Three years ago, on January 13th, Rukhsar Khatun, then 15 months old, was diagnosed with polio. She now has a crippled leg and struggles to keep up with her friends. But this little girl, from a West Bengali village, can claim some fame: she is, with luck, the last Indian to be infected with the wild polio virus. Enough time has passed with no new case for India shortly to be certified as free of the pain. That is a big success. India's anti-polio campaign began in 1995 with severe disadvantages. The country spends little on public health, barely 1% of GDP, and has been awful at immunising children. Too few parents know the basics of hygiene and nutrition, let alone the benefits of vaccines. India has bad sanitation, large remote populations and vast migration from village to slum. Yet much has gone right. The anti-polio campaign received over $3 billion, mostly from within India itself, and deployed 2.4m vaccinators. UNICEF, the World Health Organisation (WHO), Rotary International and the Gates Foundation (both charities) gave technical help. Religious leaders reassured people suspicious about vaccinations, and politicians knocked on doors to make sure children took their medicine. At the peak of coverage, 99.1% of the target population swallowed anti-polio drops, says Anuradha Gupta of the national health ministry. That is surprisingly high, considering that a decade ago "universal" vaccination coverage for seven preventable diseases was a pitiful 30% in Bihar, a big, poor northern state. India's campaign has been successful enough for its lessons to be applied in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria, the last places with endemic polio. Vaccinators learned to attend especially to mobile populations, like seasonal workers at brick kilns, and found that many migrants are best reached not at home but in bus and railway stations. Good monitoring was crucial, too. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, vaccinators visited 60m households several times a year, says Hamid Jafari of the WHO. To compile data on receivers, some 400,000 hard-to-reach population groups were carefully tracked and plotted, down to each household. Data passed early to decision-makers, at the district-official level, allowed a quick response to new cases.

Renewable energy, it turns out, does grow on trees. The fruit pods plucked from jatropha trees have seeds that produce clean-burning diesel fuel. But unlike corn and other biofuel sources, the jatropha doesn"t have to compete with food crops for arable land. Even in the worst of soils, it grows like weeds. Sound too good to be true? That"s why brothers Paul and Mark Dalton chose to name their Florida jatropha company My Dream Fuel. If President Barack Obama"s green-energy rhetoric is on the level, this should be the year the U. S. gets clued in to what much of the rest of the world is already betting: that jatropha, like other nonfood sources such as algae, will revive a biofuels movement battered of late by charges that it diverts too many crops from too many mouths. India has set aside 100 million acres for jatropha and expects the oil to account for 20% of its diesel consumption by 2011. Australia, China, Brazil and Kenya have also embraced it. In December, a Boeing 747 was successfully test-flown by Air New Zealand using a 50-50 blend of jatropha and aviation fuel. "This is a superior biodiesel, " says Roy Beckford, a University of Florida researcher and expert on sustainable farm development. He has been studying different varieties of jatropha and in February plans to publish his findings that trees like those the Daltons are growing (since 2006 they"ve planted 900,000 near Fort Myers) thrive so well in Florida that they may yield up to eight times as much oil as they do in places like India and Africa. Native to the Caribbean, jatropha curcas was taken to India in the 1600s by Portuguese sailors who used the seeds for long-burning lamp oil. When Paul Dalton, 54, a Washington attorney, decided to invest $ 500,000 in an alternative-fuel venture, he followed the Portuguese trail to India and found prolific new jatropha varieties being cloned in the city of Mysore. The fuel emits negligible greenhouse gases, and the trees can capture four tons of carbon dioxide per acre (which might make growers eligible for carbon credits on the global market). Says Ron Pernick, co-founder of the alternative-energy research firm Clean Edge, "Jatropha isn"t a silver bullet, but it looks very promising. " That"s good news not only for energy gluttons like the U. S. but also for energy-starved nations like Haiti, which rarely has enough diesel to power its capital for a full day. My Dream Fuel donates jatropha trees to Caribbean countries in the hope that they won"t have to choose between producing enough fuel and producing enough food. "We want to make money with jatropha, but we also want to make a difference, " Paul Dalton says. If jatropha can do both, it"s an idea that could grow like weeds.

