听力题Questions 15 to 18 are based on the conversation you have just heard

听力题Questions 33 to 35 are based on the recording you have just heard

听力题Questions 1 to 3 are based on the passage you have just heard

听力题Questions 14 to 17 are based on the passageyou have just heard

听力题Questions 8 to 10 are based on the conversation you have just heard

听力题Questions 8 to 10 are based on the conversation you have just heard

单选题 The Body-data Craze A. Welcome to my biography, 2013-style. It includes more data points than it possibly could have 20 years ago. And it's part of a national obsession of a people who, literally, number our days. According to a recent nationwide survey for Pew Research Center Internet American Life Project, 7 out of 10 people self-track regularly—using everything from human memory to a memory stick—some aspect of health for themselves or for someone else. Among the 3,000 adults questioned, the most popular things to monitor were weight and diet. A third of the people surveyed also track more complicated elements of their health, from blood pressure to sleep to blood sugar. B. While many of them keep this information 'in their heads', a full 50 percent actually keep a written record of the data either using technology or on paper. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, in 2012 the U.S. sports and fitness category was a $70 billion business; and earlier this year, market firm ABI released a report that estimated that 485 million wearable computing devices—like smart watches and smart glasses—will be shipped annually by 2018. Privately owned 'human-centered wearable technology' company Jawbone is valued at a billion dollars, and perhaps more. C. What do people count in their everyday lives? True believers in the power of measurement go one step further—tracking every bite or step, but also sharing what they've learned with others. A male friend sends his body mass index from his gym scale to the cloud. A cousin of mine counts her steps on a pedometer (步程计) and posts them on Facebook. People like New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, who wrote in his article Tall Tales, Truth and My Twitter Diet, that he could not diet alone, so he 'decided to use Twitter. I thought it would make me more accountable, because I could record everything I ate instantly.' D. If our life stories used to be reducible to a shoebox full of old photographs, now we will remember ourselves by Fitbit at the gym. Meanwhile, a shoe sensor called Amiigo, a wristband device called Basis, indoor-environment monitoring systems, Jawbone's UP for sleep and fitness and Google Glass are all available on the sales site Groupon. E. We collect this information on the pretext of health, self-knowledge, organization, or efficiency. We believe we need to know it so that we can better ourselves. But what happens if the upsides have downsides to match? What happens if we can't stop ourselves from counting on our endless digital abacuses (算盘)? And are we giving up some of the shreds of privacy we have left by endlessly recording ourselves and sending it to the cloud? F. It's true that some of this data may be useful. If you track your food consumption and digestion, seeing the numbers may inspire you to eat better. If you track your blood sugar, you may maintain better control of it. A person who uses Asthmapolis, a wireless sensor in an asthma (哮喘) inhaler that records the GPS of a person experiencing an attack or shortness of breath could be recording details of the attack that would help all of us learn what nearby plants or chemicals in the air contributed to the attack. G. 'Self-quantifiers absolutely fit into big data,' says Kenneth Cukier, author of Big Data, an optimistic book about today's gathering, storage, and analysis of information on a massive scale. 'Big data is not just about size—it's about doing new things with data. We are collecting material about ourselves—respiration or heart rate—that we never collected before and crunching the numbers.' H. The idea is that self-quantifying is a way of being an expert on yourself, at a time when studies can tell you about percentages and probability for everything from drug effectiveness to your vote, but cannot tell you about you in particular. For Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of Who Owns the Future? it can be societally productive when normal people are forced 'to act like scientists, challenging their biases,' and clearing their perceptions. Also, having been 'blind to our own insides,' Lanier says, he sees the value of 'seeing in real time some things that go on in my body. Now I am in my 50s, I am just starting to learn how to use my own body.' I. 'Quantifying is mostly a way to take care of ourselves,' Cukier says. 'In the past, experts did vast studies in lab hospitals to discover this, but now we can use one-hundred-dollar UP bands.' For Cukier, the dark side of QS is: hypochondria (疑病症). If people are constantly monitoring themselves, they may imagine they are encountering the onset of a disease when their symptoms are really 'statistical noise,' as Cukier puts it. J. QS-ers Honeywell and Greenhall both questioned why achieving a low body weight is the desired outcome of dozens of new sensors now on the market. That's not to say it doesn't work: thanks to QS, Greenhall says she lost 40 pounds over two years. Honeywell, on the other hand, gets too thin when she gets stressed. 'I'd like to tell all of these companies that offer ways to measure yourself, that consumers should have the option to turn offall the diet talk,' said Honeywell. 'I'd love Fitbit to have an option to keep your weight above a certain amount as well as below.' 'Calories are so emotionally loaded for people with eating disorders,' said Greenhall. K. It's possible that all this quantification might be able to help with some sorts of eating and other disorders, but the reverse is also possible: after all, obsessive bodily measurement can be a fundamental symptom of anorexia (厌食) or bulimia (贪食). Diana Freed, a therapist specializing in eating disorders, wrote last year about the way 'the drastic increase of apps that obsessively quantify eating and fitness...have radically transformed the way anorexia afflicts patients.' L. Might all of these numbers eventually be used against all self-quantifiers? Sure, the most serious QS-ers were autonomous imaginative geeks, quantifying from the bottom up. But their employers might be quantifying them as well. 'The invasion of privacy is an issue,' says Lanier. 'A company in Britain has asked its workers to wear wearable computing to monitor how healthfully they are living: this seems to be crazy. In the American context, when you use self-quantifying stuff to improve your health you are also sending this information to data aggregators and someone might one day deny your insurance because of it.' M. This is far from hypothetical: three years ago, the Nielsen company tried to go in and get health information from mentally ill people posting on a site's private online forum. 'Even if you are quantifying your own data, if it goes through the cloud service, you may be exploited,' says Lanier. 'You are making yourself vulnerable.' If you join all this DIY Big Data with the other data out there—not only all of our emails and Google searches, but also the sensors in the water system, in medical implants, in stoplight cameras and sound-activated street gunshot detectors—there's so much of it that one security expert, Bruce Schneier, recently suggested that 'the Interact is being monitored.' N. As Lanier puts it, 'There are two dangers of self-quantifying: one is compromising privacy and the other is that its participants can narrow themselves. Its extreme adherents hyperconcentrate on certain kinds of numbers about themselves, and it can make them a little more robotic than other people.' It may be too soon to know exactly how and what QS has transformed. Our memories were once defined a wooden childhood toy or a grainy picture of a lost lover, a graduation dress or a passionate postcard. O. In the future, that record could be dominated by our sleep patterns or the record of our respiration. 'Instead of saving a high school football jersey, will we remember our pulse?' Cukier wonders. We were both entirely sure, though, that quantifying is the mode of our time. 'QS is not odd,' says Cukier. 'Today, we call it Quantified Self: tomorrow we are going to call it health care. In the future, quantifying ourselves is not going to be done by some people but by all people.'

