Rome, June 13—A law that imposes strict rules on assisted fertility will remain on the books, after the failure on Monday of a hard-fought referendum that rubbed into one of Italy"s sorest spots: the relationship between church and state. (46) The fight leading up to two days of voting on Sunday and Monday mobilized the nation"s political and religious establishments like few others, as the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church including the new pope, Benedict XVI—urged Italians to boycott the referendum. In the end, the outcome was not even close. Only 26 percent of as many as 50 million eligible Italians voted, meaning that the referendum automatically failed, with the votes uncounted: in its attempt to repeal four crucial sections of a restrictive fertility law passed last year. For the referendum to be valid, 50 percent of eligible voters had to take part. (47) The results would seem an immediate victory for the church and for the young papacy(教皇权利) of Benedict, in a Europe where church influence has declined significantly in recent decades. Similar referendums in Italy on divorce and abortion in the 1970"s and 80"s passed overwhelmingly despite church opposition, and Italians now seem likely to debate whether apathy or a reverse in secularism in the home of the Roman Catholic Church defeated this referendum. "The results of today mean that Italy is maybe more similar to Texas than to Massachusetts", said Rocco Buttiglione, Italy"s culture minister and a friend of Pope Benedict. "Italians want a democracy with values—that values human life—and that is why they rejected this referendum". For the church, the results seemed especially important since the referendum concerned issues central to church teachings on values. (48) The fertility law, passed here under church lobbying last year, defines life as beginning at conception and bans most experimentation on human embryos(胚胎). "I"m struck by the maturity of the Italian people", Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian bishops" conference, told reporters, according to Reuters. Cardinal Ruini, a top Vatican official and close aide to Benedict, regularly urged Italians to abstain from the referendum. (49) Conceding a heavy defeat, the political forces that supported the referendum characterized the results as a blow to the wails between church and state. They warned that the church would next set its sights on Italy"s abortion law. "There is a problem of the climate, of the atmosphere in this country", Emma Bonino, a leader of the Radical Party who spearheaded the fight for legalized abortion in the early 1}980"s, told reporters. "It is not secular, and it"s very worrying". (50) But some experts cautioned against reading too much into the results, noting that Italy is a particular nation, where church and state are entwined like nowhere else; that a battle over abortion would be much more difficult; that a similar fight seemed unlikely to gain ground elsewhere in Europe.

In the following text, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41-45, choose the most suitable one from the list (A、B、C、D、E、F、G……) to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are several extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. (10 points) It"s hard to get more white-fenced than Naperville. In the western Chicago suburb, crime is an annoyance, not a problem. The streets are clean and the schools are some of the most impressive in the state, producing some of the brightest students who attend the nation"s best colleges. (41)______. The rankings will be phased out over the next year, with 2007"s upperclassmen deciding whether to include such a rank in their official transcripts. By no longer ranking students, the Naperville School District 203 is squarely in line with a trend that is fast sweeping the nation, as more and more private and public schools are dropping the practice. Tile goal, proponents say, is to cut down on the hyper-competition and lessen the stress at such a critical learning point and maturation curve in kids" lives. "It"s a high bar we set, and it should be," said Naperville Superintendent Alan Leis. "But there needs to be more than wrestling over who"s better than who." (42)______. Some 80% or more public schools still report rankings to inquiring universities and colleges, but a growing number of high schools in the Chicago area and around the country—in mostly affluent districts from California to Miami to New Jersey—have already adopted the practice. (43)______. Even in Naperville, a valedictorian is still expected to address the class, but that honor is not chosen until the last weeks of a school year and is not forwarded on to schools in official transcripts. (44)______. According to Dr. Scott Hunter, a clinical psychologist and school consultant at the University of Chicago Hospitals who specializes in pediatric neuropsy chology. "The reality is that we have made in the last 10 years more of rank than it deserves because some kids don"t really shine until they enter into adulthood, and they risk being ignored by the very places and people where they could greatly succeed," adds Hunter, "This is an artificial number in terms of where a person really falls." (45)______. "It makes it a little more opaque for us on the admissions side, but we fully understand it," said Jim Miller, director of admissions at Brown University. "It"s conceivable a student could get a B in gym and get knocked down 40 places in rank. So we"re getting more used to it, and probably half our applicants now come from schools that don"t have rank."A. Class rankings, a tradition at many schools, have long helped universities and colleges—especially the Harvards and Princetons of the world—weed out the weak students from the strong, the ones with not only promise but the ambition to excel and meet the difficulties of higher education.B. But it"s vicious at the top—so much so that Naperville"s school officials recently voted to stop u sing a class ranking system.C. A much higher number of private schools do not share their rankings, including some independent schools in Chicago that, for example, have societies that recognize the top 10% of a class but choose to allow the students themselves dictate who speaks at graduation.D. Competitions among students for the title of honored graduates are very tight and are on the rise in a great number of private schools.E. Schools just have to make certain, through student profiles and other means, the strength of a schedule and student performance relative to other students.F. Not surprisingly, there is still lots of disagreement about the new policy; some parents are worried that it hurts high-achieving students" chances of getting over the bar, while forcing colleges and universities to rely on perhaps less reliable or easier measures or on standardized tests like the ACT or SAT.G. Students and their parents increasingly fight over who gets to be number one, and the damage that can be done—both academically and psychologically—to those who lose out far wins the benefits of the glory attached to such titles.

