BSection III Writing/B

You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the【C1】______of your reading. I want to persuade you to "write between the lines".【C2】______you do, you are not likely to do the most【C3】______kind of reading. I【C4】______, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the【C5】______right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture.【C6】______this act of purchase is only the【C7】______to possession. Full ownership comes【C8】______you have made it a part of yourself, and the best【C9】______to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. A(n)【C10】______may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and【C11】______it from the butcher"s icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you【C12】______it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be【C13】______in your bloodstream to do you【C14】______. There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard【C15】______and bestsellers—unread, untouched. The second has【C16】______books—a few of them read through, most of them【C17】______, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they【C18】______. The third has a few books or many—every one of them dogeared and dilapidated, shaken and【C19】______by continual use, marked and【C20】______in from front to back. This man owns books.

It is commonly supposed that the health of Long Island Sound is chiefly the responsibility of the shoreline communities in Long Island, Westchester County and Connecticut. This is largely true. It is also true, however, that New York City has long been a major contributor to the environmental ills that torture this noblest of American estuaries. The main reason is four old municipal sewage treatment plants on the East River. Every day of every year, these plants deposit hundreds of thousands of gallons of partly treated wastewater into the river, which then, with tidal certainty, propels the polluted water into the Sound itself The most damaging of the pollutants leaving the plants is nitrogen—useful as a fertilizer on land but, in sufficient quantities, fatal to bodies of water like the Sound, where it stimulates the growth of bacteria and algae and robs the water of oxygen. This condition is known as hypoxia, and it suppresses marine life. Roughly half the nitrogen comes from treatment plants and other sources in about 80 shoreline communities, the other half comes from the New York City plants. It is thus cause for great celebration that the city agreed last week to settle a longstanding legal action and spend at least $700 million to upgrade these four plants, cutting their nitrogen output by nearly 60 percent by 2017. Audubon New York, a leader among the environmental groups that helped shape the agreement and move it forward, when negotiations seemed to falter, called the agreement an historic moment in the struggle to restore the Sound to good health. In retrospect, the most important moment in that struggle the moment from which all else has flowed, including last week"s agreement—came m 1994, when New York and Connecticut. after sustained pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, approved a comprehensive plan to clean up the Sound. The city"s main responsibility was to modernize its sewage treatment plants. The Giuliani administration left the bulk of the task to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Alarmed by the project"s estimated $1.3 billion price tag, Mr. Bloomberg dispatched Christopher Ward, then the environmental commissioner, to Europe and elsewhere to find new, more cost-efficient waste treatment technologies. In due course, Mr. Ward and his counterpart in Albany, Erin Crotty, reached an agreement in principle to reform the plants at well under the original cost. Mr. Ward and Ms. Crotty left public service, but after further debating aimed partly at ensuring that future city administrations could not wiggle out of the deal, and after further prodding by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, their successors. Emily Lloyd and Denise Sheehan, brought the matter to a close. This does not mean the Sound is no longer at risk. The Sound passes through the densest population corridor in the country, and will remain forever stressed by the 20 million people who live within 50 miles of its shores. Thus the shoreline communities in Long Island, Westchester and Connecticut must do more than ever to contain pollution.

One of the oft-repeated mantras of the global warming crowd is that there is no longer any debate in the scientific community about the threat of global warming. That is just not true. While there are many scientists who firmly believe global warming is real and it is a threat, there are many other scientists who have serious reservations about that judgment. One who sticks out in the debate on global warming is Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. Five years ago, Lomborg who views himself as an environmentalist, ignited a firestorm of controversy with his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. In it, Lomborg pointed out, as he has continued to explain since, "that actually a lot of the things we are doing to the environment are making it better". On global warming, he told the online site TechCentralStation; "Global warming is an important issue and one which we should address. But there is no sense of proportion either in environmental terms, or indeed in terms of the other issues facing the world." According to Lomborg, millions die each year from lack of clean drinking water and proper sanitation and indoor air pollution kills millions more, but a warmer world poses no such threat. "One of the top climate change economists has modelled—and several papers that came out a couple of weeks ago essentially point out -that climate change will probably mean fewer deaths, not more deaths. It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths. " Another critic of the standard model of global warming is MIT professor of meteorology Richard S. Lindzen. A giant in climate science, Lindzen has published literally hundreds of scientific papers. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2001, writing about a National Academy of Sciences report on climate change in which he participated, Lindzen noted: "We are quite confident(1)that global mean temperature is about 0. 5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago;(2)that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and(3)that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth(one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But—and I cannot stress this enough we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions. "

A Thank-you Letter for Hospitality Write a letter of about 100 words based on the following situation: Last weekend you went to Brian's home and enjoyed hospitality from his family. Now write a letter to thank him. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

TheCompetitionofDiplomaorParents?Studythepicturecarefullyandwriteanessayof160-200words,youshould1)describethepicturebriefly,2)interpretthesocialphenomenonreflectedbyit,and3)giveyourcomments.

