单选题Directions:Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteanessaybasedonthepicturebelow.YoushouldstartyouressaywithabriefdescriptionofthepictureandthendiscusswhypeoplelikemakingfriendsontheInternet.Youshouldgivesoundargumentstosupportyourviewsandwriteatleast150wordsbutnomorethan200words.'I'vemadethreenewfriendsontheInternet.'

单选题Imagine that the Spanish-speaking world was a single country which is called Hispanidad. It covers a 28 perhaps one-and-a-half times the size of China. Its population is nearly 500m, making it the world's third most 29 country, behind China and India. Among these people, the number of native Spanish-speakers is rising towards 400m; as a 30 , only 31 is bigger. Only English and Chinese are more widely used on the internet than Spanish. So if you are in business, into the arts or just want to join a conversation, the 32 size of Hispanidad is a powerful reason to learn Spanish. But Hispanidad is not a single country. The fact that it 33 across the Americas, Spain and even parts of Africa and Asia makes the case for Spanish stronger still. After English, it is the most used 34 language. For tourists it 35 and enriches travel in the 20-plus countries where Spanish is a main language. Not forgetting the United States, the country with the second-largest number of Spanish-speakers (about 50m and rising) after Mexico. Latinos (拉丁美裔) are growing in influence culturally, 36 and politically. Nowadays, would-be presidents make sure to advertise in Spanish. Even for those with no political ambitions, there is another 37 reason to pick Spanish as your second language: it's easy (certainly compared with, say, Mandarin). And once you've got Spanish, you're half-way to Italian, French and Portuguese too. A. territory B. sheer C. populous D. vast E. mother tongue F. spreads G. Mandarin Chinese H. conquer I. economy J. commercially K. defending L. compelling M. eases N. causes O. international

单选题 The Birth of Scientific English A. World science is dominated today by a small number of languages, including Japanese, German and French, but it is English which is probably the most popular global language of science. This is not just because of the importance of English-speaking countries such as the USA in scientific research; the scientists of many non-English-speaking countries find that they need to write their research papers in English to reach a wide international audience. B. Given the prominence of scientific English today, it may seem surprising that no one really knew how to write science in English before the 17th century. Before that, Latin was regarded as the lingua franca for European intellectuals. C. The European Renaissance (c. 14th～16th century) is sometimes called the 'revival of learning', a time of renewed interest in the 'lost knowledge' of classical times. At the same time, however, scholars also began to test and extend this knowledge. D. The emergent nation states of Europe developed competitive interests in world exploration and the development of trade. Such expansion, which was to take the English language west to America and east to India, was supported by scientific developments such as the discovery of magnetism (and hence the invention of the compass), improvements in cartography and—perhaps the most important scientific revolution of them all—the new theories of astronomy and the movement of the Earth in relation to the planets and stars, developed by Copernicus (1473-1543). E. England was one of the first countries where scientists adopted and publicized Copernican ideas with enthusiasm. Some of these scholars, including two with interests in language—John Wall's and John Wilkins—helped Found the Royal Society in 1660 in order to promote empirical scientific research. F. Across Europe similar academies and societies arose, creating new national traditions of science. In the initial stages of the scientific revolution, most publications in the national languages were popular works, encyclopaedias, educational textbooks and translations. G. Original science was not done in English until the second half of the 17th century. For example, Newton published his mathematical treatise, known as the Principia, in Latin, but published his later work on the properties of light—Opticks—in English. H. There were several reasons why original science continued to be written in Latin. The first was simply a matter of audience. Latin was suitable for an international audience of scholars, whereas English reached a socially wider, but more local, audience. Hence, popular science was written in English. I. A second reason for writing in Latin may, perversely, have been a concern for secrecy. Open publication had dangers in putting into the public domain preliminary ideas which had not yet been fully exploited by their 'author'. This growing concern about intellectual properly rights was a feature of the period—it reflected both the humanist notion of the individual, rational scientist who invents and discovers through private intellectual labour, and the growing connection between original science and commercial exploitation. J. There was something of a social distinction between 'scholars and gentlemen' who understood Latin, and men of trade who lacked a classical education. And in the mid-17th century it was common practice for mathematicians to keep their discoveries and proofs secret, by writing them in cipher, in obscure languages, or in private messages deposited in a sealed box with the Royal Society. Some scientists might have felt more comfortable with Latin precisely because its audience, though international, was socially restricted. Doctors clung the most keenly to Latin as an 'insider language'. K. A third reason why the writing of original science in English was delayed may have been to do with the linguistic inadequacy of English in the early modern period. English was not well equipped to deal with scientific argument. First, it lacked the necessary technical vocabulary. Second, it lacked the grammatical resources required to represent the world in an objective and impersonal way, and to discuss the relations, such as cause and effect, that might hold between complex and hypothetical entities. L. Fortunately, several members of the Royal Society possessed an interest in language and became engaged in various linguistic projects. Although a proposal in 1664 to establish a committee for improving the English language came to little, the society's members did a great deal to foster the publication of science in English and to encourage the development of a suitable writing style. M. Many members of the Royal Society also published monographs in English. One of the first was by Robert Hooke, the society's first curator of experiments, who described his experiments with microscopes in Micrographia (1665). This work is largely narrative in style, based on a transcript of oral demonstrations and lectures. N. In 1665 a new scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, was inaugurated. Perhaps the first international English-language scientific journal, it encouraged a new genre of scientific writing, that of short, focused accounts of particular experiments. O. The 17th century was thus a formative period in the establishment of scientific English. In the following century much of this momentum was lost as German established itself as the leading European language of science. It is estimated that by the end of the 18th century 401 German scientific journals had been established as opposed to 96 in France and 50 in England. However, in the 19th century scientific English again enjoyed substantial lexical growth as the industrial revolution created the need for new technical vocabulary, and new, specialised, professional societies were instituted to promote and publish in the new disciplines.

