For the past 10, 000 years humans have influenced the plants they use at first unknowingly, later by design. Today's crops have been created by a process of selection and classical breeding. More specific improvements in breeding will be possible in future. Science has cracked the genetic information code. Green gene technology is an effective tool in crop breeding, enabling us to develop new crops even more rapidly and specifically.【F1】 We can make them more efficient, optimizing their contents and valuable substances to suit the wishes and requirements of customers and the processing industry. Their metabolism can be individually modified, making them produce starch, protein and fats with special properties. Through gene transfer plants can be made more resistant to viruses, bacteria, harmful fungi and insect pests. 【F2】 Genetically modified plants can be cultivated to possess improved stress behavior, with the result that they absorb water better in dry locations and can make more efficient use of soil nutrients. We can also optimize weed control. To do so, we make crops tolerant to environmentally sound and easily degradable herbicides. This is not as simple as it sounds. But we have been successful: Innovator has been on the Canadian market since 1995. This is the first oilseed rape variety to contain the glufosinate tolerance gene, facilitating the use of AgrEvo' s broad-spectrum herbicide liberty. We are committed to green gene technology, with which we aim to make crop breeding even more efficient and environmentally friendly.【F3】 Before being brought on to the market these genetically modified plants are researched and tested for years until the questions posed regarding their safety have been answered. 【F4】 This is a great opportunity for us to realize our vision: the use of faster methods to breed varieties which will continue to provide us with sufficient food and raw materials in future. Our fossil reserves will soon be exhausted. Experts estimate that we only have e-nough oil for another 43 years and natural gas for less than 60. 【F5】 This means we must rethink and act accordingly, using new crop varieties to step up the move to reusable sources of raw materials and energy. In other words, green gene technology is the key technology for sustainable agriculture.

There is no agreement whether methodology refers to the concepts peculiar to historical work in general or to the research techniques appropriate to the various branches of historical inquiry.

