The good news about America"s economy is that jobs are plentiful despite slower growth and the housing blues. Some 180,000 new jobs were created in March and the unemployment rate fell to 4. 4% , three-tenths of a percentage point lower than a year ago. With employment and wage growth strong, consumers are unlikely to stop spending and throw the economy into recession. That is not all cause for celebration , however. The drop in the jobless rate at the same time as the economy is slowing implies that the growth in productivity—the amount workers produce in an hour—is waning. If this proves to be a permanent shift, slower productivity growth bodes ill for inflation and living standards. Few associate America with limping productivity. Central to its success over the past decade has been its "productivity miracle", the sudden acceleration in workers" efficiency in 1995. After advancing at a measly 1.5% per year for more than two decades, productivity growth soared to an average of 2. o% a year in the late 1990s and over 3% a year between 2002 and 2004. This spurt set America apart from other rich countries. But between mid-2004 and the end of 2006, the growth in business output per hour outside agriculture, the most common gauge of worker efficiency, slowed to an annual rate of just 1. 5% , on average. Judging by the recent jobs figures, its growth in the first few months of 2007 may be lower still. Deciding how worrying this is depends on what lies behind the sluggishness. Productivity growth has two components: a long-term trend(set by the quality of the workforce, the pace of capital investment and the speed of innovation)and more volatile short-term fluctuations driven by the business cycle. Early in an expansion, for instance, productivity takes off temporarily as firms squeeze their existing staff harder before hiring new workers. As an economy slows, it tails off, because firms are loth to sack workers immediately. This time, temporary factors are almost certainly playing the biggest role. Not only has the business cycle reached the point at which productivity growth usually slows, it also has several characteristics that may have exacerbated temporary productivity swings. Unusually savage company cost-cutting early in this cycle is another reason why recent productivity swings have been so extreme. An odd business cycle makes it hard to gauge what has happened to America" s underlying rate of productivity growth. So too do shifts in the sources of productivity growth. In the late 1990s workers" efficiency rose thanks both to rapid investment, particularly in information technology(IT), and to innovation, again mainly in IT. Hence the conventional view that America"s productivity miracle was based on its ability to harness the power of computers.

One reason why shareholder activism has been increasing is that regulators have encouraged it, especially on pay. For a decade Britain has required firms to give shareholders a non-binding annual vote on executive pay. The colossal Dodd-Frank act of 2010 gave shareholders in American companies a "say on pay", too. Now comes two new moves. On March 3rd the Swiss voted to oblige firms to hold a binding annual vote on director's pay: in the small print, the referendum also banned golden handshakes and severance packages for board members, and bonuses that encourage the buying or selling of firms. Then on March 5th EU finance ministers (with only Britain objecting) agreed to cap bankers' bonuses to 100% of their basic salary, or 200% if shareholders vote for it. If the Swiss had merely given shareholders an annual vote on pay, it would have been a good thing; but the accompanying bans are not. There are times when a golden handshake to a talented manager can be in shareholders' interests: far better to let the owners vote on it than restrict the firm from trying it. The EU's proposal has less still to recommend it. The rationale for it is that banking bonuses have encouraged risk taking, because they reward bankers hugely for bets that come off and punish them only slightly for those that don't. But banks have come a long way since the crisis, by deferring bonuses and making them partly payable in their own debt and equity. Blunt laws could undermine such progress. And bonus caps will either hold pay down, thus sending clever people elsewhere, or push up salaries, thus making pay less responsive to performance. Enpowering shareholders is a good idea; requiring them to channel populist fury is not.

