单选题What is making the world so much older? There are two long-term causes that will continue to show up in the figures for the next few decades. The first of the big causes is that people everywhere are living far longer than they used to, and this trend started with the industrial revolution and has been slowly gathering pace. In 1900 average life expectancy at birth for the world as a whole was only around 30 years, and in rich countries under 50. The figures now are 67 and 78 respectively, and still rising. A second, and bigger, cause of the ageing of societies is that people everywhere are having far fewer children, so the younger age groups are much too small to counterbalance the growing number of older people. This trend emerged later than the one for longer lives, first in developed countries and now in poor countries too.

单选题Organised volunteering and work experience has long been a vital companion to university degree courses. Usually it is left to【C1】______to deduce the potential from a list of adventures outside the classroom on a graduate's resume,【C2】______now the University of Bristol has launched an award to formalize the achievements of students who【C3】______time to activities outside their courses. Bristol PLuS aims to boost students in an increasingly【C4】______job market by helping them acquire work and life skills alongside【C5】______qualifications. "Our students are pretty active, but we found that they didn't【C6】______appreciate the value of what they did【C7】______the lecture hall," says Jeff Goodman, director of careers and employability at the university. "Employers are much more【C8】______than they used to be. They used to look for【C9】______and saw it as part of their job to extract the value of a candidate's skills. Now they want students to be able to explain why those skills are【C10】______to the job." Students who【C11】______the award will be expected to complete 50 hours of work experience or【C12】______work, attend four workshops on employability skills, take part in an intensive skills-related activity【C13】______, crucially, write a summary of the skills they have gained.【C14】______efforts will gain an Outstanding Achievement Award. Those who【C15】______best on the sports field can take the Sporting PLuS Award which fosters employer-friendly sports accomplishments. The experience does not have to be【C16】______organised. "We're not just interested in easily identifiable skills," says Goodman "【C17】______, one student took the lead in dealing with a difficult landlord and so【C18】______negotiation skills. We try to make the experience relevant to individual lives. " Goodman hopes the【C19】______will enable active students to fill in any gaps in their experience and encourage their less-active【C20】______to take up activities outside their academic area of work.

单选题There is no more fashionable answer to the woes of the global recession than "green jobs." Leaders of great nations have all gotten behind what Ban Ki-moon has called a "green New Deal"—pinning their hopes for future growth and new jobs on creating clean-technology industries. It all sounds like the ultimate win-win deal: beat the worst recession in decades and save the planet from global warming, all in one spending plan. So who cares how much it costs? And since the financial crisis and recession began, governments, environmental nonprofits, and even labor unions have been busy spinning out reports on just how many new jobs might be created from these new industries—estimates that range from the tens of thousands to the millions. The problem is that history doesn't bear out the optimism. As a new study from McKinsey consulting points out, clean energy is less like old manufacturing industries that required a lot of workers than it is like new manufacturing and service industries that don't. The best parallel is the semiconductor industry, which was expected to create a boom in high-paid high-tech jobs but today employs mainly robots. Clean-technology workers now make up only 0.6 percent of the American workforce, despite the government subsidies, tax incentives, and other supports that already exists. The McKinsey study, which examined how countries should compete in the post-crisis world, figures that clean energy won't command much more of the total job market in the years ahead. "The bottom line is that these 'clean' industries are too small to create the millions of jobs that are needed right away," says James Manyika, a director at the McKinsey Global Institute. Although they might not create those jobs, yet they could help other industries do just that: they did create a lot of jobs, indirectly, by making other industries more efficient. McKinsey and others say that the same could be true today if governments focus not on building a "green economy," but on greening every part of the economy using cutting-edge green products and services. Stop betting government money on particular green technologies that may or may not pan out, and start thinking more broadly. As McKinsey makes clear, countries don't become more competitive by slightly changing their "mix" of industries but by outperforming in each individual sector. Taking care of the environment at the broadest levels is often portrayed as a political red herring that will weaken competitiveness in the global economy. In fact, the future of growth and job creation may depend on it.