One factor that can influence consumers is their mood state. Mood may be defined【B1】______a temporary and mild positive or negative feeling that is generalized and not tied【B2】______any particular circumstance. Moods should be 【B3】______ from emotions which are usually more intense, 【B4】______to specific circumstances, and often conscious. 【B5】______ one sense, the effect of a consumer' s mood can be thought of in 【B6】______ the same way as can our reactions to the 【B7】______ of our friends—when our friends are happy and "up", that tends to influence us positively, 【B8】______ when they are "down", that can have a 【B9】______ impact on us. Similarly, consumers operating under a【B10】______mood state tend to react to stimuli in a direction【B11】______with that mood state. Thus, for example, we should expect to see【B12】______in a positive mood state evaluate products in more of a【B13】______manner than they would when not in such a state.【B14】______, mood states appear capable of【B15】______a consumer' s memory. Moods appear to be【B16】______influenced by marketing techniques. For example, the rhythm, pitch, and【B17】______of music has been shown to influence behavior such as the【B18】______of time spent in supermarkets or【B19】______to purchase products. In addition, advertising can influence consumers' moods which, in【B20】______, are capable of influencing consumers' reactions to products.

The Earth's daily clock, measured in a single revolution, is twenty-four hours. The human clock, 【B1】______ , is actually about twenty-five hours. That's 【B2】______ scientists who study sleep have determined from human subjects who live for several weeks in observation chambers with no 【B3】______ of day or night. Sleep researchers have 【B4】______ other surprising discoveries as well. We spend about one-third of our lives asleep, a fact that suggests sleeping, 【B5】______ eating and breathing, is fundamental life process. Yet some people almost never sleep, getting by on as 【B6】______ as fifteen minutes a day. And more than seventy years of 【B7】______ into sleep deprivation, in which people have been kept 【B8】______ for three to ten days, has yielded only one certain findings: Sleep loss makes a person sleepy and that's about all; it causes no lasting ill 【B9】______ . Too much sleep, however, may be 【B10】______ for you. These findings 【B11】______ some long-held views of sleep, and they raise questions about its fundamental purpose in our lives. In 【B12】______ , scientists don't know just why sleep is necessary. "We get sleepy, and when we sleep, that sleepiness is reversed," Dr. Howard Roffwarg of the University of Texas in Dallas explains. "We know sleep has a function, 【B13】______ we feel it has a function. We can't put our finger on it, but it must, 【B14】______ in some way, direct or indirect, have to do with rest and restitution." Other scientists think sleep is more the result of evolutionary habit than 【B15】______ actual need. Animals sleep for some parts of the day perhaps because it is the 【B16】______ thing for them to do: it keeps them 【B17】______ and hidden from predators; it's a survival tactic. Before the advent of electricity, humans had to spend at least some of each day in 【B18】______ and had little reason to question the reason or need for 【B19】______ But the development of the electroencephalograph and the resulting discovery in 1937 of dramatic 【B20】______ in brain activity between sleep and wakefulness opened the way for scientific inquiry in the subject.

It is widely believed that our never-ending quest for material goods is part of the basic character of human beings. According to the popular belief, we may not like it, but there"s little we can do about it. Despite its popularity, this view of human nature is wrong. While human beings may have a basic desire to strive towards something, there is nothing inevitable about material goods. There are numerous examples of societies in which things have played a highly restricted rule. In medieval Europe, the acquisition of goods was relatively unimportant. The common people, whose lives were surely poor by modern standards, showed strong preferences for leisure rather than money. In the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century United States, there is also considerable evidence that many working people also exhibited a restricted appetite for material goods. Materialism is not a basic trait of human nature, but a specific product of capitalism. With the development of the market system, materialism "spilled over", for the first time, beyond the circles of the rich. The growth of the middle class created a large group of potential buyers and the possibility that mass culture could be oriented around material goods. This process can be seen not only in historical experiences but is now going on in some parts of the developing world, where the growth of a large middle class has contributed to extensive materialism and the breakdown of traditional values. In the United States, the turning point was the 1920s—the point at which the "psychology of shortage" gave way to the "psychology of abundance". This was a crucial period for the development of modern materialism. Economy and discipline were out; waste and excess were in. Materialism flourished—both as a social ideology and in terms of high rates of real spending. In the midst of all this buying, we can detect the origins of modern consumer discontent. This was the decade during which the American dream, or what was then called "the American standard of living", captured the nation"s imagination. But it was always something of an illusion. Americans complained about items they could not afford—despite the fact that in the 1920s most families had telephones, virtually all had purchased life insurance, two-thirds owned their own homes and took vacations, and over half had motor cars. The discontent expressed by many Americans was promoted—and to a certain extent even created—by manufacturers. The explosion of consumer credit made the task easier, as automobiles, radios, electric refrigerators, washing machines—even jewelry and foreign travel—could be paid for in installments. By the end of the 1920s, 60 percent of cars, radios, and furniture were being purchased this way. The ability to buy without actually having money helped encourage a climate of instant satisfaction, expanding expectations, and ultimately, materialism.