European regulators have contributed to their banks' decline, in two ways. First, they are specifying how much banks can pay in bonuses relative to base pay. Second, they are trying to force banks to hold more capital and to make it easier to allow them to fail by, for instance, separating their retail deposits from their wholesale businesses. The first approach is foolish. It will drive up the fixed costs of Europe's banks and reduce their flexibility to cut expenses in downturns (低迷时期). They will therefore struggle to compete in America or fast-growing Asian markets with foreign rivals that have the freedom to pay the going rate. The second approach is sensible. Switzerland and Britain are making progress in ending the implicit taxpayer subsidy that supports banks that are too big to fail. The collapse of Ireland's economy is warning enough of what happens when governments feel compelled to help out banks that weaken their economies. Some European bankers argue that the continent needs investment-banking champions. Yet it is not obvious that European firms or taxpayers gain from having national banks that are good at packaging and selling American subprime loans (次级贷款). Indeed, it is American taxpayers and investors who should worry about the dominance of a few Wall Street firms. They bear the main risk of future bail-outs (紧急援助). They would benefit from greater competition in investment banking. IPO fees are much higher in America than elsewhere, mainly because the market is dominated by a few big investment banks. Wall Street's new titans say they are already penalised by new international rules that insist they have somewhat bigger capital buffers (缓冲) than smaller banks because they pose a greater risk to economies if they fail. Yet the huge economies of scale and implicit subsidies from being too big to fail more than offset (抵销) the cost of the buffers. Increasing the capital surcharges for big banks would do more for the stability of the financial system than the thicket of Dodd-Frank rules ever will. Five years on from the frightening summer of 2008, America's big banks are back, and that is a good thing. But there are still things that could make Wall Street safer.

A. Study the following account of a personal experience carefully and write an essay in no less than 200 words. B. Your essay must be written clearly. C. Your essay should meet the requirements below. 1) Elaborate your impressions on the story told, and 2) point out its implications in our life. One summer my wife Chris and I were invited by friends to row down the Colorado River in a boat. Our expedition included many highly successful people—the kind who have staffs to take care of life"s daily work. But in the wilder rapids, all of us naturally set aside any pretenses and put out backs into every stroke to keep the boat from tumbling over. At each night"s encampment, we all hauled supplies and cleaned dishes. After only two days in the river, people accustomed to being spoiled and indulged had become a team, working together to cope with the unpredictable twists and turns of the river. I believe that in life—as well as on boat trips—teamwork will make all our journeys successful ones. The rhythms of teamwork have been the rhythms of my life...

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

How did the company come to produce a record glorifying the murder of police, which is entitled Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T on the album Boby Count? The album is released by Warner Bros. Records, part of the Time Warner media and entertainment conglomerate. In a Wall Street Journal oped piece laying out the company"s position? Time Warner co-CEO Gerald Levin makes two defenses. First, Ice-T"s Cop Killer is misunderstood. "It doesn"t induce or glorify violence... It"s his fictionalized attempt to get inside a character"s head... Cop Killer is no more a call for gunning down the police than Frankie and Johnny is a summons for jilted lovers to shoot one another". Instead of "finding ways to silence the messenger", we should be "heeding the anguished cry contained in his message". This defense is self-contradictory. Frankie and Johnny does not pretend to have a political "message" that must be "heeded". If Cop Killer has a message, it is that the murder of policemen is a justified response to police brutality. And not in self-defense, but in premeditated acts of revenge against random cops. Killing policemen is a good thing—that is the plain meaning of the song, and no "larger understanding" of black culture, the rage of the streets or anything else can explain it away. As in much of today"s popular music, the line between performer and performance is purposely blurred. These are political sermonettes clearly intended to support the sentiments being expressed. Traey Marrow (Ice-T) himself has said, "I scared the police, and they need to be scared". That seems clear. The company"s second defense of Cop Killer is the classic one of free expression: "We stand for creative freedom. We believe that the worth of what an artist or journalist has to say does not depend on preapproval from a government official or a corporate censor". Of course Ice-T has the right to say whatever he wants. But that doesn"t require any company to provide him an outlet. And it doesn"t relieve a company of responsibility for the messages it chooses to promote. Judgment is not "censorship". Many an "anguished cry" goes unrecorded. This one was recorded, and promoted, because a successful artist under contract wanted to record it. Nothing wrong with making money, but a company cannot take the money and run from the responsibility. The founder of Time, Henry Luce, would have scorned the notion that his company provided a value-free forum for the exchange of ideas. In Luce"s system, editors were supposed to make value judgments and promote the truth as they saw it.

