单选题 Questions6-9 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

单选题 昆曲 几百年来，昆曲在表演(staging)的通俗性上经历了种种波折，然而从未有人怀疑过它在戏剧领域享有的最高(supreme)地位。昆曲在其他形式的传统戏剧的创立中发挥了指导性的作用，并产生了一批致力于昆曲的追随者(devotee)。昆曲陶冶了中国古代文人的性情，这方面的作用是不可低估的。近年来，随着中国人的思维观念和生活方式发生了迅速而巨大的变化，昆曲的生存问题面临着巨大的挑战。然而在这个相对不利的环境中，昆曲仍保持着它古老的传统。

单选题 The American Workplace Is Broken. Here's How We Can Start Fixing It. A. Americans are working longer and harder hours than ever before. 83% of workers say they're stressed about their jobs, nearly 50% say work-related stress is interfering with their sleep, and 60% use their smartphones to check in with work outside of normal working hours. No wonder only 13% of employees worldwide feel engaged in their occupation. B. Glimmers (少许) of hope, however, are beginning to emerge in this bruising environment: Americans are becoming aware of the toll their jobs take on them, and employers are exploring ways to alleviate the harmful effects of stress and overwork. Yet much more work remains to be done. To call stress an epidemic isn't exaggeration. The 83% of American employees who are stressed about their jobs—up from 73% just a year before—say that poor compensation and an unreasonable workload are their number-one sources of stress. And if you suspected that the workplace had gotten more stressful than it was just a few decades ago, you're right. Stress levels increased 18% for women and 24% for men from 1983 to 2009. Stress is also starting earlier in life, with some data suggesting that today's teens are even more stressed than adults. C. Stress is taking a significant toll on our health, and the collective public health cost may be enormous. Occupational stress increases the risk of heart attack and diabetes, accelerates the aging process, decreases longevity, and contributes to depression and anxiety, among numerous other negative health outcomes. Overall, stress-related health problems account for up to 90% of hospital visits, many of them preventable. Your job is 'literally killing you,' as The Washington Post put it. It's also hurting our relationships. Working parents say they feel stressed, tired, rushed and short on quality time with their children, friends and partners. D. Seven in 10 workers say they struggle to maintain work-life balance. As technology (and with it, work emails) seeps (渗入) into every aspect of our lives, work-life balance has become an almost meaningless term. Add a rapidly changing economy and an uncertain future to this 24/7 connectivity, and you've got a recipe for overwork, according to Phyllis Moen. 'There's rising work demand coupled with the insecurity of mergers, takeovers, downsizing and other factors,' Moen said. 'Part of the work-life issue has to talk about uncertainty about the future.' E. These factors have converged to create an increasingly impossible situation with many employees overworking to the point of burnout. It's not only unsustainable for workers, but also for the companies that employ them. Science has shown a clear correlation between high stress levels in workers and absenteeism (旷工), reduced productivity, disengagement and high turnover. Too many workplace policies effectively prohibit employees from developing a healthy work-life balance by barring them from taking time off, even when they need it most. F. The U.S. trails far behind every wealthy nation and many developing ones that have family-friendly work policies including paid parental leave, paid sick days and breast-feeding support, according to a 2007 study. The U.S. is also the only advanced economy that does not guarantee workers paid vacation time, and it's one of only two countries in the world that does not offer guaranteed paid maternity leave. But even when employees are given paid time off, workplace norms and expectations that pressure them to overwork often prevent them from taking it. Full-time employees who do have paid vacation days only use half of them on average. G. Our modern workplaces also operate based on outdated time constraints. The practice of clocking in for an eight-hour workday is a leftover from the days of the Industrial Revolution, as reflected in the then-popular saying, 'Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.' H. We've held on to this workday structure—but thanks to our digital devices, many employees never really clock out. Today, the average American spends 8.8 hours at work daily, and the majority of working professionals spend additional hours checking in with work during evenings, weekends and even vacations. The problem isn't the technology itself, but that the technology is being used to create more flexibility for the employer rather than the employee. In a competitive work environment, employers are able to use technology to demand more from their employees rather than motivating workers with flexibility that benefits them. I. In a study published last year, psychologists coined the term 'workplace telepressure' to describe an employee's urge to immediately respond to emails and engage in obsessive thoughts about returning an email to one's boss, colleagues or clients. The researchers found that telepressure is a major cause of stress at work, which over time contributes to physical and mental burnout. Of the 300 employees participating in the study, those who experienced high levels of telepressure were more likely to agree with statements assessing burnout, like 'I've no energy for going to work in the morning,' and to report feeling fatigued and unfocused. Telepressure was also correlated with sleeping poorly and missing work. J. Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow explains that when people feel the pressure to be always 'on,' they find ways to accommodate that pressure, including altering their schedules, work habits and interactions with family and friends. Perlow calls this vicious cycle the 'cycle of responsiveness': Once bosses and colleagues experience an employee's increased responsiveness, they increase their demands on the employee's time. And because a failure to accept these increased demands indicates a lack of commitment to one's work, the employee complies. K. To address skyrocketing employee stress levels, many companies have implemented workplace wellness programs, partnering with health care providers that have created programs to promote employee health and well-being. Some research does suggest that these programs hold promise. A study of employees at health insurance provider Aetna revealed that roughly one quarter of those taking in-office yoga and mindfulness classes reported a 28% reduction in their stress levels and a 20% improvement in sleep quality. These less-stressed workers gained an average of 62 minutes per week of productivity. While yoga and meditation (静思) are scientifically proven to reduce stress levels, these programs do little to target the root causes of burnout and disengagement. The conditions creating the stress are long hours, unrealistic demands and deadlines, and work-life conflict. L. Moen and her colleagues may have found the solution. In a 2011 study, she investigated the effects of implementing a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) on the productivity and well-being of employees at Best Buy's corporate headquarters. M. For the study, 325 employees spent six months taking part in ROWE, while a control group of 334 employees continued with their normal workflow. The ROWE participants were allowed to freely determine when, where and how they worked—the only thing that mattered was that they got the job done. The results were striking. After six months, the employees who participated in ROWE reported reduced work-family conflict and a better sense of control of their time, and they were getting a full hour of extra sleep each night. The employees were less likely to leave their jobs, resulting in reduced turnover. It's important to note that the increased flexibility didn't encourage them to work around the clock. 'They didn't work anywhere and all the time—they were better able to manage their work,' Moen said. 'Flexibility and control is key,' she continued.

