In one very long sentence, the introduction to the U.N. Charter expresses the ideals and the common aims of all the people whose governments joined together to form the U.N. "We, the people of the U.N., determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold suffering to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations, large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends, to practise tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims". The name "United Nations" is accredited to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the first group of representatives of member States met and signed a declaration of common intent on New Year"s Day in 1942. Representatives of five powers worked together to draw up proposals, completed at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944. These proposals, modified after deliberation at the conference on International Organization in San Francisco which began in April 1945, were finally agreed on and signed as the U.N. Charter by 50 countries on 26 June 1945. Poland, not represented at the conference, signed the Charter later and was added to the list of original members. It was not until that autumn, however, after the Charter had been ratified by China, France, the U.S.S.R.U., the U.K. and the U.S. and by a majority of the other participants that the U.N. officially came into existence. The date was 24 October, now universally celebrated as United Nations Day. The essential functions of the U.N. are to maintain international peace and security, to develop friendly relations among nations, to cooperate internationally in solving international economic, social, cultural and human problems, promoting respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and to be a centre for co-ordinating the actions of nations on attaining these common ends. No country takes precedence over another in the U.N. Each member"s rights and obligations are the same. All must contribute to the peaceful settlement of international dispute, and members have pledged to refrain from the threat or use of force against other states.

You are going to read a text about relations between machine and human, followed by a list of examples. Choose the best example from the list A—F for each numbered paragraph (41—45). There is one extra example which you do not need to use. Will humans always be superior to machines? This statement actually consists of a series of three related claims (1) machines are tools of human minds; (2) human minds will always be superior to machines; and (3) it is because machines are human tools that human minds will always be superior to machines. While I concede the first claim, whether I agree with the other two claims depends partly on how one defines "superiority", and partly on how willing one is to humble oneself to the unknown future scenarios. (41) After all, would any machine even exist unless a human being invented it? Of course not. Moreover, I would be hard-pressed to think of any machine that cannot be described as a tool. Even machines designed to entertain or amuse us—for example, toy robots, cars and video games, and novelty items—are in fact tools, which their inventors and promoters use for engaging in commerce and the business of entertainment and amusement. (42) And, the claim that a machine can be an end in itself, without purpose or utilitarian function for humans whatsoever, is dubious at best, since I cannot conjure up even a single example of any such machine. (43) As for the statement"s second claim, in certain respects machines are superior. We have devised machines that perform number-crunching and other rote cerebral tasks with greater accuracy and speed than human minds ever could. However, if one defines superiority not in terms of competence in performing rote tasks but rather in other ways, human minds are superior. Machines have no capacity for independent thought, for making judgments based on normative considerations, or for developing emotional responses to intellectual problems. (44) Up until now, the notion of human-made machines that develop the ability to think on their own, and to develop so-called "emotional intelligence", has been pure fiction. Besides, even in fiction we humans ultimately prevail over such machines—as in the cases of Frankenstein"s monster and Hat, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet it seems presumptuous to assert with confidence that humans will always maintain their superior status over their machines. In other words, machines will soon exhibit the traits to which we humans attribute our own superiority. (45) And insofar as humans have the unique capacity for independent thought, subjective judgment, and emotional response, it also seems fair to claim superiority over our machines. Besides, should we ever become so clever a species as to devise machines that can truly think for themselves and look out for their own well-being, then query whether these machines of the future would be "machines" anymore.A. Recent advances in biotechnology, particularly in the area of human genome research, suggest that within the twenty-first century we"ll witness machines that can learn to think on their own, to repair and nurture themselves, to experience Visceral sensations, and so forth.B. The statement is clearly accurate insofar as machines are tools of human minds.C. In sum, because we devise machines in order that they may serve us, it is fair to characterize machines as "tools of human minds".D. It"s hardly surprising that human-made machine can do the most works that belong to human before.E. In fact, it is because we can devise machines that are superior in these respects that we devise them—as our tools—to begin with.F. When we develop any sort of machine we always have some sort of end in mind—a purpose for that machine.

