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 in 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.

In September, more than a dozen whales beached themselves in the Canary Islands. Rescuers tried to water down the whales and keep them cool. But all of them【C1】______died. Nearby, NATO naval forces were【C2】______echo sounding devices meant to【C3】______an enemy"s submarines, and public【C4】______of the deaths ultimately came to【C5】______suspicions of a link between whale distress and loud ocean noises. The theory is that the mammals seek to【C6】______the roar of the deep, rush toward the surface and in some cases end up going【C7】______. For decades, environmentalists have worked to reduce the undersea noise—usually with【C8】______success, given the growing industrialization and militarization of the oceans. They have【C9】______suits and waged letter-writing campaigns,【C10】______a recent petition that asks the United States Navy to【C11】______its testing of underwater sound equipment The discovery by biologists in Hawaii that whales can【C12】______the sensitivity of their hearing to protect their ears from loud noise adds another dimension to the【C13】______. Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst, called the research fascinating and said he hoped it would prove【C14】______in protecting whale hearing from these threats. But he【C15】______the finding as a work in【C16】______that posed many unanswered questions. "A lot more work needs【C17】______," he said. "Could it be replicated in the wild? It"s a huge question." 【C18】______whales could learn to decrease the sensitivity of their hearing, Mr. Jasny said, that would【C19】______only a relatively small part of the oceanic noise problem. "It"s important to understand that it"s【C20】______," he said of the proposed method. "It won"t be a silver bullet."

Students"BreakfastandTheirHealthConditionsA.Studythefollowingchartcarefullyandwriteanessayof160-200words.B.Youressayshouldcoverthesethreepoints:1)therelationshipbetweenstudents"breakfastandtheirhealthconditions2)possiblereasons3)yoursuggestions

Write a letter to the director of the library in your university, giving some advice on how to improve the library service. You should include the details you think necessary. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address. (10 points)

The producers of instant coffee found their product strongly resisted in the market places despite their product"s manifest advantages. Furthermore, the advertising expenditure for instant coffee was far greater than that for regular coffee. Efforts were made to find the cause of the consumers" seemingly unreasonable resistance to the product. The reason given by most people was dislike for the taste. The producers suspected that there might be deeper reasons, however. This was confirmed by one of motivation research"s classic studies, one often cited in the trade. Mason Haire, of the University of California, constructed two shopping lists that were identical except for one item. There were six items common to both lists: hamburger, carrots, bread, baking powder, canned peaches, and potatoes, with the brands or amounts specified. The seventh item, in fifth place on both lists, read "1 lb. Maxwell House Coffee" on one list and "Nestle Instant Coffee" on the other. One list was given to each one in a group of fifty women, and the other list to those in another group of the same size. The women were asked to study their lists and then to describe, as far as they could, the kind of women ("personality and character") who would draw up that shopping list. Nearly half of those who had received the list including instant coffee described a housewife who was lazy and a poor planner. On the other hand, only one woman in the other group described the housewife, who had included regular coffee on her list, as lazy; only six of that group suggested that she was a poor planner. Eight women felt that the instant-coffee user was probably not a good wife! No one in the other group drew such a conclusion about the housewife who intended to buy regular coffee.

Yesterday afternoon I met an old friend of mine, who said that he would go abroad next week.

Countering their expectations, biologists working in Bangladesh have found a thriving population of 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins, a species restricted to brackish bays and rivers from southern Asia to northern Australia that marine mammal experts had worried was vulnerable to extinction. The population, many times larger than any other known regional groups of the dolphins, was revealed in 2004 in the first systematic survey for marine mammals along Bangladesh " s coast of waterways, bays and mangrove-fringed islands. The full results were described Wednesday in Hawaii at the first international conference on protected areas for marine mammals and in a paper in the winter issue of the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. American and Bangladeshi biologists conducted the dolphin survey by boat. The researchers said that the six to eight-foot dolphins, while apparently thriving, needed to be protected and monitored in view of rising threats like entanglement in fishing nets, a decline in freshwater flows because of dam construction and inland diversions of water along the rivers that sustain the coastal ecosystems. The scientists also signaled a long-term threat to the dolphins from global warming, which climate studies project will raise sea levels and change the river flows as Himalayan glaciers erode. This would shrink the species" range, which is restricted to water with low salinity. The Wildlife Conservation Society, which led the study, is working with the Bangladesh Ministry of Environment and Forests to create protected areas for the dolphin and for another species, the Ganges River dolphin, and seeking money for the effort, said Howard Rosenbaum, a biologist who directs the "ocean giants" program of the nonprofit group. "This mother-lode population in Bangladesh really gives us hope for the survivability of the species in the long term," Dr. Rosenbaum said. Dolphin and porpoise species that have adapted to rivers and deltas around the world have long been considered some of the most vulnerable of marine mammals because of their restricted habitats. In 2007, experts concluded that the baiji, a river dolphin that thrived in the Yangtze River for 20 million years in what is today China, had been driven extinct by a variety of activities by the nearly half billion people now living in that watershed. The vaquita, a porpoise living in waters where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California, is critically endangered, biologists say, depleted by fishing nets and the disruptions in the river"s flow from dam construction.

