Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield stirred up controversy recently by criticizing the violent grade inflation at his institution, stating, "I was told that the most frequently given grade at Harvard right now is an A-." A recent【C1】______of 200 colleges and universities also found that more than 40 percent of all grades awarded were in the A range. Some argue that these inflated grades are【C2】______for the competitive job market, but at the national level it is a negative-sum game that【C3】______serious costs on society. Because grades are【C4】______at A or A+, grade inflation results in a greater concentration of students at the【C5】______of the distribution. This【C6】______of grades diminishes their value as a(n) 【C7】______of student abilities. There is also evidence that【C8】______grading reduces student effort. As giving low grades puts students at a disadvantage【C9】______to their peers, professors face strong 【C10】______ to award inflated grades. 【C11】______universities need to take steps to bring it under【C12】______. Recently, some universities have experimented with【C13】______ information about the grade distribution for each course either online or on student transcripts. So, if employers are aware that grades in a particular course were high, they might be less 【C14】______with the students who earned those grades. Thus, students might seek out tougher courses, 【C15】______professors to offer such courses in 【C16】______. The administration of Princeton issued a【C17】______that no more than 35 percent of grades awarded in undergraduate courses should be in the A range. These steps may not be【C18】______with students and professors, but it"s necessary to prevent higher education from【C19】______into Lake Wobegon—"where... all the children are above【C20】______."

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

Women are, on the whole, more verbal than men. They are good at language and verbal reasoning, while men tend to be skilled at tasks demanding visual spatial abilities. In fact, along with aggression, these are the most commonly accepted differences between the sexes. Words are tools for communicating with other people, especially information about people. They are mainly social tools. Visual and spatial abilities are good for imagining and manipulating objects and for communicating information about them. Are these talents programmed into the brain? In some of the newest and most controversial research in neurophysiology, it has been suggested that when it comes to the brain, males are specialists while women are generalists. But no one knows what, if anything, this means in terms of the abilities of the two sexes. Engineering is both visual and spatial, and it"s true that there are relatively few women engineers. But women become just as skilled as men at shooting a rifle or driving a car, tasks that involve visual spatial skills. They also do equally well at programming a computer, which is neither visual nor spatial. Women do, however, seem less likely to fall in love with the objects themselves. We all know men for whom machines seem to be extensions of their identity. A woman is more likely to see her car, rifle, or computer as a useful tool, but not in itself fascinating.

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

BSection III Writing/B

My dictionary defines subtle as "not immediately obvious; characterized by skill or ingenuity; clever; elusive; (even) insidious". Let us look at some concrete instances of this. (The very word itself is an example, as the letter" b" is silent in pronunciation.)" Language can be straight-forward and directly to the point, but sometimes that takes the fun out of it. On occasion, at least, one appreciates subtleties—often as the mark of a quick wit. This particularly is true of jokes that generally have a double meaning. For example: Awaitress received only three pennies for a tip. Nonplussed, she told the customer that those three pennies told a lot about him. He took the bait and asked what they revealed. "The first penny", she said, "tells me you are thrifty". The patron agreed. "what does the second penny say?" asked the customer. "It tells me you"re a bachelor". "Right again", he replied, "And what does the third penny tell you?" "The third penny", responded the waitress, "tells me your daddy was a bachelor, too". How"s that for a subtle punishment? Subtleties also can be used on occasion for a good putdown. For instance, one can say a certain man was a big gun of industry. "Yes", is the counter, "he was fired several times". In this category was Mark Twain"s caustic time bomb: "He was a good man—in the worst sense of the term". In our day of political correctness (sometimes called the tyranny of the minority), police seldom talk about suspects, but only about" persons of interest". I guess law enforcement does not want another lawsuit on its hands. Then, too, with the campaign against fat and fried foods, Kentucky Fried Chicken calls itself KFC, figuring that few will think of "fried" that way. The meaning of a word or phrase seems to change more rapidly today and unless one is "with it", a faux pas (失礼) can be committed. Such is the case with the term, "an exceptional child". Way back when, one would think that referred to an especially bright youngster, whereas today it indicates a handicapped youth. So, too, the word "primitive" virtually has been erased from our language and replaced with "earlier culture" and Indians are known as Native Americans. The world of advertising is a master at subtleties with which it hopes to bamboozle(欺骗) the customer. For instance, when asked how much a gallon of gasoline costs, the reply might be something like $2.25. Yet, one must add a penny to that as a 9/10 follows the price, making it, in effect, $2.26. Cereal prices have skyrocketed over the years, but some companies claim to have held the line by keeping the price the same. What many do, however, is reduce the number of ounces in the package. I leave the reader with the truism that subtlety, not brevity, is the soul of wit. Use it to win friends and influence people.

