During the day, Leipzig's airport is quiet. It is at night that the airfield comes to life. Next to the runway a yellow warehouse serves as the global sorting hub for DHL, a delivery firm owned by Deutsche Post of Germany. A huge extension, which opened in October, means it can sort 150,000 parcels each hour, says Ken Allen, DHL's CEO. With falling trade barrier, cross-border e-commerce has become a key term in the modern economy. The rise of cross-border e-commerce has meant booming business for express-delivery firms. On January 31st UPS revealed record revenues for the fourth quarter of 2016; FedEx and DHL are expected to report similarly buoyant results next month. Since 2008 half of the increase in express-delivery volumes has come from shoppers buying items online from another country. Falling trade barriers have greatly helped them. When DHL and FedEx were getting going in the 1970s, there was little demand for international express deliveries. Packages often got stuck in customs for weeks and were heavily taxed. The expansion of free-trade areas, lower tariffs and the Internet brought years of growth. But after Mr. Trump's threats to raise tariffs on goods from China and Mexico, together with the indication last month from Theresa May, Britain's prime minister, that the country will leave the EU's customs union, there are widespread fears that the favourable tailwinds enjoyed by the industry for decades are gone. The express-delivery industry faces a new challenge: the return of trade barriers due to the protectionist bent of Donald Trump and because of Brexit. The return of borders poses a challenge to the soaring parcel-delivery business. " It's all a real nightmare," groans David Jinks of ParcelHero, a British parcel broker which works with DHL, FedEx and UPS. Start with Brexit. Post-Brexit costs will probably come from long wrangles over which of 19,000 customs codes should be applied to a consignment. As an example of what could happen, Halloween costumes from China often get stuck at Britain's border while customs officials work out whether they are toys or children's clothes, which attract different duties. Such complexity would force delivery firms to put up their prices to customers, Mr. Jinks says. Sending an item from Britain to Switzerland (outside the EU) costs 150% more than it does to Italy (inside the EU). The most severe impact on business would come from higher tariffs, which would hurt demand for cross-border imports and deliveries in favour of local goods. This is where Mr. Trump's threats come into focus.

Robots have been the stuff of science fiction for so long that it is surprisingly hard to see them as the stuff of management fact. It is time for management thinkers to catch up with science-fiction writers. Robots have been doing menial jobs on production lines since the 1960s. The world already has more than 1 million industrial robots. There is now an acceleration in the rates at which they are becoming both cleverer and cheaper: an explosive combination. Robots are learning to interact with the world around them. Their ability to see things is getting ever closer to that of humans, as is their capacity to ingest information and act on it. Tomorrow' s robots will increasingly take on delicate, complex tasks. And instead of being imprisoned in cages to stop them colliding with people and machines, they will be free to wander. Until now executives have largely ignored robots, regarding them as an engineering rather than a management problem. This cannot go on: robots are becoming too powerful and ubiquitous . Companies certainly need to rethink their human-resources policies—starting by questioning whether they should have departments devoted to purely human resources. The first issue is how to manage the robots themselves. An American writer, Isaac Asimov laid down the basic rule in 1942: no robot should harm a human. This rule has been reinforced by recent technological improvements: robots are now much more sensitive to their surroundings and can be instructed to avoid hitting people. A second question is how to manage the homo side of homo-robo relations. Workers have always worried that new technologies will take away their livelihoods, ever since the original Luddites' fears about mechanised looms. Now, the arrival of increasingly humanoid automatons in workplaces, in an era of high unemployment, is bound to provoke a reaction. Two principles—don't let robots hurt or frighten people—are relatively simple. Robot scientists are tackling more complicated problems as robots become more sophisticated. They are keen to avoid hierarchies among rescue-robots (because the loss of the leader would render the rest redundant). They are keen to avoid duplication between robots and their human handlers. This suggests that the world could be on the verge of a great management revolution: making robots behave like humans rather than the 20th century's preferred option, making humans behave like robots.

BPart B/B

Directions:Writeanessaybasedonthedrawing.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethedrawingbriefly,2)explainitsintendedmeaning,and3)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.

