WHERE do the world's poor live? The obvious answer: in poor countries. But in a recent series of articles Andy Sumner of Britain's Institute of Development Studies showed that the obvious answer is wrong. Four-fifths of those surviving on less than $2 a day, he found, live in middle-income countries with a gross national income per head of between $1,000 and $12,500, not poor ones. His finding reflects the fact that a long but inequitable period of economic growth has lifted many developing countries into middle-income status but left a minority of their populations mired in poverty. Since the countries involved include giants like China and India, even a minority amounts to a very large number of people. That matters because middle-income countries can afford to help their own poor. If most of the poverty problem lies within their borders, then foreign aid is less relevant to poverty reduction. A better way to help would be to make middle-income countries' domestic policies more "pro-poor". Now Mr. Sumner's argument faces a challenge. According to Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution and Andrew Rogerson of Britain's Overseas Development Institute, "by 2025 most absolute poverty will once again be concentrated in low-income countries." They argue that as middle-income countries continue to make progress against poverty, its incidence there will fall. However, the number of poor people is growing in "fragile" states, which the authors define as countries which cannot meet their populations' expectations or manage these through the political process (sounds like some European nations, too). The pattern that Mr. Sumner describes, they say, is a passing phase. Messrs Kharas and Rogerson calculate that the number of poor in "non-fragile" states has fallen from almost 2 billion in 1990 to around 500m now; they think it will go on declining to around 200m by 2025. But the number of poor in fragile states is not falling—a testament both to the growing number of poor, unstable places and to their fast population growth. This total has stayed flat at about 500m since 1990 and, the authors think, will barely shift until 2025. As early as next year, the number of poor in what are sometimes called FRACAS (fragile and conflict-affected states) could be greater than the number in stable ones. That would imply something different to Mr. Sumner's view: instead of being irrelevant to poverty reduction, foreign aid will continue to be vital, since fragile states (unlike middle-income ones) cannot afford to help the poor but instead need help themselves.

A war on sugar has begun in the UK that echoes the nation"s successful campaign against salt. The effort is【C1】______because it could help to reduce obesity, but cutting sugar out of people"s diets poses【C2】______challenges. Last week, a group of academics and policy【C3】______specializing in medicine and【C4】______announced that they had formed a campaign group, Action on Sugar. Their idea is to convince manufacturers to【C5】______and gradually lower the【C6】______of sugar added to foods—so slowly that it isn"t missed by【C7】______.It is essentially the same【C8】______as a campaign that is【C9】______credited with reducing British people"s salt intake. Over the past decade, CASH, a non-government organisation, helped to create anti-salt【C10】______ aimed at the general public, 【C11】______year-by-year targets for companies to reduce salt levels. These were 【C12】______but had the backing of the government, and it was【C13】______that the targets would be legally enforced if companies【C14】______. Most manufacturers lowered their salt levels —and, 15 , there has been a【C15】______per cent 【C16】______in salt intake in the UK, according to CASH. Repeating the trick with sugar may be more【C17】______not least because we do not know for sure if our palates (sense of taste) can adjust to eating food that is less【C18】______. By contrast, studies have shown that if volunteers are forced to eat a less salty diet, over several weeks they gradually begin to【C19】______food that is less salty. "There"s no reason to think that would not hold【C20】______for sweet taste too," says Charles Spence, a neurogas-tronomist at the University of Oxford.

Though some people have suggested that women should return to housework in order to leave (1)_____ jobs for men, the idea has been rejected by both women and men in public (2)_____ polls. Lately some union officials have suggested that too many women are employed in types of work were (3)_____ for men and that women should step aside to make (4)_____ for unemployed young men. They argue that women, especially women in their child-bearing years. (5)_____ delay economic development and result (6)_____ lower productivity, poor quality and inefficiency. To solve the problem, they suggested that working women stay at home (7)_____ their husbands or brothers were given double wages. They argue that (8)_____ these circumstances, families would (9)_____ their same level of income, and women could run the house and (10)_____ children much better. The suggestion, (11)_____, has been flatly rejected by 9 out of 10 people (12)_____. Some other people have suggested another way (13)_____ "phased employment "theory. The theory suggests that a woman worker take (14)_____ from her job when she is seven months pregnant and stay off the job (15)_____ her baby reaches the age of 3.@It suggests that women (16)_____ leave receive 75 percent of their (17)_____ salary and be allowed to return to work after the three-year period. This will (18)_____ children, women, their families and the society and it (19)_____ seems to be more acceptable than the suggestion (20)_____ women return to their homes forever.

