Elections often tell you more about what people are against than what they are for. So it is with the European ones that took place last week in all 25 European Union member countries. These elections, widely trumpeted as the world"s biggest-ever multinational democratic vote, were fought for the most part as 25 separate national contests, which makes it tricky to pick out many common themes. But the strongest are undoubtedly negative. Europe"s voters are angry and disillusioned—and they have demonstrated their anger and disillusion in three main ways. The most obvious was by abstaining. The average overall turnout was just over 45%, by some margin the lowest ever recorded for elections to the European Parliament. And that average disguises some big variations: Italy, for example, notched up over 70%, but Sweden managed only 37%. Most depressing of all, at least to believers in the European project, was the extremely low vote in many of the new member countries from central Europe, which accounted for the whole of the fall in turnout since 1999. In the biggest, Poland, only just over a fifth of the electorate turned out to vote. Only a year ago, central Europeans voted in large numbers to join the EU, which they did on May 1st. That they abstained in such large numbers in the European elections points to early disillusion with the European Union—as well as to a widespread feeling, shared in the old member countries as well, that the European Parliament does not matter. Disillusion with Europe was also a big factor in the second way in which voters protested, which was by supporting a ragbag of populist, nationalist and explicitly anti-EU parties. These ranged from the 16% who backed the UK Independence Party, whose declared policy is to withdraw from the EU and whose leaders see their mission as "wrecking"" the European Parliament, to the 14% who voted for Sweden"s Junelist, and the 27% of Poles who backed one of two anti-EU parties, the League of Catholic Families and Selfdefence. These results have returned many more Eurosceptics and trouble-makers to the parliament: on some measures, over a quarter of the new MEPS will belong to the "awkward squad". That is not a bad thing, however, for it will make the parliament more representative of European public opinion. But it is the third target of European voters" ire that is perhaps the most immediately significant: the fact that, in many EU countries, old and new, they chose to vote heavily against their own governments. This anti-incumbent vote was strong almost everywhere, but it was most pronounced in Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Sweden. The leaders of all the four biggest European Union countries, Tony Blair in Britain, Jacques Chirac in France, Gerhard Schroder in Germany and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, were each given a bloody nose by their voters. The big question now is how Europe"s leaders should respond to this. By a sublime (or terrible) coincidence, soon after the elections, and just as The Economist was going to press, they were gathering in Brussels for a crucial summit, at which they are due to agree a new constitutional treaty for the EU and to select a new president for the European Commission. Going into the meeting, most EU heads of government seemed determined to press ahead with this agenda regardless of the European elections—even though the atmosphere after the results may make it harder for them to strike deals.

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

The fundamental fact of our time is the gradual encroachment of principled individualism, or unregulated personal freedom, into all areas of our lives. Every moral and communal certainty, except those that can be justified through contract and consent, has heen transformed into a question. Every human attachment seems basically voluntary. The great institutions that shape the character of human beings- the family, the church, the community, and the country are weakened and still eroding.【F1】 Young people who have grown up in this cultural environment are deprived of what it takes to develop firm moral bearings, and, with them, a sense of purpose. New students arrive at college not knowing who they are or what their lives are for. 【F2】 Professors, meanwhile, used to believe their primary responsibility was to shape souls: to pass on the truths embedded in a religious tradition or other moral code that should thoughtfully define the lives of educated men and women. 【F3】 At the very least, they believed they had to open students" eyes to the varied forms of human excellence displayed in the greatest works of philosophy and literature: the saint, the sage, the poet, the warrior, the inventor, the entrepreneur, the scientist, the statesman. By means of these models of human greatness, professors could offer guidance to students discerning who they are and what they want to do. But, arriving at college with characters already formed, those students were less in need of direction than are students today. In those days, the real experience of professors was often a kind of blithe irresponsibility that came with moral impotence. They could say what they wanted without the fear of doing much harm, or much good.【F4】 In many cases, students 1 bought(with good reason)that their professors were basically reinforcing what they already knew from more firsthand, or not merely bookish, communal experience. College seems to have inherited the job that religion used to do.【F5】 Today"s colleges at their secular best—at, say, Great Books schools like St. John"s approach education by articulating perennial questions of human identity and purpose. But even the Great Books model of education has morphed into a celebration of the questions in the absence of real answers. Who can be satisfied with merely reveling in Socratic indecision about who we are and what to do? Great Books education seems to present us with the alternatives of being a self-knowing philosopher or losing oneself in either fundamentalist dogmatism or aimless relativism. But the searcher neither needs nor wants to be told that the point of life is searching.

Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets and newsletters. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, The New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media. Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The Internet is making news more participatory, social and diverse, reviving the discursive characteristics of the era before the mass media. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005 and 2009. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries. Over the past decade, throughout the Western world, people have been giving up newspapers and TV news and keeping up with events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and distributing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classified documents are published in their thousands online. Mobile-phone footage of Arab uprisings and American tornadoes is posted on social-networking sites and shown on television newscasts. Social-networking sites help people find, discuss and share news with their friends. And technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important conduits of news. The Internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world. The web has allowed new providers of news to rise to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practiced by WikiLeaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets. In principles, every liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. The transformation of the news business is unstoppable. Although this transformation does raise concerns, there is much to celebrate in the noisy, diverse, vociferous, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the ages of the Internet. The coffee house is back. Enjoy it.

The first two stages in the development of civilized man were probably the invention of primitive weapons and the discovery of fire, al though nobody knows exactly when acquired the use of (1)_____. The (2)_____ of language is also obscure. No doubt it began very gradually. Animals have a few cries that serve (3)_____ signals, (4)_____ even the highest apes have not been found able to pronounce words (5)_____ with the most intensive professional instruction. The superior brain of man is apparently (6)_____ for the mastering of speech. When man became sufficiently intelligent, we must suppose that he (7)_____ the number of cries for different purposes. It was a great day (8)_____ he discovered that speed could be used for narrative. There are those who think that (9)_____ picture language preceded oral language. A man (10)_____ a picture on the wall of his cave to show (11)_____ direction he had gone, or (12)_____ prey he hoped to catch. Probably-picture language and oral language developed side by side. I am inclined to think that language (13)_____ the most important single factor in the development of man. Two important stages came not (14)_____ before the dawn of written history. The first was the domestication of animals; the second was agriculture. Agriculture was (15)_____ in human progress to which subsequently there was nothing comparable (16)_____ our own machine age. Agriculture made possible (17)_____ immense increase in the number of the human species in the regions where it could be successfully practiced. (18)_____ were, at first, only those in which nature fertilized the soil (19)_____ each harvest. Agriculture met with violent resistance from the pastoral nomads, but the agricultural way of life prevailed in the end (20)_____ the physical comforts it provided.

科学研究的方法与人类思维的关系 ——1993年英译汉及详解 【F1】 The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind; it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanation. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graded weights.【F2】 It is not that the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement than the former. You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar examples.【F3】 You have all heard it repeated that men of science work by means of induction(归纳法)and deduction, that by the help of these operations, they, in a sort of sense, manage to extract from Nature certain natural laws, and that out of these, by some special skill of their own, they build up their theories. 【F4】 And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special training. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus are being used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives. There is a well-known incident in one of Motiere" s plays, where the author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he had been talking prose(散文)during the whole of his life. In the same way, I trust that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive and deductive philosophy during the same period.【F5】 Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.