Despite Denmark"s manifest virtues, Danes never talk about how proud they are to be Danes. This would sound weird in Danish. When Danes talk to foreigners about Denmark, They always begin by commenting on its tininess, its unimportance, the difficulty of its language, the general small-mindedness and self-indulgence of their countrymen and the high taxes. No Dane would look you in tire eye and say, "Denmark is a great country". You"re supposed to figure this out for yourself. It is the land of the silk safety net, where almost half the national budget goes toward smoothing out life"s inequalities, and there is plenty of money for schools, day care, retraining programs, job seminars. Danes love seminars: Three days at a study center hearing about waste management is almost as good as a ski trip. It is a culture bombarded by English, in advertising, pop music, the Internet, and despite all the English that Danish absorbs—there is no Danish Academy to defend against it—old dialects persist in Jutland that can barely be understood by Copenhageners. It is the land where, as the saying goes, "Few have too much and fewer have too little", and a foreigner is struck by the sweet egalitarianism that prevails, where the lowliest clerk gives you a level gaze, where Sir and Madame have disappeared from common usage, even Mr. and Mrs. It"s a nation of recyclers—about 55% of Danish garbage gets made into something new—and no nuclear power plants. It"s a nation of tireless planners. Trains run on time. Things operate well in general. Such a nation of overachievers—a brochure from the Ministry of Business and Industry says, "Denmark is one of the world"s cleanest and most organized countries, with virtually no pollution, crime, or poverty. Denmark is the most corruption-free society in the Northern hemisphere". So, of course, one"s heart lifts at any sighting of Danish sleaze: skinhead graffiti on buildings ("Foreigners out of Denmark!"), broken beer bottles in the gutters, drunken teenagers slumped in the park. Nonetheless, it is an orderly land. You drive through a Danish town, it comes to an end at a stone wall, and on the other side is a field of barley, a nice clean line: town here, country there. It is not a nation of jaywalkers. People stand on the curb and wait for the red light to change, even if it"s 2 a.m. and there"s not a car in sight. However, Danes don"t think of themselves as a waiting-at-2-a.m.-for-the-green-light people—that"s how they see Swedes and Germans. Danes see themselves as jazzy people, improvisers, more free spirited than Swedes, but the truth is (though one should not say it) that Danes are very much like Germans and Swedes. Orderliness is a main selling point. Denmark has few natural resources, limited manufacturing capability; its future in Europe will be as a broker, banker, and distributor of goods. You send your goods by container ship to Copenhagen, and these bright, young, English-speaking, utterly honest, highly disciplined people will get your goods around to Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Russia. Airports, seaports, highways, and rail lines are ultramodern and well-maintained. The orderliness of the society doesn"t mean that Danish lives are less messy or lonely than yours or mine, and no Dane would tell you so. You can hear plenty about bitter family feuds and the sorrows of alcoholism and about perfectly sensible people who went off one day and killed themselves. An orderly society cannot exempt its members from the hazards of life. But there is a sense of entitlement and security that Danes grow up with. Certain things are yours by virtue of citizenship, and you shouldn"t feel bad for taking what you"re entitled to, you"re as good as anyone else. The rules of the welfare system are clear to everyone, the benefits you get if you lose your job, the steps you take to get a new one; and the orderliness of the system makes it possible for the country to weather high unemployment and social unrest without a sense of crisis.

