back and forth

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

iron and steel plant

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

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

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

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

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

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

Write to the head of a train, and complain about its bad services. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

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

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

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

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

You just come back from your holiday. Write a letter to the manager of the hotel you booked to complain the bad service in the hotel. Write your letter with no less than 100 xvords. Do not sign your name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

Microsoft employees do not recognize themselves in the government's suits in the Microsoft cafeteria in Redmond, Washington. The governments antitrust suit against the company is frequently discussed among people who (like me) have no inside knowledge of what is actually going on in the negotiations. Slate, the online magazine I edit, is owned by Microsoft, so discount anything I say accordingly as you please. But having lived and worked among them for four years, I have found the attitude of folks inside the company pretty interesting, and maybe you will too. Not people like Bill Gates, or those who write the legal briefs and press releases, but the ordinary software developer in the cafeteria. Call him the Mall in the plaid Flannel Shirt. He or she is, above all, aggrieved. The grievance was well expressed by a midlevel manager when AI Gore "was on campus" a few months ago. At a Q & A session, he told the Vice President, in essence: I have been a Democrat all my life, because I believe in the values the Democratic Party represents. But also work very hard, and I believe that the work I do is helping make life better for people. Yet now my government is telling me that the work I do is actually harmful. So should I believe my government is wrong, or should I believe I'm devoting my life to hurting people? Fortunately for Gore, he was able to duck the question on the ground that he couldn't comment on an active lawsuit. If Gore had wanted to be mean, he might have asked how many stock options that interrogator had and whether that number has any impact on his decision to come to work every day. The human capacity for grievance is deep and universal. Even among these most rational members of the species, grievance seems immune to the reality that "unfair to Microsoft" is the world's least sympathetic evidence, even if it's true. However, it surely counts for something that the typical softy truly doesn't recognize himself or his work in the description of Microsoft, promulgated by the company's critics. He probably hasn't read the legal documents in the case, and is unqualified to judge the legal issues anyway. Even hardened criminals may concoct some innocent rationale for their crimes and believe it themselves. So the fact that my colleagues feel innocent doesn't mean they are innocent. But it surely complicates the issue. These people honestly believe they are promoting innovation, and they genuinely sense rivals at every turn. If the company is a complacent monopoly ruthlessly suppressing innovation, it has somehow become that way even though the people who constitute it are not. It was the day after Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings of fact last November if one moment crystallized the bitterness here. Which, despite its label, was widely interpreted as meaning that Microsoft was "gonna get nailed (折磨)." Newspapers across the country carried pictures of the Department of Justice litigators (上诉人) laughing about the judge's ruling. For the competitive Microsoft types, this was rubbing salt in the wounds. And it confirmed their suspicion that the government was unfairly "out to get" them. It's one thing for all official agencies to conclude solemnly that you have violated a vague and complex law.

Fossils are the remains and traces (such as footprints or other marks) of ancient plant and animal life that are more than 10,000 years old. They range in size from microscopic structures to dinosaur skeletons and complete bodies of enormous animals. Skeletons of extinct species of humans are also considered fossils. An environment favorable to the growth and later preservation of organisms is required for the occurrence of fossils. Two conditions are almost always present: (1) The possession of hard parts, either internal or external, such as bones, teeth, skulls, shells, and wood; these parts remain after the rest of the organism has decayed. Organisms that lack hard parts, such as worms and jellyfish, have left few geologic records. (2) Quick burial of the dead organism, so that protection is afforded against weathering, bacterial action, etc. Nature provides many situations in which the remains of animals and plants are protected against destruction. Of these, marine sediment is by far the most important environment for the preservation of fossils, owing to the incredible richness of marine life. The beds of former lakes are also productive sources of fossils. The rapidly accumulating sediments in the channels, floodplains, and deltas of streams bury fresh-water organisms, along with land plants and animals that fall into the water. The beautifully preserved fossil fish from the Green River oil shale of Wyoming in the western United States lived in a vast shallow lake. The arctic ground in the far north acts as a remarkable preservative for animal fossils. The woolly mammoth, a long-haired mammal, and other mammals have been periodically exposed in the area of Siberia, the hair and red flesh still frozen in cold storage. Volcanoes often provide environments favorable to fossil preservation. Extensive falls of volcanic ash and coarser particles overwhelm and bury all forms of life, from flying insects to great trees. Caves have preserved the bones of many animals that died in them and were subsequently buried under a blanket of clay or a cover of dripstone. Predatory animals and early humans alike sought shelter in caves and brought food to them to be eaten, leaving bones that have been discovered.