How men first learned to invent words is unknown; 【B1】______, the origin of language is a mystery. All we really know is that men, unlike animals, somehow invented certain 【B2】______ to express thoughts and feelings, actions and things, 【B3】______ they could communicate with each other; and that later they agreed 【B4】______ certain signs, called letters, which could be 【B5】______ to represent those sounds, and which could be【B6】______. Those sounds, whether spoken, 【B7】______written in letters, we call words. The power of words, then, lies in their【B8】______—the things they bring up before our minds.Words become【B9】______with meaning for us by experience;【B10】______the longer we live, the more certain words【B11】______to us the happy and sad events of our past; and the more we【B12】______, the more the number of words that mean something to us【B13】______. Great writers are those who not only have great thoughts but also express these thoughts in words which appeal【B14】______to our minds and emotions. This【B15】______and telling use of words is what we call【B16】______style. Above all, the real poet is a master of【B17】______. He can convey his meaning in words which sing like music, and which【B18】______their position and association can【B19】______men to tears. We should, therefore, learn to choose our words carefully and use them accurately, or they will【B20】______our speech or writing silly and vulgar.

BSection III Writing/B

That orientals and occidentals think in different ways is not mere prejudice. Many psychological studies conducted over the past two decades【C1】______Westerners have a more individualistic, analytic and abstract【C2】______life than do East Asians. Several hypotheses have been put forward to【C3】______this. One, that modernization promotes individualism, falls at the first obstacle: Japan, an ultra-modem country whose people have【C4】______a collective outlook. A second, that a higher prevalence of【C5】______disease in a place makes contact with【C6】______more dangerous, and causes groups to turn inward, is hardly better. Europe has had its【C7】______of plagues; probably more than either Japan or Korea. That【C8】______Thomas Talhelm of the University of Virginia and his colleagues to【C9】______into a third suggestion: that the crucial difference is【C10】______The West"s staple is wheat; the East"s, rice.【C11】______the mechanization of agriculture a farmer who grew rice had to【C12】______twice as many hours doing so as one who grew wheat To allocate labor【C13】______, especially at times of planting and【C14】______, rice-growing societies as far【C15】______as India, Malaysia and Japan all developed【C16】______labor exchanges which let【C17】______rearrange their farms" schedules in order to assist each other during these crucial periods.【C18】______until recently, almost everyone alive was a farmer, it is a reasonable hypothesis that such a collective outlook would【C19】______a society"s culture and behavior, and might prove so deep-rooted that even now, when most people earn their living in other ways, it helps to【C20】______their lives.