A. Title: GOOD HEALTH B. Time limit: 40 minutes C. Word limit; 120-150 words (not including the given opening sentence) D. Your composition should be based on the OUTLINE below and should start with the given opening sentence: "The desire for good health is universal. " E. Your composition should be written neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (15 points) Outline: 1. Importance of good health 2. Ways to keep fit 3. My own practices

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

"My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas". Many American school children are taught this sentence to help them remember the order of the planets of the solar system. Soon though, this may change because, on July 29th, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of a very distant celestial body larger than Pluto. The researchers claim that the new body—which they are informally calling Xena—should be classified as a planet. The new body—temporarily named 2003UB313—orbits the Sun once every 560 years. It is currently over 14 billion kilometres away, about three times farther out than Pluto, making it the most distant object ever discovered in the solar system. The researchers think it is part of the Kuiper belt, a ring of rocky objects that extends beyond Neptune. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory and David Rabino witz of Yale University discovered the object in data recorded at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego in October 2003, but its motion did not become apparent until they reanalysed the data in January 2005. The question of whether or not the new body should be considered a planet has rekindled the de bate over what exactly counts as a planet. A handful of objects of similar size to, but smaller than, Pluto have been discovered in the Kuiper belt over the past few years. These have not been considered planets, mainly because they were smaller than Pluto. But 2003UB313 is larger than Pluto. If Pluto is a planet, shouldn"t it be as well? The case is not so clear cut. Many astronomers argue that Pluto should not be considered a plan et. It is more like a large asteroid, they hold. Meanwhile, Dr. Brown asserts that as Pluto has historically been considered a planet, anything larger should also be considered one. Ultimately, the International Astronomical Union, a group of professional astronomers, will end this existential anxiety. Dr. Brown expects the process to take months, and the team is not allowed to reveal its suggested name until then. Since most Greek and Roman names have already been used, he and his colleagues have previously drawn upon Native American and Inuit mythology for names. He will only hint that the new name comes from a different tradition altogether. Time will tell whether mother will be serving "nine polished xylophones", "nine pizzas" or just "noodles".

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

How to Solve the Rubbish Problem in Cities?

In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, over ten percent of the Black population of the United States left the South, where most of the Black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1916 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that the majority of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two factors: the collapse of the cotton industry, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants" subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills. But the question of who actually left the South has never been thoroughly investigated. Although numerous investigations document an exodus(大批出走) from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 over 600,000 Black workers, or ten percent of the Black work force, reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits", the federal census category roughly encompassing the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be enticed to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South. About thirty-five percent of the urban Black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery—blacksmiths, masons, carpenters—which had had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and out-date. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries—tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and Black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the Black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. During that period, urban black workers faced competition from the continuing arrival of both Black and White rural workers, who were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus a move north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their sub-sequent economic problems in the North to their rural background comes into question.