The rough guide to marketing success used to be that you got what you paid for. No longer. While traditional "paid" media—such as television commercials and print advertisements—still play a major role, companies today can exploit many alternative forms of media. Consumers passionate about a product may create "earned" media by willingly promoting it to friends, and a company may leverage "owned" media by sending e-mail alerts about products and sales to customers registered with its Web site.【F1】 The way consumers now approach the process of making purchase decisions means that marketing's impact stems from a broad range of factors beyond conventional paid media. Paid and owned media are controlled by marketers promoting their own products. For earned media , such marketers act as the initiator for users' responses. But in some cases, one marketer's owned media become another marketer's paid media—for instance, when an e-commerce retailer sells ad space on its Web site.【F2】 We define such sold media as owned media whose traffic is so strong that other organizations place their content or e-commerce engines within that environment. This trend, which we believe is still in its infancy, effectively began with retailers and travel providers such as airlines and hotels and will no doubt go further. Johnson & Johnson, for example, has created BabyCenter, a stand-alone media property that promotes complementary and even competitive products.【F3】 Besides generating income, the presence of other marketers makes the site seem objective, gives companies opportunities to learn valuable information about the appeal of other companies' marketing, and may help expand user traffic for all companies concerned. 【F4】 The same dramatic technological changes that have provided marketers with more(and more diverse)communications choices have also increased the risk that passionate consumers will voice their opinions in quicker, more visible, and much more damaging ways. Such hijacked media are the opposite of earned media: an asset or campaign becomes hostage to consumers, other stakeholders, or activists who make negative allegations about a brand or product. Members of social networks, for instance, are learning that they can hijack media to apply pressure on the businesses that originally created them. 【F5】 If that happens, passionate consumers would try to persuade others to boycott products, putting the reputation of the target company at risk. In such a case, the company's response may not be sufficiently quick or thoughtful, and the learning curve has been steep. Toyota Motor, for example, alleviated some of the damage from its recall crisis earlier this year with a relatively quick and well-orchestrated social-media response campaign, which included efforts to engage with consumers directly on sites such as Twitter and the social-news site Digg.

If you are a tourist interested in seeing a baseball game while in New York, you can find out which of its teams are in town simply by sending a message to AskForCents.com. In a few minutes, the answer comes back, apparently supplied by a machine, but actually composed by a human. Using humans to process information in a machine-like way is not new: it was pioneered by the Mechanical Turk, a famed 18th-century chess-playing machine that was operated by a hidden chessmaster. But while computers have since surpassed the human brain at chess, many tasks still baffle even the most powerful electronic brain. For instance, computers can find you a baseball schedule, but they cannot tell you directly if the Yankees are in town. Nor can they tell you whether sitting in the bleachers is a good idea on a first date. AskForCents can, because its answers come from people. "Whatever question you can come up with, there"s a person that can provide the answer—you don"t have the inflexibility of an algorithm-driven system", says Jesse Heitler, who developed AskForCents. Mr. Heitler was able to do this thanks to a new software tool developed by Amazon, the online retailer, that allows computing tasks to be farmed out to people over the internet. Aptly enough, Amazon"s system is called Mechanical Turk. Amazon"s Turk is part toolkit for software developers, and part online bazaar: anyone with internet access can register as a Turk user and start performing the Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) listed on the Turk website (mturk. com). Companies can become "requesters" by setting up a separate account, tied to a bank account that will pay out fees, and then posting their HITs. Most HITs pay between one cent and $5. So far, people from more than 100 countries have performed HITs, though only those with American bank accounts can receive money for their work; others are paid in Amazon gift certificates. Mr. Heitler says he had previously tried to build a similar tool, but concluded that the infrastructure would be difficult to operate profitably. Amazon already has an extensive software infrastructure designed for linking buyers with sellers, however, and the Turk simply extends that existing model. Last November Amazon unveiled a prototype of the system, which it calls "artificial intelligence". The premise is that humans are vastly superior to computers at tasks such as pattern recognition, says Peter Cohen, director of the project at Amazon, so why not let software take advantage of human strengths? Mr. Cohen credits Amazon"s boss, Jeff Bezos, with the concept for the Turk. Other people have had similar ideas. Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem, an American firm that builds software tools modeled on natural systems, has built what he calls the "Hunch Engine" to combine human intelligence with computer analysis. The French postal service, for example, has used it to help its workers choose the best delivery routes, and pharmaceutical researchers are using it to determine molecular structures by combining their gut instincts with known results stored in a database. And a firm called Seriosity hopes to tap the collective brainpower of the legions of obsessive players of multiplayer online games such as "World of War-craft", by getting them to perform small real-world tasks (such as sorting photographs) while playing, and paying them in the game"s own currency.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and selfawareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.

