单选题 亚投行(AIIB)是亚洲基础投资银行(Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank)的简称，这是一个政府间性质的亚洲区域多边开发机构，重点支持亚洲地区的基础设施建设，总部设在北京。 亚投行旨在为亚洲的基础设施和其他生产类项目提供资金支持，这些项目包括：能源、电力、交通、通讯等等。亚投行计划设立理事会、董事会和管理层三层(three-tier)管理架构，并将建立有效的监督机制，确保决策的高效、公开和透明。 该机构最初由中国国家主席习近平提议成立，它将有助于增加中国的地区影响力。

单选题 农历正月(the first lunar month)十五是中国的元宵节(Lantern Festival)，人们习惯在门外悬挂大红灯笼，孩子们提着彩色的灯笼玩，大人们则上街观赏各式各样的灯笼。据记载，灯笼早在约3 000年前就出现在了元宵节上。到了唐代，朝廷将灯笼与佛教(Buddhism)联系起来，从此点灯笼就成为了元宵节官方礼议的一部分。不同地区的彩灯风格迥异，陕北的农民用南瓜做灯笼，用棉花等材料做成羊头形状。而北京因为是帝王之都，灯笼一般都做成宫廷(imperial palace)灯笼的样子。

单选题 重庆 重庆位于中国西南部，长江上游。它是一座举世闻名的山城，最突出的特点是地形起伏有致，立体感强。重庆凭借长江“黄金水道”之便，依托丰富的资源和广阔的市场，从汉代起就是长江上游的工商业重镇，如今更发展为集重工业、轻工业、贸易等为一体的经济、政治和文化中心。重庆处处都有中国传统文化的印痕，历代诗人如李白、陆游等，都在这里写有许多脍炙人口的名篇佳句。此外，重庆还是川菜的主要代表地域之一。

单选题 Now listen to the following recording and answer questions16-18.

单选题 The pharmaceutical (制药的) giant Bayer has made a remarkable—and lucrative—discovery. Allergies are on the rise. The company's eye and nose ointment Bepanthen, already good for more than $ 200 million in annual sales, could soon be in even higher demand. Bayer mentions this in its annual response to the watchdog CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, which surveys the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's largest corporations. The CDP celebrates companies that cut carbon, of course, but also celebrates brutal honesty, awarding prizes and A rankings to those that give a true and full accounting of how climate change could affect their bottom lines. Bayer is a winner on both counts. Though still high, its emissions are down nearly 40% from 1990 levels. And the company is transparent about what it believes a warming world will bring. One of Bayer's latest products is 'a new generation of mosquito net,' the LifeNet. It also has two advanced bug sprays in the pipeline. These will be lucrative because mosquitoes and the disease they carry are expected to thrive in a warmer world, leaving another 40 to 60 million people at risk of malaria in Africa alone. 'In light of an expected climate-change-related increase of malaria incidents in further regions of the world (e.g., Northern Europe), we expect a growing demand for Bayer mosquito nets,' the company writes. Americans often frame climate change as a tragedy of the commons: We all pursue our selfish lives, we all emit, and together we all will someday pay. But this is a dangerous way to understand the future and our responsibilities to it. That some are planning to get rich from the warming world only underscores the reality of climate change: Its impacts, though mostly bad for most people in most places, are deeply uneven. It happens that those largely responsible for the historic emissions that got us here—wealthy North Americans and Europeans—are the most likely to stay relatively prosperous, because we have our northerly geographies and we have enough money in our wallets for, say, high-performance polycarbonate building materials. It happens that those least responsible for historic emissions, the equatorial and the poor, are the most likely to see the worst impacts, likely to get poorer faster. This unevenness suggests that self-interest, however rational, may never be enough to jumpstart real climate action in the wealthy countries where it's most needed. It's hard to scare people into cutting emissions if they're not actually all that scared. There's nothing wrong with selling mosquito nets, and there's nothing wrong with buying them. But there's something wrong if we ignore the true ethical stakes as an ever more imbalanced world keeps lurching ahead, blithely thinking, 'At least we're all in this together.'