If national health insurance would not cure the problems of the American healthcare system, what, then, is responsible for them? Suspicion falls heavily on hospitals, which make up the largest component of the system. In 1988 hospitals accounted for 39% of all health expenditures-more than doctor, nursing homes, drugs, and home health care combined. Although U.S. hospitals provide outstanding research and frequently excellent care, they also exhibit the classic attributes of insufficient organizations: increasing costs and decreasing use. The average cost of a hospital stay in 1987—$3,850—was more than double the 1980 cost. A careful government analysis published in 1987 revealed the inflation of hospital costs, over and above general price inflation, as a major factor in their growth, even after allowances were made for increases in the population and in intensity of care. While the rate of increase for hospital costs was 2796 greater than that for all medical care and 163% greater than that for all other goods and services, demand for hospital services fell by 34%. But hospitals seemed oblivious of the decline: during this period the number of hospital beds shrank only by about 396, and the number of full-time employees grew by more than 240,000. After yet another unexpectedly high hospital-cost increase last year, one puzzled government analyst asked: "Where"s the money going?" Much of the increase in hospital costs—amounting to $180 billion from 1965 to 1987—went to duplicating medical technology available in nearby hospitals and maintaining excess beds. Modern Healthcare, a leading journal in the field, recently noted that "anecdotes of hospitals" unnecessary spending on technology abound". Medical technology is very expensive. An operating room outfitted to perform open-heart surgery costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. From 1982 to 1989 the number of hospitals with open-heart-surgery facilities grew by 33%, and the most rapid growth occurred among smaller and moderate-sized hospitals. This growth was worrisome for reasons of both costs and quality. Underused technology almost inevitably decreases quality of care. In medicine, as in everything else, practice makes perfect. For example, most of the hospitals with the lowest mortality rates for coronary-bypass surgery perform at least fifty to a hundred such procedures annually, and in some cases many more; the majority of those with the highest mortality rates perform fewer than fifty a year.

An E-mail to a Roommate You are going to study abroad and share an apartment with John, a local student. Write him an e-mail to tell him about your living habits, and ask for advice about living there. Do not sign your own name at the end of the e-mail. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

"There is one and only one social responsibility of business," wrote Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, "That is, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits." But even if you accept Friedman's premise and regard corporate social responsibility(CSR)policies as a waste of shareholders' money, things may not be absolutely clear-cut. New research suggests that CSR may create monetary value for companies—at least when they are prosecuted for corruption. The largest firms in America and Britain together spend more than $ 15 billion a year on CSR, according to an estimate by EPG, a consulting firm. This could add value to their businesses in three ways. First, consumers may take CSR spending as a "signal" that a company's products are of high quality. Second, customers may be willing to buy a company's products as an indirect way to donate to the good causes it helps. And third, through a more diffuse "halo effect," whereby its good deeds earn it greater consideration from consumers and others. Previous studies on CSR have had trouble differentiating these effects because consumers can be affected by all three. A recent study attempts to separate them by looking at bribery prosecutions under America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act(FCPA). It argues that since prosecutors do not consume a company's products as part of their investigations, they could be influenced only by the halo effect. The study found that, among prosecuted firms, those with the most comprehensive CSR programmes tended to get more lenient penalties. Their analysis ruled out the possibility that it was firms' political influence, rather than their CSR stand, that accounted for the leniency: Companies that contributed more to political campaigns did not receive lower fines. In all, the study concludes that whereas prosecutors should only evaluate a case based on its merits, they do seem to be influenced by a company's record in CSR. "We estimate that either eliminating a substantial labour-rights concern, such as child labour, or increasing corporate giving by about 20% results in fines that generally are 40% lower than the typical punishment for bribing foreign officials," says one researcher. Researchers admit that their study does not answer the question of how much businesses ought to spend on CSR. Nor does it reveal how much companies are banking on the halo effect, rather than the other possible benefits, when they decide their do-gooding policies. But at least they have demonstrated that when companies get into trouble with the law, evidence of good character can win them a less costly punishment.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