The mythology of a culture can provide some vital insights into the beliefs and values of that culture.【F1】 By using fantastic and sometimes incredible stories to create an oral tradition by which to explain the wonders of the natural world and teach lessons to younger generations, a society exposes those ideas and concepts held most important. 【F2】 Just as important as the final lesson to be gathered from the stories, however, are the characters and the roles they play in conveying that message. 【F3】 Perhaps the epitome of mythology and its use as a tool to pass on cultural values can be found in Aesop' s Fables, told and retold during the era of the Greek Empire. Aesop, a slave who won the favor of the court through his imaginative and descriptive tales, almost exclusively used animals to fill the roles in his short stories. Humans, when at all present, almost always played the part of bumbling fools struggling to learn the lesson being presented. This choice of characterization allows us to see that the Greeks placed wisdom on a level slightly beyond humans, implying that deep wisdom and understanding is a universal quality sought by, rather than steanning from, human beings. Aesop' s fables illustrated the central themes of humility and self-reliance, reflecting the importance of those traits in early Greek society. The folly of humans was used to contrast against the ultimate goal of attaining a higher level of understanding and awareness of truths about nature and humanity. For example,one notable fable features a fox repeatedly trying to reach a bunch of grapes on a very high vine. After failing at several attempts, the fox gives up, making up its mind that the grapes were probably sour anyway.【F4】 The fable's lesson, that we often play down that which we can't achieve so as to make ourselves feel better, teaches the reader or listener in an entertaining way about one of the weaknesses of the human psyche. 【F5】 The mythology of other cultures and societies reveal the underlying traits of their respective cultures just as Aesop' s fables did. The stories of Roman gods, Aztec ghosts and European elves all served to train ancient generations those lessons considered most important to their community, and today they offer a powerful looking glass by which to evaluate and consider the contextual environment in which those culture existed.

At the Museum of Sex in New York City, artificial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. "Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple," he said to a laughing crowd. When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry arobot was deceived, his face grew serious. "If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you?" Levy responded. "Does it really matter, if you"re a happier person?" In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy contends that sex, love and even marriage between humans and robots are coming soon and, perhaps, are even desirable. "I know some people think the idea is totally peculiar," he says. "But I am totally convinced it"s inevitable." The 62-year-old London native has not reached this conclusion on a whim. Levy"s academic love affair with computing began in his last year of university, during the vacuum-tube era. That is when he broadened his horizons beyond his passion for chess. "Back then people wrote chess programs to simulate human thought processes," he recalls. He later became engrossed in writing programs to carry on intelligent conversations with people, and then he explored the way humans interact with computers, a topic for which he earned his doctorate last year from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Over the decades, Levy notes, interactions between humans and robots have become increasingly personal. Whereas robots initially found work, say, building cars in a factory, they have now moved into the home in the form of Roomba the robotic vacuum cleaner and digital pets such as Tamagotchis and the Sony Aibo. Science-fiction fans have witnessed plenty of action between humans and characters portraying artificial life-forms, such as with Data from the Star Trek franchise or the Cylons from the re-imagined Batttestar Galactica. And Levy is betting that a lot of people will fall in love with such devices. Programmers can tailor the machines to match a person"s interests or render them some what disagreeable to create a desirable level of friction in a relationship. "It"s not that people will fall in love with an algorithm but that people will fall in love with a convincing simulation of a human being, and convincing simulations can have a remarkable effect on people," he says.

