As a young mother, every morning at 4 : 30 a. m. Kimberly Moore would drop off her young child at her mother-in-law"s home before reporting to work at McDonald"s. After a full day at the fast-food chain, according to the Tallahassee Democrat, she got her books together and went to class, first at Tallahassee Community College and then at Florida State University. A single mother, she eventually earned her MBA. Keeping her nose to the grindstone, she rose through the ranks of the business world in Florida, eventually earning the title of Chief Executive Officer of Workforce Plus, a large employment firm. Starting with little more than her own initiative and drive to succeed, she reached the pinnacle of the business world, making hers an inspiring story of self-made success, a story of a woman living the American dream. As inspiring as Kimberly Moore"s story is, the really amazing thing about it is that it is only a small part of the incredible tapestry of success that is the American dream. Generations of Americans have believed that in America they can work hard to make a better life for themselves than their parents had before them. And every day Americans head out the door to jobs where, through dedication and perseverance, they work harder, longer, and more productively than the citizens of any other nation. Why do they do it? Why do Americans like Kimberly Moore work long hours for low pay only to leave work and put in countless additional hours pursuing education? Why do small investors struggle to find a few dollars here and there in order to invest in some possibly risky venture? The short answer—for the money—misses the essential point: Americans do these things, they work harder and longer, because the wealth they earn serves a greater purpose. To the parent who comes home from a hard day at the factory or office, the son playing basketball in the driveway or the daughter riding her new bicycle on the sidewalk provides reason for any amount of labor, any amount of sacrifice. Americans work for many reasons, but prominent among them is the unwavering desire to provide a good life, and maybe a better life than they themselves had known, to their children. It happens frequently and spectacularly in America, because Americans are uniquely free.

The historian Frederick J. Turner wrote in the 1890"s that the agrarian discontent that had been developing steadily in the United States since about 1870 had been precipitated by the closing of the internal frontier that is, the depletion of available new land needed for further expansion of the American farming system. Actually, however, new lands were taken up for farming in the United States throughout and beyond the nineteenth century. (46) In the 1890"s, when agrarian discontent had become most acute, 1,100,000 new farms were settled, which was 500,000 more than had been settled during the previous decade. After 1890, under the terms of the Homestead Act and its successors, more new land was taken up for farming than had been taken up for this purpose in the United States up until that time. (47) It is true that agricultural practices had become sufficiently advanced to make it possible to increase the profitability of farming by utilizing even these relatively barren lands. The emphasis given by both scholars and statesmen to the presumed disappearance of the American frontier helped to obscure the great importance of changes in the conditions and consequences of international trade that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. (48) By about 1870 improvements in agricultural technology made possible the full exploitation of areas that were most suitable for extensive farming on a mechanized basis. Huge tracts of land were being settled and farmed in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and in the American West, and these areas were joined with one another and with the countries of Europe into an interdependent market system. (49) As a consequence, agrarian depressions no longer were local or national in scope, and they struck several nations whose internal frontiers had not vanished or were not about to vanish. Between the early 1870"s and the 1890"s, the mounting agrarian discontent in American paralleled the almost uninterrupted decline in the prices of American agricultural products on foreign markets. (50) Those staple-growing farmers in the United States who exhibited the greatest discontent were those who had become most dependent on foreign markets for the sale of their products. Insofar as American had been deterred from taking up new land for farming, it was because market conditions had made this period a perilous time in which to do so.

