A US Department of Energy report calls for incentives to boost coal-fired and nuclear power plants following a stream of closures that it said undermined reliable sources of electricity. The findings of the study, released late on Wednesday, drew scorn from renewable energy advocates but praise from the coal and nuclear industries. The report dovetails with (与……相吻合) President Donald Trump's promise to revive the ailing mining sector. But it differs from conclusions presented in an earlier draft, which had said big increases in renewable power generation remained possible without undermining grid reliability. The administration had not yet reviewed the early draft, which was written by department staff. Energy Secretary Rick Perry commissioned the study in April to evaluate whether 'regulatory burdens' imposed by past administrations, including that of former President Barack Obama, had hurt the grid by forcing shutdowns of baseload (基本负载) plants, which provide nonstop power, like those fired by coal and nuclear fuel. Obama had introduced a number of regulations intended to slash emissions of carbon dioxide, which are blamed for climate change. This accelerated the retirement of coal-fired power plants and bolstered the newly-developed solar and wind sectors, which depend heavily on weather conditions for their power output. 'It is apparent that in today's competitive markets certain regulations and subsidies are having a large impact on the functioning of markets, and thereby challenging our power generation mix,' Perry said in a letter introducing the study. 'It is important for policy makers to consider their intended and unintended effects.' The study, conducted by the department's staff, said cheap natural gas was the main driver of the closure of baseload coal and nuclear plants, a trend that was putting areas of the country at greater risk of power outages. The department recommended giving baseload plants pricing advantages for their power, as well as making it easier and cheaper to get permits to build more such projects. Howard Crystal, a spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity which advocates for clean energy, called the recommendations 'dangerously misguided'. 'The reality is that we can protect our planet and our energy supplies by embracing wind and solar,' he said. Some coal and nuclear energy groups welcomed the final report's findings. 'This is a much-needed, pragmatic look at US electricity reliability and resilience (复原力), including the priority of maintaining critical clean baseload power as electricity markets change,' said Rich Powell, director of ClearPath, which advocates for nuclear and hydropower. Last week, Neil Chatterjee, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said coal plants needed to be 'properly compensated to recognize the value they provide to the system.'

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the importance of building trust between employers and employees. You can cite examples to illustrate your views. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

Why facts don't change our minds

Look at the people around you. Some are passive, others more aggressive. Some work best alone, others crave companionship. We easily recognize that there is great variation among the individuals who live near us. Yet, when we speak of people from elsewhere, we seem to inevitably characterize them based on their country of origin. Statistics specialists, when they speak of national averages, often make the same mistake. Newly published research shows how erroneous such overviews are. Three researchers analyzed decades of values-based surveys and found that only between 16% and 21% of the variation in cultural values could be explained by differences between countries. In other words, the vast majority of what makes us culturally distinct from one another has nothing to do with our homeland. To determine what factors really are associated with culture, the authors combined data from 558 prior surveys that each measured one or more of Hofstede's cultural dimensions. These are traits, such as individualism and masculinity, that describe work-related cultural values. (They are not a measure of visible cultural traits, such as food or dress.) Though the validity of Hofstede's dimensions has been questioned, they have the singular benefit of having been in use for decades, which allows for historical and international comparisons. The researchers found that both demographic factors, such as age, and environmental factors, such as long-term unemployment rates, were more correlated with cultural values than nationality. Occupation and social economic status were the most strongly correlated, suggesting that our values are more economically driven than we usually give them credit for. The evidence implies that people with similar jobs and incomes are more culturally alike, regardless of where they live. Vas Taras, the lead author of the study, puts it this way: "Tell me how much you make and I will make a pretty accurate prediction about your cultural values. Tell me what your nationality is and I probably will make a wrong prediction." Taras says our erroneous belief that countries are cultures has caused businesses to teach their employees useless or even harmful ways of interacting with their international peers. Chinese and American lawyers might be trained to interact based on the assumption that the Chinese person is less individualistic, even though their similar social economic situations make it probable they are actually quite alike in that regard. The country, as the unit of authority, is often a convenient way of generalizing about a population. However, our focus on countries can mask broad variations within them. In the majority of cases we would be better off identifying people by the factors that constrain their lives, like income, rather than by the lines surrounding them on a map.