Today"s worker is no longer willing to work in an authoritarian and dehumanizing environment. Workers want meaning in their work and balance in their lives. They want opportunities to contribute and to know how their work is effective. Employees want to work for organizations that respect them as individuals. (46) They also want to know that they are working for an ethical company that acts in a socially and environmentally responsible manner. Today, and in the future, companies must design work so that employees can take responsibility and be rewarded appropriately. By changing attitudes and conditions in the workplace, organizations can help make work more meaningful. Repetitive factory routines and office work that simply moves paper from in-box to out-box are mindless tasks that destroy motivation and productivity. Research has shown that mental challenge is closely related to job satisfaction. (47) Too little challenge in the work, as in completely automated tasks, generally leads to boredom and lowered satisfaction. On the other hand, too much-challenge may lead to failure and frustration. Thus success or achievement in reaching an accepted standard of competence is an important factor in job satisfaction. Today"s workers want to be a valued part of the whole. They want to know that their work is important and how it fits into the corporate strategy. They want to know not only how the work they do affects others and the organization"s goals, but how they as individuals can make an impact. (48) Employees will contribute their knowledge enthusiastically in a corporate culture that values the individual. (49) The profitability of a company is related to the quality and efforts of its workers. Therefore, a direct relationship between job performance and reward makes work more meaningful. Compaq Computers, for example, has an unusually low turnover rate among its employees. Like most companies in the computer field, Compaq expects its people to work long and hard to achieve big results quickly. (50) In many companies an atmosphere of constant push would inspire people to seek employment with less pressure somewhere else. Instead, high quality people stay with Compaq. The company"s culture emphasizes individual responsibility for results and high respect for individuals. Compaq benefits from creating opportunities for employees to perform to the best of their potential and to be rewarded for their achievements.

Men are generally better than women on tests of spatial ability, such as mentally rotating an object through three dimensions or finding their way around in a new environment. But a new study suggests that under some circumstances a woman"s way of navigating is probably more efficient. Luis Pacheco-Cobos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico andhis colleagues discovered this by following mushroom gatherers from a village in the state of Tlaxcala for two rainy seasons. Two researchers, each fitted with GPS navigation devices and heart-rate monitors, followed different gatherers on different days. They recorded the weight of the mushrooms each gatherer collected and where they visited. The GPS data allowed a map to be made of the routes taken and the heart-rate measurements provided an estimate of the amount of energy expended during their travels. The results, to be published in Evolution and Human Behaviour, show that the men and women collected on average about the same weight of mushrooms. But the men travelled farther, climbed higher and used a lot more energy—70% more than the women. The men did not move any faster, but they searched for spots with lots of mushrooms. The women made many more stops, apparently satisfied with, or perhaps better at finding, patches of fewer mushrooms. Previous work has shown that men tend to navigate by creating mental maps of a territory and then imagining their position on the maps. Women are more likely to remember their routes using landmarks. The study lends support to the idea that male and female navigational skills were honed differently by evolution for different tasks. Modern-day hunter-gatherers divide labor, so that men tend to do more hunting and women more gathering. It seems likely that early humans did much the same thing. The theory is that the male strategy is the most useful for hunting prey; chasing an antelope, say, would mean running a long way over a winding route. But having killed his prey, the hunter would want to make a beeline for home rather than retrace his steps exactly. Women, by contrast, would be better off remembering landmarks and retracing the paths to the most productive patches of plants. The research suggests that in certain circumstances women are better at navigating than men, which might lend some comfort to a man desperately searching for an item in a supermarket while his exasperated wife methodically moves around the aisles filling the shopping trolley. He is simply not cut out for the job, evolutionarily speaking.

"This is a really exciting time, a new era is starting," says Peter Bazalgette, the chief creative officer of Endemol, the television company behind "Big Brother" and other popular shows. He is referring to the upsurge of interest in mobile television, a nascent industry at the intersection of telecoms and media which offers new opportunities to device makers, content producers and mobile-network operators. And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. Already, many mobile operators offer a selection of television channels or individual shows, which are "streamed" across their third-generation (3G) networks. In South Korea, television is also sent to mobile phones via satellite and terrestrial broadcast networks, which is far more efficient than sending video across mobile networks; similar broadcasts will begin in Japan in April. In Europe, the Italian arm of 3, a mobile operator, recently acquired Canale 7, a television channel, with a view to launching mobile-TV broadcasts in Italy in the second half of 2006. Similar mobile-TV networks will also be built in Finland and America, and are being tested in many other countries. Meanwhile, Apple Computer, which launched a video-capable version of its iPod portable music-player in October, is striking deals with television networks to expand the range of shows that can be purchased for viewing on the device, including "Lost", "Desperate Housewives" and "Law ＆ Order". TiVo, maker of the pioneering personal video recorder (PVR), says it plans to enable subscribers to download recorded shows on to iPods and other portable devices for viewing on the move. And mobile TV was one of the big trends at the world"s largest technology fair, the Consumer Electronics Show, which took place in Las Vegas this week. Despite all this activity, however, the prospects for mobile TV are unclear. For a start, nobody really knows if consumers will pay for it, though surveys suggest they like the idea. Informa, a consultancy, says there will be 125m mobile-TV users by 2010. But many other mobile technologies inspired high hopes and then failed to live up to expectations. And even if people do want TV on the move, there is further uncertainty in three areas: technology, business models and the content itself.