"Poverty", wrote Aristotle, "is the parent of crime." But was he right? Certainly, poverty and crime are【C1】______. And the idea that a lack of income might drive someone to【C2】______sounds plausible. But research by Amir Sari-aslan casts【C3】______on the chain of causation— at least as far as violent crime and the misuse of【C4】______are concerned. Sariaslan consulted the【C5】______collected by Scandinavian governments which contained information about people's annual family incomes and criminal【C6】______. In Sweden the age of criminal responsibility is 15, so Sariaslan【C7】______his subjects from the dates of their 15th birthdays【C8】______, for an average of three-and-a-half years. When he looked at families which had started poor and got richer, the younger children—those born into relative【C9】______—were just as likely to misbehave as the elder children. Family income was, in itself not the【C10】______factor. That suggests two【C11】______. One is that a family's culture, once established, is "【C12】______"— that you can take the kid out of the neighborhood,【C13】______not the neighborhood out of the kid.【C14】______children's inclination to imitate elder brothers or sisters whom they admire, that sounds【C15】______plausible. The other is that genes which make them susceptible to criminal behavior are common at the【C16】______of society, perhaps because the lack of impulse-control also tends to reduce someone's earning capacity. Neither of these conclusions is likely to be welcome to【C17】______reformers. They suggest that merely【C18】______people's incomes will not by itself address questions of bad behavior. Such conclusions will need to be【C19】______by others. If they are confirmed, the fact that they are【C20】______will be no excuse for ignoring them.

BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

You are a college graduate and try to find a job in a joint venture. You find from an advertisement that there is a company suiting you very well. Write a letter of application based on the following outline: 1) a brief information about yourself, 2) your ability to take the job, 3) other necessary introduction. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write your address.

Yasuhisa Shizoki, a 51-year-old MP from Japan"s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), starts tapping his finger on the dismal economic chart on his coffee table. "Unless we change the decision-making process," he says bluntly, "we are not going to be able to solve this kind of problem." With the economy in such a mess, it may seem a bit of a diversion to be trying to sort out Japan"s political structures as well as its economic problems. Since co-writing a report on political reform, which was released by an LDP panel last week, Mr. Shizoki has further upset the party"s old guard. Its legionaries, flanked by columns of the bureaucracy, continue to hamper most attempts to overhaul the economy. Junichiro Koizumi was supposed to change all that, by going over their heads and appealing directly to the public. Yet nearly a year after becoming prime minister, Mr. Koizumi has precious little to show for his efforts. His popularity is now flagging and his determination is increasingly in doubt. As hopes of immediate economic reform fade, optimists are focusing on another potential benefit of Mr. Koizumi"s tenure. They hope that his highly personalized style of leadership will pave the way for a permanent change in Japanese politics: towards more united and authoritative cabinets that are held directly accountable for their policies. As that happens, the thinking goes, real economic reforms will be able to follow. Unfortunately, damage-limitation in the face of scandal too often substitutes for real reform. More often, the scandals serve merely as distractions. What is really needed is an overhaul of the rules themselves. A leading candidate for change is the 40-year-old system—informal but religiously followed-through which the LDP machinery vets every bill before it ever gets to parliament. Most legislation starts in the LDP"s party committees, which mirror the parliamentary committee structure. Proposals then go through two higher LDP bodies, which hammer out political deals to smooth their passage. Only then does the prime minister"s cabinet get fully involved in approving the policy. Most issues have been decided by the LDP mandarins long before they reach this point, let alone the floor of parliament, leaving even the prime minister limited influence, and allowing precious little room for public debate and even less for accountability. As a result, progress will probably remain slow. Since they know that political reform leads to economic reform, and hence poses a threat to their interests, most of the LDP will resist any real changes. But at least a handful of insiders have now brought into one of Mr. Koizumi"s best slogans: "Change the LDP, change Japan."

