单选题 Caring for Elderly Parents Catches Many Unprepared A．Last July, Julie Baldocchi's mother had a massive stroke and was paralyzed. Baldocchi suddenly had to become a family caregiver, something that she wasn't prepared for. 'I was flying by the seat of my pants,' says Baldocchi, an employment specialist in San Francisco. Both of her parents are 83, and she knew her father couldn't handle her mother's care. The hospital recommended putting her mother in a nursing home. Baldocchi wasn't willing to do that. But moving her back into her parents' home created other problems. Baldocchi, 48, is married and lives about a mile away from her parents. She has a full-time job and has back problems that make it difficult for her to lift her mother. 'I couldn't do it all,' she says. 'But I didn't even know how to find help.' B．With help from the Family Caregiver Alliance, she eventually hired a live-in caregiver. 'But even if you plan intellectually and legally, you're never ready for the emotional impact,' Baldocchi says. In the first two months after her mother's stroke, she lost about 30 pounds as stress mounted. More than 42 million Americans provide family caregiving for an adult who needs help with daily activities, according to a 2009 survey by the AARP. An additional 61.6 million provided at least some care during the year. And many are unprepared. C．While many parents lack an advance care directive, it's the most basic and important step they can take. The directive includes several parts, including: a durable power of attomey, which gives someone legal authority to make financial decisions on another's behalf; a health care proxy, which is similar to the power of attorney, except it allows someone to make decisions regarding medical treatment; and a living will that outlines instructions for end-of-life care. (For example, parents can say if they want to be kept alive by artificial measures.) 'It's invaluable for the kids, because it's hard to make those decisions for a parent,' says Jennifer Cona, an elder-law attorney at Genser Dubow Genser Cona in Melville, N.Y. An advance care directive is the first line of defense if a situation arises, says Kathleen Kelly, executive director of the Family Caregiver Alliance, which supports and educates caregivers. Without an advance directive, the family will have to petition the court to be appointed the parent's legal guardian, says AgingCare.com. D．It's important for families to talk about Iong-term care so the adult children know their parents' preferences, wishes and goals, says Lynn Feinberg, a caregiving expert at AARP. But it's not an easy conversation. Elderly parents are sometimes suspicious of their children's financial motives, says Susan John, a financial planner at Financial Focus in Wolfeboro, N.H. One client asked John to hold a family meeting because they needed an intermediary to talk about financial issues, she says. And when there are many siblings, the family decisions can become a three-ring circus with much acrimony, says Ann-Margaret Carrozza, an elder-law attorney in Glen Cove, N.Y. Families who need information and help sorting out disagreements can call on elder-law attorneys, financial planners, geriatric care managers and caregiver support groups. In February, AARP said it will offer its members a new caregiving support service through financial services firm Genworth. E．Many families are unprepared for quick decisions, especially when they find out that Medicare doesn't pay for long-term care, Feinberg says. The median cost of a year in a private room at a nursing home in 2011 was $77,745, according to Genworth. And only those who have spent most of their assets can qualify for Medicaid to pay for the nursing home. F．Assisted living is another option. Residents can have their own apartment to maintain some independence. But the facilities generally provide personal care services, such as meals, housekeeping and assistance with activities. Still, it's not cheap: The national median cost in 2011 was $39,135, according to Genworth. Assisted living isn't covered by Medicaid. G．If they have a choice, at least 90% of elderly parents prefer to stay at home as long as they can, according to AARP research. But if the parents can no longer safely live at home, it can be hard for children to move them into an adult care facility. There may be another option. Sometimes the home can be modified so a parent can stay there. For example, Baldocchi put in a chair lift for her mother. She also arranged for a home caregiver. H．Family caregivers take over many responsibilities. One might manage a parent's finances, while another sibling will take the parent to doctors' appointments and shopping. Those who move in with a parent take on a significant and sustained burden of care. Jan Walker moved into her mother's home in Leesburg, Fla. After her mother, who is 83, had fallen, she wasn't able to get around as well. Walker, 55, has three brothers. But she is the only daughter, is divorced and has no children. 'I always knew that this was the role that I would have, and I guess my mind was prepared for it,' says Walker, who now is a full time caregiver and works from home as a tutorial instructor for a digital scrapbooking website. 'When you get into the trenches, it's literally baptism by fire,' she says. 'New things come up. It's not just about advance planning for finances or medical care. It's everything,' she says. I．Caregivers need to also watch their own health. 'There is such a thing as caregiver burnout,' Cona says. Among female caregivers 50 and older, 20% reported symptoms of depression, according to a 2010 study on working caregivers by MetLife. 'It's a hard job,' Walker says. 'But most worthwhile things are hard. She was always there for me when I needed a helping hand. It's only natural that I be here for her now.'

