The world religion is derived from the Latin noun religion, which denotes both (1)_____ observance of ritual obligations and an inward spirit of reverence. In modern usage, religion covers a wide spectrum of (2)_____ that reflects the enormous variety of ways the term can be (3)_____ At one extreme, many committed believers (4)_____ only their own tradition as a religion, understanding expressions such as worship and prayer to refer (5)_____ to the practices of their tradition. They may (6)_____ use vague or idealizing terms in defining religion, (7)_____, true love of God, or the path of enlightenment. At the other extreme, religion may be equated with (8)_____, fanaticism, or wishful thinking. By defining religion as a sacred engagement with what is taken to be a spiritual reality, it is possible to consider the importance of religion in human life without making (9)_____ about what is really is or ought to be. Religion is not an object with a single, fixed meaning, or (10)_____ a zone with clear boundaries. It is an aspect of Human (11)_____ that may intersect, incorporate, or transcend other aspects of life and society. Such a definition avoid the drawbacks of (12)_____ the investigation of religion to Western or biblical categories (13)_____ monotheism or church structure, which are not (14)_____. Religion in this understanding includes a complex of activities that cannot be (15)_____ to any single aspect of human experience. It is a part of individual life but also of (16)_____ dynamics. Religion includes not only patterns of language and thought. It is sometimes an (17)_____ part of a culture. Religious experience may be expressed (18)_____ visual symbols, dance and performance, elaborate philosophical systems, legendary and imaginative stories, formal (19)_____, and detailed rules of some ways. There are as many forms of religious expression as there are human cultural (20)_____.

Birth, growth, decline, death: it is the usual cycle for people, companies and industries. But the story of violin-making in Cremona in northern Italy, which flourished under such master craftsmen as Andrea Amati, Giuseppe Guarneri and Antonio Stradivari from the mid-16th century to the early 18th, suggests that, for industries at least, there may be life after death. Violin-making in Cremona struggled through the 19th century in the hands of a few carpenters who turned out low-quality instruments. By the 1950s it had died out, says Gio Batta Morassi, a 73-year-old maestro liutaio(master violin-maker). Yet today, in workshops overlooking the city"s cobbled streets, more than 100 craftsmen cut and plane maple and spruce to make string instruments—more than in any other European city. Cremona is once again the capital of hand-crafted instruments. A new school to train craftsmen in instrument-making opened in Cremona in 1938, though when Mr. Morassi began his studies in 1950 there were just six students on the course, of whom only one other went on to make instruments. But this slight revival was sustained by a growing interest in Baroque music in northern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, says Hildegard Dodel, a German who studied at the school. It created new demand for instruments made in the traditional Cremonese style. Today Italians are a minority among the school"s 150 students; 30 are South Korean, 26 are Japanese, six are from China and three from Taiwan. Some will set up shop in the city: Ms Dodel worked for about ten years restoring and repairing instruments in Germany and the Netherlands before returning to open her own workshop in Cremona in 2003. Instrument-making is not an easy life. "I often thought of giving up," says Francesco Toto, who moved to Cremona 17 years ago and specializes in making cellos. Wood is expensive, must be seasoned properly and is at risk from woodworm; the maple for a cello costs around ￠1,500, for example. Mr. Toto was able to raise his prices after winning a competition, but to maintain quality he makes just four instruments a year. Violin-makers can produce perhaps seven top-quality instruments a year.(Cellos made by Cremona"s craftsmen typically cost ￠15,000-35,000, and violins ￠8,000-20,000.)Having come back from the dead, Cremona"s instrument-makers, like many others in Italian industries, hope that an emphasis on quality, tradition and craftsmanship will keep cheaper foreign rivals at bay.