Exercise Is Good for Your Body and Your Mind A. The benefits of exercise are widely known., it helps you live longer and lowers risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. A new study published Wednesday in The Lancet Psychiatry journal suggests that when done in moderation, it leads to better mental health as well. The researchers analyzed responses from 1.2 million adults in the United States taken from a US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention survey given in 2011, 2013 and 2015. The average number of days of poor mental health per person in the past month was around 3.4, according to the study. Those who reported exercising had about 1.5, or 43%, fewer days of 'bad self-reported mental health' in the past month compared to those who did not exercise. Poor mental health was reported in the study as stress, depression and trouble with emotions. B. 'I think in comparison to all other treatments, when a patient successfully exercises at the right dose, there is a sense of self-efficacy and confidence that the patient develops that is absolutely also a remarkably positive thing,' said Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, Director of the Centre for Depression Research and Clinical Care at the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas. He was not involved with the study but recently published a paper in JAMA Psychiatry linking midlife fitness with lower risk of depression. C. 'I think it's a huge deal,' said Adam Chekroud, an author of the study and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. 'Even just walking just three times a week seems to give people better mental health than not exercising at all. I think from a public health perspective, it's pretty important because it shows that we can have the potential for having a pretty big impact on mental health for a lot of people.' D. The sweet spot for exercising was found to be 45-minute sessions three to five times a week. There wasn't a big difference in benefit for exercising beyond 90 minutes in a session—until one hit the three-hour mark. After that, there appeared to be worse mental health associated with those people compared to others who did not exercise at all. E. 'I think it makes sense,' Chekroud said. 'If you're not exercising enough, perhaps that's not giving you the biological aspect of exercise, maybe you're not putting your body through the intensity and through the changes that it needs to stimulate those biological changes in the brain. And on the high end, anecdotally we hear a lot about people who get addicted to exercise or maybe you're kind of running yourself into the ground.' F. Though all forms of exercise resulted in better mental health compared to doing nothing, the strongest association was found in people who played popular team sports (a 22%lower mental health burden), cycling (22%) and other aerobic and gym activities (20%). Even completing household chores led to about a 10% drop in days of poor mental health in a month, the researchers found. 'Exercise in group settings could have a slightly higher benefit than exercise alone,' Trivedi said. 'There's not enough evidence to be very strong but that could be what happened.' G. As for cycling, Chekroud, who is also chief scientist at Spring Health, a mental health company based in New York that provides mental health services to large employers and an avid cyclist himself, said, 'There's... the biological benefit of exercise. And you'll have increases in your respiratory (与呼吸有关的) rate and your heart rate and that kind of thing. But also, it's an opportunity where you're not working for a relatively long period of time and you get to think things through, perhaps reevaluate situations that happen in your life.' H. The authors adjusted for various physical and sociodemographic factors like age, race, gender, marital status, socioeconomic status, education, self-reported physical health and previous diagnosis of depression. Still the improvement seen from exercise was more than what could be seen from any other modifiable social or demographic factor such as education, body mass index or household income. I. Seventy-five types of 'exercise' were included in the report, leading to some experts preferring another label instead. 'In the current study, we see the inclusion of activities such as childcare, housework, lawn-mowing, carpentry, fishing, and yoga as forms of exercise,' wrote Dr. Gary Cooney, a psychiatrist at Gartnavel Royal Hospital in the United Kingdom in an accompanying commentary published with the article. 'The study... in its all-encompassing approach, might more accurately be considered a study in physical activity rather than exercise.' J. Though the study is purportedly the largest of its size, and 'unprecedented in scale', it does have a few limitations, Cooney said. Mental health disorders are not a monolith and there are discrete factors involved in research and clinical purposes of various conditions like dementia, substance misuse or personality disorder, he said. K. 'There is an uncomfortable interchangeability between mental health and depression, as if these concepts were functionally equivalent, or as if other mental disorders were somewhat peripheral,' wrote Cooney, who also cited the authors' choice to research previous studies regarding exercise and primarily depression. Consequently, the study may offer the most guidance in depression research. L. 'I think that particular concern is more of an academic concern rather than a practical concern,' Chekroud countered. 'I think part of the reason that we were less concerned about that than the particular commentary was that we know that depression and anxiety are the most common mental health conditions. And when we talk about mental health, most people have mood or anxiety disorders. So it's true that some people will have things like schizophrenia (精神分裂症) or bipolar disorder (狂躁抑郁症) but those conditions make up a very small percentage of the population.' 'In the future we can start to maybe hone in on different illness categories and maybe we would see a different pattern, but I think overall though it's kind of an edge case in this situation,' he added. M. And because the answers to the survey are self-reported, individuals who have conditions like schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder (分裂情感性障碍) or bipolar affective disorder, may have a diminished ability to do so accurately, Cooney said. N. The next step in research is asking more detailed questions and following up with people long-term, Trivedi said. The authors of the study also propose collecting data from wearable trackers, like Fitbit, to more precisely determine how frequency, duration and intensity of exercise and mental health burden are connected. O. 'People and patients should actually get well informed and become informed consumers and ask their doctors about whether this is a valid treatment for them or not,' Trivedi said. 'And if the doctor says yes, then you try to figure out a plan to make sure like any other treatment—if you get pills, then you figure out a way to take them regularly. If your doctor and you decide exercise is your treatment, then you develop strategies to make sure you basically swallow the pill.'