单选题 有人说，阅读决定着一个民族思维的深度和广度，对文化传承、国家发展有着重要的意义。已有专家指出，如果仅仅满足于“浅阅读”，对于国家和人民将是灾难性的。这就是为什么在高科技浪潮中，很多网络发达的国家反而更强调传统式阅读。近年来，很多国家都把提倡阅读、提升阅读能力列为教育改革的重点，通过实施这些措施努力唤起“深阅读”。

单选题 Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected. Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed. Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar. Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a teddy-bear with the sound pattern 'teddy-bear'. And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways. But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child's babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child's non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

单选题 How to Create Healthier Anger in Your Children A. Anger often makes us uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to witness and uncomfortable to feel. Witnessing your child's anger can be especially uncomfortable. In order to relieve this feeling, parents will often encourage children to 'stop crying' and say things like 'it's nothing to cry about.' It's moments like these that plant the seeds of unhealthy anger. B. The 'stop crying' parent is just doing what they were taught by their own parents, who were probably taught that by their parents, and on and on. While telling your child to 'stop crying' isn't emotional child abuse per se, your child may still need help with depression, addiction, or other issues later in life. This cycle can be stopped, however, if we learn how to create healthier anger in our kids, and in ourselves. C. To understand why stuffing emotions away is unhealthy, think of emotions like they are physical wounds. When you cut your finger, your body knows to tighten blood vessels and release white blood cells. In order to let your cut finger heal, you've got to let the body's natural process work. Like the body, the psyche knows what needs to happen to heal emotional wounds. To let your mind heal, you've got to let yourself go through a healing process as well. If you don't let yourself heal, whenever a similar event happens in your life, the old emotions will emerge and cause you pain. Until you learn to examine your feelings, retrieve their messages, and let them go, they'll act like cuts that never close. D. When we find our anger too uncomfortable to process and let go, we set that model for our children to copy. If a child never sees his or her parent express anger, the parent teaches that child that they, too, should never express anger. Or, if a parent always expresses their anger loudly and hurtfully, or there is a violent relationship between parents, the child may start to think of anger as something that is always frightening. E. The first thing you can do to create healthier anger in your children is to practice creating healthier anger in yourself. Try mindfulness exercises to start feeling more comfortable being angry. It's our resistance to anger that often makes our anger worse. Once you're better at experiencing anger and expressing it in a healthy way—a way that isn't passive-aggressive or an explosion of rage—you'll be able to model a good anger style for your kids. F. Some kids deal with anger by creating a 'false self': a child who is perfect for their parents. If you still use this coping skill as an adult, the result can be catastrophic. Inside a false self, you become separated from your true feelings. While you never express anger openly, the 'true you' inside has to deal with all those repressed emotions. People who have developed a false self are often passive aggressive and seem shallow because they've tucked away all the feelings that would give them depth and character. G. Preventing kids from expressing their feelings may also create shame. While you feel guilt when you think you've done something wrong, you feel shame when you believe you yourself are wrong. Children can't separate their feelings from their self-image, so when they express their feelings and are told that it's 'nothing to cry about,' they come to the conclusion that they themselves are bad. H. How do we keep kids from creating false selves or from believing that they should be ashamed of their feelings? We need to raise them in an environment where it's safe to express feelings. Once you feel more comfortable with your own anger, you can teach your children why anger is a helpful emotion. When your kid expresses anger, help them examine what it is that has made them angry. Why did it make them angry? How did it do that? Then, you can teach them that while emotions are never wrong and are always valid, our expressions of our emotions are within our control. I. Parenting styles that teach children to stuff their anger creates adults who are bursting at the seams with repressed emotions. People who are afraid of their own anger will never learn how to listen to what their anger is trying to tell them. Instead of teaching our kids that their anger is wrong, that 'happy families' are never angry, or that all feelings of anger lead to violence and fear, we can teach our children that anger is OK. Anger is natural, it is normal, and it can be experienced and expressed in a healthy way.