单选题 Now listen to the following recording and answer questions21-23.

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay commenting on the remark 'Successful People does not only Have Talents but also Some Other Things'. You can cite examples to illustrate your point. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1.

单选题 The first week of July 1776 was a busy one for Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence, which he largely wrote, was adopted on the fourth. But he chose the same week to begin keeping a record of the temperature change in a notebook. This wasn't a single example: for eight years, as president, Jefferson made detailed notes on the seasonal availability of various vegetables in the markets of Washington, DC. This wasn't because he couldn't focus, says Joshua. Kendall, author of America's Obsessives(强迫症者): The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation. Rather, his obsessional habits were a self-soothing response to anxiety. When his wife died, he responded by cataloguing the tens of thousands of letters he'd sent or received. 'A mind always employed is always happy,' he liked to say. But that wasn't a platitude(陈辞滥调): some of Jefferson's compulsive industriousness made history, but all of it helped keep him mentally healthy. The core of Kendall's argument is that many successful people show symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (强迫型人格障碍). Steve Jobs would get angry over a misplaced comma; he rejected one version of the Apple II computer because the lines on its internal circuit boards weren't straight enough. But, if-Kendall is correct, Jobs wasn't a person consumed solely by his own ambition: he focused on shaping and perfecting the physical world just to avoid con fronting his innermost self. Kendall quotes a psychiatrist who says it often begins with an insecure growing-up: 'Children who have little control over the key events and people in their lives begin to focus on something they can control.' Avoiding self-reflection, they make poor parents and partners. But their avoidance also leads to their success. This is disturbing, since the 'experiential avoidance' —the effort not to feel certain feelings, or think certain thoughts—is widely considered as a bad thing. It's blamed for everything from social anxiety to self-harm; the fast-developing acceptance and commitment therapy is dedicated to overcoming it, by helping people safely to 'feel their feelings'. Could it really bring benefits? The question strikes deep at how we think about psychological disorders. By definition, they interfere with life. But what counts as interfering is subjective: is it 'better' to be a great innovator than an ordinary spouse, or vice versa? The happiest among Kendall's obsessives are those with self-awareness: they chose to embrace their obsessions, accepting the downsides. The tragic ones kept trying to make their relationships conform to their rigid demands. A Wired magazine cover last year asked readers, 'Do you really want to be like Steve Jobs?' In a work culture that increasingly uses 'obsessive' as a compliment, it's worth pausing to ask the question.

单选题 For a century and a half the piano has been one of the most popular solo instruments for Western music. Unlike string and wind instruments, the piano is completely self-sufficient, as it is able to play both the melody and its accompanying harmony at the same time. For this reason, it became the favorite household instrument of the nineteenth century. The ancestry of the piano can be traced to the early keyboard instruments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the spinet, the dulcimer, and the virginal. In the seventeenth century the organ, the clavichord, and the harpsichord became the chief instruments of the keyboard group, a supremacy they maintained until the piano supplanted them at the end of the eighteenth century. The clavichord's tone was metallic and never powerful; nevertheless, because of the variety of tone possible to it, many composers found the clavichord a sympathetic instrument for intimate chamber music. The harpsichord with its bright, vigorous tone was the favorite instrument for supporting the bass of the small orchestra of the period and for concert use, but the character of the tone could not be varied save by mechanical or structural devices. The piano was perfected in the early eighteenth century by a harpsichord maker in Italy (though musicologists point out several previous instances of the instrument). This instrument was called a piano eforte (soft and loud), to indicate its dynamic versatility; its strings were struck by a recoiling hammer with a felt-padded head. The wires were much heavier in the earlier instruments. A series of mechanical improvements continuing well into the nineteenth century, including the introduction of pedals to sustain tone or to soften it, the perfection of a metal frame, and steel wire of the finest quality, finally produced an instrument capable of myriad tonal effects from the most delicate harmonies to an almost orchestral fullness of sound, from a liquid, singing tone to a sharp, percussive brilliance.