Artificial hearts have long been the stuff of science fiction. In "Robocop", snazzy cardiac devices are made by Yamaha and Jensen, and in "Star Trek", Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Enterprise, has one implanted in the year 2328. In the present day, however, their history has been more chequered. The first serious attempt to build one happened in the 1980s, when Jarvik-7, made by Robert Jarvik, a surgeon at the University of Utah, captured the world's attention. But Jarvik-7 was a complicated affair that needed to be connected via tubes to machines outside the body. The patient could not go home, nor even turn around in bed. Scientists have tried many other designs, but all were seen as temporary expedients intended to tide a patient over until the real thing became available from a human donor. That may be about to change. This week, America's Food and Drug Administration gave its approval to a new type of artificial heart made by Abiomed, a firm based near Boston. The agency granted a "humanitarian device exemption" , a restricted form of approval that will allow doctors to implant the new device in people whose hearts are about to fail but who cannot, for reasons such as intolerance of the immunosuppressive drugs needed to stop rejection, receive a transplant. Such people have a life expectancy of less than a month, but a dozen similarly hopeless patients implanted with Abiomed's heart survived for about five months. Unlike Dr. Jarvik's device, this newfangled bundle of titanium and polyurethane aims to set the patient free. An electric motor which revolves up to 10,000 times a minute pushes an incompressible fluid around the Abiomed heart, and that fluid, in turn, pushes the blood—first to the lungs to be oxygenated, and then around the body. Power is supplied by an electric current generated in a pack outside the body. This induces current in the motor inside the heart. All diagnostics are done remotely, using radio signals. There are no tubes or wires coming out of the patient. The charger is usually plugged into the mains, but if armed with a battery it can be carried around for hours in a vest or backpack, thus allowing the patient to roam freely. Most strikingly, the device's internal battery can last half an hour before it needs recharging. That allows someone time to take a shower or even go for a quick swim without having to wear the charger. Abiomed's chairman, Michael Minogue, does not claim that his firm's product will displace human transplants. Even so, the firm has big ambitions. It is already developing a new version that will be 30% smaller (meaning more women can use it) and will last for five years. That should be ready by 2008—320 years earlier than the writers of "Star Trek" predicted.

It seems to me that the time is ripe for the Department of Employment and the Department of Education to get together with the universities and produce a revised educational system which will make a more economic use of the wealth of talent, application and industry currently being wasted on certificates, diplomas and degrees that no one wants to know about.

【F1】 With the extension of democratic rights in the first half of the nineteenth century and the ensuing decline of the Federalist establishment, a new conception of education began to emerge. Education was no longer a confirmation of a pre-existing status, but an instrument in the acquisition of higher status. For a new generation of upwardly mobile students, the goal of education was not to prepare them to live comfortably in the world into which they had been born, but to teach them new virtues and skills that would propel them into a different and better world.【F2】 Education became training; and the student was no longer the gentleman-in-waiting, but the journeyman apprentice for upward mobility. In the nineteenth century a college education began to be seen as a way to get ahead in the world. The founding of the land-grant colleges opened the doors of higher education to poor but aspiring boys from non-Anglo-Saxon, working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds.【F3】 The myth of the poor boy who worked his way through college to success drew millions of poor boys to the new campuses. And with this shift, education became more vocational: its object was the acquisition of practical skills and useful information. 【F4】 For the gentleman-in-waiting, virtue consisted above all in grace and style, in doing well what was appropriate to his position; education was merely a way of acquiring polish. And vice was manifested in gracelessness, awkwardness, in behaving inappropriately, discourteously, or ostentatiously. For the apprentice, however, virtue was evidenced in success through hard work. The requisite qualities of character were not grace or style, but drive, determination, and a sharp eye for opportunity. While casual liberality and even prodigality characterized the gentleman, frugality, thrift and self-control came to distinguish the new apprentice.【F5】 And while the gentleman did not aspire to a higher station because his station was already high, the apprentice was continually becoming, striving, struggling upward. Failure for the apprentice meant standing still, not rising.

What you did at school has offended your teacher. Write a letter of apology of about 100 words to your teacher for your misconduct.You should include the details you think necessary.You should write neatly 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.

Actually, it isn't, ...