You"ve been told that your best roommate Zhichao in senior high school, who is studying in US now, has been admitted to the Graduate College of Cornell University. Write a letter to congratulate him on it. You should write about 100 worts on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Scientists are supposed to change their minds. 【F1】 Having adopted their views on scientific questions based on an objective evaluation of empirical evidence, they are expected to willingly, even eagerly, abandon cherished beliefs when new evidence undercuts them. So it is remarkable that so few of the essays in a new book in which scientists answer the question in the title, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?" express anything like this ideal. Many of the changes of mind are just changes of opinion or an evolution of values. One contributor, a past supporter of manned spaceflight, now thinks it's pointless, while another no longer has moral objections to cognitive enhancement through drugs. Other changes of mind have to do with busted predictions, such as that computer intelligence would soon rival humans'. 【F2】 Rare, however, are changes of mind by scientists identified with either side of a controversial issue. There is no one who rose to fame arguing that a disease is caused by sticky brain plaques and who has now been convinced by evidence that the plaques are mostly innocent bystanders, not culprits. But really, we shouldn' t be surprised.【F3】 Supporters of a particular viewpoint especially if their reputation is based on the accuracy of that viewpoint, cling to it like a shipwrecked man to floats. Studies that undermine that position, they say, are fatally flawed. In truth, no study is perfect, so it would be crazy to abandon an elegant, well-supported theory because one new finding undercuts it. 【F4】 But it's fascinating how scientists with an intellectual stake in a particular side of a debate tend to see flaws in studies that undercut their dearly held views, and to interpret and even ignore "facts" to fit their views. No wonder the historian Thomas Kuhn concluded almost 50 years ago that a scientific paradigm falls down only when the last of its powerful adherents dies. The few essays in which scientists do admit they were wrong—and about something central to their reputation—therefore stand out.【F5】 Physicist Marcelo Gleiser of Dartmouth breaks ranks with almost every physicist since Einstein, and with his Own younger self, in now doubting that the laws of nature can be unified in a single elegant formulation. Gleiser has written dozens of papers proposing routes to the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics through everything from superstrings to extra dimensions, but now concedes that "all attempts so far have failed." Unification may be esthetically appealing, but it's not how nature works.

When young people who want to be journalists ask me what subject they should study after leaving school, I tell them: "Anything except journalism or media studies." Most veterans of my trade would say the same. It is practical advice. For obvious reasons, newspaper editors like to employ people who can bring something other than a knowledge of the media to the party that we call our work. On The Daily Telegraph, for example, the editor of London Spy is a theologian by academic training. The obituaries editor is a philosopher. The editor of our student magazine, Juice, studied physics. As for myself, I read history, ancient and modern, at the taxpayer"s expense. I am not sure what Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, would make of all this. If I understand him correctly, he would think that the public money spent on teaching this huge range of disciplines to the staff of The Daily Telegraph was pretty much wasted. The only academic course of which he would wholeheartedly approve in the list above would be physics—but then again, he would probably think it a terrible waste that Simon Hogg chose to edit Juice instead of designing aeroplanes or building nuclear reactors. By that, he seems to mean that everything taught at the public expense should have a direct, practical application that will benefit society and the economy. It is extremely alarming that the man in charge of Britain"s education system should think in this narrow-minded, half-witted way. The truth, of course, is that all academic disciplines benefit society and the economy, whether in a direct and obvious way or not. They teach students to think—to process information and to distinguish between what is important and unimportant, true and untrue. Above all, a country in which academic research and intelligent ideas are allowed to flourish is clearly a much more interesting, stimulating and enjoyable place than one without "ornaments", in which money and usefulness are all that count. Mr. Clarke certainly has a point when he says that much of what is taught in Britain"s universities is useless. But it is useless for a far more serious reason than that it lacks any obvious economic utility. As the extraordinarily high drop-out rate testifies, it is useless because it fails the first test of university teaching—that it should stimulate the interest of those being taught. When students themselves think that their courses are a waste of time and money, then a waste they are. The answer is not to cut off state funding for the humanities. It is to offer short, no- nonsense vocational courses to those who want to learn a trade, and reserve university places for those who want to pursue an academic discipline. By this means, a great deal of wasted money could be saved and all students—the academic and the not-so-academic—would benefit. What Mr. Clarke seems to be proposing instead is an act of cultural vandalism that would rob Britain of all claim to be called a civilised country.

