阅读理解 Whitening the world's roofs would offset the emissions of the world's cars for 20 years, according to a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Overall, installing lighter-colored roofs and pavement can cancel the heat effect of two years of global carbon dioxide emissions, Berkeley Lab says. It's the first roof-cooling study to use a global model to examine the issue. Lightening up roofs and pavement can offset 57 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, about double the amount the world emitted in 2006, the study found. It was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. Researchers used a conservative estimate of increased albedo, or solar reflection, suggesting that purely white roofs would be even better. They increased the albedo of all roof by 0.25 and pavement by 0.15. That means a black roof, which has an albedo of zero, would only need to be replaced by a roof of a cooler color—which might be more feasible to implement than a snowy white roof. Berkeley Lab says. The researchers extrapolated a roof's CO2 offset over its average lifespan. If all roofs were converted to white or cool colors, they would offset about 24 gigatons (24 billion metric tons) of CO2, but only once. But assuming roofs last about 20 years, the researchers came up with 1.2 gigatons per year. That equates to offsetting the emissions of roughly 300 million cars, all the in the world, for 20 years. Pavement and roofs cover 50 to 65 percent of urban areas and cause a heat-island effect because they absorb so much heat. That's why cities are significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. This effect makes it harder—and therefore more expensive—to keep buildings cool in the summer. Winds also move the heat into the atmosphere, causing a regional warming effect. Energy secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel laurete in physics (and former Berkeley Lab director), has advocated white roofs for years. He put his words into actions by directing all Energy Department offices to install white roofs. All newly installed roofs will be white, and black roofs might be replaced when it is cost-effective over the lifetime of the roof. 'Cool roofs are one of the quickest and lowest-cost ways we can reduce our global carbon emissions and begin the hard work of slowing climate change.' He said in a statement.

阅读理解Directions:In this part of the test，there will be 5 passages for you to read. Each passage is followed by 4 questions or unfinished statements, and each question or unfinished statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. You are to decide on the best choice by blackening the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.Passage OneMr Gordon is right that the second industrial revolution involved never-to-be-repeated changes. Butthat does not mean that driverless cars count for nothing. Messrs Erixon and Weigel are also right toworry about the West’s dismal recent record in producing new companies. But many old firms are notrun by bureaucrats and have reinvented themselves many times over：General Electric must be on at leastits ninth life. And the impact of giant new firms bom in the past 20 years such as Uber, Google andFacebook should not be underestimated: they have all the Schumpeterian characteristics the authorsadmire.On the pessimists* side the strongest argument relies not on closely watching corporate and investorbehavior but rather on macro-level statistics on productivity. The figures from recent years are trulydismal. Karim Foda, of the Brookings Institution, calculates that labor productivity in the rich world isgrowing at its slowest rate since 1950. Total factor productivity (which tries to measure innovation) hasgrown at just 0.1% in advanced economies since 2004, well below its historical average.Optimists have two retorts. The first is that there must be something wrong with the figures. Onepossibility is that they fail to count the huge consumer surplus given away free of charge on the Internet.But this is unconvincing. The official figures may well be understating the impact of the Internetrevolution, just as they downplayed the impact of electricity and cars in the past, but they are notunderstating it enough to explain the recent decline in productivity growth.Another, second line of argument that the productivity revolution has only just begun is morepersuasive. Over the past decade many IT companies may have focused on things that were more “ funthan fundamental” in Paul Krugman’s phrase. But Silicon Valley’s best companies are certainly focusingon things that change the material world.Uber and Airbnb are bringing dramatic improvements to two large industries that have been more orless stuck for decades. Morgan Stanley estimates that driverless cars could result in $ 507 billion a yearof productivity gains in America, mainly from people being able to stare at their laptops instead of at theroad.