St. Paul didn"t like it. Moses warned his people against it. Hesiod declared it "mischievous" and "hard to get rid of it", but Oscar Wilder said, "Gossip is charming". "History is merely gossip", he wrote in one of his famous plays. "But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality". In times past, under Jewish law, gossipmongers might be fined or flogged. The Puritans put them in stocks or ducking stools, but no punishment seemed to have the desired effect of preventing gossip, which has continued uninterrupted across the back fences of the centuries. Today, however, the much-maligned human foible is being looked at in a different light. Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, even evolutionary biologists are concluding that gossip may not be so bad after all. Gossip is "an intrinsically valuable activity", philosophy professor Aaron Ben-Ze"ev states in a book he has edited, entitled Good Gossip. For one thing, gossip helps us acquire information that we need to know that doesn"t come through ordinary channels, such as: "What was the real reason so and-so was fired from the office?" Gossip also is a form of social bonding, Dr. Ben-Ze"ev says. It is "a kind of sharing" that also "satisfies the tribal need—namely, the need to belong to and be accepted by a unique group". What"s more, the professor notes, "Gossip is enjoyable". Another gossip groupie, Dr. Ronald De Sousa, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, describes gossip basically as a form of indiscretion and a "saintly virtue", by which he means that the knowledge spread by gossip will usually end up being slightly beneficial. "It seems likely that a world in which all information were universally available would be preferable to a world where immense power resides in the control of secrets", he writes. Still, everybody knows that gossip can have its ill effects, especially on the poor wretch being gossiped about. And people should refrain from certain kinds of gossip that might be harmful, even though the ducking stool is long out of fashion. By the way, there is also an interesting strain of gossip called medical gossip, which in its best form, according to researchers Jerry M. Suls and Franklin Goodkin, can motivate people with symptoms of serious illness, but who are unaware of it, to seek medical help. So go ahead and gossip. But remember, if (as often is the case among gossipers) you should suddenly become one of the gossipees instead, it is best to employ the foolproof defense recommended by Plato, who may have learned the lesson from Socrates, who as you know was the victim of gossip spread that he was corrupting the youth of Athens: When men speak ill of thee, so live that nobody will believe them. Or, as Will Rogers said, "Live so that you wouldn"t be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip".

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

The Economist calculates that around the world almost 290 million 15- to 24-year-olds are neither working nor studying: almost a quarter of the planet's youth. On the other hand, many of the "employed" young have only informal and【C1】______jobs. In rich countries more than a third, on average, are on temporary【C2】______which make it hard to【C3】______skills In poorer ones, according to the World Bank, a fifth are【C4】______family labourers or work in the informal economy.【C5】______, nearly half of the world's young people are either【C6】______the formal economy or contributing less【C7】______than they could. What has caused this【C8】______of joblessness? Young people have long had a raw【C9】______in the labour market. Two things make the problem more【C10】______now. The financial crisis and its consequence had an unusually big【C11】______on them. Many employers【C12】______the newest hires first, so a【C13】______raises youth joblessness disproportionately. Second, the emerging economies that have the largest and fastest-growing【C14】______of young people also have the【C15】______labour markets. Almost half of the world's young people live in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa They also have the highest【C16】______of young people out of work or in the informal sector. In rich countries with generous welfare states this【C17】______a heavy burden on taxpayers. One estimate suggests that, in 2011, the economic loss from【C18】______young people in Europe【C19】______to $153 billion, or more than 1% of GDP. And failure to employ the young not only【C20】______growth today. It also threatens it tomorrow.

