Writeanessayof160—200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,andthen3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

As with many a grown-up sporting star, the first hint of greatness came at an early age for Lewis Hamilton. As an eight-year-old at his first kart race, he charged "more like a mature driver than a novice", remembers Martin Hines, owner of the Zip Kart racing company. Scything his way through the field just outside London, Hamilton had a confident style that seemed different from normal rookies, Hines says. "There was a little spark about him". Now 22, and in his debut season in Formula One—he became the first black driver to make it onto the grid in motor racing"s blue-ribbon championship. His success and profile that have earned young Hamilton comparisons with other sporting greats. His color—Hamilton"s grandfather came to Britain from Grenada in the 50s—and the positive influence of his father, Anthony, have drawn parallels with Tiger Woods. Hamilton acknowledges that his participation could stoke interest among ethnic groups who may not be into the sport now. "Hopefully people that can relate to me will see that it"s possible and also try to get into the sport", he told the BBC. Moreover, his youth, good looks and wholesome image are also likely to get marketers fired up. Countless more karting titles followed before 2001. He "made seasoned drivers look silly", says Tony Shaw, Hamilton"s then team manager at Manor Motorsport. Hamilton"s raw, natural speed and canny race craft nudged him closer to the big leagues. Hamilton"s "understanding of when and where to overtake and how to take advantage of a situation is very advanced", Shaw says. At his first crack at GP2, the training ground for Formula One, Hamilton dominated the 2006 season with a series of blistering drives on his way to the title. Hamilton is "not worried about showing or doing what he"s used to doing just because it"s Formula One", says Hill. For many new drivers, "that"s an enormous hurdle". With the retirement last year of seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher, there"s one less rival for Hamilton to negotiate. And Hamilton is certainly not short on confidence. When he first met Ron Dennis—now his Formula One team boss—as a 10-year-old in a borrowed suit, Hamilton promptly told him he wanted to drive for McLaren. Three years later, he joined the team"s support program for promising young drivers. But, say former team managers, he"s ready to listen and learn when things go wrong. Hamilton has a rare "capacity to question himself—to analyze very clearly after a race", says Frederic Vasseur, general manager at the ART Grand Prix team behind Hamilton"s GP2 championship. As for whether he"ll become the Tiger Woods of the sport, it"s too early to know whether he can live up to those standards. But for now, his fans are bullish. Damon Hill was the last British driver to take the world crown. And it"s Hamilton, Hill says, "who looks likely to be the next".

