high bar, only about half of the state"s high school graduates immediately headed off to college of any kind. "We wanted to give students and parents more flexibility, to not only be college-prepared—which I think we"re doing a pretty good job of—but perhaps to【C16】______that preparation to folks who may not be going to college," Representative Jimmie Don Aycock, who【C17】______the Texas House"s Public Education Committee, says of the revision. The goal isn"t to dumb down the curriculum, he says, but to let kids【C18】______a path that might not have been【C19】______to them before. The state"s educational system still rewards schools when students【C20】______college readiness.

BPart B/B

BPart ADirections: Write a composition/letter of no less than 100 words on the following information./B

You've now heard it so many times, you can probably repeat it in your sleep. President Obama will no doubt make the point publicly when he gets to Beijing: the Chinese need to consume more; they need — believe it or not — to become more like Americans, for the sake of the global economy. And it's all true. But the other side of that equation is that the U.S. needs to save more. For the moment, American households actually are doing so. After the personal-savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, the shock of the economic crisis last year prompted people to snap shut their wallets. In China, the household-savings rate exceeds 20%. It is partly for policy reasons. As we've seen, wage earners are expected to care for not only their children but also their aging parents. And there is, to date, only the flimsiest (脆弱的) of publicly-funded health care and pension systems, which increases incentives for individuals to save while they are working. But China is a society that has long esteemed personal financial prudence(谨慎)for centuries. There is no chance that will change anytime soon, even if the government creates a better social safety net and successfully encourages greater consumer spending. Why does the U.S. need to learn a little frugality(节俭) ? Because healthy savings rates are one of the surest indicators of a country's long-term financial health. High savings lead, over time, to increased investment, which in turn generates productivity gains, innovation and job growth. In short, savings are the seed corn of a good economic harvest. The U.S. government thus needs to act as well. By running constant deficits, it is dis-saving, even as households save more. Peter Orszag, Obama's Budget Director, recently called the U.S. budget deficits unsustainable and he's right. To date, the U.S. has seemed unable to see the consequences of spending so much more than is taken in. That needs to change. China's leaders might gently hint that Beijing is getting a little nervous about the value of the dollar — which has fallen 15% since March, in large part because of increasing fears that America's debt load is becoming unmanageable. That's what happens when you're the world's biggest creditor; you get to drop hints like that, which would be enough by themselves to create international economic chaos if they were ever leaked. (Every time any official in Beijing deliberately publicly talks about seeking an alternative to the U.S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans saved more and spent less, consistently over time, they wouldn't have to worry about all that.

Amazon today unveiled Dash Buttons, an easy way for customers to【C1】______select bulk goods 【C2】______ an internet-connected button, and yesterday 【C3】______ Home Services, an on-demand installation and handyman service. Combined, they show that the e-commerce giant has a clear understanding of how the Internet-of-things will 【C4】______ its business. And it isn' t going to be shy about capitalizing on connectivity to build its bottom line. Dash Buttons are an adaptation of Amazon's 【C5】______ -controlled Dash ordering system that lets people speak to order new【C6】______items. So 【C7】______ Amazon has is a retrofit strategy for connecting smart appliances to its e-commerce operations and a future-facing strategy for the coming flood of 【C8】______ devices. And all of this is geared around making buying products from Amazon as easy as possible. The 【C9】______ of one-button tasks are appealing,【C10】______it could lead to a【C11】______of packages ending up at people's doors if Amazon doesn't try to【C12】______waste on its end, by grouping shipments together when possible. People on Twitter seem mostly【C13】______about pets and small children playing with the Dash Buttons and ordering multiples of their Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes, although Amazon notes that【C14】______the button is pressed more than once, the order doesn't go【C15】______on the second time, and you'll get a smartphone notification about it. Amazon also recently launched Home Services, following up on last year's opening of a home automation e-store devoted to connected gadgets for the home—many of which require a【C16】______in staller. So now Amazon can sell these devices along with the person who can install them. It also is【C17】______on maintenance, via a network of service providers that it can call 【C18】______ for its network of suppliers or for its own planned connected home play. With Dash, it's【C19】______an offensive play to【C20】______up more sales as devices come online. With Amazon Home Services, it's making a defensive play as other large companies try to become more vertically integrated.

Come on—everybody's doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us thinking of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good—drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the world. Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of examples of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers. The idea seems promising, and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many public-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. "Dare to be different, please don't smoke!" pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers—teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure. But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it's presented here is that it doesn't work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program prodvices lasting changes is limited and mixed. There' s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits—as well as negative ones—spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day. Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It's like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that's the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.

