单选题You should treat skeptically the loud cries now coming from colleges and universities that the last bastion of excellence in American education is being destroyed by state budget cuts and mounting costs. Whatever else it is, higher education is not a bastion of excellence. It is shot through with waste, lax academic standards and mediocre teaching and scholarship. (2)True, the economic pressures—from the Ivy League to state systems—are intense. Last year, nearly two-thirds of schools had to make midyear spending cuts to stay within their budgets. It is also true(as university presidents and deans argue)that relieving those pressures merely by raising tuition and cutting courses will make matters worse. Students will pay more and get less. The university presidents and deans want to be spared from further government budget cuts. Their case is weak. (3)Higher education is a bloated enterprise. Too many professors do too little teaching to too many ill-prepared students. Costs can be cut and quality improved without reducing the number of graduates. Many colleges and universities should shrink. Some should go out of business. Consider: Except for elite schools, admission standards are low. About 70 percent of freshmen at four-year colleges and universities attend their first-choice schools. Roughly 20 percent go to their second choices. Most schools have eagerly boosted enrollments to maximize revenues(tuition and state subsidies). Dropout rates are high. Half or more of freshmen don’t get degrees. A recent study of PhD programs at 10 major universities also found high dropout rates for doctoral candidates. The attrition among undergraduates is particularly surprising because college standards have apparently fallen. One study of seven top schools found widespread grade inflation. In 1963 , half of the students in introductory philosophy courses got a B—or worse. By 1986, only 20 percent did. If elite schools have relaxed standards, the practice is almost surely widespread. Faculty teaching loads have fallen steadily since the 1960s. In major universities, senior faculty members often do less than two hours a day of teaching. Professors are "socialized to publish, teach graduate students and spend as little time teaching(undergraduates)as possible," concludes James Fairweather of Penn State University in a new study. Faculty pay consistently rises as undergraduate teaching loads drop. Universities have encouraged an almost mindless explosion of graduate degrees. Since 1960, the number of masters’ degrees awarded annually has risen more than fourfold to 337 ,000. Between 1965 and 1989, the annual number of MBAs(masters in business administration)jumped from 7,600 to 73,100. (4)Even so, our system has strengths. It boasts many top-notch schools and allows almost anyone to go to college. But mediocrity is pervasive. We push as many freshmen as possible through the door, regardless of qualifications. Because bachelors’ degrees are so common, we create more graduate degrees of dubious worth. Does anyone believe the MBA explosion has improved management? (5)You won’t hear much about this from college deans or university presidents. They created this mess and are its biggest beneficiaries. Large enrollments support large faculties. More graduate students liberate tenured faculty from undergraduate teaching to concentrate on writing and research: the source of status. Richard Huber, a former college dean, writes knowingly in a new book "How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream: Why We’re Paying More and Getting Less in Higher Education" : Presidents, deans and trustees...call for more recognition of good teaching with prizes and salary incentives. (6)The reality is closer to the experience of Harvard University’s distinguished paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould: "To be perfectly honest, though lip service is given to teaching, I have never seriously heard teaching considered in any meeting for promotion. .. Writing is the currency of prestige and promotion. " (7)About four-fifths of all students attend state-subsidized systems, from community colleges to prestige universities. How governors and state legislatures deal with their budget pressures will be decisive. Private schools will, for better or worse, be influenced by state actions. The states need to do three things. (8)First, create genuine entrance requirements. Today’s low standards tell high school students: You don’t have to work hard to go to college. States should change the message by raising tuition sharply and coupling the increase with generous scholarships based on merit and income. To get scholarships, students would have to pass meaningful entrance exams. Ideally, the scholarships should be available for use at instate private schools. All schools would then compete for students on the basis of academic quality and costs. Today’s system of general tuition subsidies provides aid to well-to-do families that don’t need it or to unqualified students who don’t deserve it. (9)Next, states should raise faculty teaching loads, mainly at four-year schools.(Teaching loads at community colleges are already high.)This would cut costs and reemphasize the primacy of teaching at most schools. What we need are teachers who know their fields and can communicate enthusiasm to students. Not all professors can be path-breaking scholars. The excessive emphasis on scholarship generates many unread books and mediocre articles in academic journals. "You can’t do more of one(research)without less of the other(teaching)," says Fairweather. "People are working hard—it’s just where they’re working. " (10)Finally, states should reduce or eliminate the least useful graduate programs. Journalism(now dubbed "communications"), business and education are prime candidates. A lot of what they teach can—and should—be learned on the job. If colleges and universities did a better job of teaching undergraduates, there would be less need for graduate degrees. (11)Our colleges and universities need to provide a better education to deserving students. This may mean smaller enrollments, but given today’s attrition rates, the number of graduates need not drop. Higher education could become a bastion of excellence, if we would only try.

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 interview.1.

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单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 Most West African lorries are not in what one would call the first flush of youth, and I had learnt by bitter experience not to expect anything very much of them. But the lorry that arrived

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 My professor brother and I have an argument about head and heart, about whether he overvalues IQ while I lean more toward EQ. We typically have this debate about people—can you be friends w

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

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 Letty the old lady lived in a "Single Room Occupancy" hotel approved by the New York City welfare department and occupied by old losers, junkies, cockroaches and rats. Whenever she left her room—a tiny cubicle with a cot, a chair, a seven-year-old calendar and a window so filthy it blended with the unspeakable walls—she would pack all her valuables in two large shopping bags and carry them with her. If she didn't, everything would disappear when she left the hotel. Her "things" were also a burden. Everything she managed to possess was portable and had multiple uses. A shawl is more versatile than a sweater, and hats are no good at all, although she used to have lots of nice hats, she told me. The first day I saw Letty I had left my apartment in search of a "bag lady". I had seen these women round the city frequently, had spoken to a few. Sitting around the parks had taught me more about these city vagabonds. As a group, few were eligible for social security. They had always been flotsam and jetsam, floating from place to place and from job to job—waitress, short order cook, sales clerk, stock boy, maid, mechanic, porter—all those jobs held by faceless people. The "bag ladies" were a special breed. They looked and acted and dressed strangely in some of the most determinedly conformist areas of the city. They frequented Fourteen Street downtown, and the fancy shopping districts. They seemed to like crowds but remained alone. They held long conversations with themselves, with telephone poles, with unexpected cracks in the sidewalk. They hung around lunch counters and cafeterias, and could remain impervious to the rudeness of a determined waitress and sit for hours clutching a coffee cup full of cold memories. Letty was my representative bag lady. I picked her up on the corner of Fourteenth and Third Avenue. She had the most suspicious face I had encountered; her entire body, in fact, was pulled forward in one large question mark. She was carrying a double plain brown shopping bag and a larger white bag ordering you to vote for some obscure man for some obscure office and we began talking about whether or not she was an unpaid advertisement. I asked her if she would have lunch with me, and let me treat, as a matter of fact. After some hesitation and a few sharp glances over the top of her glasses, Letty the Bag Lady let me come into her life. We had lunch that day, the next, and later the next week. Being a bag lady was a full-time job. Take the problem of the hotels. You can't stay to long in any one of those welfare hotels, Letty told me, because the junkies figure out your routine, and when you get your checks, and you'll be robbed, even killed. So you have to move a lot. And every time you move, you have to make three