Inside the Race to Rescue Clues to Earth's Past from Melting Glaciers A. Margit Schwikowski and her team were attempting to drill into the Corbassière glacier in the Swiss Alps when the weather started to turn. They were camped among the soaring peaks of the Grand Combin mountain chain. The only way off this vast sheet of ice in a storm is to descend a steep mountain wall or go across the jagged glacier surface itself, which claims several lives a year. Instead, they retreated by helicopter before it was too late. B. For Schwikowski, an environmental chemist at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, the risks of missions like this October 2020 expedition to Corbassière are worth it. The team she was leading is part of an international enterprise that aims to preserve the 'memories' frozen into mountain glaciers across the world, by drilling out long samples all the way from the young surface snow down to the old, compacted ice at the base of a glacier. C. These ice cores are loaded with information about Earth's past that could be crucial in our fight against global warming. Locked within them is a picture of how the planet's climate has changed over time, as well as evidence of human activity as far back as the Romans, clues about the evolution of microorganisms (微生物) and much more. Now, scientists are racing rising temperatures to rescue ice cores from the world's glaciers before they melt. D. Mountain glaciers, also known as alpine glaciers, are slow-flowing rivers of ice. They begin life at high altitudes where the amount of snow settling in winter significantly exceeds the amount that melts in the summer. Over time, the snowpack builds up and the overlying weight causes snowflakes in the deeper layers to gradually transform into blue-tinted glacier ice, which eventually creeps downhill under its own weight. E. 'Deep within glaciers there is an amazing process, where ancient air is preserved from the time when it became trapped in the ice,' says Schwikowski, describing an effect of the increasing density with depth. This critical depth where not even air can escape is around 45 metres in the European Alps. The trapped air is just one relic that will be lost forever if sample ice cores aren't gathered before the glaciers melt. Schwikowski and her team are rushing to extract samples from the planet's most vulnerable glaciers. F. Sadly, in the case of the Corbassière glacier it is already too late. Even before the weather turned, the mission was scuppered (使泡汤). At each attempt to extract an ice core, the scientists hit a hard layer known as an ice lens. These form when glacier surface layers melt, causing water to percolate (渗入，渗透) through the snow, before refreezing into a thick ice sheet below. With the chronology of ice layers mixed up like this, valuable scientific information is lost forever. G. It is a similar story across the world. Glaciers are shrinking at alarming rates. More than 9 trillion tonnes of glacier ice was lost between 1961 and 2016, adding 27 millimetres to the average global sea level, according to a 2019 study led by Michael Zemp, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service. If current melting rates continue, glaciers will vanish entirely from Europe, New Zealand and the west of North America, among other parts of the world, by the end of the century. H. The result will be a further rise in sea levels globally, with all the knock-on effects for people, especially those living near coasts and in rural communities that rely on water from seasonal ice melt. For scientists like Schwikowski, the melting of the glaciers also endangers an unparalleled archive in the ice of Earth's environmental past, prompting the launch of the Ice Memory project in 2015. 'These archives are formidable records of our past and they must be preserved for future generations of scientists,' says Carlo Barbante, a chemist at the University of Venice, Italy, and a co-founder of the project. I. Geologically speaking, mountain glaciers hold a fairly young ice record, typically spanning the past 1,000 to 10,000 years. One thing they can't do is build a picture of the really long-term climate. For this, scientists mostly rely on older ice samples from continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. These are also threatened by global warming, but their shrinkage (缩小，收缩) will occur over thousands of years, so they are beyond the scope of the Ice Memory project. Although younger, mountain glaciers have one major advantage over the ice sheets—their geographical spread. They exist on all continents except Australia. This helps us to build a truly global picture of relatively recent past climates and means the information they contain is also highly region-specific. J. It may even be possible to unpick some of the impact of past changes in climate on ecosystems. One way to do that is through the microorganisms stored inside mountain glaciers. Traditionally, investigations of ice-dwelling microbes involved growing them from field samples, which favoured certain 'lab-happy' microorganisms. However, genetic sequencing technologies are bypassing this requirement, enabling biologists to gain a more complete picture of glacial ecosystems directly from the field samples themselves. K. Eager not to miss out on these clues to the past, researchers involved with the Ice Memory project have fanned out across the world to gather samples. In 2016, the launch mission extracted three ice cores from the Col du DSme glacier at an altitude of 4,300 metres on Mont Blanc in France. Since then, cores have been extracted in 2017 from the Illimani glacier in Bolivia—where glaciers hold records dating back 18,000 years—and from two sites in Russia during 2018. The plan is to extract cores from a further 20 sites across the world over the next 10 to 15 years. L. The scientists drill near the highest points of glaciers, where snow and ice accumulates, rather than lower down the glacier tongue, where downhill flow mixes the ice record. But nature doesn't always play ball. Patrick Ginot at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences (IGE) in Grenoble, France, who led the Bolivia mission, recalls battering winds and heavy snowfall for two weeks at 6,300 metres above sea level. 'There were days on the summit of Illimani when we could not work at all.' M. Battling the elements isn't the only challenge for these expeditions. There are logistical hurdles to navigate, too. The scientists need permits from governments, local assistance with transport and a reliable refrigeration chain to ensure that samples don't melt. These local partnerships are an essential element of Ice Memory. Project scientists are acutely aware of the damage that could be done by European scientists 'parachuting in' to less scientifically developed nations to extract samples for the benefit of their careers. 'Our way is always to start by building a collaboration with local scientists and then to organise the operation from there,' says Ginot. N. Even after all this, retrieving the ice cores is only half the battle, as they also need to be stored. The plan is to house them in a purpose-built 'ice sanctuary' facility at the French-Italian Concordia Research Station, more than 1,000 kilometres inland from the south-east coast of Antarctica. The location was chosen for being politically neutral and reliably cold over the long term, so there is no threat of freezer failure wiping out millennia of data. Schedules have been stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the first cores could reach the ice sanctuary as early as 2023.

The United States boasts the best public universities in the world. No young person should be turned away because they were born into a family without enough money for tuition; nor should getting a degree consign (把……置于) a person to decades of crippling debt. For the sake of fairness, class mobility, and the ideal of equality of opportunity, I believe generous financial aid should be available to all needy students for whom a four-year degree is the best way to achieve the American dream. But I also know America is overwhelmingly led by people with college degrees and white collar backgrounds—people who overvalue their own path to success and rig the system against others who'd thrive under a different approach. Our elites are too often blind to the value of education that is received away from college, whether through apprenticeships or vocational schools or on-the-job training. They don't always understand that there are lots of blue-collar jobs that are more fulfilling, better paying, and more in demand than lots of white-collar jobs. And they are blind to the wisdom in cultural enclaves where a young person is not considered 'culturally competent' until knowing how to perform CPR, help a stranger change a flat, or work alongside people from different social classes without taking offense when their etiquette is different than the etiquette at UCLA or Berkeley. So rather than promising free tuition, I have a more inclusive proposal: No matter your race or class or gender, you should be able to afford a degree from a public university without crippling debt if that path best maximizes your potential; and we should all value the important work being done at universities. The future I want to see begins with redoubling America's efforts at civic education in high school. Everyone with a high-school diploma should have learned all the tools they need to meaningfully participate as citizens in America's government-by-the-people. In fact, adults who want to study American civics now should have that opportunity. Next, for everyone who earns their diploma or GED, I propose financial aid for college or for an alternative investment in education that will help them toward any career that they choose, so long as they demonstrate that they're making an informed decision. Yes, we'll need to be watchful to fraudsters (行骗者) eager to get a piece of that money without offering valuable knowledge in return. But the problem will be no greater than under the status quo, when so much of the money that flows to public universities is wasted on administrative expansion and luxurious campus installations. Finally, so that those who pursue routes other than four-year colleges are treated more fairly, I propose legal reforms to eliminate obstacles like professional-licensing requirements that amount to no more than credentialism (文凭至上主义), and a shift away from insisting on a bachelor's degree for jobs that shouldn't require one.