On a weekday night this January, thousands of flag-waving youths packed Olaya Street, Riyadh"s main shopping strip, to cheer a memorable Saudi victory in the GCC Cup football final. One car, rock music blaring from its stereo, squealed to a stop, blocking an intersection. The passengers leapt out, clambered on to the roof and danced wildly in front of the honking crowd. Having paralyzed the traffic across half the city, they sped off before the police could catch them. Such public occasion was once unthinkable in the rigid conformist kingdom, but now young people there and in other Gulf states are increasingly willing to challenge authority. That does not make them rebels: respect for elders, for religious duty and for maintaining family bonds remain pre-eminent values, and premarital sex is generally out of the question. Yet demography is beginning to put pressure on ultra-conservative norms. After all, 60% of the Gulf"s native population is under the age of 25. With many more of its citizens in school than in the workforce, the region faces at least a generation of rocketing demand for employment. In every single GCC country the native workforce will double by 2020. In Saudi Arabia it will grow from 3.3m now to over 8m. The task of managing this surge would be daunting enough for any society, but is particularly forbidding in this region, for several reasons. The first is that the Gulf suffers from a lopsided labor structure. This goes back to the 1970s, when ballooning oil incomes allowed governments to import millions of foreign workers and to dispense cozy jobs to the locals. The result is a two-tier workforce, with outsiders working mostly in the private sector and natives monopolizing the state bureaucracy. Private firms are as productive as any. But within the government, claims one study, workers are worth only a quarter of what they get paid. Similarly, in the education sector, 30 years spent keeping pace with soaring student numbers has taken a heavy toll on standards. The Saudi school system, for instance, today has to cope with 5m students, eight times more than in 1970. And many Gulf countries adapted their curricula from Egyptian models that are now thoroughly discredited. They continue to favor rote learning of "facts" intended to instill patriotism or religious values. Even worse, the system as a whole discourages intellectual curiosity. It channels students into acquiring prestige degrees rather than gaining marketable skills. Of the 120,000 graduates that Saudi universities produced between 1995 and 1999, only 10,000 had studied technical subjects such as architecture or engineering. They accounted for only 2% of the total number of Saudis entering the job market.

When it comes to eating smart for your heart, stop thinking about short-term fixes and simplify life with a straightforward approach that will serve you well for years to come. Smart eating goes beyond analyzing every bite you lift 【B1】______ your mouth. "In the past we used to believe that 【B2】______ amounts of individual nutrients were the 【B3】______ to good health," Linda Van Horn, chair of the American Heart Association's Nutrition Committee. "But now we have a 【B4】______ understanding of healthy eating and the kinds of food necessary to 【B5】______ not only heart disease but disease 【B6】______ general," she adds. Scientists now 【B7】______ on the broader picture of the balance of food eaten 【B8】______ several days or a week【B9】______than on the number of milligrams of this or that【B10】______at each meal. Fruits, vegetables and whole grains, for example, provide nutrients and plant-based compounds【B11】______for good health. "The more we learn, the more【B12】______we are by the wealth of essential substances they【B13】______," Van Horn continues, "and how they【B14】______with each other to keep us healthy." You'll automatically be【B15】______the right heart-healthy track if vegetables, fruits and whole grains make【B16】______three quarters of the food on your dinner plate.【B17】______in the remaining one quarter with lean meat or chicken, fish or eggs. The foods you choose to eat as well as those you choose to【B18】______clearly contribute to your well-being. Without a【B19】______, each of the small decisions you make in this realm can make a big【B20】______on your health in the years to come.

How men first learned to invent words is unknown; in other words, the origin of language is a mystery. All we really know is that men,【B1】______animals, somehow invented certain【B2】______to express thoughts and feelings, actions and things,【B3】______they could communicate with each other; and that later they agreed 【B4】_______ certain signs, called letters, which could be 【B5】_______ to represent those sounds, and which could be 【B6】_______ down. Those sounds, whether spoken, 【B7】_______ written in letters, we call words. The power of words, then, lies in their【B8】______—the things they bring up before our minds. Words become 【B9】_______ with meaning for us by experience;【B10】______the longer we live, the more certain words【B11】______the happy and sad events of our past to us; and the more we read and【B12】______, the more the number of words that mean something to us【B13】______. Great writers are those who not only have great thoughts but also express these thoughts in words which appeal【B14】______to our minds and emotions. This【B15】______and telling use of words is what we call【B16】______style. Above all, the real poet is a master of【B17】______. He can convey his meaning in words which sing like music, and which【B18】______their position and association can【B19】______men to tears. We should, therefore, learn to choose our words carefully and use them accurately, or they will【B20】______our speech or writing silly and vulgar.

