单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Part Two of the interview.6.

单选题. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Part One of the conversation.1.

单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Part Two of the interview.6.

单选题I can still remember the faces when I suggested a method of dealing with what most teachers of English considered one of their pet horrors, extended reading. The room was full of tired teachers, and many were quite cynical about the offer to work together to create a new and dynamic approach to the place of stories in the classroom. (2)They had seen promises come and go and mere words weren’t going to convince them, which was a shame as it was mere words that we were principally dealing with. Most teachers were unimpressed by the extended reading challenge from the Ministry, and their lack of enthusiasm for the rather dry list of suggested tales was passed on to their students and everyone was pleased when that part of the syllabus was over. It was simply a box ticking exercise. We needed to do something more. We needed a very different approach. (3)That was ten years ago. Now we have a different approach, and it works. Here’s how it happened(or, like most good stories, here are the main parts. You have to fill in some of yourself employing that underused classroom device, the imagination.)We started with three main precepts: (4)First, it is important to realize that all of us are storytellers, tellers of tales. We all have our own narratives — the real stories such as what happened to us this morning or last night, and the ones we have been told by others and we haven’t experienced personally. We could say that our entire lives are constructed as narratives. As a result, we all understand and instinctively feel narrative structure. Binary opposites — for example, the tension created between good and bad together with the resolution of that tension through the intervention of time, resourcefulness and virtue — is a concept understood by even the youngest children. Professor Kieran Egan, in his seminal book ’Teaching as Storytelling’ warns us not to ignore this innate skill, for it is a remarkable tool for learning. (5)We need to understand that writing and reading are two sides of the same coin: an author has not completed the task if the book is not read: the creative circle is not complete without the reader, who will supply their own creative input to the process. Samuel Johnson said: A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it. In teaching terms, we often forget that reading itself can be a creative process, just as writing is, and we too often relegate it to a means of data collection. We frequently forget to make that distinction when presenting narratives or poetry, and often ask comprehension questions which relate to factual information — who said what and when, rather than speculating on ’why’, for example, or examining the context of the action. (6)The third part of the reasoning that we adopted relates to the need to engage the students as readers in their own right, not simply as language learners: learning the language is part of the process, not the reason for reading. What they read must become theirs and have its own special and secret life in their heads, a place where teachers can only go if invited. (7)We quickly found that one of the most important ways of making all the foregoing happen was to engage the creative talents of the class before they read a word of the text. The pre-reading activities become the most important part of the teaching process: the actual reading part can almost be seen as the cream on the cake, and the principle aim of pre-reading activities is to get students to want to read the text. We developed a series of activities which uses clues or fragments from the text yet to be read, and which rely on the students’ innate knowledge of narrative, so that they can build their own stories before they read the key text. They have enough information to generate ideas but not so much that it becomes simply an exercise in guided writing: releasing a free imagination is the objective. (8)Moving from pre-reading to reading, we may introduce textual intervention activities. ’Textual Intervention’ is a term used by Rob Pope to describe the process of questioning a text not simply as a guide to comprehension but as a way of exploring the context of the story at any one time, and exarnining points at which the narrative presents choices, points of divergence, or narrative crossroads. We don’t do this for all texts, however, as the shorter ones do not seem to gain much from this process and it simply breaks up the reading pleasure. (9)Follow-up activities are needed, at the least, to round off the activity, to bring some sense of closure but they also offer an opportunity to link the reading experience more directly to the requirements of the syllabus. Indeed, the story may have been chosen in the first place because the context supports one of the themes that teachers are required to examine as part of the syllabus — for example, ’families’, ’science and technology’, ’communications’, ’the environment’ and all the other familiar themes. For many teachers this is an essential requirement if they are to engage in such extensive reading at all. (10)The whole process — pre-, while and post reading — could be just an hour’s activity, or it could last for more than one lesson. When we are designing the materials for exploring stories clearly it isn’t possible for us to know how much time any teacher will have available, which is why we construct the activities into a series of independent units which we call kits. They are called kits because we expect teachers to build their own lessons out of the materials we provide, which implies that large amounts may be discarded. What we do ask, though, is that the pre-reading activities be included, if nothing else. That is essential for the process to engage the student as a creative reader. (11)One of the purposes of encouraging a creative reading approach in the language classroom is to do with the dynamics we perceive in the classroom, Strategic theorists tell us of the social trinity, whereby three elements are required to achieve a dynamic in any social situation. In the language classroom these might be seen as consisting of the student, the teacher and the language. Certainly from the perspective of the student — and usually from the perspective of the teacher — the relationship is an unequal one, with the language being perceived as placed closer to the teacher than the student. This will result in less dynamic between language and student than between language and teacher. However, if we replace ’language’ with narrative and especially if that is approached as a creative process that draws the student in so that they feel they ’own’ the relationship with the text Then this will shift the dynamic in the classroom so that the student, who has now become a reader, is much closer to the language — or narrative — than previously. This creates a much more effective dynamic of learning. However, some teachers feel threatened by this apparent loss of overall control and mastery. Indeed, the whole business of open ended creativity and a lack of boxes to tick for the correct answer is quite unsettling territory for some to find themselves in.