In a game the moves are set up beforehand. In a non-game situation the moves are supposed to arise out of events as these develop. A girl wants to encourage her boyfriend so she pretends to be busy when he phones her or she pretends that someone else is courting her. (46) A young child who is reluctant to go to bed deliberately spills milk from a cup onto the carpet so that the ensuing fuss and scolding the immediacy of his bedtime will be forgotten. Diplomats at a conference make a great fuss over the shape of the table as they play the procedural game. (47) An agent selling the film rights in a first novel casually mentions other parties who have shown an interest in buying the rights. A hostess deliberately places a seductive lady next to a husband with a jealous wife. Union negotiators go through a ritual of complains before setting down to discuss the current issue. The characteristic of a game is that a sequence of moves are recognizable as part of the game. The game may be played very seriously; it may also be played for a purpose rather than as an end in itself. Nevertheless each move in the sequence is determined by the requirements of the game rather than the realities of the situation itself. (48) Someone who is aware that a game is being played sits back and waits for the game to be played out. Someone who is not aware that it is a game gets involved and manipulated by the games player who knows the moves of the game better. It is this expertise in the moves of the game which makes it worth playing. If the player knows, from long experience, the moves, reactions and counter-moves then he only has to entice the other person to play the game to achieve success. If the situation works it out naturally neither side has an advantage. But if one side sets up a game with which only he is familiar then that side immediately acquires the advantage of skill and fore-knowledge. A good games player not only knows how to make the next move, he can think one, two or three moves ahead. This is extremely difficult for an inexperienced player. (49) Thus the player who sets up a familiar game can lay traps several moves ahead with very little chance of the opponent noticing what is being done. (50) Just as a philosopher will always try to run an argument according to his own definitions so a games player will always try to make an opponent play his special game.

[A]The first published sketch, "A Dinner at Polar Walk" brought tears to Dickens' s eyes when he discovered it in the pages of The Monthly Magazine . From then on his sketches, which appeared under the pen name "Boz" in The Evening Chronicle, earned him a modest reputation. [B]The runaway success of The Pickwick Papers, as it is generally known today, secured Dickens' s fame. There were Pickwick coats and Pickwick cigars, and the plump, spectacled hero, Samuel Pickwick, because a national figure. [C]Soon after Sketches by Boz appeared, a publishing firm approached Dickens to write a story in monthly installments, as a backdrop for a series of woodcuts by the then-famous artist Robert Seymour, who had originated the idea for the story. With characteristic confidence, Dickens successfully insisted that Seymour' s pictures illustrate his own story instead. After the first installment, Dickens wrote to the artist and asked him to correct a drawing Dickens felt, was not faithful enough to his prose. Seymour made the change, went into his backyard, and expressed his displeasure by committing suicide. Dickens and his publishers simply pressed on with a new artist. The comic novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, appeared serially in 1836 and 1837 and was first published in book form in 1837. [D]Charles Dickens is probably the best-known and, to many people, the greatest English novelist of the 19th century. A moralist, satirist, and social reformer, Dickens crafted complex plots and striking characters that capture the panorama of English society. [E]Soon after his father' s release from prison, Dickens got a better job as errand boy in law offices. He taught himself shorthand to get an even better job later as a court stenographer and as a reporter in Parliament. At the same time, Dickens, who had a reporter' s eye for transcribing the life around him, especially anything comic or odd, submitted short sketches to obscure magazines. [F]Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on England' s southern coast. His father was a clerk in the British Navy Pay office—a respectable position, but with little social status. His paternal grandparents, a steward and a housekeeper, possessed even less status, having been servants, and Dickens later concealed their background. Dicken' s mother supposedly came from a more respectable family. Yet two years before Dicken' s birth, his mother' s father was caught stealing and fled to Europe, never to return. The family' s increasing poverty forced Dickens out of school at age 12 to work in Warren' s Blacking Warehouse, a shoe-polish factory, where the other working boys mocked him as " the young gentleman". His father was then imprisoned for debt. The humiliations of his father' s imprisonment and his labor in the blacking factory formed Dickens' s greatest wound and became his deepest secret. He could not confide them even to his wife, although they provide the unacknowledged foundation of his fiction. [G]After Pickwick, Dickens plunged into a bleaker world. In Oliver Twist, he traces an orphan' s progress from the workhouse to the criminal slums of London. Nicholas Nickleby, his next novel, combines the darkness of Oliver Twist with the sunlight of Pickwick. The popularity of these novels consolidated Dickens as a nationally and internationally celebrated man of letters. D →【C1】______→【C2】______→【C3】______→【C4】______→ B →【C5】______