Of all the senseless ways to end up in the emergency room, getting injured because you're walking while using your cell phone has to be up near the top. Yet at least 1,500 Americans told that embarrassing story in 2010, according to research being published next month in the journal Accident Analysis it may just occur less often.) Injured pedestrian tended to be on the younger side of 25, and the authors of the new paper think parents should make "don't talk and walk" the new "look both ways before you cross the street." At the end of the day, distracted walking isn't nearly the problem distracted driving is—far more often an annoyance to other pedestrians than a genuine safety risk. While legislative efforts to ban the practice have all failed (and, let's be honest, probably should fail), there are still some pretty simple street design measures that cities can take to address the problem.【F5】 New York's "LOOK" campaign tries to alert distracted pedestrians before they cross the street, and one can also imagine some jolting pedestrian equivalent to highway rumble strips. Then again, if distracted walkers don't notice a clown on a unicycle, you have to wonder if anything will catch their attention.

President Bush takes to the bully pulpit to deliver a stern lecture to America"s business elite. The Justice Dept. stuns the accounting profession by filing a criminal indictment of Arthur Andersen LLP for destroying documents related to its audits of Enron Corp. On Capitol Hill, some congressional panels push on with biased hearings on Enron"s collapse and, now, another busted New Economy star, telecom"s Global Crossing. Lawmakers sign on to new bills aimed at tightening oversight of everything from pensions and accounting to executive pay. To any spectators, it would be easy to conclude that the winds of change are sweeping Corporate America, led by George W. Bush, who ran as "a reformer with result". But far from deconstructing the corporate world brick by brick into something cleaner, sparer, and stronger, Bush aides and many legislators are preparing modest legislative and administrative reforms. Instead of an overhaul, Bush"s team is counting on its enforcers, Justice and a newly empowered Securities & Exchange Commission, to make examples of the most egregious offenders. The idea is that business will quickly get the message and clean up its own act. Why won"t the outraged rhetoric result in more changes? For starters, the Bush Administration warns that any rush to legislate corporate behavior could produce a raft of flawed bills that raise costs without halting abuses. Business has striven to drive the point home with an intense lobbying blitz that has convinced many lawmakers that over-regulation could startle the stock market and perhaps endanger the nascent economic recovery. All this sets the stage for Washington to get busy with predictably modest results. A surge of caution is sweeping would-be reformers on the Hill. "They know they don"t want to make a big mistake", says Jerry J. Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. That go-slow approach suits the White House. Aides say the President, while personally disgusted by Enron"s sellout of its pensioners, is reluctant to embrace new sanctions that frustrate even law-abiding corporations and create a litigation bonanza for trial lawyers. Instead, the White House will push for narrowly targeted action, most of it carried out by the SEC, the Treasury Dept., and the Labor Dept. The right outcome, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O"Neill said on Mar. 15, "depends on the Congress not legislating things that are over the top". To O"Neill and Bush, that means enforcing current laws before passing too many new ones. Nowhere is that stance clearer than in the Andersen indictment. So the Bush Administration left the decision to Justice Dept. prosecutors rather than White House political operatives or their reformist fellows at the SEC.