The city of Bath was founded by the Romans almost two thousand years ago. It has been famous for its pleasing __26__ architecture and healing thermal springs ever since.There are three hot springs in Bath; one is the Kings Spring, upon which the Roman baths and a temple were __27__. The other two are the Cross Spring and the Hetling Spring close to each other in Hot Bath Street. Although Bath is __28__ known as a Roman and Georgian city, many people came in the intervening centuries to make use of the __29__ waters.While the Georgians made taking the waters or bathing particularly fashionable, it was __30__ generations who paved the way，creating greater interest in Bath and its springs.Charles II，desperate for an heir and unable to produce a __31__ son，came to Bath to take the waters in the hope that their magical powers would do something to __32__ the situation.Craving for a male heir James and Mary both came to Bath and soon after produced a son，which bred many conspiracy theories about who was the real father of their __33__.Regardless，themiraclecreated something of a boom in tourism for Bath and once Queen Anne had paid a visit in 1702，sealing it as the place to be，the whole nation __34__ to the city.Afterwards，the spas（泉养浴）in Bath continued to go in and out of fashion for more than 150 years until they closed completely.The new Bath Spa，which opened in 2006 __35__ modern architecture with the ancient spring，now the New Royal Bath.

The public must be able to understand the basics of science to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the negative consequences of poor communication between scientists and the public is the issue of climate change, where a variety of factors, not the least of which is a breakdown in the transmission of fundamental climate data to the general public, has contributed to widespread mistrust and misunderstanding of scientists and their research. The issue of climate change also illustrates how the public acceptance and understanding of science (or the lack of it) can influence governmental decision-making with regard to regulation, science policy and research funding. However, the importance of effective communication with a general audience is not limited to hot issues like climate change. It is also critical for socially charged neuroscience issues such as the genetic basis for a particular behavior, the therapeutic potential of stern cell therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, or the use of animal models, areas where the public understanding of science can also influence policy and funding decisions. Furthermore, with continuing advances in individual genome (基因组) sequencing and the advent of personalized medicine, more non-scientists will need to be comfortable analyzing complex scientific information to make decisions that directly affect their quality of life. Science journalism is the main channel for the popularization of scientific information among the public. Much has been written about how the relationship between scientists and the media can shape the efficient transmission of scientific advances to the public. Good science journalists are specialists in making complex topics accessible to a general audience, while adhering to scientific accuracy. Unfortunately, pieces of science journalism can also oversimplify and generalize their subject material to the point that the basic information conveyed is obscured or at worst, obviously wrong. The impact of a basic discovery on human health can be exaggerated so that the public thinks a miraculous cure is a few months to years away when in reality the significance of the study is far more limited. Even though scientists play a part in transmitting information to journalists and ultimately the public, too often the blame for ineffective communication is placed on the side of the journalists. We believe that at least part of the problem lies in places other than the interaction between scientists and members of the media, and exists because for one thing we underestimate how difficult it is for scientists to communicate effectively with a diversity of audiences, and for another most scientists do not receive formal training in science communication.

At the UN climate summit in Glasgow, world leaders have stressed the need to limit global warming to 1.5 ℃. Scientists have also said crossing the 1.5 ℃ 27 risks unleashing far more severe climate change effects on ecosystems. But what is the difference between 1.5 ℃ and 2 ℃ of warming? 'Half a degree means much more 28 weather, and it can be more often, more intense, or extended in 29 ,' said climate scientist Daniela Jacob at the Climate Service Center Germany. Just this year, Greenland saw massive melting events, wildfires 30 the Mediterranean and Siberia, and record drought hit parts of Brazil. Climate change is already affecting every 31 region across the globe. More warming to 1.5 ℃ and beyond will worsen such impacts. The difference between 1.5 ℃ and 2 ℃ is 32 for Earth's oceans and frozen regions. At 1.5 ℃, there is a good chance we can prevent most of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing. That would help limit sea level rise to a few feet by the end of the century. But blow past 2 ℃ and the ice sheets could collapse, with sea levels rising up to 10 metres. At 2 ℃, more than 99% of coral reefs would be lost. That would destroy fish habitats and communities that 33 on reefs for their food and livelihoods. As the world heats up, the risk increases that the planet will reach the 'tipping points' which will trigger irreversible impacts, though 34 when those points would be reached is uncertain. Droughts, reduced rainfall, and continued destruction of the Amazon through deforestation, for example, could see the rainforest system collapse, 35 CO2 into the atmosphere rather than storing it. That's why it's so risky to keep emitting from fossil fuels—because we're increasing the 36 that we go over one of those tipping points. A. absorbing B. critical C. devastated D. diminished E. duration F. exactly G. extreme H. inhabited I. implication J. likelihood K. particularly L. pose M. releasing N. rely O. threshold

赵州桥建于隋朝，公元605年左右，长50.82米，宽9.6米，跨度37.37米。天才建筑师李春设计并监督了桥的建设。赵州桥结构新颖、造型优美。桥有一个大拱，在大拱的两端各有两个小拱，帮助排泄洪水、减轻桥梁重量并节省石材。建成以来，该桥经受了多次洪水和地震，但其主体结构仍然完好无损，至今仍在使用。赵州桥是世界桥梁建筑史上的一次创举，是中国古代文明史上的一项杰出成就。类似设计的桥梁直到14世纪才在欧洲出现，比赵州桥晚了700多年。_____Part IV Translation（30 minutes）Directions：For this part，you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English.You should write your answer on Answer Sheet 2.

