Expertise can be shared worldwide through teleconferencing, and problems in dispute can be settled without the participants leaving their homes and / or jobs to travel to a distant conference site.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)A. In 1849 gold was discovered in California in the mountains near San Francisco. So started the famous Gold Rush of the 49ers across the vast, unexplored wilderness that lay west of the Mississippi. Whole families perished. One small group of 49ers, looking for a short cut across the Sierra Nevada Mountains, happened to enter the infamous Death Valley. It was lucky for them it was winter, for in summer Death Valley is about the hottest and most desolate place on earth. As it was, one of the group died of thirst, and it was the 49ers who gave the valley its grim name.B. The completion of the railroad not only joined the cities of the east with California, it also brought prosperity to the isolated farmers of the plains, and to the ranchers who were now able to send their cattle to the slaughterhouses in freight ears. In fact, the new railroad became an essential life-line for a nation which now stretched 3,000 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.C. As late as the 1880s a man in the Far west could be hanged for stealing a horse, yet get no more than five years in jail for robbing a bank. Ever since the pioneers went west into the unknown, they depended absolutely on their horses and their guns. If a man lost his horse or his gun in the deserts, mountains or forests of Nevada, Arizona and eastern California, he stood no chance. Hunger, thirst, a grizzly bear, a mountain lion, or hostile Indians would finish him off sooner or later. A frontiers man had to be tough, brave and resourceful in those days.D. The colonization of the West was given a tremendous impetus by the building of the Transcontinental railroad, one of the great engineering feats of all time. Congress decided that the laying of the tracks should begin from the East and the West at the same time. So the building of this railroad lined with poles for the first east-west telegraph system, developed into a race. The Easterners, moving across the plains, progressed faster, for they did not have to tunnel through giant mountains or bridge gaping canyons. The two railroads linked up in Utah on July 10th, 1867. There was great excitement, and a special ceremony to mark the occasion.E. Deserts, mountains and forests are still the frontier between teeming Californian cities and the sparsely populated wilderness of Nevada and eastern California. Even today, Nevada has hardly more than 500 thousand inhabitants, most of whom live in the cities of Las Vegas and Reno.F. Later, in 1865, after the Civil War, disillusioned soldiers, unable to find work, followed in the footsteps of the 49ers. They did not find much gold, but they found rich pastures for cattle. It was they who founded the USA"s great food industry, and they worked with the vigor and courage of the early pioneers and with a faith fortified by the Bible.G. Some Americans feel that the frontier spirit no longer exists in the USA. But it expressed itself in a number of ways. Americans do not like being without work, and they will travel hundreds of miles in search of a job, showing a courage and an enterprise which is unusual in most of the older European countries. Then there is the exploration of outer space. President John Kennedy in a speech to the nation, spoke of this "New Frontier". The frontier spirit certainly played a part in putting the first men on the noon, the most recent of all frontiers to be crossed.Order: C is the first paragraph and G is the last.

The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photographer"s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art (1)_____ distinctive from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the (2)_____ to establish it as a fine art. (3)_____ the charge that photographers was a soulless mechanical duplication of (4)_____, photographers (5)_____ that it was instead a privileged (6)_____ of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and (7)_____ worthy an art than painting. Ironically, (8)_____ photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or (9)_____ to label it as such. Serious photographers are no longer willing to (10)_____ whether photography is not involved with art, (11)_____ to proclaim that their own work is not involved with it. This shows the extent (12)_____ which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the (13)_____ of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. Photographers" disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the troubled status of the contemporary (14)_____ of art (15)_____ about whether photography is or is not art. Photography, (16)_____ Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art. Photography, (17)_____, has developed all the (18)_____ and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the (19)_____ of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity— (20)_____, an art.

Even as the U. S. Labor Department released figures showing that the economy lost more than half a million jobs in April, researchers on Friday made public a large study with an unsettling finding: Losing your job may make you sick. A researcher at the Harvard School of Public analyzed detailed employment and health data from 8,125 individuals surveyed in 1999, 2001 and 2003 by the U. S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared to people who were continuously employed. Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed. Though it"s long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment triggers illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or laid off. In an attempt to sort out this chicken-or-egg problem, the new study looked specifically at people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own—for example, because of a plant or business closure. "I was looking at situations in which people lost their job for reasons that.. . shouldn"t have had anything to do with their health," said author Kate W. Strully, an assistant professor of sociology at State University of New York in Albany, who did the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health. "What happens isn"t reflecting a prior condition . " Only 6 percent of people with steady jobs developed a new health condition during each survey period of about a year and a half, compared with 10 percent of those who had lost a job during the same period. It didn"t matter whether the laid off workers had found new employment; they still had a one in 10 chance of developing a new health condition, Dr. Strully found. David Williams, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the research, said the study is a reminder that job loss and other life stressors have a tremendous impact on both mental and physical health and contribute to the development of chronic conditions.