For the past two years in Silicon Valley, the centre of America"s technology industry, conference-goers have entertained themselves playing a guessing game: how many times will a speaker mention the phrase "long tail"? It is usually a high number, thanks to the influence of the long-tail theory, which was first developed by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, in an article in 2004. Though technologists and bloggers chuckle at how every business presentation now has to have its long-tail section, most are envious of Mr. Anderson, whose brainwave quickly became the most fashionable business idea around. Whether a blockbuster film, a bestselling novel, or a chart-topping rap song, popular culture idolises the hit. Companies devote themselves to creating them because the cost of distribution and the limits of shelf space in physical shops mean that profitability depends on a high volume of sales. But around the beginning of this century a group of internet companies realised that with endless shelves and a national or even international audience online they could offer a huge range of products—and make money at the same time. The niche, the obscure and the specialist, Mr. Anderson argues, will gain ground at the expense of the hit. As evidence, he points to a drop in the number of companies that traditionally calculate their revenue/sales ratio according to the 80/20 rule—where the top fifth of products contribute four-fifths of revenues. Ecast, a San Francisco digital jukebox company, found that 98% of its 10000 albums sold at least one track every three months. Expressed in the language of statistics, the experiences of Ecast and other companies such as Aragon, an online bookseller, suggest that products down in the long tail of a statistical distribution, added together, can be highly profitable. The internet helps people find their way to relatively obscure material with recommendations and reviews by other people, (and for those willing to have their artistic tastes predicted by a piece of software) computer programs which analyse past selections. Long-tail enthusiasts argue that the whole of culture will benefit, not just commercial enterprises. Television, film and music are such bewitching media in their own right that many people are quite happy to watch and listen to what the mainstream provides. But if individuals have the opportunity to pick better, more ideally suited entertainment from a far wider selection, they will take it, according to the theory of the long tail. Some analysts reckon that entire populations might become happier and wiser once they have access to thousands of documentaries, independent films and subgenres of every kind of music, instead of being subjected to what Mr. Anderson calls the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare. That might be taking things a bit far. But the long tail is certainly one of the internet"s better gifts to humanity.

SpamTextMessageWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

A Notarized Certificate Write a notarization of about 100 words based on the following situation: Please write a notarization of graduation certificate for Li Ming on behalf of the Notary Public Office of Shanghai.

Actually, it isn't, ...

A mace-wielding clown lashes at a bear cub. An elephant stands on its rear legs on the point of a stun gun, electric arcs running through its body. These and dozens of other images featured at a poster exhibition in Beijing are meant to shock, so that hopefully visitors will go home with the message the organizers want them to remember: animal performance is cruel, and people can help end it by not watching. "Not Born to Perform," which runs until April 15, is yet another anticruelty campaign by Animals Asia Foundation. Except this time, seeking a venue to display the posters, the animal welfare group has teamed up with an unlikely partner, the city's oldest and perhaps best-known zoo. "By agreeing to host the exhibition on their premises, Beijing Zoo has set a precedent for all other zoological gardens in China," said Pei Xin, the senior animal welfare officer of Animals Asia. "We hope more zoos will join it in making such an outstanding commitment to ending animal performance." The exhibition may help educate "zoo managers on why animal performances stifle the expression of normal behavior and that is just not right," said Zhang Jinguo, the deputy curator of the Beijing Zoo. It also tells visitors that "novelty and thrill isn't always cool," he said. The partnership illustrates the long way Chinese zoos have come in a continuing debate, sometimes laden with high-stake confrontations, over the welfare of wild animals in captivity. "As recently as 2010, mentioning the issue of animal performance was a sure-fire way to be excluded and ignored by zoos and animal facilities," Dave Neale, Animal Asia's animal welfare director, said in an emailed statement. About 50 percent of urban zoos, 91 percent of the wildlife parks and 89 percent of the aquariums in China were still operating recreational animal shows, China Zoo Watch, a volunteer-based group that documents alleged abuses, found in 2012, after monitoring over 40 facilities across the country. Even the Beijing Zoo, in its 107 years as a public zoo, had its share of animal abuse scandals. In July 2010, the zoo was found to have covered up the death of a panda for three weeks. Earlier the same year, news that a zoo restaurant served non-indigenous animals including hippopotamus and kangaroos subjected the zoo to public ridicule.

