"Forests are the lungs of our land," said Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Twenty years ago, the world"s lungs were diseased. Roughly half of all the planet"s once-luxuriant tropical forests had been felled and the further deterioration of the Earth"s green spaces seemed【C1】______. Over time countries【C2】______ a "forest transition curve". They start in【C3】______with the land covered in trees. As they get richer, they fell the forest and the curve drops sharply until it reaches a low point when people decide to【C4】______whatever they have left Then the curve rises as reforestation【C5】______. At almost every point along the【C6】______, countries are now doing better deforested are【C7】______down less; reforesters are【C8】______more. This matters to everyone because of the extraordinary【C9】______that tropical forests make to reducing carbon emissions. Trees are carbon【C10】______. If you fell and burn them, you【C11】______ carbon into the atmosphere. If you let them【C12】______they store carbon away in their trunks for centuries. Despite decades of【C13】______, tropical forests are still【C14】______about a fifth of emissions from fossil fuels each year. Encouraging countries to plant trees (or【C15】______ them from logging) is by far the most【C16】______way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.【C17】______Brazil had kept on felling trees as rapidly as it was cutting them【C18】______in 2005, it would, by 2013, have put an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As a way of【C19】______the environment, protecting trees is hard to beat. It is in everyone"s interest to find out which forest policies work—and【C20】______them.

Short stories are due a revival. In recent years, there have been critically【C1】______collections by American writers such as Lydia Davis and Junot Diaz. But few others manage to【C2】______the bestseller lists, and they are all too often【C3】______by novels.【C4】______their heyday in the early 20th century, short stories are mostly viewed as trials or experiments before an author【C5】______with the real thing. John Burnside, a Scottish poet and novelist,【C6】______, this fixed idea in his latest collection, "Something Like Happy". Over 13 stories, Mr Burnside shows the versatility of the condensed【C7】______. His stories take place mostly in Scotland, in flats "high up on the third floor of an apartment block in the middle of Dundee" or in the back room of a hardware shop,【C8】______men drink "sweet, milky coffee"【C9】______waiting for the results of the races. His men carry knives or conduct extramarital【C10】______; his women are often【C11】______housewives who drink, take up bell-ringing in their local church or fantasise about younger men【C12】______a way of filling in time. Happiness is the subject that【C13】______the collection together. In other hands, this could become sentimental.【C14】______Mr Burnside, with only a few【C15】______, never allows that to happen. Instead, happiness【C16】______stays away from these figures; so much【C17】______they have almost ceased to【C18】______it Rooted in the bleaker aspects of Scotland"s landscapes, it is something that his【C19】______continually search for, in these concise and poetic tales—yet【C20】______to find.

The NHS remains one of the reasons why people are proud to be British. It provides outstanding care to more than a million of us every day, despite huge pressure caused by tight finances and an ageing population. At the last election, the British people were clear—a strong NHS needs a strong economy. So those who back Brexit need to explain what that would mean for the NHS. I am not someone who believes we could not survive economically outside the EU. Nor do I believe that—as the world's fifth largest economy—we would not eventually negotiate new trade deals. But we know that would involve years of economic uncertainty and that no country outside the EU has ever secured full, unfettered access to the single market. Even the most bullish Brexiteers concede that the short-term impact on the British economy would be a period of uncertainty and volatility. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility has said that "there appears to be a greater consensus that a vote to leave would result in a period of potentially disruptive uncertainty while the precise details of the UK's new relationship with the EU were negotiated". And therein lies the risk to the NHS of leaving. Those wishing to leave might say this uncertainty is a price worth paying, but my concern is more practical. The NHS consumes the second biggest budget in Whitehall. Next year, thanks to this government's success in turning around the economy, it will have the sixth biggest increase in its history. Investing in the NHS will always be a priority for this government, but the simple fact is this: an economic shock would put pressure on our finances. According to the OECD, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy all cut health spending per head following the economic crisis. Of course, our economy is stronger and more resilient, but only in the last two weeks a series of studies from the likes of the London School of Economics, Oxford Economics and the CBI have shown that the impact of an exit could cost the UK more than 5% of the size of our economy.This would inevitably mean less money for public services like the NHS. Those who want to leave need to explain how they could protect the NHS from this economic shock. It is not just a question of the risk to the pounds in our pocket, but to the pounds in the NHS budget as well. We should not take that risk.