单选题 中医中药在中国已经应用了几千年。已经证实其无论是在治病和防病上，还是在养生上，都 有显著的效果。西医未传入中国之前，我们的祖祖辈辈都用中医中药来治疗疾病。中药学作为一 个体系，是目前世界上保留最完整的传统医学，而其在整个历史进程中也一直随着临床条件的变 化在不断地发展完善。中医医药以其系统的医疗方法和临床效果，几个世纪以来对东方的医学理 论和实践产生了巨大的影响，近些年来在西方也得到了迅速普及。

单选题 Now listen to the following recording and answer questions16-19.

单选题 As anyone who has tried to lose weight knows, realistic goal-setting generally produces the best results. That's partially because it appears people who set realistic goals actually work more efficiently, and exert more effort, to achieve those goals. What's far less understood by scientists, however, are the potentially harmful effects of goal-setting. Newspapers relay daily accounts of goal-setting prevalent in industries and businesses up and down both Wall Street and Main Street, yet there has been surprisingly little research on how the long-trumpeted practice of setting goals may have contributed to the current economic crisis, and unethical (不道德的) behavior in general. 'Goals are widely used and promoted as having really beneficial effects. And yet, the same motivation that can push people to exert more effort in a constructive way could also motivate people to be more likely to engage in unethical behaviors, ' says Maurice Schweitzer, an associate professor at Penn's Wharton School. 'It turns out there's no economic benefit to just having a goal—you just get a psychological benefit. 'Schweitzer says, 'But in many cases, goals have economic rewards that make them more powerful. ' A prime example Schweitzer and his colleagues cite is the 2004 collapse of energy-trading giant Enron, where managers used financial incentives to motivate salesmen to meet specific revenue goals. The problem, Schweitzer says, is the actual trades were not profitable. Other studies have shown that saddling employees with unrealistic goals can compel them to lie, cheat or steal. Such was the case in the early 1990s when Sears imposed a sales quota on its auto repair staff. It prompted employees to overcharge for work and to complete unnecessary repairs on a companywide basis. Schweitzer concedes his research runs counter to a very large body of literature that commends the many benefits of goal-setting. Advocates of the practice have taken issue with his team's use of such evidence as news accounts to support his conclusion that goal-setting is widely over-prescribed. In a rebuttal (反驳) paper, Dr. Edwin Locke writes: 'Goal-setting is not going away. Organizations cannot thrive without being focused on their desired end results any more than an individual can thrive without goals to provide a sense of purpose. ' But Schweitzer contends the 'mounting causal evidence' linking goal-setting and harmful behavior should be studied to help spotlight issues that merit caution and further investigation. 'Even a few negative effects could be so large that they outweigh many positive effects, ' he says. 'Goal-setting does help coordinate and motivate people. My idea would be to combine that with careful oversight, a strong organizational culture, and make sure the goals that you use are going to be constructive and not significantly harm the organization, ' Schweitzer says.

