问答题Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer whose invention of the integrated circuit gave rise to the information age and heralded an explosion of consumer electronics products in the last 50 years, from personal computers to cellphones, died Monday in Dallas. He was 81. His death, after a brief battle with cancer, was announced yesterday by Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based electronics company where he worked for a quarter-century. (46) The integrated circuit that Mr. Kilby designed '.shortly after arriving at Texas Instruments in 1958 served as the basis for modern microelectronics, transforming a technology that permitted the simultaneous manufacturing of a mere handful of transistors(晶体管 ) into a chip industry that routinely places billions of Lilliputian(微小的) switches in the area of a fingernail. His achievement--the integration--yielded a thin chip of crystal connecting previously separate components like transistors, resistors and capacitors within a single device. For that creation, commonly called the microchip, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. (47) During his career at Texas Instruments he claimed more than 60 patents and was also one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer. But it was Mr. Kilby's invention of the integrated circuit that most broadly shaped the electronic era. "It's hard to find a place where the integrated circuit doesn't affect your life today," Richard m. Templeton, Texas Instruments' president and chief executive officer, said in an interview yesterday. "That's how broad its impact is. " It is an impact, Mr. Kilby said, that was largely unexpected. (48) "We expected to reduce the cost of electronics, but I don't think anybody was thinking in terms of factors of a million," he said in an undated interview cited by Texas Instruments. (49) The remarkable acceleration of the manufacturing process based on the integrated circuit was later described by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, whose partner, Robert N. Noyce, invented another version of the integrated circuit just months after Mr. Kilby. In 1965, three years after the first commercial integrated circuits came to market, Dr. Moore observed that the number of transistors on a circuit was doubling at regular intervals and would do so far into the future. (50) The observation, which came to be known as Moore's law, became the defining attribute of the chip-making industry, centered in what is now known as Silicon Valley, where Intel was based, rather than in Dallas.

问答题Directions: Professor Rodger Eade is planning to visit China as a visiting scholar. Now Mr. Li Ming, Head of Chinese Language Department, Beijing University, is writing a letter to 1) express warm welcome, and 2) formally invite him to be a visiting scholar, discussing the matters related to research field, financial support, duration of the visit, etc. You should write about 100 words on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

问答题The produce departments of the future may look like nothing on earth, and with good reason. Chinese scientists have been growing tomatoes the size of softballs, cucumbers as long as baseball bats and other outsize fruits and vegetables, using seeds that have been shot into space. The seeds are then exposed to seven types of extraterrestrial conditions, from zero gravity and cosmic radiation to subatomic particles. (46) As these space veggies grow back on earth, they are selected for desirable traits—bulk, appearance or certain nutrients—then bred through successive generations to ensure that the mutations are consistent. Chinese scientists don't understand exactly how a trip into space alters the seeds'DNA and yields such effects, but it's not just size that changes. (47) Tong Yichao, whose firm, the Beijing Flying Eagle Green Foods Group, has been sending seeds and seedlings aboard Chinese spacecraft since 1999, says it has grown space tomatoes with 27 percent more of the antioxidant beta carotene than ordinary ones, and six-foot-tall cotton plants that produce longer, more flexible threads. Using conventional methods, "a scientist might create just three new plants in his lifetime," says Tong. "We've developed more than 50 since 1999." (48) A dozen or so Chinese firms are paying up to $45,000 a gram to place various flora aboard satellites and manned spacecraft. The long-term goal: to feed more people and help endangered species escape extinction. To date, nearly 3,000 botanical species—including garden vegetables, medicinal herbs and flowers—have been sent into orbit and brought back to earth. (49) The commercial promise of China's space veggies has yet to, er, bear fruit. It's legal to sell the cosmic produce, and commercial farms have purchased some space plants. But most are being developed in labs or experimental greenhouses because no one wants to go to market before the safety and Quality of the produce have been established. Even so, the idea of space flora is proving irresistible to a novelty-loving Chinese public. (50) When Tong displayed a handful of monster space eggplants—the largest of which weighed more than four pounds—at an expo, one disappeared before the show opened. Hot stuff, for sure.

问答题Directions: Your new friend Tamia sent you a letter when you were absent, so you answered her letter late. Write him a letter to make an apology, and state your reason(s). You should write about 100 words. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

问答题Directions: One of your close friends, Catherine, gave a piano solo at a concert last night and won the first prize. Now write her a letter of congratulation including the following details: 1) your heart-felt congratulations, 2) your strong impression, 3) and your encouragement. Write your letter in no less than 100 words. Write it neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter, use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

问答题Directions: Your neighbor often plays records so loudly deep into the night. Write a note to convey your complaint. You should write about 100 words on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead.

问答题Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. It is the inner working of own brains that we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation but, custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is other way around. (46) Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how unusual and abnormal. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of fist-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest. No man ever looks at the world with primitive and unchanged eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. (47) Even in his philosophical probing(探测术) he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual, as against any way in which we can affect traditional Custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular(本国的)of his family. (48) When one seriously studies the social orders that have the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. (49) The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. (50) Every child that is born into his group will share them with him and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem which is more responsible for us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.

问答题Directions: Write a poster to your schoolmates, informing them of a new book to be released. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.

