Technologists aren"t usually known for their sense of humor, but last week Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun Microsystems, was working hard to come up with the Quip of the Day. For four contentious hours, he and another casualty of the software wars, Netscape"s Jim Barksdale, took turns before the Senate Judiciary committee slamming their nemesis, Bill Gates. They called him a predator, a monopolist, the "most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age!. Microsoft"s Windows operating systems, driving 90 percent of the computers across the land, are the railroads of our dawning Information Age. No one person should be allowed to control them, they argued. Cyberspace should be open to all, Gates insisted it still was. He"s no monopolist, he told the senators. Windows is vulnerable. So is his company. "Technology is ever-changing", Gates retorted. Who knows what new wave will come along and sweep even mighty Microsoft into the dustbin of history? To many that sounded a bit disingenuous, given Microsoft"s dominance, and the lawmakers were skeptical, to say the least. But might Gates be right? Last week"s other big tech news gave just such a hint. First, Intel announced a surprise drop in first-quarter earnings. That was followed late Friday by report that Compaq"s financials would also be disappointing. Demand for computers seems to be slowing, analyst suggested—a trend due in part to a range of short-term factors, including Asia"s economic crisis. "I don"t think we have clear date either as a company or an industry as to what these numbers mean", says Intel spokesman Howard High, True enough. But the slowdown is a sharp reminder that consumer demand for computers has fallen short of the hype surrounding the Info Revolution. Three years ago, 31 percent of U.S. house holds owned a computer. Today, 40 percent do. "We should be at 60 to 65 percent", says Nick Donatiello, president of Odyssey Communications, a San Francisco market-research firm. For most Americans, he suggests, the personal computer is not yet the indispensable tool that digital enthusiasts think it is. Today, new products are coming out that resemble computers but aren"t, and they may eventually appeal to frustrated consumers more than hard-to-use PCs. The computer "is a technology-driven device made by technologists for technologists who don"t know any better", says Donald Norman, senior technical adviser to Hewlett Packard. At the same time, new alliances between companies and industries are aiming to dash in on the Internet of tomorrow—without partnering with the titans of today. If all this poses a challenge for Intel, it portends even greater difficulties for Microsoft. All the challenges and threats pose a compelling question: if Microsoft enjoys the monopoly critics say it has, how long will it last?

【F1】 Roger Rosenblatt's book Black Fiction, in attempting to apply literary rather than sociopolitical criteria to its subject, successfully alters the approach taken by most previous studies. As Rosenblatt notes, criticism of Black writing has often served as a pretext for expounding on Black history. Addison Gayle' s recent work, for example, judges the value of Black fiction by overtly political standards, rating each work according to the notions of Black identity which it propounds. 【F2】 Although fiction assuredly springs from political circumstances, its authors react to those circumstances in ways other than ideological, and talking about novels and stories primarily as instruments of ideology circumvents much of the fictional enterprise. Rosenblatt's literary analysis discloses affinities and connections among works of Black fiction which solely political studies have overlooked or ignored. Writing acceptable criticism of Black fiction, however, presupposes giving satisfactory answers to a number of questions. First of all, is there a sufficient reason, other than the facial identity of the authors, to group together works by Black authors? Second, how does Black fiction make itself distinct from other modern fiction with which it is largely contemporaneous? Rosenblatt shows that Black fiction constitutes a distinct body of writing that has an identifiable, coherent literary tradition. Looking at novels written by Black over the last eighty years, he discovers recurring concerns and designs independent of chronology.【F3】 These structures are thematic, and they spring, not surprisingly, from the central fact that the Black characters in these novels exist in a predominantly white culture, whether they try to conform to that culture or rebel against it. Black Fiction does leave some aesthetic questions open. Rosenblatt's thematic analysis permits considerable objectivity; he even explicitly states that it is not his intention to judge the merit of the various works—yet his reluctance seems misplaced, especially since an attempt to appraise might have led to interesting results. For instance, some of the novels appear to be structurally diffuse. Is this a defect, or are the authors working out of, or trying to forge, a different kind of aesthetic?【F4】 In addition, the style of some Black novels, like Jean Toomer's Cane, verges on expressionism or surrealism; does this technique provide a counterpoint to the prevalent theme that portrays the fate against which Black heroes are pitted, a theme usually conveyed by more naturalistic modes of expression? In spite of such omissions, what Rosenblatt does include in his discussion makes for an astute and worthwhile study.【F5】 Black Fiction surveys a wide variety of novels, bringing to our attention in the process some fascinating and little-known works like James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Its argument is tightly constructed, and its forthright, lucid style exemplifies levelheaded and penetrating criticism.

