Misers everywhere: that Mediterranean cruise could be within reach at last. There"ll be no free ride to the port, and no free food or entertainment on board. The cabin will measure 30 meters square and housekeeping will be extra. But the fiberglass suite is easy to clean, and costs as little as ￡29 a night. Earlier this year, serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the man who gave Europe its first budget airline, cashed in ￡14 million of his easyJet shares to fund what he calls a "little shopping spree." Boldly expanding his no-frills model into new markets, Stelios (he insists on first-name in formality) plans to open the first easyHotel in London this year with prices from ￡ 5 a night, an easy Bus fleet and easy Cruise, ready to sail next summer. Also on the list: easy Pizzas and easy Tele com, a mobile-phone service. Can he make it work? The soaring success of easyJet and its rivals was Europe"s great business story of the late 1990s, and yet more carriers are emerging to serve the 10 nations that joined the European Union last week. While copycatting the idea may look like a no-brainer, though, some experts doubt Stelios"s expansion plans have much of a future. "The no-frills model is very fragile." says Chris Voss of London Business School. "Stelios is applying it rather indiscriminately." The entrepreneur"s record is mixed. He launched easyJet in 1995, when he was 28, and it now has 70 planes and revenues of ￡932 million last year, up nearly 70 percent from 2002. But his first attempt to clone the no-frills model, a Europe-wide chain of Internet cafes launched at the height of the bubble, has since struggled to make money. His first easy Cinema-tickets for just 50 pence is suffering because big distributors, fearful of undercutting their other business, refuse to allow cheap screenings of new blockbusters. The larger problem: reducing prices is not enough to make no-frills work. Stelios, for example, likes to sell direct to the customer, preferably online, and avoids corporate accounts on the theory that only individuals care enough about price to be loyal no-kills customers. He chooses only sectors in which the volume of business will clearly rise as prices fall. There"s no point, say, in offering a cut-rate burial service. Says Stelios: "The demand for funerals isn"t going to go up—regardless of the price."

Paul received the girl "The English-Chinese Dictionary" from his friend James, and wrote a letter to thank James. The following contents are to be included in his writing: 1. Show his thanks for the gift; 2. The gift is very useful; 3. Some wishes for James. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at he end of the letter. Use "Paul" instead. You do not need to write the address.

She likes being looked at.

Your dormitory at the college is neighboring a very busy snack street. You are always woken up in the early hours by all kinds of loud noises outside and it smells bad whenever the windows are open. You suffer a lot from lacking sleep and uncomfortable breathing. Write a letter to the Accommodation Officer at the college. 1. You should write about 100 words. 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Zhang Wei" instead. 3. Do not write the address.

(46) The job of raising children is a tough one. Children don"t come with an instruction manual. And each child is different. So parents sometimes pull their hair out in frustration, not knowing what to do. But in raising children—as in all of life—what we do is influenced by our culture. Naturally then, American parents teach their children basic American values. To Americans, the goal of parents is to help children stand on their own two feet. From infancy, each child may get his or her own room. As children grow, they gain more freedom td make their own choices. Teenagers choose their own forms of entertainment, as well as the friends to share them with. When they reach young adulthood, they choose their own careers and marriage partners. Of course, many young adults still seek their parents" advice and approval for the choices they make. (47) But once they "leave the nest" at around 18 to 21 years old, they want to be on their own, not "tied to their mother"s apron strings." (48) The relationship between parents and children in America is very informal. American parents try to treat their children as individuals—not as extensions of themselves. They allow them to fulfill their own dreams. Americans praise and encourage their children to give them the confidence to succeed. When children become adults, their relationship with their parents becomes more like a friendship among equals. But contrary to popular belief, most adult Americans don"t make their parents pay for room and board when they come to visit. Even as adults, they respect and honor their parents. Most young couples with children struggle with the issue of childcare. Mothers have traditionally stayed home with their children. In recent years, though, a growing trend is to put preschoolers in a day care center so that Mom can work. (49) Many Americans have strong feelings about which type of arrangement is best. Some argue that attending a day care center can be a positive experience for children. Others insist that mothers are the best caregivers for children. A number of women are now leaving the work force to become full-time homemakers. (50) Being a parent is a tall order. It takes patience, love, wisdom, courage and a good sense of humor to raise children (and not lose your sanity). Some people are just deciding not to have children at all, since they"re not sure it"s worth it. But raising children means training the next generation and preserving our culture. What could be worth more than that?

