Boys' schools are the perfect place to teach young men to express their emotions and involve them in activities such as art, dance and music. Far from the traditional image of a culture of aggressive masculinity (阳刚), the absence of girls gives boys the chance to develop without pressure to conform to a stereotype, a US study says. Boys at single-sex schools were said to be more likely to get involved in cultural and artistic activities that helped develop their emotional expressiveness, rather than feeling they had to conform to the "boy code" of hiding their emotions to be a "real man". The findings of the study go against received wisdom that boys do better when taught alongside girls. Tony Little, headmaster of Eton, warned that boys were being failed by the British education system because it had become too focused on girls. He criticized teachers for failing to recognize that boys are actually more emotional than girls. The research argued that boys often perform badly in mixed schools because they become discouraged when their female peers do better earlier in speaking and reading skills. But in single-sex schools teachers can tailor lessons to boys' learning style, letting them move around the classroom and getting them to compete in teams to prevent boredom, wrote the study's author, Abigail James, of the University of Virginia. Teachers could encourage boys to enjoy reading and writing with specifically "boy-focused" approaches such as themes and characters that appeal to them. Because boys generally have more acute vision, learn best through touch, and are physically more active, they need to be given "hands-on" lessons where they are allowed to walk around. "Boys in mixed schools view classical music as feminine and prefer the modern genre(类型) in which violence and sexism are major themes," James wrote. Single-sex education also made it less likely that boys would feel they had to conform to a stereotype that men should be "masterful and in charge" in relationships. "In mixed schools, boys feel compelled to act like men before they understand themselves well enough to know what that means," the study reported.
BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B
Directions:Writeanessaybasedonthechart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethediagram,and2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.
BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B
Nationally, an ageing population is a problem. But locally it can be a boon. The over-50s control 80% of Britain' s wealth, and like to spend it on houses and high-street shopping. The young "generation rent", by contrast, is poor, distractible and liable to shop online. People aged between 50 and 74 spend twice as much as the under-30s on cinema tickets. Between 2000 and 2010 restaurant spending by those aged 65-74 increased by 33%, while the un-der-30s spent 18% less. And while the young still struggle to find work, older people are retiring later. During the financial crisis full-time employment fell for every age group but the over-65s, and there has been a rash of older entrepreneurs. Pensioners also support the working population by volunteering: some 100 retirees in Christchurch help out as business mentors. Even if they wanted to, most small towns and cities could not capture the cool kids. Mobile young professionals cluster, and greatly prefer to cluster in London. Even supposed meccas like Manchester are ageing: clubs in that city are becoming members-only. Towns that aim too young, like Bracknell and Chippenham, can find their high streets full of closed La Senzas(a lingerie chain)and struggling tattoo parlours. Companies often lag behind local authorities in working this out. They are London-obsessed, and have been slow to appreciate the growing economic: heft of the old—who are assumed, often wrongly, to stick with products they learned to love in their youth. But Caroyln Freeman of Revelation Marketing reckons Britain could be on the verge of a marketing surge directed at the grey pound, "similar to what we saw with the pink". The window will not remain open forever: soon the baby boomers will start to ail, and no one else alive today is likely to have such a rich retirement. Meanwhile, with the over-50s holding the purse strings, the towns that draw them are likely to grow more and more pleasant. Decent restaurants and nice shops spring up in the favoured haunts of the old, just as they do in the trendy, revamped boroughs of London. Latimer House, a Christchurch furniture store full of retro clothing and 1940s music, would not look out of place in Hackney. Improved high streets then entice customers of all ages. Indeed, gentrification and gerontification can look remarkably similar. Old folk and young hip-sters are similarly fond of vinyl and typewriters, and wander about in outsized spectacles. Some people never lose their edge.
BSection III Writing/B
During the last 15 years, the Earth's surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18℃ increase in the 1990s. Meanwhile, emissions of carbon dioxide rose【C1】______This pause in warming has raised【C2】______in the public mind about climate change. A few skeptics say that global warming has stopped. Others argue scientists' understanding of the climate is so flawed that their judgments cannot be【C3】______with any confidence. A convincing explanation of the pause therefore【C4】______both to a proper understanding of the climate and to the【C5】______of climate science.
As evidence piled up that temperatures were not rising much, some scientists【C6】______it as a pause. The temperature had fallen for much longer periods twice in the past century or so,【C7】______the general trend was up. Variability is part of the climate system and a 15-year【C8】______was not worth getting excited about.