As childhood-obesity rates skyrocket, doctors are seeing an alarming rise in a costly disease once unheard of in children: type 2 diabetes. Unlike type 1, or "juvenile" diabetes—an autoimmune disorder in which the pancreas stops producing insulin—type 2 diabetes is linked to diet and lifestyle. It usually develops only in individuals who are genetically sicken for the condition, but requires a trigger—typically, insulin resistance resulting from overeating. The disease used to be seen only in adults because it took years to exhaust the body"s natural insulin production and resistance. No longer. With kids from Austria to Australia eating a diet laden with fats and sugars, type 2 diabetes is striking at ever earlier ages. Says Arian Rosenbloom, a Florida-based pediatric endocrinologist: "We do not see type 2 in kids of normal weight." The pattern is similar all over the world. In the United States and Britain, half of the new cases of diabetes in children are type 2, compared with just 4 percent in 1990. In China, where 90 percent of the children who have contracted the disease are now type 2, experts say the incidence has been rising by 9 percent each year since 1992. Between 1975 and 1995 in Japan, cases of type 2 in children increased fourfold. And children in Latin America could see a 45 percent rise in the disease by 2010. The trend mirrors the explosion of diabetes among the general population. In 1985 an estimated 30 million people worldwide had the disease; today that number has been more than fivefold, to 177 million, 85 percent of whom have type 2. If modern diet and lifestyle aren"t drastically altered, the World Health Organization expects this number to rise to nearly 300 million cases by 2025—half of them in Asia. The biggest danger of developing diabetes at a younger age is that it allows more time for complications. Among other things, diabetes commonly causes blindness, loss of circulation, heart and kidney disease, strokes and dangerously high blood-sugar levels. For young people with diabetes, the expected life span is 15 years less than average. Neville Rigby, head of policy and public affairs at the International Obesity Task Force, puts it bluntly: "Some of these children are going to die before their parents." Ultimately, diabetes is incurable. Although changes in lifestyle and diet can help stem the progression of the disease, it never disappears. Most patients are on insulin injections a decade after diagnosis. Ralph Abraham, a specialist at the London Diabetes and Lipid Centre, compares trying to develop a healthy body after being diagnosed to "trying to run up a down escalator." The best long term hope for reversing the trend is for society to get its weight problem under control.

CompanyIsMoreImportantthanGiftsWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)interpretitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

技术发展给社会带来的弊端 ——1989年英译汉及详解 When Jane Matheson started work at Advanced Electronics Inc. 12 years ago,【F1】 she laboured over a microscope, hand-welding tiny electronic computers and turned out 18 per hour. Now she tends the computerized machinery that turns out high capacity memory chips at the rate of 2, 600 per hour. Production is up, profits are up, her income is up and Mrs. Matheson says the work is far less strain on her eyes. But the most significant effect of the changes at AEI was felt by the workers who are no longer there. Before the new computerized equipment was introduced, there were 940 workers at the plant. Now there are 121.【F2】 A plant follow-up survey showed that one year after the layoffs only 38% of the released workers found new employment at the same or better wages. Nearly half finally settled for lower pay and more than 13% are still out of work. The AEI example is only one of hundreds around the country which forge intelligently ahead into the latest technology, but leave the majority of their workers behind. 【F3】 Its beginnings obscured by unemployment caused by the world economic slow-down, the new technological unemployment may emerge as the great socio-economic challenge of the end of the 20th century. One corporation economist says the growth of "machine job replacement" has been with us since the beginning of the industrial revolution, but never at the pace it is now. The human costs will be astonishing.【F4】 "It's humiliating to be done out of your job by a machine and there is no way to fight back, but it is the effort to find a new job that really hurts." Some workers, like Jane Matheson, are retrained to handle the new equipment, but often a whole new set of skills is required and that means a new, and invariably smaller set of workers.【F5】 The old workers, trapped by their limited skills, often never regain their old status and employment. Many drift into marginal areas. They feel no pride in their new work. They get badly paid for it and they feel miserable, but still they are luckier than those who never find it. 【F6】 The social costs go far beyond the welfare and unemployment payments made by the government. Unemployment increases the chances of divorce, child abuse, and alcoholism, a new federal survey shows. Some experts say the problem is only temporary... that new technology will eventually create as many jobs as it destroys.【F7】 But futurologist Hymen Seymour says the astonishing efficiency of the new technology means there will be a simple and direct net reduction in the amount of human labor that needs to be done. "We should treat this as an opportunity to give people more leisure. It may not be easy, but society will have to reach a new unanimity on the division and distribution of labor," Seymour says. He predicts most people will work only six-hour days and four-day weeks by the end of the century. But the concern of the unem ployed is for now.【F8】 Federally funded training and free back-to-school programs for laid-off workers are under way, but few experts believe they will be able to keep up with the pace of the new technology. For the next few years, for a substantial portion of the workforce, times are going to be very tough indeed.