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1I can still remember the faces when I suggested a method of dealing with what most teachers of English considered one of their pet horrors, extended reading. The room was full of tired tea

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1It’s 7 pm on a balmy Saturday night in June, and I have just ordered my first beer in I Cervejaria, a restaurant in Zambujeira do Mar, one of the prettiest villages on Portugal’s south-wes

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1Once again, seething, residual anger has burst forth in an American city. And the riots that overtook Los Angeles were a reminder of what knowledgeable observers have been saying for a qua

单选题. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are three passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE (1)Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity—by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power—and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial auto-biography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman. (2)At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him—home-spun cloth, "soul forces" and vegetarianism—were unappealing. It was also apparent that the British were malting use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence—which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever—he could be regarded as "our man". In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror. (3)But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded. Again, he seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. And though he came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavorably, and was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority. Color feeling when he first met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was fighting what was in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a haft-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way. (4)Written in short lengths for newspaper serialization, the autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin—all this was the idea of assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as possible. He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other Idnd who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to confess. (5)One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handier of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions. His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi's worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive. Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings can have much for those who do not accept the religions beliefs on which they are founded, I have never felt hilly certain. PASSAGE TWO (1)In 1823, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age." Unfortunately, there is a steady push of students into the STEM subjects so they can get high-paying jobs when they are done. (2)This is college admissions decision season—a time when many young people have traditionally looked forward to an educational experience quite different from what they had (sometimes just endured) in high school. The days of checking off boxes to prove their worthiness to some future gatekeepers would be over. In college there might be requirements, but there would also be much more freedom, much more relevance, and much more intellectual excitement. (3)But the discourse about colleges and universities today is undermining these hopeful expectations. Everywhere one looks, from government statistics on earnings after graduation to a bevy of rankings that purport to show how to monetize your choice of major, the message to students is to think of their undergraduate years as an economic investment that had better produce a substantial and quick return. (4)There are good reasons for this. One is the scourge of student indebtedness. When students graduate with mountains of debt, especially from shady institutions graduating a small percentage of those who enroll, they can fall into a vicious cycle of poor choices and ever more limited horizons. They are collateral damage in a world of rising tuition. While the wealthiest families have been benefiting from enormous tax breaks, many states have disinvested in public universities, putting great pressure on these institutions to collect tuition dollars. Middle-class and low-income students often borrow those dollars to pay the bills. And the bills grow ever greater as colleges raise tuition in part to meet the demands of rich families for campus amenities so that their children can live in the style to which they have grown accustomed. (5)But even students without the pressure of loans are being encouraged to turn away from "college as exploration" and toward "college as training." They hear that in today's fast-paced, competitive world, one can no longer afford to try different fields that might improve one's ability to interpret cultural artifacts or analyze social dynamics. Learning through the arts, one of the most powerful ways to tap into one's capacities for innovation is often dismissed as an unaffordable luxury. (6)Parents, pundits and politicians join in the chorus warning students not to miss the economic boat. Study science, technology, engineering and mathematics, they chant, or else you will have few opportunities. Other subjects will leave you a "loser" in our not-so-brave new world of brutal change. College, they insist, should be the place where you conform and learn to swim with this tide. (7)As president of a university dedicated to broad, liberal education, I both deplore the new conformity and welcome an increased emphasis on STEM fields. I've been delighted to see mathematics and neuroscience among our fastest growing majors, have supported students from under-represented groups who are trying to thrive in STEM fields, and have started an initiative to integrate design and engineering into our liberal arts curriculum. (8) Choosing to study a STEM field should be a choice for creativity not conformity. There is nothing narrow about an authentic education in the sciences. Indeed, scientific research is a model for the American tradition of liberal education because of the creative nature of its inquiries, not just the truth-value of its results. As in other disciplines (like music and foreign languages), much basic learning is required, but science is not mere instrumental training; memorizing formulae isn't thinking like a scientist. On our campus, some of the most innovative, exploratory work is being done by students studying human-machine interactions, using computer science to manipulate moving images to tell better stories, and exploring inter-sections of environmental science with economics and performance art. (9)Fears of being crushed by debt or of falling off the economic ladder are pressuring students to conform, and