Stephen M. Saland, chairman of the State Senate Education Committee, is a conservative upstate Republican, and Steven Sanders, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, is a liberal New York City Democrat. But when it comes to education, they have much in common. Neither is a fan of the federal No Child Left Behind Law and its extensive testing mandates. Both say that standardized tests are too dominant in public schools today. That has at times put the two education chairmen in conflict with the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills. (46) During his 10-year tenure, Dr. Mills has turned New York into one of the most test-driven public systems in the nation, requiring students to pass five state tests to graduate. (47) For months now, the legislative leaders and the commissioner have been locked in a little-noticed fight over the future of 28 small alternative public high schools, a fight that may well be the final stand for opponents of standardized testing in New York. Senator Saland and Assemblyman Sanders are doing their best to protect these schools in New York City (Urban Academy, Manhattan International), Ithaca (Lehman Alternative) and Rochester (School Without Walls) and help them retain their distinctive educational approach. (48) Instead of the standard survey courses in global studies, American history, biology and chemistry pegged to state tests, these schools favor courses that go into more depth on narrower topics. At Urban Academy, there are courses in Middle East conflicts, world religions, post-Civil War Reconstruction and microbiology. In the mid-1990"s, the former education commissioner, Thomas Sobol, granted these 28 consortium schools (serving 16,000 students, about 1 percent of New York"s high school population) an exemption from most state tests. That permitted a more innovative curriculum, and students were evaluated via a portfolio system that relies on research papers and science projects reviewed by outside experts like David S. Thaler, a Rockefeller University microbiology professor, and Eric Foner, a Columbia history professor. The Gates Foundation, which has given hundreds of millions of dollars to start small high schools nationwide, is so impressed with these schools, and it regularly sends educators to New York to see how they"re run. But the testing exemption for these schools is about to expire, and Commissioner Mills does not want it renewed. He believes that all students, without exception, should take every test. Recently, Senator Saland defied the commissioner. He shepherded a bill through the Republican-controlled Senate that passed 50 to 10 and would continue these schools" waivers for four years. (49) Senator Saland"s bill does require that students pass the state English and math tests to graduate, letting the state gauge the alternative schools" performance versus mainstream schools. On the Senate floor, Senator Saland noted that while 61 percent of consortium students qualified for free lunches and three-quarters were black or Hispanic, 88 percent went on to college, compared with 70 percent at mainstream schools that give state tests. (50) He said that the dropout rate was half the rate at mainstream schools and that on the one statewide test these students took regularly, English, they scored an average of 77, outdoing mainstream students by 5 points.

A Letter for Offering Financial Aid You want to contribute to Project Hope by offering financial aid to a child in a remote area. Write a letter to the department concerned, asking them to help find a candidate. You should specify what kind of child you want to help and how you will carry out your plan. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Today, at the push of a button, you can download and print the whole of Dante"s Divine Comedy, using only a computer, an Internet connection, a paving stone of paper and a small bucket of ink. Technically, the service is free, although it would be easier and cheaper simply to buy the book, which could then be read in the bath, while saving on printer cartridges and trees. The new service is the latest step in the stated goal of Google, the Internet search engine, "to organize the world"s information and make it universally accessible and useful" and, although few may be rushing to print out the Digitized Dante, it marks an important development in world literature. For some, making books available online for free download represents a paradise found; others, including a number of worried publishers and writers, fear it may point the way to the ninth circle of hell. Google"s Book Search service is just one part of the Library Project, in which the Internet engine has teamed up with libraries around the world, including the Bodleian in Oxford, to digitize collections and make millions of books available and searchable online. At first sight, the notion of a limitless digital library seems irresistible, a single, free repository accessible from every corner of the globe. Partners in the Library Project say the system will enable users to access not just the classics, but also much more obscure works: forgotten novels, scientific accounts, illustrations and neglected poetry. Moribund books may be brought back to life. Librarians are often frustrated at the unseen gems in their collections gathering dust. Now the whole lot can be digitally stacked on an endless virtual shelf, to be browsed by anyone with a computer mouse. The problem lies not with digitalizing dead or undead books, but the potential danger to those that still have commercial life in them in the form of copyright. Google is quick to point out that the books available for download through Book Search are all out of copyright. Indeed, while European law allows copyright to expire 70 years after an author"s death, the new service does not offer anything published later than the mid-19th century. Some publishers, however, see the availability of free books for digital download as the thin end of a very large wedge that could split literature by undermining copyright itself. Last year the Association of American Publishers filed suit against Google claiming that by scanning 100 per cent of a book (to make it searchable by word) the company is infringing copyright, even if only a small excerpt is then available for free. Silence is golden in a library; but the law of copyright is beyond price.