At the end of last year, a town called Friendship Heights, in Maryland"s Montgomery County, approved America"s (and thus the world"s) strictest tobacco policy. Town officers courageously banned smoking on all public property, including streets, pavements and public squares. "It"s a public health issue", said the mayor, Alfred Muller, who is also a doctor. "We don"t have the right to outlaw tobacco, but we"re doing what we can within our rights". This newspaper has expressed disgruntlement with the element of intolerance that is increasingly manifesting itself within America"s anti-tobacco movement. It must be said, however, that brave Friendship Heights has discovered an approach that liberals can embrace. Private property is its owners" sanctuary, but the public rules in public spaces. Undeniably, the streets belong to the government; what happens in them, therefore, is the government"s business. On this worthy principle, smoking should be merely the beginning. For example, it is clear that the consumption of fatty foods contributes to heart disease, strokes and other deadly disease. Besides, eating junk makes you fat and ugly. What people do at home is their own affair, but why allows them to abuse the public streets for this gluttony? America"s pavements and boardwalks are overridden with persons, many of them overweight, who amble along licking ice cream or gobbling chips. In many cities, hot dogs are spread, quite openly, on the pavement itself. All this should be stopped. Not just in Friendship Heights but in other enlightened districts, it should be illegal to eat anything but low-fat foods in public zones. Because Americans consume too little by way of fruits and vegetables, in time (it is best to move slowly, because people"s rights must be respected) streets should become strictly vegetarian. More can be done. Shrieking newspaper headlines create stress for those who may not wish to view them. People who want to buy and read papers should therefore be required to do so in private. America has long and justly sought to prevent the entanglement of religion with public life. What people do in church or at home is their business. However, praying, sermonizing or wearing religious garb in the streets surely compromises the requirement that the public will not be dragooned into supporting religion. There is the environment to consider, as well. That people exhale carbon dioxide in public places, thus contributing to global warming, is probably inevitable, and America"s politicians would be wise to permit it. But methane, too, is a greenhouse gas, and an odiferous one. Its emission in public places, where it can neither be avoided nor filtered, seems an imposition on both planetary hygiene and human comfort. Breakers of wind, surely, can be required to wait until they can answer their needs in private; and prosecuted when they fail. Fame, then, to Friendship Heights. Other towns should take note. If they intend to fulfill their responsibilities to the health and welfare of citizens, to public order, and above all to the public streets and parks whose rights the authorities are sworn to uphold, then the way ahead is clear.

"According to such-and-such, a think-tank," is a phrase familiar to readers of any newspaper. Sharp quotes, intriguing facts and bold new policy proposals are 【C1】______ the mysterious tanks. What exactly are these outfits, 【C2】______ churn out reports on everything from Brexit to badgers? The "think-tank" label became popular in the 1950s, 【C3】______ which time there were already plenty of such organizations in existence. Many of America's most 【C4】______ tanks were founded in the early 20th century. But think-tanks really 【C5】______ in the second half of the 20th century. Think-tanks 【C6】______ fill the gap between academia and policymaking. Academics 【C7】______ authoritative studies, 【C8】______ at a snail's pace. Journalists' first drafts of history are 【C9】______ but thin. A good think-tank helps the policymaking process by publishing reports that are as 【C10】______ as academic research and as accessible as journalism. They 【C11】______ in the 20th century for two reasons. Governments were expanding everywhere, meaning there was lots of 【C12】______ for policy expertise. And the arrival of 24-hour news created an insatiable appetite 【C13】______ informed interviewees. The same trends are now causing think-tanks to 【C14】______ in developing countries. 【C15】______ the world may have reached peak tank. The Pennsylvanian researchers found that in 2014 the number of new tanks 【C16】______ for the first time in 30 years. One reason is that donors nowadays prefer to make project-specific grants, 【C17】______ funneling money into mere thinking. 【C18】______ is increased competition. So some tanks are rethinking themselves. The Pew Research Centre describes itself as a "fact tank" , 【C19】______ information rather than policy recommendations. And the Sutton Trust calls itself a "do tank", putting its own recommendations into 【C20】______.

