Considering that industry analysts claim that hospital price calculations are arbitrary, we asked hospitals nationwide a simple question: How do you calculate your sticker prices? Five declined to comment or didn't provide an answer, leaving Murray Askinazi, senior vice president and CFO of Lawrence Hospital Center in Bronxville, New York, to offer this explanation: For an outpatient MRI, as an example , his hospital calculates its charge based on such factors as the cost of buying or leasing the machinery, the wear and tear on that machine, staff salaries, the climate control and electric bill, cleaning costs, local competitive pricing, and other costs related to the hospital's overhead, like malpractice insurance. Surprisingly, medical services can vary wildly from one hospital to the next. The median charge for acute appendicitis admissions at 289 medical centers and hospitals throughout California, for example, ranged from $1,529 to almost $183,000, an Archives of Internal Medicine study reported in April. Within San Francisco alone, the range between the lowest and highest charge was nearly $172,000. But hospital sticker prices matter only to a limited extent because they typically get trumped by a higher power; the amounts that insurance companies are willing to pay for those services. The figures are determined by a negotiated contract that dictates the rate at which the companies will reimburse the hospital on the patient's behalf. (In addition, the rates paid by Medicare and Medicaid, Askinazi adds, often fail to cover the hospital's cost of providing the service in the first place, which means some of those costs are often shifted to commercially insured patients.) Now, all those factors affect the math for one simple outpatient test. For an inpatient hospital stay, those computations sprout into an intricate vine in which every service (from radiology to pathology) generates its own charges. The hospital also has facility charges, covering room and board, certain room-use fees (such as the operating room) , and nursing services, all of which get consolidated into the bill sent to you and your insurance company. As technology advances, those charges rise. Palmer had a client from Louisville, Kentucky, who was astonished to receive a charge of $45,330 for a prostate surgery and an overnight stay (insurance would cover only $4,845). The billing department told Palmer that the steep price was not only because it was a robotic procedure but also because patients who receive the high-tech surgery shortly after the hospital starts offering it are helping to recoup the facility's equipment costs.

Menorca or Majorca? It is that time of the year again. The brochures are piling up in travel agents while newspapers and magazines bulge with advice about where to go. But the traditional packaged holiday, a British innovation that provided many timid natives with their first experience of warm sand, is not what it was. Indeed, the industry is anxiously awaiting a High Court ruling to find out exactly what it now is. Two things have changed the way Britons research and book their holidays: low-cost airlines and the internet. Instead of buying a ready made package consisting of a flight, hotel, car hire and assorted entertainment from a tour operator"s brochure, it is now easy to put together a trip using an online travel agent like Expedia or Travelocity, which last July bought Lastminute.com for ￡577m ($1 billion), or from the proliferating websites of airlines, hotels and car-rental firms. This has led some to sound the death knell for high street travel agents and tour operators. There have been upheavals and closures, but the traditional firms are starting to fight back, in part by moving more of their business online. First Choice Holidays, for instance, saw its pre tax profit rise by 16% to ￡114m ($196m) in the year to the end of October. Although the overall number of holidays booked has fallen, the company is concentrating on more valuable long-haul and adventure trips. First Choice now sells more than half its trips directly, either via the internet, over the telephone or from its own travel shops. It wants that to reach 75% within a few years. Other tour operators are showing similar hustle. MyTravel managed to cut its loss by almost half in 2005. Thomas Cook and Thomson Holidays, now both German owned, are also bullish about the coming holiday season. Highstreet travel agents are having a tougher time, though, not least because many leading tour operations have cut the commissions they pay. Some high-street travel agents are also learning to live with the internet, helping people book complicated trips that they have researched online, providing advice and tacking on other services: This is seen as a growth area. But if an agent puts together separate flights and hotel accommodation, is that a package, too? The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it is and the agent should hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence, which provides financial guarantees to repatriate people and provide refunds. The scheme dates from the early 1970s, when some large British travel firms went bust, stranding customers on the Costas. Although such failures are less common these days, the CAA had to help out some 30,000 people last year. The Association of British Travel Agents went to the High Court in November to argue such bookings are not traditional packages and so do not require agents to acquire the costly licences. While the court decides, millions of Britons will happily click away buying online holidays, unaware of the difference.