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) US President Bush has been having a difficult summer. Recent polls show a considerable decline in public approval of his conduct of the nation"s business, yet in just few weeks voters will decide whether he or Democrat John Kerry is to be the next president. If things are going so badly for Bush, then Kerry must be doing well, right? (41)______. His public appearances kindle little enthusiasm. His TV ads sway few viewers. As a result, Kerry supporters tend to be more anti-Bush than they are genuinely pro-Kerry. Democratic strategists point out that Kerry has a pattern of coming from behind to win political races. And even though Kerry stirs little excitement, many Americans are quite eager to learn whom he will choose as his running mate. A popular vice presidential candidate could energize his campaign, especially since there is little chance that President. Bush will dump the much-loathed Richard Cheney from the Republican ticket. Most observers agree that Kerry is not a particularly strong candidate for the US presidency. He tends to be respected, but he arouses little enthusiasm. (42)______. But then, two weeks ago, the Republicans counterattacked vigorously, end the race is once again wide open. The public"s generally positive impression of Senator"s Kerry"s character is based in large part on his record during the war in Vietnam, when he performed heroically as the commander of a "swift boat", a light military craft used by the US Navy to thread the rivers and canals of southern Vietnam. The crew of his old boat are united in their praise of him. (43)______. Two weeks ago they began appearing in stingingly negative TV ads aired in crucial states where currently undecided voters will probably determine the outcome of the election. And the ads were effective, drawing independent voters away from Kerry. In the meantime, Kerry"s own crewmen have strongly rejected the new version of events. (44)______. Journalists quickly turned up links between the navy veterans and Texas fat cats who had long supplied the Bush family with funds for political campaigns. These rich folks were in turn linked to Karl Rove, Bush"s masterful political strategist—his very own Zhuge Liang. (45)______. Cartoonist David Horsey, like many other observers, thinks Karl Rove is up to his old tricks; a similar effort—in this case, untraceable slanderous rumors during a key primary race—undermined popular Republican Senator John McCaine"s campaign for the GOP nomination in 2000. In today"s cartoon Rove is portrayed as the puppeteer controlling Bush"s wealthy supporters in Texas (notice the Texas-style cowboy hat). The hand puppet in turn seems to be manipulating another, smaller puppet that represents the angry swift boat veterans.A. Nonetheless, thanks to the slow economic recovery, the difficult situation in Iraq and changing perceptions of President Bush"s competence, he seemed to be on the road to a very narrow victory in November.B. But leadership, you know, isn"t about taking the easy route; it is about making the tough, sometimes unpopular decisions. President Bush has demonstrated that he can make tough decisions, and I personally like the fact that his faith end his values are the foundation of his decisions.C. Not exactly. Americans outside Massachusetts, which Kerry represents in the Senate, seem to find it hard to relate to the Democratic candidate.D. While Bush would dearly love to undermine Kerry"s image, he cannot afford to be seen doing so. (His own military record, after all; makes a sorry contrast with Kerry"s.)E. Are the ads the Bush campaign in action or just the vengeful protest of naval officers whose leadership was questioned in a recent biography of Kerry? It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make such an ad and buy air time; so many people immediately suspected that wealthy Republicans were behind the effort.F. However, a group of navy veterans (all present in the same area of Vietnam as Kerry and during the same period, some as senior officers, others as crewmen not on Kerry"s boat but on other, similar craft) have denounced Kerry in a book that came out last month. They allege that he did not deserve the medals for valiant leadership he won in the war.G. Kerry remains an unknown quantity to most Americans, but better known Democrats are much in the news. Examine the publicity posters in the cartoon. In both upper comers are ads for ex-President Clinton"s lengthy autobiography, My Life.

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

BPart B/B

Enter the information age. Information is the raw material for many of the business activities shaping this new era, (1)_____ iron and steel were the basic commodities in the dawning of the industrial age. The world"s knowledge is said to be doubling (2)_____ eight years. This knowledge explosion is (3)_____ economic progress. The need to collect, analyze, and communicate (4)_____ quantities of information is Spawning new products and services, creating jobs, and widening career opportunities. The information age is (5)_____ considered to be a phenomenon of the service sector of the economy, (6)_____ a product of heavy industry. Certainly, burgeoning information technologies are creating new capabilities (7)_____ knowledge-based service spheres. But changes just as dramatic are (8)_____ industry, giving people the opportunity to do challenging work in exciting new ways. Manufacturing is a full participant in the information age. From design (9)_____ production, the manufacturing process has long been in formation-intensive. It always has required exacting communication to describe (10)_____ goes into products and how to make them, Now, computer technology is giving factory managers new capability to gather all of this information and (11)_____ it to control production. Telecommunications are producing error-free communication between the design office (12)_____ the factory, computer-aided design is enabling engineers to evaluate product performance and manufacturing process (13)_____ video displays, before resources are committed to build and test prototypes. Techniques like these are bringing (14)_____ new advances in manufacturing productivity. Just as coal fueled the transformation to an industrial society, (15)_____ microelectronics is powering the rise of the information age. Microelectronic information-management tools are strengthening U.S. industrial capability, (16)_____ remains vital to America"s economic well being and national security. More and more manufacturing companies are (17)_____ that the wise of information can give them a competitive edge. As companies emphasize (18)_____ information management, talented people will continue to find (19)_____ to make factories and milks sing with increased productivity. In manufacturing as well as in services, information technology is a tool to (20)_____ human creativity into productivity.