Suddenly, everywhere you look, everyone's taking cold showers. Not literally—that would be weird—but there's no mistaking a lifestyle trend when you see one. They're 27 in a new book, What Doesn't Kill Us, which 28 the exploits of the Dutch extreme-cold enthusiast (狂热者) Wim Hof, who once spent nearly two hours in an ice bath. In The New York Times, the novelist Ben Dolnick reports that cold showers changed his 'entire 29 toward the outside world'. The benefits include everything from 30 immunity to slowing ageing and fighting depression. It's environmentally better, too, so you'll feel the warm glow of being moral, which is fortunate, given that you're going to be extremely bloody cold. As someone who has always preferred the cold, and 31 the way hot days are considered 'good weather', I'm a natural candidate for the craze. Finding myself sleepy at 5 p.m.—having woken with the baby at 5 a.m.—I tried taking naps, 32 that plan, and then started jumping under icy water instead. It worked 33 , helping me squeeze out a few more hours of energy. When I took another cold shower before bed, I slept better, too. But I'll admit there's something a little 34 about this, as there is with many strategies for 'breaking out of your comfort zone'. What are we all trying to prove, exactly? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that behind the desire to 35 over extreme cold, there's a desire to somehow conquer yourself, since both participants in this wrestling match, as you may have noticed, are you. The far more likely result is just more 36 conflict. A. abandoned B. boosting C. brilliantly D. charts E. disposition F. exciting G. goal H. initial I. inner J. intelligently K. overcome L. recommended M. resents N. self-punishing O. triumph

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay related to the short passage given below. In your essay, you are to comment on the phenomenon described in the passage and suggest measures to address the issue. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Some parents in China are overprotective of their children. They plan everything for their children, make all the decisions for them, and do not allow them to explore on their own in case they make mistakes or get hurt.

Telecommunications is just one of the means by which people communicate and, as such, we need to look at telecommunications and any other communications technologies within the wider context of human communication activity. Early findings show that many people are uneasy and even fearful of information technology by avoiding it or by using it in minimal ways. To obtain this type of data we have spent time with individuals, watching how they communicate where they get confused, what they don't understand and the many mistakes they make. You can do this type of research yourself in an informal way. Just watch someone at the desk next to you trying to use a phone or trying to fill in a form. What you will quickly notice about people on the phone is that they use very few of the buttons available on the keypad, and they get quite anxious if they have to use any buttons outside their normal ones. Most will not use the instruction book, and those that do will not necessarily have a rewarding experience. Watch someone fill out a form—a good meaty one such as an application form or a tax form—and you will see a similar pattern of distressed behavior. The simple fact we can all observe from how people use these ordinary instruments of everyday communication is how messy, uncertain and confusing the experience can be. Now multiply these individual close encounters of the communicative kind to take account of the full range you may experience in a single day, from getting up in the morning until you go to bed at night and the world takes on a slightly different appearance. Even watching television which for many provides an antidote to the daily confusion is itself fraught with a kind of low level confusion. For example, if you ring people up five minutes after the evening news has finished and ask them what the news was about, many cannot remember, and those who do remember get some of it wrong. One of the reasons why this obvious confusion gone unnoticed is because 'communication' is a word we associate with success, and therefore we expect the process to work effectively most of the time. To suggest otherwise is to challenge one of our society's most deeply held beliefs.