单选题Bankruptcy rates in the U.S. have been growing for more than two decades despite generally rising levels of personal income. The most prominent explanation puts the blame directly on credit cards, which became vastly more popular in the past 30 years. University of Pennsylvania law professor David A. Skeel notes that a 1978 Supreme Court decision allowed credit-card companies to charge the interest rate allowed in their state of incorporation. As a result, many incorporated in the high-rate states of Delaware and South Dakota. Being able to charge high rates throughout the country, they could afford to issue cards to those with limited ability to repay. Many high-risk cardholders, overburdened with debt, filed for bankruptcy. Skeel also notes that the impersonality of credit-card borrowing may have helped weaken the moral imperative to repay debts: in the 1960s a prospective borrower met face-to-face with a bank lending officer, but today the borrower gets credit by responding to a junk-mail offer. Other developments also fueled the rise in bankruptcy, including medical bills. A Harvard University study found that about a quarter of filers cited illness or injury as the specific reason for their troubles. Loss of jobs probably also drove some credit-card holders into bankruptcy. Other possible contributors include the growth of the gambling industry in recent years and the Supreme Court's 1977 decision to allow lawyers to advertise directly to the general public. Changes in bankruptcy law apparently have had little effect on filings. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 was designed to make it easier for consumers to pay off debts and start anew. As under previous acts, penniless debtors could file for complete discharge of debts under Chapter 7, and debtors with substantial assets could arrange for partial repayment under Chapter 13. Most filers opted for the more generous provisions of Chapter 7. During the six years following implementation of the act, filings rose substantially. The act was amended in 1984 to curb opportunistic petitions. However, filings went in the opposite direction than expected. Evidently, easy credit and other debt-creating forces have been more powerful. The latest legal effort is the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which went into effect in October. The new act lays down far more strict standards for debtors, including a test to qualify for Chapter 7 relief. Despite the new restrictions, bankruptcy experts tend to be skeptical or noncommittal about the effectiveness in reducing filings.

单选题What is the difference between Joe Six-Pack, Joe the Plumber and Joe Biden? One is vice president; the other two are not. Why? The answer depends on a host of interactive variables that must be factored into any equation of success: genes, parents, brothers and sisters, peers, teachers, practice, drive, culture, timing, legacy and luck. The rub for the scientist is determining the percentage of influence of each variable and its interactions, which requires sophisticated statistical models. Journalists, who are unrestricted by research terms, very quickly produce large quantities of self-help books that focus on select variables that interest them. Few do so better than Malcolm Gladwell, and in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, the New Yorker writer claims that successful people are not "self-made" but instead "are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Bill Gates, for example, may be smart, but Gladwell prefers to emphasize the fact that Gates's wealthy parents sent him to a private school that had a computer club with a teletype time-sharing terminal with a direct link to a mainframe computer in Seattle, and in 1968 this was very unusual. His good fortune to be born in the mid-1950s also meant that Gates came of age when the computer industry was ready to have someone of his experience start a software company. Similarly, Gladwell says, Mozart's father was a composer who mentored the young Wolfgang into greatness from age six until his early 20s, when his compositions changed from pleasantly melodious into masterful. The Beatles' lucky break came in Hamburg, Germany, where they were able to log in more than 1,200 live performances and thereby meet the well-known 10,000-hour rule for perfecting a profession. Asian wonder children are the product of "the tradition of wet-rice agriculture" that must be practiced year-round and that requires "the highest emphasis on effort and hard work," and that's why they study all summer while American students go to the mall. Such geniuses, Gladwell says, "are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky but all critical to making them who they are."

单选题If you know where to find a good plastic-free shampoo, can you tell Jeanne Haegele? Last September, the 28-year-old Chicago resident【C1】______to cut plastics out of her life. The marketing coordinator was concerned about【C2】______the chemicals coming out of some common types of plastic might be doing to her body. She was also worried about the damage all the plastic【C3】______was doing to the environment. So she【C4】______on her bike and rode to the nearest grocery store to see what she could find that didn't【C5】______plastic. "I went in and【C6】______bought anything," Haegele says. She did【C7】______some canned food and a box of milk—【C8】______discover later that both containers were【C9】______with plastic materials. "Plastic," she says, "just seemed like it was in everything." She's right. Back in the 1960s, plastic was well【C10】______its way to becoming a staple of American life. The U.S. produced 28 million tons of plastic waste in 2005—27 million tons of which【C11】______in waste dump. Our food and water come【C12】______in plastic. It's used in our phones and our computers, the cars we drive and the planes we ride in. But the【C13】______adaptable substance has its dark side. Environmentalists feel worried about the petroleum needed to make it. Parents worry about the possibility of【C14】______chemicals making their way from【C15】______plastic into children's bloodstreams. Which means Haegele isn't the only person trying to cut plastic out of her life—she isn't【C16】______the only one blogging about this kind of【C17】______. But those who've tried know it's【C18】______from easy to go plastic-free. "These things seem to be so common【C19】______it is practically impossible to avoid coming into【C20】______with them," says Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri.

