It never rains but it pours . Just as bosses and boards have finally sorted out their worst accounting and compliance troubles, and improved their feeble corporation governance, a new problem threatens to earn them—especially in America—the sort of nasty headlines that inevitably lead to heads rolling in the executive suite: data insecurity. Left, until now, to odd, low-level IT staff to put right, and seen as a concern only of data-rich industries such as banking, telecoms and air travel, information protection is now high on the boss" s agenda in businesses of every variety. Several massive leakages of customer and employee data this year—from organizations as diverse as Time Warner, the American defense contractor Science Applications International Corp and even the University of California, Berkeley—have left managers hurriedly peering into their intricate IT systems and business processes in search of potential vulnerabilities. "Data is becoming an asset which needs to be guarded as much as any other asset," says Haim Mendelson of Stanford University"s business school. "The ability to guard customer data is the key to market value, which the board is responsible for on behalf of shareholders." Indeed, just as there is the concept of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles(GAAP), perhaps it is time for GASP, Generally Accepted Security Practices , suggested Eli Noam of New York" s Columbia Business School. "Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue, not a technical one," he says. The mystery is that this should come as a surprise to any boss. Surely it should be obvious to the dimmest executive that trust, that most valuable of economic assets, is easily destroyed and hugely expensive to restore—and that few things are more likely to destroy trust than a company letting sensitive personal data get into the wrong hands. The current state of affairs may have been encouraged—though not justified—by the lack of legal penalty (in America, but not Europe) for data leakage. Until California recently passed a law, American firms did not have to tell anyone, even the victim, when data went astray. That may change fast: lots of proposed data-security legislation is now doing the rounds in Washington, D.C.Meanwhile, the theft of information about some 40 million credit-card accounts in America, disclosed on June 17th, overshadowed a hugely important decision a day earlier by America"s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that puts corporate America on notice that regulators will act if firms fail to provide adequate data security.

Owing to the insufficient gas supply in the United States, the gas price has dramatically risen. The new gas price reality and the policy decisions it may trigger will undoubtedly lead to critical financial implications for some individuals or companies, but the situation can hardly be termed a "national crisis" or even a "shortage". What is true is that buyers—particularly those in the chemical industry and in independent power generation will not be able to acquire the quantity of gas they wish at the prices they wish to pay, or even at prices that will allow them to remain competitive in their markets, particularly during peak demand seasons. Over the next year or two, the result will be higher, and more volatile prices, to be sure, but there are market-driven adjustment mechanisms even in the short term, e.g., more electric power from coal and oil, reduced production of domestic chemicals, and a commensurate substitution of imports. Consumers and companies will feel the economic pinch of higher prices; particularly, if we experience an exceptionally hot summer and a winter, when average temperatures were 20% colder than the year before in the Northeast. Still, the United States faces neither the specter of economic recession—at least not solely due to gas prices—nor of freezing families unable to "obtain gas to heat their homes. Given this new price plateau, demand adjustments will also take place and vary across regions of the United States and across industries, with power generation and chemicals perhaps the most affected. Some in those industries may find that their facilities are no longer financially viable at the new price plateau, and there will likely be another round of industrial restructuring not unlike others that have resulted from international differences in resource and labor costs—lest we forget, natural gas is still abundant and very low cost in other countries such as Trinidad, Qatar, and Iran, just as labor is abundant and low cost in China, Indonesia, and parts of Latin America. From a policy perspective, the United States needs to carefully evaluate a series of trade-offs between environmental concerns and economic growth. The gas price experiences of the last two years are the first real tastes of the economic costs of a gas-based environmental strategy. Evaluating these trade-offs needs to be done with a level head and a clear understanding of those trade-offs.