You have heard some folk music in a program on the radio, but you do not know when the program is broadcasted at different times of the day and on other frequencies as well. Write to the radio station to find out. Be sure to make clear: 1) what you are interested in; 2) what you want to know; 3) how to contact you. You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Wang Ling" instead.

We have to realize how old, how very old, we are. Nations are classified as "aged" when they have 7 percent or more of their people aged 65 or above, and by about 1970 every one of the advanced countries had become like this. Of the really ancient societies, with over 13 percent above 65, all are in Northwestern Europe. We know that we are getting even older, and that the nearer a society approximates to zero population growth, the older its population is likely to be—at least, for any future that concerns us now. To these now familiar facts a number of further facts may be added, some of them only recently recognized. There is the apparent paradox that the effective cause of the high proportion of the old is births rather than death. There is the economic principle that the dependency ratio—the degree to which those who cannot earn depend for a living on those who can—is more advantageous in older societies like ours than in the younger societies of the developing world, because lots of dependent babies are more of a liability than numbers of the inactive aged. There is the appreciation of the historical truth that the aging of advanced societies has been a sudden change. If "revolution" is a rapid resettlement of the social structure, and if the age composition of the society counts as a very important aspect of that social structure, then there has been a social revolution in European and particularly Western European society within the lifetime of everyone over 50.@Taken together, these things have implications which are only beginning to be acknowledged. These facts and circumstances had a leading position at a world gather about aging as a challenge to science and to policy, held at Vichy in France. There is often resistance to the idea that it is because the birth rate fell earlier in Western and Northwestern Europe than elsewhere, rather than because of any change in the death rate, that we have grown so old. But this is what elementary demography makes clear. Long life is altering our society, of course, but in experiential terms. We have among us a very much greater experience of continued living than any society that has preceded us anywhere, and this will continue. But too much of that lengthening experience, even in the wealthy West, will be experience of poverty and neglect, unless we do something about it. If you are in your thirties, you ought to be aware that you can expect to live nearly one third of the rest of your life after the age of 60. The older you are now, the greater this proportion will be, and greater still if you are a woman.

The decision of the New York Philharmonic to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director has been the talk of the classical-music world ever since the sudden announcement of his appointment in 2009. For the most part, the response has been favorable, to say the least. "Hooray! At last!" wrote Anthony Tommasini, a sober-sided classical-music critic. One of the reasons why the appointment came as such a surprise, however, is that Gilbert is comparatively little known. Even Tommasini, who had advocated Gilbert"s appointment in the Times, calls him "an unpretentious musician with no air of the formidable conductor about him." As a description of the next music director of an orchestra that has hitherto been led by musicians like Gustav Mahler and Pierre Boulez, that seems likely to have struck at least some Times readers as faint praise. For my part, I have no idea whether Gilbert is a great conductor or even a good one. To be sure, he performs an impressive variety of interesting compositions, but it is not necessary for me to visit Avery Fisher Hall, or anywhere else, to hear interesting orchestral music. All I have to do is to go to my CD shelf, or boot up my computer and download still more recorded music from iTunes. Devoted concertgoers who reply that recordings are no substitute for live performance are missing the point. For the time, attention, and money of the art-loving public, classical instrumentalists must compete not only with opera houses, dance troupes, theater companies, and museums, but also with the recorded performances of the great classical musicians of the 20th century. These recordings are cheap, available everywhere, and very often much higher in artistic quality than today"s live performances; moreover, they can be "consumed" at a time and place of the listener"s choosing. The widespread availability of such recordings has thus brought about a crisis in the institution of the traditional classical concert. One possible response is for classical performers to program attractive new music that is not yet available on record. Gilbert" s own interest in new music has been widely noted: Alex Ross, a classical-music critic, has described him as a man who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into "a markedly different, more vibrant organization." But what will be the nature of that difference? Merely expanding the orchestra"s repertoire will not be enough. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic are to succeed, they must first change the relationship between America"s oldest orchestra and the new audience it hopes to attract.

