A few milliamps of electricity can cause plants to increase synthesis of chemicals. These compounds often also have a pharmacological (related to medicine) or commercial value, so the trick could be used to help increase yields of commercially useful biologicals. Artemisinic acid, from sweet wormwood, for example, is used in malarial medications, and shikonin (紫草素), from the purple gromwell plant, is used against skin infections. Researchers have long known that stressing plants can force them to take defensive action, often ramping up the production of protective chemicals that, for example, make them more resistant to insect attack. It has become common practice to stress such plants into increasing their yields. This is usually clone using physical stress elicitors (诱导子), including bits of the micro-organisms that normally attack the plants, or irritants made from metallic compounds such as copper chloride. These are effective, but they come at a cost. Most elicitors are toxic to plants and can build up in tissues, making it necessary to occasionally "clean" a plant of the chemicals so they keep having the same effect. Recently, research groups at the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the application of an electric current to the hairy roots of the poisonous herb Hyoscyamus muticus stimulated the production of the herb"s toxin hyoscyamine (天仙子胺). This unpublished finding inspired Hans Van Etten, also of the University of Arizona, and his colleagues to test sub-lethal levels of electrical currents on other plants, to assess electricity"s potential to elevate chemical production. The researchers exposed eight different plant species (ranging from Japanese pagoda tree seedlings to pea plants) to weak electrical currents of 30 milliamps. Seven of the plants increased their production o{ defensive chemicals. The average boost of chemical production was 20 times, they report in Biotechnology Progress. One plant, a type of alfalfa, increased its chemical yield by 168 times. These values are very similar to those achieved using chemical elicitors, and seem to have no lethal effects-just a negative effect on growth. The treatment can be used over and over again without the build-up of any unwanted material. The useful compounds would be very easy to harvest: they simply pour out into solution if the plants are grown hydroponically. "The fact that we can use electricity instead of toxic materials to elicit chemical production is very exciting because it means we get to look at how these chemicals form without having to constantly add and remove toxins from the system," says Van Etten. "This is a really novel and creative approach that I"ve never seen before," says plant metabolic engineer Fabricio Medina Bolivar from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. "The possibilities for using electricity with plants in this way are absolutely tremendous. "

There is no grammatical rule that does not have exceptions.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

Humans are unique in the extent to which they can reflect on themselves and others. Humans are a-ble to 1 , to think in abstract terms, to reflect on the future. A meaningless, 2 world is an insecure world. We do not like extensive insecurity. When it 3 to human behavior we infer meaning and 4 to make the behavior understandable. What all this means is that people develop "quasi theories" of human behavior, that is, theories that are not developed in an objective, scientific 5 When doing so, people believe they know 6 humans do the things they do. Let"s consider an example. In the United States people have been 7 with the increasing amount of crime for several years. The extent of crime bothers us; we ourselves could be 8 But what also bothers us is that people behave in such ways. Why can such things happen? We develop quasi theories. We 9 concerned about the high crime rate, but we now believe we 10 it; our criminal justice system is 11 ; people have grown selfish and inconsiderate as our moral values 12 from the influence of liberal ideas; too many people are 13 drugs. These explanations suggest possible solutions. 14 the courts; put more people in jail as 15 to other law breakers. There is hope that the problem of crime can be solved if only we 16 these solutions. Again, the world is no longer meaningless nor 17 so threatening. These quasi theories 18 serve a very important function for us. But how accurate are they? How 19 will the suggested solutions be? These questions must be answered 20 how people normally go about developing or attaining their quasi theories of human behavior.