trips to the welfare office to get them to approve the new place, even if it's just another cockroach-filled, rat-infested hole in the wall. During the last five years, Letty tried to move every two or three months. Most of our conversations took place standing in line. New York State had just changed the regulations governing Medicaid cards and Letty had to get a new card. That took two hours in line, one hour sitting in a large dank-smelling room, and two minutes with a social worker who never once looked up. Another time, her case worker at the welfare office sent Letty to try and get food stamps, and after standing in line for three hours she found out she didn't qualify because she didn't have cooking facilities in her room. "This is my social life," she said. "I run around the city and stand in line. You stand in line to see one of them fancy movies and calling it art; I stand in line for medicine, for food, for glasses, for the cards to get pills, for the pills; I stand in line to see people who never see who I am; at the hotel, sometimes I even have to stand in line to go to the john. When I die there'll probably be a line to get through the gate, and when I get up to the front of the line, somebody will push it closed and say, 'Sorry. Come back after lunch.' These agencies, I figure they have to make it as hard for you to get help as they can, so only really strong people or really stubborn people like me can survive." Letty would talk and talk; sometimes, she didn't seem to know I was even there. She never remembered my name, and would give a little start of surprise whenever I said hers, as if it had been a long time since anyone had said "Letty." I don't think she thought of herself as a person, anymore; I think she had accepted the view that she was a welfare case, a Mediaid card, a nuisance in the bus depot in the winter time, a victim to any petty criminal, existing on about the same level as cockroaches. (此文选自 The New York Times) Passage Two About two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live in cities by the year 2020 and, according to the United Nations, approximately 3.7 billion people will inhabit urban areas some ten years later. As cities grow, so do the number of buildings that characterize them: office towers, factories, shopping malls and high-rise apartment buildings. These structures depend on artificial ventilation systems to keep clean and cool air flowing to the people inside. We know these systems by the term "air-conditioning". Although many of us may feel air-conditioners bring relief from hot, humid or polluted outside air, they pose many potential health hazards. Much research has looked at how the circulation of air inside a closed environment—such as an office building—can spread disease or expose occupants to harmful chemicals. One of the more widely publicised dangers is that of Legionnaire's disease, which was first recognised in the 1970s. This was found to have affected people in buildings with air-conditioning systems in which warm air pumped out of the system's cooling towers was somehow sucked back into the air intake, in most cases due to poor design. This warm air was, needless to say, the perfect environment for the rapid growth of disease-carrying bacteria originating from outside the building, where it existed in harmless quantities. The warm, bacteria-laden air was combined with cooled, conditioned air and was then circulated around various parts of the building. Studies showed that even people outside such buildings were at risk if they walked past air exhaust ducts. Cases of Legionnaire's disease are becoming fewer with newer system designs and modifications to older systems, but many older buildings, particularly in developing countries, require constant monitoring. The ways in which air-conditioners work to "clean" the air can inadvertently cause health problems, too. One such way is with the use of an electrostatic precipitator, which removes dust and smoke particles from the air. What precipitators also do, however, is to emit large quantities of positive air ions into the ventilation system. A growing number of studies show that overexposure to positive air ions can result in headaches, fatigue and feelings of irritation. Large air-conditioning systems add water to the air they circulate by means of humidifiers. In older systems, the water used for this process is kept in special reservoirs, the bottoms of which provide breeding grounds for bacteria and fungi which can find their way into the ventilation system. The risk to human health from this situation has been highlighted by the fact that the immune systems of approximately half of workers in air-conditioned office buildings have developed antibodies to fight off the organisms found at the bottom of system reservoirs. Chemical disinfectants, called "biocides", that are added to reservoirs to make them germ-free, are dangerous in their own right in sufficient quantities, as they often contain compounds such as pentachlorophenol, which is strongly linked to abdominal cancers. Finally, it should be pointed out that the artificial climatic environment created by airconditioners can also adversely affect us. In a natural environment, whether indoor or outdoor, there are small variations in temperature and humidity. Indeed, the human body has long been accustomed to these normal changes. In an air-conditioned living or work environment, however, body temperatures remain well under 37℃, our normal temperature. This leads to a weakened immune system and thus greater susceptibility to diseases such as colds and flu. (此文选自 Science) Passage Three The other day, I walked into an airport men's room, which was empty except for one man, who appeared to be having a loud, animated conversation with a urinal. Ten years ago, I would have turned right around and walked briskly back out of there. One rule my parents stressed when I was a child was: "Never stay in a restroom with a man who talks to the plumbing." But, of course, as a modern human, I knew that this man was talking on his cell phone, using one of those earpiece thingies, with the little microphone on the wire, the kind that people feel they must shout at, to make sure their vital messages are getting through. It's not clear to me why so many people in airports use the earpiece thingies. Why do they need to keep their hands free? Do they expect some emergency to suddenly arise that will require them to have both hands free while talking? Or maybe they're afraid that if they hold the phone next to their head, the radiation will give them brain cancer. If so, an option they might consider is wrapping their heads in aluminum foil. Granted, this would make them look stupid. But not nearly as stupid as they look shouting into their earpiece wires. So anyway, there I was, in this restroom, standing maybe six feet from this guy, both of us facing the wall, him shouting at his urinal about some business thing involving specifications, and at some point he said "I swear this is a direct quote—I am handling it." This caused me to emit an involuntary snorting sound (not loud; certainly nowhere near as loud as this guy was talking; just a little snortlet), which caused the guy to stop talking and—violating the No.1 Guy Rule of Restroom Etiquette? —turn his head and look directly at me, so I could see (using peripheral vision) that he was irritated by my rude interruption of his conversation. Then he went back to shouting at the urinal. The point is that every key element of this scenario—the cell phone, the airplane, the zipper— is made possible by technology. We know that technology is a wonderful thing. But at what point does technology go too far? Is it fair to say that cell phones, if used thoughtfully and politely, are OK, but that if a person attaches an earpiece thingy and walks around shouting in public, bystanders should be allowed to snatch the wire and sprint off down the airport concourse, with the shouter's earphone, and possibly even the shouter's detached ear, bouncing gaily behind on the floor? I think we all agree that the answer is: Yes. When technology goes too far, ordinary citizens must take action. But the question is: How do we define "too far"? I will tell you. We define "too far" as "when scientists start putting weapons on cockroaches." This is actually happening, according to an article in the Sept. 6 issue of Science magazine, brought to my attention by alert reader Richard Sweetman. This article states that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have been "mounting tiny cannons on the backs of cockroaches." That is correct: These researchers have been outfitting live cockroaches with backpacks containing "plastic tubes filled with explosives." Of course, the researchers have a scientific reason for doing this: They are on LSD. No, really, it has something to do with figuring out how cockroaches have such good balance (You almost never see a cockroach fall off a bicycle.). The researchers have used their findings to construct a working robot roach that is, according to Science, the size of a breadbox. Swell! If there's anything this world needs more than armed cockroaches, it's giant, mechanized cockroaches! Newspaper story from the year 2010: "A homeowner in Santa Rosa, California, was found shot to death in his kitchen Friday. Police said the man apparently was felled by 500 rounds of small-bore cannon fire, mostly in his ankles, indicating that this was the work of the gang of armed research cockroaches that escaped from a Berkeley lab. Police said the motive in the slaying was apparently a Ring Ding. In a related development, an escaped robot cockroach broke into an Oakland Wal-Mart and made off with an estimated 