America's most popular newspaper website today announced that the era of free online journalism is drawing to a close. The New York Times has become the biggest publisher yet to 【B1】______ plans for a pay wall around its digital offering, 【B2】______ the accepted practice that internet users will not pay for news. Struggling 【B3】______ an evaporation of advertising and a downward drift in street corner sales, The New York Times 【B4】______ to introduce a "metered" model at the beginning of 2011. Readers will be required to pay when they have 【B5】______ a set number of its online articles per month. The decision puts the 159-year-old newspaper 【B6】______ the charging side of an increasingly wide chasm in the media industry. But others, including The Guardian, have said they will not【B7】______internet readers, and certain papers, 【B8】______ London's Evening Standard, have gone further in abandoning readership revenue by making their print editions【B9】______. The New York Times' publisher, Arthur Sulzberger,【B10】______that the move is a gamble: "This is a【B11】______, to a certain degree, in where we think the web is going." Boasting a print【B12】______of 995,000 on weekdays and 1.4 million on Sundays, The New York Times is the third bestselling American newspaper,【B13】______The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.【B14】______most U.S. papers focus on a single city, The New York Times is among the few that can【B15】______national scope—as well as【B16】______bureaus in the New York area, it has 11 offices around the U.S. and 1626 bureaus elsewhere in the world. But【B17】______many in the publishing industry, the paper is in the grip of a【B18】______financial crisis. Its parent company, the New York Times Company, has 15 papers, but【B19】______a loss of $70 million in the nine months to September and recently accepted a $250 million【B20】______from a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, to strengthen its balance sheet.

If there is one central, recurring mistake the United States makes when dealing with the rest of the world, it is to assume that creating political stability is easy. The adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan remind us that "the most important distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government." Look around. So many of the world"s problems—from terrorists in Waziristan to the devastating AIDS epidemic in Africa to piracy in Somalia—are caused or made worse by governments that are unable to exercise real authority over their lands or people. That was the central insight of Samuel P. Huntington, the greatest political scientist of the last half-century, who died on Christmas Eve. Huntington is most famous for The Clash of Civilizations, but his scholarly reputation properly rests on his earlier work. His analysis of political order had immediate, real-world applications. While studying the topic, he was asked by Lyndon Johnson"s administration to assess the progress of the Vietnam War. After touring the place he argued, in 1967 and 1968, that America"s strategy in South Vietnam was fatally flawed. The Johnson administration was trying to buy the people"s support through aid and development. But money wasn"t the key, in Huntington"s view. The segments of South Vietnam"s population that had resisted the Viet Cong"s efforts had done so because they were secure within effective local communities structured around religious or ethnic ties. The United States, however, wanted to create a modern Vietnamese nation and so refused to reinforce these "backward" sources of authority. This 40-year-old analysis describes our dilemma in Afghanistan today. Huntington noticed a troubling trend. Sometimes, progress American style—more political participation or faster economic growth—actually created more problems than it solved. If a country had more people who were economically, politically and socially active and yet lacked effective political institutions, such as political parties, civic organizations or credible courts, the result was greater instability. That has been the story of parts of the Third World over the past three decades. Think of Pakistan, whose population has gone from 68 million in 1975 to 165 million today, while its government has proved ill equipped to tackle the basic tasks of education, security and social welfare. Living through change, people have often stuck with their oldest and most durable source of security: religion. That was the most important message of The Clash of Civilizations. While others were celebrating the fall of communism and the rise of globalization, he saw that with ideology disappearing as a source of human identity, religion was returning to the fore.