we must find ways to counteract these pressures or we risk undermining our scientific productivity as well as our broad cultural creativity. (10)I've heard it said that students today opt for two fields of study, one for their parents and one for themselves. Examples abound of undergraduates focusing on: economics and English; math and art; biology and theater. But we make a mistake in placing too much emphasis on the bifurcation. Many students are connecting these seemingly disparate fields, not just holding them as separate interests. And they are finding that many employers want them to develop these connections further. Exploration and innovation are not fenced in by disciplines and majors. Students who develop habits of mind that allow them to develop connections that others haven't seen will be creating the opportunities of the future. (11)When Thomas Jefferson was thinking through a new, American model of higher education, it was crucial for him that students not think they already knew at the beginning of their studies where they would end up when it was time for graduation. For him, and for all those who have followed in the path of liberal education in this country, education was exploration—and you would only make important discoveries if you were open to unexpected possibilities. About a century later W.E.B. Du Bois argued that a broad education was a form of empowerment not just apprenticeship. Both men understood that the sciences, along with the humanities, arts and social sciences had vast, integrative possibilities. (12)This integrative tradition of pragmatic American liberal education must be protected. We must not over-react to fears of being left behind. Yes, ours is a merciless economy characterized by deep economic inequality, but that inequality must not be accepted as a given; the skills of citizenship acquired through liberal learning can be used to push back against it. We must cultivate this tradition of learning not only because it is has served us well for so long, but because it can vitalize our economy, lead to an engaged citizenry and create a culture characterized by connectivity and creativity. PASSAGE THREE (1)Innovation, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were. (2)For those who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. Optimism remains the right starting-point, but for workers the dislocating effects of technology may make themselves evident faster than its benefits. Even if new jobs and wonderful products emerge, in the short term income gaps will widen, causing huge social dislocation and perhaps even changing politics. (3)Why be worried? It is partly just a matter of history repeating itself. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital; later on, labor reaped most of the benefits. The pattern today is similar. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labor's share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. Fifteen years ago, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%. (4)Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets, innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too. (5)Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information ("big data"), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people. Clever industrial robots can quickly "learn" a set of human actions. Services may be even more vulnerable. Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors. (6)At the same time, the digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation itself. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms that host services (such as Amazon's cloud computing), provide distribution (Apple's app store) and offer marketing (Facebook), the number of digital startups has exploded. Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity never knew it needed but now cannot do without, so these firms will no doubt dream up new goods and services to employ millions. But for now they are singularly light on workers. When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30 million customers and employed 13 people. Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed 145,000 people in its heyday. (7)The problem is one of timing as much as anything. Google now employs 46,000 people. But it takes years for new industries to grow, whereas the disruption a startup causes to incumbents is felt sooner. Airbnb may turn homeowners with spare rooms into entrepreneurs, but it poses a direct threat to the lower end of the hotel business—a massive employer. (8)If this analysis is halfway correct, the social effects will be huge. Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise) tend to be higher up, so median wages are likely to remain stagnant for some time and income gaps are likely to widen. (9)Anger about rising inequality is bound to grow, but politicians will find it hard to address the problem. Shunning progress would be as futile now as the Luddites' protests against mechanised looms were in the 1810s, because any country that tried to stop would be left behind by competitors eager to embrace new technology. The freedom to raise taxes on the rich to punitive levels will be similarly constrained by the mobility of capital and highly skilled labour. (10)The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers' fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them apart from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking. Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work. (11)Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed. The best way of helping them is not, as many on the left seem to think, to push up minimum wages. Jacking up the floor too far would accelerate the shift from human workers to computers. Better to top up low wages with public money so that anyone who works has a reasonable income, through a bold expansion of the tax credits that countries such as America and Britain use. (12)Innovation has brought great benefits to humanity. Nobody in their right mind would want to return to the world of handloom weavers. But the benefits of technological progress are unevenly distributed, especially in the early stages of each new wave, and it is up to governments to spread them. In the 19th century it took the threat of revolution to bring about progressive reforms. Today's governments would do well to start making the changes needed before their people get angry.1. According to Para. 1, a testing criterion for Gandhi's sainthood is to see if ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Part Two of the interview.6.

单选题 音频同上

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》　　1 In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work. The

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》　　1 In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work. The

单选题. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Part One of the interview.1.