Tea drinking was common in China for nearly one thousand years before anyone in Europe had ever heard about tea. People in Britain were much slower in finding out what tea was like, mainly because tea was very expensive. It could not be bought in shops and even those people who could afford to have it sent from Holland did so only because it was a fashionable curiosity. Some of them were not sure how to use it. They thought it was a vegetable and tried cooking the leaves. Then they served them mixed with butter and salt. They soon discovered their mistake but many people used to spread the used tea leaves on bread and give them to their children as sandwiches. Tea remained scarce and very expensive in England until the ships of the East India Company began to bring it direct from China early in the seventeenth century. During the next few years so much tea came into the country that the price fell and many people could afford to buy it. At the same time people on the Continent were becoming more and more fond of tea. Until then tea had been drunk without milk in it, but one day a famous French lady named Madame de Sevigne decided to see what tea tasted like when milk was added. She found it so pleasant that she would never again drink it without milk, because she was such a great lady, her friends thought they must copy everything she did, so they also drank their tea with milk in it. Slowly this habit spread until it reached England and today only very few Britons drink tea without milk. At first, tea was usually drunk after dinner in the evening. No one ever thought of drinking tea in the afternoon until a duchess found that a cup of tea and a piece of cake at three or four o" clock stopped her getting "a sinking feeling" as she called it. She invited her friends to have this new meal with her and so, tea-time was born.

Hunting for a job late last year, lawyer Gant Redmon stumbled across Career Builder, a job database on the Internet. He searched it with no success but was attracted by the site"s "personal search agent." It"s an interactive feature that lets visitors key in job criteria such as location, title, and salary, then E-mails them when a matching position is posted in the database. Redmon chose the keywords legal, intellectual property, and Washington, D.C.. Three weeks later, he got his first notification of an opening. "I struck gold," says Redmon, who E-mailed his resume to the employer and won a position as in-house counsel for a company. With thousands of career-related sites on the Internet, finding promising openings can be time-consuming and inefficient. Search agents reduce the need for repeated visits to the databases. But although a search agent worked for Redmon, career experts see drawbacks. Narrowing your criteria, for example, may work against you: "Every time you answer a question you eliminate a possibility." says one expert. For any job search, you should start with a narrow concept—what you think you want to do —then broaden it. "None of these programs do that," says another expert. "There"s no career counseling implicit in all of this." Instead, the best strategy is to use the agent as a kind of tip service to keep abreast of jobs in a particular database; when you get E-mail, consider it a reminder to check the database again. "I would not rely on agents for finding everything that is added to a database that might interest me," says the author of a job-searching guide. Some sites design their agents to tempt job hunters to return. When Career Site" s agent sends out messages to those who have signed up for its service, for example, it includes only three potential jobs— those it considers the best matches. There may be more matches in the database; job hunters will have to visit the site again to find them—and they do. "On the day after we send our messages, we see a sharp increase in our traffic," says Seth Peets, vice president of marketing for Career Site. Even those who aren"t hunting for jobs may find search agents worthwhile. Some use them to keep a close watch on the demand for their line of work or gather information on compensation to arm themselves when negotiating for a raise. Although happily employed, Redmon maintains his agent at Career Builder. "You always keep your eyes open," he says. Working with a personal search agent means having another set of eyes looking out for you.

