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A Letter for Offering Financial Aid You want to contribute to Project Hope by offering financial aid to a child in a remote area. Write a letter to the department concerned, asking them to help find a candidate. You should specify what kind of child you want to help and how you will carry out your plan. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

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A growing number of women are rising to the top—and beginning to change the culture of the workplace. This should be a season of celebration. After all, by many measures, there"s never been a better time to be a woman. In places like Scandinavia and Britain, a third or more of all corporate managers are now women. The number of female executive directors of FISE 100 companies nearly doubled from 2000 to 2004. Latin America has seen a 50 percent jump in the number of women politicians in the last decade. Japan voted 26 new female parliamentarians into office this year. Of course, the jewel in the equal-opportunity crown was this fall"s election of Angela Merkel—once nicknamed "the Girl" by Helmut Kohl—to Germany"s highest office. But as always, statistics tell a multifaceted story. Sure, it"s no longer an anomaly to have a female CEO—but there are still only 17 female executive directors in the largest FTSE 100 companies. In the EU Parliament, only 23 out of 162 members are female. In Britain, studies show that women have never been more dissatisfied with the workplace. No wonder: the EU pay gap between men and women shrank only one point in the last couple of years, to 17.5 percent. So where does all this leave us? With some big challenges that require more female leadership to solve. At some major companies—including Shell and British Telecom—women are combating the old-boys" club atmosphere by starting their own networks, linking top female leaders with up-and-comers they can mentor. Labor flexibility is also on the agenda; in parts of Europe, top female legislators have fought to give employees with children or elderly parents the right to ask for adjustable hours. Perhaps most important, there is an increasingly vibrant debate around work-life balance. Study after study shows that it is a working woman"s second full-time job—as caregiver—that makes it most difficult for her to stay on the career ladder. While extra benefits and longer maternity, leave can help, they aren"t a complete solution. Clearly, some out-of-the-box thinking is required. And that"s where women come in. In countries like Cameroon, Bolivia and Malaysia, greater numbers of women in public office have resulted in less spending on the military and more on health, education and infrastructure. Norway"s woman-heavy Parliament recently passed a law mandating that 40 percent of directors on corporate boards be women. And in Germany, the archetypal outsider—a woman who grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain—will likely take the helm in a country with virtually no other women in top positions of power. No longer "the Girl" but poised to become the chancellor, Merkel is a symbol of how far women have come—and the work that remains to be done.

Should anyone much care whether an American boy living overseas gets six vicious thwacks on his backside? So much has been argued, rejoined and rehashed about the case of Michael Fay, an 18-year-old convicted of vandalism and sentenced to a caning in Singapore, that an otherwise sorry little episode has shaded into a certified International Incident, complete with intercessions by the U.S. head of state. An affair has outraged American libertarians even as it has animated a general debate about morality East and West and the proper functioning of U.S. law and order. Which, to all appearances, is what Singapore wanted. The question of whether anyone should care about Michael Fay is idle: though Singapore officials profess shock at the attention his case had drawn, they know Americans care deeply about the many sides of this issue. Does a teenager convicted of spraying cars with easily removable paint deserve half a dozen powerful strokes? At what point does swift, sure punishment become torture? By what moral authority can America, with its high rates of lawlessness and license, preach of a safe society about human rights? The caning sentence has concentrated minds wondrously on an already lively domestic debate over what constitutes a due balance between individual and majority rights. Too bad Michael Fay has become a focus for this discussion. Not only does he seem destined to be pummeled and immobilized, but the use of Singapore as a standard for judging any other society, let alone the cacophonous U.S., is fairly worthless. To begin with, Singapore is an offshore republic that tightly limits immigration. Imagine crime-ridden LOS Angeles, to which Singapore is sometimes contrasted, with hardly any inflow of the hard-luck, often desperate fortune seekers who flock to big cities. Even without its government"s disciplinary measures, Singapore more than plausibly would be much the same as it is now. An academic commonplace today is that the major factor determining social peace and prosperity is culture—a sense of common identity, tradition and values. Unlike Singapore, though, the U.S. today is a nation in search of a common culture, trying to be a universal society that assimilates the traditions of people from all over the world. Efforts to safeguard minority as well as individual rights have produced a gridlock in the justice system. Its troubles stem more from the decay of family life than from any government failures. Few societies can afford to look on complacently. As travel eases and cultures intermix, the American experience is becoming the world"s. The circumstances of this affair—evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property—suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights.