When a search engine guesses what you want before you finish typing it, or helpfully ignores your bad spelling, that is the result of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Although AI has been through cycles of hype and disappointment before, big technology companies have recently been scrambling to hire experts in the field, in the hope of building machines that can learn even more sophisticated tasks. IBM said this month it would invest $ 1 billion in a new division to develop uses for Watson, its computer that understands human language. But this week Google enhanced its lead in this field by paying around $ 660 m for DeepMind Technologies, a startup in London that has yet to announce a product. The boss of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, previously created video games such as " Evil Genius" and "Theme Park". DeepMind"s 75 geniuses will join the world"s leading group of machine-learning experts, which Google has been assembling in the past few years. Google"s main source of income, its search engine and the accompanying ad-placement system, is driven by machine learning. The firm"s self-driving cars rely on it, as do the intelligent thermostats made by Nest, a firm it has just taken over, and the robots made by Boston Dynamics and other robotics outfits it has been buying. The technology is already the backbone of many other internet firms. It is why Facebook and Linkedln have that slightly creepy ability to find people you know, and why Amazon and Netflix are good at suggesting books and films you might like. It also helps intelligence agencies to identify terrorist networks. As machine learning leaves the lab and goes into practice, it will threaten white-collar, knowledge-worker jobs just as machines, automation and assembly lines destroyed factory jobs in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, the technique has been applied by researchers at Stanford University to tell whether a biopsy of breast cells is highly cancerous, something that until now has required a human expert to assess. Another of DeepMind"s founders, Shane Legg, has predicted that artificial intelligence running wildly will be the biggest existential risk to humans in this century. Its founders have asked Google to set up an "ethics board" to consider the appropriate use of machine learning in its products. The creator of "Evil Genius" is ensuring that his new overlord sticks to its motto, "Don"t be evil".

Read the following text and answer the questions by choosing the most suitable subtitle from the list A-G for each numbered paragraph(41-45). There are two extra subtitles which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET.(10 points) [A]Pick up the local paper [B]Save from the first place [C]Use a guidebook—your own [D]Pick up the phone [E]Choose cheap countries [F]Download magazines from web [G]Splurge when it matters You've mastered the art of modern-travel savings: Your airfare alerts are set up on Kayak; you flit around Europe on cheap carriers like EasyJet. You stay in apartments rented through Airbnb. You could probably shave a few more cents off travel costs by downloading five new apps and bookmarking 10 new sites. But real savings will come to those who go retro by stepping away from the screen, or using it differently, to find old-fashioned tactics that can save you big. Here are some old-school tips for getting the most out of your travel buck. 【R1】______ We think we can get everything done online these days, but sometimes a simple phone call is your best bet for saving money. Speak with an innkeeper and learn of potential discounts on extended stays or information on how to get there from the airport by public transit. Contact the specific location where you'll pick up your rental car and reserve a compact to avoid getting "upgraded" to a bigger vehicle that will increase(sometimes even double)your gas costs. Call travel agencies that strike special deals with airlines to get your prices below anything you' ll find online. 【R2】______ Goodbye Norway, hello Bolivia. Or as a blogger put it, "Cheapest dorm bed in Zurich=nice room in Bangkok." Extrapolate that to tour guides, museum entries, food and more, and the savings start to add up. Of course, keep in mind how much it will cost you to get there in the first place. Luckily, a lot of the cheaper countries are also cheap to fly to; another blogger put together a list of 10 "Cheap Places to Travel on the U.S. Dollar," which includes Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru, Hun gary and Romania. 【R3】______ Most travelers will never be across-the-board cheapskates. Street food, nosebleed-theater seats and bunk beds are not for everyone. But you don't have to be a purist. For each trip, decide on a themed "waste" or two—transportation, food, arts, lodging—and save on the rest. 【R4】______ No listings are more up-to-the-minute than Friday arts supplements, alternative weeklies or the local editions of Time Out magazine. Get them on actual paper while they last. You' 11 not only find the nontouristy scene laid out for you in one handy package, but often come across coupons or specials you certainly won't find on Yelp. 【R5】______ I still carry a travel guide around when I travel—as backup, if nothing else. But those books are pricey, and there's so much free information online that, with a little copying and pasting(and printing out), you can come pretty close to matching them with your own bespoke travel guide. So, in a retro twist, no Wi-Fi needed.