They are regarded as chores by both sexes, but fall disproportionately on only one. The latest survey of time use in America suggests women still【C1】______most of the housework, spending on average an hour a day scrubbing, hoovering and shopping, 【C2】______with barely 20 minutes for the unfairer sex. Standard【C3】______for this division of labour 【C4】______on the pay gap between the sexes. A recent report shows women【C5】______earn about 20% less than men in America Couples can maximise earnings【C6】______the lower-paid (usually female) partner does the【C7】______work at home. But in a new paper Leslie Stratton of Virginia Commonwealth University asks【C8】______different attitudes to housework also play a【C9】______ in sharing the dusting. Mr Stratton draws on data from the Time Use Survey in Britain,【C10】______shows how people spent their day and which tasks they enjoyed. Attitudes certainly【C11】______: women disliked laundry less than men. Ironing was generally dreaded; weirdly large numbers of both sexes liked shopping for food. Mr Stratton found some【C12】______for the pay-gap hypothesis. Women with higher wages did a little【C13】______work at home. A woman who earned 10% more than【C14】______ducked out of two minutes" housework per weekday. Her partner heroically【C15】______up this time at the weekend. 【C16】______his wages made no difference【C17】______ the extent of his efforts around the house. There is【C18】______in the idea that chores go to the lower-paid partner. But cause and effect are【C19】______ . Do women do more【C20】______lower pay, or might their careers suffer from a disproportionate burden at home?

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

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

It may be just as well for Oxford University"s reputation that this week"s meeting of Congregation, its 3,552-strong governing body, was held in secret, for the air of civilized rationality that is generally supposed to pervade donnish conversation has lately turned fractious. That"s because the vice-chancellor, the nearest thing the place has to a chief executive, has proposed the most fundamental reforms to the university since the establishment of the college system in 1249; and a lot of the dons and colleges don"t like it. The trouble with Oxford is that it is unmanageable. Its problems-the difficulty of recruiting good dons and of getting rid of bad ones, concerns about academic standards, severe money worries at some colleges-all spring from that. John Hood, who was recruited as vice-chancellor from the University of Auckland and is now probably the most-hated antipodean in British academic life, reckons he knows how to solve this, and has proposed to reduce the power of dons and colleges and increase that of university administrators. Mr. Hood is right that the university"s management structure needs an overhaul. But radical though his proposals seem to those involved in the current row, they do not go far enough. The difficulty of managing Oxford stems only partly from the nuttiness of its system of governance; the more fundamental problem lies in its relationship with the government. That"s why Mr. Hood should adopt an idea that was once regarded as teetering on the lunatic fringe of radicalism, but these days is discussed even in polite circles. The idea is independence. Oxford gets around ￡5,000 ($9,500) per undergraduate per year from the government. In return, it accepts that it can charge students only ￡1,150 (rising to￡3,000 next year) on top of that. Since it probably costs at least ￡10,000 a year to teach an undergraduate, that leaves Oxford with a deficit of ￡4,000 or so per student to cover from its own funds. If Oxford declared independence, it would lose the ￡52m undergraduate subsidy at least. Could it fill the hole? Certainly. America"s top universities charge around ￡20,000 per student per year. The difficult issue would not be money alone, it would be balancing numbers of not-so-brilliant rich people paying top whack with the cleverer poorer ones they were cross-subsidising. America"s top universities manage it: high fees mean better teaching, which keeps competition hot and academic standards high, while luring enough donations to provide bursaries for the poor. It should be easier to extract money from alumni if Oxford were no longer state-funded.

back and forth

America"s most popular newspaper website today announced that the era of free online journalism is drawing to a close. The New York Times has become the biggest publisher yet to【C1】______ plans for a pay wall around its digital offering, 【C2】______ the accepted practice that internet users will not pay for news. Struggling 【C3】______an evaporation of advertising and a downward drift in street corner sales, The New York Times【C4】______to introduce a "metered" model at the beginning of 2011. Readers will be required to pay when they have【C5】______a set number of its online articles per month. The decision puts the 159-year-old newspaper【C6】______the charging side of an increasingly wide chasm in the media industry. But others, including The Guardian, have said they will not【C7】______internet readers, and certain papers, 【C8】______London"s Evening Standard, have gone further in abandoning readership revenue by making their print editions【C9】______. The New York Times" publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, 【C10】______that the move is a gamble: "This is a【C11】______, to a certain degree, in where we think the web is going." Boasting a print【C12】______ of 995,000 on weekdays and 1.4 million on Sundays, The New York Times is the third bestselling American newspaper, 【C13】______The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. 【C14】______most U.S. papers focus on a single city, The New York Times is among the few that can【C15】______ national scope—as well as 16 bureaus in the New York area, it has 11 offices around the U.S. and 【C16】______26 bureaus elsewhere in the world. But【C17】______many in the publishing industry, the paper is in the grip of a【C18】______ financial crisis. Its parent company, the New York Times Company, has 15 papers, but 【C19】______a loss of $70 million in the nine months to September and recently accepted a $250 million【C20】______from a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, to strengthen its balance sheet.