The Amazon-Walmart Showdown That Explains the Modern Economy A. With Amazon buying the high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, something retail analysts have known for years is now apparent to everyone: The online retailer is on a collision course with Walmart to try to be the predominant seller of pretty much everything you buy. Each one is trying to become more like the other—Walmart by investing heavily in its technology, Amazon by opening physical bookstores and now buying physical supermarkets. But this is more than a battle between two business titans. Their rivalry sheds light on the shifting economics of nearly every major industry. B. That in turn has been a boon (福音) for consumers but also has more worrying implications for jobs, wages and inequality. To understand this epic shift, you can look not just to the grocery business, but also to my closet, and to another retail acquisition announced Friday morning. C. Men's dress clothing, mine included, can be a little boring. Like many male office workers, I lean toward clothes that are sharp but not at all showy. Nearly every weekday, I wear a dress shirt that is either light blue, white or has some subtle check pattern, usually paired with slacks and a blazer. The description alone could make a person doze. I used to buy my dress shirts from a Chinese tailor. They fit perfectly, but ordering required an awkward meeting with a visiting salesman in a hotel suite. They took six weeks to arrive, and they cost around $120 each, which adds up fast when you need to buy eight or 10 a year to keep up with wear and tear (破损). Then several years ago I realized that a company called Bonobos was making shirts that fit me nearly as well, that were often sold three for $220, or $73 each, and that would arrive in two days. D. Bonobos became my main shirt provider, at least until recently, when I learned that Amazon was trying to get into the upper-end men's shirt game. The firm's 'Buttoned Down' line, offered to Amazon Prime customers, uses high-quality fabric and is a good value at $40 for basic shirts. I bought a few; they don't fit me quite as well as the Bonobos, but I do prefer the stitching (针脚). I'm on the fence as to which company will provide my next shirt order, and a new deal this week makes it interesting: Walmart is buying Bonobos. Walmart's move might seem a strange decision. It is not a retailer people typically turn to for $88 summer weight shirts in Ruby Wynwood Plaid or $750 Italian wool suits. Then again, Amazon is best known as a reseller of goods made by others. E. Walmart and Amazon have had their sights on each other for years, each aiming to be the dominant seller of goods—however consumers of the future want to buy them. It increasingly looks like that 'however' is a hybrid of physical stores and online-ordering channels, and each company is coming at the goal from a different starting point. F. Amazon is the dominant player in online sales, and is particularly strong among affluent consumers in major cities. It is now experimenting with physical bookstores and groceries as it looks to broaden its reach. Walmart has thousands of stores that sell hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of goods. It is particularly strong in suburban and rural areas and among low- and middle-income consumers, but it's playing catch-up with online sales and affluent urbanites. G. Why are these two mega-retailers both trying to sell me shirts? The short answer is because they both want to sell everything. More specifically, Bonobos is known as an innovator in exactly this type of hybrid of online and physical store sales. Its website and online customer service are excellent, and it operates stores in major cities where you can try on garments and order items to be shipped directly. Because all the actual inventory is centralized, the stores themselves can occupy minimal square footage. So the acquisition may help Walmart build expertise in the very areas where it is trying to gain on Amazon. You can look at the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods through the same lens. The grocery business has a whole different set of challenges from the types of goods that Amazon has specialized in; you can't store a steak or a banana the way you do books or toys. And people want to be able to make purchases and take them home on the spur of the moment. H. Just as Walmart is using Bonobos to get access to higher-end consumers and a more technologically savvy way of selling clothes, Amazon is using Whole Foods to get the expertise and physical presence it takes to sell fresh foods. But bigger dimensions of the modern economy also come into play. I. The apparel business has long been a highly competitive industry in which countless players could find a niche (商机). Any insight that one shirt-maker developed could be rapidly copied by others, and consumer prices reflected the retailer's real estate costs and branding approach as much as anything. That helps explain why there are thousands of options worldwide for someone who wants a decent-quality men's shirt. In that world, any shirt-maker that tried to get too big rapidly faced diminishing returns. It would have to pay more and more to lease the real estate for far-flung stores, and would have to outbid competitors to hire all the experienced shirt-makers. The expansion wouldn't offer any meaningful cost savings and would entail a lot more headaches trying to manage it all. J. But more and more businesses in the modern economy, rather than reflecting those diminishing returns to scale, show positive returns to scale: The biggest companies have a huge advantage over smaller players. That tends to tilt markets toward a handful of players or even a monopoly, rather than an even playing field with countless competitors. K. The most extreme example of this would be the software business, where a company can invest bottomless sums in a piece of software, but then sell it to each additional customer for practically nothing. The apparel industry isn't that extreme—the price of making a shirt is still linked to the cost of fabric and the workers to do the stitching—but it is moving in that direction. And that helps explain why Walmart and Amazon are so eager to put a shirt on my back. L. Already, retailers need to figure out how to manage sophisticated supply chains connecting Southeast Asia with stores in big American cities so that they rarely run out of product. They need mobile apps and websites that offer a seamless user experience so that nothing stands between a would-be purchaser and an order. Larger companies that are good at supply chain management and technology can spread those more-or-less fixed costs around more total sales, enabling them to keep prices lower than a niche player and entrench their advantage. M. These positive returns to scale could become even more pronounced. Perhaps in the future, rather than manufacture a bunch of shirts in Indonesia and Malaysia and ship them to the United States to be sold one at a time to urban office workers, a company will have a robot manufacture shirts to my specifications somewhere nearby. N. If that's the future of clothing, and quite a few companies are working on just that, apparel will become a landscape of high fixed costs and enormous returns to scale. The handful of companies with the very best shirt-making robots will win the market, and any company that can't afford to develop shirt-making robots, or isn't very good at it, might find itself left in the cold.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled How to Avoid Staying up Too Late? You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1. 1．现在许多学生养成了熬夜的习惯； 2．熬夜坏处多，如何改掉这一坏习； 3．我的观点。

The U. K.'s rapid shift to renewable energy, which has helped it cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 44% in the past 30 years, is lauded by many in the industry. But the country's experiences offer a reminder that decarbonizing (脱碳) an economy must be carefully managed. U.K. natural-gas prices have risen more than fivefold over the past year, which is slightly lower than the price in the Netherlands—the benchmark for continental Europe—but more than four times the price in the U.S. But the U.K. is more vulnerable than most to gas shortages, some analysts say. High reliance on renewable energy, mainly wind, and low coal use has left the country heavily dependent on imported natural gas for electricity generation when the wind doesn't blow. A jump in energy prices leaves the U.K. a victim of its own progress on lowering emissions. Lack of storage follows a decision back in 2013 by the U.K. government not to subsidize loss-making gas-storage facilities. Output from the North Sea gas fields was declining, leaving the country more dependent on imports, at the same time as a transition from coal-powered electricity to renewables was under way. At a meeting with the then climate-change minister, energy-company lobbyists had urged the government to subsidize storage. After a consultation, the government said no. By 2020, the U.K. relied on wind for 24% of its power-generation mix but didn't have a backup plan when it fell to 2% of supplies in late summer this year. Meanwhile, a series of local mishaps (小事故) curtailed other sources of energy. A fire disrupted the flow of electricity through a subsea electricity cable linking the U. K. and France. Some nuclear plants in Britain were offline while undergoing maintenance. In late summer, it was less windy than normal, resulting in turbines (涡轮机) sitting idle. Britain's gas policy is based on faith that the market would produce a robust supply. But the government has intervened, imposing a moratorium (暂停) on fracking projects and capping domestic energy prices to protect consumers from higher bills. A British government spokeswoman said domestic storage had little bearing on the price of gas and that the U.K. 'benefits from access to gas reserves in British territorial waters and secure sources from reliable import partners.' As a result, the country doesn't have to rely on natural gas storage, the government added. British customers will pay more for energy in October after the market regulator announced it would increase a price cap on gas and electricity prices. Some smaller consumer-energy providers have gone bust after failing to hedge against rising wholesale prices. 'The energy system is not a light switch,' said Daniel Yergin, an author and vice chairman of consulting firm IHS Markit. 'When you go too fast, you hit the bumps.'