单选题 Most young boys are trained to believe that men should be strong, tough, cool, and detached. Thus, they learn early to hide 27 emotions such as love, joy, and sadness because they believe that such feelings are 28 and imply weakness. Over time, some men become strangers to their own emotional lives. It seems that men with traditional views of 29 are more likely to suppress outward emotions and to fear emotions, 30 because such feelings may lead to a loss of composure (镇定). Keep in mind, however, that this view is challenged by some researchers. As with many gender gaps, differences in emotionality tend to be small, inconsistent, and dependent on the situation. For instance, Robertson and colleagues found that males who were more traditionally masculine were more emotionally expressive in a 31 exercise than when they were simply asked to talk about their emotions. Males' difficulty with 'tender' emotions has serious consequences. First, suppressed emotions can contribute to stress-related disorders. And worse, men are less likely than women to seek help from health professionals. Second, men's emotional inexpressiveness can cause problems in their relationships with partners and children. For example, men who 32 traditional masculine norms report lower relationship satisfaction, as do their female partners. Further, children whose fathers are warm, loving, and accepting toward them have higher self-esteem and lower rates of aggression and behavior problems. On a positive note, fathers are 33 involving themselves with their children. . And 30 percent of fathers report that they take equal or greater 34 for their children than their working wives do. One emotion males are allowed to express is anger. Sometimes this anger translates into physical 35 or violence. Men 36 nearly 90 percent of violent crimes in the United States and almost all sexual assaults. A. evoke B. endorse C. fabricate D. responsibility E. supposedly F. insensitive G. masculinity H. commit I. feminine J. aggression K. structured L. vulnerable M. increasingly N. cite O. inevitably