It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialisation of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180°relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the fight side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain is usually dominant. And on average, left-handers are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie thinks he knows the answer. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is tree, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr. Faurie set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modem societies often involves the use of technology, notably firms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr. Faurie decided to confine his investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, Dr. Faurie found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year. And, according to Dr. Faufie, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister".

It may turn out that the "digital divide"—one of the most fashionable political slogans of recent years—is largely fiction. As you will recall, the argument went well beyond the unsurprising notion that the rich would own more computers than the poor. The disturbing part of the theory was that society was dividing itself into groups of technology "haves" and "have-nots" and that this segregation would, in turn, worsen already large economic inequalities. It is this argument that is either untrue or wildly exaggerated. We should always have been suspicious. After all, computers have spread quickly because they have become cheaper to buy and easier to use. Falling prices and skill requirements suggest that the digital divide would spontaneously shrink—and so it has. Now, a new study further discredits the digital divide. The study, by economist David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, challenges the notion that computers have significantly worsened wage inequality. The logic of how this supposedly happens is straightforward: computers raise the demand for high-skilled workers, increasing their wages. Meanwhile, computerization—by automating many routine tasks—reduces the demand for low-skilled workers and, thereby, their wages. The gap between the two widens. Superficially, wage statistics support the theory. Consider the ratio between workers near the top of the wage distribution and those near the bottom. Computerization increased; so did the wage gap. But wait, point out Card and DiNardo. The trouble with blaming computers is that the worsening of inequality occurred primarily in the early 1980s. With computer use growing, the wage gap should have continued to expand, if it was being driven by a shifting demand for skills. Indeed, Card and DiNardo find much detailed evidence that contradicts the theory. They conclude that computerization does not explain "the rise in U.S. wage inequality in the last quarter of the 20th century". The popular perception of computers" impact on wages is hugely overblown. Lots of other influences count for as much, or more. The worsening of wage inequality in the early 1980s, for example, almost certainly reflected the deep 1981—1982 recession and the fall of inflation. Companies found it harder to raise prices. To survive, they concluded that they had to hold down the wages of their least skilled, least mobile and youngest workers. The "digital divide" suggested a simple solution (computers) for a complex problem (poverty). With more computer access, the poor could escape their lot. But computers never were the source of anyone"s poverty and, as for escaping, what people do for themselves matters more than what technology can do for them.

As thick-skinned elected officials go, FIFA President Joseph S. Blotter is right up there with Bill Clinton. The chief of the Zurich-based group that oversees World Cup Soccer hasn"t been accused of groping any interns, but that"s about all he hasn"t been accused of. Vote buying, mismanagement, cronyism-and that"s just for starters. Yet the 66-yearold Swiss shows no sign of abandoning his campaign for a second four-year term. Blatter, a geek of dispensing FIFA"s hundreds of million in annual revenue to inspire loyalty, even stands a good chance of reelection. At least he did. Since mid-March, he has seen a credible challenger emerge in Issa Hayatou, president of the African Football Confederation. Hayatou, a 55-year-old from Cameroon, leads a group of FIFA reformers that also includes FIFA Vice-President Lennart Johansson, a Swede who lost the presidential election to Blatter in 1998. These contenders" mission: to end what they call the culture of secrecy and lack of accountability that threatens FIFA with financial disaster. Representatives of the world"s 204 national soccer associations meet in Seoul on May 29, and the rebels are given a chance of unseating Blatter. But even they concede that the FIFA honcho won"t be easy to dislodge. Blatter"s staying power seems incredible, given the array of misdeeds attributed to him and his circle. However, there are signs that FI FA"s troubles are bigger than Blatter is saying. The insurgents have already won one victory: They persuaded the rest of the executive board to order an audit of FIFA finances. But Blatter—who claims, through a spokesman, that the accusations are a smear campaign—should not be underestimated. At least publicly, sponsors and member associations remain remarkably silent with the controversy. For example, there is no outward sign of outrage from German sports equipment maker Adidas-Salomon, which is spending much of its $625 million marketing budget on the World Cup. "We don"t expect current developments within FIFA to have a negative impact on our expectations" for the World Cup, says Michael Riehl, Adidas head of global sports marketing. The conventional wisdom is that fans don"t care about FIFA politics. Says Bernd Schiphorst, president of Hertha BSC Berlin, a top-ranked German team: "I"ve no fear that all these discussions are going to touch the event. "Still, the Olympic bribery scandals and the doping affair in the Tour de France show that sleazy dealings can stain the most venerable athletic spectacle. "For the Good of the Game" is FIFA"s official motto. The next few months should show whether it rings true.