If you smoke, no one needs to tell you how bad it is. So why haven"t you quit? Why hasn"t everyone? Because smoking feels good. It stimulates and focuses the mind at the same time that it soothes and satisfies. The concentrated dose of nicotine in a drag off a cigarette triggers an immediate flood of dopamine and other neurochemicals that wash over the brain"s pleasure centers. Inhaling tobacco smoke is the quickest, most efficient way to get nicotine to the brain. "I completely understand why you wouldn" t want to give it up," said Dr. David Abrams, an addiction researcher at the National Institutes of Health. "It"s more difficult to get off nicotine than heroin or cocaine. " Smoking "hijacks" the reward systems in the brain that drive you to seek food, water and sex, Dr. Abrams explained, driving you to seek nicotine with the same urgency. "Your brain thinks that this has to do with survival of the species," he said. Nicotine isn"t equally addictive for everyone. A lot of people do not smoke because they never liked it to begin with. Then there are "chippers", who smoke occasionally but never seem to get hooked. But most people who smoke will eventually do it all day, every day. New discoveries in genetics may explain why certain people take to smoking with such gusto and end up so addicted. Some people, for instance, produce a gene encoded enzyme that clears nicotine from their bloodstreams rapidly, so they tend to smoke more and develop stronger addictions. Others possess special receptors in the brain that bond extra tightly with nicotine, giving them an especially intense high that makes it harder to quit. Drug makers are exploiting the science of addiction to create novel treatments to help smokers quit. Meanwhile, experts continue to recommend the old standbys: nicotine replacement gums, patches, nasal sprays, inhalers and lozenges, which have been proved to be safe. Still, no treatment works for everyone. And even with the most successful treatments, only about 30 percent of attempts to quit last more than six months. Compared with willpower alone, however, that"s a huge improvement. Fewer than one in 10 smokers who go it alone manages to go six months without a cigarette. Most do not make it past a week. When longtime smokers finally do quit, they soon realize that not smoking doesn"t necessarily make them nonsmokers. That"s what counseling is for- learning to function without nicotine and to cope with the cues that trigger smoking urges. Most important, former smokers have to rediscover that it is possible to enjoy life without cigarettes, although the yearning may never die completely.

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about five possible scientific breakthroughs in the 21st century. Choose the most suitable heading from the list or each numbered paragraph. The first and last paragraphs of the text are not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use.A. We"ll "manage" Earth.B. We"ll have a brain road map.C. We"ll know where we came from.D. We"ll clone many useful creatures.E. We"ll live longer (120 years?).F. We"ll crack the genetic code and conquer cancer. It is predicted that there will be 5 scientific breakthroughs in the 21st century. (41)______. Why does the universe exist? To put it another way, why is there something instead of nothing? Since the 1920s, scientists have known the universe is expanding, which means it must have started at a definite time in the past. They even have developed theories that give a detailed picture of the evolution of the universe from the time it was a fraction of a second old to the present. Over the next couple of decades, these theories will be refined by data from extraordinary powerful new telescope. We will have a better understanding of how matter behaves at the unfathomably high temperatures and pressures of the early universe. (42)______. In 19th-century operas, when the heroine coughs in the first act, the audience knows she will die of tuberculosis in Act 3. But thanks to 20th-century antibiotics, the once-dreaded, once-incurable disease now can mean nothing more serious than taking some pills. As scientists learn more about the genetic code and the way cells work at the molecular level, many serious diseases—cancer, for on—will become less threatening. Using manufactured "therapeutic" viruses, doctors will be able to replace cancer-causing damaged DNA with healthy genes, probably administered by a pill or injection. (43)______. If the normal aging process is basically a furious, invisible contest in our cells—a contest between damage to our DNA and our ceils" ability to repair that damage—then gist-century strides in genetic medicine may let us control and even reverse the process. But before we push scientists to do more, consider: Do we really want to live in a world where no one grows old and few children are born because the planet can hold only so many people? Where would new ideas come from? What would we do with all that extra time? (44)______. In the next millennium, we"ll stop talking about the weather but will do something about it. We"ll gradually learn how to predict the effects of human activity on the Earth, its climate and its ecosystems. And with that knowledge will come an increasing willingness to use it to manage the workings of our planet. (45)______. This is the real final frontier of the 21st century: The brain is the most complex system we know. It contains about 100 billion neurons (roughly the number of stars in the Milky Way), each connected to as many as 1,000 others. Early in the next century, we will use advanced forms of magnetic resonance imaging to produce detailed maps of the neurons in operation. We"ll be able to say with certainty which ones are working when you read a word, when you say a word, when you think about a word, and so on. Maybe these things will come true, maybe not. But we can firmly believe that tomorrow will be more beautiful and glorious.

TheImportanceoftheSenseofResponsibilityWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

I am not an accomplished lawyer. I find quite as much material for a lecture in those points wherein I have failed, as in those where I have been moderately successful. The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man, of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today. Never let your correspondences fall behind. Whatever piece of business you have in hand, before stopping, do all the labor related to it which can then be done. When you bring a common law suit, if you have the facts for doing so, write the declaration at once. If a law point be involved, examine the books and note the authority you rely on the declaration itself, where you are sure to find it when wanted. In business not likely to be litigated,—ordinary collection cases, partitions, and the like—make all examinations of titles, note them and even draft orders and official orders in advance. This course has a triple advantage: it avoids omissions and neglect, saves your labor, when once done, performs the labor out of court when you have leisure, rather than in court when you have not. Spontaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer"s avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow bringing him business, if he cannot make a speech. And yet here is not a more fatal error to young lawyers, than relying too much on speechmaking. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim exemption from the exhausting work of the law, his case is a failure in advance. Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser—in fees, and expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. Who can be more nearly a friend than he who habitually overhauls the Register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket? A moral tone ought to be introduced into the profession, which should drive such men out of it.

Americans don"t like to lose wars. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test patriotism and courage—and those are the kind at which the U.S. excels. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads? If American indulge in a bit of flag—when the job is done, they earned it. Now there is a similar challenge—global warming. The steady deterioration of the very climate of this very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. is losing. Indeed, if America is fighting at all, it"s fighting on the wrong side. The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world"s greenhouse gases each year and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn"t intend to do a whole lot about it. Although 174 nations approved the admittedly flawed Kyoto accords to reduce carbon levels, the U.S. walked away from them. There are vague promises of manufacturing fuel from herbs or powering cars with hydrogen. But for a country that tightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, the U.S. is taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It"s hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of a country"s coasts and farms, the health of its people and stability of its economy. The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there"s far less agreement on how to fix it. Industry offers its plans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to native wish lists that could weaken America"s growth. But let"s assume that those interested parties and others will always bent the table and will always demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like—one that would leave the U.S. both environmentally safe and economically sound? Halting climate change will be far harder. One of the more conservative plans for addressing the problem calls for a reduction of 25 billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 52 years. And yet by devising a consistent strategy that mixes short-time profit with long-range objective and blends pragmatism with ambition, the U.S. can, without major damage to the economy, help halt the worst effects of climate change and ensure the survival of its way of life for future generations. Money will do some of the work, but what"s needed most is will. "I"m not saying the challenge isn"t almost overwhelming," says Fred Krupp. "But this is America, and America has risen to these challenges before."