Something extraordinary is happening in London this week: in Lambeth, one of the city"s poorest boroughs(区), 180 children are starting their secondary education in a brand new school. The state- funded school was set up by parents who were fed up with the quality of local education. In countries with more enlightened education systems, this would be unremarkable. In Britain, it is an amazing achievement by a bunch of desperate and determined people after years of struggle. Britain"s schools are in a mess. Average standards are not improving despite billions in extra spending, and a stubbornly long tail of underachievers straggles(拖后腿) behind. A couple of years ago, a consensus emerged among reformers that councils had too much control and parents too little. One might have expected more from the Conservatives, who stood for election on a pledge to bring in school vouchers. Yet the Tory policy group charged with thinking deep thoughts about public services paid only lip service to parent power in its report. Where schools are failing, it said, parents or charities should get taxpayers" money to open new ones. But only 2.9% are actually failing, on official definitions. And another proposal, that children in failing schools get extra funding if they go elsewhere, was so lacking in detail as to be meaningless. Worry about underperforming schools is hardly confined to Britain: in America, in Italy, in Germany, even in once-proud France education is a hot-button topic. Yet a number of countries seem to have cracked it. Although specific problems differ in different societies, parental choice is at the heart of most successful solutions. What are the lessons? The first is that if a critical mass of parents wants a new school and there is a willing provider, local government should be required to finance it as generously as it does existing state schools. The second is that if a charity wants to open a school in the hope that children will come, then taxpayers" money should follow any that do. Third, rules about what, where and how schools teach should be relaxed to avoid stifling innovation and discouraging newcomers with big ideas. In any event, public-examination results would give parents the information they needed to enforce high standards. These proposals may seem radical, yet parents in the Netherlands have had the right to demand new schools since 1917, and those in Sweden have been free since 1992 to take their government money to any school that satisfies basic government rules. In the Netherlands 70% of children are educated in private schools at the taxpayers" expense; in Sweden 10% already are. In both countries state spending on education is lower per head than in Britain, and results are better. It doesn"t take a genius IQ—just a little political courage—to draw the correct conclusion.

The economic transformation of India is one of the great business stories of our time. Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are powerful global players, while Western firms like G.E. and I.B.M. now have major research facilities in India employing thousands. India"s seemingly endless flow of young, motivated engineers, scientists, and managers offering developed-world skills at developing-world wages is held to be putting American jobs at risk, and the country is frequently heralded as "the next economic superpower." But India has run into a surprising hitch on its way to superpower status: its inexhaustible supply of workers is becoming exhausted.【C1】______ How is this possible in a country that every year produces two and a half million college graduates and four hundred thousand engineers? Start with the fact that just ten per cent of Indians get any kind of post-secondary education, compared with some fifty per cent who do in the U.S.【C2】______ India does have more than three hundred universities, but a recent survey by the London Times Higher Education Supplement put only two of them among the top hundred in the world. A current study led by Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, has found that if you define "engineer" by U.S. standards, India produces just a hundred and seventy thousand engineers a year, not four hundred thousand. The irony of the current situation is that India was once considered to be overeducated.【C3】______ However, once the Indian business climate loosened up, though, that meant companies could tap a backlog of hundreds of thousands of eager, skilled workers at their disposal. Unfortunately, the educational system did not adjust to the new realities.【C4】______ Even as the need for skilled workers was increasing, India was devoting relatively fewer resources to producing them. India has taken tentative steps to remedy its skills famine—the current government has made noises about doubling spending on education, and a host of new colleges and universities have sprung up since the mid-nineties.【C5】______ In a country where more than three hundred million people live on a dollar a day, producing college graduates can seem like a low priority. Ultimately, the Indian government has to pull off a very tough trick, making serious changes at a time when things seem to be going very well. It needs, in other words, a clear sense of everything that can still go wrong. The paradox of the Indian economy today is that the more certain its glowing future seems to be, the less likely that future becomes. A. But India"s impressive economic performance has made the problem seem less urgent than it actually is, and allowed the government to defer difficult choices. B. Moreover, of that ten per cent, the vast majority go to one of India"s seventeen thousand colleges, many of which are closer to community colleges than to four-year institutions. C. Infosys says that, of 1.3 million applicants for jobs last year, it found only two per cent acceptable. D. Although India has one of the youngest workforces on the planet, the head of Infosys said recently that there was an "acute shortage of skilled manpower," and a study by Hewitt Associates projects that this year salaries for skilled workers will rise fourteen and a half per cent, a sure sign that demand for skilled labor is outstripping. E. In the seventies, as its economy languished, it seemed to be a country with too many engineers and Ph.D.s working as clerks in government offices. F. Many Indian graduates therefore enter the workforce with a low level of skills. G. Between 1985 and 1997, the number of teachers in India actually fell, while the percentage of students enrolled in high school or college rose more slowly than it did in the rest of the world.