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

Women have been driving yellow cabs in New York since the 1940s, but 99% of drivers are male. Even among drivers of cars booked by phone or online, only 4% are women. That may change with the launch of SheTaxis, an app that lets female passengers insist on female drivers, and vice versa. It will be available in New York City, Westchester and Long Island, and the firm plans to expand to other cities. Stella Mateo, the founder, is betting that quite a few women are nervous and weary of getting into cars driven by men. The service may also appeal to those whose religious beliefs forbid them to travel with unrelated men. Each driver wears a pink pashmina. Men who ask for a ride will be directed to another car service. Similar services thrive in India, South Africa and several Middle Eastern cities. Japan has had women-only railway carriages on and off since 1912. Known as hana densha (flower trains), they of fer shelter from the gropers who make rush hour in Tokyo so disagreeable. But SheTaxis faces two speed bumps. One is practical. Demand has been so great that the firm has had to decelerate its launch until it can recruit 500 drivers. The other obstacle is legal. By employing only female drivers, SheTaxis is obviously discriminating against men. Since anti-discrimination law is not always applied with common sense, that may be illegal. And there is no shortage of potential litigants. Yellow cabbies are furious at the growth of online taxi firms such as Uber. "It's not hard to imagine a guy... filing suit," says Sylvia Law of New York University Law School. "SheTaxis' defence would probably be that its drivers are all independent contractors." Because the firm caters only to women, it is discriminating against male customers, too. Is that legal? Angela Cornell of Cornell Law School thinks there could be a loophole. New York's Human Rights Commission could make an exemption on the ground that SheTaxi offers a service that is in the public interest: women feel safer not getting into cars with strange men. Women-only colleges are allowed, so why not women-only cabs? The snag is that some men may also feel safer getting into cabs with female drivers. A study in 2010 found that 80% of crashes in New York City that kill or seriously injure pedestrians involve male drivers. Women drivers are simply better.

Directions:Writeanessaybasedonthechart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethediagram,and2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.

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

Just as each wedding creates potential business for divorce lawyers, so each engagement gives insurers a chance to drum up business. Future spouses, says Alan Tuvin of Travelers, an insurer, may wish to protect themselves against something going wrong on the wedding day. It is unlikely that your intended wife will leave on horseback, as Julia Roberts did in "Runaway Bride", and most insurers wouldn't cover that anyway. But you never know what might happen. Mr. Tuvin launched the firm' s wedding-insurance business; he and his wife were its first clients. A typical American wedding costs 25,000 or so. This has fallen a bit over the past quarter-century but still seems lavish given how tight American belts are these days. Weddings are pricey because the rich are more likely to marry than the poor, and the average age of newlyweds has gone up, so couples are more prosperous when they eventually tie the knot. High prices, and the fact that many venues require couples to take out liability insurance, feed demand for wedding insurance. A fifth of couples buy it, says the Wedding Report, a trade publication. Wedding insurance began in Britain: Cornhill, an insurer, wrote its first policy in 1988. But there were few takers. The idea only took off once transplanted to America. In the early days, says Mr. Nuccio of Robert Nuccio of Wedsure, an surer, there were incidents of couples faking engagements to collect a payout. Since then, most policies have a clause that excludes "change of heart". Wedsure does insure against cold feet, but its policy will pay out only if the wedding is cancelled more than 12 months before it is due to take place, thereby guarding against fiances phoning the broker once the relationship is already on the rocks. This does not mean policies are useless. Common causes of payouts include the venue or caterers going bust after having taken a big deposit. Extreme weather, a spouse being deployed by the armed forces and an absent priest can all trigger payouts. Most policies will pay to re-stage the photos if the photographer fails to turn up or disappears with the pictures. For some, even a small risk of something going wrong on a day that has been planned for months is worth paying to avoid. Who says romance is dead?

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

Directions: In this section, you are asked to write an essay based on the following information. Make comments and express your own opinion. You should write at least 150 words. 近年来，一些人认为应给予有创造性的艺术家们自由，让他们能够以自己希望的任何方式(文字、图画、音乐或者电影)表达想法，而政府不应该对此进行限制。你是否同意这个观点?