Eric Hansen writes about travel as a participating enthusiast rather than a mere observer. (46) It gives these nine essays, based on his adventures over the past quarter-century, a resonance and psychological depth not usually seen in more routine travel narratives. (47) The reader follows wide-eyed from the armchair as Mr. Hansen journeys from the French Riviera to the South Pacific, India, the United States and Borneo. Each story combines nuanced portraits of memorable characters with lyrical descriptions of human fallibility and generosity. In his wildest tale, Mr. Hansen recounts his time working at a hotel on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. (48) "Seldom," he writes, "does one have the chance to enjoy the company of people who have so completely given themselves over to the cultivation of the low life in such style and with such gusto." (49) Beyond the booze, broken glass and fist fights, the author learns the history of the island"s pearl divers who, in canvas suits and lead weighted shoes, snatch gold-lip pearl shells from a seabed teeming with sea snakes, giant groupers and saltwater crocodiles. Other stories tell of drinking hallucinogenic kava in Vanuatu; lingering on a beach with a beautiful Maldivian girl in a pleasurable pursuit that the locals call "night fishing"; cooking piroshki with a Moscow emigre in a tiny Manhattan apartment while drug dealers shoot each other in the lobby below; and watching the Indonesian crew of a becalmed tall ship dance on deck to country and western music. (50) The most moving story comes from Kolkata(formerly Calcutta), where the author"s frustration at the impenetrable bureaucracy when trying to ship his belongings home is put into perspective by his voluntary work at Mother Theresa"s home for the dying. Here he bathes, feeds and comforts the inhabitants of the men"s ward, where the panic and despair of death are replaced by dignity and humour. This sensitive portrait alone makes this heartfelt collection a magical and uplifting read.

As people in rich countries know very well, eating too much food and burning too lew calories is why a substantial number of us are overweight or obese. Now, however, a remarkable change in perspective has come from the discovery that obesity actually provides people with temporary protection from the harmful effects of fat The insight has come from re-examining the common assumption that fatness itself drives the development of metabolic syndrome, which is what causes so much of the actual damage. The syndrome comes with a mixture of life-threatening effects, with cardiovascular disease(diseases relating to the heart and blood vessels)and type 2 diabetes being among the most serious. In fact, it now seems that body fat may be a barrier that stops-millions of Americans and fatty citizens elsewhere from going on to develop the syndrome. And the real damage is caused by the inflammatory effect of high levels of fat in the bloodstream. And ironically, it"s fat cells that protect us from this by serving as toxic dumps, locking away the real villains of the modern diet. The problem is that this protection only lasts so long, until there is simply no more room inside the fat cells. That"s when they start to break down, leading to a toxic spill into the bloodstream. This sets off an inflammatory response that causes various kinds of damage to body tissues. In this way, every excess calorie takes people closer to metabolic syndrome. So what can we do to stop a superabundance of fat triggering the syndrome? Of course there"s no substitute for a healthy diet and exercise, but incitation to this effect seem to be of limited use. As with cigarettes and alcohol, a tax on calories—pricing foods by their energy content—is increasingly seen as another "lever" to change behaviour by making obesity too costly. The new research may even suggest treatments to combat metabolic syndrome, such as antiinflammatory drugs. One promising candidate is salsalate, an arthritis drug related to aspirin, and the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston is now considering large-scale trials. What might be more helpful, though, is simply a wider recognition that fatty and sugary foods are more directly toxic than we had assumed. Ideally, people should be as well informed about the harmful effects of what they eat as, for example, pregnant women are about drinking and smoking. There is a consolation—you have your fat tissue to protect you when you consume that extra burger or sweetened soda. But now you know the perils of pushing your friendly fat cells beyond their natural limits.

According to studies cited by the National Eating Disorders Association, 42 percent of girls in first through third grade want to be thinner, 81 percent of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat, and 51 percent of 9-and 10-year-old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet. In many ways, this fixation on weight at ever earlier ages comes at an inopportune time physiologically. At a recent Hadassah meeting at the Woodlands Community Temple in White Plains, Dr. Marcie Schneider, the director of adolescent medicine at Greenwich Hospital, and Erica Leon, a registered dietitian, spoke about early adolescence as a time when a little hit of pudginess is necessary for proper growth, and youngsters wrestle constantly with their body image. "I can"t tell you how many kids I"ve seen who"ve been on the Atkins diet, or on the South Beach diet," Ms. Leon said, adding that overweight children who try diets can be at risk of developing eating disorders. After the presentation, three mothers from Hartsdale who wanted to help their children avoid such issues spoke about how their young daughters are already beginning to become weight-conscious. Anorexia is a mental illness in which the victim eats barely enough to survive, because her distorted thinking makes her think she is fat. Bulimia, a mental illness in which someone binges on large amounts of food, then purges it through vomiting or the abuse of laxatives, is on the rise, and is surfacing in younger and younger patients, mostly girls, said Judy Scheel, the director of the Center for Eating Disorder Recovery in Mount Kisco. About 90 percent of victims of eating disorders are female, and often the male victims are on teams like wrestling and crew, where they must keep their weight low for competitive reasons. Dr. Scheel believes that where girls claim the eating disorder enables them to be thin, boys typically state their goal is to achieve or maintain a muscular but thin physique. The average onset for bulimia used to be 17, but to see teenagers age 14 and 15 with bulimia is common these days, Dr. Scheel said. Other people believe the disorders have genetic Or chemical components, and many people with eating disorders respond well to anti-depressants, for example. A certain amount of education is necessary to help young people avoid becoming obsessed with their body image. "Teachers need to stay outside of talking about diets," Dr. Scheel said. "It"s like a parent, always talking about their next diet. You have to help a child understand that if you eat healthily and exercise, your body is going to take care of itself." And in relatively homogenous populations, like in some Westchester schools, competition runs high. "So the young people don"t really see how beautiful diversity is," she said, "and they tend to all be competing for kind of the same goals."