单选题For a quarter of a century, surveys of reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federally-funded body, have been favorite material for anyone who thinks America is dumbing down. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, for example, cites the 2007 NEA report that "the proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004." So it is a surprise that this trend seems to have taken a turn for the better. This week the NEA reported that, for the first time since 1982 when its survey began, the number of adults who said they had read a novel, short story, poem or play in the past 12 months had gone up, rising from 47% of the population in 2002 to over 50% in 2008. The increase, modest as it is, has thrown educationalists into excitement. "It's just a temporary change," one professor said. It is certainly a snapshot. But it is not statistically insignificant. As the NEA's research director, Sunil Iyengar, points out, almost every ethnic group seems to be reading more. The increase has been most marked in groups whose reading had declined most in the past 25 years, African-Americans and Spanish Americans (up by 15% and 20% respectively since 2002). It has also been larger among people at lower levels of education: reading among college graduates was flat, but among those who dropped out of high school it rose from under a quarter to over a third. Most remarkable of all has been the rebound among young men. The numbers of men aged 18-24 who say they are reading books (not just online) rose 24% in 2002-08. Teachers sometimes despair of young men, whose educational performance has lagged behind that of young women almost across the board. But the reading gap at least may be narrowing. Dana Gioia, the NEA's outgoing chairman, thinks the reason for the turnaround is the public reaction to earlier reports which had sounded the alarm. "There has been a measurable change in society's commitment to literacy," he says. "Reading has become a higher priority." It may also be benefiting from the growing popularity of serious-minded leisure pursuits of many kinds. Museums, literary festivals and live opera transmissions into cinemas are all reporting larger audiences. Mr. Iyengar thinks the division between those who read a lot and those who don't is eroding. What has not changed, though, is America's "functional illiteracy" rate. Fully 21% of adult Americans did not read a book last year because they couldn't, one of the worst rates in the rich world.

单选题Texting has long been lamented as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all—it's actually more similar to spoken language. And it's a "spoken" language that is getting richer and more complex by the year. Historically, talking came first; writing is just an artifice that came along later. While talk is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. Over time, writers took advantage of this and started crafting sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The whole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself." No one talks like that casually—or should. But it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions. In the old days, we didn't much write like talking because there was no mechanism to reproduce the speed of conversation. But texting and instant messaging do—and a revolution has begun. It involves the basic mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and even vulgarity, texting is actually a new kind of talking. There is a virtual fashion of concision and little interest in capitalization or punctuation. The argument that texting is "poor writing" is analogous, then, to one that the Rolling Stones is "bad music" because it doesn't use violas. Texting is developing its own kind of grammar. Take LOL. It doesn't actually mean "laughing out loud" in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolved into something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing. Jocelyn texts "Where have you been?" and Annabelle texts back "LOL at the library studying for two hours." LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of equality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something—conveying an attitude—just like the "-ed" ending conveys past tense rather than "meaning" anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar. Civilization is fine—people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills. Worldwide people speak differently from the way they write, and texting—quick, casual and only intended to be read once—is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

单选题When you get interrupted in the middle of something, it can be hard to regain your train of thought, which can be annoying. But when you're interrupted while measuring medication for patients, the consequences can be more serious. A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that, perhaps unsurprisingly, when interrupted while dosing out medication, nurses are more likely to make mistakes. Researchers at the University of Sydney studied 98 nurses while they prepared and administered medications to more than 4,000 patients in almost 1.5 years. For a total of 505 hours during this period, investigators noted any interruptions that nurses encountered while dealing with medication, and also tracked two types of mistakes: procedural, which included things like not reading medication labels or failing to fully read a patient chart, and clinical, which included actually giving patients the wrong dose or wrong medication. For all administrations of medication studied, researchers noted that nurses were interrupted more than half the time (53%), and researchers noted procedural errors in nearly three quarters (74.4%) of administrations, and clinical errors in a quarter of all cases. The study authors also point out that the risk for major errors increased significantly the more when nurses were interrupted and that with no interruptions, the risk for a serious mistake was 2.3%. While it's understandable that some interruptions will, of necessity, take place during a nurse's work day, the authors suggest that such high levels of interruption and the resulting increase in errors associated with them point to a need for efforts to better enable nurses to focus on the task at hand. They write: "The converging evidence of the high rate of interruptions occurring during medication preparation and administration adds impetus to the need to develop and implement strategies to improve communication practices and to reduce unnecessary interruptions within ward environments." To that end, they suggest that simple measures such as installing white boards in hospital wards to prominently display commonly needed information or having nurses wear special "do not interrupt" vests while preparing or giving patients medication, could go some distance toward minimizing mistakes. They also suggest that reconsidering how the physical space of a hospital ward is organized could play a role in reducing errors. Whatever the potential solution, the authors say that this is indeed a problem, and one that requires additional research to solve.