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 Have you ever noticed a certain similarity in public parks and back gardens in the cities of the West? A ubiquitous woodland mix of lawn grasses and trees has found its way throughout Europ

单选题 音频同上

单选题. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE (1)"The world isn't flat," writes Edward Glaeser, "it's paved." At any rate, most of the places where people prefer to dwell are paved. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, and every month 5 million people move from the countryside to a city somewhere in the developing world. (2)For Mr Glaeser, a Harvard economist who grew up in Manhattan, this is a happy prospect. He calls cities "our species' greatest invention": proximity makes people more inventive, as bright minds feed off one another, more productive, as scale gives rise to finer degrees of specialisation; and kinder to the planet, as city-dwellers are more likely to go by foot, bus or train than the car-slaves of suburbia and the sticks. He builds a strong case, too, for town-dwelling, drawing on his own research as well as that of other observers of urban life. And although liberally sprinkled with statistics, Triumph of the City is no dry work. Mr Glaeser writes lucidly and spares his readers the equations of his trade. (3)What makes some cities succeed? Successful places have in common the ability to attract people and to enable them to collaborate. Yet Mr Glaeser also says they are not like Tolstoy's happy families: those that thrive, thrive in their own ways. Thus Tokyo is a national seat of political and financial power. Singapore embodies a peculiar mix of the free market, state-led industrialisation and paternalism. The well-educated citizenries of Boston, Milan, Minneapolis and New York have found new sources of prosperity when old ones ran out. (4)Mr Glaeser is likely to raise hackles in three areas. The first is urban poverty in the developing world. He can see the misery of a slum in Kolkata, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro as easily as anyone else, but believes that "there's a lot to like about urban poverty" because it beats the rural kind. Cities attract the poor with the promise of a better lot than the countryside offers. About three-quarters of Lagos's people have access to safe drinking water; the Nigerian average is less than 30%. Rural West Bengal's poverty rate is twice Kolkata's. (5)The second is the height of buildings. Mr Glaeser likes them tall—and it's not just the Manhattanite in him speaking. He likes low-rise neighbourhoods, too, but points out that restrictions on height are also restrictions on the supply of space, which push up the prices of housing and offices. That suits those who own property already, but hurts those who might otherwise move in, and hence perhaps the city as a whole. (6)So Mr Glaeser wonders whether central Paris might have benefited from a few skyscrapers. He certainly believes that his hometown should preserve fewer old buildings. And he thinks that cities in developing countries should build up rather than out. New downtown developments in Mumbai, he says, should rise to at least 40 storeys. (7)The third, related, area is sprawl, which is promoted, especially in America, by flawed policies nationally and locally. Living out of town may feel green, but it isn't. Americans live too far apart, drive too much and walk too little. The tax-deductibility of mortgage interest encourages people to buy houses rather than rent flats, buy bigger properties rather than smaller ones and therefore to spread out. Minimum plot sizes keep folk out of, say, Marin County, California. He says that spreading Houston has "done a better job of providing affordable housing than all of the progressive reformers on America's East and West coasts." (8)Cities need wise government above all else, and they get it too rarely. That is one reason why, from Paris in 1789 to Cairo in 2011, they are sources of political upheaval as well as economic advance. The reader may wonder if Mumbai really would be better off as a city of high-rise slums rather than low-rise ones. PASSAGE TWO: (1)Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years, and you're 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you're at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men's mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness. (2)Langer's findings were stunning: After just one week, the men in the experimental group (compared with controls of the same age) had more joint flexibility, increased dexterity and less arthritis in their hands. Their mental sensitivity had risen measurably, and they had improved posture. Outsiders who were shown the men's photographs judged them to be significantly younger than the controls. In other words, the aging process had in some measure been reversed.. (3)Though this sounds a bit woo-wooey, Langer and her Harvard colleagues have been running similarly inventive experiments for decades, and the accumulated weight of the evidence is convincing. Her theory, argued in her new book, Counterclockwise, is that we are all victims of our own stereotypes about aging and health. We mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our serf-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative clichés that dominate our thinking about health, we can "mindfully" open ourselves to possibilities for more productive lives even into old age. (4)Consider another of Langer's mindfulness studies, this one using an ordinary optometrist's eye chart. That's the chart with the huge E on top, and descending lines of smaller and smaller letters that eventually become unreadable. Langer and her colleagues wondered: what if we reversed it? The regular chart creates the expectation that at some point you will be unable to read. Would turning the chart upside down reverse that expectation, so that people would expect the letters to become readable? That's exactly what they found. The subjects still couldn't read the tiniest letters, but when they were expecting the letters to get more legible, they were able to read smaller letters than they could have normally. Their expectation—their mindset—improved their actual vision. (5)That means that some people may be able to change prescriptions if they change the way they think about seeing. But other health consequences might be more important than