Parents and students are now relying Jess on taking out loans and more on grants, scholarships and their own income and savings, according to a new report from Sallie Mae. "Over the last few years they"re considering cost more.【C1】______applying for bank loans, they"re making【C2】______decisions to save on their college【C3】______," says Sarah Ducich, an author of the report The large private lender, in conjunction with Ipsos Public Affairs,【C4】______ in its seventh annual report that more than half of the cost of college is【C5】______ by grants and scholarships, as well as parent income and savings. The average family also【C6】______ less on parent and student loans, which【C7】______ for 7 percent and 15 percent of the cost, 【C8】______ . "But one of the most【C9】______ findings of the report," Ducich says, "is that【C10】______soaring tuition and fees, families"【C11】______ in the value of college has remained strong." Nearly all of the 1,600 parents and students【C12】______said they believed that college is an【C13】______in the future, nearly 90 percent said it"s needed for a(n)【C14】______occupation and about 86 percent said they would be【C15】______to stretch financially to pay for college. And although more than two-thirds of families said they planned on borrowing, at least as a last【C16】______, many are increasingly looking for【C17】______to cut costs. Nearly all families reported taking at least one step to make college more【C18】______, and on average families took five steps. Seven in 10 said they chose a(n)【C19】______college to pay in-state tuition and more than half said they lived at home or with【C20】______.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. You are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A—E. The first and the last paragraphs have been placed for you.A. Hemp has been cultivated by many cultures for thousands of years. It produces fibre which can be made into paper, fuel, oils, textiles, food, and rope. For many centuries, it was essential to the economies of many countries because it was used to make the ropes and cables used on sailing ships; colonial expansion and the establishment of a world-wide trading network would not have been possible without hemp. Nowadays, ships" cables are usually made from" wire or synthetic fibres, but scientists are now suggesting that the cultivation of hemp should be revived for the production of paper and pulp. According to its proponents, four times as much paper can be produced from land using hemp rather than tress, and many environmentalists believe that the large-scale cultivation of hemp could reduce the pressure on Canada"s forests.B. Much of Canada"s forestry production goes towards making pulp and paper. According to the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, Canada supplies 34% of the world"s wood pulp and 49% of its newsprint paper. If these paper products could be produced in some other way, Canadian forests could be preserved. Recently, a possible alternative way of producing paper has been suggested by agriculturalists and environmentalists: a plant called hemp.C. In recent years, two major movements for legalization have been gathering strength. One group of activists believes that ALL cannabis should be legal—both the hemp plant and the marijuana plant—and that the use of the drag marijuana should not be an offense. They argue that marijuana is not dangerous or addictive, and that it is used by large numbers of people who are not criminals but productive members of society. They also point out that marijuana is less toxic than alcohol or tobacco.D. However, there is a problem: hemp is illegal in many countries of the world. This plant, so useful for fibre, rope, oil, fuel and textiles, is a species of cannabis, related to the plant from which marijuana is produced.E. The other legalization movement is concerned only with the hemp plant used to produce fibre; this group wants to make it legal to cultivate the plant and sell the fibre for paper and pulp production. This second group has had a major triumph recently: in 1997, Canada legalized the farming of hemp for fibre. For the first time since 1938, hundreds of farmers are planting this crop, and soon we can expect to see pulp and paper produced from this new source.F. In the late 1930s, a movement to ban the drug marijuana began to gather force, resulting in the eventual banning of the cultivation not only of the plant used to produce the drug, but also of the commercial fibre-producing hemp plant. Although both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew hemp in large quantities on their own land, any American growing the plant today would soon find himself in prison—despite the fact that marijuana cannot be produced from the hemp plant, since it contains almost no THC (the active ingredient in the drug).G. Every second, 1 hectare of the world"s rainforest is destroyed. That"s equivalent to two football fields. An area the size of New York City is lost every day. In a year, that adds up to 31 million hectares—more than the land area of Poland. This alarming rate of destruction has serious consequences for the environment; scientists estimate, for example, that 137 species of plant, insect or animal become extinct every day due to logging. In British Columbia, where, since 1990, thirteen rainforest valleys have been clear-cut, 142 species of salmon have already become extinct, and the habitats of grizzly bears, wolves and many other creatures are threatened. Logging, however, provides jobs, profits, taxes for the government and cheap products of all kinds for consumers, so the government is reluctant to restrict or control it.Order: G is the first paragraph and E is the last.