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

King Richard III was a monster. He poisoned his wife, stole the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London. Richard was a sort of Antichrist the King—"that bottled spider, that poisonous bunch-backed toad". Anyway, that was Shakespeare"s version. Shakespeare did what the playwright does: he turned history into a vivid, articulate, organized dream-repeatable nightly. He put the crouchback onstage, and sold tickets. And who would say that the real Richard known to family and friends was not identical to Shakespeare"s memorably loathsome creation? The actual Richard went dimming into the past and vanished. When all the eye-witnesses are gone, the artist"s imagination begins to twist. Variations on the King Richard Effect are at work in Oliver Stone"s JFK. Richard III was art, but it was propaganda too. Shakespeare took the details of his plot from Tudor historians who wanted to blacken Richard"s name. Several centuries passed before other historians began to write about Richard"s virtues and suggest that he may have been a victim of Tudor malice and what is the cleverest conspiracy of all: art. JFK is a long and powerful harangue about the death of the man Stone keeps calling "the slain young king". What are the rules of Stone"s game? Is Stone functioning as commercial entertainer? Propagandist? Documentary filmmaker? Historian? Journalist? Fantasist? Sensationalist? Crazy conspiracy monger? Lone hero crusading for the truth against a corrupt Establishment? Answer: some of the above. The first superficial effect of JFK is to raise angry little scruples like welts in the conscience. Wouldn"t it be absurd if a generation of younger Americans, with no memory of 1963, were to form their ideas about John Kennedy"s assassination from Oliver Stone"s report of it? But worse things have happened—including, perhaps, the Warren Commission report? Stone uses a suspect, mixed art form, and JFK raises the familiar ethical and historical problems of docudrama. But so what? Artists have always used public events as raw material, have taken history into their imaginations and transformed it. The fall of Troy vanished into the Iliad. The Battle of Borodino found its most memorable permanence in Tolstoy"s imagining of it in War and Peace. Especially in a world of insatiable electronic storytelling, real history procreates, endlessly conjuring new versions of itself. Public life has become a metaphysical breeder of fictions. Watergate became an almost continuous television miniseries—although it is interesting that the movie of Woodward and Bernstein"s All The President"s Men stayed close to the known facts and, unlike JFK, did not validate dark conjecture.

Crying is hardly an activity encouraged by society. Tears, whether they are of sorrow, anger, or joy, typically make Americans feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. The shedder of tears is likely to apologize, even when a devastating tragedy was the provocation. The observer of tears is likely to do everything possible to put an end to the emotional outpouring. But judging from recent studies of crying behavior, links between illness and crying and the chemical composition of tears, both those responses to tears are often inappropriate and may even be counterproductive . Humans are the only animals definitely known to shed emotiomal tears. Since evolution has given rise to few, if any, purposeless physiological responses, it is logical to assume that crying has one or more functions that enhance survival. Although some observers have suggested that crying is a way to elicit assistance from others(as a crying baby might from its mother), the shedding of tears is hardly necessary to get help. Vocal cries would have been quite enough, more likely than tears to gain attention. So, it appears, there must be something special about tears themselves. Indeed, the new studies suggest that emotional tears may play a direct role in alleviating stress. University of Minnesota researchers who are studying the chemical composition of tears have recently isolated two important chemicals from emotional tears. Both chemicals are found only in tears that are shed in response to emotion. Tears shed because of exposure to cut onion would contain no such substance. Researchers at several other institutions are investigating the usefulness of tears as a means of diagnosing human ills and monitoring drugs. At Tulane University"s Tear Analysis Laboratory Dr. Peter Kastl and his colleagues report that they can use tears to detect drug abuse and exposure to medication, to determine whether a contact lens fits properly of why it may be uncomfortable, to study the causes of "dry eye" syndrome and the effects of eye surgery, and perhaps even to measure exposure to environmental pollutants. At Columbia University Dt. Liasy Faris and colleagues are studying tears for clues to the diagnosis of diseases away from the eyes. Tears can be obtained painlessly without invading the body and only tiny amounts are needed to perform highly refined analyses.

And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can by no means be compared with these processes, and that they have to be required by a sort of special training.