17,000 AA batteries." Ask yourself: Is that the kind of story you want to read in your newspaper? No, seriously, this is bad. We need somebody in authority to look into this right away. Maybe Dick Cheney could handle it. (此文选自 The Baltimore Sun) Passage Four In the go-go years of the late 1990s, no economic theorist looked better than Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian champion of capitalism who died in 1950. His distnction? A theory he called "creative destruction". The idea was straight-forward: in with the new, out with the old. Companies had life cycles, just as people do. They were born, they grew up. And when a better competitor came along, they died due to capital starvation. It was the way things were, and the way they should be. The markets had no sentiment. Capitalism was relentless, unforgiving. In their book Creative Destruction (367 pages. Doubleday. $ 27.50), Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan of the consulting firm McKinsey Co. apply Schumpeter's logic in the context of a technology-driven economy. They want their corporate readers to understand the implications of one basic idea: there is an inescapable conflict between the internal needs of a corporation and the total indifference capital markets have for those needs. Managers care desperately about the survival of their companies. Investors don't give a hoot. This was always true, the authors say, but until recently nobody really noticed because of the relatively languid pace of economic change. No more. In the 1920s, when the first Standard Poor's index was compiled, a listed company had a life expectancy of more than 65 years. In 1998 the annual turnover rate of SP firms was nearly 10 percent, implying a corporate lifetime of only 10 years. How does anyone manage in this environment? Foster and Kaplan argue that companies today must embrace "discontinuity", the idea that everything they have always done is now irrelevant. Consider Intel: by its top executives' own accounts, the company had to kill its ground-breaking memory-chip business once it became clear that Japanese companies could deliver essentially the same product at a lower price. Intel then moved into the much more lucrative microprocessor business. It was an obvious decision, but one that was hard to make. Memory chips were Intel's core competence. They were at the heart of the company's self-image. The transition was wrenching, said Intel chief Andrew Grove. But as a result, the company survived and prospered. From now forgotten automobile companies like Studebaker to early technology leaders like Wang, the corporate landscape is littered with the bones of companies that couldn't adapt to change. At bottom, say Foster and Kaplan, corporations are managed for survival. "They presume continuity in the business environment. They fail to introduce new products for fear of cannibalizing current product lines. They turn down acquisition opportunities to keep from diluting earnings. They prize rational decision making and internal control systems. They resist contrary information, and often punish managers who voice it. And all the while, capital markets are dedicated to finding and funding new competitors. Incumbents ignore this fact to their peril, if they don't cannibalize their product lines, someone else will do it for them. Even the greatest of brand names are not immune." As the authors ask rhetorically, would IBM even exist today had it stuck to its core business in mainframe computers? "Unless the corporation can learn to overcome the natural bias for denial," they write, "it will, in the long term, fail, or at best underperform." The successful company, Foster and Kaplan conclude, is one that manages for discontinuity. It presumes change. It is comfortable with fluid and even vague decision making. It has relatively flat hierarchies. In short, it adopts the fearlessness of capital markets themselves. And it doesn't have to be a start-up, or even a young company. Typical success stories include Coming, which shifted its business from glass to optical fiber just in time to capture a growing market, and General Electric, which dumped one fifth of its asset base in the first four years of Jack Welch's tenure as CEO. Not long ago, it was fashionable to liken business to warfare. Executives were reading Sun-tm, Machiavelli and Clausewitz for guidance on how to overcome the competition. But business differs from war in one vital respect. In war the advantage lies with the defense. In the New Economy, as Foster and Kaplan make clear, it belongs to the attacker. (此文选自 The Economist)1. Which of the following is closest in meaning to "flotsam and jetsam" in the second paragraph?(Passage One)

单选题　　(1) PICASSO THE PAINTER WE ALL KNOW. Picasso the sculptor? Not so much. But that all changes with "Picasso Sculpture", a once-in-a-lifetime show now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through Feb. 7. With more than 140 works from all phases of his career, it magnificently enlarges our view of the great man. It’s literally Picasso in 3-D.　　(2) Though there was never a time he wasn’t painting and drawing, for Picasso sculpture was an on-and-off affair. He approached it in intense episodes, any of which might go on for years and each of which was usually devoted to some new practice or material. He worked his way into and out of carved wood, molded clay, welded assemblage, steel-rod constructions, plaster heads, painted ceramics and sheet metal—not rewriting the rules of each medium so much as discarding the very idea that rules were required.　　(3) Picasso was perfectly suited to ignore the conventions of sculpture because he never learned them. Schooled from the first as a painter, he never mastered the business end of a chisel or trained to work in clay. So he had no reservations about nontraditional tools like the welding torch or unconventional materials like tin cans, sand and even trash. For a time in the 1950s he would take walks with his then companion Francoise Gilot, who pushed an empty baby carriage that he would fill with whatever caught his eye at the local junkyard.　　(4) And because he wasn’t committed to the long traditions of sculpture it was easy for him to take his most radical step—to reconceive sculpture not just as a solid form but also as a framework that traps space, to make voids as palpable as the solids around them. Cubism, the uproar on canvas he started with Georges Braque around 1907, was already a way of exploding form and space in two dimensions. Why not demolish the third?　　(5) Thinking that way led him to one of his first and most fundamental breakthroughs, a guitar he produced in paperboard in 1912, then in metal two years later. It was a very new machine, an open assembly of interlocking planes and voids that incorporated emptiness. As a kind of visual paradox the sound hole was actually a solid protrusion—a cylinder that thrust its circular opening toward you. He would make several subsequent versions, including one in 1924 that wasn’t built out of multiple components but sliced and bent from a single sheet of metal—a thing unfolding itself in space. For good measure every version of his guitar also validated the novel idea that an ordinary object, not a person or animal, was a subject fit for sculpture. In 1934 Picasso would take that notion to the limit with Crumpled Paper—a wad of just that, immortalized in plaster. In recent years a number of artists have produced trash bags in solid form. He did it 81 years ago.　　(6) Paradox was often central to Picasso’s sculpture. He used forms and materials in ways that contradicted their qualities as we ordinarily understand them—making a solid "hole" or plaster "paper". In 1914 he crafted a series of six bronzes called Glass of Absinthe (苦艾酒) , all identical in form but each painted differently—a transparent glass made from opaque metal. Picasso gave it a certain transparency all the same by cutting two wedge-shaped openings in its side.　　(7) Borrowing an idea from the Cubist collage paintings (拼贴画) he and Braque were both making that year—pictures with bits of newsprint or wallpaper glued to the canvas—he also incorporated a spoon into each one, turning the "real" spoon into "art" and drawing the art into the real world. That kind of assemblage was a crucial tactic, pressing humble objects into service as high art. In his 1933 Head of a Warrior, the eyes are repurposed tennis balls.　　(8) In the last decades of his life—he was 91 when he died in 1973—Picasso was arguably more interesting as a sculptor than as a painter. In his late canvases there are too many strenuous reimaginings of Velazquez, Poussin, Delacroix—encounters with Old Masters in which the old man didn’t always come out on top. But his sculpture remained vital and original. He devoted years to ceramics, making hundreds of witty painted plates and figures like Vase-. Woman. He also discovered how to scale his work into monumental public displays, like his mysterious steel head in Chicago’s Daley Plaza, a conflation of his wife Jacqueline with their Afghan hound that manages to be both overwhelming and ingratiating.　　(9) It’s useful to remember that not all the breakthroughs in 20th century sculpture emerged from Picasso’s fevered brain. He was always aware of and responding to the currents around him: Abstraction, Surrealism and, above all, the work of his lifelong frenemy Matisse. But he opened the way to so many varied approaches that there are stretches of this show that seem to be the work of three or four different artists. The cumulative effect is so powerful that you have to remind yourself this isn’t a group show, a conversation among contemporaries. It’s all just Picasso, talking to himself.