Writeanessayofl60~200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould:1)describethedrawingbriefly;2)explainitsintendedmeaning,andthen3)stateyourpointsofview.YonshouldwriteneatlyonANSWERSHEET2.(20points)

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

【F1】 Despite the general negative findings, it is important to remember that all children who live through a divorce do not behave in the same way. The specific behavior depends on the child's individual personality, characteristics, age at the time of divorce, and gender.【F2】 In terms of personality, when compared to those rated as relaxed and easygoing, children described as temperamental and irritable have more difficulty coping with parental divorce, as indeed they have more difficulty adapting to life change in general. Stress, such as that found in disrupted families, seems to impair the ability of temperamental children to adapt to their surroundings, the greater the amount of stress, the less well they adapt. In contrast, a moderate amount of stress may actually help an easygoing, relaxed child learn to cope with adversity. There is some relationship between age and children's characteristic reaction to divorce.【F3】 As the child grows older, the greater is the likelihood of a free expression of a variety of complex feelings, an understanding of those feelings, and a realization that the decision to divorce cannot be attributed to any one simple cause. Self-blame virtually disappears after the age of 6, fear of abandonment diminishes after the age of 8, and the confusion and fear of the young child is replaced in the older child by shame, anger, and self-reflection. Gender of the child is also a factor that predicts the nature of reaction to divorce. The impact of divorce is initially greater on boys than on girls. They are more aggressive, less compliant, have greater difficulties in interpersonal relationships, and exhibit problem behaviors both at home and at school. Furthermore, the adjustment problems of boys are still noticeable even two years after the divorce. Girls' adjustment problems are usually internalized rather than acted out, and are often resolved by the second year after the divorce. However, new problems may surface for girls as they enter adolescence and adulthood. How can the relatively greater impact of divorce on boys than on girls be explained?【F4】 The greater male aggression and noncompliance may reflect the fact that such behaviors are tolerated and even encouraged in males in our culture more than they are in females. Furthermore, boys may have a particular need for a strong male model of self-control, as well as for a strong disciplinarian parent.【F5】 Finally, boys are more likely to be exposed to their parents' fights than girls are, and after the breakup, boys are less likely than girls to receive sympathy and support from mothers, teachers, or peers.

Up until a few decades ago, our visions of the future were largely—though by no means uniformly— glowingly positive. Science and technology would cure all the ills of humanity, leading to lives of fulfillment and opportunity for all. Now utopia has grown unfashionable, as we have gained a deeper appreciation of the range of threats facing us, from asteroid strike to epidemic flu to climate change. You might even be tempted to assume that humanity has little future to look forward to. But such gloominess is misplaced. The fossil record shows that many species have endured for millions of years—so why shouldn"t we? Take a broader look at our species" place in the universe, and it becomes clear that we have an excellent chance of surviving for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Look up Homo sapiens in the "Red List" of threatened species of the International Union for the Conversation of Nature (IUCN) and you will read: "Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline." So what does our deep future hold? A growing number of researchers and organizations are now thinking seriously about that question. For example, the Long Now Foundation has its flagship project a mechanical clock that is designed to still be marking time thousands of years hence. Perhaps willfully, it may be easier to think about such lengthy timescales than about the more immediate future. The potential evolution of today"s technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated, and it"s perhaps best left to science fiction writers and futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can envisage. That"s one reason why we have launched Arc, a new publication dedicated to the near future. But take a longer view and there is a surprising amount that we can say with considerable assurance. As so often, the past holds the key to the future: we have now identified enough of the long-term patterns shaping the history of the planet, and our species, to make evidence-based forecasts about the situations in which our descendants will find themselves. This long perspective makes the pessimistic view of our prospects seem more likely to be a passing fad. To be sure, the future is not all rosy. But we are now knowledgeable enough to reduce many of the risks that threatened the existence of earlier humans, and to improve the lot of those to come.