Google must be the most ambitious company in the world. Its stated goal, "to organize the world"s information and make it universally accessible and useful," deliberately omits the word "web" to indicate that the company is reaching for absolutely all information everywhere and in every form. From books to health records and videos, from your friendships to your click patterns and phys-ical location, Google wants to know. To some people this sounds uplifting, with promises of free access to knowledge and help in managing our daily lives. To others, it is somewhat like another Big Brother, no less frightening than its totalitarian ancestors for being in the private information. Randall Stross, a journalist at the New York Times, does a good job of analyzing this unbounded ambition in his book "Planet Google". One chapter is about the huge data centers that Google is building with a view to storing all that information, another about the sets of rules at the heart of its web search and advertising technology, another about its approach to information bound in books, its vision for geographical information and so forth. He is at his best when explaining how Google"s mission casually but fatally smashes into long-existing institutions such as, say, copyright law or privacy norms. And yet, it"s puzzling that he mostly omits the most fascinating component of Google, its people. Google is what it is because of its two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who see themselves as kindly elites and embody the limitless optimism about science, technology and human nature that is native to Silicon Valley. The world is perfectible, and they are the ones who will do much of the perfecting, provided you let them. Brin and Page set out to create a company and an entire culture in their image. From the start, they professed that they would innovate as much in managing—rewarding, feeding, motivating, entertaining and even transporting (via Wi-Fi-enabled free shuttle buses) their employees—as they do in internet technology. If Google is in danger of becoming a caricature, this is first apparent here—in the over-engineered day-care centers, the Shiatsu massages and kombucha teas. In reality Googlers are as prone to power struggle and office politics as anyone else. None of that makes it into Mr Stross" account, which at times reads like a diligent summary of news articles. At those moments, "Planet Google" takes a risk similar to trying to board a speeding train: the Google story changes so fast that no book can stay up to date for long. Even so, a sober description of this moment in Google"s quest is welcome. Especially since Google fully expects, as its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, says at the end of the book, to take 300 years completing it.

Career or Family: Which Is More Important?

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

Six years later, in an about-face, the FBI admits that federal agents fired tear gas canisters capable of causing a fire at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in 1993. But the official said the firing came several hours before the structure burst into flames, killing 80 people including the Davidians" leader, David Koresh. "In looking into this, we"ve come across information that shows some canisters that can be deemed pyrotechnic in nature were fired—hours before the fire started", the official said. "Devices were fired at the bunker, not at the main structure where the Davidians were camped out". The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains it did not start what turned to be a series of fiery bursts of flames that ended a 51-day standoff between branch members and the federal government. "This doesn"t change the bottom line that David Koresh started the fire and the government did not", the official said. "It simply Shows that devices that could probably be flammable were used in the early morning hours". The law enforcement official said the canisters were fired not at the main structure where the Davidian members were camped out but at the nearby underground bunker. They bounced off the bunker"s concrete roof and landed in an open field well, the official said. The canisters were fired at around 6 a.m., and the fire that destroyed the wooden compound started around noon, the official said. The official also added that other tear gas canisters used by agent that day were not flammable or potentially explosive. While Coulson denied the grenades played a role in starting the fire, his statement marked the first time that any U.S. government official has publicly contradicted the government"s position that federal agents used nothing on the final day of the siege at Waco that could have sparked the fire that engulfed the compound. The cause of the fiery end is a major focus of an ongoing inquiry by the Texas Rangers into the Waco siege.

