Your friend asked you to attend his (her) birthday party, but somehow you can"t come. Please write a note accompanying a present, explain the reason and express your congratulation. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the note. Use "Li Ming" instead.

Everyone has heard of the San Andreas Fault, which constantly threatens California and the West Coast with earth-quakes. But how many people know about the equally serious New Madrid fault in Missouri? Between December of 1811 and February of 1812, three major earthquakes occurred, all centered around the town of New Madrid, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. Property damage was severe. Buildings in the area were almost destroyed. Whole forests fell at once, and huge cracks opened in the ground, allowing smell of sulfur to filter upward. The Mississippi River itself completely changed character, developing sudden rapids and whirlpools. Several times it changed its course, and once, according to some observers, it actually appeared to run backwards. Few people were killed in the New Madrid earthquakes, probably simply because few people lived in the area in 1811; but the severity of the earth-quakes are shown by the fact that the shock waves rang bells in church towers in Charleston, South Carolina, on the coast. Buildings shook in New York City, and clocks were stopped in Washington D.C. Scientists now know that America"s two major faults are essentially different. The San Andreas is a horizontal boundary between two major land masses that are slowly moving in opposite directions. California earthquakes result when the movement of these two masses suddenly lurches forward. The New Madrid fault, on the other hand, is a vertical fault; at some point, possibly hundreds of millions of years ago, rock was pushed up toward the surface, probably by volcanoes under the surface. Suddenly, the volcanoes cooled and the rock collapsed, leaving huge cracks. Even now, the rock continues to settle downwards, and sudden sinking motions trigger earthquakes in the region. The fault itself, a large crack in this layer of rock, with dozens of other cracks that split off from it, extends from northeast Arkansas through Missouri and into southern Illinois. Scientists who have studied the New Madrid fault say there have been numerous smaller quakes in the area since 1811; these smaller quakes indicate that larger ones are probably coming, but rite scientists say they have no method of predicting when a large earthquake will occur.

BPart B/B

The Students' Union of your department is planning a Chinese Speaking Contest. Write an announcement which covers the following information: 1) the purpose of the contest, 2) time and place of the contest, 3) what is required of the candidates, 4) details of the judges and awards. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Department of Chinese Language and Literature" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

【F1】 For more than two decades, U.S. courts have been limiting affirmative-action programs in universities and other areas. The legal rationale is that racial preferences are unconstitutional, even those intended to compensate for racism or intolerance. For many colleges, this means students can be admitted only on merit, not on their race or ethnicity. It has been a divisive issue across the U.S., as educators blame the prolonged reaction to affirmative-action for declines in minority admissions. Meanwhile, activists continue to battle race preferences in courts from Michigan to North Carolina. 【F2】 Now, chief executives of about two dozen companies have decided to plunge headfirst into this politically unsettled debate. They, together with 36 universities and 7 nonprofitable organizations, formed a forum that set forth an action plan essentially designed to help colleges circumvent court-imposed restrictions on affirmative action. The CEOs" motive: "Our audience is growing more diverse, so the communities we serve benefit if our employees are racially and ethnically diverse as well", says one CEO of a company that owns nine television stations. Among the steps the forum is pushing: finding creative yet legal ways to boost minority enrollment through new admissions policies; promoting admissions decisions that look at more than test scores; and encouraging universities to step up their minority outreach and financial aid.【F3】 And to counter accusations by critics to challenge these tactics in court, the group says it will give legal assistance to colleges sued for trying them." Diversity diminished by the court must be made up for in other legitimate, legal ways," says a forum member. One of the more controversial methods advocated is the so-called 10% rule.【F4】 The idea is for public universities—which educate three-quarters of all U.S. undergraduates—to admit students who are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. 【F5】 Doing so allows colleges to take minorities who excel in average urban schools, even if they wouldn" t have made the cut under the current statewide ranking many universities use.