Faces, like fingerprints, are unique. Did you ever wonder how it is possible for us to recognize people? Even a skilled writer probably could not describe all the features that make one face different from another. Yet a very young child—or even an animal, such as a pigeon—can learn to recognize faces. We all take this ability for granted. We also tell people apart by how they behave. When we talk about someone"s personality, we mean the ways in which he or she acts, speaks, thinks and feels that make that individual different from others. Like the human face, human personality is very complex. But describing someone"s personality in words is somewhat easier than describing his face. If you were asked to describe what a "nice face" looked like, you probably would have a difficult time doing so. But if you were asked to describe a "nice person," you might begin to think about someone who was kind, considerate, friendly, warm, and so forth. There are many words to describe how a person thinks, feels and acts. Gordon, an American psychologist, found nearly 18,000 English words characterizing differences in people"s behavior. And many of us use this information as a basis for describing, or typing, his personality. Bookworms, conservatives, military types—people are described with such terms. People have always tried to "type" each other. Actors in early Greek drama wore masks to show the audience whether they played the villain"s(坏人) or the hero"s role. In fact, the words "person" and "personality" come from the Latin persona, meaning "mask." Today, most television and movie actors do not wear masks. But we can easily tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys" because the two types differ in appearance as well as in actions.

A Letter to Explain Write a letter of about 100 words based on the following situation: You are studying in Washington University. You lost your passport by accident yesterday. Write a letter to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, giving details of what happened and asking what you should do next. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of GE unveiled something called the "Light Speed VCT", a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a "wordlock", a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. The connection? In each case, the firm"s customers have played a big part in designing the product. How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves scientist in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old, fashioned notion. Open source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too. This is not all new. Researchers have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience, says Eric Von Hippel of MIT. "User innovation has always been around," he says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening." Harnessing customer innovation requires different methods, says Mr. Von Hippel. Instead of taking the temperature of a representative sample of customers, firms must identify the few special customers who innovate. GE"s healthcare division calls them "luminaries". They tend to be well-published doctors and research scientists from leading medical institutions, says GE, which brings up to 25 luminaries together at regular medical advisory board sessions to discuss the evolution of GE"s technology. GE"s products then emerge from collaboration with these groups. At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr. Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.

