It is a favorite pastime of older people to lament the defects of the young. Every generation seems to be convinced that in its day, standards were higher, schools were tougher and kids were smarter. But if I.Q. scores are any measure, and even their critics agree they measure something, people are getting smarter. Researchers who study intelligence say scores around the world have been increasing so fast that a high proportion of people regarded as normal at the turn of the century would be considered way below average by today"s tests. Psychologists offer a variety of possible explanations for the increase, including better nutrition, urbanization, more experience with test taking, and smaller families. Some even say that television and video games have made children"s brains more agile. But no explanation is without its critics, and no one can say with certainty what effects, if any, the change is having on how people lead their daily lives. It is all the more mysterious because it seems to be happening in the absence of a simultaneous increase in scores on achievement tests. One explanation for the rise is ruled out: genetics. Because the increase has taken place in a relatively short period of time, it cannot be due to genetic factors. The worldwide pattern of rising scores in industrialized nations was discovered by Dr. James R. Flynn, now a professor at the University of Otego, New Zealand. He began looking into the subject in the 1980"s in an effort to rebut Dr. Arthur Jensen, the professor from the UC Berkeley who argued that even if the environments of blacks and whites were equalized, the 15-point gap in I. Q. scores between the races would only be partly eliminated. As Dr. Flynn investigated, he found that I. Q. scores were going up almost everywhere he looked. Although the gap remains, Dr. Flynn said the movement in scores suggests that the gap need not be permanent. If blacks in 1995 had the same mean I. Q. that whites had in 1945, he said, it may be that the average black environment of 1995 was equivalent in quality to the average white environment of 1945. "Is that really so implausible?" Dr. Flynn asked. Meanwhile, the kinds of intelligence that are promoted and respected vary from time to time, said Dr. Patricia Greenfield, a psychology professor at the UCLA. Playing computer games like Tetris promotes very different skills from reading novels. The new skills, she said, are manifested in the world. "Flynn will tell you we don"t have more Mozarts and Beethovens," Dr. Greenfield said, "I say, look at the achievements of science, like DNA. Or look at all the technological developments of this century. "

In 1977, the year before I was born, a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its landmark "Dietary Goals for the United States," urging Americans to eat less high-fat red meat, eggs and dairy and replace them with more calories from fruits, vegetables and especially carbohydrates. By 1980 that wisdom was codified. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued its first dietary guidelines, and one of the primary directives was to avoid cholesterol (胆固醇) and fat of all sorts. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 cut fat consumption, and that same year the government announced the results of a $150 million study, which had a clear message: Eat less fat and cholesterol to reduce your risk of a heart attack. The food industry—and American eating habits—jumped in step. Grocery shelves filled with "light" yogurts, low-fat microwave dinners, cheese-flavored crackers, cookies. Families like mine followed the advice: beef disappeared from the dinner plate, eggs were replaced at breakfast with cereal or yolk-free beaters, and whole milk almost wholly vanished. From 1977 to 2012, per capita consumption of those foods dropped while calories from supposedly healthy carbohydrates increased—no surprise , given that breads, cereals and pasta were at the base of the USDA food pyramid. The nation was embarking on a "vast nutritional experiment," as the skeptical president of the National Academy of Sciences, Philip Handler, put it in 1980. But with nearly a million Americans a year dropping dead from heart disease by the mid-'80s, it had to try something. Nearly four decades later, the results are in: the experiment was a failure. Americans cut the fat, but by almost every measure, they are sicker than ever. The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in the US increased 166% from 1980 to 2012. Nearly 1 in 10 American adults has the disease, costing the country's health care system $245 billion a year, and an estimated 86 million people are prediabetic. Deaths from heart disease have fallen—a fact that many experts attribute to better emergency care, less smoking and widespread use of cholesterol-controlling drugs like statins—but cardiovascular (心血管的) disease remains the country's No. 1 killer.

OfferingYourSeatWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

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

Education is compulsory in Britain, whether at school "or otherwise"; and "other wise" is becoming more popular. In 1999, only 12,000 children were listed as being home-schooled. Now that figure is 20,000, according to Mike Fortune-Wood, an educational researcher. But he thinks that, as most home-taught children never go near a school and are therefore invisible to officialdom, the total is probably nearer 50,000. As usual, Britain lies between Europe and America. In Germany, home teaching is illegal. In America, it"s huge: over 1 million children are home-schooled, mainly by religious parents. There are a small minority among British home-educators, who consist mainly of two types: hippyish middle-class parents who dislike schools on principle, and those whose children are unhappy at school. The growth is overwhelmingly in this second category, says Roland Meighan, a home-education expert and publisher. One reason is that technology has made home-education easier. The internet allows parents to know as much as teachers. It is also a way of organizing get-togethers, sharing tips and outwitting official hassles. That supplements e vents such as the annual home-education festival last week, where 1,600 parents and children enjoyed Egyptian dancing and labyrinth-building on a muddy hillside in Devon. But a bigger reason for the growth is changing attitudes. Centralisation, government targets and a focus on exams have made state schools less customer friendly and more boring. Classes are still based strictly on age groups, which is hard for children who differ sharply from the average. Mr. Fortune-Wood notes that the National Health Service is now far more accommodating of patients" wishes about timing, venue and treatment. "It"s happened in health. Why can"t it happen in education?" he asks. Perhaps because other businesses tend to make more effort to satisfy individual needs, parents are getting increasingly picky. In the past, if their child was bullied, not coping or bored, they tended to put up with it. Now they complain, and if that doesn"t work they vote with their (children"s) feet. Some educationalists worry that home-schooling may hurt children"s psychological and educational development. Home educators cite statistics showing that it helps both educational attainment and the course of grown-up life. Labour"s latest big idea in education is "personalisation", which is intended to al low much more flexible timing and choice of subjects. In theory, that might stem the drift to home—schooling. Many home-educators would like to be able to use school facilities occasionally—in science lessons, say, or to sit exams. But for now, schools, and the officials who regulate them, like the near-monopoly created by the rule of "all or nothing".

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

Stocks finished mixed in post-holiday trading yesterday as Wall Street meandered through a shortened session. (46) The major indexes ended the week higher as investors looked forward to the results of the first weekend of holiday shopping and a key jobs report next week. Wall Street struggled to continue its bullish streak, albeit in very light trading, as continued weakness in the dollar weighed on stocks. (47) Reports that the Chinese central bank had sold off some of its US Treasury notes due to the low dollar turned out to be unsubstantiated, boosting the dollar against the yen. The dollar reached another new low against the euro, however. The trading day ended at 1 p.m. EST as part of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Investors already looked to next week for further news, hoping that consumer spending over the holidays would help revive the overall economy. The Labor Department is expected to release job-creation figures next Friday that Wall Street hopes will show signs of stronger job growth. (48) "Traditionally, this is a pretty light trading day, but the people who are in the market really want to be here, and they"re coming in with a positive bias," said Jack Caffrey, equities strategist at J.P. Morgan Private Bank. "Most everyone else will be looking ahead to next week to see how the retailers did this weekend and see how job growth will progress." As the holiday shopping season got under way with early morning sales across the country, retail stocks were mostly higher. Dow component Wal-Mart Stores Inc. lost 18 cents to $55.32 to buck the overall trend, while Target Corp. added 24 cents to$52.21, Federated Department Stores Inc. was up 34 cents at $57.33 and May Department Stores Co. rose 55 cents to $30.19. (49) Chip stocks failed to get a substantial boost from the Semiconductor Industry Association"s latest sales report, which showed a 22 percent year-over-year increase in sales in October. Sales rose 1.5 percent month-to-month. Dow component Intel Corp. lost 40 cents to $23.21 on the news, while Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slipped 4 cents to $21.53. Delta Air Lines Inc. lost 6 cents to $6.92 after it said late Wednesday that it reached new agreements with its lenders and aircraft lessors, wrangling $57 million in concessions from 2005 through 2009 in exchange for 4.4 million shares of Delta stock. (50) Oracle Corp. said it will nominate four people to the board of PeopleSoft Inc., part of its bid to acquire the rival software company that likely will trigger a proxy battle. Oracle slipped 13 cents to $12.66, while PeopleSoft was up 2 cents at $23.54.

Suppose you were taken good care of by Aunt Wang when you visited Shanghai where she lived. Write a letter to her to extend your appreciation. Begin your letter as follows: Dear Aunt Wang, You should write about 100 words and do not sign your own name, using "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Education: Examination-orientation or Quality-orientation?