Researchers have both created and relieved symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder(OCD)in genetically modified mice using a technique that turns brain cells on and off with light, known as optogenetics. The work, by two separate teams, confirms the neural circuits that contribute to the condition and points to treatment targets. It also provides insight into how quickly compulsive behaviors can develop—and how quickly they might be soothed. Brain scanning in humans with OCD has pointed to two areas—the orbitofrontal cortex, just behind the eyes, and the striatum, a hub in the middle of the brain—as being involved in the condition" s characteristic repetitive and compulsive behaviors. But "in people we have no way of testing cause and effect", says Susanne Ahmari, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York who led one of the studies. It is not clear, for example, whether abnormal brain activity causes the compulsions, or whether the behavior simply results from the brain trying to hold symptoms at bay by compensating. Ahmari"s team wanted to see if optogenetics could prompt repetitive grooming in mice. The team injected viruses into the orbitofrontal cortex carrying genes for light-sensitive proteins. The researchers then inserted an optical fiber to shine a light on these cells for a few minutes a day. It was only after a few days that they started to see the compulsive behavior. In the second study, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)in Cambridge used a mouse model of repetitive behavior in which the mice carried a mutation in a gene involved in creating neuronal connections. The researchers conditioned both mutant and control mice to groom when water was dripped on their foreheads. After a series of trials, the mutants began to groom even without a water drop. The team then used optogenetics to stimulate neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex that feed into the striatum. This is a similar but not overlapping group of cells to the neural circuit studied by Ahmari"s team. "Within a matter of a second or two, a behavioral change occurs," says Ann Graybiel, who co-authored the MIT study. The abnormal grooming disappeared, leaving behind only the normal reaction to the water drop. She was doubly surprised that the cortex—the area associated with executive, even conscious control of behavior—could be at the root of such an automatic response. "Everybody has thought that when we get these compulsive behaviors or really strong habits, then these behaviors reel off by themselves," she says. Instead, the orbitofrontal cortex can send a "stop" signal to other brain regions concerned with more automatic movements. Such a rapid relief from symptoms contrasts with how long it took the Columbia team to create the symptoms in their mice. This could have been related to the fact that the types of mice used by the two teams were different, Ahmari says, and that they examined slightly different circuits, albeit within the same broad areas.

Beyond the basic animal instincts to seek food and avoid pain, Freud identified two sources of psychic energy, which he called "drives": aggression and libido. The key to his theory is that these were unconscious drives, shaping our behavior without the mediation of our waking minds; they surface, heavily disguised, only in our dreams. The work of the past half-century in psychology and neuroscience has been to downplay the role of unconscious universal drives, focusing instead on rational processes in conscious life. But researchers have found evidence that Freud's drives really do exist, and they have their roots in the limbic system, a primitive part of the brain that operates mostly below the horizon of consciousness. Now more commonly referred to as emotions, the modern suite of drives comprises five: rage, panic, separation distress, lust and a variation on libido sometimes called seeking. The seeking drive is proving a particularly fruitful subject for researchers. Although like the others it originates in the limbic system, it also involves parts of the forebrain, the seat of higher mental functions. In the 1980s, Jaak Panksepp, a neurobiologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, became interested in a place near the cortex known as the ventral tegmental area, which in humans lies just above the hairline. When Panksepp stimulated the corresponding region in a mouse, the animal would sniff the air and walk around, as though it were looking for something. Was it hungry? No. The mouse would walk right by a plate of food, or for that matter any other object Panksepp could think of. This brain tissue seemed to cause a general desire for something new. "What I was seeing," he says, "was the urge to do stuff." Panksepp called this seeking. To neuropsychologist Mark Solms of University College in London, that sounds very much like libido. "Freud needed some sort of general, appetitive desire to seek pleasure in the world of objects," says Solms. "Panksepp discovered as a neuroscientist what Freud discovered psychologically." Solms studied the same region of the brain for his work on dreams. Since the 1970s, neurologists have known that dreaming takes place during a particular form of sleep known as REM— rapid eye movement—which is associated with a primitive part of the brain known as the pons. Accordingly, they regarded dreaming as a low-level phenomenon of no great psychological interest. When Solms looked into it, though, it turned out that the key structure involved in dreaming was actually the ventral tegmental, the same structure that Panksepp had identified as the seat of the "seeking" emotion. Dreams, it seemed, originate with the libido—which is just what Freud had believed. Freud's psychological map may have been flawed in many ways, but it also happens to be the most coherent and, from the standpoint of individual experience, meaningful theory of the mind. "Freud should be placed in the same category as Darwin, who lived before the discovery of genes, " says Panksepp. "Freud gave us a vision of a mental apparatus. We need to talk about it, develop it, test it." Perhaps it's not a matter of proving Freud wrong or right, but of finishing the job.