A Pioneering Woman of Science Re-emerges after 300 Years A. Maria Sibylla Merian, like many European women of the 17th century, stayed busy managing a household and rearing children. But on top of that, Merian, a German-born woman who lived in the Netherlands, also managed a successful career as an artist, botanist, naturalist and entomologist (昆虫学家). B. 'She was a scientist on the level with a lot of people we spend a lot of time talking about,' said Kay Etheridge, a biologist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania who has been studying the scientific history of Merian's work. 'She didn't do as much to change biology as Charles Darwin, but she was significant.' C. At a time when natural history was a valuable tool for discovery, Merian discovered facts about plants and insects that were not previously known. Her observations helped dismiss the popular belief that insects spontaneously emerged from mud. The knowledge she collected over decades didn't just satisfy those curious about nature, but also provided valuable insights into medicine and science. She was the first to bring together insects and their habitats, including food they ate, into a single ecological composition. D. After years of pleasing a fascinated audience across Europe with books of detailed descriptions and life-size paintings of familiar insects, in 1699 she sailed with her daughter nearly 5,000 miles from the Netherlands to South America to study insects in the jungles of what is now known as Suriname. She was 52 years old. The result was her masterpiece, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. E. In her work, she revealed a side of nature so exotic, dramatic and valuable to Europeans of the time that she received much acclaim. But a century later, her findings came under scientific criticism. Shoddy (粗糙的) reproductions of her work along with setbacks to women's roles in 18th-and 19th-century Europe resulted in her efforts being largely forgotten. 'It was kind of stunning when she sort of dropped off into oblivion (遗忘),' said Dr. Etheridge. 'Victorians started putting women in a box, and they're still trying to crawl out of it.' F. Today, the pioneering woman of the sciences has re-emerged. In recent years, feminists, historians and artists have all praised Merian's tenacity (坚韧), talent and inspirational artistic compositions. And now biologists like Dr. Etheridge are digging into the scientific texts that accompanied her art. Three hundred years after her death, Merian will be celebrated at an international symposium in Amsterdam this June. G. And last month, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium was republished. It contains 60 plates (插图) and original descriptions, along with stories about Merian's life and updated scientific descriptions. Before writing Metamorphosis, Merian spent decades documenting European plants and insects that she published in a series of books. She began in her 20s, making textless, decorative paintings of flowers with insects. 'Then she got really serious,' Dr. Etheridge said. Merian started raising insects at home, mostly butterflies and caterpillars. 'She would sit up all night until they came out of the pupa (蛹) so she could draw them,' she said. H. The results of her decades' worth of careful observations were detailed paintings and descriptions of European insects, followed by unconventional visuals and stories of insects and animals from a land that most at the time could only imagine. It's possible Merian used a magnifying glass to capture the detail of the split tongues of sphinx moths (斯芬克斯飞蛾) depicted in the painting. She wrote that the two tongues combine to form one tube for drinking nectar (花蜜). Some criticized this detail later, saying there was just one tongue, but Merian wasn't wrong. She may have observed the adult moth just as it emerged from its pupa. For a brief moment during that stage of its life cycle, the tongue consists of two tiny half-tubes before merging into one. I. It may not have been ladylike to depict a giant spider devouring a hummingbird, but when Merian did it at the turn of the 18th century, surprisingly, nobody objected. Dr. Etheridge called it revolutionary. The image, which also contained novel descriptions of ants, fascinated a European audience that was more concerned with the exotic story unfolding before them than the gender of the person who painted it. J. 'All of these things shook up their nice, neat little view,' Dr. Etheridge said. But later, people of the Victorian era thought differently. Her work had been reproduced, sometimes incorrectly. A few observations were deemed impossible. 'She'd been called a silly woman for saying that a spider could eat a bird,' Dr. Etheridge said. But Henry Walter Bates, a friend of Charles Darwin, observed it and put it in book in 1863, proving Merian was correct. K. In the same plate, Merian depicted and described leaf-cutter ants for the first time. 'In America there are large ants which can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night,' she wrote in the description. Merian noted how the ants took the leaves below ground to their young. And she wouldn't have known this at the time, but the ants use the leaves to farm fungi (功类) underground to feed their developing babies. L. Merian was correct about the giant bird-eating spiders, ants building bridges with their bodies and other details. But in the same drawing, she incorrectly lumped together army and leaf-cutter ants. And instead of showing just the typical pair of eggs in a hummingbird nest, she painted four. She made other mistakes in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium as well: not every caterpillar and butterfly matched. M. Perhaps one explanation for her mistakes is that she cut short her Suriname trip after getting sick, and completed the book at home in Amsterdam. And errors are common among some of history's most-celebrated scientific minds, too. 'These errors no more invalidate Ms. Merian's work than do well-known misconceptions published by Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton,' Dr. Etheridge wrote in a paper that argued that too many have wrongly focused on the mistakes of her work. N. Merian's paintings inspired artists and ecologists. In an 1801 drawing from his book, General Zoology Amphibia, George Shaw, an English botanist and zoologist, credited Merian for describing a frog in the account of her South American expedition, and named the young tree frog after her in his portrayal of it. It wouldn't be fair to give Merian all the credit. She received assistance naming plants, making sketches and referencing the work of others. Her daughters helped her color her drawings. O. Merian also made note of the help she received from the natives of Suriname, as well as slaves or servants that assisted her. In some instances she wrote moving passages that included her helpers in descriptions. As she wrote in her description of the peacock flower, 'The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.' P. Londa Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, called this passage rather astonishing. It's particularly striking centuries later when these issues are still prominent in public discussions about social justice and women's rights. 'She was ahead of her time,' Dr. Etheridge said.