单选题Directions:Forthispart,youareallowed30minutestowriteanessaybasedonthepicturebelow.Youshouldstartyouressaywithabriefdescriptionofthepictureandthendiscusshowtoprotectwildanimals.Youshouldgivesoundargumentstosupportyourviewsandwriteatleast150wordsbutnomorethan200words.

单选题 Will there ever be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of conversation at Einstein memorial meetings throughout the year. A new Einstein will emerge, scientists say. But it may take a long time. After all, more than 200 years separated Einstein from his nearest rival, Isaac Newton. Many physicists say the next Einstein hasn't been born yet, or is a baby now. That's because the quest for a unified theory that would account for all the forces of nature has pushed current mathematics to its limits. New math must be created before the problem can be solved. But researchers say there are many other factors working against another Einstein emerging anytime soon. For one thing, physics is a much different field today. In Einstein's day, there were only a few thousand physicists worldwide, and the theoreticians who could intellectually rival Einstein probably would fit into a streetcar with seats to spare. Education is different, too. One crucial aspect of Einstein's training that is overlooked is the years of philosophy he read as a teenager—Kant, Schopenhauer and Spinoza, among others. It taught him how to think independently and abstractly about space and time, and it wasn't long before he became a philosopher himself. 'The independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan (工匠) or specialist and a real seeker after truth,' Einstein wrote in 1944. And he was an accomplished musician. The interplay between music and math is well known. Einstein would furiously play his violin as a way to think through a knotty physics problem. Today, universities have produced millions of physicists. There aren't many jobs in science for them, so they go to Wall Street and Silicon Valley to apply their analytical skills to more practical—and rewarding—efforts. 'Maybe there is an Einstein out there today,' said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, 'but it would be a lot harder for him to be heard.' Especially considering what Einstein was proposing. 'The actual fabric of space and time curving? My God, what an idea!' Greene said at a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute. 'It takes a certain type of person who will bang his head against the wall because you believe you'll find the solution.' Perhaps the best examples are the five scientific papers Einstein wrote in his 'miracle year' of 1905. These 'thought experiments' were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown. There were no footnotes or citations. What might happen to such a submission today? 'We all get papers like those in the mail,' Greene said. 'We put them in the junk file.'