Heroes are people that have aehieved something that we admire. It could be a character in a book or a movie. Everybody loves a hero. People often have their own personal heroes that represent the values to which they aspire. Many select their hero from the public domain. The hero may be an actor, a musician, a politician or a celebrity. Sometimes it is a person that has committed a heroic act, showing great courage in the face of danger. We admire what they stand for. But back at home in their private(and sometimes not so private)life, heroes are normal people. Normal people are subject to temptation and are faced with the stresses of everyday life. Few people are perfect, and when the spotlight falls upon their private lives the result is often disappointing. A young golfer captured the imagination of the world. His achievements were immense, and he became a hero to many young golfers and others. He had a beautiful wife and young children and seemed like a role model for many. Suddenly, news emerged about countless affairs and infidelity. No longer the hero, the young golfer is in disgrace. Success brings about a whole new range of temptations. Our hero was human and didn"t know how to resist. Does this negate everything that he had achieved? Does it mean that his character is now bad? There must be many discarded heroes in the world—politicians and activists of high integrity that have fallen prey to the temptation of corruption, sports heroes that have used steroids, and celebrities that have become involved in drug and alcohol abuse and infidelity. These are common mistakes or errors of judgment that we are all subject to. Even when we stray away from the straight and narrow we may return. So we are disappointed by our hero who behaved badly. Is it right to discard this hero and find another? Being human means making mistakes. There are none that are perfect and do only good. Each of us has our faults and imperfections. We will all be disappointed by our heroes from time to time. Sometimes the damage is too great to allow for forgiveness and it is time to find a new hero. But doing something wrong does not take away the achievements that have been achieved. It does not negate the courage or bravery that was required to become a hero. Recognize your hero for what he or she has achieved and remember that no-one is perfect.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)A. "It is always better to buy a house; paying rent is like pouring money down the drain." For years, such advice has encouraged people to borrow heavily to get on the property ladder as soon as possible. But is it still sound advice? House prices are currently at record levels in relation to rents in many parts of the world and it now often makes more financial sense—especially for first-time buyers—to rent instead.B. "If I don"t buy now, I"ll never get on the property ladder" is a common cry from first-time buyers. If house prices continue to outpace wages, that is true. But it now looks unlikely. When prices get out of line with what first-timers can afford, as they are today, they always eventually fall in real terms. The myth that buying is always better than renting grew out of the high inflation era of the 1970s and 1950s. First-time buyers then always ended up better off than renters, because inflation eroded the real value of mortgages even while it pushed up rents. Mortgage-interest tax relief was also worth more when inflation, and hence nominal interest rates, was high. With inflation now tamed, home ownership is far less attractive.C. Homebuyers tend to underestimate their costs. Once maintenance costs, insurance and property taxes are added to mortgage payments, total annual outgoings now easily exceed the cost of renting an equivalent property, even after taking account of tax breaks. Ah, but capital gains will more than make up for that, it is popularly argued. Over the past seven years, average house prices in America have risen by 65%, those in Britain, Spain, Australia and Ireland have more than doubled. But it is unrealistic to expect such gains to continue. Making the (optimistic) assumption that house prices instead rise in line with inflation, and including buying and selling costs, then over a period of seven years,—the average time American owners stay in one house—our calculations show that you would generally be better off renting.D. Be warned, if you make such a bold claim at a dinner party, you will immediately be set upon. Paying rent is throwing money away, it will be argued. Much better to spend the money on a mortgage, and by so doing build up equity. The snag is that the typical first-time buyer keeps a house for less than five years, and during that time most mortgage payments go on interest, not on repaying the loan. And if prices fall, it could wipe out your equity.E. In any case, a renter can accumulate wealth by putting the money saved each year from the lower cost of renting into shares. These have, historically, yielded a higher return than housing. Putting all your money into a house also breaks the basic rule of prudent investing: diversify. And yes, it is true that a mortgage leverages the gains on your initial deposit on a house, but it also amplifies your losses if house prices fall.F. The divergence between rents and house prices is, of course, evidence of a housing bubble. Someday prices will fall relative to rents and wages. After they do, it will make sense to buy a home. Until they do, the smart money is on renting.G. "I want to have a place to call home" is a popular retort. Renting provides less long-term security and you cannot paint all the walls orange if you want to. Home ownership is an excellent personal goal, but it may not always make financial sense. The pride of "owning" your own home may quickly fade if you are saddled with a mortgage that costs much more than renting. Also, renting does have some advantages. Renters find it easier to move for job or family reasons.Order: A is the 1st paragraph and F is the last.