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《复合题被拆开情况》　　1 PICASSO THE PAINTER WE ALL KNOW. Picasso the sculptor? Not so much. But that all changes with "Picasso Sculpture", a once-in-a-lifetime show now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York C

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单选题Once 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 quarter-century: America will continue paying a high price in civil and ethnic unrest unless the nation commits itself to programs that help the urban poor lead productive and respectable lives. (2)Once again, a proven program is worth pondering: national service. (3)Somewhat akin to the military training that generations of American males received in the armed forces, a 1990s version would prepare thousands of unemployable and undereducated young adults for quality lives in our increasingly global and technology-driven economy. National service opportunities would be available to any who needed it and, make no mistake, the problems are now so structural, so intractable, that any solution will require massive federal intervention. (4)In his much-quoted book, "The Truly Disadvantaged," sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote that "only a major program of economic reform" will prevent the riot-prone urban underclass from being permanently locked out of American economic life. Today, we simply have no choice. The enemy within and among our separate ethnic selves is as daunting as any foreign foe. (5)Families who are rent apart by welfare dependency, job discrimination and intense feelings of alienation have produced minority teenagers with very little self-discipline and little faith that good grades and the American work ethic will pay off. A military-like environment for them with practical domestic objectives could produce startling results. (6)Military service has been the most successful career training program we’ve ever known, and American children born in the years since the all-volunteer Army was instituted make up a large proportion of this targeted group. But this opportunity may disappear forever if too many of our military bases are summarily closed and converted or sold to the private sector. The facilities, manpower, traditions, and capacity are already in place. (7)Don’t dismantle it: rechannel it. (8)Discipline is a cornerstone of any responsible citizen’s life. I was taught it by my father, who was a policeman. Many of the rioters have never had any at all. As an athlete and former Army officer, I know that discipline can be learned. More importantly, it must be learned or it doesn’t take hold. (9)A precedent for this approach was the Civilian Conservation Corps that worked so well during the Great Depression. My father enlisted in the CCC as a young man with an elementary school education and he learned invaluable skills that served him well throughout his life. The key was that a job was waiting for him when he finished. The certainty of that first entry-level position is essential if severely alienated young minority men and women are to keep the faith. (10)We all know these are difficult times for the public sector, but here’s a chance to add energetic and able manpower to America’s workforce. They could be prepared for the world of work or college — an offer similar to that made to returning GIs after World War II. It would be a chance for 16- to 21-year-olds to live among other cultures, religions, races and in different geographical areas. And these young people could be taught to rally around common goals and friendships that evolve out of pride in one’s squad, platoon, company, battalion — or commander. (11)We saw such images during the Persian Gulf War and during the NCAA Final Four basketball games. In military life and competitive sports, this camaraderie doesn’t just happen: it is taught and learned in an atmosphere of discipline and earned mutual respect for each other’s capabilities. (12)A national service program would also help overcome two damaging perceptions held by America’s disaffected youth: that society just doesn’t care about minority youngsters and that one’s personal best efforts will not be rewarded in our discriminatory job market. Harvard professor Robert Reich’s research has shown that urban social ills are so pervasive that the upper 20 percent of Americans — that "fortunate fifth" as he calls them — have decided quietly to "secede" from the bottom four-fifths, and the lowest fifth in particular. We cannot accept such estrangement on a permanent basis. And what better way to answer skeptics from any group than by certifying the technical skills of graduates from a national service training program? (13)Now, we must act decisively to forestall future urban unrest. Republicans must put aside their aversion to funding programs aimed at certain cultural groups. Democrats must forget labels and recognize that a geographically isolated subgroup of Americans — their children in particular — need systematic and substantive assistance for at least another 20 years. (14)The ethnic taproots of minority Americans are deeply buried in a soil of faith and loyalty to traditional values. With its emphasis on discipline, teamwork, conflict resolution, personal responsibility and marketable skills development, national service can provide both the training and that vital first job that will reconnect these Americans to the rest of us. Let’s do it now before the fire next time.