"Nobody really knows" was Donald Trump's assessment of man-made global warming, in an interview on December 11th. 【F1】 As far as the atmosphere is concerned, that puts him at odds with most scientists who have studied the matter . They do know that the atmosphere is warming, and they also know by how much. But turn to the sea and Mr. Trump has a point. Though the oceans are warming too, climatologists readily admit that they have only a rough idea how much heat is going into them, and how much is already there. Many suspect that the heat capacity of seawater explains the climate pause of recent years, in which the rate of atmospheric warning has slowed. 【F2】 But without decent data, it is hard to be sure to what extent the oceans are acting as a heat sink that damps the temperature rise humanity is visiting upon the planet—and, equally important, how long they can keep that up. This state of affairs will change, though, if a project described by Robert Tyler and Terence Sabaka to a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held in San Francisco this week, is successful. Dr Tyler and Dr Sabaka, who work at the Goddard Space Flight Centre, observe that satellites can detect small changes in Earth's magnetic field induced by the movement of water. They also observe that the magnitude of such changes depends on the water's temperature all the way down to the ocean floor. That, they think, opens a window into the oceans which has, until now, been lacking. To measure things in the deep sea almost always requires placing instruments there. 【F3】 The supply of oceanographic research vessels, though, is limited, and even the addition in recent years of several thousand "Argo" probes (floating robots that roam the oceans and are capable of diving to a depth of 2,000 metres) still leaves ocean temperatures severely under-sampled. Satellites, however, can look at the whole ocean—and, if they are properly equipped, can plot ways in which Earth's magnetic field is deflected by seawater. This deflection happens because seawater is both electrically conductive and always on the move. Crucially, saltwater's conductivity increases with its temperature. This means the deflection increases, too. 【F4】 And since the magnetic field originates from within Earth, it penetrates the whole ocean, from bottom to top. So any heat contributes to the deflection. 【F5】 All this means that, if you know where and how ocean water is displaced, the changes in the magnetic field, as seen from a satellite, will tell you the heat content of that water. Dr Tyler and Dr Sabaka therefore built a computer model which tried this approach on one reasonably well-understood form of oceanic displacement, the twice-daily tidal movement caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon.

With the rapid growth of China"s economy in recent years, China"s foreign trade has begun a number of new pragmatic and flexible practices in foreign trade policy, open door policy and foreign trade system. (46) In the first place, China"s foreign trade policy is coupled with China"s domestic economic reform program. (47) Import policy is aimed at acquiring capital that embodies the modern technology needed to develop China"s economy. (48) China"s export capability is expanding due to the improvement of the importation of foreign capital, technology and management skills. According to the figures issued by China"s Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade(MOFERT), the total value of imports and exports is increasing steadily. Next, the rapid growth of China"s economy needs "Open Door Policy". The key to this policy is to open China to inflows of foreign technology and foreign investment. Toward this end, the Chinese established "special economic zones" in 1979, where special incentives are being used to attract foreign capital and technology. Four such zones were set up, three in Guangdong Province, and one in Fujian Province. (49) With the establishment of four special economic zones, "economic and technical development zones" were set up in 14 coastal cities in 1980, and as the next step, the Chinese have announced that they will open up several river delta regions, including the Changjiang River delta and the Pearl River delta. Thirdly, China"s foreign trade system has undergone significant changes in the last few years. Although foreign trade is still carried out by the Foreign Trade Corporation (FTC), supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, China"s industrial departments and provincial and local enterprises have taken a more active role in China"s foreign trade. Many of these organizations have established import and export corporations of their own, with the authority to conduct technical and commercial negotiations with foreign firms. Industrial corporations are responsible for their own profits and losses. Certain plants and factories are also permitted to have more contact with foreign firms and authority to negotiate sales contracts by themselves. (50) The decentralization of China"s foreign trade has benefited foreign trade organizations at different levels, cities, provinces and autonomous regions where the foreign trade has therefore been better handled.