A bite of a cookie containing peanuts could cause the airway to constrict fatally. Sharing a toy with another child who had earlier eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich could raise a case of hives. A peanut butter cup dropped in a Halloween bag could contaminate the rest of the treats, posing an unknown risk. These are the scenarios that "make your bone marrow turn cold" according to L. Val Giddings, vice president for food and agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Besides representing the policy interests of food biotech companies in Washington, D. C., Giddings is the father of a four-year-old boy with a severe peanut allergy. Peanuts are only one of the most allergenic foods; estimates of the number of people who experience a reaction to the beans hover around 2 percent of the population. Giddings says that peanuts are only one of several foods that biotechnologists are altering genetically in an attempt to eliminate the proteins that do great harm to some people"s immune systems. Although soy allergies do not usually cause life-threatening reactions, the scientists are also targeting soybeans, which can be found in two thirds of all manufactured food, making the supermarket a minefield for people allergic to soy. Biotechnologists are focusing on wheat, too, and might soon expand their research to the rest of the "big eight" allergy-inducing foods: tree nuts, milk, eggs, shellfish and fish. Last September, for example, Anthony J. Kinney, a crop genetics researcher at DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Del., and his colleagues reported using a technique called RNA interference (RNAi) to silence the genes that encode p34, a protein responsible for causing 65 percent of all soybean allergies. RNAi exploits the mechanism that cells use to protect themselves against foreign genetic material; it causes a cell to destroy RNA transcribed from a given gene, effectively turning off the gene. Whether the public will accept food genetically modified to be low-allergen is still unknown. Courtney Chabot Dreyer, a spokesperson for Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont, says that the company will conduct studies to determine whether a promising market exists for low allergen soy before developing the seeds for sale to farmers. She estimates that Pioneer Hi-Bred is seven years away from commercializing the altered soybeans. Doug Gurian-Sherman, scientific director of the biotechnology project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest—a group that has advocated enhanced Food and Drug Administration oversight for genetically modified foods—comments that his organization would not oppose low-allergen foods if they prove to be safe. But he wonders about "identity preservation" a term used in the food industry to describe the deliberate separation of genetically engineered and no nengineered products. A batch of nonengineered peanuts or soybeans might contaminate machinery reserved for low-allergen versions, he suggests, reducing the benefit of the gene-altered food. Such issues of identity preservation could make low-allergen genetically modified foods too costly to produce, Chabot Dreyer admits. But, she says, "it"s still too early to see if that"s true. "