Languages will continue to diverge. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different forms. (46) Indeed the same could happen to English as has happened to Chinese: a language of intellectuals which doesn"t vary hugely alongside a large number of variants used by local peoples. We will continue to teach other languages in some form, and not just for reasons of practicality. Learning a language is good for your mental health; it forces you to understand another cultural and intellectual system. So I hope British education will develop a more rational approach to the foreign languages available to students in line with their political importance. Because so many people believe it"s no longer important to know another language, I fear that time devoted to language teaching in schools may well continue to decline. (47) But you can argue that learning another language well is more taxing than, say, learning to play chess well—it involves sensitivity to a set of complicated rules, and also to context. Technology will certainly make a difference to the use of foreign languages. (48) Computers may, for instance, alleviate the drudgery that a vast translation represents. But no one who has seen a computer translation will think it can substitute for live knowledge of the different languages. A machine will always be behind the times. (49) Still more important is the fact that no computer will ever get at the associations beyond the words associations that may not be expressed but which carry much of the meaning. In languages like Arabic that context is very important. Languages come with heavy cultural baggage too—in French or German if you miss the cultural references behind a word you"re very likely to be missing the meaning. It will be very hard to teach all that to a computer. (50) All the predictions are that English will be spoken by a declining proportion of the world"s population in the 21st century. I don"t think foreign languages will really become less important, but they might be perceived to be—and that would in the end be a very bad thing.

The inherency of good or evil in humans is a trick question. One must assume, since there is no moral code in the animal kingdom, that humans are neither inherently good nor evil and that morality is nothing more than a valuable human invention. At one point, Humans were little more than advanced apes. We lived according to the food chain, wandering in small bands, left to the mercy of the environment and one another. We fought over women, land and food as we drudged through the very slow infancy of our species. Over this stretch of time, our minds began the assent to intelligence and we slowly went about developing communities and primitive forms of government. Our morality began to grow within these primitive cultures. It isn" t hard to imagine how developing a moral code would be useful in preserving and strengthening a community. It is always preferable to not kill, rape or steal from your neighbor in that it builds solidarity and trust. One might occasionally lend a hand in the hopes that one day he or she would be repaid in some way. In these modest beginnings we find the bud that is now the flower of our morality, our sense of good and evil. Through moral eyes, we put qualities or draws on things that aren"t necessarily good or evil. A driver who lets us into his lane during a traffic gridlock is good. The corner of your doorframe that you constantly stub your foot against is a piece of shit. When you watch a nature channel and see a lion chasing a gazelle, the lion is the bad guy. One might define "good" in this way: good is anything that strengthens, preserves or enables the positive movement and evolution of our communities, countries and our species. This is an extremely broad definition, one that must be open to revision and question(I warn the reader that the process of proving the good to be good is ridiculous and tedious). Obviously, anything bad would be the opposite of the defined good. Labeling a newborn as inherently evil is, frankly, nothing more than religious stupidity. One must safely say that they are good, and that they are innocent and worthy of love, care and deserve an upbringing in the most positive environment possible. Humanity presupposes morality; therefore it is not possible for a human to be born inherently moral or immoral. The truth is simple and devastating: humans are inherently human.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions (41-45), choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions (41-45), choose the most suitable one from the list A-G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. English has become the world"s number one language in the 20th century. In every country where English is not the native language, especially in the Third World, people must strive to learn it to the best of their abilities, if they want to participate fully in the development of their countries. 41．______ A close examination reveals a great number of languages have fallen casualty to English. For example, it has wiped out Hawaiian, Welsh, Scotch Gaelic, Irish, native American languages, and many others. Luckily, some of these languages are now being revived, such as Hawaiian and Welsh, and these languages will live again, hopefully, if dedicated people continue their work of reviving them. 42．______If this situation continues, the native or official languages of these countries will certainly die within two or three generations. This phenomenon has been called linguistic genocide. A language dies if it is not fully used in most activities, particularly as a medium of instruction in schools. 43．______According to many studies, only around 20 to 25 percent of students in these countries can manage to learn the language of instruction (English) as well as basic subjects at the same time. Many leaders of these Third World countries are obsessed with English and for them English is everything. They seem to believe that if the students speak English, they are already knowledgeable. These leaders speak and write English much better than their national languages. If these leaders deliver speeches anywhere in the world they use English and they feel more at home with it and proud of their ability as well. The citizens of their countries do not understand their leaders" speeches because they are made in a foreign language. All the greatest countries of the world are great because they constantly use their own languages in all national development activities, including education. From a psychological point of view, those who are taught in their own language from the start will develop better self-confidence and self-reliance. From a linguistic point of view, the best brains can only be produced if students are educated in their own language from the start. 44. There is nothing wrong, however, in learning a foreign language at advanced levels of education. 45. [A] But many people are concerned that English"s dominance will destroy native languages. [B] But the best thing to do is to have a good education in one"s native language first, then go abroad to have a university education in a foreign language. [C] Suppose you work in a big firm and find English very important for your job because you often deal with foreign businessmen. Now you are looking for a place where you can improve your English, especially your spoken English. [D] Nonetheless, a world full of different languages will disappear if the present trend in many countries to use English to replace the national or official languages in education, trade and even politics continues. [E] Those who are taught in a foreign language from the start will tend to be imitators and lack self-confidence. They will tend to rely on foreign consultants. [F] Here are some advertisements about English language training from newspapers. You may find the information you need. [G] The Third World countries that are now using English as a medium of instruction are depriving 75 percent of their future leaders of a proper education.