that. Here's another study, this one using clothing as a trigger for aging stereotypes. Most people try to dress appropriately for their age, so clothing in effect becomes a cue for ingrained attitudes about age. But what if this cue disappeared? Langer decided to study people who routinely wear uniforms as part of their work life, and compare them with people who dress in street clothes. She found that people who wear uniforms missed fewer days owing to illness or injury, had fewer doctors' visits and hospitalizations, and had fewer chronic diseases—even though they all had the same socioeconomic status. That's because they were not constantly reminded of their own aging by their fashion choices. The health differences were even more exaggerated when Langer looked at affluent people: presumably the means to buy even more clothes provides a steady stream of new aging cues, which wealthy people internalize as unhealthy attitudes and expectations. (6)Langer's point is that we are surrounded every day by subtle signals that aging is an undesirable period of decline. These signals make it difficult to age gracefully. Similar signals also lock all of us—regardless of age—into pigeonholes for disease. We are too quick to accept diagnostic categories like cancer and depression, and let them define us. (7)That's not to say that we won't encounter illness, bad moods or a stiff back. But with a little mindfulness, we can try to embrace uncertainty and understand that the way we feel today may or may not connect to the way we will feel tomorrow. PASSAGE THREE (1)When catastrophic floods hit Bangladesh, TNT's emergency-response team was ready. The logistics giant, with headquarters in Amsterdam, has 50 people on standby to intervene anywhere in the world at 48 hours' notice. This is part of a five-year-old partnership with the World Food Program (WFP), the UN's agency that fights hunger. The team has attended to some two dozen emergencies, including the Asian tsunami in 2004. "We're just faster," says Ludo Oelrich, the director of TNT's "Moving the World" program. (2)Emergency help is not TNT's only offering. Volunteers do stints around the world on secondment to WFP and staff are encouraged to raise money for the program (they generated euro2.5m last year). There is knowledge transfer, too: TNT recently improved the school-food supply chain in Liberia, increasing WFP's efficiency by 15-20%, and plans to do the same in Congo. (3)Why does TNT do these things? "People feel this is a company that does more than take care of the bottom line," says Mr. Oelrich. "It's providing a soul to TNT." In a 2006 staff survey, 68% said the pro-bono activities made them prouder to work at the company. It also helps with recruitment: three out of four graduates who apply for jobs mention the WFP connection. Last year the company came top in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. (4)TNT's experience illustrates several trends in corporate philanthropy. First, collaboration is in, especially with NGOs. Companies try to pick partners with some relevance to their business. For TNT, the food program is a good fit because hunger is in part a logistical problem. Standard Chartered, a bank, is working with the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee on microfinance and with other NGOs on a campaign to help 10m blind people. (5)Coca-Cola has identified water conservation as critical to its future as the world's largest drinks company. Last June it announced an ambitious collaboration with WWF, a global environmental organization, to conserve seven major freshwater river basins. It is also working with Greenpeace to eliminate carbon emissions from coolers and vending machines. The co-operation is strictly non-financial, but marks a change in outlook. "Ten years ago you couldn't get Coca-Cola and Greenpeace in the same room," says Neville Isdell, its CEO. (6)Second, what used to be local community work is increasingly becoming global community work. In the mid-1990s nearly all IBM's philanthropic spending was in America; now 60% is outside. Part of this involves a corporate version of the peace corps: young staff get one-month assignments in the developing world to work on worthy projects. The idea is not only to make a difference on the ground, but also to develop managers who understand how the wider world works. (7)Third, once a formal program is in place, it becomes hard to stop. Indeed, it tends to grow, not least because employees are keen. In 1996 KPMG allowed its staff in Britain to spend two hours a month of their paid-for time on work for the community. Crucially for an accountancy firm, the work was given a time code. After a while it came to be seen as a business benefit. The program has expanded to half a day a month and now adds up to 40,000 donated hours a year. And increasingly it is not only inputs that are being measured but outputs as well. Salesforce.com, a software firm, tries to measure the impact of its volunteer programs, which involved 85% of its employees last year. (8)All this has meant that straightforward cash donations have become less important. At IBM, in 1993 cash accounted for as much as 95% of total philanthropic giving; now it makes up only about 35%. But cash still matters. When Hank Paulson, now America's treasury secretary, was boss of Goldman Sachs, he was persuaded to raise the amount that the firm chipped in to boost employees' charitable donations. Now it is starting a philanthropy fund aiming for $1 billion to which the partners will be encouraged to contribute a share of their pay. No doubt that is good for the bank's soul. PASSAGE FOUR (1)Under the 1996 constitution, all 11 of South Africa's official languages "must enjoy equality of esteem and be treated equitably". In practice English, the mother tongue of just 8% of the people, increasingly dominates all the others. Its hegemony may even threaten the long-term survival of the country's African languages, spoken as the mother tongue of 80% of South Africans, despite the government's repeated promises to promote and protect indigenous languages and culture. (2)Under apartheid, there were just two official languages, English and Afrikaans, a variant of Dutch with a dash of French, German, Khoisan (spoken by so-called Bushmen and Hottentots), Malay and Portuguese. Pre-colonial African languages were relegated to the black townships and tribal "homelands". Even