BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B

When shopkeepers want to lure customers into buying a particular product, they typically offer it at a discount. According to a new study to be published in the Journal of Marketing, they are【C1】______a trick A team of researchers, led by Akshay Rao of University of Minnesota, looked at consumers"【C2】______ to discounting. Shoppers, they found, much prefer getting something extra free to getting something cheaper. The main reason is that most people are【C3】______at fractions. Consumers often struggle to realise, 【C4】______, that a 50% increase in【C5】______is the same as a 33% discount in price. They【C6】______assume the former is better value. In an experiment, the researchers sold 73% more hand lotion when it was offered in a【C7】______pack than when it carried an equivalent discount. This numerical blind【C8】______remains even when the deal【C9】______favours the discounted product. In another experiment, this time on his undergraduates, Mr. Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33% extra free or 33%【C10】______the price. The discount is【C11】______ the better proposition, but the experiment shows the supposedly clever students viewed them as 【C12】______ . Marketing types can draw lessons【C13】______just pricing, says Mr. Rao. When advertising a new car"s efficiency, for example, it is more【C14】______ to talk about the number of extra miles per gallon it does,【C15】______the equivalent percentage fall in fuel【C16】______ . There may be lessons for officials who【C17】______prices too. Even well-educated shoppers are easily【C18】______ . Sending everyone back to school for maths seems out of the question. 【C19】______ more prominently displayed unit prices in shops and advertisements would be a great【C20】______.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

You are to write an email to James Cook, a newly-arrived Australia professor, recommending some tourist attraction in your city. Please give reasons for your recommendation. You should write neatly on the answer sheet. Do not sign your own name at the end of the email. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