Asked what he would, do to improve a government, the ancient Chinese sage Confucius answered that his first measure would be "to correct language". He meant that if words don"t mean what they seem to mean people cannot put any plan into action as in tended. The state of language at the dawn of the twenty-first century appears to be more confused than ever—thanks in large part to the enormous influence of television, radio, and print media over what we tiny, desire, and believe. Benjamin Radford, managing editor of The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, offers hundreds of examples of deceptive practices in journalism, advertising, political activism, public relations, and charity appeals. The real danger to the public, he insists, comes not from outright lies about events or individuals, because in most cases facts call ultimately be proven and mistakes corrected. But the emotional power of images, sound bites, and slogans can exert deep and lasting influence on our opinions and behavior as consumers, voters, and citizens. The detailed coverage of violent crimes dominating local TV news shows seldom in clues any larger context. The cumulative impression left in the minds of viewers is that violent crime is rampant and on the rise. As a result, many people live in fear and many more support the idea of ever-larger police forces, tougher laws, and bigger prisons without considering the actual crime rates in their community or across the nation. Dramatic incidents like the sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area in the fall of 2002 receive so much media attention that, again, the actual numbers of people affected and the likelihood of such attacks being repeated anywhere else become wildly exaggerated in people"s minds. In the media-fueled emotional state following such spectacular disasters, the effort and expense of turning schools info locked fortresses or putting cameras on every street to monitor suspicious individuals can seem insignificant compared to the hope of keeping our children safe from harm. Yet truly effective measures require clear thinking and clearly worded policies that citizens not only lawyers and politicians—can understand. Too often the long term future implications of new anticrime laws and policies are not even considered in the rush to feel safer by taking rapid and visible action. Misleading practices by advertisers are another subject of public concern. Governments have long limited ads for alcohol and tobacco products and examined claims by drug companies, carmakers, food suppliers, and toy manufacturers to protect the public health. But advertising uses emotional appeals to shift the viewer"s focus away from facts. Viewers who do not take the trouble to distinguish between provable claims and pleasant but meaningless word play end up buying "the sizzle, not the steak" and often paying high.