there, English was often chosen as the medium of education in preference to the inhabitants' mother tongues. Black South Africans increasingly rejected Afrikaans as the language of the main oppressor; English was a symbol of advancement and prestige. (3)Today, 16 years after the advent of black-majority rule, English reigns supreme. Not only is it the medium of business, finance, science and the internet, but also of government, education, broadcasting, the press, advertising, street signs, consumer products and the music industry. For such things Afrikaans is also occasionally used, especially in the Western Cape province, but almost never an African tongue. The country's Zulu-speaking president, Jacob Zuma, makes all his speeches in English. Parliamentary debates are in English. Even the instructions on bottles of prescription drugs come only in English or Afrikaans. (4)Yet most black South Africans are not proficient in English. This is because most of their teachers give lessons in a language that is not their own. To give non-English-speaking children a leg-up, the government agreed last year that all pupils should be taught in their mother tongue for at least the first three years of primary school. But outside the rural areas, where one indigenous language prevails, this is neither financially nor logistically feasible. (5)Some people suggest reducing the number of official languages to a more manageable three: English, Afrikaans and Zulu, the mother tongue of nearly a quarter of South Africans. But non-Zulus would object. Unless brought up on a farm, few whites speak an African language. For the school-leaving exam, proficiency in at least two languages is required. But most native English-speakers opt for Afrikaans, said to be easy to learn, rather than a useful but harder African tongue. At universities African-language departments are closing. (6)Some effort is being made to protect African languages from this apparently inexorable decline. The Sunday Times, South Africa's biggest-selling weekend paper, recently launched a Zulu edition. In September the Oxford University Press brought out the first isiZulu-English dictionary in more than 40 years. (7)Many of the black elite, who send their children to English-speaking private schools or former white state schools, may accept English emerging as the sole national language. Many talk English to their children at home. Fluency in the language of Shakespeare is regarded as a sign of modernity, sophistication and power. (8)Will South Africa's black languages suffer the fate of the six languages brought by the country's first Indian settlers 150 years ago? Maybe so, thinks Rajend Mesthrie at the University of Cape Town. For the first 100-odd years, he says, South Africa's Indians taught and spoke to their children in their native tongues. But English is now increasingly seen as "the best way forward". Today most young Indians speak only English or are bilingual in English and Afrikaans, though they may continue to chat at home in a kind of pidgin English mixed with Indian and Zulu.1. The sentence in the first paragraph "The world isn't fiat...it's paved." implies that ______.(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题. Section A In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One Cruelty to animals, it is said, is often a precursor to graver crimes. So would there not be some usefulness to a registry of individuals convicted of felony animal abuse? Legislators in California want the Golden State to be the first to establish such a record—just as California was the first in the nation to create a registry of sex offenders. The goal of the registry, which would list crimes against both pets and farm animals, is to make it easier for shelters and animal-adoption groups to identify people who shouldn't be allowed access to animals. It would also be a boon to law enforcement because animal abuse, the bill's authors' say, often escalates to violence against people. Abuses covered in the bill would include the malicious and intentional maiming, mutilation, torture, wounding or killing of a living animal. It would also target pet hoarders and operators of animal-fighting rings (such as dog-baiting and cockfighting) who have felony convictions. "We think California is primed for this kind of a bill," says state senate majority leader Dean Florez, who introduced the bill in late February. "We've progressed to the point where we as a legislature are moving in a direction of this bill, which is ultimately, how do we in essence prevent repeat offenses when it comes to cruelty to animals in the state of California?" It is an issue that, Florez says, Californians care for deeply. About 60% of California residents own pets, he says; add in farm animals, and 80% of the population has some kind of ownership of animals. The bill's biggest stumbling block may be the funding it would require. Created with the assistance of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the bill would raise the approximately $ 500,000 to $ 1 million necessary for its launch through a 2- or 3-cent tax per pound of pet food, says Florez, a Democrat who is chairman of the Food and Agriculture Committee. He estimated that after it's launch, the project could cost between $ 300,000 to $ 400,000 a year to maintain. Yet even that relatively small amount has some organizations, including a national pet-product trade group and even the Humane Society, raising concerns. Jennifer Fearing, California senior state director and chief economist for the US Humane Society, supports the measure's aims but worries about whether it can get passed. Says Fearing: "I would be shocked if this legislature is prepared to enact any tax this year, much less one levied on pet owners who are struggling to care for their animals, when many of them are dropping them off at shelters." Ed Rod, vice President of government affairs for the American Pet Products Association, says the proposal is inherently inequitable. "You're looking at pet owners paying for something that's really going to benefit everyone," says Rod. "And animal abuse certainly affects pets, but it also affects agricultural animals as well, and in this case I don't believe there is any provision to impose a fee on livestock feed. The goal we support, certainly, but we think this is kind of a blunt instrument to reach that goal." There may be other ways to