单选题 What If You Could Learn Everything A. Imagine every student has a tireless personal tutor, an artificially intelligent and inexhaustible companion that knows everything, knows the student, and helps her learn what she needs to know. ''You guys sound like you're from the future,'' Jose Ferreira, the CEO of the education technology startup Knewton, says. 'That's the most common reaction we get from others in the industry. ' B. Several million data points generated dally by each of 1 million students from elementary school through college, using Knewton's 'adaptive learning' technology to study math, reading, and other fundamentals. Adaptive learning is an increasingly popular catchphrase denoting educational software that customizes its presentation of material from moment to moment based on the user's input. It's being hailed as a 'revolution' by both venture capitalists and big, established education companies. ' C. Ferreira started Knewton in 2008 with more or less the same vision he believes in today: to enable digital technology to transform learning for everyone and to build the company that dominates that transformation. 'Look at what other industries the Internet has transformed, ' he once said. 'It laid waste to media and is rebuilding it. But for whatever reason, people don't see it with education. It is blindingly obvious to me that it will happen with education. All the content behind education is going to move online in the next 10 years. It's a great shift. And that is what Knewton is going to power. ' D. The recommendation engine is a core technology of the Internet, and probably one you encounter every day. Google uses recommendations: other people who entered these search terms clicked on this page, so we'll show it to you first. Amazon uses them: other people who bought this book also bought that book. The more you use one of these websites, the more it knows about you—not just about your current behavior, but about all the other searches and clicks you've done. In theory, as you spend more time with a site its recommendations will become more personalized even as they also draw on everyone else's interactions within the platform. E. Knewton, at base, is a recommendation engine but for learning. Rather than the set of all Web pages or all movies, the learning data set is, more or less, the universe of all facts. For example, a single piece of data in the engine might be the math fact that a Pythagorean triangle has sides in the ratio 3-4-5, and you can multiply those numbers by any whole number to get a new set of side lengths for this type of triangle. Another might be the function of 'adversatives' such as 'but, ' 'however, ' or 'on the other hand' in changing the meaning of an English sentence. F. Ferreira calls these facts 'atomic concepts, ' meaning that they're indivisible into smaller concepts—he clearly likes the physics reference. When a textbook publisher like Pearson loads its curriculum into Knewton's platform, each piece of content—it could be a video, a test question, or a paragraph of text—is tagged with the appropriate concept or concepts. G. Let's say your school bought the Knewton-powered MyMathLab online system, using the specific curriculum, say, Lial's Basic College Mathematics 8e. When a student logs on to the system, she first takes a simple placement test or pretest from the book, which has been tagged with the relevant 'atomic concepts. ' As a student reads the text or watches the video and answers the questions, Knewton's system is 'reading' the student as well—timing every second on task, tabulating (把……列成表格) every keystroke, and constructing a profile of learning style: hesitant or confident? Guessing blindly or taking her time? H. Based on the student's answers, and what she did before getting the answer, 'we can tell you to the percentile, for each concept: how fast they learned it, how well they know it, how long they'll retain it, and how likely they are to learn other similar concepts that well, ' says Ferreira. By watching as a student interacts with it, the platform deduces. I. The platform forms a personalized study plan based on that information and decides what the student should work on next, feeding the student the appropriate new pieces of content and continuously checking the progress. A dashboard shows the student how many 'mastery points' have been achieved and what to do next. Teachers, likewise, can see exactly which concepts the student is struggling with, and not only whether the homework problems have been done but also how many times each problem was attempted, how many hints were needed, and whether the student looked at the page or opened up the video with the relevant explanation. The more people use the system, the better it gets; and the more you use it, the better it gets for you. J. In a traditional class, a teacher moves a group of students through a predetermined sequence of material at a single pace. Reactions are delayed—you don't get homework or pop quizzes back for a day or two. Some students are bored; some are confused. You can miss a key idea, fall behind, and never catch up. Software-enabled adaptive learning flips all of this on its head. Students can move at their own speed. They can get hints and instant feedback. Teachers, meanwhile, can spend class time targeting their help to individuals or small groups based on need. K. Ferreira is able to work with competitors like Pearson and Wiley because his software can power anybody's educational content, the same way Amazon Web Services provides the servers for any website to be hosted in the cloud. But before it had any content partners, as a proof of concept, Knewton built its own remedial college math course using its software platform, Math Readiness was adopted starting in the summer of 2011at Arizona State University; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the University of Alabama. L. At ASU, students worked through the computer material in Knewton's Math Readiness program on their own or in small groups, with instructors spending face-to-face time working on problem solving, critical thinking, and troubleshooting specific concepts. After two semesters of use, course withdrawal rates dropped by 56percent and pass rates went from 64 percent to 75 percent. At Alabama, pass rates rose from 70 percent to 87percent, and at UNLV, where entering students were given the chance to take the course online in the summer before they started college, the percentage who then qualified for college algebra went from 30 percent to 41percent. M. 'Before this, I worked on the assumption that all students were at the same place. Now, because they progress at different rates, I meet them where they are, ' Irene Bloom, a math lecturer at ASU, told an education blog about the pilot program. 'I have so much more information about what my students do (or don't do) outside of class. I can see where they are stuck, how fast they are progressing, and how much time and effort they are putting into learning mathematics. ' N. The Knewton system uses its analytics to keep students motivated. If it notices that you seem to have a confidence problem, because you too often blow questions that should be easy based on previous results, it will start you off with a few questions you're likely to get right. If you're stuck, choosing the wrong answer again and again, it will throw out broader and broader hints before just showing you the fight answer. It knows when to drill you on multiplication and when to give you a fun animated video to watch. O. It turns out that personalizing in this way can speed up learning. In the first year, 45 percent of ASU students in a 14-week course learned the material four weeks ahead of schedule. Better data is giving more options to the student who didn't succeed as well. Students may not yet know enough to pass the final exam, but a close read of their answers shows that they are making slow and steady progress. 'In the past, those students would have dropped out of school, ' he says. In fact, the vast majority of students placed into remedial math at the nation's community colleges never get their degrees. 'Instead, we were able to say, give them another semester and they'll get it. Their whole life has now changed. '