the four northern islands

In a science-fiction movie called "Species", a mysterious signal from outer space turns out to describe the genome of an unknown organism. When the inevitable mad scientist synthesizes the DNA described by the instructions, the creature he breeds from it turns out to resemble Natasha Henstridge, an athletic actress. Unfortunately, the alien harbors within her delicate form the destructive powers of a Panzer division, and it all ends badly for the rash geneticist and his laboratory. Glen Evans, chief executive of Egea Biosciences in San Diego, California, acknowledges regretfully that despite seeking his expert opinion—in return for which he was presented with the poster of the striking Mr. Henstridge that hangs on his office wall—the producers of "Species" did not hew very closely to his suggestions about the feasibility of their script ideas. Still, they had come to the right man. Dr. Evans believes that his firm will soon be able to create, if not an alien succubus, at least a tiny biological machine made of artificial proteins that could mimic the behavior of a living cell. Making such proteins will require the ability to synthesize long stretches of DNA. Existing technology for synthesizing DNA can manage to make genes that encode a few dozen amino acids, but this is too short to produce any interesting proteins. Egea"s technology, by contrast, would allow biologists to manufacture genes wholesale. The firm"s scientists can make genes long enough to encode 6,000 amino acids. They aim to synthesize a gene for 30,000 amino acids within two years. Using a library of the roughly 1,500 possible "motifs" or folds that a protein can adopt, Egea"s scientists employ computers to design new proteins that are likely to have desirable shapes and properties. To synthesize the DNA that encodes these proteins, Egea uses a machine it has dubbed the "genewriter". Dr. Evans likens this device to a word-processor for DNA, on which you can type in the sequence of letters defining a piece of DNA and get that molecule out. As Egea extends the length of DNA it can synthesize, Dr. Evans envisages encoding not just proteins, but entire biochemical pathways, which are teams of proteins that conduct metabolic processes. A collection of such molecules could conceivably function as a miniature machine that would operate in the body and attack disease, just as the body"s own defensive cells do. Perhaps Dr. Evans and his colleagues ought to get in touch with their friends in Hollywood.

It is hard to pinpoint the date at which Americans developed an Indian—or perhaps British fatalism about the declining quality of their infrastructure. When my British mother spent several months in the US in the 1950s, it was dazzlingly futuristic. There was air conditioning, an icebox in every fridge, ubiquitous neon lights and an open road on which even the working class could afford to drive. But bit by bit over the past 30 years, the world"s first truly modern infrastructure has shown its age. It has been starved by a generation of under-investment. And Americans have adapted around it. At some point in the next 12 months, we will discover whether the US has the will to bring its infrastructure into the 21st century. If all goes well, Congress will take steps to avert a fiscal cliff before January 1. As part of that deal lawmakers will schedule another ticking time bomb for late 2013, before which they will have to strike a larger bargain or hit another fiscal cliff. The likelihood is that Congress will shrink the already meagre federal investment budget. The hope, as the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Center puts it, is that Congress will "cut to invest" rather than doing so crudely across the board. There are three reasons to worry. First, there is remarkably little public outrage over the dilapidation in the power grid, public roads, domestic airports and waterways. This means that lawmakers will be feeling stronger pressures in other directions(such as defending the existing low level of capital gains tax, for example, or maintaining job-creating defence budgets). It is hard to fly domestically in the US and not at regular intervals face heavy delays, cancellations or being bumped off your flight. It is also hard not to miss the impressively stoical reaction of most passengers. Second, most Americans are unaware of how far behind the rest of the world their country has fallen. According to the World Economic Forum"s competitiveness report, US infrastructure ranks below 20th in most of the nine categories, and below 30 for quality of air transport and electricity supply. The US gave birth to the internet the kind of decentralised network that the US power grid desperately needs, yet according to the OECD club of mostly rich nations, average US internet speeds are barely a 10th of those in countries such as South Korea and Germany. In an age where the global IT superhighway is no longer a slogan, this is no joke. The budding US entrepreneur can survive gridlocked traffic, but a slow internet can be crippling. Third, it may be asking too much of Washington in its present state of polarisation to give the green light to an ambitious infrastructure plan. In a departure from their party"s traditions, many Republicans are now ideologically opposed to any serious federal role in infrastructure and want to decentralise it to the states. It is thus also a stretch to imagine Congress setting up a public infrastructure bank, as President Barack Obama has requested. The bank would use $ 10bn in seed money to leverage a multiple of that in private money for cross-state projects much like the European Investment Bank. The chances are it will stay on the drawing board.