Much of continental Europe is in poor shape. True, the aggregate wealth of people is little changed and the social capital in museums, parks and other amenities is still intact. Yet, in the western part, the economy is failing society. Inclusion of ethnic minorities and youth in the economy is more lacking than ever. Among those who do participate, fewer are prospering. It is a measure of the decline that, in almost every country, the growth of wage rates has steadily slowed since 1995. What has gone wrong? European economists speak of a loss of competitiveness in southern Europe. They suggest that output and employment are down, relative to the past trend, because wages leapt ahead of productivity, making labour too expensive and forcing employers to cut back. Taking this perspective, some German economists argue that wages need to fall in the affected economies. Others argue instead for monetary stimulus—for instance, asset purchases by central banks—to raise prices and make current wage rates affordable. Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply. And they lay that contraction largely to outbreaks of fiscal profligacy—as happened in Europe from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Disciples of Keynes, who focus on aggregate demand, view any increase in household wealth as raising employment because they say it adds to consumer demand. They say Europe needs a lot more fiscal "profligacy" if it is to bring unemployment down. Some evidence favours the classics. Yet both sides of this debate miss the critical force at work. The main cause of Europe's deep fall—the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth—is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swathes of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates and it depresses employment. That slowdown resulted from narrowing innovation. Even in the postwar years, innovation in Europe was feeble by past standards. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, much of Europe is still suffering a slump on top of its post-1990s fall. The slump will pass but the fall will not be easily overcome. The continent is losing its best talent. It needs to fight for an economic life worth living.

Suppose your roommate Jim has suffered from psychological problems. Worried about him as you are, you don't know how to help him. Write a letter to a psychological expert, Professor White, to 1) inform him about the details, and 2) ask for advice. You should write about 100 words. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

BPart BDirections: Write an essay of 160-200 words based on the following information./B

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

If you know exactly what you want, the best route to a job is to get specialized training. A recent survey shows that companieslike the graduates in such fields as business and health care who can go to work immediately with very little on-the-job training. That's especially true of booming fields that are challenging for workers. At Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, for example, bachelor's degree graduates get an average of four or five job offers with salaries ranging from the high teens to the low 20s and plenty of chances for rapid advancement. Large companies, especially, like a background of formal education coupled with work experience. But in the long run, too much specialization doesn't pay off. Business, which has been flooded with MBAs, no longer considers the degree an automatic stamp of approval. The MBA may open doors and command a higher salary initially, but the impact of a degree washes out after five years. As further evidence of the erosion of corporate faith in specialized degrees, Michigan State's Scheetz cites a pattern in corporate hiring practices. Although companies tend to take on specialists as new hires, they often seek out generalists for middle-and upper-level management. "They want someone who isn't constrained by nuts and bolts to look at the big picture," says Scheetz. This sounds suspiciously like a formal statement that you approve of the liberal-arts graduate. Time and again labor-market analysts mention a need for talents that liberal-arts majors are assumed to have: writing and communication skills, organizational skills, open-mindedness and adapt-ability, and the ability to analyze and solve problems. David Birch claims he does not hire anybody with an MBA or an engineering degree. "I hire only liberal-arts people because they have a less-than-canned way of doing things," says Birch. Liberal-arts means an academically thorough and strict program that includes literature, history, mathematics, economics, science, human behavior—plus a computer course or two. With that under your belt, you can feel free to specialize. "A liberal-arts degree coupled with an MBA or some other technical training is a very good combination in the marketplace," says Scheetz.

BPart B/B

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

BPart ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D./B

Write a letter of about 100 words to a beach resort where you had a wonderful vocation to express your gratitude for their good service. You should include the details you think necessary. You should write neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.(10 points)

In this section, you are required to write a composition. You should write more than 150 words neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. “五一”、“十一”长假已逐渐被人们所习惯，它给百姓带来了充足的娱乐休闲机会，更促进了旅游经济的发展。但是， “黄金周”也带来了诸如交通压力增大、环保等诸多问题。作为一名普通百姓，请你给政府有关部门写一封信，提出你关于“黄金周”的意见和建议。 1．“五一”节实行了七天长假制度。 2．a．七天长假给社会和个人都带来了好处。b．七天假期也暴露出一些问题。 3．政府应确保相关设施，如交通设施，以适应假日活动的需要。