Even plants can run a fever, especially when they are under attack by insects or disease. But (1)_____ humans, plants can have their temperature (2)_____ from 3,000 feet away—straight up. A decade ago, (3)_____ the infrared scanning technology developed for military purpose and other satellites, physicist Stephen Paley (4)_____ a quick way to take the temperature of crops to determine (5)_____ ones are under stress. The goal was to let farmer (6)_____ target pesticide spraying (7)_____ rain poison on a whole field, which (8)_____ include plants that don"t have the pest problem. Even better, Paley"s Remote Scanning Services Company could detect crop problem before they became (9)_____ to the eye. Mounted on a plane flown at 3,000 fee (10)_____, an infrared scanner measured the heat emitted by crops. The data were (11)_____ into a color-coded map showing (12)_____ plants were running "fevers". Farmers could then spot spray, using 50 to 70 percent less pesticide than they (13)_____ would. The bad news is that Paley"s company closed down in 1984, after only three years. Farmers (14)_____ the new technology and long-term backers were hard (15)_____. But with the renewed concern about pesticides on produce, and refinements in infrared scanning, Paley hopes to (16)_____ into operation. Agriculture experts have no doubt about the technology works. "This technique can be used (17)_____ 75 percent of agricultural land in the United States", says George Oerther of Texas A＆M. Ray Jackson, who recently retired from the Department of Agriculture, thinks (18)_____ infrared crop scanning could be adopted by the end of the decade. But (19)_____ Paley finds the financial backing (20)_____ he failed to obtain 10 years ago.

TheImportanceofDiligenceWriteanessayof160-200wordsbasedonthedrawing.Inyouressay,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)interpretitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.

Studythepicturesabovecarefullyandwriteanessayentitled"HowtobeaHealthymodernPerson".Intheessay,youshould(1)describethepictures;(2)interprettheirmeaning;(3)giveyouropinionaboutthephenomenon.Youshouldwriteabout200wordsneatly.

Since this concern about the decline and fall of the English language is not perceived as a generational phenomenon but rather as something new and peculiar to today' s young people, it naturally follows that today' s English teachers cannot be doing their jobs.

A latest study suggest that expressing emotions about a traumatic experience in a coherent way may be important to not just mental but physical health as well. It showed that the calming effect of writing can cut physical wound healing time nearly in half. Researchers led by Elizabeth Broadbent, a senior lecturer in health psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, studied 49 healthy senior citizens, aged 64 to 97. For three days, half were assigned to write for 20 minutes a day about the most traumatic event they had experienced, and were encouraged to be as open and candid as they could. The other participants wrote for the same duration about their plans for the next day, avoiding mentioning their feelings, opinions or beliefs. Two weeks after the first day of writing, researchers took small skin biopsies, under local anesthesia, that left a wound on the arms of all participants. The skin tissue was used for another study. A week later, Broadbent and her colleagues started photographing the wounds every three to five days until they were completely healed. Eleven days after the biopsy, 76% of the group that had written about trauma had fully healed while only 42% of the other group had. However, it"s not the first, to reveal the intriguing connection between state-of-mind and physical health. In previous studies, this type of emotionally expressive writing, as opposed to writing on neutral topics, reduced viral load in HIV-positive patients and increased their levels of virus-fighting immune cells. The practice also increased the effectiveness of the hepatitis B vaccination by increasing antibody levels generated by the vaccine and speeding wound healing in young men. But in terms of psychological health, the results are more conflicting. A recent study found that writing about disturbing combat experiences may improve marital satisfaction among soldiers returning home from war zones while another paper in which patients with post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD)wrote about their difficult experiences did not find that the practice reduced symptoms. Putting emotions down in words did, however, improve mood and reduce levels of stress hormone in these patients. One way that writing about distressing events could give the body a boost is by promoting sleep. "Many people who have written about their negative experiences report that it allowed them to gain greater insight into what happened and to put the event into perspective," says Koschwanez, "This might reduce the extent to which the event troubles them and possibly improve their sleep. " The writing may also help the body by reducing stress; less anxiety means fewer stress hormones, which can interfere with chemicals needed for wound healing. While Broadbent"s study did not find such a link, it"s possible the researchers were not evaluating the right anxiety measures. "It might be that our perceived stress questionnaire was not assessing the right type or duration of stress," says Koschwanez, a study co-author and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Auckland. It"s also possible that emotional writing is not helpful for everyone. In one study published last month, when people who typically are stoic wrote about their worst trauma, their anxiety actually increased. That suggests that pushing people to express feelings when they are not inclined to do so can actually increase risk for PTSD.