阅读理解There are Americans who visit France and come back saying “the French are so rude. ”I feel differently. I think Americans perceive French behavior “rude” because it doesnt follow American rules. You cant assume that everyone in France should speak English. You cant approach a French stranger with a big American hello and “how are you” and expect them to respond in kind. However, if you look them in the eye, give a slight nod with a gentle hello, they will respond favorably. Most French people I meet are subtle and dignified. They are not loud, and they are reserved in their expressions. We like to say words like “great”, “magnificent”, or “marvelous ”The French will say “pas mal” (not bad) even if they win the lottery! And you will be wrong if you think Europeans dont have their own negative idea of Americans. Most young Europeans Ive met view Americans as “fake” and loud, since we do tend to have big hellos and smiles for strangers and ask “how are you” and walk away before a response. We should make a conscious effort to show the French that we can adjust to our surroundings, and that we dont expect to enter a foreign country and have everything be just as we wish it to be. I wasn’t able to completely forget my American roots during my stay. I was still the one getting strange looks wearing my sandals in the cold (with socks of course). I was still the one with the loudest laugh. And I could never quite get my voice to that level which is “loud enough for the waiter to hear but not nearby diners” I will always feel a bit like an awkward teenager as I stumble my way around Europe. I was very lucky in that my French friends insisted my American idiosyncrasies (习性) were charming and deserving of acceptance. So look at the French in a new light. They have a rich culture, a rich past. I can attest to the fact that if you are kind and polite, you will gain friends, and perhaps even improve foreign relations!

阅读理解Passage four: Questions are based on the following passage

阅读理解 Humanity has passed a milestone: more people live in cities than in rural areas. The current rate of urbanization is unprecedented in our history. In 1950, only 29% of people lived in cities, by 2050, 70% are projected to do so—most of them in poorer countries. Among many other issues, this rapid concentration makes cities a front line in the battles against climate change and pollution. Confronting the challenges of rampant urbanization demands integration multidisciplinary approaches, and new thinking. Take the building boom associated with the increased wealth of urban areas, and its impact on greenhouse-gas emissions as example. In China alone, the United Nations Environmental Program estimates the energy demand for heating homes build over the next decade could increase by some 430 terawatt-hours, or 4% of China's total energy use in 2003. Worldwide, the energy consumed by buildings already accounts for around 45% of greenhouse-gas emissions. Fortunately, researchers in Germany and elsewhere have already shown that they can reduce that energy consumption by 80%-90%, just by overhauling obsolete building designs and using existing technologies. These ultra-efficient buildings demand that planners, architects, engineers and building scientists work together from the outset, and require higher levels of expertise the conventional buildings. But such buildings are often cheaper than those built using conventions methods. Research is also needed to develop technologies, materials and energyconcepts; the green building research today is fragmented and poorly funded. Expanding cities must embrace such technologies and strategies—and not just in the developed nations. Many poorer countries have a rich tradition of adapting buildings to look at practices, environments and climates—a home-grown approach to integrated design that has been all but been lost in the West. They now have an opportunity to combine these traditional approaches with modem technologies. Integrated thinking is also needed to mitigate urban air pollution, which is becoming serious health and environmental risk in many regions—as shown by China's struggle to clean up Beijing's air for the Olympics. Understanding air pollution will require researchers from multiple disciplines, from atmospheric chemistry to meteorology, working over scales from street level to global. And reducing it will require integrated policies for urban planning, transport and housing—not least to reduce the use of cars.

阅读理解Cultural rules determine every aspect of food consumption. Who eats together defines social units.For example, in some societies, the nuclear family is the unit that regularly eats together. Theanthropologist Mary Douglas has pointed out that, for the English, the kind of meal and the kind offood that is served relate to the kinds of social links between people who are eating together. Shedistinguishes between regular meals, Sunday meals when relatives may come, and cocktail partiesfor acquaintances. The food served symbolizes the occasion and reflects who is present. For example,only snacks are served at a cocktail party. It would be inappropriate to serve a steak or hamburgers.The distinctions among cocktails, regular meals, and special dinners mark the social boundariesbetween those guests who are invited for drinks, those who are invited to dinner, and those whocome to a family meal. In this example, the type of food symbolizes the category of guest and withwhom it is eaten.In some New Guinea societies, the nuclear family is not the unit that eats together. The men taketheir meals in a men’s house, separately from their wives and children. Women prepare and eat theirfood in their own houses and take the husband’s portion to the men’s house. The women eat withtheir children in their own houses. This pattern is also widespread among Near Eastern societies.Eating is a metaphor that is sometimes used to signify marriage. In many New Guinea societies, likethat of the Lesu on the island of New Ireland in the Pacific and that of the Trobriand Islanders,marriage is symbolized by the couple’s eating together for the first time. Eating symbolizes their newstatus as a married couple. In U.S. society, it is just the reverse. A couple may go out to dinner on afirst date.Other cultural rules have to do with taboos against eating certain things. In some societies, membersof a clan, a type of kin (family) group, are not allowed to eat the animal or bird that is their totemicancestor. Since they believe themselves to be descended from that ancestor, it would be like eatingthat ancestor or eating themselves.There is also an association between food prohibitions and rank, which is found in its most extremeform in the caste system of India. A caste system consists of ranked groups, each with a differenteconomic specialization. In India, there is an association between caste and the idea of pollution.Members of highly ranked groups can be polluted by coming into contact with the bodily secretions,particularly saliva, of individuals of lower-ranked castes. Because of the fear of pollution, Brahmansand other high-ranked individuals will not share food with, not eat from the same plate as, not evenaccept food from an individual or from a low-ranking caste.