A college student becomes so compulsive about cleaning his dorm room that his grades begin to slip. An executive living in New York has a mortal fear of snakes but lives in Manhattan and rarely goes outside the city where he might encounter one. t computer technician, deeply anxious around strangers, avoids social and company gatherings and is passed over for promotion. Are these people mentally ill? (46) In a report released last week, researchers estimated that more than half of Americans would develop mental disorders in their lives, raising questions about where mental health ends and illness begins. (47) In fact, psychiatrists have no good answer, and the boundary between mental illness and normal mental struggle has become a battle line dividing the profession into two viscerally opposed camps. On one side are doctors who say that the definition of mental illness should be broad enough to include mild conditions, which can make people miserable and often lead to more severe problems later. (48) On the other are experts who say that the current definitions should be tightened to ensure that limited resources go to those who need them the most and to preserve the profession"s credibility with a public that often scoffs at claims that large numbers of Americans have mental disorders. The question is not just philosophical, where psychiatrists draw the line may determine not only the willingness of insurers to pay for services, but the future of research on moderate and mild mental disorders. (49) Directly and indirectly, it will also shape the decisions of millions of people who agonize over whether they or their loved ones are in need of help, merely eccentric or dealing with ordinary life struggles. "This argument is heating up right now," said Dr. Darrel Regier, director 0f research at the American Psychiatric Association, "because we"re in the process of revising the diagnostic manual," the catalog of mental disorders on which research, treatment and the profession itself are based. The next edition of the manual is expected to appear in 2010 or 2011, "and there"s going continued debate in the scientific community about what the cut-points of clinical disease are," Dr. Regier said. Psychiatrists have been searching for more than a century for some biological marker for mental disease, to little avail. (50) Although there is promising work in genetics and brain imaging, researchers are not likely to have anything resembling a blood test for a mental illness soon, leaving them with what they have always had: observations of behavior, and patients" answers to questions about how they feel and how severe their condition is.

Data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks. It even slipped past the bans of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting up-dates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor. Individually, we have all already experienced the massive changes resulting from digitisation. Events or information that we once considered momentary and private are now accumulated, permanent, public. Governments hold our personal data in huge databases. It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to. But when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don"t care much. Our privacy is expendable. It is no surprise that the reaction to these leaks is different. What has changed the dynamic of power in a revolutionary way isn" t just the scale of the databases being kept, but that individuals can upload a copy and present it to the world. To some this marks a crisis, to others an opportunity. Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography—replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency. Leaks are not the problem; they are the symptom. They reveal a disconnect between what people want and need to know and what they actually do know. The greater the secrecy, the more likely a leak. The way to move beyond leaks is to ensure a strong managing system for the public to access important information. We are at a key moment where the visionaries in the leading position of a global digital age are clashing with those who are desperate to control what we know. WikiLeaks is the guerrilla front in a global movement for greater transparency and participation. It used to be that a leader controlled citizens by controlling information. Now it"s harder than ever for the powerful to control what people read, see and hear. Technology gives people the ability to band together and challenge authority. The powerful have long spied on citizens as a means of control, now citizens are turning their collected eyes back upon the powerful. This is a revolution, and all revolutions create fear and uncertainty. Will we move to a New Information Enlightenment or will the strong resistance from those who seek to maintain control no matter the cost lead us to a new totalitarianism? What happens in the next five years will define the future of democracy for the next century, so it would be well if our leaders responded to the current challenge with an eye on the future.

BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./B

The farm is a major marketplace for millions of tons of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides (杀虫剂),and advanced machinery and the fuel required to run it. The modern super farm, large and highly capitalized, is resource dependent compared with the diversified small farms that were once dominant. On diversified farms, major energy needs may be supplied by resident humans and animals. Soil fertility may be maintained by alternating cash crops and restorative crops, and also by returning animal manure(肥料) to the soil. This farming model of relatively self- sufficient agriculture, and the way of life associated with it, are still economically viable(可行), as demonstrated by prosperous Amish farmers and other practitioners of "alternative" agriculture. Particularly relevant to today"s mainstream agriculture are the energy-saving practices on large "organic" farms, which are thoroughly mechanized but which minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. By comparison, mainstream American agriculture has until lately been careless in its use of energy, water, and land. When fossil energy was cheap, applications of fertilizers and pesticides paid large dividends, so farmers were encouraged to use these products. Soon most farmers used too much fertilizer and pesticide. Farmers in dry regions enjoyed an era of cheap water, obtained from publicly subsidized irrigation systems or from pumping groundwater using, inexpensive energy. The soil too was expendable as demand grew for U.S. agricultural products. The period of extraordinary profligacy in the use of soil, water, and fossil fuels may well be at an end. The new structure of large farms is quite sensitive to cost factors. These adaptive farms, whose development was assisted by public tax, subsidy, and research policies, have access to capital, technologies, and management skills, enabling them to switch relatively quickly to resource-conserving practices—for example, to a low-tillage system that requires less fuel, that shepherds soil moisture, and that may reduce soil erosion(侵蚀). It seems likely that federal programs that have enlarged our farms, therefore, have had a further result of creating the potential for a more conserving agriculture. With respect to energy use, for example, energy costs per unit of output are lower for large farms, mainly because these farms quickly economized on energy as costs rose. In the future, according to one authoritative assessment, "agricultural production is likely to use capital and land more intensively but energy, fertilizer and labor less intensively."