单选题 Grow Plants Without Water A. Ever since humanity began to farm our own food, we've faced the unpredictable rain that is both friend and enemy. It comes and goes without much warning, and a field of lush (茂盛的) leafy greens one year can dry up and blow away the next. Food security and fortunes depend on sufficient rain, and nowhere more so than in Africa, where 96% of farmland depends on rain instead of the irrigation common in more developed places. It has consequences: South Africa's ongoing drought—the worst in three decades—will cost at least a quarter of its corn crop this year. B. Biologist Jill Farrant of the University of Cape Town in South Africa says that nature has plenty of answers for people who want to grow crops in places with unpredictable rainfall. She is hard at work finding a way to take traits from rare wild plants that adapt to extreme dry weather and use them in food crops. As the earth's climate changes and rainfall becomes even less predictable in some places, those answers will grow even more valuable. 'The type of farming I'm aiming for is literally so that people can survive as it's going to get more and more dry,' Farrant says. C. Extreme conditions produce extremely tough plants. In the rusty red deserts of South Africa, steep-sided rocky hills called inselbergs rear up from the plains like the bones of the earth. The hills are remnants of an earlier geological era, scraped bare of most soil and exposed to the elements. Yet on these and similar formations in deserts around the world, a few fierce plants have adapted to endure under ever-changing conditions. D. Farrant calls them resurrection plants (复苏植物). During months without water under a harsh sun, they wither, shrink and contract until they look like a pile of dead gray leaves. But rainfall can revive them in a matter of hours. Her time-lapse (间歇性拍摄的) videos of the revivals look like someone playing a tape of the plant's death in reverse. E. The big difference between 'drought-tolerant' plants and these tough plants: metabolism. Many different kinds of plants have developed tactics to weather dry spells. Some plants store reserves of water to see them through a drought; others send roots deep down to subsurface water supplies. But once these plants use up their stored reserve or tap out the underground supply, they cease growing and start to die. They may be able to handle a drought of some length, and many people use the term 'drought tolerant' to describe such plants, but they never actually stop needing to consume water, so Farrant prefers to call them drought resistant. F. Resurrection plants, defined as those capable of recovering from holding less than 0.1 grams of water per gram of dry mass, are different. They lack water-storing structures, and their existence on rock faces prevents them from tapping groundwater, so they have instead developed the ability to change their metabolism. When they detect an extended dry period, they divert their metabolisms, producing sugars and certain stress-associated proteins and other materials in their tissues. As the plant dries, these resources take on first the properties of honey, then rubber, and finally enter a glass-like state that is 'the most stable state that the plant can maintain,' Farrant says. That slows the plant's metabolism and protects its dried-out tissues. The plants also change shape, shrinking to minimize the surface area through which their remaining water might evaporate. They can recover from months and years without water, depending on the species. G. What else can do this dry-out-and-revive trick? Seeds—almost all of them. At the start of her career, Farrant studied 'recalcitrant seeds (顽拗性种子),' such as avocados, coffee and lychee. While tasty, such seeds are delicate—they cannot bud and grow if they dry out (as you may know if you've ever tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit). In the seed world, that makes them rare, because most seeds from flowering plants are quite robust. Most seeds can wait out the dry, unwelcoming seasons until conditions are right and they sprout (发芽). Yet once they start growing, such plants seem not to retain the ability to hit the pause button on metabolism in their stems or leaves. H. After completing her Ph.D. on seeds, Farrant began investigating whether it might be possible to isolate the properties that make most seeds so resilient (迅速恢复活力的) and transfer them to other plant tissues. What Farrant and others have found over the past two decades is that there are many genes involved in resurrection plants' response to dryness. Many of them are the same that regulate how seeds become dryness-tolerant while still attached to their parent plants. Now they are trying to figure out what molecular signaling processes activate those seed-building genes in resurrection plants—and how to reproduce them in crops. 'Most genes are regulated by a master set of genes,' Farrant says. 'We're looking at gene promoters and what would be their master switch.' I. Once Farrant and her colleagues feel they have a better sense of which switches to throw, they will have to find the best way to do so in useful crops. 'I'm trying three methods of breeding,' Farrant says: conventional, genetic modification and gene editing. She says she is aware that plenty of people do not want to eat genetically modified crops, but she is pushing ahead with every available tool until one works. Farmers and consumers alike can choose whether or not to use whichever version prevails: 'I'm giving people an option.' J. Farrant and others in the resurrection business got together last year to discuss the best species of resurrection plant to use as a lab model. Just like medical researchers use rats to test ideas for human medical treatments, botanists use plants that are relatively easy to grow in a lab or greenhouse setting to test their ideas for related species. The Queensland rock violet is one of the best studied resurrection plants so far, with a draft genome (基因图谱) published last year by a Chinese team. Also last year, Farrant and colleagues published a detailed molecular study of another candidate, Xerophyta viscosa, a tough-as-nail South African plant with lily-like flowers, and she says that a genome is on the way. One or both of these models will help researchers test their ideas—so far mostly done in the lab—on test plots. K. Understanding the basic science first is key. There are good reasons why crop plants do not use dryness defenses already. For instance, there's a high energy cost in switching from a regular metabolism to an almost-no-water metabolism. It will also be necessary to understand what sort of yield farmers might expect and to establish the plant's safety. 'The yield is never going to be high,' Farrant says, so these plants will be targeted not at Iowa farmers trying to squeeze more cash out of high-yield fields, but subsistence farmers who need help to survive a drought like the present one in South Africa. 'My vision is for the subsistence farmer,' Farrant says. 'I'm targeting crops that are of African value.'