Britain"s universities are in an awful spin. Top universities were overwhelmed by the 24% of A-level applicants with indistinguishable straight As; newer ones are beating the byways for bodies. Curiously, both images of education—the weeping willows of Cambridge and the futuristic architecture of UEL—are cherished by the government. Ministerswant to see half of all young people in universities by 2010 (numbers have stalled at 42%), without letting go of the world-class quality of its top institutions. Many argue that the two goals are incompatible without spending a lot more money. Researchers scrabble for funds, and students complain of large classes and reduced teaching time. To help solve the problem, the government agreed in 2004 to let universities increase tuition fees. Though low, the fees have introduced a market into higher education. Universities can offer cut-price tuition, although most have stuck close to the & 3,000. Other incentives are more popular. Newcomers to St. Mark & St. John, a higher-education college linked to Exeter University, will receive free laptops. As universities enter the third week of "clearing", the marketing has become weirder. Bradford University is luring students with the chance of winning an MP3 player in a prize draw. Plymouth University students visited Cornish seaside resorts, tempting young holiday-makers with surfboards and cinema vouchers. These offers suggest that supply has surpassed demand. Not so the top universities that make up the "Russell group", however. Their ranks include the likes of Imperial College London and Bristol University along with Oxford and Cambridge. Swamped with applicants, only half offer any places through clearing. They have a different problem: they need money to compete for high quality students and academics, both British and foreign, who could be tempted overseas by better heeled American universities or fast improving institutions in developing countries such as India. Higher fees and excess supply are causing students to look more critically at just what different universities have to offer. And the critical situation could become more acute. The number of 18-year-olds in Britain will drop around 2010 and decline over the following ten years, according to government projections. Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think tank, says the government hasn"t a hope of getting 50% of young Britons into higher education by 2010. And the decline of home-grown student numbers will have a "differential effect" on universities, he reckons. Those at the bottom end will have to become increasingly "innovative" about whom they admit and some may not survive. The Cambridge shades evoked by Rupert Brooke were gentle, nostalgic ones. Many vice chancellors today are pursued by far more revengeful monsters of empty campuses, deserted laboratories, failed institutions. Markets, after all, create winners—and losers.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)A. The rise of a tycoon who is fond of America and South Africa, and who prints English slogans on his bottles of milk and mineral water, is a snub to Mr. Ratsiraka. The president, who has dominated politics since 1975—with a few years" absence in the mid-1990s—steers close to France, the former colonial power. He has been unwell, and spends much of his time having medical treatment in Paris. His government, predictably, is accused of widespread corruption. But he offers stability—and declares that "any other president" would usher in years of uncertainty.B. Mr. Ratsiraka might indeed feel aggrieved ff he did lose power just as the economy is coming right. After a two-decade spell as a socialist, then a few years of exile, he bounced back into the presidency in 1996 to impose austere neo-liberal reforms. These are now paying off. Many people are still desperately badly off, living in villages without roads, electricity or doctors. But, according to an optimistic IMF report on December 13th, the economy may mm out to have enjoyed 6.7% growth this year and inflation is low.C. In a high turnout, he took nearly 80% of the votes in the capital, and well over half in other cities. Results from the less susceptible countryside are slowly coming in. They narrow the gap, but he still seems to have a chance of either beating the incumbent, Didier Ratsiraka, outright or facing him in a run-off next year.D. A swelling flow of tourists comes to the island to see its rainforests, lemurs and tropical beaches. Sales of textiles to America are doing well, thanks to tariff reductions there. And, in the past few years, Asian investors have opened dozens of factories in special export zones around the capital. Mr. Ratsiraka has managed to negotiate debt relief that almost halves the amount the country spends on servicing its debts. R is thus able to spend a bit more on schools and hospitals. Incomes in the cities are clearly up. A good rice harvest this year and the absence of cyclones, has eased hanger in the countryside.E. As mayor, Mr. Ravalomanana won many citizens" hearts by cleaning up the capital, and seeing to new roads and street lighting. He oversaw a building boom, the rise of a dozen" flashy new supermarkets, more policemen on the streets and a cut in crime. He is known in the country at large, too. Thanks to his Tiko food empire, which delivers yoghurt and other good things to Madagascar"s emerging middle class. His face is everywhere on T-shirts. baseball caps and bags all parts of a slick campaign that was helped along by his own radio and television stations. His Christian fervour, and his job on a council of Protestant churches, have also helped him, especially among the rural poor.F. All this is rare good news for Africa. Might it be risked if there were a change of president? Some point to possible ethnic tension: Mr. Ravalomanana is from the highland Imerina people, who have a mix of Asian-settler and African blood, who have never before held political office over the blacker coastal communities. Others worry that he will have little support in parliament, and that his business career has not prepared him for political compromises. A bigger concern, perhaps, is that he might not seriously undertake to spread the good times enjoyed in the capital into the impoverished countryside.G. Excitement is in the air in Madagascar, a vast island of 15m people off the east coast of Africa. On December 16th, its voters trudged to the polls from their homes in highland towns and remote forest villages to pick a president. Many favoured Mare Ravalomanana, a tycoon who is also the handsome young mayor of the capital Antananarivo.Order: G is the first paragraph and F is the last.

Here are some management tools that can be used to help you lead a purposeful life. 1. Use Your Resources Wisely. Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent shape your life's strategy. We have a limited amount of time, energy and talent. How much do we devote to each of these pursuits? Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. If you don't invest your resources wisely, the outcome can be bad. As I think about people who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can't help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective. When people with a high need for achievement have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they'll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. Our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we're moving forward. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationships with your spouse and children typically doesn' t offer the same immediate sense of achievement. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to under invest in their families and overinvest in their careers, even though intimate and loving family relationships are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness. If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see that people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most. 2. Create a Family Culture. If employees embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision, which means that they've created a culture. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool. At the teen years, parents start wishing they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously. If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and the confidence that they can solve hard problems, you have to design them into family' s culture and you have think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Suppose you a staff member of a company. Write a letter of complaint to the president to report the problems of the company canteen service. You should write 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write your address.