Washington, June 22—More than three decades after the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government fools and a mandate to protect animals, insects and plants threatened with extinction, the landmark law is facing the most intense efforts ever by the White House, Congress, landowners and industry to limit its reach. (46) More than any time in the law"s 32-year history, the obligations it imposes on government and, indirectly, on landowners are being challenged in the courts, reworked in the agencies responsible for enforcing it and re-examined in Congress. In some cases, the challenges are broad and sweeping, as when the Bush administration, in a legal battle over the best way to protect endangered salmon, declared Western dams to be as much a part of the landscape as the rivers they control. (47) In others, the actions are deep in the realm of regulatory bureaucracy, as when a White House appointee at the Interior Department sought to influence scientific recommendations involving the sage grouse(松鸡), a bird whose habitat includes areas of likely oil and gas deposits. Some environmentalists readily concede that the law has long overemphasized the stick(处罚) and provided fewer carrots(奖励) for private interests than it might. But some of them also fear that the law"s defects will be used as a justification for a wholesale evisceration(修改法案使之失去效力). "There"s an alignment of the planets of people against the Endangered Species Act in Congress, in the White House and in the agencies," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, a lobbying group based in Washington. (48) On the opposite side, Robert D. Thornton, a lawyer for developers and Indian tribes in Southern California, has argued for years that the government goes too far to protect threatened species and curtails(剥夺) people"s ability to use their own land. "I"ve raised a child and sent him through college waiting for Congress to amend the Endangered Species Act," he said. "But I do think that a lot of forces are joining now." (49) The Endangered Species Act of 1973 set out a goal that, polls show, is still widely admired: ensuring that species facing extinction be saved and robust populations he restored. Currently 1,264 species are considered threatened or endangered. Some, like the bighorn sheep of the Southern California mountains, have obvious popular appeal and a constituency, while others, like the Kretschmarr Cave mold beetle in South Texas, are an acquired taste. But in the past 30 years lawsuits from all sides have proliferated. (50) And more private 1,nd, particularly in the West, has been designated critical habitat for species, potentially subjecting it to federal controls that could limit construction, logging, fishing and other activities. A "critical habitat" designation gives the federal government no direct authority to regulate private land use, but it does require federal agencies to take the issue into account when making regulatory decisions about private development. The conflicts are becoming sharper as the needs of newly recognized endangered species are interfering more often with the demands of exurban development.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

They learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper. Consider the nation's most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of Science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2, 000 outstanding teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. 【R1】______ What holds them back is that they don't learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn't make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own. 【R2】______ In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet "only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators, " laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. "Those who do must make a painful transition to an adult who ultimately remakes a domain." Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities by shining in their jobs without making waves. 【R3】______ So what does it take to raise a creative child? One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative 5 percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. 【R4】______. Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it' s easy to thwart. By limiting rules, parents encouraged their children to think for themselves. They tended to "place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules, " the Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile reports. 【R5】______When psychologists compared America's most creative architects with a group of highly skilled but unoriginal peers, there was something unique about the parents of the creative architects: "Emphasis was placed on the development of one' s own ethical code." [A]Even then, though, parents didn' t shove their values down their children' s throats. [B]The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule. [C]If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours. [D]When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn't suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted—as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee. [E]They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves. [F]Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher's pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep. [G]Top concert pianists didn't have elite teachers from the time they could walk; their first lessons came from instructors who happened to live nearby and made learning fun.

Who won the World Cup 1994 football game? What happened at the United Nations? How did the critics like the new play?【1】an event takes place, newspapers are on the streets【2】the details. Wherever anything happens in the world, reporters are on the spot to【3】the news. Newspapers have one basic【4】, to get the news as quickly as possible from its source, from those who make it to those who want to【5】it. Radio, telegraph, television, and【6】inventions brought competition for newspaper. So did the development of magazines and other means of communication.【7】, this competition merely spurred the newspapers on. They quickly made use of the newer and faster means of communication to improve the【8】and thus the efficiency of their own operations. Today more newspapers are【9】and read than ever before. Competition also led newspapers to branch out into many other fields. Besides keeping readers【10】of the latest news, today"s newspapers【11】and influence readers about politics and other important and serious matters. Newspapers influence readers" economic choices【12】advertising. Most newspapers depend on advertising for very【13】. Newspapers are sold at a price that【14】even a small fraction of the cost of production. The main【15】 of income for most newspapers is commercial advertising. The 【16】 in selling advertising depends on a newspaper"s value to advertisers. This【17】in terms of circulation. How many people read the newspaper? Circulation depends【18】on the work of the circulation department and on the services or entertainment【19】in a newspaper"s pages. But for the most part, circulation depends on a newspaper"s value to readers as a source of information【20】the community, city, county, state, nation, and world—and even outer space.