单选题 京剧(Peking Opera)已有200多年的历史，是中国的国剧。与其他地方戏相比，京剧享有更高的声誉，但其实京剧融合了多种地方戏的元素。京剧演员的脸谱(facial make-up)和戏服都很精美，相比之下布景则显得十分简单。表演者主要应用四种技能：唱(song)、念(speech)、做(dance)、打(combat)。京剧比较擅长于表现政治、军事斗争等历史题材。在古代，京剧大多是在户外演出的，因此演员们形成了一种极具穿透力的唱腔，以便每个人都能听到。

单选题 文房四宝 “文房四宝”(Four Treasures of the Study)即笔、墨、纸、砚(ink stone)，是中国传统文化中独有的书写工具。“文房四宝”的称谓，起源于南北朝时期，在北宋时期已被广泛使用。毛笔是四宝中最重要的工具，可以用来书写或绘画，是传统的“中国笔”，有不同种类。纸是中国古代四大发明之一，古时候的纸轻薄柔软，能很快地吸收墨汁。墨和砚是古代书写中必不可缺的工具，两者一般一起使用。“文房四宝”不仅是极有价值的文具，也是融绘画、书法、雕刻为一体的艺术品。

单选题 Questions10-12 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 1．随着科技的发展，现代人的技能也随之变化 2．有人认为外语、计算机等技能很重要，也有人认为沟通技能更重要 3．在我看来……

单选题 What a waste of money! In return for an average of ￡44,000 of debt, students get an average of only 14 hours of lecture and tutorial time a week in Britain. Annual fees have risen from ￡1,000 to ￡9,000 in the last decade, but contact time at university has barely risen at all. And graduating doesn't even provide any guarantee of a decent job: six in ten graduates today are in non-graduate jobs. No wonder it has become fashionable to denounce many universities as little more than elaborate con-tricks (骗术). There's a lot for students to complain about: the repayment threshold for paying back loans will be frozen for five years, meaning that lower-paid graduates have to start repaying their loans; and maintenance grants have been replaced by loans, meaning that students from poorer backgrounds face higher debt than those with wealthier parents. Yet it still pays to go to university. If going to university doesn't work out, students pay very little—if any—of their tuition fees back: you only start repaying when you are earning ￡21,000 a year. Almost half of graduates—those who go on to earn less—will have a portion of their debt written off. It's not just the lectures and tutorials that are important. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. Students do not merely benefit while at university; studies show they go on to be healthier and happier than non-graduates, and also far more likely to vote. Whatever your talents, it is extraordinarily difficult to get a leading job in most fields without having been to university. Recruiters circle elite universities like vultures (兀鹰). Many top firms will not even look at applications from those who lack a 2.1, i.e., an upper-second class degree, from an elite university. Students at university also meet those likely to be in leading jobs in the future, forming contacts for life. This might not be right, but school-leavers who fail to acknowledge as much risk malting the wrong decision about going to university. Perhaps the reason why so many universities offer their students so little is they know studying at a top university remains a brilliant investment even if you don't learn anything. Studying at university will only become less attractive if employers shift their focus away from where someone went to university—and there is no sign of that happening anytime soon. School-leavers may moan, but they have little choice but to embrace university and the student debt that comes with it.

