All great writers express their ideas in an individual way: it is often possible to determine the authorship of a literary passage from the style in which it is written; (46) Many authors feel that the conventions of the written language hamper them and they use words freely, with little observance of accepted grammar and sentence structure, in order to convey vividly their feelings, beliefs and fantasies. Others with a deep respect for traditional usage achieve a style of classical clearness and perfection or achieve effects of visual or musical beauty by their mastery of existing forms enriched by a sensitive and adventurous vocabulary, vivid imagery and a blending of evocative vowels and consonants. Young people often feel the need to experiment and, as a result, to break away from the traditions they have been taught. In dealing with a foreign language, however, they have to bear in mind two conditions for experiment. (47) Any great experimental artist is fully familiar with the conventions from which he wishes to break free: he is capable of achievement in established forms but feels these are inadequate for the expression of his ideas. In the second place, he is indisputably an outstanding artist who has something original to express; otherwise the experiments will appear pretentious, even childish. Few students can achieve so intimate an understanding of a foreign language that they can explore its resources freely and experimentally. Not all feel the need to do so. (48) And in any case examination candidates need to become thoroughly acquainted with conventional usage as it is a sure knowledge of accepted forms that examiners look for. The student undertaking a Proficiency course should have the ability to use simple English correctly to express everyday facts and ideas. (49) This ability to express oneself in a foreign language on a basis of thinking in that language without reference to one"s own is essential at all stages of learning. Students with extensive experience in translation who have had little practice in using the foreign language directly must, above all, write very simply at first, using only easy constructions which they are convinced are correct, forgetting for the time being their own language and rigorously avoiding translating from it. More complex forms, more varied vocabulary and sentence structure should evolve naturally in step with the student"s increasing knowledge of the language. The student introduces a certain form of construction only when he is thoroughly familiar with it and is certain that it is normally used in this way. As he achieves additional confidence, he can begin to take an interest in use of the language to create diverse effects. He may want to convey impressions of suspense, calm, dignity, humor, of music or poetry. (50) He will master the art of logical explanation, of exact letter writing, of formal speeches and natural conversation and of vivid impressionistic description. But he will still write within the limits of his ability and knowledge. And, as a learner, he will still be studying and observing conventional English usage in all that he writes.

Over the past century, all kinds of unfairness and discrimination have been condemned or made illegal.【F1】 But one insidious form continues to thrive: alphabetism. This, for those as yet unaware of such a disadvantage, refers to discrimination against those whose surnames begin with a letter in the lower half of the alphabet. It has long been known that a taxi firm called AAAA cars has a big advantage over Zodiac cars when customers thumb through their phone directories. Less well known is the advantage that Adam Abbott has in life over Zoe Zysman.【F2】 English names are fairly evenly spread between the halves of the alphabet, yet a suspiciously large number of top people have surnames beginning with letters between A and K. 【F3】 Thus the American president and vice-president have surnames starting with B and C respectively; and 26 of George Bush"s predecessors(including his father)had surnames in the first half of the alphabet against just 16 in the second half. Even more striking, six of the seven heads of government of the G7 rich countries are alphabetically advantaged(Berlusconi, Blair, Bush, Chirac, Chretien and Koizumi). The world" s three top central bankers(Greenspan, Duisenberg and Hayami)are all close to the top of the alphabet, even if one of them really uses Japanese characters. As are the world "s five richest men(Gates, Buffett, Allen, Ellison and Albrecht). Can this merely be coincidence? One theory, dreamt up in all the spare time enjoyed by the alphabetically disadvantaged, is that the rot sets in early.【F4】 At the start of the first year in infant school, teachers seat pupils alphabetically from the front, to make it easier to remember their names. So short-sighted Zysman junior gets stuck in the back row, and is rarely asked the improving questions posed by those insensitive teachers. At the time the alphabetically disadvantaged may think they have had a lucky escape. Yet the result may be worse qualifications, because they get less individual attention, as well as less confidence in speaking publicly. The humiliation continues. At university graduation ceremonies, the ABCs proudly get their awards first; by the time they reach the Zysmans most people are literally having a ZZZ.【F5】 Shortlists for job interviews, election ballot papers, lists of conference speakers and attendees: all tend to be drawn up alphabetically, and their recipients lose interest as they plough through them.