The traditional distinction between products that satisfy needs and those that satisfy wants is no longer adequate to describe classes of products. In today"s prosperous societies the distinction has become blurred because so many wants have been turned into needs. A writer, for instance, can work with paper and pencils. These are legitimate needs for the task. But the work can be done more quickly and efficiently with a word processor. Thus a computer is soon viewed as a need rather than a want. In the field of marketing, consumer goods are classed according to the way in which they are purchased. The two main categories are convenience goods and shopping goods. Two lesser types are specialty goods and unsought goods. It must be emphasized that all of these types are based on the way shoppers think about products, not on the nature of the products themselves. What is regarded as a convenience item in France(wine, for example) may be a specialty goods in the United States. People do not spend a great deal of time shopping for such convenience items as groceries, newspapers, toothpaste, razor blades, aspirin, and candy. The buying of convenience goods may be done routinely, as some families buy groceries once a week. Such regularly purchased items are called staples. Sometimes convenience products are bought on impulse: someone has a sudden desire for an ice cream on a hot day. Or they may be purchased as emergency items. Shopping goods are items for which customers search. They compare prices, quality, and styles, and may visit a number of stores be fore making a decision. Buying an automobile is often done this way. Shopping goods fall into two classes: those that are perceived as basically the same and those that are regarded as different. Items that are looked upon as basically the same, include such things as home appliances, television sets, and automobiles. Having decided on the model desired, the customer, is primarily interested in getting the item at the most favorable price. Items regarded as inherently different include clothing, furniture, and dishes. Quality, style, and fashion will either take precedence over price, or they will not matter at all. Specialty goods have characteristics that impel customers to make special efforts to find them. Price may be no consideration at all. Specialty goods can include almost any kind of product. Normally, specialty goods have a brand name or other distinguishing characteristics. Unsought goods are items a consumer does not necessarily want or need or may not even know about. Promotion or advertising brings such goods to the consumer"s attention. The product could be something new on the market as the Sony Walkman once was or it may be a fairly standard service, such as life insurance, for which most people will usually not bother shopping.

Studythepicturecarefullyandwriteanessayentitled"TheAdaptationoftheClassicalLiterature".Intheessay,youshould:1.describethepicture;2.interpretitsmeaning;3.giveyouropinionaboutthephenomenon.Youshouldwriteabout200wordsneatly.

You and your parents can stop worrying—Pasteur, Edison, Darwin and lots more were far from being geniuses in their teens. History books【B1】______mention it, but the truth is that many of our greatest figures were【B2】______"beatniks" when they were teenagers. They were given to daydreaming, indecision, plain dullness, and they showed no【B3】______of being doctor, lawyer or Indian chief. So, young men and women, if you suffer from the same【B4】______, don"t despair. The world was built by men and women whose parents worried that they would "never【B5】______to a hill of beans." You don"t hear too much about their early failure because parents prefer to cite more【B6】______examples. If you take piano lessons and your attitude towards practicing is【B7】______by laziness, your parents might【B8】______complain and flaunt before you the famous picture of little Mozart in his ruffled nightshirt, playing the piano at midnight in the attic.【B9】______the point is, your parents would not show you a picture of a certain party who never showed a【B10】______of interest in music during his 【B11】______years. In fact he never showed【B12】______in any direction whatever. Finally put to studying law, he【B13】______passed his final exams. It was not until he was 22 that he suddenly became fired【B14】______a great passion for music, and his name was Peter Ilyitch Tschaikowsky. In the sciences, there have been hundreds of geniuses who aimed straight at the【B15】______from earliest years, and hundreds who showed no【B16】______at all. There were the teenage Mayo brothers, who actually【B17】______their father in his crude country operating room.【B18】______, Harvey Cushing, one of the world"s greatest brain surgeons, might have become a professional ballplayer if his father hadn"t【B19】______that he give【B20】______a try.