Everyone remembers the whitewashing scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But how many recall the scene that precedes it? Having escaped from Aunt Polly, Tom is teaching himself to whistle when he spies a 'newcomer' in his village—a newcomer with 'a citified air.' They quarrel and wrestle in the dirt. Tom wins the battle but returns home late and is thus commanded to whitewash the famous fence. After this incident, the reader's sympathies are meant to lie with Tom. But imagine how a boy like Tom Sawyer would be regarded today. As far as I can tell, that fight is not just 'inappropriate behavior,' to use current educational terminology (术语), but is also one of the many symptoms of 'oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) ,' a condition that Tom manifests throughout the book. And Tom is not merely ODD: He clearly has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well, judging by his inability to concentrate in school. In fact, Tom manifests many disturbing behaviors. He blames his half-brother for his poor decisions, demonstrating an inability to take responsibility for his actions. He provokes his peers, often using aggression. He deliberately ignores rules and demonstrates defiance toward adults. He is frequently dishonest, at one point even pretending to be dead. Worst of all, he skips school—a behavior that might, in our time, lead him to be diagnosed with conduct disorder. I am not being entirely sarcastic here: I have reread 'Tom Sawyer' several times in recent years, precisely because Twain draws such fascinating portraits of children whose behavior is familiar, even if we now describe it differently. As a mother of boys, I find this weirdly reassuring: Although ADHD and ODD are often dismissed as recently 'invented' disorders, they describe personality types and traits that have always existed. A certain kind of boy has always had trouble paying attention in school. But if the behavior or actions of the children and the parents are familiar, the society surrounding them is not. Tom Sawyer turns out fine in the end. In 19th-century Missouri, there were still many opportunities for impulsive kids who were bored and fidgety (坐立不安的) in school: The very qualities that made him so tiresome—curiosity, hyperactivity, recklessness—are precisely the ones that get him the girl, win him the treasure and make him a hero. Nothing like that is available to children who don't fit in today. Instead of striking out into the wilderness, they get sent to psychologists and prescribed medication—if they are lucky enough to have parents who can afford that sort of thing. Every effort will be made to help them pay attention, listen to the teacher, stop picking fights in the playground. Nowadays, there aren't any other options.

Just as humans have their own individual personalities, new research in the Journal of Comparative Psychology shows that elephants have personalities, too. Moreover, an elephant's personality may play an important role in how well that elephant can solve novel problems. The article was written by Lisa Barrett and Sarah Benson-Amram in the University of Wyoming's Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab. The authors of the paper tested 15 Asian elephants and three African savanna (稀树草原) elephants in three zoos across the country. Previous work demonstrated that Asian elephants can use water as a tool to solve a novel problem—and reach a tasty marshmallow reward—in what's called the floating object task. This time, the authors designed new novel tasks, as well as personality tests, for the elephants. 'We took a comprehensive approach by using three different problem-solving tasks and three types of personality assessments to determine if individual personality played a role in which elephants were able to solve these tasks,' Barrett says. Those assessments demonstrated that the surveys and observations were the most reliable methods to get at elephant personality. Overall, Barrett and Benson-Amram measured traits such as active, affectionate, aggressive, defiant, excitable, mischievous, shy and sociable, which have been studied in other animals as well. 'We were eager to see if the personality traits we uncovered through the surveys and observations predicted success on novel problem-solving tasks,' Benson-Amram says. The three problem-solving tasks included the trap tube task, which is a common test used with primates (灵长目动物) but which had never been presented outside of primates before. Barrett and Benson-Amram found that elephants did learn to solve two out of the three tasks faster over time, even though the elephants only received three trials on each task. Traits including aggressiveness and activity were important predictors of problem-solving overall, but the personality traits measured did not significantly predict learning ability. This study makes connections between two sources of individual variation, personality and cognition, in threatened species. One reason it is important to examine problem-solving in elephants is that they are faced with new problems that they need to solve regularly in the wild. For example, if certain traits enable elephants to overcome novel problems, elephants may be more likely to invade farmland and contribute to human-elephant conflict. With more research, managers can predict which elephants might overcome or habituate to deterrents (威慑力量), and managers can devote more resources to tracking elephants. The authors call for more work on different forms of personality assessments to determine which methods would be best for management of zoo and wild elephants. 'Research with free-ranging elephants can extend this study to determine which personality traits are most important for solving novel problems that elephants experience in the wild,' says Barrett.