单选题The economic costs of noise are several. Airports are currently operating at less than 27 because of noise regulations which restrict their hours of operation. For instance, at Washington's National Airport no jet traffic is allowed from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Other airports restrict the use ofcertain runway. One estimate is that noise 28 reduce possible airport use by 20 percent. The 29 cargo trade is especially affected by night restrictions. In the case of airports, jet engines may be 30 to reduce their noise level, or insulation from air traffic noise may be provided by the purchase of land around airports or the insulation of buildings. One estimate is that $5.7 billion would be required to 31 all existing jet engines with noise control devices. However, 32 the current state of the art, even taking this step will not reduce noise levels at all points to 33 values. Some combination of methods is probably necessary. If all aircraft were made quieter by existing methods, there would be a number of economic benefits. An increase in airport capacity would 34 . Property values near airports might rise. Transportation costs to and from airports could be reduced since the airports now could be located closer to population center. Much research still needs to be done on the economic 35 of noise reduction and noise effects. Although some of the effects of noise pollution are known, more must be discovered about its effects on health, productivity, property values and the quality of life. 36 , the cost of noise pollution control to the economy as a whole needs to be investigated. A．identification B．equip C．profitable D．capacity E．pollution F．restrictions G．transformed H．significant I．Furthermore J．acceptable K．modified L．Accordingly M．considering N．occur O．aspects

单选题 Is College a Worthy Investment? A. Why arc we spending so much money on college? And why are we so unhappy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe it's time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious (大不敬的): is all this investment in college education really worth it? B. The answer, I fear, is no. For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus. C. For my entire adult life, a good education has been the most important thing for middle-class households. My parents spent more educating my sister and me than they spent on their house, and they're not the only ones...and, of course, for an increasing number of families, most of the cost of their house is actually the cost of living in a good school district. Questioning the value of a college education seems a bit like questioning the value of happiness, or fun. D. The average price of all goods and services has risen about 50 percent. But the price of a college education has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that today's students are getting twice as good? Are new workers twice as smart? Have they become somehow massively more expensive to educate? E. Perhaps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor, rays, 'I look at the data, and I see college costs rising faster than inflation up to the mid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3 to 4percent a year over inflation. What has happened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes.' Aid has increased, subsidized (补贴的) loans have become available, and 'the universities have gotten the money.' Economist Bryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees: 'It's a giant waste of resources that will continue as long as the subsidies continue.' F. Promotional literature for colleges and student loans often speaks of debt as an 'investment in yourself.' But an investment is supposed to generate income to pay off the loans. More than half of all recent graduates are unemployed or in jobs that do not require a degree, and the amount of student-loan debt carried by households has increased more than five times since 1999. These graduates were told that a diploma was all they needed to succeed, but it won't even get them out of the spare bedroom at Morn and Dad's. For many, the most visible result of their four years is the loan payments, which now average hundreds of dollars a month on loan balances in the tens of thousands. G. It's true about the money—sort of. College graduates now make 80 percent more than people who have only a high-school diploma, and though there are no precise estimates, the wage premium (高出的部分) for an outstanding school seems to be even higher. But that's not true of every student. It's very easy to spend four years majoring in English literature and come out no more employable than you were before you went in. Conversely, chemical engineers straight out of School can easily make almost four times the wages of an entry-level high-school graduate. H. James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has examined how the returns on education break down for individuals with different backgrounds and levels of ability. 'Even with these high prices, you're still finding a high return for individuals who are bright and motivated,' he says. On the other hand, 'if you're not college ready, then the answer is no, it's not worth it.' Experts tend to agree that for the average student, college is still worth it today, but they also agree that the rapid increase in price is eating up more and more of the potential return. For borderline students, tuition (学费) rise can push those returns into negative territory. I. Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how we invest in higher education—cad that employers need to rethink the increasing use of college degrees as crude screening tools for jobs that don't really require college skills. 'Employers seeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just adding that requirement, ' says Vedder. 'In fact, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becoming a bat-tender.' J. We have started to see some change on the finance side. A law passed in 2007 allows many students to cap their loan payment at 10 percent of their income and forgives any balance after 25 years. But of course, that doesn't control the cost of education; it just shifts it to taxpayers. It also encourages graduates to choose lower-paying careers, which reduces the financial return to education still further. 'You're subsidizing people to become priests and poets and so forth,' says Heckman. 'You may think that's a good thing, or you may not.' Either way it will be expensive for the government. K. What might be a lot cheaper is putting more kids to work. Caplan notes that work also builds valuable skills—probably more valuable for kids who don't naturally love sitting in a classroom. Heckman agrees wholeheartedly: 'People are different, and those abilities can be shaped. That's what we've learned, and public policy should recognize that.' L. Heckman would like to see more apprenticeship-style (学徒式) programs, where kids can learn in the workplace—learn not just specific job skills, but the kind of 'soft skills, ' like getting to work on time and getting along with a team, that ate crucial for career success. 'It's about having mentors (指导者) and having workplace-based education, ' he says. 'Time and again I've seen examples of this kind of program working.' M. Ah, but how do we get there from here? With better public policy, hopefully, but also by making better individual decisions. 'Historically markets have been able to handle these things,' says Vedder, 'and I think eventually markets will handle this one. If it doesn't improve soon, people are going to wake up and ask, 'Why am I going to college?''

