单选题 Questions14-17 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 Questions16-19 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题 The amount of floating plastic trapped in a north Atlantic current system hasn't got any bigger in 22 years, despite more and more plastic being thrown away. Since 1986 students taking samples of plankton (浮游生物) in the Atlantic and Caribbean Oceans have also noted when their nets caught plastic litter. Kara Lavender and colleagues at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, analysed the data, and found that of 6,136 samples recorded, more than 60 per cent included pieces of plastic, typically just millimetres across. The areas of highest plastic concentration are within the north Atlantic sub-tropical gyre (环流), where currents gather the litter. Lavender and her team were surprised to find that the amount of floating plastic had not increased in the gyre. Although it has been illegal since the 1970s for ships to throw plastic overboard, Lavender thinks that the overall rate of plastic rubbish reaching the ocean will have increased, given the fivefold increase in global production of plastic since 1976. 'Where the extra plastic is going is the big mystery,' she says. Plastic resists bio-degradation and can last decades or more in the ocean. Eventually sunlight and wave motion break it into smaller pieces, which can be harmful to marine life—blocking the stomachs of fish and seabirds, for example. Some experts suggest that the plastic might be degrading into pieces small enough to pass through the 0.3-millimetre-mesh nets used in the study, or becoming coated in biofilms and sinking out of range of the nets. However it is unclear why the rate of degradation during the study period should have increased to offset the extra plastic going into the ocean. Lavender says it is unlikely that ocean currents are pushing plastic out of the gyre, although Simon Boxall of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, who wasn't involved in the study, disagrees. He says the Atlantic gyre has an exit strategy in the form of the Gulf Stream. 'We've seen high levels of plastic in the Arctic.' he says. Wherever it is going at the moment, the plastic on our oceans will eventually be broken down into microscopic pieces and individual molecules whose environmental effect is unknown. 'The million-dollar question is, is it causing any damage?' says Boxall. 'When plastic particles get so small are they just like fibre going through the system? Some studies suggest that persistent chemicals in newer plastics function as endocrine (内分泌) disruptors and simulated hormones.' And this fine-grained plastic is very long-lived. 'The depressing thing is it's likely to remain in the oceans essentially forever,' says Lavender.

单选题 It is the season for some frantic last-minute math—across the country, employees of all stripes are counting backward in an attempt to figure out just how much paid time-off they have left in their reserves. More of them, though, will skip those calculations altogether and just power through the holidays into 2017: More than half of American workers don't use up all of their allotted vacation days each year. Not so long ago, people would have turned up their noses at that kind of dedication to the job. As marketing professors Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan recently explained in Harvard Business Review (HBR), leisure time was once seen as an indicator of high social status, something attainable only for those at the top. Since the middle of the 20th century, though, things have turned the opposite way—these days, punishing hours at your desk, rather than days off, are seen as the mark of someone important. In a series of several experiments, the researchers illustrated just how much we've come to admire busyness, or at least the appearance of it. Volunteers read two passages, one about a man who led a life of leisure and another about a man who was over-worked and over-scheduled; when asked to determine which of the two had a higher social status, the majority of the participants said the latter. The same held true for people who used products that implied they were short on time: In one experiment, for example, customers of the grocery-delivery service Peapod were seen as of higher status than people who shopped at grocery stores that were equally expensive; in another, people wearing wireless headphones were considered further up on the social ladder than those wearing regular headphones, even when both were just used to listen to music. In part, the authors wrote in HBR, this pattern may have to do with the way work itself has changed over the past several decades. We think that the shift from leisure-as-status to busyness-as-status may be linked to the development of knowledge-intensive economies. In such economies, individuals who possess the human capital characteristics that employers or clients value (e.g., competence and ambition) are expected to be in high demand and short supply on the job market. Thus, by telling others that we are busy and working all the time, we are implicitly suggesting that we are sought after, which enhances our perceived status. Even if you feel tempted to sacrifice your own vacation days for fake busyness, though, at least consider leaving your weekends unscheduled. It's for your own good.

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay entitled Man and Computer by commenting on the saying, The real danger is not that the computer will begin to think like man, but that man will begin to think like the computer.' You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

单选题 胡同 胡同，是北京特有的一种古老的城市小巷，在世界上是独一无二的。北京胡同已有800多年的历史，纵横交错于皇城周围。胡同不仅是城市的交通脉络，更是百姓生活的场所。作为北京历史和文化发展的舞台，它见证了历史的变迁(vicissitudes)和风貌，留下了许多社会生活的印记，保留了原汁原味的(authentic)老北京民俗风情。要想真正了解胡同，体味胡同，最好的办法就是亲自去走走、看看。那些古老的胡同，犹如滋味醇厚的佳肴，应当细细咀嚼、慢慢品味。

单选题 Questions18-20 are based on the recording you have just heard.