Individuals and businesses have legal protection for intellectual property they create and own. Intellectual proper【C1】______from creative thinking and may include products,【C2】______processes, and ideas. Intellectual property is protected【C3】______misappropriation. Misappropriation is taking the Intellectual property of others without【C4】______compensation and using it for monetary gain. Legal protection is provided for the【C5】______of intellectual property. The three common types of legal protection are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Patents provide exclusive use of inventions. If the U.S. Patent office【C6】______ a patent, it is confirming that the intellectual property is【C7】______. The patent prevents others from making, using, or selling the invention without the owner" s【C8】______ for a period of 20 years. Copyrights are similar to patents【C9】______ that they are applied to artistic works. A copyright protects the creator of an 【C10】______artistic or intellectual work, such as a song or a novel. A copyright gives the owner exclusive rights to copy, 【C11】______ , display, or perform the work. The copyright prevents others from using and selling the work, the 【C12】______of a copyright is typically the lifetime of the author 【C13】______ an additional 70 years. Trademarks are words, names, or symbols that identify the manufacturer of a product and 【C14】______it from similar others. A service mark is similar to a trademark【C15】______is used to identify services. A trademark prevents others from using the【C16】______or a similar word, name, or symbol to take advantage of the recognition and 【C17】______of the brand or to create confusion in the marketplace. 【C18】______registration, a trademark is usually granted for a period often years. It can be【C19】______for additional ten-year periods indefinitely as【C20】______as the mark"s use continues.

You are going to read a list of headings and a text about history relevant to our daily lives. Choose the most suitable from the list A—F for each numbered paragraph (41—45). The first and last paragraphs of the text are not numbered. There is one extra heading which you do not need to use.A. Human history contains great stories that can help us appreciate more about past life.B. The great achievement can provide motivation for learners.C. Making us more human, more than anything else, is the purpose of studying history.D. Learning history can lead a more colorful life.E. History can tell us when we should give up.F. History can teach us a lesson from its mistakes. The speaker alleges that studying history is valuable only insofar as it is relevant to our daily lives. I find this allegation to be specious. It wrongly suggests that history is not otherwise instructive and that its relevance to our everyday lives is limited. To the contrary, studying history provides inspiration, innumerable lessons for living, and useful value clarification and perspective—all of which help us decide how to live our lives. (41)______. To begin with, learning about great human achievements of the past provides inspiration. For example, a student inspired by the courage and tenacity of history"s great explorers might decide as a result to pursue a career in archeology, oceanography, or astronomy. This decision can, in turn, profoundly affect that student"s everyday life—in school and beyond. Even for students not inclined to pursue these sorts of careers, studying historical examples of courage in the face of adversity can provide motivation to face their own personal fears in life. In short, learning about grand accomplishments of the past can help us get through the everyday business of living, whatever that business might be, by emboldening us and lifting our spirits. (42)______. In addition, mistakes of the past can teach us as a society how to avoid repeating those mistakes. For example, history can teach us the inappropriateness of addressing certain social issues, particularly moral ones, on a societal level. Attempts to legislate morality invariably fail, as aptly illustrated by the Prohibition experiment in the U.S. during the 1930s. Hopefully, as a society we can apply this lesson by adopting a more enlightened legislative approach toward such issues as free speech, criminalization of drug use, criminal justice, and equal rights under the law. (43)______. Studying human history can also help us understand and appreciate the mores, values, and ideals of past cultures. A heightened awareness of cultural evolution, in turn, helps us formulate informed and reflective values and ideals for ourselves. Based on these values and ideals, students can determine their authentic life path as well as how they should allot their time and interact with others on a day-to-day basis. (44)______. Finally, it might be tempting to imply from the speaker"s allegation that studying history has little relevance even for the mundane chores that occupy so much of our time each day, and therefore is of little value. However, from history we learn not to take everyday activities and things for granted. By understanding the history of money and banking we can transform an otherwise routine trip to the bank into an enlightened experience, or a visit to the grocery store into an homage to the many inventors, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs of the past who have made such convenience possible today. And, we can fully appreciate our freedom to go about our daffy lives largely as we choose only by understanding our political heritage. In short, appreciating history can serve to elevate our everyday chores to richer, more interesting, and more enjoyable experiences. (45)______. In sum, the speaker fails to recognize that in all our activities and decisions—from our grandest to our most rote—history can inspire, inform, guide, and nurture. In the final analysis, to study history is to gain the capacity to be more human—and I would be hard-pressed to imagine a worthier end.