Whether the eyes are "the window of the soul" is debatable; that they are intensely important in interpersonal communication is a fact during the first two months of a baby"s life, the stimulus that produces a smile is a pair of eyes. The eyes need not be real: a mask with two dots will produce a smile, significantly, a real human face with eyes covered will not motivate a smile, nor will the sight of only one eye when the face is presented in profile. This attraction to eyes as opposed to the nose or mouth continues as the baby matures. In one study, when American four-year-olds were asked to draw people, 75 percent of them drew people with mouths, but 99 percent of them drew people with eyes. In Japan, however, where babies are carried on their mother"s back, infants do not acquire as much attachment to eyes as they do in other cultures. As a result, Japanese adults" make little use of the face either to encode or decode meaning. In fact, Argyle reveals that the "proper place to focus one"s gaze during a conversation in Japan is on the neck of one"s conversation partner." The role of eye contact in a conversational exchange between two Americans is well defined: speakers make contact with the eyes of their listener for about one second, then glance away as they talk; in a few moments they reestablish eye contact with the listener or reassure themselves that their audience is still attentive, then shift their gaze away once more. Listeners, meanwhile, keep their eyes on the face of the speaker, allowing themselves to glance away only briefly. It is important that they be looking at the speaker at the precise moment when the speaker reestablishes eye contact: if they are not looking, the speaker assumes that they are disinterested and either will pause until eye contact is resumed or will terminate the conversation. Just how critical this eye maneuvering is to the maintenance of conversational flow becomes evident when two speakers are wearing dark glasses; there may be a sort of traffic jam of words caused by interruption, false starts, and unpredictable pauses.

The next time you take a deep breath, think for a moment of Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century British scientist widely credited with discovering oxygen. As Steven Johnson explains in his engaging study of Priestley, The Invention of Air : A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America, the circumstances surrounding Priestley" s signature achievement are "far more vexed than the standard short-form biographies suggest". That"s because "discovering "oxygen" is not like " discovering" the Dead Sea Scrolls... It is closer to, say, discovering America: the meaning of the phrase depends entirely on the perspective and values you bring to the issue". Along with his contemporaries Antoine Lavoisier and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Priestly isolated oxygen gas and was the first to draw connections between "pure air" and blood. Like a laboratory Moses, Priestly pointed the way for others to a destination at which he could not quite arrive. By the time he died in America in 1804, Priestly had managed to isolate and name 10 gases, become known as "the father of modern chemistry," and, perhaps most wonderfully, invented soda water. He had emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1794, after inspiring an English mob to burn down his laboratory due to his radical Unitarian views, which blended respect for Jesus" moral teachings and an insistence on his lack of divinity.(That may be Priestley" s most amazing achievement: Stoking people to violence through Unitarianism!)He was a major influence on his friend Benjamin Franklin and other leading scientists of the day, and his political and pedagogical work left a huge impression on Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. Johnson paints Priestley not as a man of the past but precisely the sort of figure the world needs more than ever: A searcher who shared his discoveries openly and willingly, crossed disciplinary boundaries with impunity and insight, who conceived of the world as a large laboratory. As important, Priestley exemplifies " the temperament that we expect to find at the birth of America—bountiful optimism, an untroubled sense that the world must inevitably see the light of reason". We live in troubling times, filled with signs of a great economic apocalypse, politicized science on topics from birth control to climate change, and religious zealots who kill innocents rather than live peacefully with them. This is exactly the moment to learn from Priestley, who survived riots, threats of prosecution, and other hardships and yet never doubted that "the world was headed naturally toward an increase in liberty and understanding". Ironically, The Invention of Air underscores that there is nothing natural about progress and liberty, each of which must be fought for and defended every single day by visionary individuals.