There"s no news like bad news . The tabloids are full of accidents, gory murders, and mayhem, and people eat it up. But there may be a silver lining , at least for seniors. A new study finds that the human brain reacts less strongly to emotionally negative stimuli as we age, in effect making us more responsive to all things positive and less responsive to the dark and dismal. This bolsters a growing body of evidence showing that aging changes how the brain reacts to emotional stimuli. Much of the media exploits what psychologists call the "negativity bias": our tendency to pay more attention to the bad than to the good. This bias plays a role in a wide range of cognitive areas, making a headline about a murder more attention grabbing than one about a marriage, for example. However, in recent years, research has revealed that as we get older our emotional responses to the world around us become more positive and that the stereotype of the "grumpy old man" may actually be a myth. A number of studies have found that older people typically report a higher sense of well-being than younger people. But is that because the negativity bias declines with age, or does the brain become more responsive to positive stimuli? To explore this question, psychologists Michael Kisley of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and Stacey Wood of Scripps College in Claremont, California, presented 51 participants with images of puppies, car crashes, toasters, and other things for 1 second at a time. The participants, who ranged from 18 to 81 years of age, were attached to electroencephalograph electrodes and then pressed buttons to categorize the images as emotionally positive, negative, or neutral. As expected, electrical activity spiked in the brains of the young participants when they saw something discomfiting. But older brains reacted less, and they didn"t vary between negative and positive images. "Our data show that the negativity bias is gradually declining with age," comments Kisley, who reports the findings in the September issue of Psychological Science. "This study is so important because it gives us a window into the way we process information at different stages of our lives," says psychologist Derek Isaacowitz of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Why the negativity bias wanes with age is an unresolved question, but psychologist Mara Mather of the University of California, Santa Cruz, argues that "it might be the result of a human desire to surround ourselves with the pleasant and the positive as our perceived lifetime draws to a close".