iron and steel plant

What new research reveals about the adolescent brain. We 're learning that the teen years are a period of crucial brain development subject to a host of environmental and genetic factors. This emerging research shed light on a discovery that our brains are not finished maturing by adolescence, brains are only about 80 percent of the way to maturity, it takes until the mid-20s, and possibly later, for a brain to become fully developed. An excess of gray matter (the stuff that does the processing) at the beginning of adolescence makes us particularly brilliant at learning, but also particularly sensitive to the influences of our environment. Our brains' processing centers haven't been fully linked yet, particularly the parts responsible for helping to check our impulses and considering the long-term repercussions of our actions. It' s partially because of this developmental timeline that a teen can be so quick to think a harsh remark, or a biting insult, and so uninhibited in firing it off at the nearest unfortunate target. Instead, the full developed brain regions of an adult might stop himself from saying something cruel. In a paper published last year, Dr. Jay Giedd, wrote that, gray-matter (the stuff that does the processing) volume peaks around or just before the beginning of puberty, and then continuously declines. In contrast, white matter (the stuff that helps connect areas of the brain) increases right up to, and beyond, the end of puberty. These adolescent brain developments don't happen to all parts of the brain at the same time. "The order in which this maturation of connection goes, is from the back of the brain to the front of the brain," says Jensen. And one of the last parts to mature is the frontal lobe, a large area responsible for moderating reward, planning, impulsiveness, attention, acceptable social behavior, and other roles that are known as executive functions. Unfortunately, it' s just these sorts of behaviors that teenage brains are not fully endowed to deal with—and the consequences are potentially fatal when it comes to high-risk behavior like drinking and driving. This blast of teen-brain change is compounded by profound social and psychological shifts. Of particular importance is that adolescence is the time when we develop stronger social connections with our peers. Healthy social relationships have a positive effect on how an adolescent navigates through a tumultuous period of life. But at the same time, this reliance on friends makes young people susceptible to the influence of peer pressure, even when it is indirect.

The value which society places on work has traditionally been closely associated with the value of individualism and as a result it has had negative effects on the development of social security. (46) It has meant that in the first place the amount of benefits must be small lest people"s willingness to work and support themselves suffers. Even today with flat rate and earnings-related benefits, the total amount of the benefit must always be smaller than the person"s wages for fear of malingering, "The purpose of social security", said Huntford referring to Sweden"s comparatively generous benefits, "is to dispel need without crossing the threshold of prosperity". (47) Second, social security benefits are granted under conditions designed to reduce the likelihood of even the boldest of spirits attempting to live on the State rather than work. Many of the rules surrounding the payment of unemployment or supplementary benefit are for this purpose. Third, the value placed on work is manifested in a more positive way as in the case of disability. People suffering from accidents incurred at work or from occupational diseases receive preferential treatment by the social security service compared with those suffering from civil accidents and ordinary illnesses. Yet, the stranglehold which work has had on the social security service has been increasingly loosened over the years. The provision of family allowances, family income supplements, the slight liberalization of the wages stop are some of the manifestations of this trend. (48) Similarly, the preferential treatment given to occupational disability by the social security service has been increasingly questioned with the demands for the upgrading of benefits for the other types of disability. It is felt that in contemporary industrial societies the distinction between occupational and non-occupational disability is artificial for many non-occupational forms of disability have an industrial origin even if they do not occur directly in the workplace. (49) There is also the additional reason which we mentioned in the argument for one benefit for all one-parent families, that a modern social security service must concentrate on meeting needs irrespective of the causes behind such needs. The relationship between social security and work is not all a one-way affair. (50) It is true that until very recently the general view was that social security "represented a type of luxury and was essentially anti economic". It was seen as merely government expenditure for the needy. As we saw, however, redundancy payments and earnings-related unemployment benefits have been used with some success by employers and the government to reduce workers" opposition towards loss of their jobs.