I am delighted to guest at this festive occasion celebrating the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Finland and the People"s Republic of China. I have been asked to give a comment on the outlook for the common European currency, the Euro. During the past year or so, a lot of different views have been presented about the Euro"s performance. (46) Considering the fact that the Euro is a new currency with a major international role in the foreign exchange markets, it is only natural that it has drawn much attention. However, I would like to point out that attempts to measure the success of the Economic and Monetary Union by the Euro"s external value are misplaced. The benefits of the Euro stem from elsewhere. Indeed, the benefits that the Euro can and will offer are distinctly of a long-term and structural nature. In the end, a short term misalignment of the Euro has very little to do with these structural developments. One can come up with a number of explanations for the depreciation of the Euro or the strength of the US dollar, which is the other side of the coin. (47) The growth gap, and associated interest rate difference between the Euro area and United States, have been no doubt among the most popular explanations, and there is some truth to this. Most importantly, the dynamic growth in the US has been a source of constant surprise to most of us. (48) However, in the meantime the economic outlook for the Euro area has improved considerably. The European Central Bank has succeeded very well in delivering price stability for the Euro area, which is its primary and the most important objective. Member States of the Euro area have agreed on, and implemented a number of important initiatives aiming at raising the growth potential of the Euro area. Indeed, despite of these facts, it seems that the uncertainties associated with the Euro area have received more attention than those affecting the US Economy. This asymmetry has affected the Euro negatively. (49) According, it is widely recognized that the Euro is significantly undervalued, and the present level does not reflect the strong fundamentals of the Euro area economy. Most of these challenges reflect the fact that the Euro is still a young currency. (50) In fact, for the citizens of the Euro area, the single currency will not become more tangible until"2002, when the actual notes and coins will be introduced. This is just to say that at this point only tentative conclusions of the functioning of the Euro can be made.

Three weeks ago you booked a two-week holiday to Sanya with Fly-by-Night Travel. You are not happy with the holiday—the flight was delayed, the hotel was undesirable, and so on. Write a letter to Fly-by-Night Travel to complain about the holiday giving details about the problems. Write your letter with no less than 100 words, do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address.

It has been a wretched few weeks for America"s celebrity bosses. AIG"s Maurice "Hank" Greenberg has been dramatically ousted from the firm through which he dominated global insurance for decades. At Morgan Stanley a mutiny is forcing Philip Purcell, a boss used to getting his own way, into an increasingly desperate campaign to save his skin. At Boeing, Harry Stonecipher was called out of retirement to lead the scandal-hit firm and raise ethical standards, only to commit a lapse of his own, being sacked (it seems) for sending e-mails to a lover who was also an employee. Curly Fiorina was the most powerful woman in corporate America until a few weeks ago, when Hewlett-Packard (HP) sacked her for poor performance. The fate of Bernie Ebbers is much grimmer. The once high-profile boss of World-Com could well spend the rest of his life behind bars following his conviction last month on fraud charges. In different ways, each of these examples appears to point to the same, welcome conclusion: that the imbalance in corporate power of the late 1990s, when many bosses were allowed to behave like absolute monarchs, has been corrected. Alas, appearances can be deceptive. While each of these recent tales of chief-executive woe is a sign of progress, none provides much evidence that the crisis in American corporate governance is yet over. In fact, each of these cases is an example of failed, not successful, governance. At the very least, the boards of both Morgan Stanley and HP were far too slow to ad dress their bosses" inadequacies. The record of the Boeing board in picking chiefs prone to ethical lapses is too long to be dismissed as mere bad luck. The fall of Messrs Green berg and Ebbers, meanwhile, highlights the growing role of government—and, in particular, of criminal prosecutors—in holding bosses to account: a development that is, at best, a mixed blessing. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed in haste following the Enron and WorldCom scandals, is imposing heavy costs on American companies; whether these are exceeded by any benefits is the subject of fierce debate and many not be known for years. Eliot Spitzer, New York"s attorney-general, is the leading advocate and practitioner of an energetic "law enforcement" approach. He may be right that the recent burst of punitive actions has been good for the economy, even if (as is surely the case) some of his own decisions have been open to question. Where he is undoubtedly right is in arguing that corporate America has done a lamentable job of governing itself. As he says in an article in the Wall Street Journal this week: "The honour code among CEOS didn"t work. Board oversight didn"t work. Self-regulation was a complete failure." AIG"s board, for example, did nothing about Mr. Greenberg"s use of murky accounting, or the conflicts posed by his use of offshore vehicles, or his constant bullying of his critics—let alone the firm"s alleged participation in bid-rigging—until Mr. Spitzer threatened a criminal prosecution that might have destroyed the firm.