Studythefollowingpicturecarefullyandwriteanessayinwhichyoushould1)describethepicture,2)interpretitsmeaning,and3)pointouttheimplicationsinourlife.Youshouldwrite160-200wordsneatly.

It"s a problem that vexes some of China"s brightest minds: why is China so far behind the world in math? After all, this is a country with a long intellectual tradition, one that invented the abacus and may have come up with the Pythagorean theorem before it dawned on Pythagoras. (46) Sure, Chinese high-school students consistently dazzle the world with sky-high standardized-test scores and gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. But high school seems to be where they peak. Only one Chinese-born mathematician has won the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of math, in its 70-year history. And that man, Yau Shingtung, is among those most worried. (47) Now a professor at Harvard, he was stunned after recently interviewing a faculty candidate at a prominent Chinese university. "A student at that level, I wouldn"t even give a master"s degree," he said. "I"m not pessimistic, but the problems are there." Many of China"s leading minds believe the problem rests in the country"s competitive, test-driven education system. (48) Primary and Secondary schools stress rote memorization, and they can be brutally unforgiving of creative mavericks—one bad test early in life can ruin a student"s chances for college. At the doctoral level, this has resulted in low-risk, derivative research. Chinese universities simply tally the number of papers someone has published when it comes time to decide promotions. The result is that many Christians scholars publish more mediocre papers and less groundbreaking work. Many of the greatest innovations come from people in laboratories doing pure research. Sure, a country full of high-school-math whizzes can offer the world millions of qualified computer programmers. (49) But if China truly wants to become a high-tech player, then its students must be able to create cutting-edge technology—not simply serve it. China"s mathematicians may still be able to solve for these variables. People are fighting to change the rules for promoting professors. At some academy, for example, the three-person evaluation panels now must include two overseas experts. (50) Perhaps even more promising, Chinese universities are going beyond the elite city colleges and into the impoverished countryside in search of future Chinese Newtons and Nashes. Harvard"s Yau helped establish a mathematics institute in Hong Kong where, he says, some of the students producing the most creative work are the ones from the countryside or the poorest mainland schools.

WriteanessaybasedonthefollowingtableontheproductionofTVsetsinafactory.Youshouldwriteabout160-200wordsneatly.

By the mid-sixties, blue jeans were an essential part of the wardrobe of those with a commitment to social struggle. In the American Deep South, black farmers and grandchildren of slaves still segregated from whites, continued to wear jeans in their mid-nineteenth-century sense; but now they were joined by college students-black and white-in a battle to overturn deeply embedded race hatred. The clothes of the workers became a sacred bond between them. The clothing of toil came to signify the dignity of struggle. In the student rebellion and the antiwar movement that followed, blue jeans and work shirts provided a contrast to the uniforms of the dominant culture. Jeans were the opposite of high fashion, the opposite of the suit or military uniform. With the rise of the women"s movement in the late 1960s, the political significance of dress became increasingly explicit; Rejecting orthodox sex roles, blue jeans were a woman"s weapon against uncomfortable popular fashions and the view that women should be passive. This was the cloth of action; the cloth of labor became the badge of freedom. If blue jeans were for rebels in the 1960s and early 1970s, by the 1980s they had become a foundation of fashion-available in a variety of colors, textures, fabrics, and fit. These simple pants have made the long journey "from workers" clothes to cultural revolt to status symbol." On television, in magazine advertising, on the sides of buildings and buses, jeans call out to us. Their humble past is obscured; practical roots are incorporated into a new aesthetic. Jeans are now the universal symbol of the individual and Western democracy. They are the costume of liberated women, with a fit tight enough to restrict like the harness of old-but with the look of freedom and motion. In blue jeans, fashion reveals itself as a complex world of history and change. Yet looking at fashions, in and of themselves, reveals situations that often defy understanding. Our ability to understand a specific fashion-the current one of jeans, for example-shows us that as we try to make sense of it, our confusion intensifies. It is a fashion whose very essence is contradiction and confusion. To pursue the goal of understanding is to move beyond the actual cloth itself, toward the more general phenomenon of fashion and the world in which it has risen to importance. Exploring the role of fashion within the social and political history of industrial America helps to reveal the parameters and possibilities of American society. The ultimate question is whether the development of images of rebellion into mass-produced fashions has actually resulted in social change.