Here in the U.S. a project of moving the government a few hundred miles to the southwest proceeds apace, under the supervision of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Apart from the usual highways and parks, Byrd has taken a special interest in transplanting pieces of federal agencies from metropolitan Washington to his home state. Strangely, Byrd"s little experiment in de-Washingtonization has become the focus of outrage among the very people who are otherwise most critical of Washington and its ways. To these critics, it is the very symbol of congressional arrogance of power, isolation from reality, contempt for the voters, and so on, and demonstrates the need for term limits if not lynching. Consider the good-government advantages of (let"s call it) the Byrd Migration. What better way to symbolize an end to the old ways and commitment to reform than physically moving the government? What better way to break up old bureaucracies than to uproot and transplant them, files and all? Second, spreading the government around a bit ought to reduce that self-feeding and self regarding Beltway culture that Washington-phobes claim to dislike so much. Of course there is a good deal of hypocrisy in this anti-Washington chatter. Much of it comes from politicians and journalists who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington and wouldn"t care to live anywhere else. They are not rushing to West Virginia themselves, except for the occasional quaint rustic weekend. But they can take comfort that public servants at the Bureau of the Public Debt, at least, have escaped the perils of inside-the-Beltway insularity. Third, is Senator Byrd"s raw spread-the-wealth philosophy" completely illegitimate? The Federal Government and government-related private enterprises have made metropolitan Washington one of the richest areas of the country. By contrast, West Virginia is the second poorest state, after Mississippi. The entire country"s taxes support the government. Why shouldn"t more of the country get a piece of it? As private businesses are discovering, the electronic revolution is making it less and less necessary for work to be centralized at headquarters. There"s no reason the government shouldn"t take more advantage of this trend as well. It is hardly enough, though, to expel a few thousand midlevel bureaucrats from the alleged Eden inside the Washington Beltway. Really purging the Washington Culture enough to satisfy its noisiest critics will require a mass exodus on the order of what the Khmer Rouge instituted when they took over Phnom Penh in 1975. Until the very members of the TIME Washington bureau itself are traipsing south along I-95, their word processors strapped to their backs, the nation cannot rest easy. But America"s would-be Khmer Rouge should give Senator Byrd more credit for showing the way.

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

Write a letter to your cousin, who is going to take the College Entrance Examination and feels stressed, giving her some suggestions. Write your letter with no less than 100 words. Do not sign your name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

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) The tragic impact of the modern city on the human being has killed his sense of aesthetics; the material benefits of an affluent society have diverted his attention from his city and its cultural potentials to the products of science and technology, washing machines, central heating, automatic cookers, television sets, computers and fitted carpets. He is, at the moment, drunk with democracy, well-to-do, a car driver, and has never had it so good. He is reluctant to walk. Statistics reveal that the distance he is prepared to walk from his parking place to his shopping center is very short. (41)______. Congestion has become the predominant factor in his environment, and statistics suggest that two cars per household system may soon make matters worse. (42)______. "Putting land to its highest and best use" becomes the principal economic standard in urban growth. This speculative approach and the pressure of increasing population leads to the "vertical" growth of cities with the result that people are forced to adjust themselves to congestion in order to maintain these relatively artificial land values. Paradoxically the remedy for removing congestion is to create more of it. Partial decentralization, or rather, pseudo-decentralization, in the form of large development units away from the traditional town centers, only shifts the disease round the anatomy of the town; if it is not combined with the remodeling of the town"s transportation system, it does not cure it. (43)______. It is within our power to build better cities and revive the civic pride of their citizens, but we shall have to stop operating on the fringe of the problem. We shall have radically to replan them to achieve a rational density of population. We shall have to provide in them what can be called minimum "psychological elbow room". (44)______. We must collect, in an organized manner, all and complete information about the city or the town, if we want to plan effectively. The principal unit in this process is "IM" (one man). We must not forget that cities are built by people, and that their form and shape should be subject to the will of the people. (45) ______. The "man-educate" man, the human, will have to set the target, and using the results obtained by science and his own engineering skill, take upon himself the final shaping of his environment. He will have to use his high moral sense of responsibility to the community and to future generations.A. New systems of city management may be necessary to cope with the needs of today"s urban populations. Some planners insist that a decentralized decision-making process is fundamental to ensuring that cities work for and not against people.B. As there are no adequate off-street parking facilities, the cities are littered with kerb-parked cars and parking meters rear themselves everywhere.C. Here the engineering solutions are strongly affected by the necessity for complicated intersections, which in turn, are frustrated by the extravagant cost of land.D. Scientific methods of data collection and analysis will indicate trends, but they will not direct action. Scientific methods are only an instrument.E. The convergence of economic growth, population growth and urban expansion offers both great challenges and great potentials for realizing metropolitan sustainability.F. In the meantime, insult is added to injury by "land value". The value of land results from its use; its income is derived from the service it provides. When its use is intensified, its income and its value increase.G. One of the ingredients of this will be proper transportation plans. These will have to be an integral part of the overall planning process which in itself is a scientific process where facts are essential.