You are a college graduate and try to write a letter to a foreign university, expressing your desire of getting admitted. Write a letter of self-introduction based on the following outline: 1) an introduction of your education background and hopes; 2) giving your reasons for attending this university; 3) asking for application forms, financial aids, etc. You should write about 100 words and do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address.

Suppose you are Li Ming. You learn that your friend John was admitted by a famous university. You also study in the university. Write a letter of congratulation to him to 1) express your congratulations 2) give a brief account of the university 3) and give him your best wishes. The letter should be around 100 words. Write it neatly and do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. You do not need to write the address.

The journal Science is adding an extra round of statistical checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced today. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are contributing to the irreproducibility of many published research findings. "Readers must have confidence in the conclusions published in our journal," writes McNutt in an editorial. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has appointed seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors(SBoRE). Manuscript will be flagged up for additional scrutiny by the journal' s internal editors, or by its existing Board of Reviewing Editors or by outside peer reviewers. The SBoRE panel will then find external statisticians to review these manuscripts. Asked whether any particular papers had impelled the change, McNutt said: "The creation of the ' statistics board' was motivated by concerns broadly with the application of statistics and data analysis in scientific research and is part of Science' s overall drive to increase reproducibility in the research we publish." Giovanni Parmigiani, a biostatistician at the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the SBoRE group, says he expects the board to "play primarily an advisory role." He agreed to join because he "found the foresight behind the establishment of the SBoRE to be novel, unique and likely to have a lasting impact. This impact will not only be through the publications in Science itself, but hopefully through a larger group of publishing places that may want to model their approach after Science." John Ioannidis, a physician who studies research methodology, says that the policy is "a most welcome step forward" and "long overdue." "Most journals are weak in statistical review, and this damages the quality of what they publish. I think that, for the majority of scientific papers nowadays, statistical review is more essential than expert review," he says. But he noted that biomedical journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet pay strong attention to statistical review. Professional scientists are expected to know how to analyze data, but statistical errors are alarmingly common in published research, according to David Vaux, a cell biologist. Researchers should improve their standards, he wrote in 2012, but journals should also take a tougher line, "engaging reviewers who are statistically literate and editors who can verify the process". Vaux says that Science's idea to pass some papers to statisticians "has some merit, but a weakness is that it relies on the board of reviewing editors to identify 'the papers that need scrutiny' in the first place."

On a weekday night this January, thousands of flag-waving youths packed Olaya Street, Riyadh"s main shopping strip, to cheer a memorable Saudi victory in the GCC Cup football final. One car, rock music blaring from its stereo, squealed to a stop, blocking an intersection. The passengers leapt out, clambered on to the roof and danced wildly in front of the honking crowd. Having paralyzed the traffic across half the city, they sped off before the police could catch them. Such public occasion was once unthinkable in the rigid conformist kingdom, but now young people there and in other Gulf States are increasingly willing to challenge authority. That does not make them rebels: respect for elders, for religious duty and for maintaining family bonds remain preeminent values, and premarital sex is generally out of the question. Yet demography is beginning to put pressure on ultra-conservative norms. After all, 60% of the Gulf"s native population is under the age of 25. With many more of its citizens in school than in the workforce, the region faces at least a generation of rocketing demand for employment. In every single GCC country the native workforce will double by 2020. In Saudi Arabia it will grow from 3.3m now to over Sm. The task of managing this surge would be daunting enough for any society, but is particularly forbidding in this region, for several reasons. The first is that the Gulf suffers from a lopsided labor structure. This goes back to the 1970s, when ballooning oil incomes allowed governments to import millions of foreign workers and to dispense cozy jobs to the locals. The result is a two-tier workforce, with outsiders working mostly in the private sector and natives monopolizing the state bureaucracy. Private firms are as productive as any. But within the government, claims one study, workers are worth only a quarter of what they get paid. Similarly, in the education sector, 30 years spent keeping pace with soaring student numbers has taken a heavy toll on standards. The Saudi school system, for instance, today has to cope with 5m students, eight times more than in 1970. And many Gulf countries adapted their curricula from Egyptian models that are now thoroughly discredited. They continue to favor rote learning of "facts" intended to instill patriotism or religious values. Even worse, the system as a whole discourages intellectual curiosity. It channels students into acquiring prestige degrees rather than gaining marketable skills. Of the 120,000 graduates that Saudi universities produced between 1995 and 1999, only 10,000 had studied technical subjects such as architecture or engineering. They accounted for only 2% of the total number of Saudis entering the job market.