A Letter to Express Compliments Write a letter of about 100 words based on the following situation: A typhoon swept across Taiwan, and the students in your university actively took part in the donation activities. As the chairman of the Student Union, write a letter to the kindhearted students to express your gratitude and compliments. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Although recent years have seen substantial reductions in noxious pollutants from individual motor vehicles, the number of such vehicles has been steadily increasing. Consequently more than 100 cities in the United States still have levels of carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and ozone (generated by photochemical reactions with hydrocarbons from vehicle exhaust) that exceed legally established limits. There is a growing realization that the only effective way to achieve further reductions in vehicle emissions—short of a massive shift away from the private automobile—is to replace conventional diesel fuel and gasoline with cleaner-burning fuels such as compressed natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, ethanol, or methanol. All of these alternatives are carbon-based fuels whose molecules are smaller and simpler than those of gasoline. These molecules burn mom cleanly than gasoline, in part because they have fewer, if any, carbon-carbon bonds, and the hydrocarbons they do emit are less likely to generate ozone. The combustion of larger molecules, which have multiple carbon-carbon bonds, involves a more complex series of reaction. These reactions increase the probability of incomplete combustion and are more likely to release un-combusted and photo-chemically active hydrocarbon compounds into the atmosphere. On the other hand, alternative fuels do have drawbacks. Compressed natural gas would require that vehicles have a set of heavy fuel tanks—a serious liability in terms of performance and fuel efficiency-and liquefied petroleum gas faces fundamental limits in supply. Ethanol and methanol, on the other hand, have important advantages over other carbon based alternative fuels: they have a higher energy content per volume and would require minimal changes in the existing network for distributing motor fuel. Ethanol is commonly used as a gasoline supplement, but k is currently about twice as expensive as methanol, the low cost of which is one of its attractive features. Methanol"s most attractive feature, however, is that it can reduce by about 90 percent the vehicle emissions that form ozone, the most serious urban air pollutant. Like any alternative fuel, methanal has its critics. Yet much of the criticism is based on the use of "gasoline done" vehicles that do not incorporate even the simplest design improvements that are made possible with the use of methanol. It is true, for example, that a given volume of methanol provides only about one-half of the energy that gasoline and diesel fuel do; other things being equal, the fuel tank would have to be somewhat larger and heavier. However, since methanol-fueled vehicles could be designed to be much more efficient than "gasoline clone" vehicles fueled with methanol, they would need comparatively less fuel Vehicles incorporating only the simplest of the engine improvements that methanol makes feasible would still contribute to an immediate lessening of urban air pollution.

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

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

You are a college student in the English Department. Recently you have been made monitor in your class and you are going to make a speech in front of your classmates. You"ll make preparations for the speech in which you should 1) express your pleasure, 2) state briefly your moves, 3) and give complimentary remarks. Write your letter in no less than 100 words and write it neatly. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter, use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