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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 There's this great recurring "Saturday Night Live" skit from several years back where Phil Hartman plays an unfrozen caveman who goes to law school. He pontificates (发表武断的意见) on the American judicial system while marveling at modern technology like "the tiny people in the magic box" (a TV). It fits a common stereotype: Human ancestors were, well, cavemen, and not as smart as we are today. A new hypothesis from a Stanford geneticist tries to turn this stereotype upside down. Human intelligence may have actually peaked before our ancient predecessors ever left Africa, Gerald Crabtree writes in two new journal articles. Genetic mutations during the past several millennia are causing a decline in overall human intellectual and emotional fitness, he says. Evolutionary pressure no longer favors intellect, so the problem is getting worse. He is careful to say that this is taking quite a long time, so it's not like your grandparents are models of brilliance while your children will be cavemen rivaling Hartman's SNL character. But he does maintain that an ancient Athenian, plucked from 1000 BC, would be "among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions." His central thesis is that each generation produces deleterious (有害的) mutations, so down the line of human history, our intelligence is ever more impaired compared to that of our predecessors. Not surprisingly, the hypothesis, published in the journal Trends in Genetics, has several geneticists scratching their heads. "It takes thousands of genes to build a human brain, and mutations in any one of those can impair that process, that's absolutely true. It's also true that with each new generation, new mutations arise.., but Crabtree ignores the other side of the equation, which is selection," said Kevin Mitchell, associate professor at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin. "Natural selection is incredibly powerful, and it definitely has the ability to weed out new mutations that significantly impair intellectual ability. There are various aspects in these papers that I think are really just thinking about things in a wrong way." Crabtree said he wanted to examine the cumulative effect of generation-to-generation mutation on intelligence, which is thought to be controlled by many genes. Using indexes that measure X-chromosome (染色体)-related mental retardation, he comes up with between 2,000 and 5,000 genes related to human intellectual ability. Using another index measuring average mutations that arise in each generation of children, he calculates that within 3,000 years, "we have all sustained two or more mutations harmful to our intellectual or emotional stability." "There is a general feeling that evolution constantly improves us, but it only does that if there is selection applied," Crabtree said in an interview. "In this case, it is questionable about how much selection is occurring now compared to the process of optimizing those genes, which occurred in the jungles of Africa 500,000 years ago." There's already evidence for this in other areas, he argues. Take our sense of smell. Humans have far fewer olfactory receptors than other animals, he said—we're guided by our intellect now, not by smell. We can think about where a piece of food came from, how it was processed, which plant it's from, who has been around it, and so on. A dog, on the other hand, simply sniffs something and either eats it or doesn't. Similarly, he believes evolution now selects for other traits—namely, the most healthy and the most immune, not the most intelligent. But geneticists took issue with his claims, not to mention his citations and methods. Mitchell took issue with Crabtree's characterization of genes—he describes them as links in a chain, with incredible overall disruptive power. They're like a bulb on a string of Christmas tree lights that suddenly fails to work, taking out the entire strand with it: "It can be concluded that genes related to intelligence do not operate as a robust network, but rather as links in a chain, failure of any one of which leads to intellectual disability," he writes. Mitchell countered that this ignores other genes that don't cause intellectual disability. "Biological systems are robust to degradation of several different components," Mitchell said. "Evolution has gone to a lot of trouble to craft your genome so it's finely honed to do its job, and it doesn't make sense that you would have all this random mutation in your brain cells. Also, you would have a very high rate of brain cancer." (此文选自 Popular Science) Passage Two Social mobility in the U. K. could be reversed unless the government and universities make changes to encourage and pay for more students from disadvantaged backgrounds to take degrees, according to the government's independent adviser on the issue. Alan Milburn said in a report that social mobility was now "flatlining at best" after gains in the early part of the last decade. "Given the headwinds that universities and higher education institutions are facing—tuition fees, student caps, public funding constraints—there's a real danger things will go backwards, rather than forwards," Milburn told the Guardian. "As the economy changes, who gets into university does become a very important driver of social mobility." The report recommends changes across government policy and the way universities select, fund and encourage students from more disadvantaged areas, who he argues have been shown to do better at university than pupils from private schools with the same grades. Suggestions include offering all students from poorer backgrounds an interview and considering offering places to those with lower grades. Acknowledging pressure on public spending during the recession, Milburn calls on all parties to commit to government funding for higher education rising from 1.2% currently to 1.5%, the average for the OECD group of advanced economies. The former Labour MP and cabinet member, who was the first person in his family to go to university, said social mobility created "fallers as well as risers", echoing candid comments by the Liberal Democrat business secretary, Vince Cable, who told an audience on Wednesday that social mobility was often a "two-way street" and "a zero-sum game". "We want everyone to move up and no one to move down," said Cable. "But in the real world not everyone can be a star. Social mobility is often embodied in the comprehensive school pupil who reaches Oxbridge, but what about the school dropout who finished up in a lowly menial job? That is also social mobility. But this is surely what meritocracy is all about—success through hard work, not through birth." Milburn's report says universities spend more than ￡400m to soften the impact of higher tuition fees on students from poorer backgrounds, but says there is little evidence that it is well spent, and calls for deep changes. It advocates that money is spent not just on reducing fees but helping to fund poorer students, and calls for a new version of the scrapped Educational Maintenance Allowance, intended to help poorer pupils remain in school to do A-levels. Universities are asked to agree to use "contextual data" when assessing applications to give pupils from worse schools a better chance, even if they have lower grades. Because some universities—especially from the Russell Group of higher ranked institutions—have objected to such a move in the past, Milburn offers them alternatives, including running new programmes to assess and prepare school-leavers, such as summer schools, and guaranteeing interviews to pupils from schools in disadvantaged areas. Ministers are urged to scrap a cap on student numbers, which Milburn calls an artificial limit on aspiration, and to better explain the tuition fees policy, under which students start repaying their loans when their earnings rise above a certain threshold. One option would be to rename the policy a graduate tax, which it is "in all but name", says Milburn, though he says it might be too late for that. He also calls for more funding for post-graduates, probably through upfront loans, saying the issue is "in danger of becoming a social mobility timebomb". The proposal to re-introduce the EMA was widely welcomed by social and education organizations, including the children's charity Barnados, which said it had evidence that children were having to choose between the cost of breakfast and their bus fare to school. The left-of-centre IPPR thinktank welcomed the report's suggestion that "we should look at applying the lessons of the pupil premium in schools to the university sector, with more funding being provided to institutions if they recruit from disadvantaged backgrounds". (此文选自 The Guardian) Passage Three Cambridge has taken the top spot in this year's Guardian University Guide league table, breaking its arch rival Oxford's six-year stint as the U. K. 