During the traditional wedding ceremony, the【C1】______couple promise each other lifelong devotion. Yet, about one out of four American marriages ends in divorce. Since 1940, the divorce rate has more than doubled, and experts predict that, of all marriages that【C2】______in the 2000s, about 50% will end in divorce. The U.S. has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, perhaps【C3】______the highest. What goes wrong? The fact that divorce is so【C4】______in the United States does not mean that Americans consider marriage a casual, unimportant【C5】______. Just the opposite is【C6】______. Americans expect a great【C7】______from marriage. They seek physical, emotional, and intellectual compatibility. They want to be deeply loved and【C8】______. It is because Americans expect so much from marriage that so many get divorced. They prefer no marriage at all to a marriage without love and understanding. With typical American optimism, they end one marriage【C9】______that the next will be happier.【C10】______no-fault divorce laws in many states, it is easier than before to get a divorce. Some American women,【C11】______in unhappy marriages because they don't have the education or job【C12】______to support themselves and their children. But most American women believe that, if【C13】______, they can make it alone without a husband. When a couple gets divorced, the court may【C14】______the man to pay his former wife a monthly sum of money called alimony. The amount of alimony【C15】______on the husband's income, the wife's needs and the【C16】______of the marriage. 【C17】______, the court decides that a woman should pay her husband alimony. About 10% of American women【C18】______their husbands. The court may decide that she must continue to【C19】______him after the divorce. This is a rather new【C20】______in the United States.

Jeffrey Cohn and J. P. Flaum surveyed and interviewed the managing partners of 32 private equity firms (including Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Silver Lake) about their CEO search process and how it has changed over time. Among the surprises: Executives said they've learned to pay less attention to attributes such as track record and experience, the criteria typically most prized by recruiters, and to give more weight to softer skills. The researchers drew the following conclusions: Experience is overrated. When filling a CEO position, there's comfort in hiring someone with prior CEO and industry experience. But the first criterion can dramatically narrow the pool, and the second can yield, candidates who are so familiar with the industry that they're hidebound or likely just to recycle the strategic playbook from their last job. Similarly, overemphasizing quantifiable success in prior positions can be misleading, because results are often a function of "right place/right time" or organizational or team factors rather than one individual. And even within an industry, different competitive positions can demand very different skills—cost cutting versus product innovation versus business model change, for instance. Team-building skills are paramount. Of the 13 attributes included in the survey, the highest ranked was a candidate's ability to assemble a high-performing team. That makes sense, because many PE investments involve turnarounds in which the new CEO must completely rebuild the C-suite. To avoid leaders who won't excel at building teams, PE execs say, they watch out for candidates who use "I" too much when talking about accomplishments or who display so much intellectual horsepower that they come across as arrogant, which can inhibit hiring and developing A-level talent. Urgency outranks empathy. PE firms operate with strict timetables for when a company should be improved and the investment recouped through sale or IPO. (The typical goal is five years.) This ticking clock means that a portfolio company CEO can expect close oversight and faces heightened expectations a-bout the speed with which cost cuts or revenue growth will take place. While this doesn't mean that a CEO shouldn't listen to customers or show concern for employees, it does require moving decisively and without regrets. Resilience is a must. Parents understand that building resilience in children is important to character; PE types, too, cite it as an important leadership virtue. They've become skeptical about candidates who have skipped seamlessly from success to success. "PE firms want to see that a candidate has faced setbacks, made errors, and run adrift—yet lived to fight another day," according to the researchers' report. This attribute is especially important because in turnaround situations, leaders are likely to encounter some negative results. A final difference between private equity and public company CEO hiring: PE execs tend to judge very quickly—usually within nine months—whether a new hire is working out. Compared with public company directors, they are quick to engineer a failing CEO's exit—and when they think back, they often wish they'd moved even more quickly.