A study found that the radiation from CT scans—the tests regularly used to【C1】______internal injuries or signs of cancer—is likely【C2】______for 2 percent of cancer cases in the United States. 【C3】______lots of Americans undergo CT scans, that research is unlikely to【C4】______in doctors" offices: Two-thirds of patients in a new JAMA study reported 【C5】______nothing of the risks of the diagnostic procedure. 【C6】______, 17 percent felt like they played an active role in a discussion【C7】______whether this diagnostic test was the best path forward. "Our study indicates that most decisions to undergo outpatient CT are【C8】______by physicians and risk communication is【C9】______," a team of researchers led by University of Colorado"s Tanner Caverly writes. "The risk communication that took place had limited【C10】______: respondents who recalled discussing the benefits and risks of imaging did not have better 【C11】______." Would a conversation about the【C12】______risks have made a difference? Caverly"s team asked a few other questions that suggest it would: Patients undergoing the scan have little idea about the radiation【C13】______One-quarter self-identified radiation as a risk of a CT scan; 37 percent were able to identify CT scans as having a higher level of radiation【C14】______a chest x-ray. There"s a growing movement in medicine right now to【C15】______on unnecessary treatment or【C16】______of care. Much of this has been led by a group called Choosing Wisely, which has【C17】______ with dozens of medical societies to come up with lists of 【C18】______that doctors themselves don"t think they ought to be using. One of their key messages is that more care isn"t【C19】______better, all medicine comes with some level of risk. That message does not,【C20】______, seem to be delivered in the doctor"s offices studied here.

Each scientific specialty has its own set of journals. Physicists have Physical Review Letters, cell biologists have Cell, neuroscientists have Neuron, and so forth. Science and Nature, (1)_____, are the only two major journals that (2)_____ the complete range of scientific (3)_____. As a result, journalists look (4)_____ them each week for the (5)_____ of new science papers. And scientists look to the journals (6)_____ to reach journalists. Why do they care? Competition for (7)_____ has gotten so fierce that scientists have sought popular (8)_____ to gain an advantage over their (9)_____. Publication in specialized journals will win the honor of academics and satisfy the publish-or-perish (10)_____, but Science and Nature come with the added bonus of potentially getting your paper written up in The New York Times and other publications. Scientists are also trying to (11)_____ other scientists through Science and Nature, not just the public. The line between popular and professional notoriety is not (12)_____. Scientists tend to pay more attention to the Big Two than to other journals. (13)_____ more scientists know about a particular pa per, they are more apt to cite it in their own papers. Being often-cited will increase a scientist"s "Impact Factor", a measure of how often papers are cited by (14)_____. Funding agencies use the Impact Factor as a (15)_____ measure of the influence of scientists they are considering supporting. (16)_____ Science and Nature papers have more visibility, the number of" submissions is growing, say the editors. Nature now gets 10,000 (17)_____ a year, and that figure is rising, says editor-in-chief Philip Campbell via email. In his opinion, this partly reflects the increase (18)_____ scientific activity around the word. It also (19)_____ reflects the increasing and sometimes (20)_____ emphasis amongst funding agencies and governments on publication measures, such as the typical rates of citation of journals.

BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B

Parents"BurdenWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)interpretitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

Man first appeared on earth half a million years ago. Then he was little more than an animal; but early man had several big advantages over the animals. He had a large brain, he had an upright body, he had clever hands; and he had in his brain special groups of nerve cells, not present in animals, that enabled him to invent a language and use it to communicate with his fellow men. (46) This ability to speak was of great value because it allowed men to share ideas and to plan together, so that tasks impossible for a single person could be successfully undertaken by intelligent team-work. Speech also enabled ideas to be passed on from generation to generation so that the stock of human knowledge slowly increased. It was these special advantages that put men far ahead of other living creatures in the struggle for existence. They can use their intelligence against their difficulties and master them. Since these far-off times, when he first appeared, man has achieved a great deal. He has used animals, steam, electricity and oil to move himself more and more quickly from place to place. He has overcome rivers and seas with rafts, canoes, boats and ships of endless variety. (47) He mastered dark-ness, too, first with dim lights and later with brighter and brighter lamps, until he can now make for himself so dazzling a light with an are-lamp that, like the sun, it is too strong for his naked eyes. (48) Man found that his own muscles were too weak for the work which he wanted to do; he explored many forms of power—wind, water, steam, electricity—until now he has his hands on the ultimate source of physical energy, the nuclear power which ties together the smallest units from which all matter is made. From man"s earliest days the flight of birds has raised his wonder and desire. Why should he not fly as they did? Then he began to experiment. At last he learnt how "to make the fight machines to carry him through the air. Now he can fly faster than sound. Already he has plans for conquering space, and a series of experiments has been completed. (49) It will not be long now before man takes a giant step away from his planet and visits the moon, learning what it is like to have no weight to his body, no upward direction and no downward. Man, always a wanderer, has to overcome the difficulty of adapting himself to different climates, (50) Fortunately, in spite of having no thick skin or warm fur to protect him, he is peculiarly strong compared with other living creatures, most of whom are unable to live far outside the region that suits them best. Man, however, can go almost everywhere. You will find him living on the plains and up in the hills; he lives in damp areas and in dry; in the forests of the hot regions of the earth, and in snow huts in the Far North.

There (1)_____ not one type of reading but several according to your reasons for reading. To read carefully, you have to (2)_____ your reading speed and technique (3)_____ your aim (4)_____ reading. Skimming is a technique necessary for quick and efficient reading. When skimming, you (5)_____ the reading (6)_____ quickly in order to get the (7)_____ of it, to know how it is organized, (8)_____ an idea of the tone or the intention of the writer. Skimming is (9)_____ an activity which (10)_____ an overall view of the text and (11)_____ a definite reading competence. Skimming doesn"t need reading all the material, but it doesn"t mean that it is an (12)_____ skill for the lazy, because it need a high degree of alertness and concentration. When you read, you usually start with (13)_____ understanding and move towards detailed understanding rather than working the other way round. But (14)_____ is also used after you have already carefully studied and you need to (15)_____ the major ideas and concepts. In order to be able to skim quickly and (16)_____ through a text, you should know where to look for what you want. In preview skimming you read the introductory information, the headings and subheadings, and the summary, if one is provided. (17)_____ this skimming, decide whether to read the material more thoroughly, and select the appropriate speed (18)_____ you read. The same procedure (19)_____ for preview skimming could also be used to get an overview. Another method would be to read only key words. This is done by omitting the unnecessary words, phrases, and sentences. In order to skim efficiently and fulfill your purpose, (20)_____ practice is necessary.