You are a member of Photography Club and this club is going to hold a photo exhibition to celebrate the coming 50th anniversary of your university. Now you are expected to write a note to invite your schoolmates to contribute photos to this exhibition. Write your note in no less than 100 words and write it neatly. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

For several decades biologists have pondered the question of whether men and women produce pheromones. A pheromone is a chemical signal from one animal to another. 【F1】 Often, though not always , such chemicals indicate sexual availability—and when it comes to human mating signals in particular, those looking into the matter have a couple of specific molecules in mind. Androstadienone (AND) and estratetraenol (EST) are derived, respectively, from male and female hormones and are exuded in sweat. The idea that they are pheromonal is thus worth investigating. 【F2】 The results of such investigations as have been made so far, though, are contradictory. Some experiments have found that these molecules make opposite-sex faces, or photographs thereof, appear more attractive to heterosexual volunteers. Others discern no such effect. 【F3】 Unfortunately, most of these studies were done with groups of volunteers too small for clear conclusions to be drawn, or using less-than-rigorous experimental methods. To try to clear up the confusion, a group of researchers led by Robin Hare of the University of Western Australia have performed one of the most stringent studies to date. They report their results this week in Royal Society Open Science. Dr. Hare and his colleagues took 43 men and 51 women, all of them straight, and gave them two tasks. One was to decide whether an androgynous computer-generated face was, on balance, more likely to be female or male. The other was to rate members of the opposite sex shown in photographs for both their sexual attractiveness and their likelihood of being unfaithful. The participants completed both tasks twice, on consecutive days. On one day they were exposed to the appropriate molecule (AND for the women; EST for the men) and on the other to a placebo that ought to have had no effect. Crucially, the study was double-blinded, which meant that neither the researchers nor the participants knew which day was which. 【F4】 This should have made it impossible for unconscious biases on the part of the experimenters or the subjects to have had any effect on the result. If AND and EST really are aphrodisiac pheromones, the researchers reasoned, then they ought to make participants more likely to assume that androgynous faces belonged to the opposite sex. 【F5】 They should also boost the sex appeal of the people in the photographs—and, because of that boost, increase the perception that those people might be unfaithful, since the attractive have more opportunities for infidelity than the plain.

A Welcome E-mail Some international students are coming to your university. Write them an e-mail in the name of the Students" Union to extend your welcome and provide some suggestions for their campus life here. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

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

Sometimes we have specific problems with our mother; sometimes, life with her can just be hard work. If there are difficulties in your (1)_____, it"s best to deal with them, (2)_____ remember that any (3)_____ should be done (4)_____ person or by letter. The telephone is not a good (5)_____ because it is too easy (6)_____ either side to (7)_____ the conversation. Explain to her (8)_____ you find difficult in your relationship and then (9)_____ some new arrangements that you think would establish a (10)_____ balance between you. Sometimes we hold (11)_____ from establishing such boundaries because we are afraid that doing (12)_____ implies we are (13)_____ her. We need to remember that being (14)_____ from our mother does not (15)_____ mean that we no longer love her. If the conflict is (16)_____ and you cannot find a way to (17)_____ it, you might decide to give up your relationship with your mother for a while. Some of my patients had (18)_____ "trial separations". The (19)_____ allowed things to simmer down, enabling (20)_____.