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

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about some tips for learning to read a foreign language. Choose the most suitable heading from the list A-G for each numbered paragraph(1-5). There are two extra headings which you do not need to use. [A]Look up words, but not every word. [B]Sound out the language as you are reading it. [C]Make sure the text is big enough. [D]Learn something about the culture in which the language developed. [E]Read something that"s fun. [F]Take breaks. [G]When reading a new author, go more slowly in the first few pages. Let"s suppose you"ve studied the basics of a foreign language and now wish to become more fluent in reading it. What do you do? As I"ve studied several foreign languages over the years, I"ve discovered some strategies that help. 【C1】______ When learning to read a foreign language we should remember that every real tongue(as opposed to a constructed language, like Esperanto)is first and foremost a spoken form of communication. Every foreign language was spoken for many years before it was written down. There"s good reason to believe that the spoken word comes more easily to us than the written page. When a person reads a foreign language out loud, it slows the pace down, and makes the reader pay more attention to each word. It helps us distinguish very similar words, and prevents us from skipping over those little words that are sometimes easy to miss when learning to read a foreign language. 【C2】______ This may sound pretty basic, but I discovered as I was learning to read a foreign language that text sizes that are easy to read in English are harder to read in, say, Greek or Spanish. Of course, if you are having an extreme problem, the first thing you might want to do is have your eyes checked. But if that is not the problem, while you are learning to read in a foreign language you may wish to select books with slightly larger text or to use reading glasses, even if you do not usually use them. 【C3】______ Of course if you are learning to read in a foreign language you want to have a good dictionary of the foreign language you are trying to learn. But contrary to popular belief, when learning a foreign language, it"s not always necessary to look up every word you don"t know. For example, if you are only unfamiliar with one word in a phrase you are reading, but the meaning is clear from the context, it may not be necessary to reach for the dictionary. Let the context be your guide. Most of us, when we are learning to read our native tongues, do not look up every word, and the same applies as we are learning a foreign language. 【C4】______ Even when we are reading our native languages, it"s easy to see that authors have favorite words and phrases and their own particular styles. As you are learning to read a foreign language you will see that the same principle applies. Once you have looked up a few of the writer"s favorite words, and once you have gotten used to his or her idiosyncrasies, it will become easier to read a text written in a foreign language. 【C5】______ Even in English, when the author writes about something entirely outside of our own experience, it can be difficult to understand what he or she is saying. If you study the Culture of the foreign language you are trying to learn it will give the language context. When trying to read an article about contemporary Mexico in Spanish, I came across several passages about conflicts between the different ethnic groups. Because I had already read about the "conquistadors" or conquerors, it was easier to understand what was happening. In learning to read a foreign language, we should realize that we are learning a new skill. It is a very natural human skill, but a new skill all the same. Reading a foreign language is not as easy as reading your native tongue, and you"ll want to read shorter passages and stop more often than if you were reading your native English. When selecting material for your study of a foreign language, remember it"s easier to keep reading a story if you"re enjoying it. We shouldn"t think of learning a foreign language as purely a chore. Get a novel that looks interesting or a book of short stories written in the foreign language you are studying. I found it much easier to learn a new language when I purchased a book that structured its lessons around a mystery story. I think this may be the most important tip on learning to read a foreign language that I can give you. Because when we don"t enjoy doing something, we generally don"t continue with it. And the more you learn, the more you"ll enjoy it.

It was your mother-in-law whom I met in the park the day before yesterday.

The French are the masters of "grands projets". (46) They have the cruelnes, national pride and willingness to spend that are needed for great public works. (47) The British, on the other hand are usually dismissed as too mean, troubled by regulations and lacking in vision, to build anything worthwhile. But occasionally the bulldog triumphs. Take, for example, that grandest, of grands projets, the national library. The Bibliotheque Nationale de France. fast-tracked by President Mitterrand, was planned and built in less than a decade. With its four 80-metre-high glass towers, designed to resemble open books, the library was hailed as a wonder of design and construction when it opened in 1998. (48) Its 11 million books, protected by automatic climate control, were planned to be instantly accessible, with the help of computerised automatic loading trains running on miles of trains. All this, for FFr 8 billion (pounds 861 million), was hailed as evidence that the glory of France was alive and well. The British Library, which cost a third less, became a symbol of national incompetence. First conceived in 1962, it ran into trouble from the start. (49) After three decades of bitter controversy, planning delays and money problems, the new red-brick library, designed by Colin St John Wilson finally opened for business in 1997. The reviews, given its troubled history, were predictably mixed. The Prince of Wales, who had unveiled the foundation stone, compared it to "an academy for secret police". Matters look different today. The British Library is widely acknowledged as one of London"s best modern buildings, a triumph of design over adversity. Those who work there sing its praises. The Bibliotheque Nationale, by contrast, has become notorious for its poor design and even worse construction. Its high technology search system has proved a nightmare. Its glass construction bakes books in summer. Its freezing winter temperatures have provoked its 3,000 staff to strike. (50) Conditions became so intolerable that soon after it opened several hundred frustrated students stormed a reading room trampling library staff under foot. Dismissed by three famous French professors as a "sinister fame", la grande bibliotheque proves that victory does not always go to the swiftest.