's leading institution. Oxford has come second and St Andrews third, while the London School of Economics has climbed four places from last year to take fourth place. University College London, Warwick, Lancaster, Durham, Loughborough and Imperial College make up the top 10. Our analysis shows that universities with low rankings are almost as likely to be planning to charge maximum tuition fees of ￡9,000 in autumn 2012 as those with high rankings. London Metropolitan University, which comes bottom of the Guardian tables, intends to charge between ￡4,500 and ￡9,000 for its degrees. Salford, Liverpool John Moores, Manchester Metropolitan and the University of East London—all of which rank in the bottom 20—want to charge ￡9,000 for at least some of their courses. The government's access watchdog, the Office for Fair Access, is looking at the fees each university in England wants to charge and will announce in July whether it approves. All the English universities in our top 20 intend to charge ￡9,000 fees, apart from London School of Economics, which has not yet decided. The first university that proposes to charge less than ￡9,000 for all of its courses is Sunderland, which is ranked 48th. There are a total of 120 institutions in the tables: 38 in the top half intend to charge ￡9,000 for at least some of their courses, while 18 in the bottom half propose to do the same. Universities are ranked according to how much they spend per student; their student/staff ratio; the career prospects of their graduates; what grades applicants need; a value-added score that compares the academic achievements of first-years and their final degree results; and how content final-year students are with their courses, based on the annual National Student Survey. Birmingham City University has fallen most since last year—24 places, from 66th to 90th—while Middlesex is the biggest climber, reaching 75th place this year compared with 112th last year. Durham has risen from 17th place to eighth. While the oldest universities dominate the top positions in the tables, the newest have improved their rankings since last year. Winchester has leapt from 96th place to 69th. The tables, compiled by an independent consultancy firm, Intelligent Metrix, are weighted in favour of the National Student Survey. As part of the survey, final-year students are asked to score their universities for overall satisfaction, feedback and contact hours. Other league tables concentrate more on research ratings. The Guardian publishes an overall ranking table, separate tables to show which universities are best—and worst—for each subject and another table for specialist institutions. The more a university spends on each student, the more likely it is to have a high ranking and the more satisfied its students seem. However, our judges took into account that some universities do not teach expensive courses, such as engineering, and so their spending is lower. The tables show that Cambridge has overtaken Oxford in philosophy, law, politics, theology, maths, classics, anthropology and modern languages. However, Oxford overtook Cambridge in psychology and also came top in chemistry, business and management, and art and design. Loughborough is best for sports science, while King's College London is top for dentistry. University College London topped the table for English, while Trinity Laban Conservatoire excelled for drama and dance. Northumbria has shot up the table for modern languages, from 48th last year to third this year. Universities with high rankings tend to have fewer dropouts, and fewer students per academic. The top 20 institutions have a drop-out rate after the first year of just 4%, compared with almost 12% for the bottom 20. Professor David Tidmarsh, vice-chancellor of Birmingham City University, says he expects his university's fall in position to be temporary: "It is caused by student number growth, which has now been curbed, and student satisfaction scores, which we expect to improve significantly as a consequence both of increased investment and of the way in which we are engaging students as partners in their learning experience." He says the university is investing ￡180m in new buildings, facilities and equipment. Swansea Metropolitan, Wolverhampton and Liverpool Hope did not allow the Guardian to use their data. Meanwhile, the government has cut the number of places universities can offer on teacher training courses. Cambridge University, which comes top of our table for education courses, will have 49 fewer places on its teacher training course this September, an 11% cut. Altogether, almost 4,000 fewer places will be available on teacher training programmes. A spokesman from the Department for Education says pupil numbers are falling sharply in secondary schools and so the need for new teachers has gone down. (此文选自 The Guardian) Passage Four The gender pay gap for full-time workers has fallen below 10% for the first time in 15 years since comparable records began. The difference between men's and women's median hourly full-time pay fell from 10.5% in 2011 to 9.6% in 2012, according to the annual survey of hours and earnings from the Office for National Statistics(ONS). Women's average hourly earnings grew by 2% to ￡12 over the 12 months to April, while men's earnings grew by 1.1% to ￡13.27, prompting one employment expert to claim "women are steadily chipping away at the glass ceiling." The figures show women now earn an average gross full-time salary of ￡23,100—￡5,600 less than their male counterparts and ￡200 less than the gap of ￡5,800 seen in 2011. But at the current rate of change women's full-time pay will not equal men's until 2040. Economists said the narrowing gap can in part be explained by men's full-time earnings rising slower than women's. Others suggested a variety of reasons including a cultural shift, more progressive attitudes displayed by bosses, and higher aspirations among women. While women are better paid than men when it comes to part-time work, the ONS said the fact more women work part-time jobs, which tend to have lower rates of pay, means the overall pay gap remains high at 19.7% compared to 20.2% in 2011. The Trades Union Congress(TUC) said the lack of high quality part-time work is illustrated by the five highest paid occupations—aircraft pilots; chief executives and directors of advertising and PR; marketing and sales; and telecommunications firms—being dominated by men and having "a negligible number" of part-time positions. In contrast, four of the five worst paid occupations—waiters and waitresses, bar staff, catering assistants and launderers—are dominated by women and have more part-time jobs than full-time ones. Frances O'Grady, general secretary designate at the TUC, said: "No healthy modern economy should have an enduring gender pay gap and growing in-work poverty. Unfortunately, common sense solutions such as senior level job shares and flexible working are rarely available in the private sector, and are now under attack in the public sector." Unless we change the way we work we will never eliminate the pay gap or tackle poverty. Wages for full-time employees in the U. K. increased by just half the rate of inflation, the study showed, with the median salary rising by 1.4% to ￡26,500 in 2012 against inflation of 3%—meaning households are experiencing pay cuts in real terms. Xenios Thrasyvoulou, founder of the online freelance marketplace PeoplePerHour, said: "Women are steadily chipping away at the glass ceiling. They may be starting to win the battle of the sexes, but the workforce as a whole is losing the battle with inflation." The gap between the highest and lowest paid employees also narrowed, with the hourly earnings (excluding overtime) of full timers in the top 1% of earners falling by 0.2%, compared to a rise of 2.3% for those in the bottom 1%. The number of people earning below the national minimum wage fell during the past 12 months, the ONS said, from 299,000 in 2011 to 287,000 this year. But the ONS admitted the figures were not exact due to the impossibility of identifying people such as apprentices and trainees exempt from the minimum wage rate or only entitled to lower rates. Public sector workers earned more than those in the private sector across almost all measures used by the ONS. The median gross weekly pay of full-time employees in the public sector was ￡565 in 2012, up 1.6% from ￡556 in 2011, compared to ￡479 in the private sector, up 1.5% from ￡472 in 2011. But the ONS pointed out that many low-paid occupations such as hairdressers, bar and restaurant staff and junior sales roles do not exist in the public sector. (此文选自 The Guardian)1. According to the passage, "Saturday Night Live" skit is a ______.(Passage One)

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1Once across the river and into the wholesale district, she glanced about her for some likely door at which to apply. As she contemplated the wide windows and imposing signs, she became con

单选题　　(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 one who always steered the way was an obese and dreamy Greek. In the summer he would come out wearing a yellow or green polo shirt stuffed sloppily into his trousers in front and hanging loose behind. When it was colder he wore over this a shapeless gray sweater. His face was round and oily, with half-closed eyelids and lips that curved in a gentle, stupid smile. The other mute was tall. His eyes had a quick, intelligent expression. He was always immaculate and very soberly dressed. Every morning the two friends walked silently together until they reached the main street of the town. Then when they came to a certain fruit and candy store they paused for a moment on the sidewalk outside. The Greek, Spiros Antonapoulos, worked for his cousin, who owned this fruit store. His job was to make candies and sweets, uncrate the fruits, and keep the place clean. The thin mute, John Singer, nearly always put his hand on his friend’s arm and looked for a second into his face before leaving him. Then after this goodbye Singer crossed the street and walked on alone to the jewelry store where he worked as a silverware engraver. In the late afternoon the friends would meet again. Singer came back to the fruit store and waited until Antonapoulos was ready to go home. The Greek would be lazily unpacking a case of peaches or melons, or perhaps looking at the funny paper in the kitchen behind the store where he cooked. Before their departure Antonapoulos always opened a paper sack he kept hidden during the day on one of the kitchen shelves. Inside were stored various bits of food he had collected—a piece of fruit or samples of candy. Usually before leaving Antonapoulos waddled gently to the glassed case in the front of the store where some meats and cheeses were kept. He glided open the back of the case and his fat hand groped lovingly for some particular dainty inside which he had wanted. Sometimes his cousin who owned the place did not see him. But if he noticed he stared at his cousin with a warning in his tight, pale face. Sadly Antonapoulos would shuffle the morsel from one corner of the case to the other. During these times Singer stood very straight with his hands in his pockets and looked in another direction. He did not like to watch this little scene between the two Greeks. For, except drinking and a certain solitary secret pleasure, Antonapoulos loved to eat more than anything else in the world." 　　