Studythepictureabovecarefullyandwriteanessayentitled"ItisGood/BadtoWriteaboutMartialArtsNovelsintheTextbooks"Intheessay,youshould(1)describethepictureandinterpretitsmeaning;(2)giveyouropinionandsupportitwithsomeproof;(3)gettheconclusion.Youshouldwriteabout200wordsneatly.

The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media—such as television commercials and print advertisements—still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site. The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing"s impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media. Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media, such marketers act as the initiator for users" responses. But in some cases, one marketer"s owned media become another marketer" s paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site. We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products. Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies" marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned. The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more(and more diverse)communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company"s response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.

For the first time in history more people live in towns than in the country. In Britain this has had a curious result. While polls show Britons rate "the countryside" alongside the royal family, Shakespeare and the National Health Service (NHS) as what makes them proudest of their country, this has limited political support. A century ago Octavia Hill launched the National Trust not to rescue stylish houses but to save "the beauty of natural places for everyone forever." It was specifically to provide city dwellers with spaces for leisure where they could experience "a refreshing air." Hill"s pressure later led to the creation of national parks and green belts. They don"t make countryside any more, and every year concrete consumes more of it. It needs constant guardianship. At the next election none of the big parties seem likely to endorse this sentiment. The Conservatives" planning reform explicitly gives rural development priority over conservation, even authorising "off-plan" building where local people might object. The concept of sustainable development has been defined as profitable. Labour likewise wants to discontinue local planning where councils oppose development. The Liberal Democrats are silent. Only Ukip, sensing its chance, has sided with those pleading for a more considered approach to using green land. Its Campaign to Protect Rural England struck terror into many local Conservative parties. The sensible place to build new houses, factories and offices is where people are, in cities and towns where infrastructure is in place.The London agents Stirling Ackroyd recently identified enough sites for half a million houses in the London area alone, with no intrusion on green belt. What is true of London is even truer of the provinces. The idea that "housing crisis" equals "concreted meadows" is pure lobby talk. The issue is not the need for more house but, as always, where to put them. Under lobby pressure, George Osborne favours rural new-build against urban renovation and renewal. He favours out-of-town shopping sites against high streets. This is not a free market but a biased one. Rural towns and villages have grown and will always grow. They do so best where building sticks to their edges and respects their character. We do not ruin urban conservation areas. Why ruin rural ones? Development should be planned, not let rip. After the Netherlands, Britain is Europe" s most crowded country. Half a century of town and country planning has enabled it to retain an enviable rural coherence, while still permitting low-density urban living. There is no doubt of the alternative—the corrupted landscapes of southern Portugal, Spain or Ireland. Avoiding this rather than promoting it should unite the left and right of the political spectrum.

Should anyone much care whether an American boy living overseas gets six vicious thwacks on his backside? So much has been argued, rejoined and rehashed about the case of Michael Fay, an 18-year-old convicted of vandalism and sentenced to a caning in Singapore, that an otherwise sorry little episode has shaded into a certified International Incident, complete with intercessions by the U.S. head of state. An affair has outraged American libertarians even as it has animated a general debate about morality East and West and the proper functioning of U.S. law and order. Which, to all appearances, is what Singapore wanted. The question of whether anyone should care about Michael Fay is idle. Though Singapore officials profess shock at the attention his case had drawn, they know Americans care deeply about the many sides of this issue. Does a teenager convicted of spraying cars with easily removable paint deserve half a dozen powerful strokes? At what point does swift, sure punishment become torture? By what moral authority can America, with its high rates of lawlessness and license, preach of a safe society about human rights? The caning sentence has concentrated minds wondrously on an already lively domestic debate over what constitutes a due balance between individual and majority rights. Too bad Michael Fay has become a focus for this discussion. Not only does he seem destined to be pummeled and immobilized, but the use of Singapore as a standard for judging any other society, let alone the cacophonous U.S., is fairly worthless. To begin with, Singapore is an offshore republic that tightly limits immigration. Imagine crime-ridden Los Angeles, to which Singapore is sometimes contrasted, with hardly any inflow of the hard-luck, often desperate fortune seekers who flock to big cities. Even without its government"s disciplinary measures, Singapore more than plausibly would be much the same as it is now. An academic commonplace today is that the major factor determining social peace and prosperity is culture—a sense of common identity, tradition and values. Unlike Singapore, though, the U.S. today is a nation in search of a common culture, trying to be a universal society that assimilates the traditions of people from all over the world. Efforts to safeguard minority as well as individual rights have produced a gridlock in the justice system. Its troubles stem more from the decay of family life than from any government failures. Few societies can afford to look on complacently. As travel eases and cultures intermix, the American experience is becoming the world"s. The circumstances of this affair—evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property—suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights.