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light-Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection? In each case, the firm"s customers have played a big part in designing the product. How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too. This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around", he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening". Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE"s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE"s technology. GE"s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups. At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

Could the bad old days of economic decline be about to return? Since OPEC agreed to supply-cuts in March, the price of crude oil has jumped to almost $26 a barrel, up from less than $10 last December. This near-tripling of oil prices calls up scary memories of the 1973 oil shock, when prices quadrupled, and 1979-80, when they also almost tripled. Both previous shocks resulted in double-digit inflation and global economic decline. So where are the headlines warning of gloom and doom this time? The oil price was given another push up this week when Iraq suspended oil exports. Strengthening economic growth, at the same time as winter grips the northern hemisphere, could push the price higher still in the short term. Yet there are good reasons to expect the economic consequences now to be less severe than in the 1970s. In most countries the cost of crude oil now accounts for a smaller share of the price of petrol than it did in the 1970s. In Europe, taxes account for up to four-fifths of the retail price, so even quite big changes in the price of crude have a more muted effect on pump prices than in the past. Rich economies are also less dependent on oil than they were, and so less sensitive to swings in the oil price. Energy conservation, a shift to other fuels and a decline in the importance of heavy, energy-intensive industries have reduced oil consumption. Software, consultancy and mobile telephones use far less oil than steel or car production. For each dollar of GDP(in constant prices)rich economies now use nearly 50% less oil than in 1973. The OECD estimates in its latest Economic Outlook that, if oil prices averaged $22 a barrel for a full year, compared with $13 in 1998, this would increase the oil import bill in rich economies by only 0.25-0.5% of GDP. That is less than one-quarter of the income loss in 1974 or 1980. On the other hand, oil-importing emerging economies—to which heavy industry has shifted—have become more energy-intensive, and so could be more seriously squeezed. One more reason not to lose sleep over the rise in oil prices is that, unlike the rises in the 1970s, it has not occurred against the background of general commodity-price inflation and global excess demand. A sizable portion of the world is only just emerging from economic decline. The Economist"s commodity price index is broadly unchanging from a year ago. In 1973 commodity prices jumped by 70%, and in 1979 by almost 30%.

BSection III Writing/B

Harmfulness of Fake Commodities

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

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

As many of the stories in this book are about man-eating tigers, it is perhaps (1)_____ to explain why those animals (2)_____ man-eating tendencies. A man-eating tiger is a tiger that has been compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its (3)_____ to adopt a diet alien to it. The stress of circumstances is, in nine cases out of ten, wounds, and in the tenth case old age. The wound that has caused (4)_____ tiger to take up man-eating might be the result of a carelessly fired (5)_____ and failure to follow up and (6)_____ the wounded animal, or be the result Of the tiger having lost its temper when killing a porcupine. Human beings are not the natural prey of tigers, and it is only when tigers have been (7)_____ through wounds or old age that, in order to live, they are compelled to a diet of human flesh. They can no longer make a (8)_____ of animal in (9)_____ A tiger uses its teeth and claws when killing. When, therefore, a tiger is suffering (10)_____ one or more painful wounds, or when its teeth are, missing or defective and its claws (11)_____ down, and it is unable to catch the animals it has been accustomed to eating, it is (12)_____ by necessity to killing human beings. The (13)_____ from animal to human flesh is, I believe, in most cases accidental. As (14)_____ of what I mean by "accidental" I quote the case of the Muktesar man-eating tigers. This tigress, a comparatively young animal, in (15)_____ with a porcupine lost an eye and got some fifty quills, (16)_____ in length from one to nine inches, embedded under the (17)_____ of her right foreleg. Suppurating (18)_____ formed where she endeavoured to extract the quills with her teeth, and while she was lying up in a thick (19)_____ of grass, starving and licking her wounds, a woman selected this particular place to cut the grass as fodder for her cattle. At first the tigress took no notice, but when the woman had cut the grass right up to where she was lying the tigress struck once, the blow (20)_____ in the woman"s skull.

Eight months after Sep. 11, it is becoming increasingly apparent that various arms of the US government had pieces of information that, if put together, might have provided sketchy advance warning of the terrorist strikes to come. The White House now acknowledges, that the CIA told President Bush in August that suspected members of A1 Qaeda had discussed the hijacking of airplanes. At the same time, FBI agents were increasingly suspicious of some Middle Eastern men training at US flight schools. Yet the US government didn"t pay attention to this information. "There are always these little indicators that come in—of one sort or another—that don"t get enough decibels to receive attention," say former CIA Director Stansfield Turner. "The possibility of a traditional hijacking—in the pre-9.11 sense—has long been a concern of the government," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. But "this was a new type of attack that was not foreseen." In deed, he said the warnings did not suggest commercial airliners would be used as missiles and that the general assumption was that any attack would occur abroad, not in the US. Still, the White House says it did quietly alert several government agencies to the threat. Meanwhile, FBI agents were getting hints of the terrible plot. A classified memo drafted by the bureau reportedly warned in blunt language that Osama bin Laden might be linked to Middle Eastern men taking lessons at US flight schools. Mr. Turner sees this as a painful and avoidable mistake. The basic reason for the lack of coordination and communication is "a very large intelligence bureaucracy that is very compartmentalized," says Charles Penia, a senior defense analyst at the Cato Institute. Today, the disclosures raise a crucial question: Have recent reforms boosted Washington"s ability to pull together information from its many agencies—and thus disrupt future attacks? Indeed, since Sep. 11, the government has struggled to improve coordination. One change: FBI data is now merged with CIA intelligence in the president"s daily briefing. Another: A new command center near Washington was set up by White House Homeland Security. It"s one place the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and others are able to coordinate and share information. It"s not clear yet whether they actually will.