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

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." It's a classic quote from the film Casablanca, but can a computer【C1】______the magic of such classic lines? Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and colleagues at Cornell University have taught a computer to【C2】______classic quotes with an accuracy【C3】______that of mankind. It means computers might one day help film【C4】______test their latest classic lines. The Cornell team collected quotes from the Internet Movie Database, which contains a list of lines flagged by users as deserving to be【C5】______. The context【C6】______a line is uttered can make a quote more notable, so as a control, the team【C7】______each classic quote with an ordinary one from the【C8】______context It was the same【C9】______and spoken by the same character at around the same point in the film. The computer analysed the pairs of quotes— around 2200 in total—for language【C10】______, unusual words, and word combinations. The computer【C11】______to recognize several characteristics【C12】______to the classic quotes, creating a model that could help find them. "The phrases contain【C13】______combinations of words, but at the same time they have a sentence structure that is common, so they are【C14】______to use," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. The analysis also showed that classic lines often have a(n) 【C15】______: they can be widely used because they don't contain words that【C16】______them to a specific context. The model was able to【C17】______between classic and ordinary quotes with 64 percent accuracy.【C18】______scored 78 percent The team【C19】______that political candidates could use the model to assess their【C20】______.

A deal is a deal—except, apparently, when Entergy is involved. The company, a major energy supplier in New England, provoked justified outrage in Vermont last week when it announced it was reneging on a longstanding commitment to abide by the state' s strict nuclear regulations. Instead, the company has done precisely what it would not:challenge the constitutionality of Vermont' s rules in the federal court, as part of a desperate effort to keep its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant running. It' s a stunning move. The conflict has been surfacing since 2002, when the corporation bought Vermont's only nuclear power plant, an aging reactor in Vernon. As a condition of receiving state approval for the sale, the company agreed to seek permission from state regulators to operate past 2012. In 2006, the state went a step further, requiring that any extension of the plant's license be subject to Vermont legislature's approval. Then, too, the company went along. Either Entergy never really intended to live by those commitments, or it simply didn' t foresee what would happen next. A string of accidents, including the partial collapse of a cooling tower in 2007 and the discovery of an underground pipe system leakage, raised serious questions about both Vermont Yankee' s safety and Entergy's management—especially after the company made misleading statements about the pipe. Enraged by Entergy's behavior, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 last year against allowing an extension. Now the company is suddenly claiming that the 2002 agreement is invalid because of the 2006 legislation, and that only the federal government has regulatory power over nuclear issues. The legal issues in the case are obscure: whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that states do have some regulatory authority over nuclear power, legal scholars say that Vermont case will offer a precedent-setting test of how far those powers extend. Certainly, there are valid concerns about the patchwork regulations that could result if every state sets its own rules. But had Entergy kept its word, that debate would be beside the point. The company seems to have concluded that its reputation in Vermont is already so damaged that it has noting left to lose by going to war with the state. But there should be consequences. Permission to run a nuclear plant is a public trust. Entergy runs 11 other reactors in the United States, including Pilgrim Nuclear station in Plymouth. Pledging to run Pilgrim safely, the company has applied for federal permission to keep it open for another 20 years. But as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC)reviews the company' s application, it should keep in mind what promises from Entergy are worth.

Although there are many skillful Braille readers, thousands of other blind people find it difficult to learn that system. They are thereby【C1】______from the world of books and newspapers, having to【C2】______on friends to read aloud to them. A young scientist named Raymond Kurzweil has now designed a computer which is a major【C3】______in providing aid to the【C4】______. His machine, Cyclops, has a camera that【C5】______any page, interprets the print into sounds, and then delivers them orally in a robot-like【C6】______through a speaker. By pressing the appropriate buttons on Cyclops's keyboard, a blind person can "read" any【C7】______document in the English language. This remarkable invention represents a tremendous【C8】______forward in the education of the handicapped. At present, Cyclops costs $50,000. 【C9】______, Mr. Kurzweil and his associates are preparing a smaller【C10】______improved version that will sell for【C11】______than half that price. Within a few years, Kurzweil【C12】______the price range will be low enough for every school and library to【C13】______one. Michael Hingson, Director of the National Federation for the Blind, hopes that【C14】______will be able to buy home【C15】______of Cyclops for the price of a good television set. Mr. Hingson's organization purchased five machines and is now【C16】______them in Maryland, Colorado, Iowa, California, and New York. Blind people have been【C17】______in those tests, making lots of【C18】______suggestions to the engineers who helped to produce Cyclops. "This is the first time that blind people have ever done individual studies【C19】______a product was put on the market," Hingson said. Most manufacturers believed that having the blind help the blind was like telling disabled people to teach other disabled people. In that【C20】______the manufacturers have been the blind ones.