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) Universities the world over love symbols from medieval scholastic garb at degree ceremonies to the owls and scrolls of scholastic badge. But for many universities, especially in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, a more accurate emblem would include slummy buildings, dog eared books and demoralized dons. That"s why Britain"s government is next week risking defeat in the House of Commons to bring more private money into the country"s universities—and why European and developing countries now busy expanding higher education need to think hard about how much government involvement is good for universities. (41)______. America"s flourishing universities exemplify the former Europe"s the latter. Britain"s government wants to move towards the American modal. The subject of next week"s rebellion is a bill that would allow English universities Scotland and Wales are different to charge up to 3000 pounds (5460 dollars) in tuition fees instead of the current flat rate 1125. Students will borrow the money through a state run loan scheme and pay it back once they are earning enough. (42)______. But it reflects an important shift in thinking. First that the new money universities need should come from graduates rather than the general taxpayer. Second and most crucially it abandons the egalitarian assumption that all universities are equally deserving. That is commendable just because a course is cheap does not mean it is worthless and the existence of costly ones is not in itself a sign of iniquitous social division. Yet old thinking has deep roots. Bandying phrases such as "excellence for all" and "education for the many not the few", politicians, especially left wing ones, want to dap the university educated label on ever more people regardless of merit cost or practicality. (43)______. It humiliates the talented but disadvantaged whose success is then devalued and it infuriates the talented who are not deemed underprivileged enough and who feel their merits ignored and it makes universities do a job they are bound to be bad at. Public funding is addictive and the withdrawal symptoms are painful. (44)______. Inflated tuition fees are a big worry and alumni preference looks unfair. But overall America"s system looks sustainable in a way that the Old World"s does not. In short the model to strive for is varied institutions charging varied fees. Not all courses need last three years or bring a full honors degree. (45)______. It is better to do some things well rather than everything indifferently. It is because politicians have forgotten that some of the world"s oldest universities risk a future that is a lot less glorious than their past.A. Some will be longer and deeper; others shorter and shallower. Some universities may specialize as teaching only institutions like America"s liberal arts colleges. Others may want to concentrate mainly on research. All must have the right to select their intake.B. Universities can indeed give the disadvantaged a leg up—but they will do it much better if the state stands hack. Micromanaging university admissions as the British government has been trying to do on grounds of class with targets quotas fines and strictures risks the same consequences as similar American experiments based on racial preference.C. Alison Wolf a British economist terms this the "two aspirin good five aspirin better" approach to university finance. It is deeply flawed. In reality, there is no proven connection between spending on universities and prosperity, nor can there be.D. But as British dons and politicians straggle with these issues and their European counterparts ponder whether one day they might just have to do something similar, the message for emerging economies like China and India who are investing heavily in their own systems of higher education is clear—avoid a nationalized and uniform system and go for one that is diverse and independent America"s universities have their problems.E. It is a very limited start faced with sweeteners for students from poor backgrounds. The best universities worry that the maximum fee should be many times higher.F. Indeed, faced with aging populations Britain and most European countries arguably should be encouraging their young people to start earning earlier in their lives rather than later.G. There are broadly two models for running universities. They can be autonomous institutions mainly dependent on private income such as fees, donations and investments or they can be state financed and as a result, state run.

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) In France, as in many European countries, friends generally arc of the same sex, and friendship is seen as basically a relationship between men. (41)______. And many French people doubt the possibility of a friendship between a man and a woman. There is also the kind of relationship within a group—men and women who have worked together for a long time, who may be very close, sharing great loyalty and warmth of feeling. They may call one another—copains—a word that in English becomes "friends" but has more the feeling of "pals" or "buddies". In French eyes this is not friendship, although two members of such a group may well be friends. For the French, friendship is one to-one relationship that demands a keen awareness of the other person"s intellect, temperament and particular interests. (42)______. Your political philosophy assumes more depth, appreciation of a play becomes sharper, taste in food or wine is enhanced, enjoyment of a sport is intensified. And French friendships are divided into categories. A man may play chess with a friend for thirty years without knowing his political opinion, or he may talk politics with him for a long time without knowing about his personal life. Different friends fill different niches in each person"s life. (43)______. These duties, also serious and required, are primarily for relatives. Men who are friends may meet in a cafe. Intellectual friends may meet in large groups for evenings of conversation. Working people may meet at the little bistro where they drink and talk, far from the family. (44)______. In the past in France, friendships of this kind seldom were open to any but intellectual women. (45)______. The special relationship of friendship is based on what the French value most on the mind, on having the same outlook, on vivid a awareness of some chosen area of life.A. These friendships are not made part of family life. A friend is not expected to spend evenings being nice to children or courteous to a deaf grandmother.B. A Frenchman explains, "If I were to say to you in France, "This is my good friend", that person would not be as close to me as someone about whom I said only, "This is my friend." Anyone about whom I have to say more is really less."C. Since most women"s lives centered on their homes, their warmest relations with other women often went back to their girlhood.D. Marriage does not affect such friendship; wives don"t have to be taken into account.E. Frenchwomen laugh at the idea that "women can"t be friends", but they also admit sometimes that for women "it is a different thing".F. Between French friends, who have chosen each other for the similarity of their point of view, lively disagreement and sharpness of argument are the breath of life.G. A friend is someone who draws out your own best qualities, with whom you sparkle and become more of whatever the friendship draws upon.