阅读理解 It used to be that a corporation's capital consisted of tangible assets such as buildings, machines, and finished goods. But, in the information economy, value has shifted rapidly from tangible to intangible assets, such as management skills and customer loyalty. But how do you measure intangible assets? Karl Erik Sveiby began trying to answer that question as a magazine publisher in Sweden and went to become Scandinavia's leading authority on knowledge-based businesses. In his latest book, The New Organizational Wealth, he offers insights into valuing and managing intangible assets. Noting that Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software firm, once traded at an average share price of $70 at a time when its book value was $7, Sveiby asks: 'What is it about Microsoft that makes it worth 10 times the value of its recorded assets? What is the nature of that additional value that is perceived by the market but not recorded by the company?' Sveiby's answer is intangible assets, which he defines as employee competence, internal structures (systems, patents, etc.), and external structures (customer and supplier relationships and the organization's image). Because of these factors, it follows that owners hold a kind of intangible equity in the company, in addition to tangible assets such as cash and accounts receivable. Since knowledge is a key intangible asset, the ability to transfer knowledge from one employee to another, or from outside sources to employees, is a key business capacity, in Sveiby's view. The greater the transfer of knowledge, the more overall employee competence improves. The best method for transferring knowledge, says Sveiby, is through direct experience with a subject rather than simply listening to someone or reading about it. Experience enables learning more than overt teaching because people acquire knowledge tacitly, by observation and listening in an unstructured environment. And, he adds, people will more readily learn from an activity if they enjoy it. Once the flow of information within an organization is managed properly, the competence of the organization increases, and the relations with customers improve. But Sveiby also points out that knowledge and information are not the same thing. Information has no value until it becomes integrated knowledge and therefore useful.