export and import

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

【F1】 Sending your child to piano or violin lessons in a bid to boost their academic achievement is a waste of money, according to scientists. Although research has shown that youngsters who take music lessons are more likely to be top of their class, Professor Schellenberg claims this link is misleading.【F2】 Instead, improved academic performance may be because brighter children from privileged backgrounds are more likely to learn an instrument, rather than music classes helping to boost their intelligence. "Music may change you a bit, but it's also the case that different children take music lessons." said Professor Schellenberg, who added that parents' education was the most influential factor on musicality.【F3】 Children who take music lessons come from families with higher incomes, they come from families with more educated parents, they also do more extracurricular activities, they have higher IQs, and they do better at school. 【F4】 In tests on 167 children who played piano or other instruments, they found their answer to personality tests could predict how likely it was for them to continue their music lessons. Those who were more outgoing and conscientious were more likely to continue to play. "We were motivated by the fact that kids who take music lessons are particularly good students, in school they actually do better than you would predict from their IQ, so obviously something else is going on." Professor Schellenberg told the American Association for the Advancement of Science(A A AS)annual conference in Boston. 【F5】 Asked if so-called helicopter parents were wasting their money sending their children to music lessons in the belief they could boost their school results, he said "yes". "Clearly studying music changes the brain, but so does any learning. In fact, that is what learning is." he said.

【F1】 When a disease of epidemic proportions rips into the populace, scientists immediately get to work, trying to locate the source of the affliction and find ways to combat it. Oftentimes, success is achieved, as medical science is able to isolate the parasite, germ or cell that causes the problem and finds ways to effectively kill or contain it. In the most serious of cases, in which the entire population of a region or country may be at grave risk, it is deemed necessary to protect the entire population through vaccination, so as to safeguard lives and ensure that the disease will not spread. 【F2】 The process of vaccination allows the patient's body to develop immunity to the virus or disease so that, if it is encountered, one can ward it off naturally. To accomplish this, a small weak or dead strain of the disease is actually injected into the patient in a controlled environment, so that his body's immune system can learn to fight the invader properly. Information on how to penetrate the disease' s defenses is transmitted to all elements of the patient's immune system in a process that occurs naturally, in which genetic information is passed from cell to cell.【F3】 This makes sure that, should the patient later come into contact with the real problem, his body is well equipped and trained to deal with it, having already done so before. There are dangers inherent in the process, however.【F4】 On occasion, even the weakened version of the disease contained in the vaccine proves too much for the body to handle, resulting in the immune system succumbing, and, therefore, the patient's death. 【F5】 Such is the case of the smallpox vaccine, designed to eradicate the smallpox epidemic that nearly wiped out the entire Native American population and killed massive numbers of settlers. Approximately 1 in 10, 000 people who receives the vaccine contract the smallpox disease from the vaccine itself and dies from it. Thus, if the entire population of the United States were to receive the Smallpox Vaccine today, 3, 000 Americans would be left dead. Fortunately, the smallpox virus was considered eradicated in the early 1970's, ending the mandatory vaccination of all babies in America. In the event of a re-introduction of the disease, however, mandatory vaccinations may resume, resulting in more unexpected deaths from vaccination. The process, which is truly a mixed blessing, may indeed hide some hidden curses.