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 maple smoke of autumn bonfires is incense to Canadians. Bestowing perfume for the nose, color for the eye, sweetness for the spring tongue, the sugar maple prompts this sharing of a favorite myth and original etymology of the word maple. The maple looms large in Ojibwa folk tales. The time of year for sugaring-off is "in the Maple Moon". Among Ojibwa, the primordial female figure is Nokomis, a wise grandmother. (41)______. Knowing this was s pursuit to the death, Nokomis outsmarted the cold devils. She hid in a stand of maple trees, all red and orange and deep yellow. This maple grove grew beside a waterfall whose mist blurred the trees" outline. As they peered through the mist, slavering wendigos thought they saw a raging fire in which their prey was burning. (42)______. For their service in saving the earth mother"s life, these maples were given a special gift: their water of life would be forever sweet, and Canadians would tap it for nourishment. (43)______. The contention that maple syrup is unique to North America is suspect, I believe. China has close to 10 species of maple, more than any country in the world. Canada has 10 native species. North America does happen to be home to the sugar maple, the species that produces the sweetest sap and the most abundant flow. But are we to believe that in thousands of years of Chinese history, these inventive people never tapped a maple to taste its sap? I speculate that they did. (44)______. What is certain is the maple"s holdfast on our national imagination. Is leaf was adopted as an emblem in New France as early as 1700, and in English Canada by the mid-19th century. In the fall of 1867, a Toronto schoolteacher named Alexander Muir was traipsing at street a the city, all squelchy underfoot from the soft felt of falling leaves, when a maple leaf alighted to his coat sleeve and stuck there. The word "maple" is from "mapeltreow", the Old English term for maple tree, with "mapl"—as its Proto-Germanic root, a compound in which the first "m"—is, I believe, the nearly worldwide "ma", one of the first human sounds, the pursing of a baby"s lips as it prepares to suck milk from mother"s breast. The "ma" root gives rise in many world languages to thousands of words like "mama", "mammary", "maia", and "Amazon". Here it would make "mapl-" mean "nourishing mother tree", that is, tree whose maple sap in nourishing. (45)______.A. The second part of the compound, "apl-", is a variant of Indo-European able "fruit of any tree" and the origin of another English fruit word, apple. So the primitive analogy compares the liquid sap with another nourishing liquid, mother"s milk.B. In one tale about seasonal change, cannibal wendigos-creatures of evil-chased through the autumn countryside old Nokomis, who was a symbol for female fertility. Wendigos throve in icy cold. When they entered the bodies of humans, the human heart froze solid.C. Here wendigos represent oncoming winter. They were hunting to kill and eat poor Nokomis, the warm embodiment of female fecundity who, like the summer, has grown old.D. Could Proto-Americas who crossed the Bering land bridge to populate the Americas have brought with them a knowledge of maple syrup? Is there a very old Chinese phrase for maple syrup? Is maple syrup mentioned in Chinese literature? For a non-reader of Chinese, such questions are daunting but not impossible to answer.E. Maple and its syrup flow sweetly into Canadian humor. Quebeckers have developed a special love for such a nutriment.F. After it resisted several brushings-off, Muir joked to his walking companion that this would be "the maple leaf for ever!" At home that evening, he wrote a poem and set it to music, in celebration of Canada"s Confederation. Muir"s song, "The Maple Leaf Forever", was wildly popular and helped fasten the symbol firmly to Canada.G. But it was only old Nokomis being hidden by the bright red leaves of her friends, the maples. And so, drooling ice and huffing frost, the wendigos left her and sought easier prey.

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

School shootings like the one that devastated the small German town of Winnenden on 11 March may not just be random acts of violence. A review of similar killings in the US, and of general school aggression, indicates that some schools are more likely than others to be breeding grounds for killers. Schools can"t be blamed for an individual"s actions, but they may be able to reduce the chance of a killer emerging from their gates. The rare nature of school shootings makes them tough to study in a systematic way. But between July 1999 and June 2006 there were eight school shootings in which more than one person was killed in the US alone. Such case studies allow researchers to start drawing some parallels . Traci Wike and Mark Fraser at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reviewed studies of shooting incidents, such as those at Columbine High School, Colorado, in 1999 and at Virginia Tech in 2007, and of general school aggression. They identified shared characteristics that might have helped to shape the killers. "Shootings appear more likely in schools characterized by a high degree of social status and low bonding and attachment between teachers and students," Wike says. "They provide rewards and recognition for only an elite few, and create social dynamics that promote disrespectful behavior, bullying, and peer harassment." Large, academically competitive schools with an obvious "in-group" are at greatest risk, she adds. The level of attachment that pupils feel towards a school may also affect displays of violence. "No shooting has involved a student who was attached and committed to school," Wike says. Of course, personal factors can"t be ignored—and may be more important than environmental ones. Tim Kretschmer, who killed 15 people last week at Winnenden before turning the gun on himself, displayed many of the characteristics associated with other school shooters, such as anger at a girl, a fascination with violent video games and access to guns. But that doesn"t mean schools can"t play a role in reducing the alienation and hostility that seem to push such individuals over the edge. Tackling feelings of isolation in schools might work better than trying to pick out "the tiny handful of kids who are going to take a gun and massacre their peers", says Catherine Bradshaw of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore, Maryland. In the US at least, school shootings seem to be declining. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of school associated murders fell between 1992 and 2006, while multiple-victim homicides by students have been stable since 1992, with a small peak in the late 1990s.