A fundamental problem for understanding the evolution of human language has been the lack of significant parallels among nonhuman primates. Several studies found that nonhuman primates do not have a vocal tract. However, such points have been challenged by recent research, suggesting that nonhuman primates may after all be valuable models for understanding the evolution of speech and language. The main animal model for vocal learning has been birdsong acquisition. However, there are crucial differences between birdsong acquisition and human language learning. And given some severe limitations, for example, birds have two vocal organs and do not have the flexible supralaryn-geal structures that facilitate speech, of birdsong as a model of speech, there is value in seeking other appropriate parallels among mammals. Recent studies on macaques and baboons have shown that the vocal tracts of these monkeys can produce a full range of human-like vowels. Turn-taking is a key to fluent human conversation and has been thought to be unique to humans. One study found that captive chimpanzees increasingly share resources when resources are diminished. Collaborative turn-taking for food has been seen in other primates. These recent studies show that there is value in looking for the evolutionary origins of speech and language in nonhuman primates. Human speech and language are highly complex systems with multiple components. Thus, to fully explain language origins, researchers must seek multiple models that represent both diverging and converging evolutionary processes. There may also be differences among primate species in the developmental processes that parallel human language acquisition. However, no studies have yet described vowel-like sounds in these monkeys, so marmosets and tamarins may be useful primarily for developmental studies. It is probable that early humans faced evolutionary pressures that differed from those encountered by other primates and that have made our complex communication system adaptive. Language may have been important for coordinating activities in large cooperative groups. If individuals can thrive without complex vocal signaling, there would be little motivation to push the communication further. Different sensory and motor systems may be important. We tend to evaluate language through a vocal / auditory system, whereas research on apes is beginning to illustrate the complexity of gestural communication. Nonhuman primates do not talk, but we should not expect them to. Each species has its own adaptations for communication. Nevertheless, there is much about language evolution that we can learn from nonhuman primates, provided that we study a variety of species and consider the multiple components of speech and language.

Homework has never been terribly popular with students and even many parents, but in recently years it has been particularly scorned. School districts across the country, most recently Los Angeles Unified, are revising their thinking on this educational ritual. Unfortunately, L.A. Unified has produced an inflexible policy which mandates that with the exception of some advanced courses, homework may no longer count for more than 10% of a student' s academic grade. This rule is meant to address the difficulty that students from impoverished or chaotic homes might have in completing their homework. But the policy is unclear and contradictory. Certainly, no homework should be assigned that students cannot complete on their own or that they cannot do without expensive equipment. But if the district is essentially giving a pass to students who do not do their homework because of complicated family lives, it is going riskily close to the implication that standards need to be lowered for poor children. District administrators say that homework will still be a part of schooling; teachers are allowed to assign as much of it as they want. But with homework counting for no more than 10% of their grades, students can easily skip half their homework and see very little difference on their report cards. Some students might do well on state tests without completing their homework, but what about the students who performed well on the tests and did their homework? It is quite possible that the homework helped. Yet rather than empowering teachers to find what works best for their students, the policy imposes a flat, across-the-board rule. At the same time, the policy addresses none of the truly thorny questions about homework. If the district finds homework to be unimportant to its students' academic achievement, it should move to reduce or eliminate the assignments, not make them count for almost nothing. Conversely, if homework matters, it should account for a significant portion of the grade. Meanwhile, this policy does nothing to ensure that the homework students receive is meaningful or appropriate to their age and the subject, or that teachers are not assigning more than they are willing to review and correct. The homework rules should be put on hold while the school board, which is responsible for setting educational policy, looks into the matter and conducts public hearings. It is not too late for L.A. Unified to do homework right.

场景：一组面试的大学毕业生正在等待某个公司主管的面试，他们面带微笑，各自憧憬着美好的未来—高薪、高职、大房子、跑车、沙滩海岸带薪假期…但他们都忽略了一件事，那就是他们必须从头做起、努力工作才能换回梦想的一切。 1) 用自己的话描述以上情境； 2) 试着分析上述情境体现出的心态； 3) 你的观点。 You should write about 160—200 words neatly.

A Letter of Request Write a letter of about 100 words based on the following situation: You are striving to find a job in ABC Company. Now write a letter of request to your teacher Professor Brown, asking him to write a recommendation letter for you. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Suppose you are a member of staff at the library in your university. Your library plans to purchase some new books. Write a letter to the publishing house which includes: (1) the purpose of writing the letter; (2) an enquiry about detailed information on the new books; (3) an enquiry about a possible discount. 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.