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

When it comes to the slowing economy, Ellen Spero isn't biting her nails just yet . But the 47-year-old manicurist isn' t cutting, filing or polishing as many nails as she' d like to, either. Most of her clients spend $12 to $50 weekly, but last month two longtime customers suddenly stopped showing up. Spero blames the softening economy. "I'm a good economic indicator," she says. "I provide a service that people can do without when they're concerned about saving some dollars." So Spero is downscaling, shopping at middlebrow Dillard's department store near her suburban Cleveland home, instead of Neiman Marcus. "I don't know if other clients are going to abandon me, too." she says. Even before Alan Greenspan's admission that America's red-hot economy is cooling, lots of working folks had already seen signs of the slowdown themselves. From car dealerships to Gap outlets, sales have been lagging for months as shoppers temper their spending. For retailers, who last year took in 24 percent of their revenue between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the cautious approach is coming at a crucial time. Already, experts say, holiday sales are off 7 percent from last year's pace. But don't sound any alarms just yet. Consumers seem only mildly concerned, not panicked, and many say they remain optimistic about the economy' s long-term prospects, even as they do some modest belt-tightening. Consumers say they're not in despair because, despite the dreadful headlines, their own fortunes still feel pretty good. Home prices are holding steady in most regions. In Manhattan, "there' s a new gold rush happening in the $4 million to $10 million range , predominantly fed by Wall Street bonuses," says broker Barbara Corcoran. In San Francisco, prices are still rising even as frenzied overbidding quiets. "Instead of 20 to 30 offers, now maybe you only get two or three," says John Tealdi, a Bay Area real-estate broker. And most folks still feel pretty comfortable about their ability to find and keep a job. Many folks see silver linings to this slowdown. Potential home buyers would cheer for lower interest rates. Employers wouldn't mind a little fewer bubbles in the job market. Many consumers seem to have been influenced by stock-market swings, which investors now view as a necessary ingredient to a sustained boom. Diners might see an upside, too. Getting a table at Manhattan' s hot new Alain Ducasse restaurant used to be impossible. Not anymore. For that, Greenspan & Co. may still be worth toasting.