Many parents who welcome the idea of turning off the TV and spending more time with the family are still worried that without TV they would constantly be on call as entertainers for their children. They remember (1)_____ of all sorts of things to do when they were kids, but their own kids seem different, less resourceful, (2)_____ When there"s nothing to do, these parents observe (3)_____, their kids seem unable to (4)_____ any thing to do besides turning on the TV. One father, (5)_____, says "When I was a kid, we were always thinking up things to do, projects and (6)_____. We certainly never complained in an (7)_____ way to our parents, "I have nothing to do!"" He compares this with his own children today: "If someone doesn"t entertain them, they"ll happily sit there in front of the (8)_____ all day." There is one word for this father"s (9)_____: unfair. It is as if he were disappointed in them for not reading Greek though they have never studied the language. He deplores his children"s (10)_____ of inventiveness, as if the ability to play were something (11)_____ that his children are missing. In fact, while the tendency to play is built into the human species, the actual ability to play—to imagine, to invent, to elaborate on (12)_____ in a playful way—and the ability to gain (13)_____ from it, these are skills that have to be learned and developed. Such disappointment, (14)_____, is not only (15)_____, it is also destructive. Sensing their parents" disappointment, children come to believe that they are, indeed, lacking something, and that this makes them less worthy of (16)_____ and respect. Giving children the opportunity to develop new (17)_____, to enlarge their horizons and (18)_____ he pleasures of doing things on their own is, on the other hand, a way to help children develop a (19)_____ feeling about themselves as (20)_____ and interesting people.

Twenty-seven years ago, Egypt revised its secular constitution to enshrine Muslim sharia as "the principal source of legislation". To most citizens, most of the time, that seeming contradiction—between secularism and religion—has not made much difference. Nine in ten Egyptians are Sunni Muslims and expect Islam to govern such things as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Nearly all the rest profess Christianity or Judaism, faiths recognised and protected in Islam.【F1】 But to the small minority who embrace other faiths, or who have tried to leave Islam, it has, until lately, made an increasingly troubling difference. Members of Egypt"s 2, 000-strong Bahai community, for instance, have found they cannot state their religion on the national identity cards that all Egyptians are obliged to produce to secure such things as driver"s licenses, bank accounts, social insurance and state schooling. Hundreds of Coptic Christians who have converted to Islam, often to escape the Orthodox sect"s ban on divorce, find they cannot revert to their original faith.【F2】 In some cases, children raised as Christians have discovered that, because a divorced parent converted to Islam, they too have become officially Muslim, and cannot claim otherwise. 【F3】 Such restrictions on religious freedom are not directly a product of sharia, say human-rights campaigners, but rather of rigid interpretations of Islamic law by over-zealous officials. In their strict view, Bahai belief cannot be recognised as a legitimate faith, since it arose in the 19th century, long after Islam staked its claim to be the final revelation in a chain of prophecies beginning with Adam. Likewise, they brand any attempt to leave Islam, whatever the circumstances, as a form of apostasy, punishable by death. But such views have lately been challenged. Last year Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti, who is the government"s highest religious adviser, declared that nowhere in Islam"s sacred texts did it say that apostasy need be punished in the present rather than by God in the afterlife. In the past month, Egyptian courts have issued two rulings that, while restricted in scope, should ease some bothersome strictures. Bahais may now leave the space for religion on their identity cards blank.【F4】 Twelve former Christians won a lawsuit and may now return to their original faith, on condition that their identity documents note their previous adherence to Islam. 【F5】 Small steps, perhaps, but they point the way towards freedom of choice and citizenship based on equal rights rather than membership of a privileged religion.

Millions of dollars often depend on the choice of which commercial to use in launching a new product. So you show the commercials to a (1)_____ of typical consumers and ask their opinion. The answers you get can sometimes lead you into a big (2)_____. Respondents may lie just to be polite. Now some companies and major advertising (3)_____ have been hiring voice detectives who test your normal voice and then record you on tape (4)_____ commenting on a product. A computer analyzes the degree and direction of change (5)_____ normal. One kind of divergence of pitch means the subject (6)_____ Another kind means he was really enthusiastic. In a testing of two commercials (7)_____ children, they were. vocally, about equally (8)_____ of both. but the computer reported their emotional (9)_____ in the two was totally different. Most major commercials are sent for testing to theaters (10)_____ with various electronic measuring devices. People regarded as (11)_____ are brought in off the street. Viewers can push buttons to (12)_____ whether they are interested or bored. Newspaper and magazine groups became intensely interested in testing their ads for a product (13)_____ TV ads for the same product. They were interested because the main (14)_____ of evidence shows that people (15)_____ a lot more mental activity when they read (16)_____ when they sit in front of the TV set. TV began to be (17)_____ "a low-involvement" (18)_____. It is contended that low involvement means that there is less (19)_____ that the ad message will be (20)_____.Notes: commercial 广告。pitch 音调。