Anyone who has searched for a job fresh out of college knows how difficult it is to get that first job. Sending out hundreds of resumes, only to get a few interviews in the end—if you're lucky!— and if you're very lucky, eventually there's a job offer on the table. Should you grasp it, or wait for something better to come along the way? It depends on whether you are a "maximizer" or a "satisficer". Maximizers want to explore every possible option before choosing a job. They gather every stick of information in the hope of making the best possible decision. If you are a satisficer, however, you make decisions based on the evidence at hand. Simply put, satisficers are more likely to cut their job search short and take the first job offer. Maximizers are more likely to continue searching until a better job offer comes along. Which type of approach yields the better payoff? A maximizer. Specifically, quoting the results of a study of the job search of 548 members of the Class of 2002 by Sheena Iyengar, Rachael Wells, and Barry Schwartz, the maximizers put themselves through more contortions in the job hunt. They applied to twenty jobs, on average, while satisficers applied to only ten, and they were significantly more likely to make use of outside sources of information and support. But it turned out to be worth it: the job offers they got were significantly better, in terms of salary, than what the satisficers got. Satisficers were offered jobs with an average starting salary of $37, 085; the average starting salary offered to maximizers was $44, 515, more than 20 percent higher. The trouble is, however, that higher pay doesn't make maximizers a happier group than satisficers. In fact, maximizers were significantly more likely than satisficers to be unhappy with the offers they accepted. Evidently, being a maximizer can help you earn more income, but that income doesn't buy more happiness, as the maximizer's likely to agonize over the prospect of a better job offer out there he or she missed. Maximizers may have objectively superior outcomes, but they're so busy obsessing about all the things that they could have had, they tend to be less happy with the outcomes they do get.

It has become a recurring theme, and worryingly so. Since October 2015, our planet has experienced ten consecutive months of human-influenced, record-breaking temperature increases. The previous October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May and June months were all documented as the warmest Octobers, the warmest Januarys, the warmest Aprils; global heat highs are the hot new trend and the data suggests they are here to stay. According to NASA, July 2016 is not only the warmest July in history, but the warmest month in recorded history. NASA has tallied temperature changes from 1880 to the present day, with its data showing no signs of a slow-up in rising temperatures. Climate scientists have been perplexed in their attempts to understand the factors pushing the mercury so far up the thermometer this year. El Nino—the phenomenon explaining the unusual warming of surface waters in the east-central zone of the Pacific Ocean—has been tied to increased ocean water temperatures and changes in weather patterns. Important as it is to factor El Nino into the climate change framework, it is highly unlikely that it has contributed significantly to the hurried, upward trend witnessed these past ten months. If anything, focus on the subsiding effects of El Nino risks detracting attention from the pressure asserted on the climate by human activity. Greenhouse gases continue to bloat the atmosphere, trapping heat as atmospheric escape routes are obscured. Further exacerbating the climate change panic seems to be an unusually high temperature currently being experienced in the Arctic region. Arctic sea ice is the most vulnerable to climate change, and is now at a new low with ice cover down to 14. 54m sq km. With no clear solution in sight, the ice is destined to continue melting, with longer melting seasons becoming a normal occurrence. The U. S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have noted a similar trend for the past 14 months, and are expected to release a similar figure for July. Though the rise is expected to taper off towards the end of the year, a scientist drew attention to how there is a "99 percent chance of a new annual record in 2016". As we confront the reality that many of these changes are as a direct consequence of human intervention, it is very possible that without the appropriate response, we could be contending with broken records for years to come.

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

Long time ago, everyone knew that regular bedtimes were important. "Dream on! " most modern parents might reply. But research by Yvonne Kelly of University College, London, shows that the【C1】______wisdom is right-half the time. Daughters, it seems, do【C2】______regular bedtimes. Sons do not. Dr Kelly knew of many studies that had looked at the connection between sleep habits and cognitive ability in adults and【C3】______. All showed that inconsistent sleeping【C4】______went hand in hand【C5】______poor academic performance. Surprisingly,【C6】______little such research had been done on children She【C7】______examined the bedtimes and cognitive abilities of 11,178 children born in Britain. She collected the bedtime information of the participants when they were nine months, three years, five years and seven years of age.【C8】______asking whether the children had【C9】______bedtimes on weekdays and if they always, usually, sometimes or never made them, she collected information about family【C10】______economic circumstances and other matters—including whether children were read to before they went to sleep and whether they had a television in their bedroom. The children【C11】______were also asked, at the ages of three, five and seven, to take standardized reading, mathematical and spatial-awareness tests, from which their IQs could be【C12】______. Dr Kelly's report shows that by the time children had reached the age of seven, not having had a regular bedtime did seem to【C13】______their cognition, even when other relevant【C14】______such as bedtime reading, bedroom televisions and parents' socioeconomic status were controlled for. But that was true【C15】______if they were female. On the IQ scale, girls who had had regular bedtimes【C16】______between eight and nine points more than those who did not. Boys were not completely unaffected. Irregular bedtimes left their IQs about six points below those of their【C17】______at the age of three. But the distinction【C18】______by the time they were seven. This difference between the sexes is【C19】______Dr Kelly did not expect it and has no explanation to offer for it. As scientists are accustomed to say, but this time with good reason, more research is【C20】______.