Richard Satava, program manager for advanced medical technologies, has been a driving force bringing virtual reality to medicine, where computers create a "virtual" or simulated environment for surgeons and other medical practitioners(从业者). "With virtual reality we"ll be able to put a surgeon in every trench", said Satava. He envisaged a time when soldiers who are wounded fighting overseas are put in mobile surgical units equipped with computers. The computers would transmit images of the soldiers to surgeons back in the U.S. The surgeons would look at the soldier through virtual reality helmets(头盔) that contain a small screen displaying the image of the wound. The doctors would guide robotic instruments in the battlefield mobile surgical unit that operate on the soldier. Although Satava"s vision may be years away from standard operating procedure, scientists are progressing toward virtual reality surgery. Engineers at an international organization in California are developing a tele-operating device. As surgeons watch a three-dimensional image of the surgery, they move instruments that are connected to a computer, which passes their movements to robotic instruments that perform the surgery. The computer provides feedback to the surgeon on force, textures, and sound. These technological wonders may not yet be part of the community hospital setting but increasingly some of the machinery is finding its way into civilian medicine. At Wayne State University Medical School, surgeon Lucia Zamorano takes images of the brain from computerized scans and uses a computer program to produce a 3-D image. She can then maneuver the 3-D image on the computer screen to map the shortest, least invasive surgical path to the tumor(肿瘤). Zamorano is also using technology that attaches a probe to surgical instruments so that she can track their positions. While cutting away a tumor deep in the brain, she watches the movement of her surgical tools in a computer graphics image of the patient"s brain taken before surgery. During these procedures—operations that are done through small cuts in the body in which a miniature camera and surgical tools are maneuvered—surgeons are wearing 3-D glasses for a better view. And they are commanding robot surgeons to cut away tissue more accurately than human surgeons can. Satava says, "We are in the midst of a fundamental change in the field of medicine".

The idea that people might be chosen or rejected for jobs on the basis of their genes disturbs many. Such【B1】______may however, be a step 【B2】______ , thanks to work just published in Current Biology by Derk-Jan Dijk and his colleagues at the University of Surrey, in England. Dr. Dijk studies the biology of timekeeping—in particular of the part of the internal body-clock that 【B3】______people to sleep and wakes them up. One of the genes involved in 【B4】______ this clock is known as PER3 and【B5】______in two forms. Dr. Dijk's work【B6】______that one of these forms is more conducive to night-shift work than the other. The two forms of PER3 【B7】______ into two slightly different proteins, one of which is longer than the other.【B8】______work by this group showed that people with two short versions of the gene are more likely to be "owls", 【B9】______ to get up late and go to bed late. "Larks"—【B10】______, early risers, have two long versions. Pursuing this【B11】______of enquiry, Dr. Dijk and his team have been studying how such people【B12】______to sleep deprivation. Two dozen volunteers, some genetic owls and some genetic larks, were forced to stay awake for two days. The genetic larks reacted to this worse than the owls did.【B13】______, larks given memory tests and puzzles to【B14】______between the hours of four and eight in the morning turned【B15】______far worse performances than did owls. What【B16】______that may have for employers is not fully clear. Nevertheless, it is intriguing. There may【B17】______come a time when employers【B18】______night shifts will want a blood sample from【B19】______employees—【B20】______to protect themselves against negligence suits should someone have an accident.

Dad,GiveMeMoneyOnceMoreWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

贝多芬与勇气 ——2014年英译汉及详解 Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music.【F1】 It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself. Beethoven"s importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity. The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected, as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression, he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention.【F2】 By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works. This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers of Beethoven" s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for example in the use of dynamics.【F3】 Beethoven"s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him. Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.【F4】 Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression. Beethoven"s music tends to move from chaos to order as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of spiritual elevation. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word.【F5】 One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering; is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living.

A new kind of aircraft—small, cheap, pilotless—is attracting increasing attention.