Karl Von Linne (or Linnaeus, as he is widely known) was a Swedish biologist who devised the system of Latinised scientific names for living things that biologists use to this day. When he came to【C1】______people into his system, he put them into a group called Homo and Linne"s hairless fellow humans are still known biologically as Homo sapiens.【C2】______the group originally had a second member, Homo troglodytes. It lived in Africa, and the pictures show it to be covered【C3】______hair. Modern【C4】______are not as generous as Linne in welcoming other species into Man"s lofty 【C5】______, and the chimpanzee is now referred to【C6】______Pan troglodytes. But Pan or Homo, there is no【C7】______that chimps are humans" nearest living relatives, and that if the secrets of what makes humanity special are ever to be【C8】______, understanding why chimps are not people, nor people chimps, is a crucial part of the process. That, in turn, means looking at the DNA of the two species,【C9】______it is here that the【C10】______must originate. One half of the puzzle has been【C11】______for several years: the human genome was published in 2001. The second has now been added, with the announcement in this week"s Nature【C12】______the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced as well. For those expecting【C13】______answers to age-old questions【C14】______, the publication of the chimp genome may be something of an【C15】______. There are no immediately obvious genes—present in one, but not the other—that account for such characteristic human【C16】______as intelligence or even hairlessness. And【C17】______there is a gene connected with language, known as FOXP2, it had already been discovered. But although the preliminary comparison of the two genomes【C18】______by the members of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, the multinational team that generated the sequence, did not【C19】______any obvious nuggets of genetic gold, it does at least show where to look for【C20】______

Soon after his appointment as secretary-general of the United Nations in 1997, Kofi Annan lamented that he was being accused of failing to reform the world body in six weeks. "But what are you complaining about?" asked the Russian ambassador. "You"ve had more time than God." Ah, Mr. Annan quipped back, "but God had one big advantage. He worked alone without a General Assembly, a Security Council and [all] the committees. " Recounting that anecdote to journalists in New York this week, Mr. Annan sought to explain why a draft declaration on UN reform and tackling world poverty, due to be endorsed by some 150 heads of state and government at a world summit in the city on September 14th - 16th, had turned into such a pale shadow of the proposals that he himself had put forward in March. "With 191 member states", he sighed, "it"s not easy to get an agreement. " Most countries put the blame On the United States, in the form of its abrasive new ambassador, John Bolton, for insisting at the end of August on hundreds of last-minute amendments and a line-by-line renegotiation of a text most others had thought was almost settled. But a group of middle-income developing nations, including Pakistan, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Venezuela, also came up with plenty of last-minute changes of their own. The risk of having no document at all, and thus nothing for the world"s leaders to come to New York for, was averted only by marathon all-night and all-weekend talks. The 35-page final document is not wholly devoid of substance. It calls for the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to supervise the reconstruction of countries after wars; the replacement of the discredited UN Commission on Human Rights by a supposedly tougher Human Rights Council; the recognition of a new "responsibility to protect" people from genocide and other atrocities when national authorities fail to take action, including, if necessary, by force; and an "early" reform of the Security Council. Although much pared down, all these proposals have at least survived. Others have not. Either they proved so contentious that they were omitted altogether, such as the sections on disarmament and non-proliferation and the International Criminal Court, or they were watered down to little more than empty platitudes. The important section on collective security and the use of force no longer even mentions the vexed issue of pre-emptive strikes; meanwhile the section on terrorism condemns it "in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes", but fails to provide the clear definition the Americans wanted. Both Mr. Annan and, more surprisingly, George Bush have nevertheless sought to put a good face on things, with Mr. Annan describing the summit document as "an important step forward" and Mr. Bush saying the UN had taken "the first steps" towards reform. Mr. Annan and Mr. Bolton are determined to go a lot further. It is now up to the General Assembly to flesh out the document" s skeleton proposals and propose new ones. But its chances of success appear slim.