Virtually every company with a computer is vulnerable to computer abuse, crime and accident. Security of the computer and of the information and assets contained within it are therefore of paramount importance to management. Skilled computer criminals can break into a computer system far more easily than an armed robber can gain access to a bank vault, and usually with far less risk of apprehension and punishment. A slight change in a complex program can bring about the misappropriation of thousands of pounds. Accidental erasure of crucial data can paralyze company"s operations. Anyone familiar with the necessary procedure can gain access to information stored in the computer, no matter how confidential, and utilize it for his own purposes. Although the actual extent of computer crime is difficult to measure, most experts agree that it is one of the fastest growing areas of illegal activity. The principal reason for both the growth and the lack of accurate measurement is the difficulty in detecting a well-executed theft. Losses per incident thus tend to be higher than in other types of theft. Once the Computer criminal has compromised the system, it is just as easy to steal a great sum as it is to steal a little, and to continue stealing long after the initial theft. Indeed, the computer criminal may find it more difficult to stop his illicit activity than to start it. Computer criminals are, for the most part, well-educated and highly intelligent. The fact that computer criminals do not fit criminal stereotypes helps them to obtain the positions they require to carry out crimes. Being intelligent, they have fertile imaginations, and the variety of ways in which they use equipment to their advantages is constantly being extended. In addition to direct theft of funds, the theft of data for corporate espionage or extortion is becoming widespread, and can obviously have a substantial effect on a company"s finances. Another lucrative scheme, often difficult to detect, involves accumulating fractions of pence from individual payroll accounts, with electronic transfer of the accumulated amount to the criminal"s payroll. Employers are hardly concerned with pence, much less fractions of pence. In addition, undoubtedly, the company"s payroll is unaffected. But the cumulative value of fractions of pence per employee in a company with a substantial payroll can add up to a useful gain. Guarding against computer abuse—whether deliberate or accidental—involves attention to the protection of hardware from physical damage as well as protection of software and data. Computer must be isolated from other company facilities, and unauthorized person should never be admitted to the computer area. Event though some risks are reduced through this measure, most damage to software, accidental and intentional, is caused by those whose jobs require at least some access to the computer. The writer of the program is often the one responsible for its misuse. Programs devised exclusively for a particular company are therefore far more valuable to abuse and accident than standard software packages produced by external suppliers.

BPart B/B

Do animals have rights? This is how the question is usually put. It sounds like a useful, ground-clearing way to start. (46) Actually, it isn"t, because it assumes that there is an agreed account of human rights, which is something the world does not have. On one view of rights, to be sure, it necessarily follows what animals have done. (47) Some philosophers argue that rights exist only within a social contract, as part of an exchange of duties and entitlements. Therefore, animals cannot have rights. The idea of punishing a tiger that kills somebody is absurd, for exactly the same reason, so is the idea that tigers have rights. However, this is only one account, and by no means an uncontested one. It denies rights not only to animals but also to some people—for instance, to infants, the mentally incapable and future generations. In addition, it is unclear what force a contract can have for people who never consented to it. How do you reply to somebody who says "I don"t like this contract"? The point is this: without agreement on the rights of people, arguing about the rights of animals is fruitless. (48) It leads the discussion to extremes at the outset: it invites you to think that animals should be treated either with consideration humans extend to other humans, or with no consideration at all. This is a false choice. Better to start with another, more fundamental question: is this the way we treat animals a moral issue at all? Many deny it. (49) Arguing from the point of view that humans are different from animals in every relevant respect, extremists of this kind think that animals lie outside the area of moral choice. Any regard for the suffering of animals is seen as a mistake—a sentimental displacement of feeling that should properly be directed to other humans. This view, which holds that torturing a monkey is morally equivalent to chopping wood, may seem bravely "logical". In fact it is simply shallow: the confused center is right to reject it. The most elementary form of moral reasoning—the ethical equivalent of learning to crawl, is to weigh others" interests against one"s own. This in turn requires sympathy and imagination: without which there is no capacity for moral thought. To see an animal in pain is enough, for most, to engage sympathy. (50) When that happens, it is not a mistake: it is mankind"s instinct for moral reasoning in action, an instinct that should be encouraged rather than laughed at.

【F1】 The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photography's fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art 【F2】 Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting. 【F3】 Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves anything but making works of art. In the nineteenth century, photography's association with the real world placed it in an ambivalent relation to art: late in the twentieth century an ambivalent relation exists because of the modernist heritage in art. That important photographers are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art, shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism; the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. 【F4】 Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photograph's prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960's. Photography, however,has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art.【F5】 Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity—in short, an art.