单选题 A sharply divided federal appeals court on Monday exposed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to billions of dollars in legal damages when it ruled a massive lawsuit alleging gender discrimination over pay for female workers can go to trial. The Court said the world's largest private employer will have to face charges that it pays women less than men for the same jobs and that female employees receive fewer promotions and have to wait longer for those promotions than male counterparts. Wal-Mart successfully convinced the court that women who allege discrimination should file individual lawsuits. Wal-Mart employs 2.1 million workers in 8,000 stores worldwide and argued that the conventional rules of class action suits should not apply because each outlet operates as an independent business. Since it doesn't have a company-wide policy of discrimination, Wal-Mart argued that women alleging gender bias should file individual lawsuits against individual stores. The ruling was a 'big black eye for Wal-Mart, and it's not going to heal anytime in the near future,' said retail consultant Burt E Flickinger. Flickinger said the ruling could turn offwomen shoppers—the company's critical base—at a time it faces increased pressure from a host of competitors, ranging from Kroger to J.C. Penney. Wal-Mart's fourth-quarter results, announced in February, showed that total sales at its US Wal-Mart stores fell for the first time since the company went public in 1969. The company also reported its third consecutive quarter of declines in sales at stores opened at least a year. Sales at stores opened at least a year are considered a key indicator of a retailer's health. Wal-Mart's top lawyer Jeff Gearhart said the company disagreed with the ruling and was considering its next step, which could include an appeal to the US Supreme Court. 'We do not believe the claims alleged by the six individuals who brought this suit are representative of the experiences of our female associates,' said Gearhart, an executive vice president. 'Wal-Mart is an excellent place for women to work and fosters female leadership among our associates and in the larger business world.' Unions and other critics have long complained that Wal-Mart's workplace practices needed improvement, especially in the areas of diversity and career advancement. The company employs 1.4 million workers in the United States and the unions claim the company's labor practices are widely followed. Wal-Mart responded to the pressure last year at its annual shareholders' meeting by announcing a plan to address the issue of promoting women, creating a 'global council' comprised of 14 Wal-Mart female executives. 'We are proud of the strides we have made to advance and support our female associates and have been recognized for our efforts to advance women through a number of awards and accolades (荣誉) ,' Gearhart said.