阅读理解Directions: In this part for the test, there will be 5 passages for you to read. Each passage is followed by 4 questions or unfinished statement, and each question or unfinished statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. You are to decide on the best choice by blackening the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.Passage One My last flight to Rome landed at stupid o’clock in the morning so I was almost looking forward to getting a cup of hot coffee from the flight crew. Instead, I opted for holding my eyelids up with two fingers so I could find the first coffee shop in the airport. Coffee always tastes terrible on planes and there could be a simple — and disgusting — reason why.A couple of weeks ago, an assortment of airline employees spilled some of their industry’s secrets in an Ask Reddit thread, and two of them had some unpleasant things to say about the coffee-makers. A user named Muddbutt7 wrote:“ Sometimes, the vehicle that fills the potable water for washing hands and making coffee is parked next to the vehicle that in used to dump the [toilets] and fill the blue juice for the lavatories. They’re not supposed to. Sometimes, they parked at a distance from each other, which is policy, yet the guy who is filling the water is using gloves that he hasn’t in over 2 years. ”While a second user named Worseto added:“The coffee is absolutely disgusting because no one washes the container that goes out every morning. The station agents who get paid way too little don’t give a [ expletive ] about cleaning it. I certainly didn’t when I worked for AA. Also, because we weren’t given the proper supplies to clean it. We pretty much just rinsed it out and dumped coffee into it. ”After reading those sort of stomach-churning confessions, Huffington Post attempted to determine how true those statements are. Abbie Unger, a former flight attendant, told the site:“It is true that the portable water tanks are not cleaned. But they are only filled with potable (drinkable) water, so it’s not like there is old coffee in a big container somewhere. The water doesn’t make for an excellent cup of coffee, but it’s not unsafe. ”So basically, the reason that cup of Starbucks during your Delta flight tastes worse than the cup you had at the airport is because of the water, which is a point that has been raised previously. The Environmental Protection Agency began investigating the safety of the water on airplanes in 2004, after discovering that 15%—or 1. 5 out of every 10 planes—tested positive for coliform bacteria in the drinking water.In 2013, NBC 5 looked into whether those numbers had improved and discovered that 12% of planes had at least one positive test for coliform in what was then the EPA’s most recent survey. Although the EPA said that there had not been any cases of anyone getting sick from the water onboard a plane, insiders still say that the tanks 一 and the hoses that are used to fill them 一 can be pretty gross (“pretty gross” is a highly scientific term).In a Forbes piece called “Why Airline Crews Skip the Coffee and Tea On Board”，former US Air employee John Goglia wrote:“Thirty years ago when I was working for US Air, we began a process to bleach the water tanks that hold the water and flush out the system. This was done on a regular basis. Yet, it was clear to anyone working on these tanks and their hoses that a lot of sediment was accumulating in the system, sediment that was akin to pond scum. Even after the tanks were bleached and flushed，some sediment always remained. ”Of course, there could be other reasons why the coffee tastes so unpleasant. Cornell University scientists believe that the loud, inescapable sound of cabin noise can affect the way we both perceive and taste foods during flight. Either way, we might just stick with coffee served at ground level from now on.

阅读理解Itisallverywelltoblametrafficjams,thecostofpetrolandthequickpaceofmodernlite,butmannersontheroadsarebecominghorrible.Everybodyknowsthatthenicestmenbecomemonstersbehindthewheel.Itisverywell,again,tohaveatigerinthetank,buttohaveoneinthedriver’sseatisanothermatteraltogether.Youmighttoleratetheoddroad-hog,therudeandinconsideratedriver,butnowadaysthewell-manneredmotorististheexceptiontotherule.Perhapsthesituationcallsfora“BeKindtoOtherDrivers”campaign,otherwiseitmaygetcompletelyoutofhand.Roadpolitenessisnotonlygoodmanners,butgoodsensetoo.Ittakesthemostcool-headedandgood-temperedofdriverstoresistthetemptationtorevengewhensubjectedtouncivilizedbehavior.Ontheotherhand,alittlepolitenessgoesalongwaytowardsrelievingthetensionsofmotoring.Afriendlynodorawaveofacknowledgementinresponsetoanactofpolitenesshelpstocreateanatmosphereofgoodwillandtolerancesonecessaryinmoderntrafficconditions.Butsuchacknowledgementsofpolitenessarealltooraretoday.Manydriversnowadaysdon’tevenseemabletorecognizepolitenesswhentheyseeit.However,misplacedpolitenesscanalsobedangerous.Typicalexamplesarethedriverwhobrakesviolentlytoallowacartoemergefromasidestreetatsomehazardtofollowingtraffic,whenafewsecondslatertheroadwouldbeclearanyway;orthemanwhowavesachildacrossazebracrossingintothepathofoncomingvehiclesthatmaybeunabletostopintime.Thesamegoesforencouragingoldladiestocrosstheroadwhereverandwhenevertheycareto.Italwaysamazesmethatthehighwaysarenotcoveredwiththedeadbodiesofthesegrannies.Aveterandriverwhosemannersarefaultless,toldmeitwouldhelpifmotoristslearnttofiltercorrectlyintotrafficstreamsoneatatimewithoutcausingthetotalblockagesthatgiverisetobadtemper.Unfortunately,modernmotoristscan’tevenlearntodrive,letalonemasterthesubtleraspectsofboatmanship.Yearsagotheexpertswarnedusthatthecar-ownershipexplosionwoulddemandalotmoregive-and-takefromallroadusers.Itishightimeforallofustotakethismessagetoheart.