The CLBC—the Central London Broadcasting Corporation—steals from the rest of the country by taking its money and spending it on itself. Provincials have noted this for years, but now there are signs that the shrugged "what did you expect?" patience is wearing thin. Just as it clearly has in Scotland. The Scots, whether formally separate or not, are going to insist on a new settlement. This is a difficult moment for BBC senior management. Facing a hostile government, it is being squeezed financially just as media globalisation and technical transformation challenge its traditional model. But this revolt of the provincial peasants will grow. The London aristocrats fawning at court could be in trouble. London is a centripetal force sucking the life out of the rest of Britain. For centuries, it has been dominant, as most capitals are, but until recently there were other capitals, proudly representing the other regions, with their own culture, political stance and achievements. People came to London to make their names or their fortunes, but most stayed, rooted in their own provincial world. Most still do, but the Londoncentric BBC does not recognise it. In fact, the BBC has known all this for years, but it is drawn into the vortex, even though it knows it cannot afford to ignore the rest of the country. Its response is tokenism. Policy won't change until attitudes change, from recruitment, to where creative people are based, to who is allowed on the air. We do have the occasional regional voice, in its Sunday Best. For years, the attitudes offered to us have been ones of metropolitan superiority. People in the provinces have appeared on screen patronised by stylish southerners who occasionally venture north, like visiting anthropologists, to investigate the habits of the weird natives. Their lives are editorialised by the southerners, filtered and interpreted. What current affairs programmes come from anywhere but central London? Oh, but if they came from Birmingham or Leeds, no one would watch them? Well, virtually no one watches Newsnight, but that doesn't stop it boring us with the usual metropolitan talking heads. My response is that the BBC has a pre-eminent responsibility to swim against the tide, to reach out to everyone and engage in a truly national conversation. To be a platform for the whole country. A stage for the exploration of our culture, culturein its richest sense. An institution everyone feels they own, one that represents them. It could yet become the catalyst for the whole nation's rediscovery of its cultural and economic wealth. It would certainly remind Londoners that the peasants don't live in caves. Even though they talk funny.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list (A、B、C、D、E、F、G……) to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are several extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points) John Winston Lennon was born into a world at war with itself—a perfect symbol of the internal contradictions that defined his life and music. German aircraft were dropping bombs on his city at the very moment of his arrival. (41)______. Lennon also had a powerful attachment to his mother Julia that lingered long after she died in 1958; the classic 1968 album The Beatles, (known as the "White Album" for its white album liner) included his song "Julia"—an exquisite expression of raw sorrow. When he and McCartney first met on July 6th, 1957—at a church picnic where Lennon"s band was a star attraction—Lennon was budding into a fusion of bold attitude, keen wit and honest charm. The Beatles gave him the room to bloom. (42)______. In a few ways, the current boy-band phenomenon is simply the Beatles with a modern twist: huge record sales, adoring young women queued up on the sidewalks outside their concerts, and the circus-like atmosphere surrounding their every move. With his sharp, handsome features and an attractive warmth contrasted by his acid turn of phrase, Lennon evoked as much hysterical female desire as any member of the Back Street Boys, if not all of them put together. (43)______. Lennon and Ono skillfully used the disbelief and scorn that often greeted their provocative exploits to promote their peace campaigns: demonstrating in their bed clothes for an end to the Vietnam War in the spring of 1969 and paying for huge "WAR IS OVER!" signs in twelve cities around the world the following Christmas. (44)______. A peculiar irony of Lennon"s story is the way we tend to worship the Man and the Beatle at the expense of the solo artist. To be frank, Lennon was not always terrific on his own. (45)______.A. Today, the popularity of the Beatles seems like a distant miracle, an ancient explosion of energetic teenage joy. Surviving films and historical accounts only hint at the magic of the two years, 1963 and 1964, in which the Beatles brought Britain, and then America happily to their knees.B. The Beatles wore suits and chatted cheerfully with reporters in that first couple of years. They also moved quickly to seize control—of their music, their careers and their individual destinies.C. His image as the intellectual Beatle—the shy, brilliant seeker of truth with a stubborn streak and a smart mouth—was rooted in his days as a would-be art student and teenage rebel with a remarkable intellect. He found substitute father figures in American rock musicians.D. On the final day of his life, Lennon gave an interview to promote what would be his final album. When asked about his 1971 single recording "Power to the People," Lennon said he now believed that people do have the power. "I don"t mean the power of the gun," he explained. "They have the power to make and create the society they want."E. The couple planted trees for peace at Coventry Cathedral in England and, in early 1970, cut their hair for peace. In openly courting public scorn, Lennon and Ono engineered a vital public debate about peace and love as realistic goals, not just naive nonsense.F. The key line in those "WAR IS OVER!" signs was in the small type near the bottom: IF YOU WANT IT. When John Lennon died, he left us with a unique body of work and the most valuable lesson rock & roll has to offer: anything is possible—if you want it.G. He never did better than the intensity and howl of his John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, but there is much in Lennon"s post-Beatle music to be appreciated. Recorded during his so-called lost weekend—a period of separation from Ono—the 1974 album Walls and Bridges is a striking testimony to the wretched desperation he felt.

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

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. "For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols—like a digital computer," said Spivey. "More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as our support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties—like a biological organism.B. The computer metaphor describes cognition as being in a particular discrete state, for example, "on or off" or in values of either zero or one, and in a static state until moving on. If there was ambiguity, the model assumed that the mind jumps the gun to one state or the other, and if it realizes it is wrong, it then makes a correction.C. In his study, 42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen. When the students heard a word, such as "candle," and were presented with two pictures whose names did not sound alike, such as a candle and a jacket, the trajectories of their mouse movements were quite straight and directly to the candle. But when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.D. In a new study published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 27—July 1), Michael Spivey, a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell, tracked the mouse movements of undergraduate students while working at a computer. The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension is a continuous process.E. Whereas the older models of language processing theorized that neural systems process words in a series of discrete stages, the alternative model suggests that sensory input is processed continuously so that even partial linguistic input can start "the dynamic competition between simultaneously active representations."F. "When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn"t know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn"t move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area," explained Spivey. "The degree of curvature of the trajectory shows how much the other object is competing for their interpretation; the curve shows continuous competition. They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete it"s a dynamical system."G. "In thinking of cognition as working as a biological organism does, on the other hand, you do not have to be in one state or another like a computer, but can have values in between—you can be partially in one state and another, and then eventually gravitate to a unique interpretation, as in finally recognizing a spoken word," Spivey said.Order: D is the first paragraph and E is the last.