At some point during their education, biology students are told about a conversation in a pub that took place over 50 years ago. J.B.S. Haldane, a British geneticist, was asked whether he would lay down his life for his country. After doing a quick calculation on the back of a napkin, he said he would do so for two brothers or eight cousins. In other words, he would die to protect the equivalent of his genetic contribution to the next generation. The theory of kin selection—the idea that animals can pass on their genes by helping their close relatives—is biology"s explanation for seemingly altruistic acts. An individual carrying genes that promote altruism might be expected to die younger than one with "selfish" genes, and thus to have a reduced contribution to the next generation"s genetic pool. But if the same individual acts altruistically to protect its relatives, genes for altruistic behavior might nevertheless propagate. Acts of apparent altruism to non-relatives can also be explained away, in what has become a cottage industry within biology. An animal might care for the offspring of another that it is unrelated to because it hopes to obtain the same benefits for itself later on (a phenomenon known as reciprocal altruism). The hunter who generously shares his spoils with others may be doing so in order to signal his superior status to females, and ultimately boost his breeding success. These apparently selfless acts are therefore disguised acts of self-interest. All of these examples fit economists" arguments that Homo sapiens is also Homo economicus—maximizing something that economists call utility, and biologists fitness. But there is a residuum of human activity that defies such explanations: people contribute to charities for the homeless, return lost wallets, do voluntary work and tip waiters in restaurants to which they do not plan to return. Both economic rationalism and natural selection offer few explanations for such random acts of kindness. Nor can they easily explain the opposite: spiteful behavior, when someone harms his own interest in order to damage that of another. But people are now trying to find answers. When a new phenomenon is recognized by science, a name always helps. In a paper in Human Nature, Dr. Fehr and his colleagues argue for a behavioral propensity they call "strong reciprocity". This name is intended to distinguish it from reciprocal altruism. According to Dr. Fehr, a person is a strong reciprocator if he is willing to sacrifice resources to be kind to those who are being kind, and to punish those who are being unkind. Significandy, strong reciprocators will behave this way even if doing so provides no prospect of material rewards in the future.

Mark decided to go on a long, long trip away from these troubles.

And numerous experiments have shown once the concept of self is changed, other things consistent with the new concept of self are accomplished easily and without strain.

Banking is about money; and no other familiar commodity arouses such excesses of passion and dislike. Nor is there any other about which more nonsense is talked. The type of thing that comes to mind is not what is normally called economics, which is inexact rather than nonsensical, and only in the same way as all sciences are at the point where they try to predict people"s behavior and its consequences. Indeed most social sciences and, for example, medicine could probably be described in the same way. However, it is common to hear assertions of the kind "if you were left along to a desert island a few seed potatoes would be more use to you than a million pounds" as though this proved something important about money except the undeniable fact that it would not be much use to anyone in a situation where very few of us are at all likely to find ourselves. Money in fact is a token, or symbolic object, exchangeable on demand by its holders for goods and services. Its use for these purposes is universal except within a small number of primitive agricultural communities. Money and the price mechanism, i.e., the changes in prices expressed in money terms of different goods and services, are the means by which all modern societies regulate demand and supply for these things. Especially important are the relative changes in price of different goods and services compared with each other. To take random example: the price of house-building has over the past five years risen a good deal faster than that of domestic appliances like refrigerators, but slower than that of motor insurance or French Impressionist paintings. This fact has complex implications for students of the industry, trade unionism, town planning, insurance companies, fine-art auctions, and politics. Unpacking these implications is what economics is about, but their implications for bankers are quite different. In general, in modem industrialized societies, services or goods produced in a context requiting a high service-content (e.g. a meal in a restaurant) are likely to rise in price more rapidly than goods capable of mass-production on a large scale. It is also a characteristic of highly developed economies that the number of workers employed in service industries tends to rise and that of workers employed in manufacturing to fall. The discomfort this truth causes has been an important source of tension in western political life for many years and is likely to remain so for many more.