The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever since the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least. "Hooray!At last!" wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-sided classical-music critic. One of the reasons why the appointment came as such a surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert's appointment in the Times, calls him "an unpretentious musician with no air of the formidable conductor about him." As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise. For my part, I have no idea whether Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good one. To be sure, he performs an impressive variety of interesting compositions, but it is not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall, or anywhere else, to hear interesting orchestral music. All I have to do is to go to my CD shelf, or boot up my computer and download still more recorded music from iTunes. Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are no substitute for live performance are missing the point. For the time, attention, and money of the art-loving public, classical instrumentalists must compete not only with opera houses, dance troupes, theater companies, and museums, but also with the recorded performances of the great classical musicians of the 20th century. These recordings are cheap, available everywhere, and very often much higher in artistic quality than today' s live performances; moreover, they can be "consumed" at a time and place of the listener's choosing. The widespread availability of such recordings has thus brought about a crisis in the institution of the traditional classical concert. One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert' s own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, a classical-music critic, has described him as a man who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into "a markedly different, more vibrant organization." But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely expanding the orchestra' s repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America' s oldest orchestra and the new audience it hopes to attract.

Studythefollowingpicturecarefully,andwriteanessayofatleast200words.Youressayshouldmeettherequirementsbelow:1)Describethepictureandinterpretitsmeaning.2)Giveyourcommentonthephenomenon.

IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient, which is a measure of a person"s intelligence found by means of an intelligence test. Before marks gained in such a test can be useful as information about a person, they must be compared with some standard, or norm. It is not enough simply to know that a boy of thirteen has scored, say, ninety marks in a particular test. To know whether he is clever, average or dull, his marks must be compared with the average achieved by boys of thirteen in that test. In 1906 the psychologist, Alfred Binet, devised the standard in relation to which intelligence has since been assessed. He invented a variety of tests and put large numbers of children of different ages through them. He found at what age each test was passed by the average child. For instance, he found that the average child of seven could count backwards from 20 to 1 and the average child of three could repeat the sentence: We are going to have a good time in the country. Binet arranged the various tests in order of difficulty, and used them as a scale against which he could measure every individual. If, for example, a boy aged twelve could only do tests that were passed by the average boy of nine, Binet held that he was three years below average, and that he has a mental age of nine. The concept of mental age provided Binet, and through him, other psychologists, with the required standard, which enables him to state scores in intelligence tests in terms of a norm. At first, it was usual to express the result of a test by the difference between the "mental" and the "chronological" age. Then the boy in the example given would be "three years retarded". Soon, however, the "mental ratio" was introduced, that is to say, the ratio of the mental age to the chronological age. Thus a "boy of twelve with a mental age of nine has a mental ratio of 0.75. The mental age was replaced by the "intelligence quotient" or "ID". The IQ is the mental ratio multiplied by 100. For example, a boy of twelve with a mental age of nine has an IQ of 75. Clearly, since the mental age of average child is equal to the chronological age, the average IQ is 100.

"Worse than useless," fumed Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from California, on March 19th, when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Terrible, and getting worse," added Zoe Lofgren, a Demo critic colleague who has kept a watchful eye on the INS for ten years. Committee members lined up to take swings at James Ziglar, the head of the INS. He explained, somewhat pathetically, that "outdated procedures" had kept the visa-processing wheels grinding slowly through a backlog of applications. He also had some new rules in mind to tighten up visas. Speeding up the paperwork—and getting more of it on to computers—is vital, but the September 11th attacks have exposed the tension between the agency"s two jobs: on the one hand enforcing the security of America"s borders, on the other granting privileges such as work permits to foreigners. But other people want more radical changes. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, wants to split the INS into two separate bodies, one dealing with border security and the other with handling benefits to immigrants. The other approach, favored in the White House, is to treat the two functions as complementary, and to give the INS even more responsibility for security. Under that plan, the INS would merge with the Customs Service, which monitors the 20m shipments of goods brought into America every year, as well as the bags carried in by some 500m visitors. The two agencies would form one large body within the Department of Justice, the current home of the INS. This would cut out some of the duplicated effort at borders, where customs officers and agents from the INS"s Border Patrol often rub shoulders but do not work together. Mr. Bush—who has said that the news of the visa approvals left him "plenty hot"—was expected to give his approval. The senate, however, may not be quite so keen. The Justice Department could have trouble handling such a merger, let alone taking on the considerable economic responsibilities of the Customs Service, which is currently part of the Treasury. The senate prefers yet another set of security recommendations, including links between the databases of different agencies that hold security and immigration information, and scanners at ports of entry to check biometric data recorded on immigration documents. These ideas are embodied in a bill sponsored by members of both parties, but are currently held up by Robert Byrd, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who worries that there has not been enough debate on the subject. Mr. Ziglar, poor chap, may feel there has been more than enough.