Feeling anxious? Your mood may actually change how your dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavors recede, according to new research. This link between the chemical balance in your brain and your sense of taste could one day help doctors to treat depression. There are currently no on-the-spot tests for deciding which medication will work best in individual patients with this condition. Researchers hope that a test based on flavor detection could help doctors to get more prescriptions right first time. It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower-than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both. Many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry. To unpick the relationship between the two, Lucy Donaldson and her colleagues at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes. The drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, the team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience. The other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes. In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes. "What hasn"t been done be{ore is to look precisely at which tastes are affected in depression," says Donaldson. Now the results are in, "we can discriminate between the chemicals and the tastes that seem to be altered," she says. Testing sensitivity to sweet and sour tastes could potentially help doctors to pick up on which chemicals are dipping, guiding them when choosing which drug to rectify the problem. Currently, doctors rely on physical and emotional symptoms to make a best guess at an individual"s imbalance, prescribe a drug and wait about a month to check on any improvement. Good doctors have about a 60-80% success rate in selecting the right drug the first time, says psychiatrist Jan Melichar, a co-author on the paper. Are there any decent tests for prescribing drugs for depression? "No. We do a best guesstimate," says Melichar. "I"m excited by this finding because in 3, 5 or 7 years we could have a simple taste test. " Next, the team plans to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan. This chemical would lower the healthy subjects" levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients. The work has also generated interest from flavor houses--companies that develop chemicals for the food and drink industry--who are interested in making foods taste just as sweet with half the amount of sugar. "Theoretically there would be the possibility of enhancing your meal with drugs that affect brain chemicals so that things would taste better--you couid have a "designer taste tablet"," Donaldson says.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)A. This work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities.B. Besides pay, her study also looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect—namely that at all stages of a woman"s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman" to settle into a professorial chair.C. Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute"s school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up.D. Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia"s school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7,000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year"s meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around ￡1,500 ($2,850) a year.E. To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23% gap in pay, which Dr Connolly attributes to discrimination.F. That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men"s and women"s lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over ￡4,000 a year more than female ones.G. Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr Connolly"s compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does.Order: The first paragraph is C and G is the last.

No energy can be created, and none destroyed.

Write a letter to the manager of a hotel to complain about the service you received there and suggest the solution. 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)

During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the, autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Thus Edgar Allan Poe opened his story of the fall of the House of Usher in 1839. In this beautifully crafted sentence he captured so much that is essential to the horror story: darkness, ominous solitude, foreboding calm, apprehension and uncertainty, and a deep feeling of melancholy that could soon turn to fear. Many kinds of fiction are self-explanatory: mysteries, Westerns, love stories, spy thrillers, and science fiction define themselves by the terms used to name them. The horror story is less easily defined, perhaps because other types of fiction so often use the trappings of terror to enhance their plots. Charles Dickens used the vehicle of an old-fashioned ghost story to tell A Christmas Carol, but that book is not a honor story. Nor does a Grimm brothers fairy tale such as Hansen and Grate with its child-devouring witch, belong to the genre. The nature of the horror story is. best indicated by the title of the 1980s television series Tales from the Dark Side. Human beings have always acknowledged that there is evil in the world and a dark side to human nature that cannot be explained except perhaps in religious terms. This evil may be imagined as having an almost unlimited power to inspire anxiety, fear, dread, and terror in addition to doing actual physical and mental harm. In the tale of horror quite ordinary people are confronted by something unknown and fearful, which can be neither understood nor explained in reasonable terms. It is the emphasis on the unreasonable that lies at the heart of horror stories. This kind of literature arose in the 18th century at the start of a movement called Romanticism. The movement was a reaction against a rational, orderly world in which humanity was basically good and everything could be explained scientifically. The literary type that inspired the horror story is Gothic fiction, tales of evil, often set in sinister medieval surroundings. This original kind of horror fiction has persisted to the present.

Bankers have been blaming themselves for their troubles in public. Behind the scenes, they have been taking aim at someone else: the accounting standard-setters. Their rales, moan the banks, have forced them to report enormous losses, and it" s just not fair. These rules say they must value some assets at the price a third party would pay, not the price managers and regulators would like them to fetch. Unfortunately, banks" lobbying now seems to be working. The details may be unknowable, but the independence of standard-setters, essential to the proper functioning of capital markets, is being compromised. And, unless banks carry toxic assets at prices that attract buyers, reviving the banking system will be difficult. After a bruising encounter with Congress, America"s Financial Accounting Standards Board(FASB)rushed through rule changes. These gave banks more freedom to use models to value illiquid assets and more flexibility in recognizing losses on long-term assets in their income statement. Bob Herz, the FASB" s chairman, cried out against those who "question our motives." Yet bank shares rose and the changes enhance what one lobby group politely calls "the use of judgment by management." European ministers instantly demanded that the International Accounting Standards Board(IASB)do likewise. The IASB says it does not want to act without overall planning, but the pressure to fold when it completes its reconstruction of rules later this year is strong. Charlie McCreevy, a European commissioner, warned the IASB that it did "not live in a political vacuum" but "in the real world" and that Europe could yet develop different rules. It was banks that were on the wrong planet, with accounts that vastly overvalued assets. Today they argue that market prices overstate losses, because they largely reflect the temporary illiquidity of markets, not the likely extent of bad debts. The truth will not be known for years. But bank"s shares trade below their book value, suggesting that investors are skeptical. And dead markets partly reflect the paralysis of banks which will not sell assets for fear of booking losses, yet are reluctant to buy all those supposed bargains. To get the system working again, losses must be recognized and dealt with. America"s new plan to buy up toxic assets will not work unless banks mark assets to levels which buyers find attractive. Successful markets require independent and even combative standard-setters. The FASB and IASB have been exactly that, cleaning up rules on stock options and pensions, for example, against hostility from special interests. But by giving in to critics now they are inviting pressure to make more concessions.