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But more and more studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, "Progress in Brain Research." Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer's disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. "It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind." For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it. When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students. "For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they're now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another." In the real world, such tendencies can yield big advantages, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others' yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker's real impact.

【F1】 It is no longer just dirty blue-collar jobs in manufacturing; that are being sucked offshore but also white-collar service jobs, which used to be considered safe from foreign competition. Telecoms charges have tumbled, allowing workers in far-flung locations to be connected cheaply to customers in the developed world. This has made it possible to offshore services that were once non-tradable. Morgan Stanley"s Mr. Roach has been drawing attention to the fact that the "global labor arbitrage" is moving rapidly to the better kinds of jobs.【F2】 It is no longer just basic data processing and call centers that are being outsourced to low-wage countries, but also software programming, medical diagnostics, engineering design, law, accounting, finance and business consulting. These can now be delivered electronically from anywhere in the world, exposing skilled white-collar workers to greater competition. The standard retort to such arguments is that outsourcing abroad is too small to matter much. So far fewer than 1 million American service-sector jobs have been lost to off-shoring. Forrester Research forecasts that by 2015 a total of 3.4 million jobs in services will have moved abroad, but that is tiny compared with the 30 million jobs destroyed and created in America every year.【F3】 The trouble is that such studies allow only for the sorts of jobs that are already being off-shored, when in reality the proportion of jobs that can be moved will rise as IT advances and education improves in emerging economies. Mr. Blinder says: "education offers no protection.【F4】 Highly skilled accountants, radiologists or computer programmers now have to compete with electronically delivered competition from abroad, whereas humble taxi drivers, janitors and crane operators remain safe from off-shoring. This may help to explain why the real median wage of American graduates hat fallen by 6% since 2000, a bigger decline than in average wages." In the 1980s and early 1990s, the pay gap between low-paid, low-skilled workers and high-paid, high-skilled workers widened significantly. But since then, according to a study by David Autor, Lawrence Katz and Melissa Kearney, in America, Britain and Germany workers at the bottom as well as at the top have done better than those in the middle-income group. Office cleaning cannot be done by workers in India. It is the easily standardized skilled jobs in the middle, such as accounting, that are now being squeezed hardest.【F5】 A study confirms that workers in tradable services that are exposed to foreign competition tend to be more skilled than workers in non-tradable services and tradable manufacturing industries.

No Nobel prize has yet been awarded for the invention of an elixir of life, but the prize itself seems to be one. That, at least, is the conclusion of Matthew Rablen and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, in England【F1】 Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald have just published a study on the university's working-paper site which concludes that Nobel science laureates live significantly longer than those of their colleagues who were nominated for a prize, but failed to receive one. The theory they were testing was that status per se rather than the trappings of status, such as wealth, act to prolong life. This idea was first promulgated by Sir Michael Marmot, of University College, London. 【F2】 Sir Michael studied the health of British civil servants and discovered, contrary to his and everyone else's expectations, that those at the top of the hierarchy—whom the stress of the job was expected to have affected adversely—were actually far healthier than the supposedly unstressed officials at the bottom of the heap. Subsequent research has confirmed this result, and suggested it is nothing to do with the larger salaries of those at the top. But Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald thought it would be interesting to refine the observation still further, by studying individuals who were all, in a sense, at the top. By comparing people good enough to be considered for a Nobel, they could measure what the status of having one was worth. 【F3】 Comparing winners and also-rans from within the same countries, to avoid yet another source of bias, Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald found that the winners lived, on average, two years longer than those who had merely been nominated. Exactly what causes this increased longevity is unclear. It is not the cash, though. The inflation-adjusted value of the prize has fluctuated over the years, so the two researchers were able to see if the purchasing power of the money was correlated with longevity. It was not.【F4】 With the hierarchically ordered individuals studied by Sir Michael and his successors, both medical records and experiments on animals suggest stress hormones are involved. It is, indeed, more stressful to be at the bottom than the top, even if being at the top involves making decisions on the fate of nations.【F5】 The result Dr. Rablen and Dr. Oswald have come up with, though, suggests a positive effect associated with high status, rather than the absence of a negative effect, since unsuccessful nominees never know that they have been nominated.