Fire can be thought of as any combustion process intense enough to emit light. It may be a quietly burning flame or the brilliant flash of an explosion. A typical combustion process is the burning of gasoline in an automobile engine. The vaporized fuel is mixed with air, compressed in the engine"s cylinder, and ignited by a spark. As the fuel flame up, the heat produced flows into the adjacent layer of unburned fuel and ignites it. In this way a zone of fire spreads throughout the fuel mixture is called a combustion wave. The speed at which such a combustion wave travels through a fuel mixture is called the burning velocity of the mixture. The burning velocity of a gas such as methane quietly burning in air is only about one foot per second. By comparison, the burning velocity of more reactive combinations such as the rocket Fuels, hydrogen and fluorine, can be hundreds of feet per second. If the fuel flows at the same speed as the combustion wave, the result is a stationary flame, like the one in your kitchen gas burner. In the kitchen burner a jet of gas mixed with airflows from the opening in the head of the burner. If the velocity of the fuel mixture flowing from the opening is greater than its burning velocity, the flame blows out. In jet engines speeding through the air at 500 to 600 miles per hour, the engine"s flame is sometimes blown out by the blast of air entering the combustion chamber at high speeds. Jet pilots call this condition "flameout". Combustion can sometimes occur very slowly. A familiar example of slow combustion is the drying of ordinary oil-based paint. In this chemical reaction, called oxidation, the oxygen in the air reacts with the drying oil in the paint to provide a tough film. The linseed oil molecules link together, forming an insoluble coating. How can the chemical reaction involved in such a quiet process as the drying of paint also produce spectacular flames and explosions? The main difference between the two is the temperature at which they occur. At lower temperatures the reaction must take place over a long time. The heat which is slowly produced is dissipated to the surroundings and does not speed up the reaction. When the heat produced by the low-temperature reaction is retained instead of being dissipated, the system breaks into flame. In a flame or explosion, the reactions are extremely fast. In many chemical processes, however, such a rapid oxidation process would be extremely destructive.

Consumers and producers obviously make decisions that mold the economy, but there is a third major【C1】______to consider the role of government Government has a powerful【C2】______on the economy in at least four ways: Direct Services. The postal system, for example, is a federal system【C3】______the entire nation, as is the large and complex establishment Conversely the【C4】______and maintenance of most highways is the responsibility of the individual states, and the public educational systems,【C5】______a large funding role by the federal government, are primarily【C6】______for by state or city governments. Police and fire protection and sanitation services are【C7】______the responsibilities of local government. Regulation and Control. The government regulates and controls private enterprise, in many ways, for the【C8】______of assuring that business serves the best interests of the people【C9】______a whole. Regulation is【C10】______in areas where private enterprise is【C11】______a monopoly, such as in telephone or electric service. Public policy【C12】______such companies to make a reasonable profit,【C13】______limits their ability to raise prices unfairly, since the public depends on their services. Often control is exercised to protect the public, as for example, when the Food and Drug Administration bans【C14】______drugs, or requires standards of【C15】______in food. Stabilization and Growth. Branches of government including Congress attempt to control the extremes of boom and bust of inflation and depression, by【C16】______tax rates, the money supply, and the use of credit They can also【C17】______the economy through changes in the amount of public spending by the government itself. Direct Assistance. The government【C18】______businesses and individuals with many kinds of help. For example, tariffs permit certain products to remain relatively【C19】______of foreign competition; imports are sometimes taxed【C20】______American products are able to compete better with certain foreign goods.