If the idea of duty was obsolete, how would society function? Nobody would report for work, nobody would bother about paying their bills, and no one would even bother about their friends or loved ones. Without duty, there would be no commitments, no boundaries, and no relationships! and if this ever happens, if duty ever vanishes completely from the earth, what the heck would happen to humanity, to civilization? Well, first things first. What is duty? Duty, I believe, is a desire to work, to keep a commitment. Duly is to commitment what conscience is to morals; duty is the basic instinct and need to fulfil an earlier promise and commitment, and failure to do so would result in a sharp pang of guilt, just the same as conscience. Duty is what makes people honour their commitments, whether in their relationships, jobs, verbal promises, or self-set goals. Therefore, this argument can be explained in two levels: firstly, duty cannot be obsolete as it is a primal emotion, and secondly, if it was obsolete, we wouldn"t even be having this debate as society would degenerate rapidly. Right. Firstly, duty can never be obsolete. Why? Duty is an emotion, just like your conscience. It is similar, and in fact probably can be considered a variation of guilt. Duty is basically the desire to fulfill commitments, and the ensuing guilt that occurs upon failure to do so. Therefore, as duty is a contextual variation of guilt, and guilt is an emotion, duty can then be considered an emotion. And can emotions ever become "obsolete"? Can anger be obsolete? Or happiness? Or maybe you"ve heard of "obsolete sadness"? Emotions are a primal attribute of humans, just like any other physical or mental attributes unique to not only humans, but any sentient being, albeit maybe on a larger or smaller scale depending on intelligence. And as a primal force, emotions can NEVER become obsolete. Secondly, assuming that duty is obsolete, how can we even hold a proper debate? Duty is what causes humans to honour commitments, commitments are what cause humans to work on a daily routine, and work is what makes society progress." Without commitment, whether monetary or obligatory, no one would even bother working a day in their lives. And without any productive work occurring in our society, civilization would soon degenerate into its primordial states and there"s the end of life as we know it.

This type of computer is superior to that type.