Lookatthefollowingpictureandwriteanarticleonhappiness.Yourarticleshouldcoverthepointsbelow:1)describethepicture,2)interpretitsmeaning,and3)giveyoursuggestionastothebestwaytofindhappiness.Youshouldneatlywrite160—200words.

Write a letter to Professor Smith, a world famous professor majoring in Chinese philosophy and religious studies, and invite him to participate in a conference to be held in your university. 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 the address. (10 points)

She is beautiful and clever.

The modern university is the ideal environment for the creation and transfer of knowledge that drives national competitiveness in an increasingly global era. Its most effective form is the American adaptation of the European model, in which teaching, leaning and research are integrated into a single institution. Indeed, the American university has proved capable of almost anything, from developing advanced economic theories to creating new life forms. Many national leaders understand that the university is the critical catalyst for America"s adaptability, economic robustness and emergence as a great power. And they are moving aggressively to catch up. The universities created by emerging economies beginning in the 1990s and through 2020 will likely play a decisive role in reshaping the global balance of economic power. That is bad news for the United States. The past two decades of American university development have been characterized largely by self-satisfaction arising from steady progress by the top 20 or so research universities. And America as a nation has been coasting. Since 2000, the United States has lost its edge in the graduation of engineers and technologists. The country no longer dominates scientific discovery, innovation or exploration. Most important, the United States has not launched any effort to build new institutions to accommodate its increasingly diverse population of more than 300 million. The result is that America"s university system, despite its historical pre-eminence, has ceased to grow. Furthermore, America"s university system has failed to adapt to the dramatic demographic shifts occurring as a result of social mobility and immigration. America needs to realize that its universities face real competition from the rest of the world to attract the best and the brightest, to secure resources and to provide environments that educate and inspire. This is not to say that the best American universities are no longer the leaders in discovery and innovation. It is to say that the success of the higher-education system must be measured by more than just innovations. Its long-term performance depends on its ability to provide learning to a broad cross sections of citizens, to advance national proficiency in math and science and to create an adaptable work force, as well as to develop a national appreciation for discovery, entrepreneurship and the creative process. In China and elsewhere, these are the goals of the new universities being built. In the United States, we need to move from a national self-confidence based on past success to one built on the knowledge that we are advancing a system of higher education that will meet our future needs. This will require that policymakers, business leaders and universities rededicate themselves to creating comprehensive learning and discovery environments; design entirely new models and methods for teaching, and then take action to implement them.