When European Union (EU) leaders took delivery of Europe"s first draft of a constitution at a summit in Greece last June, it was with almost universal praise. There was wide agreement that the text could save the EU from paralysis once it expands from 15 to 25 members next year. It would give Europe a more stable leadership and greater clout on the world stage, said the chairman of the Convention which drafted the agreement, former French President Valery Giscard Estaing. Such praise was too good to last. As the product of a unique 16-month public debate, the draft has become a battleground. Less than four months after it was delivered, the same leaders who accepted it opened the second round of talks on its content this week by trading veiled threats to block agreement or cut off funds if they don"t get their way. The tone was polite, but unyielding. In a bland joint statement issued when the talks opened on October 4, the leaders stressed the constitution, "represents a vital step in the process aimed at making Europe more cohesive, more democratic and closer to its citizens. "Sharp differences remain, though, between member countries of the EU over voting rights, the size and composition of the executive European Commission, defense co-operation and the role of religion in the new constitution. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi"s hopes of wrapping up a deal on the constitution by Christmas seem far from being realized. While the six founding members of the EU—Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg—plus Britain and Denmark, want as little change as possible to the draft, the 10 mainly central European countries due to join the 15-nation bloc next year want to alter the institution"s balance. Such small states are afraid their views will be ignored under the constitution and are determined to defend the disproportionate voting rights they won at the 2000 Nice Summit. EU experts fear such sharp differences will create exactly the paralysis in the EU the Convention was established to avoid.

The biggest danger facing the global airline industry is not the effects of terrorism, war, SARS and economic downturn. It is that these blows, which have helped ground three national flag carriers and force two American airlines into bankruptcy, will divert attention from the inherent weaknesses of aviation, which they have exacerbated. (46) As in the crisis that attended the first Gulf War, many airlines hope that traffic will soon bounce back, and a few catastrophic years will be followed by fuller planes, happier passengers and a return to profitability. Yet the industry"s problems are deeper—and older—than the trauma of the past two years implies. As the centenary of the first powered flight approaches in December, the industry it launched is still remarkably primitive. (47) The car industry, created not long after the Wright Brothers made history, is now a global industry dominated by a dozen firms, at least half of which make good profits. Yet commercial aviation consists of 267 international carriers and another 500-plus domestic ones. (48) The world"s biggest carrier, American Airlines, has barely 7% of the global market, whereas the world"s biggest carmaker, General Motors, has (with its associated firms) about a quarter of the world"s automobile market. Aviation has been incompletely deregulated, and in only two markets: America and Europe. Everywhere else deals between governments dictate who flies under what rules. (49) These aim to preserve state-owned national flag-carriers, run for prestige rather than profit and numerous restrictions on foreign ownership hinder cross-border airline mergers. In America, the big network carriers face barriers to exit, which have kept their route networks too large. Trade unions resisting job cuts and Congressmen opposing route closures in their territory conspire to block change. In Europe, liberalization is limited by bilateral deals that prevent, for instance, British Airways (BA) flying to America from Frankfurt or Paris. To use the car industry analogy, it is as if only Renaults were allowed to drive on French motorways. (50) In airlines, the optimists are those who think that things are now so bad that the industry has no option but to evolve. Frederick Reid, president of Delta Air Lines, said that events since the September 11th attacks are the equivalent of a meteor strike, changing the climate and leading to a "compressed evolutionary cycle". So how, looking on the bright side, might the industry look after five years of accelerated development?