The quick adoption of the scheme may have indicated less about the state lawmakers" respect for working people than about a fear of risking their anger.

Studythefollowingpicturescarefullyandwriteanessayto1)describethepicture,2)deducethepurposeofthepainterofthepicture,3)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout160—200wordsneatly.

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That Louise Nevelson is believed by many critics to be the greatest twentieth-century sculptor is all the more remarkable because the greatest resistance to women artists has been, until recently, in the field of sculpture. Since Neolithic times, sculpture has been considered the prerogative of men, partly, perhaps, for purely physical reasons: it was erroneously assumed that women were not suited for the hard manual labor required in sculpting stone, carving wood, or working in metal. It has been only during the twentieth century that women sculptors have been recognized as major artists, and it has been in the United States, especially since the decades of the fifties and sixties, that women sculptors have shown the greatest originality and creative power. Their rise to prominence parallels the development of sculpture itself in the United States: while there had been a few talented sculptors in the United States before the 1940"s, it was only after 1945 — when New York was rapidly becoming the art capital of the world — that major sculpture was produced in the United States. Some of the best was the work of women. By far the most outstanding of these women is Louise Nevelson, who in the eyes of many critics is the most original female artist alive today. One famous and influential critic, Hilton Kramer, said of her work, "For myself, I think Ms. Nevelson succeeds where the painters often fail." Her works have been compared to the Cubist constructions of Picasso, the Surrealistic objects of Miro, and the Merzbau of Schwitters. Nevelson would be the first to admit that she has been influenced by all of these, as well as by African sculpture, and by Native American and pre-Columbian art, but she has absorbed all these influences and still created a distinctive art that expresses the urban landscape and the aesthetic sensibility of the twentieth century. Nevelson says, "I have always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except that it has to pass through a creative mind. " Using mostly discarded wooden objects like packing crates, broken pieces of furniture, and abandoned architectural ornaments, all of which she has hoarded for years, she assembles architectural constructions of great beauty and power. Creating very freely with no sketches, she glues and nails objects together, paints them black, or more rarely white or gold, and places them in boxes. These assemblages, walls, even entire environments create a mysterious, almost awe-inspiring atmosphere. Although she has denied any symbolic or religious intent in her works, their three-dimensional grandeur and even their titles, such as Sky Cathedral and Night Cathedral, suggest such connotations. In some ways, her most ambitious works are closer to architecture than to traditional sculpture, but then neither Louise Nevelson nor her art fits into any neat category.