Amidst troubling reports of our nation"s economic woes and pressing national security issues, one news story earlier this month received fairly little attention: President Obama"s March 11 executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. While the Council"s role is likely to be more symbolic than practical, its creation, and the accompanying rhetoric, suggests that the Obama White House is bringing a blinkered, outdated approach to gender issues—one that, far from transcending ideological divisions, takes us back to a narrow and dogmatic feminist ideology. In his remarks at the signing, Barack Obama noted that women have made great strides since the days when his grandmother encountered a glass ceiling after reaching the level of bank vice president. Yet, despite the broken barriers, he argued that "inequalities stubbornly persist": "women still earn just 78 cents for every dollar men make"; "one in four women still experiences domestic violence in their lifetimes"; and, despite being close to half the workforce, women make up only 17 percent of members of Congress and 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. But are these inequalities rooted in discrimination and fixable by the government? Numerous studies show that when differences in training, work hours, and continuity of employment are taken into account, the pay gap all but disappears. Most economists, including liberal feminists such as Harvard"s Claudia Goldin, agree that while sex discrimination exists, male-female disparities in earnings and achievement are due primarily to personal choices and priorities. Women are far more likely than men to avoid jobs with 60-hour workweeks and to scale down their careers while raising children. They are also more likely to choose less lucrative but more fulfilling jobs. Indeed, one might ask why the only gender-specific issues that seem to deserve federal attention are ones that affect women. Why not look at the fact that men account for 80 percent of suicides and 90 percent of workplace fatalities(as well as 70 percent of nonfatal on-the-job injuries)? What about the troubling trend of boys and young men lagging substantially behind their female peers in education, with women earning nearly 60 percent of college degrees at a time when a college diploma is increasingly essential in the job market? Why not talk about the marginalization of fatherhood and the fact that many men who want to be involved in their children"s lives are denied that chance? This is not a call for a new federal bureaucracy for "men"s issues". However, the discussion of gender equality in our culture needs to include these issues. For the White House to exclude them while calling for a new effort to combat inequality is at best myopic.

Recommending a Movie Write a letter to a friend of yours to recommend one of your favorite movies and give reasons for your recommendation. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

A Notarized Certificate Write a notarization of about 100 words based on the following situation: Please write a notarization of graduation certificate for Li Ming on behalf of the Notary Public Office of Shanghai.

It might take only the touch of peach fuzz to make an autistic child howl in pain. The odour of the fruit could be so overpowering that he gags. For reasons that are not well understood, people with autism do not integrate all of their senses in ways that help them understand properly what they are experiencing. By the age of three, the signs of autism—infrequent eye contact, over-sensitivity or over—sensitivity to the environment, difficulty mixing with others—are in full force. There is no cure; intense behavioural therapies serve only to lessen the symptoms. The origins of autism are obscure. But a paper in Brain, a specialist journal, casts some light. A team headed by Marcel Just, of Carnegie Mellon University, and Nancy Minshew, of the University of Pittsburgh, has found evidence of how the brains of people with autism function differently from those without the disorder. Using a brain-scanning technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (FMRI), Dr. Just, Dr. Minshew and their team compared the brain activity of young adults who had "high-functioning" autism (in which an autiat"s IQ score is normal) with that of non-autistic participants. The experiment was designed to examine two regions of the brain known to be associated with language—Broca"s area and Wernicke"s area—when the participants were reading. Three differences emerged. First, Wernicke"s area, the part responsible for understanding individual words, was more active in autists than non-autists. Second, Broca"s area—where the components of language are integrated to produce meaning—was less active. Third, the activity of the two areas was less synchronised. This research has led Dr. Just to offer an explanation for autism. He calls it "underconnectivity theory". It depends on h recent body of work which suggests that the brain"s white matter (the wiring that connects the main bodies of the nerve cells, or grey matter, together) is less dense and less abundant in the brain of an autistic person than in that of a non-autist. Dr. Just suggests that abnormal white matter causes the grey matter to adapt to the resulting lack of communication. This hones some regions to levels of superior ability, while others fall by the wayside. The team chose to examine Broca"s and Wernicke"s areas because language-based experiments are easy to conduct. But if the underconnectivity theory applies to the rest of the brain, too, it would be less of a mystery why some people with autism are hypersensitive to their environments, and others are able to do certain tasks, such as arithmetic, so well. And if it is true that underconnectivity is indeed the main problem, then treatments might be developed to stimulate the growth of the white-matter wiring.