单选题 据中国古代史书记载，治水有功的大禹通过禅让制接替舜成为部落联盟首领。但大禹死后，他的儿子夏启却破坏禅让的传统，自立为国王，建立了中国历史上第一个奴隶制国家——夏。从此，王位实行世袭制度，中国社会从此步入阶级社会。夏代处在中国社会从原始社会向奴隶社会过渡的时期，社会生活的各个方面依然保存着原始社会的种种痕迹。

单选题 西藏自治区(Tibet Autonomous Region)平均海拔4000米以上，是青藏高原的主体部分，有着“世界屋脊”(the roof of the world)之称。西藏是国际河流分布最多的一个中国省区，雅鲁藏布江(Brahmaputra River)是西藏的第一大河。它全长2057公里，流域面积24万多平方公里。西藏气候具有西北严寒干燥、东南温暖湿润的特点。对于许多未去过西藏旅游的游客来说，西藏的地理位置和气候特点很容易使人产生畏惧心理，其实只要了解西藏的气候特点，能够正确地保护自己，放松心情，就一定会在西藏度过一段美好又难忘的时光。

单选题 Plastic Surgery A better credit card is the solution to ever larger hack attacks A. A thin magnetic stripe(magstripe)is all that stands between your credit-card information and the bad guys. And they've been working hard to break in. That's why 2014 is shaping up as a major showdown: banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to stop a network of hackers who are succeeding in stealing account numbers, names, email addresses and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were affected in some way during the most recent attacks, starting last November. B. Swipe(刷卡)is the operative word: cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks when you make purchases in a store. In several recent incidents, hackers have been able to obtain massive information of credit-, debit-(借记)or prepaid-card numbers using malware, i.e. malicious soft-ware, inserted secretly into the retailers' point-of-sale system—the checkout registers. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on fake cards and being used for online purchases. C. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U. S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with a technology called EMV(short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa)that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN( personal identification number)to authenticate(验证)every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. (Online purchases can be made by setting up a separate transaction code.) D. Why haven't big banks adopted the more secure technology? When it comes to mailing out new credit cards, it's all about relative costs, says David Robertson, who runs the Nilson Report, an industry newsletter. 'The cost of the card, putting the sticker on it, coding the account number and expiration date, embossing(凸印)it, the small envelope—all put together, you're in the dollar range.' A chip-and-PIN card currently costs closer to $3, says Robertson, because of the price of chips. (Once large issuers convert together, the chip costs should drop.) E. Multiply $3 by the more than 5 billion magstripe credit and prepaid cards in circulation in the U. S. Then consider that there's an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis, says Robertson. With 44% of that in the U. S. American credit-card fraud amounts to about $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers have so far calculated that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic. F. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology to charge purchases—and leaves consumers vulnerable. Each magstripe has three tracks of information, explains payments security expert Jeremy Gumbley, the chief technology officer of CreditCall, an electronic-payments company. The first and third are used by the bank or card issuer. Your vital account information lives on the second track, which hackers try to capture. 'Malware is scanning through the memory in real time and looking for data,' he says. 'It creates a text file that gets stolen.' G. Chip-and-PIN cards, by contrast, make fake cards or skimming impossible because the information that gets scanned is encrypted (加密). The historical reason the U. S. has stuck with magstripe, ironically enough, is once superior technology. Our cheap, ultra-reliable wired net-works made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV in part because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The EMV solution allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely. H. Some big banks, like Wells Fargo, are now offering to convert your magstripe card to a chip-and-PIN model. (It's actually a hybrid(混合体)that will still have a magstripe, since most U. S. merchants don't have EMV terminals.) Should you take them up on it? If you travel internationally, the answer is yes. I. Keep in mind, too, that credit cards typically have better liability protection than debit cards. If someone uses your credit card fraudulently(欺炸性地), it's the issuer or merchant, not you, that takes the hit. Debit cards have different liability limits depending on the bank and the events surrounding any fraud. 'If it's available, the logical thing is to get a chip-and-PIN card from your bank,' says Eric Adamowsky, a co-founder of CreditCardInsider. com. 'I would use credit cards over debit cards because of liability issues. 'Cash still works pretty well too. J. Retailers and banks stand to benefit from the lower fraud levels of chip-and-PIN cards but have been reluctant for years to invest in the new infrastructure(基础设施)needed for the technology, especially if consumers don't have access to it. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: no one wants to spend the money on upgraded point-of-sale systems that can read the chip cards if shoppers aren't car-tying them—yet there's little point in consumers' carrying the fancy plastic if stores aren't equipped to use them. (An earlier effort by Target to move to chip and PIN never gained progress.) According to Gumbley, there's a 'you-first mentality. The logjam(僵局)has to be broken.' K. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently expressed his willingness to do so, noting that banks and merchants have spent the past decade suing each other over interchange fees—the percentage of the transaction price they keep—rather than deal with the growing hacking problem. Chase offers a chip-enabled card under its own brand and several others for travel-related companies such as British Airways and Ritz-Carlton. L. The Target and Neiman hacks have also changed the cost calculation: although retailers have been reluctant to spend the $6.75 billion that Capgemini consultants estimate it will take to convert all their registers to be chip-and-PIN compatible, the potential liability they now face is dramatically greater. Target has been hit with class actions from hacked consumers. 'It's the ultimate nightmare,' a retail executive from a well-known chain admitted to TIME. M. The card-payment companies MasterCard and Visa are pushing hard for change. The two firms have warned all parties in the transaction chain—merchant, network, bank—that if they don't become EMV-compliant by October 2015, the party that is least compliant will bear the fraud risk. N. In the meantime, app-equipped smartphones and digital wallets—all of which can use EMV technology—are beginning to make inroads(侵袭)on cards and cash. PayPal, for instance, is testing an app that lets you use your mobile phone to pay on the fly at local merchants—without surrendering any card information to them. And further down the road is biometric authentication, which could be encrypted with, say, a fingerprint. O. Credit and debit cards, though, are going to be with us for the foreseeable future, and so are hackers, if we stick with magstripe technology. 'It seems crazy to me,' says Gumbley, who is English, 'that a cutting-edge-technology country is depending on a 40-year-old technology.' That's why it may be up to consumers to move the needle on chip and PIN. Robertson says 'When you get the consumer into a position of worry and inconvenience, that's where the rubber hits the road.'