单选题 Questions14-16 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 Directions: Nowadays, many universities offer mental health classes to their students. Write a composition entitled The Necessity of Mental Health Education for College Students. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 Design the Prospective Patient Room A. There's very little that's sexy about the health care industry. Within the tangled threads connecting government regulation, opaque insurance policies, and the actual work of patient care itself, there's not a lot of room for glitz or style, and certainly very little time for those working within the health care machine to step back, take inventory of the larger system, and reflect on what's working, what's not, and what could be better if only someone would stop and think through certain problems. This aspect of health care ensures that virtually nobody in the industry has the time or the inclination to dwell on the role of design. B. According to a small group of architects and designers, this lack of design-thinking is precisely why the health care industry struggles to deliver on so many levels. Design, after all, isn't just about form. It's about function. 'We think that design has the power to revolutionize industries, just as it has in electronics, in cars, in everything else,' Salley Whitman says. 'But in health care we haven't tapped into that in a systematic way.' C. Whitman is the Executive Director of NXT Health, a non-profit health care design organization that she describes as something like the research and development shop that the health care industry has always lacked. NXT Health got its start back in 2006 via a Department of Defense grant asking the organization to lead a design collaboration in producing the hospital room of the future—not a futuristic operating theatre or a suite of new treatment technologies, but a patient room that could improve health care outcomes at the individual level. The room itself and the design principles underpinning it have undergone some changes and alterations in the interim, but fundamentally the objective has remained the same: to create better patient care strictly through better design—no game-changing technological breakthroughs or federal legislation required. D. The final product of that effort—christened Patient Room 2020—was unveiled this month at the DuPont Corian Design Studio in New York City. On its face the differences between the patient room of the present and the patient room of the future might appear largely cosmetic. But the NXT Health team and its collaborators—more than 30 industry partners kicked in technology, materials, and know-how to produce the prototype—insist that Patient Room 2020 not be taken at, well, face value. E. The streamlining and packaging of disparate technologies for patient and caregiver use might seem like obvious solutions, the redesign of the bathroom, a nice aesthetic touch. But what this really represents, the team says, is a wholesale rethinking of the patient environment, which has remained largely unchanged for decades. F. 'The health care industry itself is really at a crossroads, it's really being turned upside down from a clinical perspective,' says Andrew Quirk, senior vice president for the Health Care Centre of Excellence at the U.S. outpost of global construction firm Skanska (SKBSY), a collaborator on the Patient Room 2020 project. 'So when you turn to the built environment, you can't expect to deliver health care in the future the same way—and in the same space—as you did in the last few decades.'? G. What drew him to the project, Quirk says, was the idea that for the first time in the history of modern health care, a team of designers was being seriously challenged to integrate technology and architecture into a seamless environment rather than retrofit a handful of pre-existing health care technologies into a pre-existing space. 'Every other time I've heard, this is the patient room of the future, there's nothing new about it,' Quirk says. 'This project really took a leap of faith in integrating technology and architecture and really incorporating all of the activities that will typically go on in a patient room into the design.' H. Patient Room 2020 is indeed a highly integrated orchestration of technologies, materials, and plug-and-play capabilities, encompassing the customary technologies one would expect to find in a hospital room as well as wholly new ones aimed at enhancing patient comfort and care or caregiver efficiency. For instance, the so-called patient ribbon wraps all the way around the bed, from headwall to ceiling to footwall. The headwall contains the necessary machinery for capturing vital signs as well as any oxygen tanks or other hardware that might be necessary. I. The overhead panel contains patient-controlled lighting, while the footwall contains a display that can be used for everything from video-consulting with doctors to pulling up hospital information to viewing entertainment (all controlled from the bed via tablet computer). Caregiver tech in the room includes a hand-washing station, built-in RFID tech for tracking instruments, and simulated UV sanitation of workstations to cut down on the risk of hospital-acquired infection. J. The underlying technologies were provided by more than two dozen companies large and small—Osram Sylvania provided some of the lighting, fabrics-maker Milliken customized antibacterial textiles for linens and scrubs, Duracell chipped in charging technology—and largely packaged up in DuPont's (DD) Corian, a non-porous surface material selected by the design team for its ease of cleaning and the fact that it is thermoformable, leaving few seams or joints where bacteria might thrive. K. Taken altogether, Patient Room 2020 is designed to address some glaring shortcomings rife in the health care system today: a lack of patient engagement in his or her own treatment, hospital-acquired infections, caregiver inefficiency, and overall patient discomfort, which can distract from rehabilitation and generally can make hospital rooms miserable environments. L. That's why Patient Room 2020 isn't just technology for technology's sake, Whitman says. Each element was chosen for a reason and placed in the right location to enhance both patient engagement and caregiver performance and efficiency. It's a systems approach—something that has long been employed to boost efficiency in other industries but has been sorely lacking in basic patient care, where things are often still done piecemeal with pen and clipboard. M. Most importantly, its design influencing behaviours and outcomes, Whitman says, and in a health care environment where fixed costs and other inefficiencies are often beyond an individual hospital's control, enhanced human performance through design gives administrators a unique tool for cutting costs and improving care. N. 'I do not believe that building things the same way but at lower cost is going to help with things like readmission, with hospital-acquired infections,' Whitman says. 'These are some of the big issues we're dealing with payment reform, because you're paying for performance. Hospitals are going to get paid because their patients don't fall, because they don't get sicker while they're there, because they understand their care so when they leave they don't come back—these are all performance metrics the federal government is tracking. So this is not just about putting in technology so we can have fancier electronic medical records.' O. Rather it's about a value proposition for the industry. The kinds of technologies and materials integrated into Patient Room 2020 certainly aren't less expensive than the contemporary alternatives. But long-term they'll improve both patient outcomes and bottom lines. In the near term, converting patient rooms to something like Patient Room 2020 will likely remain somewhat cost-prohibitive for many hospitals, Quirk says, but over time costs will decline and ROI for these technologies will come more quickly. P. And besides, Whitman says, the idea behind Patient Room 2020 isn't for hospitals to graft this model directly onto their hospitals, but to inspire a paradigm shift in the way the health care industry thinks about the role of design in general. The prototype provides a practical model from which administrators and architects can directly borrow or simply draw inspiration. But more than that it provides a clear example of how meaningful good design can be, even in an industry as unsexy as health care. 'In the future there are going to be fewer hospitals, so when we build those hospitals we better build them right,' Whitman says. 'We need to build them in a highly engineered, highly technological way so that they are actually part of the care process, not just an appendage.'