单选题 Scattered around the globe are more than 100 small regions of isolated volcanic activity known to geologists as hot spots. Unlike most of the world's volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate. Most of the hot spots move only slowly, and in some cases the movement of the plates past them has left trails of dead volcanoes. The hot spots and their volcanic trails are milestones that mark the passage of the plates... That the plates are moving is now beyond dispute. Africa and South America, for example, are moving away from each other as new material is injected into the sea floor between them. The complementary coastlines and certain geological features that seem to span the ocean are reminders of where the two continents were once joined. The relative motion of the plates carrying these continents has been constructed in detail, but the motion of one plate with respect to another cannot readily be translated into motion with respect to the earth's interior. It is not possible to determine whether both continents are moving in opposite directions or whether one continent is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. Hot spots, anchored in the deeper layers of the earth, provide the measuring instruments needed to resolve the question. From an analysis of the hot-spot population it appears that the African plate is stationary and that it has not moved during the past 30 million years. The significance of hot spots is not confined to their role as a frame of reference. It now appears that they also have an important influence on the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate comes to rest over a hot spot, the material rising from deeper layer creates a broad dome. As the dome grows, it develops deep fissures (cracks); in at least a few cases the continent may break entirely along some of these fissures, so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continents, so hot spots may explain their mutability (inconstancy).

单选题 We can begin our discussion of 'population as a global issue' with what most persons mean when they discuss 'the population problem': too many people on earth and a too rapid increase in the number added each year. The facts are not in dispute. It was quite right to employ the analogy that likened demographic (人口统计学的) growth to 'a long, thin power fuse that bums steadily and haltingly until it finally reaches the charge, and explodes'. To understand the current situation, which is characterized by rapid increases in population, it is necessary to understand the history of population trends. Rapid growth is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Looking back at the 8, 000 years of demographic history, we find that populations have been virtually stable or growing very slightly for most of human history. For most of our ancestors, life was hard, often nasty, and very short. There was high fertility in most places, but this was usually balanced by high mortality. For most of human history, it was seldom the case that one in ten persons would live past forty, where infancy and childhood were especially risky periods. Often, societies were in clear danger of extinction because death rates could exceed their birth rates. Thus, the population problem throughout most of history was how to prevent extinction of the human race. This pattern is important to know. Not only does it put the current problems of demographic growth into a historical perspective, but it suggests that the cause of rapid increase in population in recent years is not a sudden enthusiasm for more children, but an improvement in the conditions that traditionally have caused high mortality. Demographic history can be divided into two major periods: a time of long, slow growth which extended from about 8000 B. C. till approximately 1650 A. D. and a period of rapid, dramatic growth since 1650. In the first period of some 9, 600 years, the population increased from some 8 million to 500 million in 1650. Between 1650 and the present, the population has increased from 500 million to more than 4 billion. And it is estimated that by the year 2020 there will be 8 billion people throughout the world. One way to appreciate this dramatic difference in such abstract numbers is to reduce the time frame to something that is more manageable. Between 8000 B. C. and 1650, an average of only 50, 000 persons was being added annually to the world's population each year. At present, this number is added every six hours. The increase is about 80, 000, 000 persons annually.