(2) In the dusk the two mutes walked slowly home together. At home Singer was always talking to Antonapoulos. His hands shaped the words in a swift series of designs. His face was eager and his gray-green eyes sparkled brightly. With his thin, strong hands he told Antonapoulos all that had happened during the day." 　　(3) When back at home, Antonapoulos sat back lazily and looked at Singer. It was seldom that he ever moved his hands to speak at all—and then it was to say that he wanted to eat or to sleep or to drink. These three things he always said with the same vague, fumbling signs. At night, if he were not too drunk, he would kneel down before his bed and pray awhile. Then his plump hands shaped the words Holy Jesus, or God, or Darling Mary. These were the only words Antonapoulos ever said. Singer never knew just how much his friend understood of all the things he told him. But it did not matter." 　　(4) They shared the upstairs of a small house near the business section of the town. There were two rooms. On the oil stove in the kitchen Antonapoulos cooked all of their meals. There were straight, plain kitchen chairs for Singer and an overstuffed sofa for Antonapoulos. The bedroom was furnished mainly with a large double bed covered with an eiderdown comforter for the big Greek and a narrow iron cot for Singer." 　　(5) Dinner always took a long time, because Antonapoulos loved food and he was very slow. After they had eaten, the big Greek would lie back on his sofa and slowly lick over each one of his teeth with his tongue, either from a certain delicacy or because he did not wish to lose the savor of the meal—while Singer washed the dishes." 　　(6) Sometimes in the evening the mutes would play chess. Singer had always greatly enjoyed this game, and years before he had tried to teach it to Antonapoulos. At first his friend could not be interested in the reasons for moving the various pieces about on the board. Then Singer began to keep a bottle of something good under the table to be taken out after each lesson. The Greek never got on to the erratic movements of the knights and the sweeping mobility of the queens, but he learned to make a few set, opening moves. He preferred the white pieces and would not play if the black men were given him. After the first moves Singer worked out the game by himself while his friend looked on drowsily. If Singer made brilliant attacks on his own men so that in the end the black king was killed, Antonapoulos was always very proud and pleased." 　　(7) The two mutes had no other friends, and except when they worked they were alone together. Each day was very much like any other day, because they were alone so much that nothing ever disturbed them. Once a week they would go to the library for Singer to withdraw a mystery book and on Friday night they attended a movie. Then on payday they always went to the ten-cent photograph shop above the Army and Navy Store so that Antonapoulos could have his picture taken. These were the only places where they made customary visits. There were many parts in the town that they had never even seen. The town was in the middle of the deep South. The summers were long and the months of winter cold were very few. Nearly always the sky was a glassy, brilliant azure and the sun burned down riotously bright. Then the light, chill rains of November would come, and perhaps later there would be frost and some short months of cold. The winters were changeable, but the summers always were burning hot. The town was a fairly large one. On the main street there were several blocks of two- and three-story shops and business offices. But the largest buildings in the town were the factories, which employed a large percentage of the population. These cotton mills were big and flourishing and most of the workers in the town were very poor. Often in the faces along the streets there was the desperate look of hunger and of loneliness. But the two mutes were not lonely at all. At home they were content to eat and drink, and Singer would talk with his hands eagerly to his friend about all that was in his mind. So the years passed in this quiet way until Singer reached the age of thirty-two and had been in the town with Antonapoulos for ten years."

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 tire best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE (1)This fishing village of 1,480 people is a bleak and lonely place. Set on the southwestern edge of Iceland, the volcanic landscape is whipped by the North Atlantic winds, which hush everything around them. A sculpture at the entrance to the village depicts a naked man facing a wall of seawater twice his height. There is no movie theater, and many residents never venture to the capital, a 50-min. drive away. (2)But Sandgerdi might be the perfect place to raise girls who have mathematical talent. Government researchers two years ago tested almost every 15-year-old in Iceland for it and found that boys trailed far behind girls. That fact was unique among the 41 countries that participated in the standardized test for that age group designed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. But while Iceland's girls were alone in the world in their significant lead in math, their national advantage of 15 points was small compared with the one they had over boys in fishing villages like Sandgerdi, where it was closer to 30. (3)The teachers of Sandgerdi's 254 students were only mildly surprised by the results. They say the gender gap is a story not of talent but motivation. Boys think of school as sufferings on the way to a future of finding riches at sea; for girls, it's their ticket out of town. Margret Ingporsdottir and Hanna Maria Heidarsdottir, both 15, students at Sandgerdi's gleaming school—which has a science laboratory, a computer room and a well-stocked library—have no doubt that they are headed for university. "I think I will be a pharmacist," says Heidarsdottir. The teens sat in principal Gudjon Kristjansson's office last week, waiting for a ride to the nearby town of Kevlavík, where they were competing in West Iceland's yearly math contest, one of many throughout Iceland in which girls excel. (4)Meanwhile, by the harbor, Gisli Tor Hauksson, 14, already has big plans that don't require spending his afternoons toiling over geometry. "I'll be a fisherman," he says, just like most of his ancestors. His father recently returned home from 60 days at sea off the coast of Norway. "He came back with 1.1 million krona," about $18,000, says Hauksson. As for school, he says, "it destroys the brain." He intends to quit at 16, the earliest age at which he can do so legally. "A boy sees his older brother who has been at sea for only two years and has a better car and a bigger house than the headmaster," says Kristjansson. (5)But the story of female achievement in Iceland doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. Educators have found that when girls leave their rural enclaves to attend universities in the nation's cities, their science advantage generally shrinks. While 61% of university students are women, they make up only one-third of Iceland's science students. By the time they enter the labor market, many are overtaken by men, who become doctors, engineers and computer technicians. Educators say they watch many bright girls suddenly flinch back in the face of real, head-to-head competition with boys. In a math class at a Reykjavík school, Asgeir Gurdmundsson, 17, says that although girls were consistently brighter than boys at school, "they just seem to leave the technical jobs to us." Says Solrun Gensdottir, the director of education at the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture: "We have to find a way to stop girls from dropping out of sciences." (6)Teachers across the country have begun to experiment with ways to raise boys to the level of girls in elementary and secondary education. The high school in Kevlavík tried an experiment in 2002 and 2003, separating 16-to-20-year-olds by gender for two years. That time the boys slipped even further behind. "The boys said the girls were better anyway," says Kristjan Asmundsson, who taught the 25 boys. "They didn't even try." PASSAGE TWO (1)Considering that anxiety makes your palms sweat, your heart race, and your brain seize up like a car with a busted transmission, it's no wonder people reach for the Xanax to vanquish it. But in a surprise, researchers who study emotion regulation—how we cope, or fail to cope, with the daily swirl of feelings—are discovering that many anxious people are bound and determined (though not always consciously) to cultivate anxiety. The reason, studies suggest, is that for some people anxiety boosts cognitive performance. (2)In one recent study, psychologist Maya Tamir of Hebrew University in Jerusalem gave 47 under-graduates a standard test of neuroticism, which asks people if they agree with such statements as "I get stressed out easily." She then presented the volunteers with a list of tasks, either difficult (giving a speech, taking a test) or easy (washing dishes), and asked which emotion they would prefer to be