阅读理解 Imagine a disease spreading across the globe, killing mostly middle-aged people or leaving them chronically disabled. Then one day researchers come up with a drug that can prevent some of the disease's nastier effects. You would think the world's ageing public would be eternally grateful. The disease does exist. It is called tobacco addiction. The drug too is real and in animal tests has prevented lung damage that leads to emphysema. But the inventors have received no bouquets. Prevailing medical opinion seems to be that the drug is a mere sideshow, distracting smokers from the task of quitting. Another experimental drug, which could protect smokers against cancer, is also viewed with suspicion because it could give smokers an excuse not to quit. On the face of it these responses make sense. It is ingrained in society that smokers have only themselves to blame and their salvation lies in a simple act of will. If they will not quit smoking, they cannot expect help from anyone else. But this logic is flawed. Check a survey of smokers and you find two-thirds want to give up and one-third will have tried in the previous year. Yet, even with nicotine gum, patches and drugs to ease the ordeal, the quit rate is still under 10 per cent. In the UK, the proportion of people who smoke has not fallen in a decade. Tobacco has a powerful grip, and many smokers are caught in a trap they cannot escape: they have a disease like any other and deserve the chance to reduce the harm it does to them. This reasoning is hard for many to swallow. It certainly leaves governments and anti-smoking groups in a bind. They are happy to pay lip service to methods for reducing harm—of which there are a growing number—but they are slow to create policies based upon them. European Union countries, for example, took years to even consider regulating the dangerous additives in cigarettes. One fear is that methods for reducing harm will dilute the message that tobacco kills—especially when given to youngsters. But that message won't change, in the present case, even if both drugs turn out to work in human trials, they would not protect against all the deadly side effects of smoking. And the drugs do not have to be free to all. They could be available only on prescription for people who doctors believe genuinely cannot give up. There are things that no drug aimed at harm reduction will ever be able to do. It will not cut passive smoking or stop tobacco companies persuading millions of teenagers to light up. For these reasons all other ways to counter smoking must continue, from banning tobacco advertising to raising tobacco taxes. But it would be a mistake to ignore the harm reduction measures. For those who are not convinced, forget smokers for a moment. Preventive drugs could also help non-smokers, especially those working long hours as, say, musicians and bar staff in smoky rooms. Should we deny them too?

阅读理解We’ve all heard about endangered animals. Creatures like the critically endangered black rhinoceros are famous. But what are the most endangered plants? They might not be as exciting or loveable as animals, but they are just as important to the ecosystem — and humanity relies on that ecosystem. Here are three of the most threatened plants today.【B6】______These plants occupy some of the most inaccessible, remote parts of our planet. They are threatened by habitat destruction, illegal collection, poaching, and competition with invading species. Attenborough’s pitcher plant is known only from the relatively inaccessible summit of Mount Victoria in Palawan in the Philippines. There are thought to be only a few hundred of them.【B7】______Attenborough’s pitcher plant is one of the biggest, with pitchers up to 30 cm in height that can trap insects and rats. It was only discovered in 2007 when a team of botanists, tipped off by two Christian missionaries, scaled Mount Victoria. 【B8】______ The suicide palm is a gigantic palm found only in remote parts of north-west Madagascar. It lives for about 50 years, then flowers only once, and dies soon after. Suicide palms were discovered in 2005 by a cashew plantation manager during a family outing, and formally described in 2008. With trunks reaching 18 m in height, and huge fan-leaves up to 5 m across, the palms can be seen on Google Earth. 【B9】______ The coral tree, with its bright red flowers and spiny trunk, occurs only in the remote forests of south-east Tanzania.【B10】______However, the forest patch was cleared to grow biofuels, and the species was feared to have gone extinct again until it was re-rediscovered in 2011. There are now fewer than 50 mature individuals in the wild, in a single unprotected location. A. Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants that trap animals in liquid-filled bowls called pitchers. B. They are almost all classed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). C. It was declared extinct in 1998, but rediscovered in 2001 in a small patch of forest. D. As a result, the population has dropped more than 95% over the last 20 years. E. There are only about 90 in the wild. F. It is named after British natural history broadcaster David Attenborough.

阅读理解The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photographs fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting.Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves—anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art. except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph 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 harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photographys prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon or Pop painting during the 1960s. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting—that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse—presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art.Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion 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——in short, an art.