An【C9】______way of looking at the pause's significance was to say there had been a slowdown. Most records don't include measurements from the Arctic, which has been wanning faster than anywhere else. Using satellite data to【C10】______the missing Arctic numbers, scientists put the overall rate of global warming at 0.12℃ a decade. A study by NASA puts the "Arctic【C11】______" over the same period【C12】______lower, at 0.07°C a decade, but that is still not【C13】______.
It is also worth remembering that average warming is not the only【C14】______of climate change. According to a study, the number of hot days, the number of extremely hot days and the【C15】______of warm periods all【C16】______during the pause. A more stable average temperature hides wider extremes.
Still, attempts to【C17】______that stable average have not been convincing, partly because of the conflict between【C18】______temperatures and rising CO
2
emissions, and partly because observed temperatures are now falling【C19】______the range climate models predict. The models embody the state of climate knowledge. If they are wrong, the knowledge is probably【C20】______too. Hence, scientists still attempt hard to interpret the pause.
BSection III Writing/B
Directions: You have just come back from Canada and found a music CD in your luggage that you forgot to return to Bob, your landlord there. Write him a letter to 1) make an apology, and 2) suggest a solution. 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. Do not write the address. (10 points)
For thousands of Canadians, bad service is neither make-believe nor amusing. It is an aggravating and worsening real-life phenomenon that encompasses(包含) behaviors ranging from indifference and rudeness to naked hostility and even physical violence. Across the country, better business bureaus report a lengthening litany of complaints about contractors, car dealers, and repair shops, moving companies, airlines and department stores. There s almost an adversarial(对抗的) feeling between businesses and consumers. Experts say there are several explanations for ill feeling in the marketplace. One is that customer service was an early and inevitable casualty when retailers responded to brutal competition by replacing employees with technology such as 1-800 numbers and voice mail. Another factor is that businesses have generally begun to place more emphasis on getting customers than on keeping them. Still another is that strident, frustrated and impatient shoppers vex(使生气) shop owners and make them even less hospitable—especially at busier times of the year like Christmas. On both sides, simple courtesy has gone by the board. And for a multitude of consumers, service went with it. The Better Business Bureau at Vancouver gets 250 complaints a week, twice as many as five years ago. The bureau then had one complaints counselor and now has four. People complain about being insulted, having their intelligence and integrity questioned, and being threatened. One will hear about people being hauled almost bodily out the door by somebody saying things like "I don't have to serve you!" or "This is private property, get out and don't come back!" What can customers do? If the bureau's arbitration(仲裁) process fails to settle a dispute, a customer's only recourse is to sue in claims court. But because of the costs and time it takes, relatively few ever do. There is a lot of support for the notion that service has, in part, fallen victim to generational change. Many young people regard retailing as just a bead-end job that you're just going to do temporarily on your way to a real job. Young clerks often lack both knowledge and civility. Employers have to train young people in simple manners because that is not being done at home. Salespeople today, especially the younger ones, have grown up in a television-computer society where they've interacted largely with machines. One of the biggest complaints from businesses about graduates is the lack of inter-personal skills. What customers really want is access. They want to get through when they call, they don't want busy signals, they don't want interactive systems telling them to push one for this and two for that — they don't want voice mail. And if customers do not get what they want, they defect. Some people go back to local small businesses; the Asian greengrocer, a Greek baker and a Greek fishmonger. They don't wear name tags, but one gets to know them, all by name.[A] business always emphasized the maintenance of customers.[B] they can directly get the service they need.[C] few customers will appeal to claims court.[D] impoliteness is a kind of bad service.[E] they regard retailing as a temporary job.[F] they have spent much time on TV and computers. [G] shoppers are usually strident, frustrated and impatient.
BSection I Use of EnglishDirections: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D./B
Writeanessaybasedonthefollowingdiagram.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethediagram,and2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.
Women are moody. By evolutionary design, we are hard-wired to be sensitive to our environments, empathic to our children' s needs and intuitive of our partners' intentions. This is basic to our survival and that of our offspring. Some research suggests that women are often better at articulating their feelings than men because as the female brain develops, more capacity is reserved for language, memory, hearing and observing emotions in others.
These are observations rooted in biology, not intended to
mesh with
any kind of pro- or anti-feminist ideology. But they do have social implications. Women' s emotionality is a sign of health, not disease; it is a source of power. But we are under constant pressure to restrain our emotional lives. We have been taught to apologize for our tears, to suppress our anger and to fear being called hysterical.