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. In our time women have an average lifespan of almost 80 years; double of what it was in the last century. Motherhood can be postponed and in theory marriage can be postponed. Women in the USA are studying more than men and they may become main breadwinner in the near future.B. Many women go through life thinking, consciously or unconsciously, that a man will solve all their problems, "Once we are married, everything will be OK". This attitude only set us up for failure. Men are not princes ready to take any challenge to rescue the princesses, they are human beings with their own needs and fears.C. Carrie was wondering in her bedroom about the comment that her friend, New York socialite Charlotte York, made "Women want to be rescued". Carrie wonders, "Is that true? Is that the only thing women want? Rescued by whom? If the prince did not kiss Snow White, would she have been frozen forever or would she have woken up anyway and moved on?" Snow White probably had no other chance, but we do.D. No wonder our society has changed. On the other hand, our values have not changed fast enough and many women, more so Hispanic women, are just waiting to be rescued by the prince. These women have not realized, they no longer need to be rescued; they need a man for other reasons, not to take care of them.E. Women in our society have so many options that we do not need anybody else to rescue us; we are the only ones that can rescue ourselves. If you have areas Of your life that you want to improve, go ahead; do it for you and for you only, or accept yourself as you are. Do not be so naive that you think someone else can take care of all your problems. Life does not work like that. Live life to the fullest, be happy with who you are and you will see that if you are happy with yourself, you will make others happy, including your man.F. Our society has changed in a remarkable way in the last 50 years or so. And there are many reasons for it. At the beginning of the 20th century women"s life span was about 40 years. There-fore, life needed to start earlier if a woman were going to live for only 40 years; motherhood was a priority. Men used to work and women stayed at home and took care of them and their kids. Women could not survive without a man; women needed to be rescued.G. Women are caregivers. We are strong and smart and we have the ability to take care of ourselves; we do not need to be rescued by anyone. When we are giving our power to others in exchange for security, we are also giving up our freedom. Are you waiting to be rescued? Do you ever think like that?Order: C is the first paragraph and G is the last.

Your class is going to hold a visit to Beijing. Write a notice to inform your classmates of the information related to the trip. You should write about 100 words neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "class committee" instead. Do not write the address.

(46) While much of the attention on fighting AIDS and other diseases in poor countries has focused on access to affordable drugs, concern is now shifting to the question of who exactly, will deliver them. Unfortunately, there is a severe shortage of doctors, nurses and other health-care workers in these countries. According to a report published in this week"s Lancet by the Joint Learning Initiative (JLI), an international consortium of academic centres and development agencies, sub-Saharan Africa has only one-tenth the number of nurses and doctors per head of population that Europe does, though its health-care problems are far mom pressing. (47) The reasons for this are twofold, and well known—not enough health-care workers are trained in the fast place, and too many of those who are trained then leave for better-paid jobs in the rich world. What the report does is to put some numbers on these problems. A mere 5,000 doctors, it finds, graduate in Africa each year (a third of the number that graduate in America). Only 50 of 600 doctors mined in Zambia in recent years are still in the country. There are more Malawian doctors in Manchester than Malawi. (48) And many rich countries exacerbate the problem by recruiting from poor ones to help deal with their own shortages. To overcome all this, the JLI reckons that the world needs 4m more health-care workers, of whom lm are required in sub-Saharan Africa alone. The question is who will pay for them? The report floats some ideas. (49) It recommends that roughly $400m, or 4% of the overseas aid currently spent on health, -be earmarked to help build up the health-care workforce in poor countries. (50) But it also suggests that better use be made of existing resources, for example by employing local volunteers rather than highly trained doctors for many routine matters. As Lincoln Chen of Harvard University, one of the report"s authors, points out, a few countries, such as Brazil, Thailand and Iran, have taken steps in the right direction. Others need to follow their lead.