fund the registry. Fearing says the Humane Society supported a similar law in Tennessee that called for those convicted of animal abuse to pay $ 50 toward the cost of an animal-abusers registry. The bill, however, was defeated. Florez says having offenders pay a fee toward the operation of the registry is also under consideration in the California legislation. Even if those convicted of animal-abuse felonies were charged a fee, however, that may not be enough to cover the cost of the registry, since only a small percentage of animal-abuse cases result in felony charges, according to Madeline Bernstein, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles. "The bottom line is that there aren't a lot of felony convictions for animal abuse in the state of California," says Bernstein. The proposal also puts an added burden on local police—operating at a time of state funding cuts—by requiring them to gather registry information on convicted felons and transfer the information to the Department of Justice within three days of collection. Despite the obstacles, Florez expects to push the legislation as far as it can go. Could he get the two-thirds majority required to turn the bill into law—particularly from the Republican minority that pledged not to raise taxes? "In this case," he says, "the issue is simple. Do Republican members really want to be seen on the side of animal abuse? I don't think they do. " (此文选自 Time) Passage Two You and I, and everyone else in America, own the most stunning oceanfront property, the most amazing mountain ranges, the highest free-falling waterfall on the continent, and the most spectacular collection of geothermal features on the planet. I knew the national parks were beautiful and that there must be interesting human stories behind their creation. But I was unprepared for how they touched some of the deepest emotions I've ever felt. The parks can be simultaneously humbling and ennobling. We're aware of our insignificance, yet we feel part of the larger order of things. It's a spiritual, transcendental experience—gives it whatever name you want. It's why people sometimes use biblical references to describe Yosemite, first set aside in 1864, or Yellowstone, our first truly "national" park, or the Grand Canyon, essentially a geological library and the greatest canyon on the face of the earth. My crew and I have been literally brought to tears as we worked on this project, as have many other people over the years. As one man encountering Yosemite Falls for the first time said to his companions, "Now let me die, for I am happy." The historical figures we studied, the consultants who helped us understand those men and women, and the people we've been sharing the parks with today have all had that moment when suddenly they felt connected to everything else in the universe. That isn't bad for a day's work. The real secrets of the parks are their little-known places and unseen wonders. When we were floating down the Colorado River during filming and going over those dramatic rapids, every little side canyon that we didn't have the benefit of seeing from the rim of the Grand Canyon had its own wonders. The way the light struck in the back, the way the water fell, the way new waterfalls sprouted up in the spring because the melting snow needed a place to go—for me, the most marvelous point about the parks is their hidden and beautiful layers. Every park is like an onion. The layers are sometimes very subtle, and each layer takes time to explore. A very nice old ranger at Zion told us, "You could be a ranger here if you knew the answer to three questions: Where's the bathroom? How far is it to Las Vegas? And what's the fastest way out of here?" But the tourist who has the casual "windshield experience" by driving to Yosemite's Inspiration Point can still take a picture that looks awfully like an Ansel Adams shot. The person who parks the car and hikes half a mile in has a better experience than the person who drives through. The person who hikes two miles in gets an even better experience. And the person who backpacks in and spends two weeks immersed in the high country is, of course, delivered an ecstatic religious experience on the par of naturalist John Muir's. Muir was, to me, the most colorful character in the history of the parks. A Scottish-born wanderer, he fell in love with Yosemite when he first walked into it, and for a while he worked there at a sawmill. Muir could have become a titan of industry, but the backpack of civilization slipped off him, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson. He became an apostle, a prophet, of a new kind of Americanism. Muir woke us up to the fact that all this beauty would be lost to development unless it was championed. The man did unbelievably bizarre and rapturous things in California's High Sierra in the name of the national parks. He would claw his way up into a big pine tree in the middle of a raging thunderstorm to find out what a tree felt like during a storm. He would soak sequoia cones in water and drink the purple liquid that seeped out so he could become tree-wise and "sequoical," as he put it. He would watch a lichen on a rock for an entire day; he would contemplate the life of a raindrop. He would climb mountains with very little equipment to speak of, except perhaps for nails hammered into the soles of his shoes, and he would think nothing of covering 50 miles in a two-day excursion with just crackers, oatmeal, and tea for nourishment. Everywhere he turned, Muir believed he was witnessing the work and presence of God. So enspirited was he that I think he must have struck people, as William Cronon, the historian, says in our film, as "an ecstatic holy man." (此文选自 Reader's Digest) Passage Three Despite the clear-cut technological advantages, the railroad didn't become the primary means of transportation for nearly 20 years after the first pioneering American railroads were introduced in the early 1830s. Besides the stiff competition of water transport, an important hindrance to railroad development was public antipathy, which had its roots in ignorance, conservatism, and vested interest. People thought that speeds of 20 to 30 miles per hour would be physically harmful to passengers. Many honestly believed that the railroad would prove to be impractical and uneconomical and would not provide service as dependable as that of the waterways. Unsurprisingly, the