The pharmaceutical industry plays on that fear, targeting women in a barrage of advertising on daytime talk shows and in magazines. More Americans are on psychiatric medications than ever before, and in my experience they are staying on them far longer than was ever intended. Sales of an tidepressants and antianxiety meds have been booming in the past two decades, and they've recently been outpaced by an antipsychotic, Ability, that is the No. 1 seller among all drugs in the United States, not just psychiatric ones.
At least one in four women in America now takes a psychiatric medication, compared with one in seven men. Women are nearly twice as likely to receive a diagnosis of depression or anxiety disorder than men are. For many women, these drugs greatly improve their lives. But for others they aren't necessary. The increase in prescriptions for psychiatric medications, often by doctors in other specialties, is creating a new normal, encouraging more women to seek chemical assistance. Whether a woman needs these drugs should be a medical decision, not a response to peer pressure and consumerism.
Obviously, there are situations where psychiatric medications are called for. The problem is too many genuinely ill people remain untreated, mostly because of socioeconomic factors. People who don't really need these drugs are trying to medicate a normal reaction to an unnatural set of stressors: lives without nearly enough sleep, sunshine, nutrients, movement and eye contact, which is crucial to us as social primates.
Scientists have long argued over the relative contributions of practice and native talent to the development of elite performance. This debate swings back and forth every century, it seems, but a paper in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science illustrates where the discussion now stands and hints—more tantalizingly, for people who just want to do their best—at where the research will go next. The value-of-practice debate has reached a stalemate. In a landmark 1993 study of musicians, a research team led by K. Anders Ericsson found that practice time explained almost all the difference (about 80 percent) between elite performers and committed amateurs. The finding rippled quickly through the popular culture, perhaps most visibly as the apparent inspiration for the "10,000-hour rule" in Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling "Outliers" —a rough average of the amount of practice time required for expert performance. The new paper, the most comprehensive review of relevant research to date, comes to a different conclusion. Compiling results from 88 studies across a wide range of skills, it estimates that practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess. In academics, the number is much lower—4 percent—in part because it's hard to assess the effect of previous knowledge, the authors wrote. One of those people, Dr. Ericsson, had by last week already written his critique of the new review. He points out that the paper uses a definition of practice that includes a variety of related activities, including playing music or sports for fun or playing in a group. But his own studies focused on what he calls deliberate practice: one-on-one lessons in which an instructor pushes a student continually, gives immediate feedback and focuses on weak spots. "If you throw all these kinds of practice into one big soup, of course you are going to reduce the effect of deliberate practice," he said in a telephone interview. Zach Hambrick, a co-author of the paper of the journal Psychological Science, said that using Dr. Ericsson' s definition of practice would not change the results much, if at all, and partisans on both sides have staked out positions. Like most branches of the nature-nurture debate, this one has produced multiple camps, whose estimates of the effects of practice vary by as much as 50 percentage points.
KentishTownRoadisahumdrumhighstreetinnorthLondon.Itcontainspawnbrokers,poundshops,hairdressersandsomelong-in-the-toothhardwarestores.UnlikeCamdenTowntothesouth,fullofbarsandtattooparlours,orHampsteadtothewest,withitsbistrosandboutiqueclothingshops,littleseemstohavechangedonthestreetforthepastthreedecades."It'sneverquitegotgoing,"admitsGaryMcLaren,alocalbookseller.Yetthelackofchangeisodd—andhintsatsomeofthestrangenessofLondon.KentishTownhasexcellenttransportlinkstocentralLondon,andplentyofresidentspreparedtopaygoodmoneyforthat.OffthehighstreetstretchrowsofprettyVictorianterracedhouses,whichsellforasmuchas2mapiece.Between2007and2014propertypricesinthepostcodeareasurroundingthemainTubeandrailwaystationmorethandoubled.AninfluxofFrenchparents,drawnbyaschoolthatopenedin2011,ispushingpricesevenhigher.YetKentishTown'sshopsandcafesarealmostinvariablyuntrendyandinsomecasesmouldering.Ahairsalon,abutcherandasportswearshophaveeachbeenownedbythesamemenformorethanaquarterofacentury.Why?Oneexplanationisthat,incommonwithotherpartsofLondon,KentishTownhaslotsofsocialhousingaswellascostlyVictorianterraces,CamdenCouncil,thelocalauthority,isbuildingevenmoreintheborough.Thishelpscheapershopssurvive,suggestsTonyTraversoftheLondonSchoolofEconomics;counciltenantsarelesslikelytodriveandsorelymoreonlocaloutlets.Andthesheervolumeofcarandlorrytrafficonthebusyhighstreet,whichisamainroadintothecity,mightdetershoppersfromvisitingandswankybusinessesfromsettingupinthearea.Demographyplaysapart,too.Fully72%ofthepopulationofKentishTowniswhite,includingagoodnumberofIrishresidents—higherthantheproportioninLondonasawhole,at60%.UnlikethehighstreetsaroundPeckhamandBrixtoninsouthLondon,whichcaterforAfricanshopperswhomaytravelfartoreachthem,fewspecialistshopsdrawpeopletoKentishTown."We'renotadestinationhighstreet,"sighsonelocaltrader.NIMBYshavenotalwayshelped.Lotsofcivicgroupsareactiveinthearea,campaigningagainstlatelicencesandthelike,saysDanCarrieroftheCamdenNewJournal,anewspaper.Alocalbusinessassociationisalsogoodatcomplaining.Partlybecauseofthis,abigsupermarkethasnotyetopenedonthehighstreet—thoughLidl,adiscounter,willsetupshopthisyear."Wequitelikethatitisrougharoundtheedges,"saysMichaelWilliams,awriterandlocal.Paradoxically,soaringhousepricesintheareamightbeanotherbrakeonchange.Wealthyfamilybuyersmeanthatsomehousesoncesplitintoflatshavebeenturnedbackintohomes,saysMrCarrier.Theresultisfewershoppersonthehighstreet.Wealthyresidentsaremorelikelytogettheirgroceriesonlineordrivetobiggerstores.AndmostwillgoouttotheWestEndratherthanalocalrestaurant.Such"counter-currents"willpreventKentishTownfromgentrifyingfully,suggestsGillianTin-dall,alocalhistorian.AndtheyaffectmanyotherstreetsinLondon,too.LupusStreetinPimlicoservesalargecouncilblockononesideandwhitestuccohousesontheother.CaledonianRoadinIslington,closetorapidly-changingKing'sCross,isstillfullofkebabshops.Londonisaglobalcity,butitisalsoacollectionofvillages,crankyandresistanttochange.
Bill Gates was 20 years old. Steve Jobs was 21. Warren Buffett was 26. Ralph Lauren was 28. Estee Lauder was 29.
These now iconic names were all 20-somethings when they started their companies that would throw them, and their enterprises, into some of the biggest successes ever known. Consider this: many of the truly remarkable innovations of the latest generation—a list that includes Google, Face-book and Twitter—were all founded by people under 30. The number of people in their mid-20s disrupting entire industries, taking on jobs usually reserved for people twice their age and doing it in the glare of millions of social media "followers" seems to be growing very rapidly.
So what is it about that youthful decade after those awkward teenage years that inspires such shoot-for-the-moon success?
Does age really have something to do with it? It does.
Young people bring fresh eyes to confronting problems and challenges that others have given up on. 20-something entrepreneurs see no boundaries and see no limits. And they can make change happen. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, has another, colder theory that may explain it: Ultimately, it' s about money.
In other words, it' s the young people who have nothing to lose, with no mortgage and, frankly, with nothing to do on a Friday night except work, who are the ones often willing to take the biggest risks. Sure, they are talented. But it's their persistence and zeal, the desire to stay up until 6 a.m. chugging Red Bull, that is the difference between being a salaried employee and an entrepreneur.
That's not to say that most 20-somethings are finding success. They're not. The latest crop of liber-successful young entrepreneurs, designers and authors are far, far from the norm. In truth, unemployment for workers age 16 to 24 is double the national average.
One of the biggest challenges facing this next generation—and one that may prevent more visionary entrepreneurs from succeeding—is the staggering rise in the level of debt college students have been left with. If Peter Thiel' s theory is right, it is going to be harder and harder for young people to take big risks because they will be crushed with obligations before they even begin.
If you're over 29 years old and still haven't made your world-changing mark, don't despair. Some older people have had big breakthroughs, too. Thomas Edison didn't invent the phonograph until he was 30.
BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B
BPart ADirections: Write a composition/letter of no less than 100 words on the following information./B
Directions:Writeanessaybasedonthechart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethediagram,and2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.
BSection III Writing/B