Today the study of language in our schools is somewhat confused. It is the most traditional of scholastic subjects being taught in a time when many of our traditions no longer fit our needs. You to whom these pages are addressed speak English and are therefore in a worse case than any other literate people. People pondering the origin of language for the first time usually arrive at the conclusion that it developed gradually as a system of conventionalised grunts, hisses, and cries and must have been a very simple affair in the beginning. But when we observe the language behavior of what we regard as primitive cultures, we find it strikingly elaborate and complicated. Stefansson, the explorer, said that "In order to get along reasonably well an Eskimo must have at the tip of his tongue a vocabulary of more than 10,000 words, much larger than the active vocabulary of an average businessman who speaks English. Moreover these Eskimo words are far more highly inflected than those of any of the well-known European languages, for a single noun can be spoken or written in several hundred different forms, each having a precise meaning different from that of any other. The forms of the verbs are even more numerous. The Eskimo language is, therefore, one of the most difficult in the world to learn, with the result that almost no traders or explorers have even tried to learn it. Consequently there has grown up, an intercourse between Eskimos and whites, a jargon similar to the pidgin English used in China, with a vocabulary of from 300 to 600 uninflected words, most of them derived from Eskimo but some derived from English, Danish, Spanish, Hawaiian and other languages. It is this jargon which is usually referred to by travelers as "the Eskimo language". And Professor Thalbitzer of Copenhagen, who did take the trouble to learn Eskimo, seems to endorse the explorer"s view when he writes: "The language is polysynthetic. The grammar is extremely rich in flexional forms, the conjugation of a common verb ending. For the declension of a noun there are 150 suffixes (for dual and plural, local cases, and possessive flexion). The derivative endings effective in the vocabulary and the construction of sentences or sentence-like words a mount to at least 250. Not withstanding all these constructive peculiarities, the grammatical and synthetic system is remarkably concise and, in its own way, logical."

Modern liberal opinion is sensitive to problems of restriction of freedom and abuse of power. (1)_____, many hold that a man can be injured only by violating his will, but this view is much too (2)_____. It fails to (3)_____ the great dangers we shall face in the (4)_____ of biomedical technology that stems from an excess of freedom, from the unrestrained (5)_____ of will. In my view, our greatest problems will be voluntary self-degradation, or willing dehumanization, as is the unintended yet often inescapable consequence of sternly and successfully pursuing our humanization (6)_____. Certain (7)_____ and perfected medical technologies have already had some dehumanizing consequences. Improved methods of resuscitation have made (8)_____ heroic efforts to "save" the severely ill and injured. Yet these efforts are sometimes only partly successful: They may succeed in (9)_____ individuals, but these individuals may have sever brain damage and be capable of only a less-than-human, vegetating (10)_____. Such patients have been (11)_____ a death with dignity. Families are forced to bear the burden of a (12)_____ "death watch". (13)_____ the ordinary methods of treating disease and prolonging life have changed the (14)_____ in which men die. Fewer and fewer people die in the familiar surroundings of home or in the (15)_____ of family and friends. This loneliness, (16)_____, is not confined to the dying patient in the hospital bed. As a group, the elderly are the most alienated members of our society: Not yet (17)_____ the world of the dead, not deemed fit for the world of the living, they are shunted (18)_____. We have learned how to increase their years, (19)_____ we have not learned how to help them enjoy their days. Yet we continue to bravely and feverishly push back the frontiers (20)_____ death.

Suppose you are a college student on a school campus or an employee in a company. Recently you noticed that some people never paid attention to the signs on a garbage can that say it is desirable to deal with wastes separately. Now you are going to make a conservation campaign speech at a party. And your speech should include: 1) the present situation, 2) and your suggestions. Write your letter in no less than 100 words and write it neatly. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter, use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

We were most impressed by the fact that even those patients who were not told of their serious illness were quite aware of its potential outcome.

Studythefollowingdrawingcarefullyandwriteanessayinwhichyoushould1)describethedrawing,2)interpretitsmeaning,and3)supportyourviewwithexamples.Youshouldwriteabout200wordsneatlyonANSWERSHEET2.(20points)