After being involved in an accident, you were looked after by Mr. Thomson. Write a special letter to express your thanks. 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 the address. (10 points)

How long you live has a lot to do with your environment and lifestyle, but exceptional longevity may have even more to do with your genes. For the first time, researchers have identified a genetic recipe that accurately predicts who may live to 100 and beyond. Scientists led by Dr. Thomas Perls at the Boston University School of Medicine conducted a genetic analysis of more than 1,000centenarians and their matched controls and found 150 genetic variants—or bits of DNA—that differed between the two groups. These variants identified people who lived to a very old age (past 100) with 77% accuracy, researchers found. Further analysis identified 19 distinct genetic profiles associated with extremely long life; 90% of participants who lived to 100 possessed at least one of the signature genetic clusters. Each profile appeared to confer a different tendency to develop common age-related chronic diseases, such as heart disease or brain disorder. "We realize this is a complex genetic puzzle," Perls said. "We"re quite a ways away still in understanding how the integration of these genes—not just with themselves but with environmental factors—are playing a role in this longevity puzzle." Perls has studied many factors that contribute to longevity, and he is the first to acknowledge that living longer isn"t likely to be simply a matter of genes. His previous work has shown, for example, that among most elderly people who live into their 70s and 80s, about 70% of their longevity can be ascribed to environmental factors such as not smoking; eating a healthy, low-fat, low-calorie diet; and remaining socially engaged and intellectually active throughout life. Still, it seems clear that those who live to an exceptionally ripe old age are benefiting from a special DNA boost. In fact, Perls believes that the older a person gets, the more likely it is that his or her genes are contributing to those extended years. His current genetic findings support that theory: the 19 most common genetic profiles that distinguished the exceptionally long-lived appear to be correlated with lower incidence of certain diseases. For example, some profiles were associated with lower rates of high blood pressure and diabetes, while another was linked to a reduced risk of brain disorder. Although most of us can"t expect to become centenarians, Perls is hoping that his work will lead to better ways—perhaps through pharmaceutical interventions based on the genetic clues to longevity—to help more of us live like them.

The government is to ban payments to witnesses by newspapers seeking to buy up people involved in prominent cases (1)_____ trial of Rosemary West. In a significant (2)_____ of legal controls over the press. Lord Irvine, the Lord Chancellor, will introduce a (3)_____ bill that will propose making payments to witnesses (4)_____ and will strictly control the amount of (5)_____ that can be given to a case (6)_____ a trial begins. In a letter to Gerald Kaufman, chairman of the House of commons media select committee. Lord Irvine said he (7)_____ with a committee report this year which said that self regulation did not (8)_____ sufficient control. (9)_____ of the letter came two days after Lord Irvine caused a (10)_____ of media protest when he said the (11)_____ of privacy controls contained in European legislation would be left to judges (12)_____ to Parliament. The Lord Chancellor said introduction of the Human Rights Bill, which (13)_____ the European Convention on Human Rights legally (14)_____ in Britain, laid down that everybody was (15)_____ to privacy and that public figures could go to court to protect themselves and their families. "Press freedoms will be in safe hands (16)_____ our British judges," he said. Witness payments became an (17)_____ after West was sentenced to 10 life sentences in 1995. Up to 19 witnesses were (18)_____ to have received payments for telling their stories to newspapers. Concerns were raised (19)_____ witnesses might be encouraged to exaggerate their stories in court to (20)_____ guilty verdicts.