BSection III Writing/B

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

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

It is a startling claim, but one that Congresswoman Deborah Pryce uses to good effect: the equivalent of two classrooms full of children are diagnosed with cancer every day. Mrs. Pryce lost her own 9-year-old daughter to cancer in 1999. Pediatric cancer remains a little-understood issue in America, where the health-care debate is consumed with the ills, pills and medical bills of the elderly. Cancer kills more children than any other disease in America. Although there have been tremendous gains in cancer survival rates in recent decades, the proportion of children and teens diagnosed with different forms of the disease increased by almost a third between 1975 and 2001. Grisly though these statistics are, they are still tiny when set beside the number of adult lives lost to breast cancer (41,000 each year) and lung cancer (164,000). Advocates for more money for child cancer prefer to look at life-years lost. The average age for cancer diagnosis in a young child is six, while the average adult is diagnosed in their late 60s. Robert Arceci, a pediatric cancer expert at Johns Hopkins, points out that in terms of total life-years saved, the benefit from curing pediatric cancer victims is roughly the same as curing adults with breast cancer. There is an obvious element of special pleading in such calculations. All the same, breast cancer has attracted a flurry of publicity, private fund-raising and money from government. Childhood cancer has received less attention and cash. Pediatric cancer, a term which covers people up to 20 years old, receives one-twentieth of the federal research money doled out by the National Cancer Institute. Funding, moan pediatric researchers, has not kept pace with rising costs m the field, and NCI money for collaborative research will actually be cut by 3% this year. There is no national pediatric cancer registry that would let researchers track child and teenage patients through their lives as they can do in the case of adult sufferers. A pilot childhood-cancer registry is in the works. Groups like Mr. Reaman"s now get cash directly from Congress. But it is plainly a problem most politicians don"t know much about. The biggest problem could lie with 15-19-year-olds. Those diagnosed with cancer have not seen the same improvement in their chances as younger children and older adults have done. There are some physical explanations for this: teenagers who have passed adolescence are more vulnerable to different sorts of cancer. But Archie Bleyer, a pediatric oncologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre in Texas, has produced some data implying that lack of health insurance plays a role. Older teenagers and young adults are less likely to be covered and checked regularly.

Illiteracy may be considered more as an abstract concept than a condition. When a famous English writer used the (1)_____ over two hundred years ago, he was actually (2)_____ to people who could (3)_____ read Greek or Latin. (4)_____,it seems unlikely that university examiners had this sort of (5)_____ in mind when they reported on "creeping illiteracy" in a report on their students" final examination in 1988. (6)_____ the years, university lecturers have been (7)_____ of an increasing tendency towards grammatical sloppiness, poor spelling and general imprecision (8)_____ their students" ways of writing; and sloppy writing is all (9)_____ often a reflection of sloppy thinking. Their (10)_____ was that they had (11)_____ to do teaching their own subject (12)_____ teaching their undergraduates to write. Some lecturers believe that they have a(n) (13)_____ to stress the importance of maintaining standards of dear thinking (14)_____ the written word in a world dominated by (15)_____ communications and images. They (16)_____ on the connection between clear thinking and a form of writing that is not only clear, but also sensitive to (17)_____ of meaning. The same lecturers argue that undergraduates appear to be the victims of a "softening process" that begins (18)_____ the teaching of English in schools, but this point of view has, not (19)_____, mused a great deal of (20)_____.

Studythefollowingphotoscarefullyandwriteanessayinwhichyoushould1)describethephotosbriefly2)interpretthesocialphenomenonreflectedbythem,and3)giveyourpointofviewYoushouldwrite160—200wordsneatly.(20points)

But for many, the fact that poor people are able to support themselves almost as well without government aid as they did with it is in itself a huge victory.

Much of the world should go on a diet in 2014. More than a third of adults【C1】______were estimated to be【C2】______or obese in 2008, according to a report by the Overseas Development Institute(ODI), a think tank in London. That's a 23 per cent increase on 1980. In the last three decades, the number of adults estimated to be obese in the developing world has almost quadrupled to 904 million, overtaking the number in【C3】______countries. "The most shocking thing is the degree to which obesity is now【C4】______developing as well as developed economies," says Tim Lobstein of the International Association for the Study of Obesity in London. "The problems【C5】______by overconsumption of fats and【C6】______are now global, not just Western, problems." The rise is【C7】______to a "creeping homogeni-sation"(spreading)of diets across the world, says the report, which says rising【C8】______, advertising and globalisation all play a part It criticizes policy-makers in most countries for being slow or【C9】______to tackle the problem. "We see a big【C10】______in what governments recommend people eat as part of their【C11】______campaigns and what people actually eat," says Sharada Keats. "We need governments to【C12】______the scale of the problem and start putting in place【C13】______steps to tackle it" Some countries have【C14】______to go against the grain and【C15】______. For example, South Koreans ate four times more【C16】______in 2008 than they did in 1980. The report【C17】______this to government health drives, which include【C18】______programs on how to【C19】______low-fat meals, showing what governments can do when they【C20】______.

The Students" Union of English Department will hold an English speech contest. You are required to write a poster through which students and teachers can be informed of the event.The poster should include: 1) schedule of the contest, 2) and requirements and other details. Write your letter in no less than 100 words and write it neatly.