In the two decades between 1910 and 1930, over ten percent of the Black population of the United States left the South, where the majority of the Black population had been located, and migrated to northern states, with the largest number moving, it is claimed, between 1916 and 1918. It has been frequently assumed, but not proved, that most of the migrants in what has come to be called the Great Migration came from rural areas and were motivated by two concurrent factors: the collapse of cotton industry following boll weevil infestation, which began in 1898, and increased demand in the North for labor following the cessation of European immigration caused by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This assumption has led to the conclusion that the migrants" subsequent lack of economic mobility in the North is tied to rural background, a background that implies unfamiliarity with urban living and a lack of industrial skills. But the question of who actually left the South has never been investigated in detail. Although numerous investigations document a flight from rural southern areas to southern cities prior to the Great Migration, no one has considered whether the same migrants then moved on to northern cities. In 1910 over 600,000 Black workers, or ten percent of the Black work force reported themselves to be engaged in "manufacturing and mechanical pursuits", the federal census category roughly including the entire industrial sector. The Great Migration could easily have been made up entirely of this group and their families. It is perhaps surprising to argue that an employed population could be tempted to move, but an explanation lies in the labor conditions then prevalent in the South. About thirty-five percent of the urban Black population in the South was engaged in skilled trades. Some were from the old artisan class of slavery—blacksmiths, masons, carpenters which had a monopoly of certain trades, but they were gradually being pushed out by competition, mechanization, and obsolescence. The remaining sixty-five percent, more recently urbanized, worked in newly developed industries—tobacco, lumber, coal and iron manufacture, and railroads. Wages in the South, however, were low, and Black workers were aware, through labor recruiters and the Black press, that they could earn more even as unskilled workers in the North than they could as artisans in the South. After the boll weevil infestation, urban Black workers faced competition from the continuing influx of both Black and White rural workers, who were driven to undercut the wages formerly paid for industrial jobs. Thus, a move" north would be seen as advantageous to a group that was already urbanized and steadily employed, and the easy conclusion tying their subsequent economic problems in the North to their rural backgrounds comes into question.Notes: boll weevil infestation 棉铃虫蔓延。cessation 中止，停止。mason 泥瓦匠。recruiter 招募者。influx涌入。

If the opinion polls are to be believed, most Americans are coming to trust their government more than they used to. The habit has not yet spread widely among American Indians, who suspect an organization which has so often patronized them, lied to them and defrauded them. But the Indians may soon win a victory in a legal battle that epitomizes those abuses. Elouise Cobell, a banker who also happens to be a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, is the leading plaintiff in a massive class-action suit against the government. At issue is up to $10 billion in trust payments owed to some 500,000 Indians. The suit revolves around Individual Indian Money (IIM) accounts that are administered by the Interior Department"s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Back in the 1880s, the government divided more than 11m acres of tribal land into parcels of 80 to 160 acres that were assigned to individual Indians. Because these parcels were rarely occupied by their new owners, the government assumed responsibility for managing them. As the Indians" trustee, it leased the land out for grazing, logging, mining and oil drilling—but it was supposed to distribute the royalties to the Indian owners. In fact, officials admit that royalties have been lost or stolen. Records were destroyed, and the government lost track of which Indians owned what land. The plaintiffs say that money is owing to 500,000 Indians, but even the government accepts a figure of about 300,000. For years, Cobell heard Indians complain of not getting payment from the government for the oil-drilling and ranching leases on their land. But nothing much got done. She returned to Washington and, after a brush-off from government lawyers, filed the suit. Gale Norton, George Bushes interior secretary was charged with contempt in November because her department had failed to fix the problem. In December, Judge Lam berth ordered the interior Department to shut down all its computers for ten weeks because trustfund records were vulnerable to hackers. The system was partly restored last month and payments to some Indians, which had been interrupted, resumed. And that is not the end of it. Ms. Norton has proposed the creation of a new Bureau of Indian Trust Management, separate from the BIA. Indians are cross that she suggested this without consulting them. Some want the trust funds to be placed in receivership, under a neutral supervisor. Others have called for Congress to establish an independent commission, including Indians, to draw up a plan for reforming the whole system. A messy injustice may at last be getting sorted out.