单选题American presidents seem to age before our eyes. But the common belief that high-office stress grays our leaders faster than 26 may be a myth, new research finds. In fact, the majority of American presidents have lived longer than typical men of their times. That's not to 27 that chronic stress has no effect on a person's lifespan, but so does high social standing. The findings 28 to a body of research linking high status to better health: for instance, Oscar winners live longer than those who were only 29 ; and the longevity (长寿) effect is also seen in Nobel Prize winners. The new study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed the dates of birth, inauguration and death of all 34 past presidents who died of natural causes. The 30 lifespan for these men should have been 68 years, if they'd aged twice as fast during their years in office as the popular wisdom suggests they do. Instead, the study found, these presidents lived an average 73 years. And indeed, 23 of the 34presidents who died of natural causes lived longer than expected, compared with other men their age during their lifetimes. Some presidents 31 an exceptionally long time: Gerald Ford died at 93.5 years, and Ronald Reagan at 93.3. All 32 living presidents have already exceeded their life 33 , or are likely to do so. So why do people at the top of the hierarchy fare better than those below? 34 to wealth, education and the best health care of their times would seem to be obvious factors although medical attention seems to have actually killed President Garfield, who died from a fatal 35 introduced by his doctors' unsterile (未消过毒的) treatment techniques after he was shot by an assassin. A. Access B. add C. average D. boundary E. covered F. currently G. Entrance H. expectancy I. infection J. nominated K. ultimate L. usual M. persistently N. say O. survived

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on kindness by referring to the saying 'The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.' You can cite examples to illustrate your point and then explain what you can do to offer your kindness to other people. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Last year at airports across the world, 18% of flights were delayed, leaving millions of passengers stuck with a lot of time on their hands. Most of us can kill time at airports with a bit of shopping or the distractions provided by our smartphones, but some instead choose to get creative. Richard Dunn is a case in point. Earlier this month, he found himself stuck overnight at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport, and decided to pass the time by shooting a music video of himself singing the Celine Dion cover of 'All by Myself.' Make a game of it Earlier this month, Daniel Wiersema, from Austin, Texas, was travelling with fellow members of the American Outlaws, a soccer fan club that travels to matches worldwide to show support for the USA. He was one of 530 members who flew to Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. At George HW Bush International Airport, however, he and his fellow fans found they had time to kill before boarding. 'Myself and about eight others began passing a ball around, and it broke into a full out game,' he recalls. People-watching Sometimes, people-watching provides its own rewards. Training consultant Nick Holyoake found this to be true while waiting around at arrivals at London's Stansted Airport. He happened to notice a woman who, despite her bright yellow dress and smiley face balloon, looked 'sad and solitary', he says. 'She looked like she made such an effort for someone who was either late or never coming,' Holyoake guesses. 'The contrast between the bright yellow of her hopefulness and the reality that all was most likely not going smoothly impressed me.' When he noticed her cover her face with the balloon, he couldn't help but snap a picture. Hit the lounge Some travelers, meanwhile, found themselves actually relishing their flight delays. Freddy Sherman, a luxury travel blogger, was so pleased with the facilities at Istanbul Ataturk Airport's CIP Lounge that he hated to board his flight. In addition to a spacious billiards area, the lounge also has a flight simulator (飞行模拟器). 'I travel frequently and have experienced a lot of airport lounges, but this one constantly amazes me with all the things to see, do and eat,' he says. 'I actually wanted my plane to be delayed so I could spend more time there.'

单选题 拼车 近几年，不少人开始找人拼车(carpool)上下班，这样不仅能减少车辆开支，同时也能缓解交通拥堵。在国外，不少城市都在交通高峰时段为这一类车辆开设专用车道，叫作HOV lane，它是指在交通高峰时段专门预留给那些除司机外还搭乘有其他乘客的机动车行驶的车道。每辆车最少要载有两到三个人。开设拼车专用车道是为了提高车辆的平均上座率和人员通行量(throughput)，以缓解交通拥堵和空气污染。