Write a letter to the director of the library in your university, giving some advice on how to improve the library service. You should include the details you think necessary. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address. (10 points)

Studythepictureontherightcarefullyandwriteanessayof160-200words.Intheessay,youshould1.describethedrawing,2.interpretitsmeaning,and3.giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyontheANSWERSHEET.(20points)

When the residents of Buenos Aires want to change the pesos they do not trust into the dollars they do, they go to a cueva, or "cave" , an office that acts as a front for a thriving illegal exchange market. In one cueva near Florida Street, a pedestrian avenue in the centre of the city, piles of pesos from previous transactions lie on a table. A courier is getting ready to carry the notes to safety-deposit boxes. This smallish cueva handles transactions worth $50,000-75,000 a day. Fear of inflation and of further depreciation of the peso, which fell by more than 20% in January, will keep demand for dollars high. Few other ways of making money are this good. "Modern Argentina does not offer what you could call an institutional career," says one cueva owner. As the couriers carry their bundles around Buenos Aires, they pass grand buildings like the Teatro Colón, an opera house that opened in 1908, and the Retiro railway station, completed in 1915. These are emblems of Argentina's Belle époque, the period before the outbreak of the first world war when the country could claim to be the world's true land of opportunity. In the 43 years leading up to 1914, GDP had grown at an annual rate of 6% , the fastest recorded in the world. The country was a magnet for European immigrants, who flocked to find work on the fertile pampas, where crops and cattle were propelling Argentina's expansion. In 1914 half of Buenos Aires's population was foreign-born. The country ranked among the ten richest in the world, after the likes of Australia, Britain and the United States, but ahead of France, Germany and Italy. Its income per head was 92% of the average of 16 rich economies. From this point, it looked down its nose at its neighbours: Brazil's population was less than a quarter as well-off. It never got better than this. Although Argentina has had periods of robust growth in the past century—not least during the commodity boom of the past ten years—and its people remain wealthier than most Latin Americans, its standing as one of the world's most vibrant economies is a distant memory. Its income per head is now 43% of those same 16 rich economies; it trails Chile and Uruguay in its own backyard.

Never has a generation of young people spent so much money yet understood so little about how to manage it. Over the past decade, the average credit-card debt of Americans ages 18 to 24 doubled, to nearly $3,000. Among high school seniors, 4 out of 5 have never taken a personal-finance class, but nearly half have an ATM debit card, and more than a quarter have bounced a check, according to a survey of 5,775 teens, released in April by the nonprofit JumpStart Coalition for Financial Literacy. If those trends continue, declaring bankruptcy could become as common as earning a bachelor"s degree. The scourge of financial illiteracy is worrisome not only for young debtors but also for their parents, many of whom are facing retirement and can"t keep bailing out their kids forever. But at least one financial institution has found a way to capitalize on the problem. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank has launched an online role-playing video game aimed at teaching teens and young adults the basics of financial management—with no strings attached, although Wells Fargo wouldn"t object if users ended up opening accounts at the bank. The game can be found at stagecoachisland. com and works only on Windows machines. The biggest challenge, says Erik Hauser of Swivel Media, who developed the game, was to find a way to engage kids" attention. "They"re used to instant messaging, instant gratification and instant pudding. We had to find an approach that wasn"t dry or static. " Players travel around a fantasy world, plunking down virtual cash at the mall or a car-rental agency, and earn spending money at any of the island"s seven virtual ATMs by taking quizzes(after a brief tutorial)on such real-world fundamentals as credit, auto loans and online banking. Sample question: What does APR stand for? a)account percentage rate, b)average parcel rate, c)American paper route or d)annual percentage rate. For choosing d, you net $ 15 plus a shockingly generous 10% interest each day on your virtual savings account. But no computer game alone can cure adolescent financial ignorance. Some curriculum experts wonder why high schools are still teaching algebra, trigonometry and calculus but not the financial skills their students will need to survive in the real world, such as how to fill out tax forms, compare interest rates or calculate the return on an investment. " More schools need to offer money-management classes," says Lewis Mandell, a finance professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who oversaw the JumpStart research. "The curriculum has to be made relevant to their lives.