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about cross-border marriage. Choose the most suitable headings.A. The golden wedding-ring was put on her fingerB. The foreign groom and the local brideC. Angels, children escorting the brideD. Wedding hallE. Temple and atheistic groomF. Town hall, a happy bride and groom Ornamenting the two fingers is only the first step of the "long march". Angel was never as overloaded as today, running from here to there, busy ordering invitation cards and wedding clothes, booking church and restaurant, checking availability of the photographer, the pastor and the official in the town hall, looking for a new home. She was happy and excited. However this long wedding preparation process loaded down with trivial details, gave me a big headache. In France, more and more French cohabit instead of marrying. However, when they decide to marry, they still take their wedding ceremony seriously and usually follow the never changing three traditional chapters. (41)______. The third chapter is the wedding breakfast followed by a dance. (The first and the second chapter are the civil wedding and the church wedding). After the church wedding, the newly-weds normally invite their parents and friends to take part in a sumptuous meal and dance in the evening. After champagne flutes are raised all around, the dancing starts. The newly-weds take the lead, dancing lightly and finish the evening by tiredly tripping into their bridal chamber and thus terminate the last chapter of the French marriage. (42)______. I grew up in the last seventies and early eighties, the "simple wedding" advocated by the Chinese government had been ingrained in my mind. One day finally I could not help revealing my wish for a simple wedding: "Darling, your wedding plans are far too long and over-elaborate. Let"s simplify them and reduce three chapters to only one. It"s enough to get married in the town hall!" "No! Marriage is the most important event in my life. I want to make it grand and unforgettable. "Angel refused to concede. However I really wanted to escape the church wedding. "Honey, I wasn"t baptized and being an atheist, I am not allowed to go to church. A church wedding is a burden for an atheist like me, and the church wedding for an atheist is also against church rules!" I presented my views vehemently, believing I had the best excuse in the world. "My dear, marriage is a sacred affair; we must go to the church. You are only aware of one aspect of a thing, but ignorant of another. I am a Protestant; there are no strict canons and mumbo-jumbos in Protestantism. If one of the two is Protestant, they are still allowed to marry in a Protestant church." I was rendered speechless. (43)______. The sacred moment arrived. The foreign groom and the local bride, surrounded by her family members, arrived at the marriage hall. "Do you take this woman as your wife?" "Yes!" A myriad of thoughts welled up in my mind: "I"d quit my highly coveted job in China and gone through innumerable trials and tribulations to come to Europe to join my Chinese lover, but I was jilted. Now I"d found an oasis of love, but far from my homeland The girl with me today, though from a different cultural background, with a different way of thinking and behaving, is simple, pure and kind-hearted like an angel. I"d suffered from the wandering life in Europe. But after suffering comes happiness. In a few minutes she will proclaim the end of my wandering and homeless life. "Full of deep feeling I gazed at this western beauty, shining with dazzling splendor and held her hand tight in mine. (44)______. "Do you take this man as your husband?" Brimming with tears, choking with sobs, Angel nodded her approval. Being a traditional French girl, she"d never expected that she would have fallen into the temptation of the "good but cheap Chinese merchandise" before her and would have crossed the frontier between Chinese and French cultures to marry a man with an exotic accent and a flat nose! (45)______. The church was resounding with the wedding sonata, angel and I walked up to the pastor to the heat of the music. Hand in hand, heart with heart, full of tender affection, we gave all the right answers to his questions. The golden wedding ring on her left finger and paired up with her engagement ring on the right ring finger, both complementing each other"s "radiance and beauty. Angel, now with two rings, became a real "valuable" bride. She slipped my finger with a simple ring onto my finger, and at the same time capturing my wandering heart. That evening, I, the foreign groom, with my Erru, two-stringed Chinese violin, together with Angel, the local bride, with her violin, successfully performed the most beautiful concerto of cross-border marriage. "That spring is coming, the earth is smiling..." the hall was resounding to the strains of Strauss" joyful waltz while we were tripping away in a dance. At the climax of the music we swirled so quickly that both of us felt ourselves swoon in the glamour of our cross border marriage.

When I was 13 my mother died. Through my own sorrow I was aware of the great loss this was to Pop. But he made only one reference to his own misery. He said, "To be happy every day is to be not happy at all." He was saying to his sons that happiness is not a state you achieve and keep, but something that must be won over and over, no matter what the defeats and losses. Later that year I got a job as an entertainer in small clubs, and suddenly I knew this was the career I had been searching for. The world of the theater was far removed from the world of my father, yet I found myself returning to him time and again, for the same reason his friends did. When I was 20 I got what every actor dreams of—a permanent job! At that time, at the depth of the depression, actors were out of work by the hundreds, yet I wanted to quit that job because I needed new experiences and challenges. Pop heard me out, then said, "There are some people who always have to test themselves, to stretch their wings and try new winds. If you think you can find more happiness and usefulness this way, then you should do it." This advice came from a man who never left a secure job in his life, who had the European tradition of family responsibility, but who knew I was different. He understood what I needed to do and he helped me do it. For the next few years I worked in clubs, and then I got my big break, appearing in a major movie. After that I went to Hollywood, and from then on Pop lived with me and my family there. We had a big party one evening. That night I thought Pop might enjoy hearing some of the old folk songs we used to sing at home. When I began to sing, the music and the memories were too much for him to resist, and he came over to join me. I faded away, and he was in the middle of the room singing alone—in a clear, true voice. He sang for 15 minutes before some of the world"s highest-paid stars. This simple, kindly old man singing of our European roots had touched something deep in these sophisticated people. When he finished there was overwhelming applause. I knew the applause that night was not just for a performance; it was for a man.

A Poster Write a poster of about 100 words based on the following situation: There will be some basketball matches against Yale University on your campus. Now write a poster to inform all students of the matches in your university on behalf of the Student Union. Do not sign your own name at the end of the poster. Use "The Student Union" instead. Do not write the address.

LackofResourcesWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

DoYouWantOtherstoKnowYourWell-doing?Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.