Marriage is, for many people, their most important relationship, the source of much happiness, and, for some, even adds extra years to their life. While the【C1】______between marriage and well-being has been【C2】______studied, predicting marital success is【C3】______. Exactly which people are likely to make successful 【C4】______and what can they do to【C5】______the odds of being successful and happy in marriage? "The state of marriage is that it's going in two directions. For people with a college degree, marriage is still going【C6】______." However, Cherlin explains, "for people with less 【C7】______, there's less marriage and more breakups." Happy marriage【C8】______are much less common in such households. Another predictor of successful marriages is the quality of a【C9】______childhood relationship with their parents. "The kind of relationships you have with your parents【C10】______up are predictive of marital quality in【C11】______Umberson says. Finally, there is a chicken-and-egg【C12】______to successful marriages. "People who are married are【C13】______than people who aren't. The question is how much of this is【C14】______and how much is effect?" While natural selection【C15】______has an impact here, Cherlin says, "people who are【C16】______happy are more likely to get married, but marriage makes them even healthier." The【C17】______to good marriages is similar in Umberson's view. "I think it's the presence of emotional support, and that the person you're with does make you feel emotionally supported," she says.【C18】______, "If your partner is 【C19】______and demanding" all the time, those "are just red flags" in terms of marital happiness. And in terms of【C20】______, she notes, "marital strain is worse for your health than marital happiness is good for your health."

A."Ijustdon"tknowhowtomotivatethemtodoabetterjob.We"reinabudgetcrunchandIhaveabsolutelynofinancialrewardsatmydisposal.Infact,we"llprobablyhavetolaysomepeopleoffinthenearfuture.It"shardformetomakethejobinterestingandchallengingbecauseitisn"t—it"sboring,routinepaperwork,andthereisn"tmuchyoucandoaboutit.B."Finally,Ican"tsaytothemthattheirpromotionswillhingeontheexcellenceoftheirpaperwork.Firstofall,theyknowit"snottrue.Iftheirperformanceisadequate,mostaremorelikelytogetpromotedjustbystayingontheforceacertainnumberofyearsthanforsomespecificoutstandingact.Second,theyweretrainedtodothejobtheydooutinthestreets,nottofilloutforms.Allthroughtheircareeritisthearrestsandinterventionsthatgetnoticed.C."I"vegotarealproblemwithmyofficers.Theycomeontheforceasyoung,inexperiencedmen,andwesendthemoutonthestreet,eitherincarsoronabeat.Theyseemtolikethecontacttheyhavewiththepublic,theactioninvolvedincrimeprevention,andtheapprehensionofcriminals.Theyalsolikehelpingpeopleoutatfires,accidents,andotheremergencies.D."Somepeoplehavesuggestedanumberofthingslikeusingconvictionrecordsasaperformancecriterion.However,weknowthat"snotfair—toomanyotherthingsareinvolved.Badpaperworkincreasesthechancethatyouloseincourt,butgoodpaperworkdoesn"tnecessarilymeanyou"llwin.Wetriedsettingupteamcompetitionsbasedontheexcellenceofthereports,buttheguyscaughtontothatprettyquickly.Noonewasgettinganytypeofrewardforwinningthecompetition,andtheyfiguredwhyshouldtheylaborwhentherewasnopayoff.E."Theproblemoccurswhentheygetbacktothestation.Theyhatetodothepaperwork,andbecausetheydislikeit,thejobisfrequentlyputoffordoneinadequately.Thislackofattentionhurtsuslateronwhenwegettocourt.Weneedclear,factualreports.Theymustbehighlydetailedandunambiguous.Assoonasonepartofareportisshowntobeinadequateorincorrect,therestofthereportissuspect.Poorreportingprobablycausesustolosemorecasesthananyotherfactor.F."SoIjustdon"tknowwhattodo.I"vebeengropinginthedarkinanumberofyears.AndIhopethatthisseminarwillshedsomelightonthisproblemofmineandhelpmeoutinmyfuturework."G.Alargemetropolitancitygovernmentwasputtingonanumberofseminarsforadministrators,managersand/orexecutivesofvariousdepartmentsthroughoutthecity.Atoneofthesesessionsthetopictobediscussedwasmotivation—howwecangetpublicservantsmotivatedtodoagoodjob.Thedifficultyofapolicecaptainbecamethecentralfocusofthediscussion.