Gandhi"s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. (46) Its motive was religious, but he chimed also for it that it was a definite technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results. Gandhi"s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, (47) the method Gandhi proposed and practiced, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of nonviolent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like Gandhi objected to "passive resistance" as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujaruti, it seems the word means "firmness in the truth". (48) In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914—1918. Even after he had completely renounced violence he was honest enough. to see that in wax it is usually necessary to take sides. Since his whole political life centered round a struggle for national independence, he could not and, (49) indeed, he did not take the fruitless and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer is: What about the Jews and are you prepared to see them exterminated? (50) I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you"re another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and his answer was on record in Mr. Louis Fisher"s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fisher, Gandhi"s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler"s violence".

One meaning of the Greek word "dran" is to accomplish, and in this meaning lies a further key to the structure of drama. A play concerns a human agent attempting to accomplish some purpose. In tragedy his attempt is, in personal terms at least, unsuccessful; in comedy it is successful; in the problem play final accomplishment is often either ambiguous or doubtful. This action, from the beginning to the end of a movement toward a purposed goal, must also have a middle; it must proceed through a number of steps, the succession of incidents which make up the plot. Because the dramatist is concerned with the meaning and logic of events rather than with their casual relationship in time, he will probably select his material and order it on a basis of the operation, in human affairs, of laws of cause and effect. It is in this causal relationship of incidents that the element of conflict, present in virtually all plays, appears. The central figure of the play—the protagonist—encounters difficulties; his purpose or purposes conflict with events or circumstances, with purposes of other characters in the play, or with cross-purposes which exist within his own thoughts and desires. These difficulties threaten the protagonist"s accomplishment; in other words, they present complications, and his success or failure in dealing with these complications determines the outcome. Normally, complications build through the play in order of increasing difficulty; one complication may be added to another, or one may grow out of the solution of a preceding one. At some point in this chain of complication and solution, achieved or attempted, the protagonist performs an act or makes a decision which irrevocably commits him to a further course, points toward certain general consequences. This point is usually called the crisis; the complications and solutions which follow work out the logical steps from crisis to find resolution, or denouement.

Historically, humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just struck them. 【B1】______ that logic, 2006 should have been a breakthrough year for rational behavior. With the memory of 9/11 still 【B2】______ in their minds, Americans watched hurricane Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history, on【B3】______TV. Anyone who didn' t know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made【B4】______worse by our willful blindness to risk as much as our 【B5】______ to work together before everything goes to hell. Granted, some amount of delusion is probably part of the 【B6】______ condition. In A.D. 63, Pompeii was seriously damaged by an earthquake, and the locals immediately went to work 【B7】______ , in the same spot—until they were buried altogether by a volcano eruption 16 years later. But a【B8】______of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly bad at【B9】______themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we【B10】______did about the dangers we face. But it turns【B11】______that in times of crisis, our greatest enemy is【B12】______the storm, the quake or the【B13】______itself. More often, it is ourselves. So what has happened in the year that【B14】______the disaster on the Gulf Coast. In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night to rebuild the floodwalls. They have got the walls to 【B15】______ they were before Katrina, more or less. That' s not【B16】______, we can now say with confidence. But it may be all【B17】______can be expected from one year of hustle. Meanwhile, New Orleans officials have crafted a plan to use buses and trains to 【B18】______ the sick and the disabled. The city estimates that 15,000 people will need a【B19】______out. However, state officials have not yet determined where these people will be taken. The【B20】______with neighboring communities are ongoing and difficult.

Write on the following topic: Keep our Language Pure You are to write in three paragraphs. In the first paragraph, state the phenomenon of reckless use of foreign names by Chinese producers. In the second paragraph, state its negative effects. In the last paragraph, bring what you have written to a natural conclusion with your advice on counter-measures. You should write about 160-200 words neatly.