Restrictions on the use of plastic bags have not been so successful in some regions. "White pollution" is still going on. Write a letter to the editor(s) of your local newspaper to give your opinions briefly and make two or three suggestions. You should write about 100 words on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

The amount of sunlight reaching Earth"s surface appears to be growing. The phenomenon, which some dub "global brightening," (1)_____ scientists with a puzzle. If the (2)_____ is real and global, how long will it last and what are the consequences for climate change, the planet"s water cycle, and other (3)_____ that draw energy from sunlight? (4)_____, the answer might seem obvious: More sunlight reaching the ground in a warming world means that temperatures will get warmer (5)_____ Not so fast, some researchers say. Additional warming would be certain (6)_____ nothing else in the climate system changes. And the climate system is (7)_____ static. Some combinations of changes could reinforce the heating; others could (8)_____ it. Unraveling these interactions and forecasting their course require an accurate accounting of the sunlight reaching the surface and the (9)_____ the surface sends skyward. Moreover, researchers say, measurements of the sun"s strength at Earth"s surface are potentially powerful tools for (10)_____ human influences on the climate. Earth"s radiation "budget" (11)_____ an "extremely important parameter that is (12)_____ known," says Robert Charlson, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington at Seattle. "It needs to be (13)_____ much better than it is." (14)_____ about the amount of sunlight reaching Earth"s surface were first raised in 1974.@Researchers from the United States and Israel recorded a 12% drop (15)_____ sunlight over 40 years at a (16)_____ station in the southern Sinai Peninsula. Since then, others have used a variety of techniques to try to track (17)_____ sunlight. Three years ago, for example, a (18)_____ led by Beate Liepert at Columbia University"s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory gathered data from ground (19)_____ around the world and found that solar radiation reaching the surface fell (20)_____ 4% from 1961 to 1990.

We all know(or should know)by now that the carbon dioxide we produce when we burn fossil fuels and cut down forests is the planet"s single largest contributor to global warming. It persists in the atmosphere for centuries. Reducing these emissions by as much as half by 2050 is essential to avoid disastrous consequences by the end of this century, and we must begin immediately. But this is a herculean undertaking, both technically and politically. There is, however, a short-term strategy. We can slow this warming quickly by cutting emissions of four other climate pollutants: black carbon, a component of soot; methane, the main component of natural gas; lower-level ozone, a main ingredient of urban smog; and hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used as coolants. They account for as much as 40 percent of current warming. We can reduce black carbon emissions significantly in the next few decades by using particulate filters on cars and trucks and switching to low-sulfur diesel. By employing those strategies, California, for instance, has cut the warming effect from diesel emissions by nearly half since the late 1980s. In addition, we can further reduce emissions of black carbon and carbon monoxide(which produces lower-level ozone)in the developing world simply by turning to efficient biomass cook stoves instead of using traditional mud stoves, by replacing kerosene lamps in villages with solar lamps, and by deploying modern brick kilns. Methane emissions can be cut by nearly a third by reducing leaks from gas pipes, coal mines and hydraulic fracturing, by capturing methane from waste dumps, water treatment plants and manure, and by cutting emissions from rice paddies. These reductions in methane, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds would also significantly reduce lower-level ozone, which is another important climate-warming pollutant that is formed by the interaction of sunlight with other short-lived pollutants. And HFCs, which are widely used in refrigerators, can be replaced with readily available climate-friendly refrigerants. Nearly 100 ozone-depleting chemicals have been phased out under the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty that took effect in 1989, and more than 100 countries support a shift to the safer HFC alternatives. Phasing down HFCs would provide climate protection many times greater than the current Kyoto climate treaty—the equivalent of about 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050. Unlike carbon dioxide, these pollutants are short-lived in the atmosphere. If we shtop emitting them, they will disappear in a matter of weeks to a few decades. These reductions would also prevent an estimated two to four million deaths from air pollution and avoid billions of dollars of crop loss annually, according to a study commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization.

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

I will never forget the day when I was admitted into the university.