Write a letter to a friend of yours to 1) recommend one of your favorite movies and 2) give reasons for your recommendation. You should write about 100 words 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. (10 points)

Man is born free but is everywhere in debt. In the rich world, getting hold of your first credit card is a rite of passage far more important for your daily life than casting your first vote. Buying your first home normally requires taking on a debt several times the size of your annual income. And even if you shun the temptation of borrowing to indulge yourself, you are still saddled with your portion of the national debt. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s a rise in debt levels accompanied the "great moderation", when growth was steady and unemployment and inflation remained low. No longer did Western banks have to raise rates to halt consumer booms. By the early 2000s a vast international scheme of vendor financing had been created. Those who cautioned against rising debt levels were dismissed as doom-mongers; after all, asset prices were rising even faster, so balance-sheets looked healthy. And with the economy advancing, debtors could afford to meet their interest payments. In short, it paid to borrow and it paid to lend. Like alcohol, a debt boom tends to induce euphoria. Traders and investors saw the asset-price rises as proof of their brilliance; central banks and governments thought that rising markets and higher tax revenues attested to the soundness of their policies. The answer to all problems seemed to be more debt. Depressed? Use your credit card for a shopping spree "because you're worth it". Want to get rich quick? Work for a private-equity or hedge-fund firm, using borrowed money to enhance returns. Looking for faster growth for your company? Borrow money and make an acquisition. And if the economy is in recession, let the government go into deficit to bolster spending. Debt increased at every level, from consumers to companies to banks to whole countries. The effect varied from country to country, but a survey by the McKinsey Global Institute found that average total debt(private and public sector combined)in ten mature economies rose from 200% of GDP in 1995 to 300% in 2008. There were even more startling rises in Iceland and Ireland, where debt-to-GDP ratios reached 1,200% and 700% respectively. The burdens proved too much for those two countries, plunging them into financial crisis. Such turmoil is a sign that debt is not the instant solution it was made out to be. From early 2007 onwards there were signs that economies were reaching the limit of their ability to absorb more borrowing. The growth-boosting potential of debt seemed to peter out. According to Leigh Skene of Lombard Street Research, each additional dollar of debt was associated with less and less growth.

Have you ever been afraid to talk back when you were treated unfairly? Have you ever bought something just because the salesman talked you into it? Are you afraid to ask someone for a date? Many people are afraid to assert themselves, Dr. Alberti, author of Stand Up, Speak Out, and Talk Back, thinks it"s because their self-respect is low. "Our whole set-up is designed to make people distrust themselves," says Alberti, "There"s always "superior" around a parent, a teacher, a boss who "knows better". There superiors often gain when they chip away at your self-image." But Alberti and other scientists are doing something to help people assert themselves. They offer "assertiveness training" courses, AT for short. In the AT courses people learn that they have a right to be themselves. They learn to speak out and feel good about doing so. They learn to be more active without hurting other people. In one way, learning to speak out is to overcome fear. A group taking an AT course will help the timid person to lose his fear. But, AT uses an even stronger motive—the need to share. The timid person speaks out in the group because he wants to tell how he feels. Whether or not you speak up for yourself depends on your self-image. If someone you face is more "important" than you, you may feel less of a person. You start to doubt your own good sense. You go by the other person "s demand. But, why should you? AT says you can get to feel good about yourself. And once you do, you can learn to speak out.

Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detailed for their own good. Biographers make the mistake of spending too much time worshipping their subjects. Think of the authoritative three-volume life of Robert Frost by Lawrence Thompson, for example, and how the biographer passed, over the many years of its making, from hero worship to intense dislike of thepoet he shadowed for almost a quarter of a century. Yes, too long and intense an acquaintance can lead to sourness. As the bicentenary of Charles Darwin"s birth on February 12th approaches, it is good to welcome a biography which is relatively small, but in no way superficial or meager. Ruth Padel has achieved this feat by writing her great-great-grandfather"s life in a sequence of often quite short poems. Through her verses she seeks to capture the "voice" of Darwin. Ms Padel embeds many of Darwin"s own words—from his books or his letters—in her poems, and the results tend to give the sense of being jointly authored. Sometimes she shapes entire pieces of quotation into her own poetic passages. If this seems to be a bit of sly plagiarism, it doesn"t feel like it. It feels more like a skillful act of collaboration between the living and the dead, one melding easily with the other. Why does this book work so well? How does it manage to say so much in so few words? Ms Padel seems to have caught the essence of the man"s .character, as if in a butterfly net. She enters into his cast of mind, bringing across his hyper-sensitivity, his sense of fragility, his lifelong boldness, and the poems are a sequence of snapshots—often small, intermittent and delicately imagistic—of particularly crucial incidents in his life; of moments of intellectual illumination. It is not easy to describe a whole life in relatively few words. You need to find some way of filling in the background. Ms Padel has overcome this problem by having paragraphs of notes run, in a single column, beside the texts of the poems so that they can be read side by side. And why are poems a good way of iUuminating a life such as Darwin"s? The best lyric poems— think of Keats or Shelley, for example—are moments of sudden insight. And Darwin, throughout, was in the grip of something very similar: a terrible, destabilizing sense of wonder. He sensed hints of the marvelous everywhere he looked. All the sadder then—and this is something that Ms Padel does not explain—that, later in life, the man who carried with him on the Beagle Channel a copy of Milton"s "Paradise Lost" found that he could no longer enjoy poetry.

Lookatthepictureandwriteanarticleonamarketingstrategy:discountpromotion.Yourarticleshouldmeetthefollowingtworequirements:1)interpretthemessageconveyedbythepicture2)makeyourcommentsonthephenomenonYoushouldwrite160～200wordsneatly.

To walk among me stars has been a dream of human kind since the beginning of time, wandering among the heavens that inspire legends and fantasies across the ages. Today, that dream has become a reality, a memory of some of the greatest human achievements in history: walking on the moon, sending probes to distant planets and discovering the secrets behind the mysteries of the cosmos. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, humans were at the halfway point between viewing space travel as a dream and as a reality. To them it was a goal rather than a memory, and the two main forces working toward that goal were the world"s two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Both of the great nations, on the advent of incredibly efficient rocket thrusters capable of propelling manmade objects into space, strove to achieve the victory of finding a place among the stars and securing the considerable international prestige associated with that monumental achievement. The Soviet Union gained the initial upper hand in the "Space Race," as it is commonly called, sending the first animal into space with. its Sputnik program. Its success and momentum carried it forward, achieving the second remarkable goal of putting a human cosmonaut into orbit around the earth and, more importantly, bringing him safely back to earth. The United States, sensing its losing position in the Space Race, set out to achieve the most ambitious goal yeti, to put a man on the moon. The resources of the entire nation were mobilized to work toward that goal under the orders of President John F. Kennedy, in an attempt to assert itself as a contender in the Space Race despite the Soviet Union"s early victories. After several years, all the efforts bore fruit, when Neil Armstrong, an American became the first man to walk on file moon. With the utterance of his famous words, "That"s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong stated what everyone was thinking. The impossible has been achieved, for such a feat was considered impossible a scant hundred years prior. With the space program continuing forward, the future does indeed seem to hold unlimited possibilities for human kind. An international space station is now orbiting the earth and there are even plans for colonizing planets, bringing the dreams and fantasies of yesterday in line with the reality of today.