More and more of us are (1)_____ the TV networks. That"s not news, of course; there have been countless stories on their (2)_____ audience. But I didn"t realize how far out! had dropped (3)_____ I glanced at the Nielsen ratings of the top 71 shows. Of those 71 programs, I had not watched (4)_____ one. (5)_____, I could count only five that I had ever seen in my entire life. And of those five, there isn"t one I watch (6)_____. Despite its popularity, I don"t like happy family shows. They"re (7)_____. If I watch a family show, I prefer something lifelike, such as "Death" of a Salesman." (8)_____ the second-rated program, "A Different World," I"ve never heard of it. If I want to see a different (9)_____, I"ll drive to the west side of Chicago. I (10)_____ watch" Cheers," which is still (11)_____ the top ten, but gave it up after Diana left and Sam began lusting after a career-crazed yuppie. Am I the only person in America who has never watched a segment of "Dallas"? A while ago, I recall somebody important was killed on the "last (12)_____ of the season and almost everybody in America was caught up in the hype. I watched wrestling that night; I"ll bet the acting was (13)_____. It"s not (14)_____ I"m snobbish—I enjoy TV (15)_____ as much as the next slob. But the (16)_____ of truly trashy trash has declined. I was one of the first writers in America to recognize the greatness of Robin Leach"s "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." So, what do I watch? I still turn to the networks, (17)_____ I have learned to exploit and cheat them. For example, I like football, but seldom watch it (18)_____. In stead, I (19)_____ it and later play it back an my VCR, fast-forwarding through all the commercials, the announcers" babble, the half-time drivel and even the huddles. I also watched movies, but only on some cable channels, (20)_____ the networks.

In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Questions 41—45, choose the most suitable one from the list A—G to fit into each of the numbered blanks. There are two extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. The first two stages in the development of civilized man were probably the invention of primitive weapons and the discovery of fire, although nobody knows exactly when he acquired the use of the latter. (41) ______. Animals have a few cries that serve as signals, but even the highest apes have not been found able to pronounce words, even with the most intensive professional instruction. The superior brain of man is apparently a necessity for the mastering of speech. When man became sufficiently intelligent, we must suppose that he gradually increased the number of cries for different purposes. It was a great day when he discovered that speech could be used for narrative. There are those who think that in this respect picture language preceded oral language. A man could draw a picture on the wall of his cave to show in which direction he had gone, or what prey he hoped to catch. (42) ______. Two important stages came not so long before the dawn of written history. The first was the domestication of animals; the second was agriculture. Agriculture made possible an immense increase in the number of the human species in the regions where it could be successfully practiced. (43) ______. (44) ______. These inventions and discoveries—fire, speech, weapons domestic animals, agriculture, and writing—made the existence of civilized communities possible. From about 3000 B. C. until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution less than two hundred years ago there was no technical advance comparable to these. During this long period man had time to become accustomed to his technique, and to develop the beliefs and political organizations appropriate to it. There was, of course, an immense extension in the area of civilized life. At first it had been confined to the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Indus, but at the end of the period in question it covered much the greatest part of the inhabitable globe. I do not mean to suggest that there was no technical progress during the time. (45) ______.Notes:ape 猿。pastoral nomad 田园式的游牧部落的人。the Euphrates 幼发拉底河。the Tigris底格里斯河。the Indus 印度河。in question 所谈的(在名词后作后置定语)。A. Probably picture language and. oral language developed side by side. I am inclined to think that language has been the most important single factor in the development of man.B. Another fundamental technical advance was writing, which, like spoken language, developed out of pictures, but as soon as it had reached a certain stage, it was possible to keep records and transmit information to people who were not present when the information was given.C. With the development of civilization, primitive people who lived in caves at that time badly needed a language, which would help them to communicate with one another.D. The origin of language is also obscure. No doubt it began very gradually.E. In fact, there was progress—there were even two inventions of very great importance, namely, gunpowder and the mariner"s compass—but neither of these can be compared in their revolutionary power to such things as speech and writing and agriculture.F. These were, at first, only those in which nature fertilized the soil after each harvest. Agriculture met with violent resistance from the pastoral nomads, but the agricultural way of life prevailed in the end because of the physical comforts it provided.G. But industry was a step in human progress to which subsequently there was nothing comparable until our own machine age.