Nearly two-thirds of businesses in the UK want to recruit staff with foreign language skills. French is still the most highly prized language, but Spanish and Mandarin speakers are more【C1】______ demand than in the past. Katja Hall, deputy director-general of Confederation of British Industry (CBI), said that, 【C2】______ the EU was the UK"s largest export market, it was no surprise to see European languages so【C3】______valued. "【C4】______ with China and Latin America seeing solid growth, ambitious firms want the language skills that can【C5】______the path into new markets," she said. The 2014 annual education and skills survey by the CBI and Pearson, the educational 【C6】______that owns the Financial Times, 【C7】______that 41 percent of the 291 companies surveyed across the UK【C8】______ knowledge of a foreign language was 【C9】______to their business. European languages—French, German and Spanish—still【C10】______the list in terms of desirability, but these were closely【C11】______by Mandarin and Arabic. Ms Hall said it was【C12】______whether recent government initiatives to encourage language learning in schools would have any 【C13】______. "It has been a【C14】______to see foreign language study in our schools under pressure with one in five schools having a 【C15】______ low take-up of languages," she said. "Young people【C16】______their future subject choices should be made more【C17】______of the benefits to their careers that can 【C18】______from studying a foreign language." The number of students studying foreign languages has【C19】______in the past decade. In January, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills said the number of "skills shortage vacancies" had risen from 16 per cent of all【C20】______ in 2009 to 22 per cent in 2013.

Write a composition on the topic: The Right to Die on the outline (given in Chinese) below: 医学的技术进步可以使人们能比过去活得长。然而，一些人们，包括一些医生，不支持那些延长生命的做法，认为人有权利选择死亡。这种争论仍将继续。 You should write about 160-200 words neatly.

Europe is not a gender-equality heaven. In particular, the corporate workplace will never be completely family-friendly until women are part of senior management decisions, and Europe" s top corporate-governance positions remain overwhelmingly male. Indeed, women hold only 14 percent of positions on European corporate boards. The Europe Union is now considering legislation to compel corporate boards to maintain a certain proportion of women—up to 60 percent. This proposed mandate was bora of frustration. Last year, Europe Commission Vice President Viviane Reding issued a call to voluntary action. Reding invited corporations to sign up for gender balance goal of 40 percent female board membership. But her appeal was considered a failure: only 24 companies took it up. Do we need quotas to ensure that women can continue to climb the corporate ladder fairly as they balance work and family? "Personally, I don"t like quotas," Reding said recently. "But I like what the quotas do." Quotas get action: they "open the way to equality and they break through the glass ceiling," according to Reding, a result seen in France and other countries with legally binding provisions on placing women in top business positions. I understand Reding"s reluctance—and her frustration. I don"t like quotas either; they run counter to my belief in meritocracy, governance by the capable. But, when one considers the obstacles to achieving the meritocratic ideal, it does look as if a fairer world must be temporarily ordered. After all, four decades of evidence has now shown that corporations in Europe as well as the US are evading the meritocratic hiring and promotion of women to top positions—no matter how much "soft pressure" is put upon them. When women do break through to the summit of corporate power—as, for example , Sheryl Sandberg recently did at Facebook—they attract massive attention precisely because they remain the exception to the rule. If appropriate pubic policies were in place to help all women—whether CEOs or their children"s caregivers—and all families, Sandberg would be no more newsworthy than any other highly capable person living in a more just society.