Consumers and producers obviously make decisions that mold the economy, but there is a third major【C1】______to consider, the role of government. Government has a powerful【C2】______on the economy in at least four ways: Direct Services. The postal system, for example, is a federal system【C3】______ the entire nation, as is the large and complex establishment. Conversely the【C4】______and maintenance of most highways is the responsibility of the individual states, and the public educational systems, 【C5】______ a large funding role by the federal government, are primarily【C6】______for by state or city governments. Police and fire protection and sanitation services are【C7】______the responsibilities of local government. Regulation and Control. The government regulates and controls private enterprise, in many ways, for the【C8】______of assuring that business serves the best interests of the people【C9】______a whole. Regulation is【C10】______in areas where private enterprise is【C11】______a monopoly, such as in telephone or electric service. Public policy【C12】______ such companies to make a reasonable profit,【C13】______limits their ability to raise prices unfairly, since the public depends on their services. Often control is exercised to protect the public, as for example, when the Food and Drug Administration bans【C14】______drugs, or requires standards of 【C15】______in food. Stabilization and Growth. Branches of government including Congress attempt to control the extremes of boom and bust of inflation and depression, by【C16】______tax rates, the money supply, and the use of credit. They can also【C17】______the economy through changes in the amount of public spending by the government itself. Direct Assistance. The government【C18】______businesses and individuals with many kinds of help. For example, tariffs permit certain products to remain relatively【C19】______of foreign competition; imports are sometimes taxed【C20】______American products are able to compete better with certain foreign goods.

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about laughing. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A—F for each numbered paragraph (41—45). The first paragraph of the text is not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use. (10 points)A. What have they found?B. Is it true that laughing can make us healthier?C. So why do people laugh so much?D. What makes you laugh?E. How did you come to research it?F. So what"s it for? Why are you interested in laughter? It"s a universal phenomenon, and one of the most common things we do. We laugh many times a day, for many different reasons, but rarely think about it, and seldom consciously control it. We know so little about the different kinds and functions of laughter, and my interest really starts there. Why do we do it? What can laughter teach us about our positive emotions and social behaviour? There"s so much we don"t know about how the brain contributes to emotion and I think we can get at understanding this by studying laughter.(41)______. Only 10 or 20 per cent of laughing is a response to humour. Most of the time it"s a message we send to other people—communicating joyful disposition, a willingness to bond and so on. It occupies a special place in social interaction and is a fascinating feature of our biology, with motor, emotional and cognitive components. Scientists study all kinds of emotions and behaviour, but few focus on this most basic ingredient. Laughter gives us a clue that we have powerful systems in our brain which respond to pleasure, happiness and joy. It"s also involved in events such as release of fear.(42)______. My professional focus has always been on emotional behaviour. I spent many years investigating the neural basis of fear in rats, and came to laughter via that route. When I was working with rats, I noticed that when they were alone, in an exposed environment, they were scared and quite uncomfortable. Back in a cage with others, they seemed much happier. It looked as if they played with one another—real rough-and-tumble—and I wondered whether they were also laughing. The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp had shown that juvenile rats make short vocalisations, pitched too high for humans to hear, during rough-and-tumble play. He thinks these are similar to laughter. This made me wonder about the roots of laughter.(43)______. Everything humans do has a function, and laughing is no exception. Its function is surely communication. We need to build social structures in order to live well in our society and evolution has selected laughter as a useful device for promoting social communication. In other words, it must have a survival advantage for the species.(44)______. The brain scans are usually done while people are responding to humorous material. You see brainwave activity spread from the sensory processing area of the occipital lobe, the bit at the back of the brain that processes visual signals, to the brain"s frontal lobe. It seems that the frontal lobe is involved in recognising things as funny. The left side of the frontal lobe analyses the words and structure of jokes while the right side does the intellectual analyses required to "get" jokes. Finally, activity spreads to the motor areas of the brain controlling the physical task of laughing. We also know about these complex pathways involved in laughter from neurological illness and injury. Sometimes after brain damage, tumours, stroke or brain disorders such as Parkinson"s disease, people get "stonefaced syndrome" and can"t laugh.(45)______. I laugh a lot when I watch amateur videos of children, because they"re so natural. I"m sure they"re not forcing anything funny to happen. I don"t particularly laugh hard at jokes, but rather at situations. I also love old comedy movies such as Laurel and Hardy and an extremely ticklish. After starting to study laughter in depth, I began to laugh and smile more in social situations, those involving either closeness or hostility. Laughter really creates a bridge between people, disarms them, and facilitates amicable behaviour.