单选题 The Alzheimer's Association and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimate that men make up nearly 40 percent of family care providers now, up from 19 percent in a 1996 study by the Alzheimer's Association. About 17 million men are caring for an adult. Women still provide the bulk of family care, especially intimate tasks like bathing and dressing. Many complain that their brothers are treated like heroes just for showing up. But with smaller families and more women working full-time, many men have no choice but to take on roles that would have been alien to their fathers. Often they are overshadowed by their female counterparts and faced with employers, friends, support organizations and sometimes even parents who view caregiving as an essentially female role. Male caregivers are more likely to say they feel unprepared for the role and become socially isolated, and less likely to ask for help. 'Isolation affects women as well, but men tend to have fewer lifeline. They are less likely to have friends going through similar experiences, and depend more on their jobs for daily human contact,' Dr. Donna Wagner, the director of gerontology (老年学) at Towson University and one of the few researchers who has studied sons as caregivers, said. In past generations, men might have pointed to their accomplishments as breadwinners or fathers. Now, some men say they worry about the conflict between caring for their parents and these other roles. In a 2003 study at three Fortune 500 companies, Dr. Donna Wagner found that men were less likely to use employee-assistance programs for caregivers because they feared it would be held against them. 'Even though the company has endorsed the program, your supervisors may have a different opinion,' Dr. Wagner said. Matt Kassin, 51, worked for a large company with very generous benefits, and his employer had been understanding. But he was reluctant to talk about his caregiving because he thought 'when they hire a male, they expect him to be 100 percent focused.' And he didn't want to appear to be someone who had distractions that detracted (破坏) from performance. For many men, the new role means giving up their self-image as experts, said Louis Colbert, director of the office of services for the aging in Delaware County, Pa., who has shared care of his 84-year-old mother with his siblings since her Alzheimer's made it necessary. Once a year, Mr. Colbert organizes a get-together for male caregivers. The concerns they raise, he said, are different from those of women in support groups. 'Very clearly, they said they wanted their role as caregivers validated, because in our society, as a whole, men as caregivers have been invisible,' he said.

单选题The British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world's first webpage. It is worth 22 the extraordinary impact that his invention has had on the English language. Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn't exist in 1990. Even more words have had unexpected 23 in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting (小鸟的啁啾声) to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have 24 you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging (微博) site Twitter. Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent every 25 minute on the Internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network. And wireless still means, to anyone of a certain age, a radio—not the system for 26 Internet pages without wires. 'The Internet is an amazing 27 for languages,' said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. 'Language itself changes slowly but the Internet has 28 the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.' English is a remarkably 29 language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary. But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have 30 among some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption that 31 a picture of a cat, like 'I'm in your bed sleeping.' But according to Prof. Crystal, they are all little developments used by a very small number of people—thousands rather than millions. 'Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised.'