单选题The shorter growing seasons expected with climate change over the next 40 years will endanger hundreds of millions of already poor people in the global tropics, say researchers working【C1】______the world's leading agricultural organisations. The effects of climate change are likely to be seen across the entire tropical【C2】______but many areas previously considered to be【C3】______food secure are likely to become highly【C4】______to droughts, extreme weather and higher temperatures, say the researchers with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Intensively farmed areas【C5】______northeast Brazil and Mexico are likely to see their【C6】______growing seasons fall below 120 days, which is critical for crops【C7】______corn to mature. Many other places in Latin America are likely to【C8】______temperatures that are too hot for bean【C9】______, a staple in the region. The impact could be【C10】______most in India and southeast Asia. More than 300 million people in south Asia are likely to be affected even with a 5% decrease in the【C11】______of the growing season. Higher peak temperatures are also expected to take a heavy【C12】______on food producers. Today there are 56 million crop-dependent people in parts of west Africa and India who live in areas where, in 40 years, maximum daily temperatures could be【C13】______than 30℃. This is【C14】______to the maximum temperature that beans can tolerate,【C15】______corn and rice yields suffer when temperatures【C16】______this level. "We are starting to see much more clearly【C17】______the effects of climate change on agriculture could【C18】______hunger and poverty," said research leader Patti Kristjanson "Farmers already【C19】______variable weather by changing their planting schedules. What this study suggests is that the speed of climate【C20】______and the magnitude of the changes required to adapt could be much greater."

问答题Writeanessaybasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explaintheintendedmeaningandthen3)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150wordsontheANSWERSHEET.

问答题There was a time when visiting the toilet was a way to avoid doing work while still at work; that's all about to change. According to statistic, British people are looking at their mobile devices an average of 34 times a day. Clever employers keen to make the most of our habit of obsessively tapping on our phones every second we don't have anything to do are now providing employees with task-specific apps that let us do work from anywhere. This is enabling a whole new way of working by offering up so-called micro-moments of productivity. This is all part of a larger trend that has developed around the rise of enterprise apps, the work-related version of the smartphone apps that have changed the way we live our private lives. It is reported that in the next year the number of mobile workers will surpass 1.3 billion, which will create a huge market for this new industry.

问答题Write a letter to the Office of Safety Management of your school to give your advice on how to improve school security. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Id Ming" instead. Do not write your address. (10 points)

问答题Suppose you are the manager of ABC Factory and your former employee, John Green, is looking for a job in another factory. Write for him a letter of certification to 1) confirm his working experience in your factory, and 2) include other information that you think is relative. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

问答题Suppose you are a graduate student and you have done a survey about college students' exercising habits. Write a report to 1) explain the purpose and methods of the survey, and 2) provide the finding(s). You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

问答题Nowadays, the younger generation really relies on the power of the "Internet" when it comes to searching for information. People underestimate the power of encyclopedias. Well, technically, all of them are primary sources. They are first hand accounts done by professionals and scholars. On the other hand, Internet information is majority secondary or third hand sources which basically means that they have been edited or modified. However, the problem here is the errors which the writer or the author committed. He/she may have different understanding on the data than you, when you have actually seen the data. Aside from that, you're not 100% sure that the author is reliable. What I would like to convey here is that manual research is still stronger than any other. As they say, "No Pain, No Gain", so working hard with your research will surely be a compacted and a strong one.

问答题Suppose you are going to have a dinner party and you want to invite your friend Wang Bo to join you. Write him a letter to 1) inform him of the dinner party, and 2) include other information that you think is relative. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

问答题Suppose you are going to take a vacation for about a month and you are concerned about your plants. Write a note to your roommate, Wang Bo, to 1) inform him of your vacation, and 2) ask him for help. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

问答题Suppose the National Forum on College Education will be held at your university. Write a notice to all the students to recruit volunteers. You should 1) inform them of the qualifications for application, and 2) include other information that you think is relative. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Student Union" instead.

问答题Write an essay based on the following information. Make comments and express your own opinion. You should write about 150 words on the ANSWER SHEET. 人们时常面临一个两难选择：究竟是“宁做鸡头不做凤尾”，还是甘当陪衬，换得广阔天地呢?这还得看每个人自己的抉择。你的想法如何?