Fate has not been kind to the western grey whale. Its numbers have dwindled to 130 or so, leaving it "critically endangered" in the eyes of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Fishing-nets, speeding ships, pollution and coastal development threaten the few that remain. Most recently, drilling for oil and gas in their main summer feeding grounds, near Sakhalin island off Russia"s Pacific coast, has brought fresh risks for the luckless creatures. Yet the rush to develop Sakhalin"s offshore fields may yet be the saviour of the species. When drilling was first discussed in the 1990s, there were muted complaints. When a consortium called Sakhalin Energy, led by Royal Dutch Shell, announced plans to build an oil platform and lay pipelines in the only bay where the whales were known to congregate, these protests proliferated. In response, the consortium established an independent panel to advise it on how best to protect the whales and promised to fund its work. It subsequently agreed to change the route of the pipeline at the panel"s suggestion, although it refused to move the platform, as other critics had demanded. It also agreed either to follow the panel"s recommendations in future or to explain publicly why it was rejecting them. The platforms and pipelines are now complete. Sakhalin Energy exported its first cargo of liquefied natural gas last week. The project, says Shell, is an engineering triumph and a commercial success despite all the controversy. But has it been a success for the whales? Sakhalin Energy says their number seems to be growing by 2. 5% a year, although Ian Craig, the firm"s boss, admits that the cause might be greater scrutiny rather than population growth. The scientists on the panel still seem worried. They complain that the firm has not always provided the information they need to assess the threat to the whales. It also has not always followed advice, the scientists" advice about how noisy construction might scare the animals away, for example, or the speed that boats should travel to minimize the risk of hitting the whales. The scientists warn that the loss of just a few fertile females would be enough to tip the population into irrevocable decline. Last summer, there seemed to be far fewer whales around than normal. On the other hand, the panel knows this only because Sakhalin Energy funds lots of research on the whales. As a result, it has discovered that they have a wider range than originally thought, which might explain why so few of them showed up off Sakhalin island last year. Therefore, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, for creatures with a lot as sorry as the western grey whale, a nearby oil project is something of a blessing.

When enthusiasts talk of sustainable development, the eyes of most people glaze over. There is a whiff of sack-cloth and ashes about their arguments, which usually depend on people giving up the comforts of a modern economy to achieve some debatable greater good. Yet there is a serious point at issue. Modern industry pollutes, and it also seems to cause significant changes to the climate. What is needed is an industry that delivers the benefits without the costs. And the glimmerings of just such an industry can now be discerned. That industry is based on biotechnology. At the moment, biotech"s main uses are in medicine and agriculture. But its biggest long-term impact may be industrial. Here, it will diminish demand for oil by taking the cheapest raw materials imaginable, carbon dioxide and water, and using them to make fuel and plastics. Plastics and fuels made in this way would have several advantages. They could accurately be called "renewables", since nothing is depleted to make them. They would be part of the natural carbon cycle, borrowing that element from the atmosphere for a few months, and returning it when they were burned or dumped. That means they could not possibly contribute to global warming. And they would be environmentally friendly in other ways. Bioplastics are biodegradable, since bacteria understand their chemistry and can therefore digest them. Biofuels, while not quite "zero emission" from the exhaust pipe (though a lot cleaner than petrol and diesel), would be cleaner overall even than the fuel-cell technology now being touted as an alternative to the internal-combustion engine. That is because making the hydrogen that fuel cells use is not an environmentally friendly process, and never will be—unless it, too, uses biotechnology. All this will, in the end, depend on costs. But these do not look unfavourable. Already, the price of bioplastics overlaps the top end of the petroleum-based plastics market. Bulk production should bring prices "down, particularly when the raw materials are free. Meanwhile, ethanol would be a lot easier to introduce than fuel cells. Existing engines will run on it with minor tweaking, so there is no need to change the way ears are made. And since, unlike hydrogen, it is a liquid, the fuel-distribution infrastructure would not need radical change. The future could be green in ways that traditional environmentalists had not expected. Whether they will embrace that possibility, or stick to sack-cloth, remains to be seen.

Wherever you work, you must always serve the people whole-heartedly.

The situation is not necessarily so.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

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

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

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

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

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

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