It"s easy to scare people about what"s in their food, but the danger is almost never real. And the【C1】______itself kills. Take the panic【C2】______genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Ninety percent of all corn grown in America is genetically modified now. That means it grew from a seed that scientists【C3】______by playing with its genes. The new genes may make corn grow faster, or they may make it less【C4】______to bugs so farmers can use【C5】______pest-killing chemicals. This【C6】______some people. GMOs are "unnatural," they say. A【C7】______from the movie "Seeds of Death" warns that eating GMOs "causes multiple organ system【C8】______." Michael Hansen of Consumer Reports sounds almost as【C9】______when he talks about GMOs. He says, "You can"t control【C10】______you"re inserting that genetic information; it can have different effects【C11】______on the location." Jon Entine of Genetic Literacy Project responds: "We"ve eaten about 7 trillion meals in the 18 years 【C12】______GMOs first came on the market. There"s not one documented instance of someone getting so【C13】______as a cough." Given all the fear from【C14】______and activists, you might be surprised to learn that most serious scientists【C15】______with him. "There have been about 2,000 studies," says Entine, and "there is no【C16】______of human harm in a major peer-reviewed journal." That might be enough to reassure people if they knew how widespread and familiar GMOs really are—but【C17】______they think of GMOs as something strange and new, they think more tests are needed. 【C18】______people don"t worry about crops bred in【C19】______varieties for centuries without farmers having any idea exactly what genetic changes【C20】______.

Much has been made of the 400th anniversary this year of Galileo pointing a telescope at the moon and jotting down what he saw. But 2009 is also the 400th anniversary of the publication by Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer, of "Astronomia Nova".【F1】 This was a book that contained an account of his discovery of how the planets move around the sun, correcting Copernicus"s own more famous but incorrectly formulated description of the solar system. And it established the laws for planetary motion on which Isaac Newton based his work. Four centuries ago the received wisdom was that of Aristotle, who asserted that the Earth was the centre of the universe, and that it was encircled by the spheres of the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars beyond them. Copernicus had noticed inconsistencies in this theory and had placed the sun at the centre, with the Earth and the other planets travelling around the sun. 【F2】 Some six decades later when Kepler tackled the motion of Mars, he proposed a number of geometric models, checking his results against the position of the planet as recorded by his boss. Kepler repeatedly found that his model failed to predict the correct position of the planet. He altered it and, in so doing, created first egg-shaped "orbits" and, finally, an ellipse(椭圆)with the sun placed at one focus.【F3】 Kepler went on to show that an elliptical orbit is sufficient to explain the movement of the other planets and to devise the laws of planetary motion that Newton built on . A.E.L. Davis this week told astronomers and historians that it was the rotation of the sun that provided Kepler with what he thought was one of the causes of the planetary motion that his laws described, although his reasoning would today be considered entirely wrong. 【F4】 In 1609 astronomy and astrology were seen as intimately related; mathematics and natural philosophy, meanwhile, were quite separate areas of endeavor, however, Kepler sought physical mechanisms to explain his mathematical result. He wanted to know how it could be that the planets orbited the sun.【F5】 Once he learned that the sun rotated, he comforted himself with the thought that the sun"s rays must somehow sweep the planets around it while some magnetism accounted for the exact elliptical path. As today"s astronomers struggle to determine whether they can learn from the past, Kepler"s tale provides a salutary reminder that only some explanations stand the test of time.