In the past year, a lot has changed in the field of human spaceflight. (46) In January, President George Bush brushed aside the fact that America"s entire space-shuttle fleet was grounded when he announced grandiose plans to put people back on the moon, and then to launch a manned mission to Mars. (47) In June, Burt Rutan, an American aeronautical engineer, showed that human spaceflight was no longer the preserve of governments by sending a man to the edge of space in Space Ship One, a privately financed vehicle that cost about the same to build as a luxury yacht. That was followed in September by Sir Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur behind the Virgin brand, announcing that he had signed a deal with Mr. Rutan to work on plans for a fleet of five suborbital vehicles developed from Space Ship One. (48) Now, in the dying days of the year, America"s Congress has passed a bill that unravels a tangle about who would be responsible for regulating the fledgling industry, and under what terms. (49) The hill also allows passengers to fly on the understanding that this new generation of vehicles may not be as safe as taking a commercial flight between, say, New York and London. The official line from Virgin Galactica, as Sir Richard"s latest venture is modestly named, is that this coming change in the law makes no practical difference to the firm"s plans, since they do not intend to fly unless they can make their spacecraft as safe as a private jet. But it must surely come as some sort of relief. In any case, Will Whitehorn, director of corporate affairs at Virgin"s headquarters in London, and soon to become the president of Virgin Galactica, says that work is under way on a mock up of the inter[or of a new spacecraft that will hold five passengers. (50) Virgin has already committed $20m towards licensing the SpaceShipOne technology from Mr. Rutan and his financial backer Paul Allen, a software billionaire.

The success of Augustus owed much to the character of Roman theorizing about the state. The Romans did not produce ambitious blueprints【C1】______the construction of ideal states, such as【C2】______to the Greeks. With very few exceptions, Roman theorists ignored, or rejected 【C3】______valueless, intellectual exercises like Plato" s Republic, in【C4】______ the relationship of the individual to the state was 【C5】______out painstakingly without reference to 【C6】______ states or individuals. The closest the Roman came to the Greek model was Cicero"s De Re Publica, and even here Cicero had Rome clearly in【C7】______. Roman thought about the state was concrete, even when it【C8】______religious and moral concepts. The first ruler of Rome, Romulus, was【C9】______to have received authority from the gods, specifically from Jupiter, the "guarantor" of Rome. All constitutional【C10】______was a method of conferring and administering the【C11】______. Very clearly it was believed that only the assembly of the【C12】______, the family heads who formed the original senate, 【C13】______the religious character necessary to exercise authority, because its original function was to【C14】______ the gods. Being practical as well as exclusive, the senators moved【C15】______to divide the authority, holding that their consuls, or chief officials, would possess it on【C16】______months, and later extending its possession to lower officials.【C17】______the important achievement was to create the idea of continuing【C18】______authority embodied only temporarily in certain upper-class individuals and conferred only【C19】______the mass of the people concurred. The system grew with enormous【C20】______, as new offices and assemblies were created and almost none discarded.