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Back when we were kids, the hours spent with friends were too numerous to count. There were marathon telephone conversations, all-night studying and giggling sessions. Even after boyfriends entered the picture, our best friends remained irreplaceable. And time was the means by which we nurtured those friendships. Now as adult women we never seem to have enough time for anything. Husbands, kids, careers and avocations—all require attention; too often, making time for our friends comes last on the list of priorities. And yet, ironically, we need our friends as much as ever in adulthood. A friendship network is absolutely crucial for our well-being as adults. We have to do the hard work of building and sustaining the network. Here are some important ways for accomplishing this. Let go of your less central friendships. Many of our friendships were never meant to last a lifetime. It" s natural that some friendships have time limits. Furthermore, now everyone has a busy social calendar, so pull back from some people that you don" t really want to draw close to and give the most promising friendship a fair chance to grow. (41) Be willing to "drop everything" when you"re truly needed. You may get a call from a friend who is really depressed over a certain problem when you are just sitting down to enjoy a romantic dinner with your husband. This is just one of those instances when a friend"s needs mattered more. (42) Take advantage of the mails. Nearly all of us have pals living far away—friends we miss very much. Given the limited time available for visits and the high price of phone calls, writing is a fine way to keep in touch—and makes both sender and receiver feel good. (43) Risk expressing negative feelings. When time together is tough to come by, it"s natural to want the mood during that time to be upbeat. And many people fear that others will think less of you if you express the negative feelings like anger and hurt. (44) Don"t make your friends" problems your own. Sharing your friend"s grief is the way you show deep friendship. Never underestimate the value of loyalty. Loyalty has always been rated as one of the most desired qualities in friends. True loyalty can be a fairly subtle thing. Some people feel it means that, no matter what, your friend will always take your side. But real loyalty is being accepting the person, not necessarily of certain actions your friend might take. (45) Give the gift of time as often as time allows. Time is what we don"t have nearly enough of—and yet, armed with a little ingenuity, we can make it to give it to our friends. The last but not the least thing to keep a friendship alive is to say to your friends "I miss you and love you. " Saying that at the end of a phone conversation, or a visit, or writing it on a birthday card, can sustain your friendship for the times you aren"t together.[A] But taking on your friend"s pain doesn"t make that pain go away. There"s a big difference between empathy or recognizing a friend"s pain, and over identification, which makes the sufferer feel even weaker—"I must be in worse pain than I even thought, because the person I" m confiding in is suffering so much!" Remember troubled people just need their friends to stay grounded in their own feelings.[B] Remember honesty is the key to keeping a friendship real. Sharing your pain will actually deepen a friendship.[C] Besides, letters, cards and postcards have the virtue of being tangible—friends can keep them and reread them for years to come.[D] The trick is remembering that a little is better than none and that you can do two things at once. For instance, if you both go for a weekly aerobics, go on the same day. If you both want to go on vocation, schedule the same destination.[E] Careful listening, clear writing, close reading, plain speaking, and accurate description—will be invaluable. In tomorrow"s fast-paced business environment there will be precious little time to correct any misunderstandings. Communications breakdown may well become a fatal corporate disease.[F] Sometimes, because of our unbreakable commitments or other circumstances, we simply can"t give a needy friend the time we"d like. If you can"t be there at that given moment, say something like, "I wish I could be with you—I can hear that you"re in pain. May I call you tomorrow?" Be sure your friend knows she"s cared about.

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

And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can by no means be compared with these processes, and that they have to be required by a sort of special training.

Ruth Simmons joined Goldman Sachs"s board as an outside director in January 2000; a year later she became president of Brown University. For the rest of the decade she apparently managed both roles without attracting much criticism. But by the end of 2009 Ms. Simmons was under fire for having sat on Goldman " s compensation committee; how could she have let those enormous bonus payouts pass unremarked? By February the next year Ms. Simmons had left the board. The position was just taking up too much time, she said. Outside directors are supposed to serve as helpful, yet less biased, advisers on a firm"s board. Having made their wealth and their reputations elsewhere, they presumably have enough independence to disagree with the chief executive" s proposals. If the sky, and the share price, is falling, outside directors should be able to give advice based on having weathered their own crises. The researchers from Ohio University used a database that covered more than 10,000 firms and more than 64,000 different directors between 1989 and 2004. Then they simply checked which directors stayed from one proxy statement to the next. The most likely reason for departing a board was age, so the researchers concentrated on those "surprise" disappearances by directors under the age of 70. They found that after a surprise departure, the probability that the company will subsequently have to restate earnings increases by nearly 20%. The likelihood of being named in a federal class-action lawsuit also increases, and the stock is likely to perform worse. The effect tended to be larger for larger firms. Although a correlation between them leaving and subsequent bad performance at the firm is suggestive, it does not mean that such directors are always jumping off a sinking ship. Often they "trade up", leaving riskier, smaller firms for larger and more stable firms. But the researchers believe that outside directors have an easier time of avoiding a blow to their reputations if they leave a firm before bad news breaks, even if a review of history shows they were on the board at the time any wrongdoing occurred. Firms who want to keep their outside directors through tough times may have to create incentives. Otherwise outside directors will follow the example of Ms. Simmons, once again very popular on campus.