Crying is hardly an activity encouraged by society. Tears, whether they are of sorrow, anger, or joy, typically make Americans feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. The shedder of tears is likely to apologize, even when a devastating tragedy was the provocation. The observer of tears is likely to do everything possible to put an end to the emotional outpouring. But judging from recent studies of crying behavior, links between illness and crying and the chemical composition of tears, both those responses to tears are often inappropriate and may even be counterproductive . Humans are the only animals definitely known to shed emotional tears. Since evolution has given rise to few, if any, purposeless physiological responses, it is logical to assume that crying has one or more functions that enhance survival. Although some observers have suggested that crying is a way to elicit assistance from others (as a crying baby might from its mother), the shedding of tears is hardly necessary to get help. Vocal cries would have been quite enough, more likely than tears to gain attention. So, it appears, there must be something special about tears themselves. Indeed, the new studies suggest that emotional tears may play a direct role in alleviating stress. University of Minnesota researchers who are studying the chemical composition of tears have recently isolated two important chemicals from emotional tears. Both chemicals are found only in tears that are shed in response to emotion. Tears shed because of exposure to cut onion would contain no such substance. Researchers at several other institutions are investigating the usefulness of tears as a means of diagnosing human ills and monitoring drugs. At Tulane University"s Tear Analysis Laboratory Dr. Peter Kastl and his colleagues report that they can use tears to detect drug abuse and exposure to medication, to determine whether a contact lens fits properly of why it may be uncomfortable, to study the causes of "dry eye" syndrome and the effects of eye surgery, and perhaps even to measure exposure to environmental pollutants. At Columbia University Dt. Liasy Faris and colleagues are studying tears for clues to the diagnosis of diseases away from the eyes. Tears can be obtained painlessly without invading the body and only tiny amounts are needed to perform highly refined analyses.

What is a woman worth? That is the question that has to be faced by divorcing couples and by their lawyers. The answers seem to be getting curiouser and curiouser. Last week a judge ordered an insurance broker to give his former wife a settlement of ￡48m. She had earlier refused his offer of about ￡20m, which is why the matter went to court. No doubt Beverley Charman was an exemplary wife, and it is written in the Book of Proverbs that the price of a virtuous woman is above rubies, but even so, 348m seems a little steep. It would buy a couple of continents" worth of rubies. What women are really worth is beset with confusion and contradiction. There was a time when what women wanted was equal pay for equal work. One of the logical consequences was that no woman was entitled to take out of a marriage any more than she brought into it. That view was later softened by a recognition that childbearing and childcare present a serious opportunity cost to most women. So now people tend to agree that at divorce a woman should be compensated both for the real value that she brought to the marriage and for the opportunity cost to herself—her long slide down the career ladder, her loss of a personal pension, her reduced chances of finding another spouse. Then there is a surprisingly unliberated tendency among women, and among men, to make estimates that are unfairly biased in favor of women. The judge in the Charmans" hearing said that this was one of the very small category of cases where the wealth created is of extraordinary proportions from extraordinary talent and energy of the husband and therefore the husband could keep more than half the assets. That still left the wife with 48m(37% of the assets). But then the judge made some odd remarks about old-fashioned attitudes. Discussing John Charman"s determination "to protect what he regards as wealth generated entirely by his efforts", he said: "In the narrow, old-fashioned sense, that perspective is understandable, if somewhat outdated." Wrong. It is the judge who sounds old-fashioned. This country is awash with clever and hardworking men who make huge sums of money while their wives do little to contribute to domestic comfort and not much to advance their husband"s careers. That does not mean they are not entitled to proper compensation on divorce, but I think the assumption that they are entitled to half the fruits of the marriage, unless there is good reason why not, is absurd.