"Ah, yes, divorce", Robin Williams once mused, "from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man"s genitals through his wallet". The derivation may not be found in dictionaries, but he was on well-trodden ground in linking divorce to money. This month a survey conducted among financial analysts, stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers by Mishcon de Reya, a law firm, suggested that theeconomic downturn will prompt an upsurge in divorces among high-earners in London"s financial centre. This pattern is not without precedent; Sandra Davis, who commissioned the study, says that the recession of the early 1990s led to a wave of divorces among the City"s wealthy people.A third of current inquiries to lawyers by those deciding to break the knot, she claims, are linked to the credit crunch. One explanation is that the defecting spouses of high earners are getting out before the crunch reduces the potential for profitable settlements. As the City boom turns to bust, redundancies are becoming commonplace and huge bonuses a distant dream. Since recent earnings are one of the factors taken into account in divorce settlements, it makes sense to divorce sooner rather than later. Others argue that money and the distractions it buys allow couples to avoid addressing difficulties in their relationship, which come to the fore in more financially-distressed times. For middle earners, the link between divorce rates and economic conditions is less clear-cut, not least since the main marital asset is houses rather than spouses. Rising inflation and falling house prices put pressure on marriages and might thus contribute to higher divorce rates. Yet the same factors also make splitting up more complicated. Falling property prices mean that selling the family home may not provide sufficient funds for two separate homes, especially now that lenders have become much more choosy. "A flagging economy clearly leads to an increase in misery; whether or not it causes a rise in the divorce rate is a debatable point," sums up Stephen Jenkins, director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research. One consequence is that more couples are living together after divorce, which raises its own problems. Godfrey Freeman, chairman of Resolution, an association of family lawyers, points out that the lower-earning partners in such couples may find it harder to claim benefits. They are usually refused help, he says, on the grounds that their mortgage is being paid, even if they have no cash of their own to cover everyday expenses.

Floating on water, a ship displaces an amount of water equal to the weight of the ship.

Jim Boon is a hybrid kind of guy. He drives a Toyota hybrid to work, a Honda hybrid on weekends and, as a manager for Seattle public transit he recently placed the world"s largest order for hybrid electric buses. Now, with the biggest hybrid-bus fleet in the world, Seattle has become the main testing ground for a technology that claims it can drastically cut air pollution and fuel consumption. In the 1990s, demo fleets of 35 buses or fewer started cropping up in cities such as Tempe, Ariz. Sixteen of these early hybrids still service Genoa, Italy, where drivers switch from diesel to electric power when passing the city"s downtown architectural treasures. But no city has gone as far as Seattle, which last year bought 235 GM hybrid buses at $ 645,000 a pop. When the final one rolls out this December, the region"s bus system will be 15 percent hybrid. But why Seattle, and why now? The Pacific Northwest has long been a hotbed of both Green politics and cutting-edge technology. Fourteen years ago the Seattle area bought 236 Italian-made Breda buses to service a mile-long downtown tunnel. They were supposed to operate as clean electric trolleys underground, but the switching mechanism often failed and "the bus drove through the tunnel as a diesel," says Boon. "It was pretty loud and smoky. " When the Bredas hit retirement age in 2002, Boon went shopping. He chose the GM buses because they use an automatic transmission and diesel boosters that provide power to scale inclines without strain. In hilly Seattle, the prospect of a hybrid that could climb like a diesel but accelerate without belching black fumes helped justify a price $ 200,000 higher than that of a regular bus. "The days of seeing a diesel pull away and pour out smoke are over," says Boon. "After we drove these hybrid buses across the country, I wiped a handkerchief inside the tailpipe. It came out spotless. " Experts say buses are critical to realizing the hybrid dream of greater efficiency and cleaner air. It would take thousands of hybrid cars to save as many gallons of gas (750,000) as Boon expects his buses to save Seattle each year. GM claims that compared with conventional diesels, its new buses also churn out 90 percent less particulate matter—a known carcinogen. "Buses are a major source of pollution in any city," says Dave Kircher of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. "They operate where people are breathing this exhaust, so this is a major step forward in terms of emissions. " And a major step forward in the marketplace: Philadelphia, Honolulu, Long Beach, Calif., and Albuquerque, N. M. , have all bought the GM buses in recent months. GM is now touting itself in ads as the top hybrid-bus innovator, but Siemens is among the global giants dueling GM for new business, and New York plans to deploy 325 BAE Systems hybrids by 2006. "There"s room for competition," says James Cannon, editor of Hybrid Vehicles newsletter. Seems Seattle isn"t the only city trying to leave grunge behind.