Sea rise as a result of global warming would immediately threaten that large fraction of the globe living at sea level. Nearly one-third of all human beings live within 36 miles of a coastline. Most of the world's great seaport cities would be【C1】______. Some countries would be inundated. Heavily populated coastal areas【C2】______large populations occupy low-lying areas, would suffer extreme【C3】______. Warmer oceans would spawn stronger hurricanes and typhoons,【C4】______coastal flooding, possibly swamp ing valuable agricultural lands around the world.【C5】______water quality may result as【C6】______flooding forces salt water into coastal irrigation and drinking water supplies, and irreplaceable, natural【C7】______could be flooded with ocean water, destroying forever many of the【C8】______plant and animal species living there. Food supplies and forests would be【C9】______affected. Changes in rainfall patterns would disrupt agriculture. Warmer temperatures would【C10】______grain-growing regions polewards. The warming would also increase and change the pest plants, such as weeds, and the insects【C11】______the crops. Human health would also be affected. Warming could【C12】______tropical climate bringing with it yellow fever and other diseases. The harmful【C13】______of localized urban air pollution would very likely be more serious in warmer【C14】______. There will be some【C15】______from warming. New sea-lanes will open in the Arctic, longer growing seasons further north will【C16】______new agricultural lands, and warmer temperature will make some of today's colder regions more【C17】______. But these benefits will be in individual areas. The natural systems—both plant and animal—will be less able than man to cope and【C18】______. Any change of temperature, rainfall, and sea level of the magnitude now【C19】______will be destructive to natural systems and living things and【C20】______to man as well.

One hundred and thirteen million Americans have at least one bank-issued credit card. They give their owners automatic credit in stores, restaurants, and hotels, at home, across the country, and even abroad, and they make many banking services available as well. More and more of these credit cards can be read automatically, making it possible to withdraw or deposit money in scattered locations, whether or not the local branch bank is open. For many of us, the "cashless society" is not on the horizon—it's already here. While computers offer these conveniences to consumers, they have many advantages for sellers too. Electronic cash registers can do much more than simply ring up sales. They can keep a wide range of records, including who sold what, when, and to whom. This information allows businessmen to keep track of their list of goods by showing which items are being sold and how fast they are moving. Decisions to reorder or return goods to suppliers can then be made. At the same time these computers record which hours are busiest and which employees are the most efficient, allowing personnel and staffing assignments to be made accordingly. And they also identify preferred customers for promotional campaigns. Computers are relied on by manufacturers for similar reasons. Computer analyzed marketing reports can help to decide which products to emphasize now, which to develop for the future, and which to drop. Computers keep track of goods in stock, of raw materials on hand, and even of the production process itself. Numerous other commercial enterprises, from theaters to magazine publishers, from gas and electric utilities to milk processors, bring better and more efficient services to consumers through the use of computers.

In this part, you are required to write an essay on SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—A BLESSING OR A CURSE? Your essay should be based on the information given below: 科学技术的发展使我们的生活发生了巨大的变化。请具体说明这些积极变化。另一方面，科技的发展也引起了许多麻烦，举例说明。最后，请你谈谈为解决这些问题人类所面临的任务。 You should write about 160—200 words neatly.