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) Training is intended primarily for the service of society; education is primarily for the individual. Society needs doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers to perform specific tasks necessary to its operation, just as it needs carpenters and plumbers and stenographers(速记员). (41) ______. And these needs, our training centers—the professional and trade schools, fill. But although education is for the improvement of the individual, it also serves society by providing a leavening of men of understanding, of perception, and wisdom. (42)______. They serve society by examining its function, appraising its needs, and criticizing its direction. They may be earning their livings by practicing one of the professions, or in pursuing a trade, or by engaging in business enterprise. They may be rich or poor. They may occupy positions of power and prestige, or they may be engaged in some humble employment. Without them, however, society either disintegrates or else becomes an anthill. (43)______. In the one, the recruit is training to become a professional baseball player who will make a living and serve society by playing baseball; in the other, he is training only to improve his own body and musculature. The training at the baseball camp is all relevant. The recruit may spend hours practicing how to slide into second base, not because it is a particularly useful form of calisthenics(柔软体操) but because it is relevant to the game. The exercise would stop if the rules were changed so that sliding to a base was made illegal. Similarly, the candidate for the pitching staff spends a lot of time throwing a baseball, not because it will improve his physique—it may have quite the opposite effect, but because pitching is to be his principal function on the team. At the gym, exercises have no such relevance. (44)______. (45)______. What is taught at law school is the present law of the land, not the Napoleonic Code or even the archaic laws that have been scratched from the statute books. And at medical school, too, it is modern medical practice that is taught, which is relevant to conditions today. And the plumber(水管工人) and the carpenter and the electrician and the mason(泥瓦匠) learn only what is relevant to the practice of their respective trades in this day with the tools and materials that are presently available and that conform to the building code.A. Education refers to the knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process.B. They are our intellectual leaders, the critics of our culture, the defenders of our free traditions, the instigators of our progress.C. The intention is to strengthen the body in general, and when the members sit down on the floor with their legs outstretched and practice touching their fingers to their toes, it is not because they hope to become galley slaves, perhaps the only occupation where that particular exercise would be relevant.D. The difference between the two types of study is like the difference between the discipline and exercise in a professional baseball training camp and that of a gym.E. Training supplies the immediate and specific needs of society so that the work of the world may continue.F. In general, relevancy is a facet of training rather than of education.G. Training is to make proficient with specialized instruction and practice.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

The meanings of "science" and "technology" have changed significantly from one generation to another. More similarities than differences, however, can be found between the terms. (46) Both science and technology imply a thinking process, both are concerned with causal relationships in the material world and both employ an experimental methodology that results in empirical demonstrations that can be verified by repetition. (47) Science, at least in theory, is less concerned with the practicality of its results and more concerned with the development of general laws, but in practice science and technology are inextricably involved with each other. The varying interplay of the two can be observed in the historical development of such practitioners as chemists, engineers, physicists, astronomers, carpenters, potters, and many other specialists. Differing educational requirements, social status, vocabulary, methodology, and types of rewards, as well as institutional objectives and professional goals, contribute to such distinctions as can be made between the activities of scientists and technologists; but throughout history the practitioners of "pure" science have made many practical as well as theoretical contributions. (48) Indeed, the concept that science provides the ideas for technological innovations and that pure research is therefore essential for any significant advancement in industrial civilization is essentially a myth. Most of the greatest changes in industrial civilization cannot be traced to the laboratory. Fundamental tools and processes in the fields of mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, metallurgy, and hydraulics were developed before the laws governing their functions were discovered. The steam engine, for example, was commonplace before the science of thermodynamics elucidated the physical principle underlying its operations. In recent years a sharp value distinction has grown up between science and technology. Advances in science have frequently had their bitter opponents, but today many people have come to fear technology much more than science. (49) For these people, science may be perceived as a serene, objective source for understanding the eternal laws of nature, whereas the practical manifestations of technology in the modern world now seem to them to be out of control. (50) Many historians of science argue not only that technology is an essential condition of advanced, industrial civilization but also that the rate of technological change has developed its own momentum in recent centuries. Innovations now seem to appear at a rate that increase geometrically, without respect to geographical limits or political systems. These innovations tend to transform traditional cultural systems, frequently with unexpected social consequences. Thus technology can be conceived as both a creative and a destructive process.