To Journalists, three of anything makes a trend. So after three school shootings in six days, speculation about an epidemic of violence in American classrooms was inevitable, and wrong. Violence in schools has fallen by half since the mid-1990s; children are more than 100 times more likely to be murdered outside the school walls than within them. On September 27th a 53-year-old petty criminal, Duane Morrison, walked into a school in Bailey, Colorado, with two guns. He took six girls hostage, molested some of them, and killed one before committing suicide as police stormed the room. And on September 29th a boy brought two guns into his school in Cazenovia, Wisconsin. Prosecutors say that 15-year-old Eric Hainstock may have planned to kill several people. But staff acted quickly when they saw him with a shotgun, calling the police and putting the school into "lock-down". The head teacher, who confronted him in a corridor, was the only one killed. October 2nd a 32-year-old milk-truck driver, Charles Roberts, entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He lined the girls up, tied their feet and, after an hour, shot them, killing at least five. He killed himself as police broke into the classroom. What to make of such horrors? Some experts see the Colorado and Pennsylvania cases as an extreme manifestation of a culture of violence against women. Both killers appeared to have a sexual motive, and both let all the boys in the classroom go free. But it is hard to infer from such unusual examples, and one must note that violence against women is less than half what it was in 1995. Other experts see all three cases as symptomatic of a change in the way men commit suicide. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist, told a radio audience "men are deciding to take their lives, "and they"re not going alone anymore. They"re taking people down with them". True, but not very often. Gun-control enthusiasts think school massacres show the need for tighter restrictions. It is too easy, they say, for criminals such as Mr. Morrison and juveniles such as Mr. Hainstock to obtain guns. Gun enthusiasts draw the opposite conclusion: that if more teachers carried concealed handguns, they could shoot potential child-killers before they kill. George Bush has now called for a conference on school violence. Will it unearth anything new, or valuable? After the Columbine massacre in 1999, the FBI produced a report on school shooters. It concluded that it was impossible to draw up a useful profile of a potential shooter because "a great many adolescents who will never commit violent acts will show some of the behaviours on any checklist of warning signs".

Studythefollowinggraphgivenbelowandwriteandessayofabout200words.Youressayshouldcovertheinformationofthegraphandmeetthefollowingrequirement:1)interpretthegraph;2)explainthechanges;3)yourcomments.

In 1951, Time magazine set out to paint a portrait of the nation"s youth, those born into the Great Depression. It doomed them as the Silent Generation, and a generally dull lot: cautious and obedient, uninterested in striking out in new directions or shaping the great issues of the day—the outwardly efficient types whose inner agonies the novel Revolutionary Road would analyze a decadelater. "Youth"s ambitions have shrunk," the magazine declared. "Few youngsters today want to mine diamonds in South Africa, ranch in Paraguay, climb Mount Everest, find a cure for cancer, sail around the world or build an industrial empire. Some would like to own a small, independent business, but most want a good job with a big firm, and with it, a kind of suburban idyll." The young soldier "lacks flame,,," students were "docile notetakers." And the young writer"s talent "sometimes turns out to be nothing more than a byproduct of his nervous disposition." "The best thing that can be said for American youth, in or out of uniform, is that it has learned that it must try to make the best of a bad and difficult job, whether that job is life, war, or both," Time concluded. "The generation which has been called the oldest young generation in the world has achieved a certain maturity." Today we are in a recession the depth and duration of which are unknown; Friday"s job loss figures were just the latest suggestion that it could well be prolonged and profound rather than shorter and shallower. So what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will deal with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did. "The "30s challenged the whole idea of the American dream, the idea of open economic possibilities," said Morris Dickstein, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "The version you get of that today is the loss of confidence on the part of both parent and children that life in the next generation will inevitably be better." How today"s young will be affected 10, 20 or 40 years on will depend on many things. If history is any guide, what will matter most is where this recession generation is in the historical process.

After having finished the end-of-term exams, you have gone straight home without saying goodbye to your roommate Li Hong. Write a letter to her: 1) explaining the situation, and 2) inviting her home during the vacation. 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 the address. (10 points)