When I was a child in Sunday school, I would ask searching questions like "Angels can fly up in heaven, but how do clouds hold up pianos?" and get the same puzzling response about how that was not important, what was important was that Jesus died for our sins and if we accepted him as our savior, when we died, we would go to heaven, where we"d get everything we wanted. Some children in my class wondered why anyone would hang on a cross with nails stuck through his hands to help anyone else; I wondered how Santa Claus knew what I wanted for Christmas, even though I never wrote him a letter. Maybe he had a tape recorder hidden in every chimney in the world. This literal-mindedness has stuck with me; one result of it is that I am unable to believe in God. Most of the other atheists I know seem to feel freed or proud of their unbelief, as if they"ve cleverly refused to be sold snake oil. My husband, who was reared in a devout Catholic family and served as an altar boy, is also firmly grounded on this earth. He doesn"t even have the desire to believe. So other than baptizing our son to reassure our families, we"ve skated over the issue of faith. Some people believe faith is a gift; for others, it"s a choice, a matter of spiritual discipline. I have a friend who was reared to believe, and he does. But his faith has wavered. He has struggled to hang onto it and to pass it along to his children. Another friend of mine never goes to church because she"s a single mother who doesn"t have the gas money. But she once told me about a day when she was washing oranges as the sun streamed onto them. As she peeled one, the smell rose to her face, and she felt she received the Holy Spirit. "He sank into my bones," she recounted. "I lifted my palms upward, feeling filled with love." Being no theologian, and not even a believer, I am not in a position to offer up theories, but mine is this: people who receive faith directly, as a spontaneous combustion of the soul, have fewer questions. They have been sparked with a faith that is more unshakable than that of those who have been taught.

Linguists have been able to follow the formation of a new language in Nicaragua. The catch is that it is not a spoken language but, rather, a sign language which arose spontaneously in deaf children. The Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) emerged in the late 1970s, at a new school for deaf children. Initially the children were instructed by teachers who could hear. No one taught them how to sign; they simply worked it out for themselves. By conducting experiments on people who attended the school at various points in its history, Dr. Senghas has shown how NSL has become more sophisticated over time. For example, concepts that an older signer uses a single sign for, such as rolling and falling, have been unpacked into separate signs by youngsters. Early users, too, did not develop a way of distinguishing left from right. Dr. Senghas showed this by asking signers of different ages to converse about a set of photographs that each could see. One signer had to pick a photograph and describe it. The other had to guess which photograph was being described. When all the photographs contained the same elements, merely arranged differently, older people, who had learned the early form of the language, could neither signal which photo they meant, nor understand the signals of their younger partners. Nor could their younger partners teach them the signs that indicate left and right. The older people clearly understood the concept of left and right, they just could not converse about it a result that bears on the vexing question of how much language merely reflects the way the brain thinks about the world, and how much it actually shapes such thinking. For a sign language to emerge spontaneously, though, deaf children must have some inherent tendency to tie gestures to meaning. Spoken language, of course, is frequently accompanied by gestures. But, as a young researcher, Dr. Goldin-Meadow suspected that deaf children use gestures differently from those who can hear. In a 30-year-long project carried out on deaf children in America and Taiwan, whose parents can hear normally, she has shown that this is true. Even deaf children who have no deaf acquaintances use signs as words. The order the signs come in is important. It is also different from the order of words in either English or Chinese. But it is the same, for a given set of signs and meanings, in both America and Taiwan. Curiously enough, the signs produced by children in Spain and Turkey, whom Dr. Goldin-Meadow is also studying, while similar to each other, differ from those that American and Taiwanese children produce. Dr. Goldin-Meadow is not certain why that is. However, the key commonality is that their spontaneously created languages resemble fully-formed languages.

In the two decades between 1929 and 1949, sculpture in the United States sustained what was probably the greatest expansion in sheer technique to occur in many centuries. (46) There was, first of all, the incorporation of welding into sculptural practice, with the result that it was possible to form a new kind of metal object. For sculptors working with metal, earlier restricted to the dense solidity of the bronze cast, it was possible to add a type of work assembled from paper-thin metal sheets or sinuously curved rods. Sculpture could take the form of a linear, two-dimensional frame and still remain physically self-supporting. Along with the innovation of welding came a correlative departure: freestanding sculpture that was shockingly flat. Yet another technical expansion of the options for sculpture appeared in the guise of motion. (47) The individual parts of a sculpture were no longer understood as necessarily fixed in relation to one another, but could be made to change position within a work con strutted as a moving object. Motorizing the sculpture was only one of many possibilities taken up in the 1930s. (48) Other strategies for getting the work to move involved structuring it in such a way that external forces, like air movements or the touch of a viewer, could initiate motion. Movement brought with it a new attitude toward the issue of sculptural unity: a work might be made of widely diverse and even discordant elements; their formal unity would be achieved through the arc of a particular motion completing itself through time. (49) Like the use of welding and movement, the third of these major technical expansions to develop in the 1930s and 1940s addressed the issues of sculptural materials and sculptural unity. But its medium for doing so was the found object, an item not intended for use in a piece of artwork such as a newspaper or metal pipe. To create a sculpture by assembling parts that had been fabricated originally for a quite different context did not necessarily involve a new technology. (50) But it did mean a change in sculptural practice, for it raised the possibility that making sculpture might involve more a conceptual shift than a physical transformation of the material from which it is composed.