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." It"s a classic quote from the film Casablanca, but can a computer【C1】______the magic of such classic lines? Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and colleagues at Cornell University have taught a computer to【C2】______classic quotes with an accuracy【C3】______that of mankind. It means computers might one day help film【C4】______test their latest classic lines. The Cornell team collected quotes from the Internet Movie Database, which contains a list of lines flagged by users as deserving to be【C5】______. The context【C6】______a line is uttered can make a quote more notable, so as a control, the team【C7】______each classic quote with an ordinary one from the【C8】______context It was the same【C9】______and spoken by the same character at around the same point in the film. The computer analysed the pairs of quotes—around 2200 in total—for language【C10】______, unusual words, and word combinations. The computer【C11】______to recognize several characteristics【C12】______to the classic quotes, creating a model that could help find them. "The phrases contain【C13】______combinations of words, but at the same time they have a sentence structure that is common, so they are【C14】______to use," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. The analysis also showed that classic lines often have a(n) 【C15】______: they can be widely used because they don"t contain words that【C16】______them to a specific context The model was able to【C17】______between classic and ordinary quotes with 64 percent accuracy. 【C18】______scored 78 percent The team【C19】______that political candidates could use the model to assess their【C20】______.

Search engine Google was aiming to float on Wall Street this week, valued at up to $36 billion. But the Internet company"s advisers are meeting this weekend to discuss possibly delaying the public listing after a sharp fall in share prices in New York on Friday. An insider said last night: "The float is teetering on the brink—it really is 50/50 at this stage, although many of us are optimistic." The initial public offering(IPO) of shares in Google, which could raise nearly $4bn, will amount to one of the biggest IPOs for years. But many US firms have shelved their IPOs amid volatile market conditions and investors appear unwilling to subscribe to new equity. A Wall Street analyst said that the Google IPO "would be a seminal event for the American stock market" as its real significance was that it would test whether or not the recovery in equity prices since the end of the Iraq war had taken hold. "If this float works, a lot of other companies will be encouraged and come to the market later in the year," the insider added. "But it will be bad news if the IPO is pulled or the shares fall sharply after the company is listed. If that happens, it could kill off the IPO market in America and elsewhere for at least 12 months." Several fund managers have already expressed reservations about Coogle, in particular its high valuation and the complex way the shares are being sold. Moreover the Google flotation is taking place at a time when technology companies in the US have been shunned. On Thursday, the IPO hit a technical hitch over the failure of the company to meet its legal obligations concerning its employees" stock option plans. But the company did not think that the disclosure would mean a delay to the IPO, which is due on Tuesday, At the top of the suggested price range, Google would be valued not far short of its rival Internet firm Yahoo!—and this has raised eyebrows within the industry. The auction is being conducted over the Internet, and potential buyers will have to register by signing on to a Google website. But only investors who have brokerage accounts with one of the 28 US banks and brokers underwriting the stock sale, will be able to apply. Google suffered a setback last month after it re ported an unexpected, slowdown in its huge growth rate. But sources close to Google"s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, said that the tailing-off of growth was due to seasonal factors and would not affect the IPO.

KnowingtheProblemsIsNotEnoughWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

In George Orwell"s Animal Farm the mighty cart-horse, Boxer, inspires the other animals with his heroic cry of "I will work harder". He gets up at the crack of dawn to do a couple of hours" extra ploughing. He even refuses to take a day off. And his reward for all this effort? As soon as he collapses on the job he is sent to the knacker"s yard to be turned into glue and bone-meal. Animal Farm looks ever more like an allegory about capitalism as well as socialism. Everybody knows about the plague of unemployment. But unemployment is bringing another plague in its wake-overwork. The Hay Group, a British consultancy which recently surveyed 1,000 people, says that two-thirds of workers report they are putting in unpaid overtime. The reward for all this effort is frozen pay and shrinking perks. The only difference between these overstretched workers and Boxer is that they can see the knacker"s van coming. So far workers have borne all this with remarkable perseverance—partly because they feel lucky to keep their jobs and partly because they want to save their firms from going under. But the Dunkirk spirit is beginning to fade. The Hay survey notes that 63% of workers say that their employers do not appreciate their extra effort. Half report that their current level of work is unsustainable. People are wearying of frantic reorganization as well as the added toil-floods of memos and meetings, endless reshuffles, earnest persuasions to do more with less. For their part, companies are beginning to notice the downside of all this overstretching. Absenteeism is on the rise. Corporate loyalty is on the wane. And the biggest danger for companies is if workers head for the door as the economy picks up. Most problematic of all is when star employees decide to look for work elsewhere. These "high-potentials" (HiPos) are doubly frustrated: they have been asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the growing burden of work and they have seen senior jobs dry up as older managers try to cling to their positions. What can organizations do to cope with this new era of overwork? Most obviously they can redouble efforts to make staff feel valued. Cash-strapped companies are making more use of symbolic rewards.A second strategy is to make more use of that old favorite, "empowerment". This means trying harder to explain why companies are acting as they are.A third strategy is to pay particular attention to high performers.A striking number of companies have introduced "HiPo schemes" to identify and nurture potential stars. Yet this approach is less divisive than it sounds because some animals are more equal than others.