阅读理解Passage One When Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says hes a translator between two hostile tribes the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs

阅读理解A UCSF study has revealed new information about how the brain directs the body to make movements. The key factor is “noise” in the brain’s signaling, and it helps explain why all movement is not carried out with the same level of precision.Understanding where noise arises in the brain has implications for advancing research in neuromotor control and in developing therapies for disorders where control is impaired, such as Parkinson’s disease.The new study was developed “to understand brain machinery behind such common movements as typing, walking through a doorway or just pointing at an object,” says Stephen Lisberger, PhD, senior study investigator who is director of the W. M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Study co-investigators are Leslie C. Osborne, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, and William Bialek, PhD, professor of physics at Princeton University.The study findings, reported in the September 15 issue of the journal Nature, are part of ongoing research by Lisberger and colleagues on the neural mechanisms that allow the brain to learn and maintain skills and behavior. These basic functions are carried out through the coordination of different nerve cells within the brain’s neural circuits. “To make a movement, the brain takes the electrical activity of many neurons and combines them to make muscle contractions,” Lisberger explains. “But the movements aren’t always perfect. So we asked, what gets in the way?” The answer, he says, is “noise”, which is defined as the difference between what is actually occurring and what the brain perceives. He offers making a foul shot in basketball as an example. If there were no noise in the neuromotor system, a player would be able to perform the same motion over and over and never miss a shot.“Understanding how noise is reduced to very precise commands helps us understand how those commands are created,” says Lisberger, who also is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a UCSF professor of physiology.In the study, the research team focused on a movement that all primates are very skilled at: an eye movement known as “smooth pursuit” that allows the eyes to track a moving target. In a series of exercises with monkeys in which the animals would track visual targets, the researchers measured neural activity and smooth pursuit eye movements. From this data, the team analyzed the difference between how accurately the animals actually tracked a moving object and how accurately the brain perceived the trajectory. Findings showed that both the smooth pursuit system and the brain’s perceptual system were nearly equal.“This teaches us that these very different neural processes are limited to the same degree by the same noise sources,” says Lisberger. “And it shows that both processes are very good at reducing noise.” He concludes, “Because the brain is noisy, our motor systems don’t always do what it tells us to. Making precise movements in the face of this noise is a challenge.”

阅读理解Passage three: Questions are based on the following passage

阅读理解Water problems in the future will become more intense and more complex. Our increasingpopulation will tremendously increase urban wastes, primarily sewage. On the other hand, increasingdemands for water will decease substantially the amount of water available for diluting wastes.Rapidly expanding industries which involve more and more complex chemical processes willproduce large volumes of liquid wastes, and many of these will contain chemicals which are noxious.To feed our rapidly expanding population, agriculture will have to be intensified. This will involveever-increasing quantities of agricultural chemicals. From this, it is apparent that drastic steps mustbe taken immediately to develop corrective measures for the pollution problem.There are two ways by which this pollution problem can be dwindled. The first relates to thetreatment of wastes to decrease their pollution hazard. This involves the processing of solid wastes“prior to” disposal and the treatment of liquid wastes, or effluents, to permit the reuse of the water orminimize pollution upon final disposal.A second approach is to develop an economic use for all or a part of the wastes. Farm manure isspread in fields as a nutrient or organic supplement. Effluents from sewage disposal plants are usedin some areas both for irrigation and for the nutrients contained. Effluents from other processingplants may also be used as a supplemental source of water. Many industries, such as meat andpoultry processing plants, are currently converting former waste products into marketable byproducts.Other industries are potential economic uses for waste products.