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. A machine has been developed that pulps paper and then processes it into packaging, e.g. egg-boxes and cartons. This could be easily adapted for local authorities use. It would mean that people would have to separate their refuse into paper and non-paper, with a different dustbin for each. Paper is, in fact, probably the material that can be most easily recycled; and now, with massive increases in paper prices, the time has come at which collection by local authorities could be profitable.B. Recycling of this kind is already happening with milk bottles, which are returned to the dairies, washed out, and refilled. But both glass and paper are being threatened by the growing use of plastic. More and more dairies are experimenting with plastic bottles, and it has been estimated that if all the milk bottles necessary were made of plastic, then British dairies would be producing the equivalent of enough plastic tubing to encircle the earth every five or six days!C. The package itself is of no interest to the shopper, who usually throws it away immediately. Useless wrapping accounts for much of the refuse put out by the average London household each week. So why is it done? Some of it, like the cellophane on meat, is necessary, but most of the rest is simply competitive selling. This is absurd. Packaging is using up scarce energy and resources and messing up the environment.D. The trouble with plastic is that it does not rot. Some environmentalists argue that the only solution to the problem of ever growing mounds of plastic containers is to do away with plastic altogether in the shops, a suggestion unacceptable to many manufacturers who say there is no alternative to their handy plastic packs.E. Little research, however, is being carried out on the costs of alternative types of packaging. Just how possible is it, for instance, for local authorities to salvage paper, pulp it and recycle it as egg-boxes? Would it be cheaper to plant another forest? Paper is the material most used for packaging—20 million paper bags are apparently used in Great Britain each day—but very little is salvaged.F. It is evident that more research is needed into the recovery and re-use of various materials and into the cost of collecting and recycling containers as opposed to producing new ones. Unnecessary packaging, intended to be used just once, and making things look better so that more people will buy them, is clearly becoming increasingly absurd. But it is not so much a question of doing away with packaging as using it sensibly. What is needed now is a more sophisticated approach to using scarce resources for what is, after all, a relatively unimportant function.G. To get a chocolate out of a box requires a considerable amount of unpacking: the box has to be taken out of the paper bag in which it arrived; the cellophane wrapper has to be torn off, the lid opened and the paper removed; the chocolate itself then has to be unwrapped from its own piece of paper. But this insane amount of wrapping is not confined to luxuries. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to buy anything that is not done up in cellophane, polythene or paper.Notes：cellophane (包装用的)玻璃纸 do up 打包，装饰 polythene 聚乙烯refuse n．废料，废物 mess up 弄脏，弄乱 salvage 回收利用pulp 使…成为浆状 carton 纸板盒 encircle 环绕mound 小丘，小堆 do away with 处理掉 as opposed to 与…对照not so much...as 与其…倒不如…"Order: G is the first paragraph and F is the last one.

Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayof160—200words.Youressayshouldcoveralltheinformationprovidedandmeettherequirementsbelow:1)interpretthefollowingpicture.2)possiblereasonsforthephenomenon.3)yourcomments.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 1~5, choose the most suitable one from the list A~G to fit into each of the numbered blanks. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the blanks. For the endangered North Atlantic right whale, these arc trying times. These leviathans who live and migrate in waters along the East Coast of North America teeter closer to the brink of extinction than perhaps any other whale species. Their population is tiny—less than 350—and continues to shrink.【C1】______ Yet for scientists and conservationists anxious about the future of these creatures, rays of hope are beginning to pierce an otherwise gloomy horizon. Thanks to a surge of scientific research and new tools for conducting it, they expect to learn far more about right whales, their interaction with the environment, and how to better protect them from their biggest threat: man.【C2】______ For the right whales, the leading causes of mortality are collisions with ships and encounters with fishing gear, researchers say. Females appear to have the toughest time surviving the range of human and natural threats. It"s these challenges scientists hope to address with a growing momentum in right-whale research. 【C3】______ Conservationists are working with governments and the shipping industry to move or control traffic on heavily used sea lanes that ships and whales share. And recent research is yielding potentially useful insights into the impact of factors ranging from water quality to shifts in climate. "I"m not much of a Pollyannaj 1 can be very grumpy about the progress of right-whale biology and conservation," says Scott Kraus, director of research at the New England Aquarium in Boston. But "in the next couple of years we"re going to see a tremendous burst of very creative scientific energy" applied to fundamental biological and ecological questions surrounding the whales. "When those questions get answered, we" re going to have very specific ideas about what management strategies will reduce mortality and perhaps enhance reproduction," he says. 【C4】______ In principle, preventing "two female deaths a year would have a major impact on the prospects for the population," says Hal Caswell, a marine zoologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. 【C5】______ From 1500 to 1600, Basque whalers decimated right-whale populations in the eastern Atlantic, taking an estimated 25,000 to 40,000. In the late 1600s, by some accounts, it would have been possible to walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of whales. But by the mid-1700s, New Englanders had taken another 3,000, Mr. Kraus says. By the early 20th century, "only a few dozen whales survived in the western North Atlantic". [A]If they can save a population this small, then it could boost hopes of saving other species from the unintended impact of humans on the environment. [B]Yet achieving that means untangling a web of intertwined human and environmental factors that contribute to the whales" plight. The one factor that weighs most heavily is human. [C]In addition, researchers are exploring a number of acoustic approaches to avoiding ship-whale collisions. One technique scientists hope to test later this month involves the use of moored buoys that use passive sonar systems to listen for whales. [D]To an outsider, the goal looks deceivingly within reach. The population is so small that it would take only modest pains in saving whales to help turn the situation around. [E]That population had slowly rebuilt. Over the past 20 years, researchers have built an impressive collection of 250,000 photos—a catalog of some 460 North Atlantic right whales. Each animal bears unique growths of hardened skin, or callosities, in places where hair would appear on humans. The callosity patterns act as visual tags, allowing researchers to follow the whales" life history. [F]Later this month, for example, researchers are set to test new approaches to tracking the elusive whales in hopes of alerting ships to their presence. Meanwhile, chemists and engineers are developing whale-friendly commercial-fishing gear. [G]By some estimates, if current population trends hold, the species will vanish within the next 200 years.

As people in rich countries know very well, eating too much food and burning too few calories is why a substantial number of us are overweight or obese. Now, however, a remarkable change in perspective has come from the discovery that obesity actually provides people with temporary protection from the harmful effects of fat. The insight has come from re-examining the common assumption that fatness itself drives the development of metabolic syndrome, which is what causes so much of the actual damage. The syndrome comes with a mixture of life-threatening effects, with cardiovascular disease (diseases relating to the heart and blood vessels) and type 2 diabetes being among the most serious. In fact, it now seems that body fat may be a barrier that stops millions of Americans and fatty citizens elsewhere from going on to develop the syndrome. And the real damage is caused by the inflammatory effect of high levels of fat in the bloodstream. And ironically, it"s fat cells that protect us from this by serving as toxic dumps, locking away the real villains of the modern diet. The problem is that this protection only lasts so long, until there is simply no more room inside the fat cells. That"s when they start to break down, leading to a toxic spill into the bloodstream. This sets off an inflammatory response that causes various kinds of damage to body tissues. In this way, every excess calorie takes people closer to metabolic syndrome. So what can we do to stop a superabundance of fat triggering the syndrome? Of course there"s no substitute for a healthy diet and exercise, but incitation to this effect seem to be of limited use. As with cigarettes and alcohol, a tax on calories—pricing foods by their energy content—is increasingly seen as another "lever" to change behaviour by making obesity too costly. The new research may even suggest treatments to combat metabolic syndrome, such as antiinflammatory drugs. One promising candidate is salsalate, an arthritis drug related to aspirin, and the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston is now considering large-scale trials. What might be more helpful, though, is simply a wider recognition that fatty and sugary foods are more directly toxic than we had assumed. Ideally, people should be as well informed about the harmful effects of what they eat as, for example, pregnant women are about drinking and smoking. There is a consolation—you have your fat tissue to protect you when you consume that extra burger or sweetened soda. But now you know the perils of pushing your friendly fat cells beyond their natural limits.