You might be forgiven for thinking that sleep researchers are a dozy bunch. Most of the other things people do regularly—eat, excrete, copulate and so on—are biologically fairly straightforward: there is little mystery about how or why they are done. Sleep, on the other hand, which takes up more of most people"s time than all of the above, and which attracts plenty of study, is still fundamentally a mystery. The one view shared by all is that sleep matters. For evidence, look no further than the experiments led by Allan Rechtaschaffen and Bernard Bergmann at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. They kept experimental rats awake around the clock in an environment where control rats were allowed as much sleep as they wanted. The sleep-deprived rats all died within a month. Carol Everson worked with the Chicago team as a graduate student and now has a job at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. While repeating the Chicago experiments she was struck by the fact that, although the sleep-deprived rats showed no obvious symptoms of particular diseases—and no such signs were picked up in post-mortems—their emaciation and generally sorry state was reminiscent of that which befalls many terminal cancer patients and AIDS patients, whose immune systems have packed up. While Dr. Everson does not claim to have hard and fast proof that sleep is needed for resistance to infection, her work does point that way—as does the re search of others around the world. Another approach is to look for chemicals that cause sleep; from these, you should be able to start telling a biological story which will eventually reveal the function of sleep. Peter Shiromani of Harvard Medical School has found a protein that builds up at high levels in chronically sleep-deprived cats, but disappears within an hour if the animals are allowed 45 minutes of recovery sleep. Researchers at the University of Veron have found something similar. But no one chemical tells the whole story. So new ways of inducing sleep may soon be available; an understanding of its purpose, though, remains elusive. In this, sleep is like the other great biological commonplace that is still mysterious: consciousness, which is also easily altered chemically but not too well under stood. No one knows how Consciousness arises, or what, if anything, it is for(though there are a lot of theories). Almost the only thing that can be said about it for certain is that you lose it when you fall asleep. Solving the mystery of sleeping and waking might require new insights into the consciousness that is lost and regained in the process. Putting it this way makes the problem sound rather grander, and the lack of progress so far look a bit less dozy.

The Tuscan town of Vinci, birthplace of Leonardo and home to a museum of his machines, should fittingly put on a show of the television-robot sculptures of Nam Jun Paik. This Koreanborn American artist and the Renaissance master are kindred spirits: Leonardo saw humanistic potential in his scientific experiments, Mr. Paik endeavors to harness media technology for artistic purposes. A pioneer of video art in the late 1960s, he treats television as a space for art images and as material for robots and interactive sculptures. Mr. Paik was not alone. He and fellow artists picked on the video cameras because they offered an easy way to record their performance art. Now, to mark video art"s coming of age, New York"s Museum of Modern Art is looking back at their efforts in a film series called "The First Decade". It celebrates the early days of video by screening the archives of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world"s leading distributors of video and new media art, founded 30 years ago. One of EAI"s most famous alumni is Bill Viola. Part of the second generation of video artists, who emerged in the 1970s, Mr. Viola experimented with video"s expressive potential. His camera explores religious ritual and universal ideas. The Viola show at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin shows us moving-image frescoes that cover the gallery walls and envelop the viewer in all-embracing cycles of life and death. One new star is a Californian, Doug Aitken, who took over London"s Serpentine Gallery last October with an installation called "New Ocean". Some say Mr. Aitken is to video what Jackson Pollock was to painting. He drips his images from floor to ceiling, creating sequences of rooms in which the space surrounds the viewer in hallucinatory images, of sound and light. At the Serpentine, Mr. Aitken created a collage of moving images, on the theme of water"s flow around the planet as a force of life. "I wanted to create a new topography in this work, a liquid image, to show a world that never stands still," he says. The boundary between the physical world and the world of images and information, he thinks, is blurring. The interplay of illusion and reality, sound and image, references to art history, politics, film and television in this art form that is barely 30 years old can make video art difficult to define. Many call it film-based or moving-image art to include artists who work with other cinematic media. At its best, the appeal of video art lies in its versatility, its power to capture the passing of time and on its ability to communicate both inside and outside gallery walls.