Video games get a bad press. Many are unquestionably violent and, as has been the way with new media from novels to comic books to television, they have been accused of corrupting the moral fabric of youth. Nor are such accusations without merit. There is a body of research suggesting that violent games can lead to aggressive thoughts, if not to violence itself.But not allgames are shoot-them-ups, and what is less examined is whether those that reward more constructive behavior also have lingering impacts. That, however, is starting to change. Two studies showing that video games have a bright side as well as a dark one have been carried out recently. One, to be published in June by the Journal of Experirnental Social Psychology, was conducted by Douglas Gentile, of Iowa State University"s media research laboratory. He and his colleagues tested the effects of playing so-called "pro-social" games on children and young adults in three countries. A group of 161 American students played one of six games for 20 minutes. Some were given"Ty2" or "Crash Twinsanity", both of which involve cartoonish fighting and destruction. Others were assigned "Chibi-Robo!", which involves helping characters in the game by doing their chores, or "Super Mario Sunshine", in which players clean up pollution and graffiti. A third group, acting as a control, played "Pure Pinball" or "Super Monkey Ball Deluxe", both of which involve guiding a ball through mazes. Their games over, the participants were asked to choose 11 of 30 easy, medium or hard shape-based puzzles for a partner to complete, and told that their partner would receive a $10 gift voucher if he could complete ten of them. Those who had been playing prosocial games were significantly more likely to help their partner by selecting easy puzzles. The opposite was true for those assigned violent games. The other parts of Dr Gentile"s study looked at established behavior. In one, a group of 680 Singaporeans aged 12-14 were asked to list their three favorite games and state the number of hours they played. They were then given questionnaires, the answers to which suggested that those who spent the longest playing games which involved helping others were most likely to help, share, co-operate and empathize with others. They also had lower scores in tests for hostile thoughts and the acceptance of violence as normal. In the second, Japanese aged 10-17 were asked how much time they spent playing games in which the main character helps others. When questioned three to four months later, those who played these types of games the most were also rated as more helpful to those around them in real life.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

You want to recommend Mr. Collins to Professor Smith to find a position for the former. Write a letter based on the following outline. 1) Personal information about Mr. Collins(curriculum vitae, personality, job capabilities etc.), 2) Your sincere hope. You should write about 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.

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm"s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us. As if this was not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness. If we take up the wrong kind of personality, we run the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks. The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today"s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in child hood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma. Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had in creased people"s resistance to infection. In short we have come a long way—the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn"t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.

Writeanessayof160~200wordsbasedonthefollowingdrawings.Inyouressay,youshould:1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,andthen3)giveyourcomments.YoushouldwriteneatlyonANSWERSHEET2.(20points)