问答题You come into the world with nothing, the saying goes. A new campaign proposes to change that by giving every newborn child in the world an online bank account with $100 in it. The aim of the Financial Access@ Birth (FAB) campaign is to do something about the fact that half the world"s population has no access to mainstream financial services. 1 This is a huge handicap, exposing people who are typically already on the poverty line to risks that wealthier folk can manage through savings or insurance, and leaving them to be blackmailed by unregistered moneylenders. The campaign is the brainchild of Bhagwan Chowdhry, a finance professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is starting to attract some prominent supporters, including Peter Singer, a well-known philosopher, and Vijay Mahajan, an Indian social entrepreneur. 2 FAB fits perfectly together with another big idea: an effort being led by Nandan Nilekani, an outsourcing tycoon turned government minister, to provide every Indian with a legal proof of identity in the form of an electronic smart card. 3 The prospect of a bank account with $100 in it—this initial amount would be untouchable until the child"s 16th birthday—would encourage parents to register their newborn babies. The account could then be used by governments or charities to make direct payments, to fund things like the child"s education or health care. Opening accounts for babies has been tried before, but only in rich countries such as Britain, Canada and South Korea, where its potential impact is far smaller. 4 Mr. Chowdhury expects the parents of the richest 35m children born each year voluntarily to give up the free money, which would leave accounts for the other 100m newborns born each year to be funded. The campaign proposes that national governments each donate one-fiftieth of one percent of GDP to cover the estimated $10 billion annual cost. That is still a tough deception in today"s economic climate: 5 one issue to be thoroughly discussed is whether the accounts have to be funded at birth, or whether the money needs to arrive only when the child turns 16. But governments are not the only potential donors. The idea sounds perfect for banks, which would gain a potentially lucrative army of future customers and could polish up their battered images at the same time.

问答题As civilization proceeds in the direction of technology, it passes the point of supplying ai1 the basic essentials of life--food, shelter, clothes, and warmth. 46) Then we either raise our standard of living above the necessary for comfort and happiness or leave it at this level and work shorter hours. Mankind has probably chosen the latter alternative. Men will be working shorter and shorter hours in their paid employment. And the great majority of the housewives will wish to be relieved completely of the routine operations of the home such as washing the clothes or washing up. 47) By far the most logical step to relieve the housewife of routine is to provide a robot slave which can be trained to meet the requirements of a particular home and can be programmed to carry out half a dozen or more standard operations, when so switched by the housewife. 48) It will be a machine having no more emotions than a car, but having a memory for instructions and a limited degree of instructed or built-in adaptability according to the positions in which it finds various types of objects. It will operate other more specialized machines, for example, the vacuum cleaner or clothes-washing machine. There are no problems in the production of such a domestic robot to which we do not have already the glimmering of a solution. When I have discussed this kind of device with housewives, some 90 percent of them have the immediate reaction, "How soon can I buy one?" The other 10 percent have the reaction, "I would be terrified to have it moving about my house. " 49) But when one explains to them that it could be switched off or unplugged or stopped without the slightest difficulty, or made to go and put itself away in a cupboard at any time, they quickly realize that it is a highly desirable object. 50) Now it is generally recognized that there is no greater pleasure than to go to bed in the evening and know that the washing up is being done downstairs after one is asleep. Most families are now delighted, no doubt, to have a robot slave doing all the downstairs housework after they were in bed at night.

问答题Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a psychiatrist in the Washington area and an expert on depression and anger, when reviewing the driver who kept threatening me says, drivers who repeatedly tailgate (紧跟着某车驾驶),trying to pressure the cars in front to move faster or get out of the way, "are always sitting on their arteries," which constricts in response to stress hormones that spew forth from their adrenal 46)It is hard to say whether rage is now more common than it used to be or we are simply now more aware of it. given high-profile cases like mass shootings by children and evidence that chronically angry people endanger their health, their lobs and their personal relationships. For example, in a 25-year follow-up study of University of North Carolina medical students, Dr. John Barefoot, now at Duke, found that those who scored highest in hostility on a standard personality rest were nearly five rimes as likely to die of heart disease as their less hostile classmates. 47)Certainly pressures built into many modern lives—urban, suburban and rural— give many opportunities for latent anger to erupt. But that does not mean frequent hostile outbursts are either inevitable or productive. As Dr. Rosenthal wrote, "In most everyday situations we are more likely to pay a greater price for losing our temper than for not getting our licks in quickly enough." The advice to count to 10, and if you're still angry, count to 100 before you take any action, is far from an old wife's tale. Dr. Rosenthal said the driver threatening me appeared to attribute hostile motives to other people. In his mind I deliberately made his life difficult and he was determined to teach me a lesson. Furthermore, he said, common misperceptions often fuel anger. Some people, especially those who are depressed, see hostility where it does not exist. 48)They believe—Incorrectly—that others feel hostile or critical toward them and tend to defend themselves, in the process actually provoking hostility and a vicious cycle of anger 49)Others operate from a misperception that the world should be other than it is and become enraged when disturbed by the ordinary hassles and inconveniences of everyday life—an airport delay, a traffic jam, a person who breaks into a line. Dr. Rosenthal told of a friend who was often angered by long red lights and whose wife "minds him gently that the red light doesn"t care, so he might as well save his fury." 50)The psychiatrist noted that "it is easier to change your expectations and recognize that life is often neither fair nor easy than it is to change the world." Sometimes chemical influences-'-like excessive caffeine, steroids, diet drugs and antidepressants--foster irritability. If medications may be contributing to your anger, discuss this possibility with your physician.