Title: Parents are too Permissive with Their Children Nowadays Your composition should be based on the Outline given in Chinese below: 1. 孩子成为家庭的中心，父母日渐失去应有的权威。 2. 父母对孩子的溺爱和忽视导致表少年犯罪。 3. 孩子的生活过于安逸对他们日后的成长不利。 You should write about 160-200 words neatly.

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

They jumped to the conclusion that the Red Army would launch an attack from the west battlefront.

BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./B

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

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. Electronics should also make it technically easier to charge cars the proper costs for road congestion. Road-side sensors could identify and charge cars at a high rate during busy periods, and less or nothing at other times. The trouble is that the technology looks easier to develop than the political will to use it. Drivers are as hooked on cars as smokers are on cigarettes. This is true not only when there are few alternatives, as in rural America, but even in cities such as Paris, with a highly developed urban rail system and stinging petrol taxes. Indeed, even colossal traffic jams, for all their cost in wasted time, have failed to deter motorists.B. There are 500 million cars on the world"s roads today, ten times as many as 50 years ago. By 2030 there could be a billion, plus another 500 million lorries and motorcycles. That is splendid news: few things transform lives for the better as fast and as thoroughly as access to a car. Yet even drivers admit that more cars (other people"s, of course) will also bring heavy costs, notably in air pollution and congestion.C. Indeed, all political action to reduce car use seems as gridlocked as downtown New York. California, which pioneered innovations such as catalytic converters to reduce carbon-monoxide emissions and car-sharing on highway, has backed off its demand that 2% of new sales should be "zero emission vehicles" (i.e. electric cars) in 1998. This was not merely the result of lobbying; battery technology is simply not good enough to make electric cars attractive. Petrol taxes remain highly unpopular in America. In Europe, although high fuel taxes are more widely accepted, experiments to reduce congestion by charging car commuters have repeatedly been postponed.D. Over the past 20 years, technical fixes have made cars far cleaner. Now the fixes will get fewer; and sheer traffic growth will soon swamp any gains. Cleaning up city air is also easier than curbing output of carbon dioxide, a gas thought to cause climate change. Road transport accounts for one-fifth of world carbon-dioxide out-put, and the share may grow as developing countries get wheels. Congestion makes things worse: cars stuck in traffic jam pollute three times as much as those on the open road. But the simple answer to the building more roads-is increasingly expensive and politically unacceptable.E. Yet something must be done about the future rise in congestion and pollution. The best approach is to tackle what remains the fundamental cause of both problems: the fact that the full external costs of each car journey (in congestion, pollution and accidents) are not home by the motorist. That suggests using the tax system in harness with market forces to limit the growth of car travel and to coax motorists into more environmentally friendly behavior.F. As with cigarette taxes, higher taxes on car use in general look like good ways to raise revenue. It is surely sensible to tax socially and economically damaging behavior rather than such desirable activities as saving and hard work. If voters see such taxes as substitutes for more undesirable ones, they may grudgingly accept them. But they will always be more unpopular than taxes merely aimed at persuading drivers to switch, for instance, those that have successfully promoted unleaded over leaded petrol. Taxes of this sort should be able to boost sales of less polluting cars such as today"s natural-gas vehicles and tomorrow"s hybrid electric cars, which will use tiny internal-combustion engines running at a steady, low-polluting rate to generate electricity for the engine.G. New technology ought to make this easier. A promising way to load the pollution costs of motoring on to motorists may be a plan developed by green activists in Germany. This would implant an electronic smart card in cars" engine-management systems, to monitor the quantity of polluting emissions. The results would then be totted up every year to produce a tax bill.Order: B is the first paragraph, and F is the last one.

BSection III Writing/B

Studythepictureontherightcarefullyandwriteanessayof160-200words.Intheessay,youshould1.describethepicturebrieflyandinterpretitsmeaning,2.discussthedialecticalrelationshipofknowledgeandmoneyinthenewera,andthen3.summarizeyourpoints.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

Write a composition based on the picture. The title can be offered in your preference. Make sure that your writing follows the given OUTLINE:Outline: 1. Brief description of the picture 2. Comment on its theme You should write about 160-200 words neatly.