人类学研究 ——2003年英译汉及详解 Human beings in all times and places think about their world and wonder at their place in it. Humans are thoughtful and creative, possessed of insatiable curiosity.【F1】 Furthermore, humans have the ability to modify the environment in which they live, thus subjecting all other life forms to their own peculiar ideas and fancies. Therefore, it is important to study humans in all their richness and diversity in a calm and systematic manner, with the hope that the knowledge resulting from such studies can lead humans to a more harmonious way of living with themselves and with all other life forms on this planet Earth. "Anthropology" derives from the Greek words anthropos "human" and logos "the study of". By its very name, anthropology encompasses the study of all humankind. Anthropology is one of the social sciences.【F2】 Social science is that branch of intellectual enquiry which seeks to study humans and their endeavors in the same reasoned, orderly, systematic, and dispassioned manner that natural scientists use for the study of natural phenomena. Social science disciplines include geography, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Each of these social sciences has a subfield or specialization which lies particularly close to anthropology. All the social sciences focus upon the study of humanity. Anthropology is a field-study oriented discipline which makes extensive use of the comparative method in analysis.【F3】 The emphasis on data gathered first-hand, combined with a cross-cultural perspective brought to the analysis of cultures past and present, makes this study a unique and distinctly important social science. Anthropological analyses rest heavily upon the concept of culture. Sir Edward Tylor"s formulation of the concept of culture was one of the great intellectual achievements of 19th century science.【F4】 Tylor defined culture as "... that complex whole which includes belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society". This insight, so profound in its simplicity, opened up an entirely new way of perceiving and understanding human life. Implicit within Tylor"s definition is the concept that culture is learned, shared, and patterned behavior. 【F5】 Thus, the anthropological concept of "culture", like the concept of "set" in mathematics, is an abstract concept which makes possible immense amounts of concrete research and understanding.

Historians have only recently begun to note the increase in demand for luxury goods and service that took place in eighteenth century England. McKendrick has explored the Wedgwood firm"s remarkable success in marketing luxury pottery; Plumb has written about the proliferations of provincial theaters, musical festivals, and children"s toys and books. While the fact of this consumer revolution is hardly in doubt, three key questions remain: Who were the consumers? What were their motives? And what were the effects of the new demand for luxuries? An answer to the flint of these has been difficult to obtain. Although it has been possible to infer from the goods and services actually produced what manufacturers and servicing trades thought their customers wanted, only a study of relevant personal documents written by actual consumers will provide a precise picture of who wanted what. We still need to know how large this consumer market was and how far clown the social scale the consumer demand for luxury goods penetrated. With regard to this last question, we might note in passing that Thompson, while rightly restoring laboring people to the stage of eighteenth century. English history, has probably exaggerated the opposition of these people to the inroads of capitalist consumerism in general: for example, laboring people in eighteenth century England readily shifted from home-brewed beer to standardized beer produced by huge, heavily capitalized urban breweries. To answer the question of why consumers became so eager to buy, some historians have pointed to the ability of manufacturers to advertise in a relatively uncensored press. This, however, hardly seems a sufficient answer. McKendrick favors a Veblen model of conspicuous consumptions stimulated by competition for status. The "middling sort" bought goods and services because they wanted to follow fashions set by the rich. Again, we may wonder whether this explanation is sufficient. Do not people enjoy buying things as a form of self-gratification? If so, consumerism could be seen as a product of the rise of new concepts of individualism and materialism, but not necessarily of the frenzy for conspicuous competition. Finally, what were the consequences of this consumer demand for luxuries? McKendrick claims that it goes a long way toward explaining the coming of the Industrial Revolution. But does it? What for example does the production of high-quality pottery and toys have to do with the development of iron manufacture or textile mills? It is perfectly possible to have the psychology and reality of a consumer society without a heavy industrial sector. That future exploration of these key questions is undoubtedly necessary should not, however, diminish the force of the conclusion of re cent studies: the insatiable demand in eighteenth century England for frivolous as well as useful goods and services foreshadows our own world.

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