Barbie is going through a midlife crisis. After (1)_____ with longtime boyfriend Ken earlier this year, she has (2)_____ refuge in shopping, surfing, bubble baths and partying with a crew of trendy pals on the beach in Jamaica. At 45, she even made a (3)_____ for the White House. Then there was the makeover: a new. (4)_____ of Paul Frank fashions, her own fragrance, a new musical and a new man-spiky-haired Australian surfer Blaine. But, she (5)_____ is going through a crisis, one that started at the cash register. (6)_____ the Barbie brand as a whole (7)_____ $3.6 billion in global retail sales this year, according to manufacturer Mattel Inc., Barbie has (8)_____ sales slide over the past seven quarters. In the past few years, rivals (9)_____ the edgier Bratz have upstaged the iconic doll. To re-energize its flagship brand, the world"s largest toy maker set out to (10)_____ Barbie and her pals in a (11)_____ of books, magazines and animated films, hoping the story lines would (12)_____ sales of the doll and her trove of accessories. For girls ages 6 to 9, Mattel crafted stories with preteen scenarios—dance parties, dating and shopping. Barbie"s look now (13)_____ reflects current fashion trends. Mattel signed diva Hilary Duff to (14)_____ the brand. "She"s the "It" girl for the Barbie set," said Chris Byrne, an independent toy consultant and editor of the Toy Report. Mattel is (15)_____ the story-line concept to new and existing doll lines across Barbie"s (16)_____, though only about two-thirds of the new toys will be in stores this year, with the (17)_____ arriving in 2005. "We need to make progress in regaining the confidence of retailers, and that (18)_____ time," Robert A. Eckert, Mattel"s chairman and chief executive, told Wall Street analysts last month. Perhaps a bigger (19)_____ for Mattel is persuading parents and children that Barbie is cool. That cachet has eluded the brand in recent years, particularly among older girls, many of whom either have lost interest in dolls or (20)_____ Bratz.

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. Then, in the 1970s, science began to show that the nurture—only view was indeed too simplistic-which triggered a backlash from the left. When researchers like Richard Herrnstein and E.O. Wilson demonstrated that genes do play a significant role in human intelligence and behavior, for example, they were vilified by many of their colleagues. And just a few years ago, a conference designed to explore the genetic roots of violence had to be canceled in the face of widespread condemnation.B. But if you think this compromise has stopped the arguments, think again. Scientists and philosophers are still getting steamed up over the issue, but now they"re fighting over percentages, over how much of human character is shaped by genes and how much by environment. And according to Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we continue to give far too much credit to the latter. In a new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking), Pinker argues that ignorance, prejudice and political correctness have kept scientists and the public from appreciating the power of our genes.C. The backlash was understandable, says Pinker. Once you suggest that human nature is in any way hardwired, it"s easier for the unscrupulous to write off entire groups as genetically inferior-as the Nazis did with Jews, Poles and Gypsies. If have-nots are genetically lacking in drive or intelligence or ambition, what"s the point of fighting poverty?D. That echoed 20th century liberal social theory: violence, crime and poverty were not the fault of the violent, the lawless and the poor but of society. Improve living conditions and you will curd the problems. These notions, of course,, flew in the face of everything conservatives held dear—the idea that the lower classes were inherently stupid and lazy, for example, and that rehabilitating lawbreakers was an exercise in futility which may have been part of their appeal.E. Anyone who has read Pinker"s earlier books will rightly guess that his latest effort is similarly sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, richly footnoted and fun to read. It"s also highly persuasive. The view that environment is paramount began, he says, with the philosophers of the Enlightenment: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rene Descartes and John Stuart Mill. And it was reinforced in the 1950s by Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, who said that all human behavior was simply a set of conditioned responses.F. In one important sense the argument over nature and nurture has been resolved. For centuries, the nature camp said that personalities are born, not made, that our character is pretty much formed by the time we pop out of the womb. The nurture people countered with the metaphor of the tabula rasa: our mind starts out as a blank slate, and it"s how we are reared that determines what gets written on it. Modern science, though—especially our fast-growing understanding of the human genome—makes it clear that both sides are partly right. Nature endows us with inborn abilities and personality traits; nurture takes these raw materials and molds them as we learn and mature.G. Plenty, says Pinker. Compassion and altruism (which he thinks also are at least partly hardwired) are good reasons to make life better for those who start out at a disadvantage. And while Pinker also admits, albeit in a less strident voice, that environment plays a significant part in how we turn out, he insists it"s just not the whole story and our genes, which haven"t got enough respect, do play significant roles.

BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

the four northern islands