In the past year, a lot has changed in the field of human spaceflight. (46) In January, President George Bush brushed aside the fact that America"s entire space-shuttle fleet was grounded when he announced grandiose plans to put people back on the moon, and then to launch a manned mission to Mars. (47) In June, Burt Rutan, an American aeronautical engineer, showed that human spaceflight was no longer the preserve of governments by sending a man to the edge of space in Space Ship One, a privately financed vehicle that cost about the same to build as a luxury yacht. That was followed in September by Sir Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur behind the Virgin brand, announcing that he had signed a deal with Mr Rutan to work on plans for a fleet of five suborbital vehicles developed from Space Ship One. (48) Now, in the dying days of the year, America"s Congress has passed a bill that unravels a tangle about who would be responsible for regulating the fledgling industry, and under what terms. (49) The bill also allows passengers to fly on the understanding that this new generation of vehicles may not be as safe as taking a commercial flight between, say, New York and London. The official line from Virgin Galactica, as Sir Richard"s latest venture is modestly named, is that this coming change in the law makes no practical difference to the firm"s plans, since they do not intend to fly unless they can make their spacecraft as safe as a private jet. But it must surely come as some sort of relief. In any case, Will Whitehorn, director of corporate affairs at Virgin"s headquarters in London, and soon to become the president of Virgin Galactica, says that work is under way on a mock-up of the interior of a new spacecraft that will hold five passengers. (50) Virgin has already committed $ 20m towards licensing the SpaceShipOne technology from Mr. Rutan and his financial backer Paul Allen, a software billionaire.

Let"sBeReadytoHelpOthers!Writeanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

Manners nowadays in metropolitan cities like London are practically non-existent. It is nothing for a big, strong schoolboy to elbow an elderly woman aside in the dash for the last remaining seat on the tube or bus, much less stand up and offer his seat to her, as he ought. In fact, it is saddening to note that if a man does offer his seat to an older woman, it is nearly always a Continental man or one from the older generation. This question of giving up seats in public transport is much argued about by young men, who say that, since women have claimed equality, they no longer deserve to be treated with courtesy, and that those who go out to work should take their turn in the rat race like anyone else. Women have never claimed to be physically as strong as men. Even if it is not agreed, however, that young men should stand up for younger women, the fact remains that courtesy should be shown to the old. the sick and the burdened. Conditions in travel are really very hard on everyone, we know, but hardship is surely no excuse. Sometimes one wonders what would have been the behavior of these about young men in a packed refugee train or a train on its way to a prisoner-camp during the war. Would they have considered it only right and their proper due to keep the best places for themselves then? Older people, tired and irritable from a day"s work, are not angels, either—far from it. Many a brisk argument or an insulting quarrel breaks out as the weary queues push and shove each other to gel on buses and tubes. One cannot commend this, of course, but one does feel there is just a little more excuse. If cities are to remain pleasant places to live in at all, however, it seems urgent, not only that communications in transport should be improved, but also that communication between human beings should be kept smooth and polite. All over cities, it seems that people are too tired and too rushed to be polite. Shop assistants won"t bother to assist, taxi drivers shout at each other as they dash dangerously round corners, bus conductors pull the bell before their desperate passengers have had time to get on or off the bus. and so on and so on. It seems to us that it is up to the young and strong to do their small part to stop such deterioration.Notes:much less 更不用说。Continental man欧洲大陆上的人。rat race激烈的竞争。be lost to全然不顾。all too实在太。be hard on sth.对…太严峻。due n.应该得到的东西。communications In transport 运输工具。won"t bother to do sth.不愿费心去做某事。pull the hell(售票员)拉铃(以便让司机开动车辆)。do one"s part某人的责任。

You want to apply for admission to Chicago University. You are asking Ms. Thompson to support you as a financial guarantor. Write a letter to her about: 1) the reason for your letter; 2) the importance of her support; 3) how you make your living in the U.S. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Wang Ling" instead. You do not need to write the address.

Write an email to Mr. Brown in your high school, inviting him to attend the reunion in October. You should write about 100 words neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.