Title: GET RID OF BAD HABITSWord limit: 160-200 wordsTime limit: 40 minutesYou are required to develop your essay according to the given topic sentence of each paragraph.Outline:1. We may have some bad habits that we are ashamed of.2. To get rid of a bad habit, we have, first of all, to come to realize how bad it really is.3. To get rid of a bad habit, we also need courage and determination.4. However, we should never stop trying to get rid of bad habits.

BSection III Writing/B

The "MyDoom" virus could presage a generation of computer attacks by organised gangs aiming to extract ransoms from online businesses, experts said yesterday. The warning came as the website run by SCO, a company that sells Unix computer software, in effect disappeared from the web under a blizzard of automated attacks from PCs infected by the virus, which first appeared a week ago. The "MyDoom-A" version of the virus is reckoned to be the worst to have hit the internet, in terms of the speed of its spread, with millions of PCs worldwide believed to be infected. Such "zombie" machines begin to send out hundreds of copies of the virus every hour to almost any e-mail address in their files. On Sunday they began sending automated queries to SCO"s website, an attack that will continue until 12 February. The attack is the web equivalent of ringing the company"s doorbell and running away a million times a second, leaving its computers unable to deal with standard requests to view its pages. "You have to wonder about the time limit", said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the antivirus company Sophos. "Someone could go to SCO after the 12th and say, "If you don"t want this to happen again, here are our demands"". Raimund Genes, European president of the security software firm Trend Micro, said: "Such a programme could take out any major website on the internet. It"s not terrorism, but it is somebody who is obviously upset with SCO" SCO has earned the enmity of computer users through a lawsuit it has filed against IBM. SCO claims ownership of computer code it says IBM put into the free operating system Linux, and is demanding licence fees and damages of $1bn. Mr. Cluley said: "It might be that whoever is behind this will say to SCO, "if you don"t want the next one to target you, drop the lawsuit"". SCO has offered $250,000 (￡140,000) for information leading to the arrest of the person or people who wrote and distributed MyDoom. Nell Barrett, of the security company Information Risk Management, said, "I would give a lot of credence to the idea of gangs using viruses to extort money. It"s hard for law enforcement to track them down, because they"re using machines owned by innocent people". A second variant of MyDoom will start attacking part of Microsoft"s website later today. The antivirus company MessageLabs said it had blocked more than 16 million copies of the virus in transit over the net so far. But millions more will have reached their targets.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

"If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will," Barack Obama said last month in his state-of-the-union speech. "I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy." This week Mr. Obama named the officials charged with fulfilling that directive: Gina McCarthy, his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ernest Moniz, the prospective new secretary of energy. Their selection suggests that Mr. Obama is indeed serious about tackling climate change, but not doctrinaire in his approach. Ms Mc Carthy already works at the EPA, where she is in charge of air quality. That has given her a leading role drafting the administration's most ambitious and controversial environmental rules, including limits on emissions of greenhouse gases for new power plants and strict fuel-efficiency requirements for cars. She is the natural candidate to oversee the most obvious and consequential step Mr. Obama could take to stem global warming: a regulation curbing emissions from existing power plants. Republicans do not fancy that idea at all, and have introduced bills in Congress to strip the EPA of its regulatory authority over greenhouse gases. They often accused Lisa Jackson, the agency's previous boss, of disregarding the cumulative impact of its many clean-air rules, and suffocating industry as a result. Yet Ms McCarthy makes an unlikely target. She has worked for Republican governors in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Industry groups mustered kind words about her nomination. As Mr. Obama put it," She's earned a reputation as a straight-shooter."

China is no longer what it used to be.

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