Write to the head of a train, and complain about its bad services. You should write about 100 words 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. (10 points)

In our increasingly complex world, information is becoming the basic building block of the society. (46) However, at a time when the acquisition of new scientific information alone is approaching a rate of 250 million pages annually, the tide of knowledge is overwhelming the human capability of dealing with it. So man must turn to a machine if he hopes to contain the tide and channel it to beneficial ends. (47) The electronic computer, handling millions of facts with the swiftness of light, has given contemporary meaning to Aristotle"s vision of the liberating possibilities of machines: "When looms weave by themselves, man"s slavery will end." By transforming the way in which he gathers, stores, retrieves, and uses information, this versatile instrument is helping man to overcome his mental and physical limitations. (48) It is vastly widening his intellectual horizon, enabling him better to comprehend his universe, and providing the means to master that portion of it lying within his reach. Although we are only in the second decade of electronic date processing, the outlines of its influence on our culture are beginning to e merge. (49) Far from depersonalizing the individual and dehumanizing his society, the computer promises a degree of personalized service never before available to mankind. By the end of century, for the equipment of a few dollars a month, the individual will have a vast complex of computer services at his command. Information utilities will make computing power available, like electricity, to thousands of users simultaneously. (50) The computer in the home will be joined a national and global computer system that provides services ranging from banking and travel facilities to library research and medical care. High-speed communication devices, linked to satellites in space, will transmit data to and from virtually any point on earth with the ease of a dial system.

In the late 1960"s, many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems, and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized. Ecologists pointing【C1】______that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot【C2】______. Skyscrapers are also enormous【C3】______, and wasters, of electric power. In one recent year, the addition 【C4】______17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the【C5】______daily demand for electricity by 120,000 kilowatts—enough to【C6】______the entire city of Albany for a day. Glass-wailed skyscraper can be especially【C7】______. The heat loss (or gain) through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times【C8】______through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain【C9】______heating and air-conditioning equipment, 【C10】______of skyscrapers have begun to use double-glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses【C11】______with silver or gold mirror films that reduce【C12】______as well as heat gain. However, 【C13】______skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and【C14】______neighboring buildings. Skyscrapers put severe pressure on a city"s sanitation【C15】______, too. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year—as【C16】______as a city the size of Stamford, Connecticut, which has a【C17】______of more than 109,000. Skyscrapers also【C18】______with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. Still, people【C19】______to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built them—personal ambition and the【C20】______of owners to have the largest possible amount of rentable space.

In general, the tests work most effectively when the qualities to be measured can be most precisely defined and least effectively when what is to be measured or predicted cannot be well defined.

Perhaps the most ambitious long-term health study ever planned by the National Institutes of Health (NET) has been hit by a NASA style price shock: Once estimated at $3 billion over 25 years, the actual cost could be twice that much. The problem became public last week at a Capitol Hill hearing on the NIH budget. Acting NIH Director Raynard Kington said he has launched a high-level re-view of the plan to track the health of 100,000 children from before birth to age 21 and that the study will likely be scaled back. The National Children"s Study (NCS) grew out of a 2000 congressional directive to NIH to determine how environmental influences, from chemical contaminants to video games, shape the development of children and affect diseases such as autism and obesity. Researchers plan to recruit a diverse group of pregnant mothers at 105 sites around the United States by knocking on randomly selected doors. Congress provided $192 million in funding this year to set up the sites and launch a pilot study. Kington says he became concerned in early January after being informed of his staffs latest cost projections. It was since then that Kington realized "there was a fundamental problem in estimating the true costs." In order to turn things around, Kington has now added "greatly heightened oversight." That includes asking Claude Lenfant, former director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, to return to NIH as his adviser on the study. NIH will also take a longer pause than originally planned after the 1-year pilot, which began in January at two of seven sites, to revise the protocol and reassess the costs. When trimming begins, Kington says he hopes the 100,000 sample size will be "the last thing" considered for cuts. But the size, number of hypotheses, and the protocols are all on the table. Pediatrician Philip Landrigan, who helped conceive the NCS, hopes not to lose components such as in-home detailed assessments of each child"s development, which are expensive. "We"re just waiting to see how this works out," says Landrigan, whose team has knocked on more than 1000 doors in Queens and foundthat many women seem interested. The budget problems come as no surprise to former NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, who wanted to avoid funding for the NCS. Zerhouni says he had "severe reservations" about the potential cost and felt NIH should complete the pilot before any decisions were made about proceeding with the full study. Instead, "Congress interfered" by providing the money to move ahead anyway. "It was political management," Zerhouni says, and "I don"t think people should be shocked" at the result.