most vigorous opposition to railroads came from groups whose economic interests suffered from the competition of the new industry. Millions of dollars had been spent on canals, rivers, highways, and plank roads, and thousands of people depended on these transportation enterprises for their livelihood. Tavern keepers feared their businesses would be ruined, and farmers envisioned the market for hay and grain disappearing as the "iron horse" replaced the flesh-and-blood animal that drew canal boats and pulled wagons. Competitive interests joined to embarrass and hinder the railroads, causing several states to limit traffic on them to passengers and their baggage or to freight hauled only during the months when canal operations ceased. One railroad company in Ohio was required to pay for any loss in canal traffic attributed to railroad competition. Other railroads were ordered to pay a tonnage tax to support the operation of canals. These sentiments, however amusing today, were seriously espoused by national leaders, as seen in a 1829 letter from Martin Van Buren, then governor of New York, to President Andrew Jackson. Despite the opposition of those who feared the railroads, construction went on. In sections of the country where canals could not be built, the railroad offered a means of cheap transportation for all kinds of commodities. In contrast to the municipality that wished to exclude the railroad, many cities and towns, as well as their state governments, did much to encourage railroad construction. And the federal government provided tariff exemptions on railroad iron. By 1840, railroad mileage in the United States was within 1,000 miles of the combined lengths of all canals, the volume of goods carried by water still exceeded that transported by rail. After the depression of the early 1840s, rail investments continued, mostly government assisted, and by 1850,the country had 9,000 miles of railroads, and the railroad's superiority was clear. With the more than 20,000 miles of rails added to the transportation system between 1850 and 1860, total trackage surpassed 30,000 at the end of the decade, and the volume of freight traffic equaled that of canals. All the states east of the Mississippi were connected during this decade. The eastern seaboard was linked with the Mississippi River system, and the Gulf and South Atlantic states could interchange traffic with the Great Lakes. Growing trunk lines like the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio completed construction of projects that had been started in the 1840s, and combinations of short lines provided new through routes. By the beginning of the Civil War, the eastern framework of the present rail-transportation system had been erected, and it was possible to travel by rail the entire distance from New York to Chicago to Memphis and back to New York. Many modifications and improvements occurred, and total factor productivity in railroads more than doubled in the two decades before the Civil War. Technological advances were reflected in the fact that the average traction force of locomotives more than doubled in these two decades. Freight car sizes also increased, with eight-wheel cars being common by 1859. Most of the productivity rise, however, resulted from increased utilization of existing facilities. The stock of capital—and other inputs—grew, but output grew much faster as the initial input became more fully utilized. (此文选自 Popular Mechanics) Passage Four The term "folk custom" is very broad, but it has been used by folklorists to refer to those shared patterns of behaviors in a particular folk group. Those patterns of behaviors are regarded as the traditional and established ways of members of the particular folk group. Folk custom is transmitted by word of mouth, demonstration or imitation. The folklore and folk customs of England are rich and varied. Many customs are ancient, passed down, generation to generation from our Germanic and Celtic ancestors. Others are more modern creations. One of the greatest problems in assessing most accounts of folk customs is that they tend to give only the antiquary's point of view. After all, to most observers, the people they were looking at were simple and illiterate, unmindful of the true significance of the customs they had preserved. Why question them at length if they didn't understand the essential nature of what they were doing? So a folklorist is likely to emphasize aspects of a tradition which reflect his or her own interests or which fit in with preconceived ideas, while possibly ignoring or giving only passing mention to aspects which may, in fact, be of equal importance. One aspect which generally gets left out of accounts is the viewpoint of the participants themselves, for instance, why they indulge in a particular activity at a particular time of year or of their lives and what feelings they experience while doing so. And now, ideas deriving from folklore studies are so widespread that they may easily have become an integral part of the attitude of the participants in a custom. So the folklorist is rather like a man staring at a scene in a mirror who must be aware, to fully understand that scene, that his own reflection is a major part of what he is looking at. It is, however, also true to say that many contemporary students of folklore are fully aware of the problems which beset their enquiries. Like true scientists they draw their conclusions by looking at available evidence, rather than selecting evidence which fits in with existing theories. Some have also looked away from the "obviously" ancient and turned their attention to folklore where it thrives, in the social life of modern cities, in industry and sport, etc. They may, for example, end up looking at the lore of the motor car, or of popular music, and at customs which, though they have no hints of paganism, nevertheless have much in common with older activities which do. Many folklorists have gradually come to the conclusion that folklore is not necessarily a thing of the past, a relic of ancient and outmoded ways of thinking, but the means by which people try to make sense of the world (or to confront its lack of sense) and try to alleviate boredom and suffering. (此文选自 Time)1. If the bill were passed, which of the following actions would be registered for animal abuse?(Passage One)

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