The title of the biography The American Civil War Fighting for the Lady could hardly be more provocative. Thomas Keneally, an Australian writer, is unapologetic. In labeling a hero of the American civil war a notorious scoundrel he switches the spotlight from the brave actions of Dan Sickles at the battle of Gettysburg to his earlier premeditated murder, of the lover of his young and pretty Italian-American wife, Teresa. It is not the murder itself that disgusts Mr. Keneally but Sickles"s treatment of his wife afterwards, and how his behavior mirrored the hypocritical misogyny of 19th-century America. The murder victim, Philip Barton Key, Teresa Sickles"s lover, came from a famous old southern family. He was the nephew of the then chief justice of the American Supreme Court and the son of the writer of the country"s national anthem. Sickles, a Tammany Hall politician in New York turned Democratic congressman in Washington, shot Key dead in 1859 at a corner of Lafayette Square, within shouting distance of the White House. But the murder trial was melodramatic, even by the standards of the day. With the help of eight lawyers, Sickles was found not guilty after using the novel plea of "temporary insanity". The country at large was just as forgiving, viewing Key"s murder as a gallant crime of passion. Within three years, Sickles was a general on the Unionist side in the American civil" War and, as a new friend of Abraham and Mary Lincoln, a frequent sleepover guest at the White House. Mrs. Sickles was less fortunate. She was shunned by friends she had made as the wife of a rising politician. Her husband, a serial adulterer whose many mistresses included; Queen Isabella II of Spain and the madamof an industrialized New York whorehouse, refused to be seen in her company. Laura, the Sickles"s daughter, was an innocent victim of her father"s vindictiveness and eventually died of drink in the Bowery district of New York. Sickles"s bold actions at Gettysburg are, in their own way, just as controversial. Argument continues to rage among scholars, as to whether he helped the Union to victory or nearly caused its defeat when he moved his forces out of line to occupy what he thought was better ground. James Longstreet, the Confederate general who led the attack against the new position, was in no doubt about the brilliance of the move. Mr. Keneally is better known as a novelist. Here he shows himself just as adept at biography, and achieves both his main aims. He restores the reputation of Teresa Sickles, "this beautiful, pleasant and intelligent girl", and breathes full and controversial life into a famous military engagement.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

Who would you trust more, someone whose moral principles are absolute, black and white, or someone who carefully considers the rights and wrongs of specific situations before leaping to judgment? My guess is that most people reading this would say the former. " Rigidity" is a dirty word for most thinking folk, and being comfortable with ambiguity the hallmark of sophistication. But according to new research by experimental psychologists at Oxford and Cornell, in practice most people trust the absolutists more than the ponderers. In fact, all the experiments show is that people who refuse to kill an innocent person to save the lives of many others are considered more trustworthy than those who would do so for the greater good. It's quite an inferential leap to go from that to the view that rigidity in general confers trust. Nonetheless, there is something suggestive in these findings that challenges an assumption we've inherited from the kind of religious ethics most in Britain no longer follow. It's the idea that morality in some sense stands above human behaviour, representing an external standard we have to conform to. Our goal is to do the right thing, to make the choice that is judged as the best one from some kind of impartial viewpoint. But what if this is profoundly misguided? What if morality is in fact nothing more than a system for managing social interaction, a way of promoting harmony and keeping us from each other's throats? We have very good reasons for thinking this is precisely how we should view morality, and it is none the worse for it. Morality is primarily a matter of how we should treat others, for the good of everyone. You don't need to posit any kind of transcendental source for the principles that should govern this. All you need to think about is what helps us to live and flourish. If this is what morality is, then it is not difficult to see why we should prefer simple, fixed rules to case-by-case calculations. First, for morality to work as a social system we need others to be predictable. If we cannot be sure whether someone might decide to kill us tomorrow in order to save others, we can never be sure that we are safe from anyone. We can have no faith in a justice system that allows the odd innocent to be punished in order to deter those who might otherwise harm even more. So although having a fixed rule that we should never harm the innocent might sometimes result in more innocent people being harmed, on balance the price we pay for that is much less than the cost of uncertainty. From a social point of view, the predictability and reliability of moral behaviour are much more important than getting it right from some abstract, intellectual perspective.