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the saying 'All shall pass with time going by.' You can cite examples to illustrate the meaning of letting go of past glory and suffering in life. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.

单选题 Sensational at the time, Brown's counsel seems sensible now. Certainly both sexes have taken it to heart, marrying later, divorcing readily and living alone in larger numbers than ever before. In America more than half of all adults are single and roughly one out of seven lives alone. Worldwide, the number of solo dwellers has climbed from 153m in 1996 to 202m in 2006—a 33% jump in a decade, according to Euromonitor International, a market analyst. Yet little is known about the wider social effects of this unprecedented boom, writes Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University. His new book 'Going Solo' offers a comprehensive look at the lures and perils of living alone. Mr. Klinenberg parts with those who see the rise of solo living as yet another sign of the decline of civic society. Now that marriage is no longer the ticket to adulthood, a desire to live alone is perfectly reasonable, he writes. Young adults view it as a rite of passage, a period of personal growth before possibly settling down. Its cultural acceptance has helped to liberate women from bad marriages and oppressive families, granting them a space to return to civic life. Solitary living need not mean solitude. The author offers evidence that people who live alone are often more socially active than their cohabitating peers. The 'communications revolution' has allowed more people to experience the pleasures of social life from the comforts of home, and cities with high numbers of singletons enjoy a thriving public culture of bars, cafés and restaurants. Urban officials are now eager to lure professional singles—known to both work and play hard—in the hope that they will stimulate the local culture and economy. Living alone is easy enough for the young and solvent; less so for the elderly, frail and poor. Mr. Klinenberg came to this story while working on a book about the lethal Chicago heatwave of 1995, when hundreds of people died alone at home, out of touch with friends and neighbours. The trend for solo living can too easily morph into social isolation, particularly for men, who are less adept than women at making and sustaining connections. Other bugbears include loneliness, discrimination (in the workplace, the tax code and so on) and workaholism.

单选题 风筝 古时在中国风筝也称作“鸢(hawk)”。春秋战国时期(the Spring and Autumn Period)，东周哲人墨子(Mo Tze)曾“费时三年，以木制木鸢，飞升天空”，但这只木鸢只飞了一天就坏了。墨子制造的这只“木鸢”就是世上最早的风筝，已有2400多年的历史。唐代时，风筝传入朝鲜、日本及其他周边国家。十三世纪末，风筝的故事首次被意大利探险家马可·波罗带到欧洲，至此，中国风筝便逐渐开始传到世界各地。