阅读理解Most young people enjoy some form of physical activity. It may be walking, cycling or swimming,or in winter, skating or skiing. It may be game of some kind football, hockey, golf, or tennis. It maybe mountaineering.Those who have a passion for climbing high and difficult mountains are often looked upon withastonishment. Why are men and women willing to suffer cold and hardship, and to take risks on highmountains? This astonishment is caused probably by the difference between mountaineering andother forms of activity to which men give their leisure.Mountaineering is a sport and not a game. There are no man-made rules, as there are for such gamesas golf and football. There are, of course, rules of a different kind which it would be dangerous toignore, but it is this freedom from man-made rules that makes mountaineering attractive to manypeople. Those who climb mountains are free to use their own methods.If we compare mountaineering and other more familiar sports, we might think that one big differenceis that mountaineering is not a “team game”. We should be mistaken in this. There are, it is true, no“matches” between “teams” of climbers, but when climbers are on a rock face linked by a rope onwhich their lives may depend, there is obviously teamwork.The mountain climber knows that he may have to fight forces that are stronger and more powerfulthan man. He has to fight the forces of nature. His sport requires high mental and physical qualities.A mountain climber continues to improve in skill year after year. A skier is probably past his best bythe age of thirty, and most international tennis champions are in their early twenties. But it is notunusual for man of fifty or sixty to climb the highest mountains in Alps. They may take more timethan younger men, but they probably climb with more skill and less waste of effort, and theircertainly experience equal enjoyment.

阅读理解The productivity of Americans employed in private businesses has declined. The productivity of workers in countries such as Japan and Germany is increasing. American machine tools, on average, are old, relatively inefficient, and rapidly becoming obsolete, whereas those of our competitors overseas, in comparison, are newer and more efficient. We are no longer the most productive workers in the world. We are no longer the leaders in industrial innovation. We are an immensely wealthy nation of educated men and women who seem to have lost sight of the fact that everything—from the simplest necessities to the finest luxuries—must be produced through our own collective hard work. We have come to expect automatic increases in our collective standard of living, but we seem to have forgotten that these increases are possible only when our productivity continues to grow.One thing that must change is the rate at which we substitute capital equipment for human labor. Simply put, our labor force has increased at a far greater rate than has our stock of capital investment. We seem to have forgotten that our past productivity gains, to a large extent, were realized from substitutions of capital for human labor. Today, 3 times as many robots are listed as capital assets by Japanese firms as by United States firms.There is no doubt that robots will become a common sight in American factories. Representing a new generation of technology, robots will replace factory labor much as the farm tractor replaced the horse. Robot technology has much to offer. It offers higher levels of productivity and quality at lower costs; in promises to free men and women from the dull, repetitious toil of the factory; it is likely to have an impact on society comparable to that made by the growth of computer technology.

阅读理解Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but it is difficult to appreciate just how much trouble until you read the report from the Modern Language Association (MLA). The report is about Ph. D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track position. The core of the problem is the job market. The MLA report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph. D. s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the MLA got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list with the number of new graduates. But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting. Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don’t want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, “adjunct” professors, rather than full-time, tenure-trackprofessors, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire. These trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly, bulking up on professors and graduate programs. When the boom ended and enrollments declined, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were seeking out new constituencies — among them, women and minorities — and creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students. Those reforms worked: about twice as many people attend college per capita now as they did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges have had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university.

阅读理解 Liver disease is the 12th-leading cause of death in the U.S., chiefly because once it's determined that a patient needs a new liver it's very difficult to get one. Even in case where a suitable donor match is found, there's guarantee a transplant will be successful. But researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken a huge step toward building functioning livers in the lab, successfully transplanting culture-grown livers into rats. The livers aren't grown from scratch, but rather within the infrastructure of a donor liver. The liver cells in the donor organ are washed out with a detergent that gently strips away the liver cells, leaving behind a biological scaffold of proteins and extracellular architecture that is very hard to duplicate synthetically. With all of that complicated infrastructure already in place, the researchers then seeded the scaffold (支架) with liver cells isolated from healthy livers, as well as some special endothelial cells to line the bold vessels. Once repopulated with healthy cells, these livers lived in culture for 10 days. The team also transplanted some two-day-old recellularized livers back into rats, where they continued to thrive for eight hours while connected into the rats' vascular systems. However, the current method isn't perfect and cannot seem to repopulate the blood vessels quite densely enough and the transplanted livers can't keep functioning for more than about 24 hours (hence the eight-hour maximum for the rat transplant). But the initial successes are promising, and the team thinks they can overcome the blood vessel problem and get fully functioning livers into rats within two years. It still might be a decade before the tech hits the clinic, but if nothing goes horribly wrong—and especially if stem-cell research establishes a reliable way to create health liver cells from the very patients who need transplants—lab-generated livers that are perfect matches for their recipients could become a reality.