feeling before each. The more neurotic subjects were significantly more likely to choose feeling worried before a demanding task; non-neurotic subjects chose other emotions. Apparently, the neurotics had a good reason to opt for anxiety: when Tamir gave everyone anagrams to solve, the neurotics who had just written about an event that had caused them anxiety did better than neurotics who had recalled a happier memory. Among non-neurotics, putting themselves in an anxious frame of mind had no effect on performance. (3)In other people, anxiety is not about usefulness but familiarity, finds psychology researcher Brett Ford of the University of Denver. She measured the "trait emotions" (feelings people tend to have most of the time) of 139 undergraduates, using a questionnaire that lists emotions and asks "to what extent you feel this way in general." She then grouped the students into those characterized by "trait fear" (those who tended to be anxious, worried, or nervous), "trait anger" (chronically angry, irritated, or annoyed), and "trait happy" (the cheerful, joyful gang). Six months later, the volunteers returned to Ford's lab. This time she gave them a list of emotions and asked which they wanted to experience. Not surprisingly, the cheerful bunch wanted to be happy. But in a shock for those who think anyone who is chronically anxious can't wait to get their hands on some Ativan (氯羟安定), those with "trait fear" said they wanted to be worried and nervous—even though it felt subjectively unpleasant. (The "trait angry" students tended to prefer feeling the same way, too.) Wanting to feel an emotion is not the same thing as enjoying that emotion, points out neuroscientist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, who discovered that wanting and liking are mediated by two distinct sets of neurotransmitters. (4)In some cases, the need to experience anxiety can lead to a state that looks very much like addiction to anxiety. "There are people who have extreme agitation, but they can't understand why," says psychiatrist Harris Stratyner of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. They therefore latch on to any cause to explain what they're feeling. That rationalization doubles back and exacerbates the anxiety. "Some people," he adds, "get addicted to feeling anxious because that's the state that they've always known. If they feel a sense of calm, they get bored; they feel empty inside. They want to feel anxious." Notice he didn't say "like." PASSAGE THREE (1)A period of climate change about 130,000 years ago would have made water travel easier by lowering sea levels and creating navigable lakes and rivers in the Arabian Peninsula, the study says. Such a shift would have offered early modern humans—which arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago—a new route through the formerly scorching northern deserts into the Middle East. The new paper was spurred by the discovery of several 120,000-year-old tools at a desert archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates. The presence of the tools—whose design is uniquely African, experts say—so early in the region suggests early humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula directly from the Horn of Africa, roughly present-day Somalia. Previously, scientists had thought humans first left via the Nile Valley or the Far East. (2)"Up till now we thought of cultural developments leading to the opportunity of people to move out of Africa," said study co-author Hans-Peter Uerpmann, a retired archaeobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. "Now we see, I think, that it was the environment that was the key to this," Uerpmann said during a press briefing Wednesday. (3)The discovery "leaves a lot of possibilities for human migrations, and keeping this in mind, might change our view completely." During the past few years, a series of tools were discovered at the Jebel Faya site in the U.A.E., some of which—such as hand axes—had a two-sided appearance previously seen only in early Africa. (4)Scientists used luminescence dating to determine the age of sand grains buried with the stone tools. This technique measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. For the climatic data, scientists studied the climate records of ancient lakes and rivers in cave stalagmites, as well as changes in the level of the Red Sea. This warmer period 130,000 years or so ago caused more rainfall on the Arabian Peninsula, turning it into a series of lush rivers that humans might have boated or rafted. (5)During this period the southern Red Sea's levels dropped, offering a "brief window of time" for humans to easily cross the sea—which was then as little as 2.5 miles wide, according to Adrian Parker, a physical geographer from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. (6)Once humans entered the peninsula, they dispersed and likely reached the Jebel Faya site by about 125,000 years ago, according to the study, published in the journal Science. (7)Geneticist Spencer Wells called the discovery a "very interesting find," especially because the Arabian Peninsula is becoming a hot spot for archaeological finds—particularly underwater, since the Persian Gulf was a fertile river delta during early human migrations. But he noted that the study doesn't "rewrite the book on what we know about human migratory history." That's because tools dating to the same period have already been found in Israel, so it's "consistent with what we suspected" about an earlier wave of migration into the Middle East, said Wells, director of the National Geographic Society's Geographic Project. Wells also noted there's no evidence yet that the migrants in the new paper were our ancestors—the group, and their genes, may have died out long ago. (8)Bence Viola, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, agreed the finding was interesting but not that surprising, also citing the evidence of humans in Israel about 120,000 years ago. Viola, who wasn't involved in the study, added that the migration route proposed in the paper makes sense on another level—the Arabian Peninsula would have been something early humans were used to. "If you look even today, the environment in the Horn of Africa, in Somalia or northern Ethiopia, is similar to what you see in Oman or Yemen—not like the big desert," Viola noted. "It's not like they needed to adapt to a completely different environment—it's an environment that they knew." (9)Why they made the trek is another question, since they wouldn't have been hurting for food or resources in their African homeland, Viola noted. "Curiosity," he said, "is a pretty human desire." PASSAGE FOUR (1)Is there anything more boring than hearing about someone else's dream? And is there anything more miraculous than having one of your own? The voluptuous pleasure of Haruki Murakami's enthralling fictions—full of enigmatic imagery, random nonsense, and profundities that may or may not hold up in the light of day—reminds me of dreaming. Like no other author I can think of, Murakami captures the juxtapositions of the trivial and the momentous that characterize dream life, those crazy incidents that seem so vivid in the moment and so blurry and preposterous later on. His characters live ordinary lives, boiling pasta for lunch, riding the bus, and blasting Prince while working out at the gym. Then suddenly and matter-of-factly, they do something utterly nuts, like strike up a conversation with a coquettish Siamese cat. Or maybe mackerel and sardines begin to rain from the sky. In Murakami's world, these things make complete, cock-eyed sense. (2)Like many of Murakami's heroes, Kafka Tamura in Kafka on the Shore has more rewarding relationships with literature and music than with people. (Murakami's passion for music is infections; nothing made me want to rush out and purchase a Brahms CD until I read his Sputnik Sweetheart.) On his 15th birthday, Kafka runs away from his Tokyo home for obscure reasons related to his famous sculptor father. His choice of a destination is arbitrary. Or is it? "Shikoku, I decide. That's where I'll go...The more I look at the map—actually every time I study it—the more I feel Shikoku tugging at me." (3)On the island of Shikoku, Kafka makes himself a fixture at the local library, where he settles into a comfortable sofa and starts reading The Arabian Nights: "Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom that common sense can't keep bottled up." As in a David Lynch movie, all the library staffers are philosophical eccentrics ready to advance the surreal narrative. Oshima, the androgynous clerk, talks to Kafka about (inevitably) Kafka and the merits of driving while listening to Schubert ("a dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right there"). The tragically alluring head librarian, Miss Saeki, once wrote a hit song called "Kafka on the Shore"—and may or may not be Kafka's long-lost mother. Alarmingly, she also stars in his erotic fantasies. (4)In alternating chapters, Murakami records the even odder antics of Nakata, a simpleminded cat catcher who spends his days chatting with tabbies in a vacant Tokyo lot. One afternoon, a menacing dog leads him to the home of a sadistic cat killer who goes by the name Johnnie Walker. Walker ends up dead by the end of the encounter; back in Shikoku, Kafka unaccountably finds himself drenched in blood. Soon, Nakata too begins feeling an inexplicable pull toward the island. (5)If this plot sounds totally demented, trust me, it gets even weirder than that. Like a dream, you just have to be there. And, like a dream, what this dazzling novel means—or whether it means anything at all—we may never know.1. Which of the following word can best describe Sandgerdi?______(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题此题为音频题

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