You"re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let"s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn"t it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University? More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week. Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then, if it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them "impostors"; another refers to them as "special cases" one well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by "no such people." To avoid outright lies, some job-seekers claim that they "attended" or "were associated with" a college or university. After carefully checking, a personnel officer may discover that "attending" means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that "being associated with" a college means that the job seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century—that"s when they began keeping records, anyhow. If you don"t want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of nonexistent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from "Smoot State University." The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the "University of Purdue." As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.

The greatest knowledge we can receive is taken from everyday life lessons. If we learn from our many mistakes and grow from each lesson we may learn, we will be wiser, smarter and happier people. This journey we travel together, called life, holds amazing opportunities along the way. If we are aware of what is happening around us we can gain wisdom from what we observe. If we don"t learn from those around us, we lose valuable life lessons. I learned a great deal growing up with alcoholic parents. I learned from a young age what kind of parent I would strive to be. I gained a great understanding of the damage alcohol can have on a family and this life lesson is with me still today. As a young adult, I believe the greatest lessons I learned were from others and their life experiences. I grew to understand there were so many people going through situations much worse than mine. I learned to appreciate the fact that I was loved in spite of the circumstances I lived in. A friend of mine was abused and I realized my problems were minor in comparison. Another one of my best friends was involved in a car accident, and is a quadriplegic. Life takes many turns and twists and the greatest lessons are learned from these experiences. When we look around us and see so much hunger, hurt and hatred we cannot help but find our problems small and manageable. Regardless of our personal situation, we can be assured there is greater suffering all around us. There are lessons in our lives that will give us wisdom to help others. When we experience heartache,we are better able to comfort a friend. We know what they need and can be supportive of them. Life lessons come along for many reasons. To teach us to appreciate what we have. To make us aware there is always someone worse off than we are. To learn from our mistakes, teach us to grow and mature. Every day there is a new lesson to learn so we can be better human beings. We really do have the power to bring happiness and quality to our lives. Take each lesson along the way and make it count, don"t let the negative lessons bring you down but teach you to move forward to a better tomorrow.

【F1】 With the extension of democratic rights in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ensuing decline of the Federalist establishment, a new conception of education began to emerge. Education was no longer a confirmation of a pre-existing status, but an instrument in the acquisition of higher status. For a new generation of upwardly mobile students, the goal of education was not to prepare them to live comfortably in the world into which they had been born, but to teach them new virtues and skills that would propel them into a different and better world.【F2】 Education became training; and the student was no longer the gentleman-in-waiting, but the journeyman apprentice for upward mobility. In the nineteenth century a college education began to be seen as a way to get ahead in the world. The founding of the land-grant colleges opened the doors of higher education to poor but aspiring boys from non-Anglo-Saxon, working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds.【F3】 The myth of the poor boy who worked his way through college to success drew millions of poor boys to the new campuses. And with this shift, education became more vocational: its object was the acquisition of practical skills and useful information. 【F4】 For the gentleman-in-waiting, virtue consisted above all in grace and style, in doing well what was appropriate to his position; education was merely a way of acquiring polish. And vice was manifested in gracelessness, awkwardness, in behaving inappropriately, discourteously, or ostentatiously. For the apprentice, however, virtue was evidenced in success through hard work. The requisite qualities of character were not grace or style, but drive, determination, and a sharp eye for opportunity. While casual liberality and even prodigality characterized the gentleman, frugality, thrift and self-control came to distinguish the new apprentice.【F5】 And while the gentleman did not aspire to a higher station because his station was already high, the apprentice was continually becoming, striving, struggling upward. Failure for the apprentice meant standing still, not rising.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

You heard that one of your friends failed in the entrance examination of postgraduate. Write a letter to him which should include the following information: (1) express your regrets; (2) encourage him to try again; (3) hope to see him in high spirits. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your won name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address.