Euthanasia has been a topic of controversy in Europe since at least 1936.@On an average of six times a day, a doctor in Holland practices "active" euthanasia: (1)_____ administering a lethal drug to a (2)_____ ill patient who has asked to be relieved (3)_____ suffering. Twenty times a day, life prolonging treatment is withheld or withdrawn (4)_____ there is no hope that it can (5)_____ an ultimate cure. "Active" euthanasia remains a crime on the Dutch statute books, punishable (6)_____ 12 years in prison. But a series of court cases over the past 15 years has made it clear that a competent physician who (7)_____ it out will not be prosecuted. Euthanasia, often called "mercy killing", is a crime everywhere in Western Europe. (8)_____ more and more doctors and nurses in Britain, Germany, Holland and elsewhere readily (9)_____ to practicing it, most often in the "passive" form of withholding or withdrawing(10)_____. The long simmering euthanasia issue has lately (11)_____ into a sometimes fierce public debate, (12)_____ both sides claiming the mantle of ultimate righteousness. Those (13)_____ to the practice see themselves (14)_____ sacred principles of respect for life, (15)_____ those in favor raise the banner of humane treatment. After years (16)_____ the defensive, the advocates now seem to be (17)_____ ground. Recent polls in Britain show that 72 percent of British (18)_____ favor euthanasia in some circumstances. An astonishing 76 percent of (19)_____ to a poll taken late last year in France said they would like the law changed to (20)_____ mercy killings. Obviously, pressure groups favoring euthanasia and "assisted suicide" have grown steadily in Europe over the years.Notes:euthanasia 安乐死lethal 致命的statute book 法典prosecute 起诉simmering 处于沸腾的状态mantle 重任，责任

A new kind of aircraft—small, cheap, pilotless—is attracting increasing attention.

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

Rebel uprising kills seventy! Plane crash leaves no survivors! Rock star dies of overdose! Evening newscasts and metropolitan newspapers scream the bad news, the sensational, and the action. Audiences of today focus upon the sensational action, the violence, the loss, the terror. Individually, our lives are redirected, our worlds reshaped, and our images changed. While wary of the danger of change, we human beings surrender daily to exploitation of values, opportunities, and sensitivity. The evolution has brought us to the point that we believe little of what is presented to us as good and valuable; instead, we opt for suspicion and disbelief, demanding proof and something for nothing. Therein lies the danger for the writer seeking to break into the market of today. Journalists sell sensationalism. The journalist who loses sight of the simple truth and opts only for the sensation loses the audience over the long run. Only those seeking a short-term thrill are interested in following the journalistic thinking. How, then do we capture the audience of today and hold it, when the competition for attention is so fierce? The answer is writing to convey action, and the way to accomplish this is a simple one — action verbs. The writer whose product suspends time for the reader or viewer is the successful writer whose work is sought and reread. Why? Time often will melt away in the face of the reality of life"s little responsibilities for the reader. Instead of puzzling over a more active and more accurate verb, some journalists often limp through passive voice and useless tense to squeeze the life out of an action-filled world and fill their writing with missed opportunities to appeal to the reader who seeks that moment of suspended time. Recently, a reporter wrote about observing the buildings in a community robbed by rebel uprising as "thousands of bullet holes were in the hotel. " A very general observation. Suppose he had written, "The hotel was pocked with bullet holes. " The visual image conjured up by the latter is far superior to the former. Here is the reader... comfortable in the easy chair before the fire with the dog at his feet. The verb "pocked" speaks to him. The journalist missed the opportunity to convey the reality.

Studythegraphbelowcarefullyandwriteanessayofabout200words.Youressaymustcoveralltheinformationprovidedandmeettherequirementsbelow:1.interpretthegraph;2.givethepossiblecausesforthechange;3.yourcomments.

BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B