One stereotype of wisdom is a wizened Zen-master smiling kindly at his pupils, while referring to them as little grasshoppers and safe in the knowledge that one day they, too, will have been set on the path that leads to wizened masterhood. But is it true that age brings wisdom? A study two years ago in North America, by Igor Grossmann of the University of Waterloo, in Canada, suggested that it is. Dr. Grossmann found that elderly Americans had more of it than youngsters. He has, however, now extended his investigation to Asia—the land of the wizened Zen-master—and, in particular, to Japan. There, he found, in contrast to the West, that the grasshoppers are their masters' equals almost from the beginning. Dr. Grossmann recruited 186 Japanese from various walks of life and compared them with 225 Americans. Participants were asked to read a series of pretend newspaper articles. Half described conflict between groups, such as a debate between residents of an impoverished Pacific island over whether to allow foreign oil companies to operate there following the discovery of petroleum. The other half took the form of advice columns that dealt with conflicts between individuals: siblings, friends and spouses. After reading each article, participants were asked "What do you think will happen after that?" and "Why do you think it will happen this way?" Their responses were recorded and transcribed. Dr. Grossmann and his colleagues removed age-related information from the transcripts, and also any clues to participants' nationalities, and then passed the edited versions to a group of assessors. These assessors were trained to rate transcribed responses consistently, and had been tested to show that their ratings were statistically comparable with one another. The assessors scored participants' responses on a scale of one to three. This attempted to capture the degree to which they discussed what psychologists consider five crucial aspects of wise reasoning: willingness to seek opportunities to resolve conflict; willingness to search for compromise; recognition of the limits of personal knowledge; awareness that more than one perspective on a problem can exist; and appreciation of the fact that things may get worse before they get better. The upshot was that, as Dr. Grossmann had found before, Americans do get wiser with age. Their intergroup wisdom score averaged 45 at the age of 25 and 55 at 75. Their interpersonal score similarly climbed from 46 to 50. Japanese scores, by contrast, hardly varied with age. Both 25-year-olds and 75-year-olds had an average intergroup wisdom of 51. For interpersonal wisdom, it was 53 and 52. Taken at face value, these results suggest Japanese learn wisdom faster than Americans. One up, then, to the wizened Zen-masters. But they also suggest a paradox. Generally, America is seen as an individualistic society, whereas Japan is quite collectivist. Yet Japanese have higher scores than Americans for the sort of interpersonal wisdom you might think would be useful in an individualistic society. Americans, by contrast—at least in the maturity of old age—have more intergroup wisdom than the purportedly collectivist Japanese. Perhaps, then, you need individual skills when society is collective, and social ones when it is individualistic. All of which goes to show that the real root of wisdom is this: do not assume, little grasshopper, that your prejudices are correct. [A]interpersonal skills are more important for Americans. [B]conflicts between groups and advice to deal with conflicts between individuals. [C]slightly between young people and old people. [D]greatly with age. [E]Japanese social skills are higher than Americans'. [F]can rate transcribed responses consistently. [G]one day his pupils will be as smart as him.

Being plugged into an iPod is a feature of adolescence. A new study suggests that teens who spend too much time listening to music may be at higher risk of depression. The study found that teens who reported listening to music more often—【C1】______using other types of media like TV and books—were more likely to have major depressive disorder,【C2】______with teens who listened to music less frequently. With each level increase in music use, teens had an 80% higher risk of depression, the study found. The study didn"t measure【C3】______listening times, but based on previous data, the study authors【C4】______that teens in the highest-use group were likely listening to music【C5】______at least four or five hours a day. At this【C6】______it is not clear whether depressed people begin to listen to more music to【C7】______or whether listening to large【C8】______of music can lead to depression, or both.【C9】______researchers found that reading books had the opposite【C10】______: with time spent in reading increasing, teens" risk of depression【C11】______50%. This is worth emphasizing because overall in the U.S., reading books is decreasing,【C12】______nearly all other forms of media use are increasing. For the study, the researchers【C13】______106 participants aged 7 to 17 for two months; 46 participants had been previously【C14】______with depression. Throughout the course of the study, researchers made【C15】______weekend phone calls to the teens in order to determine, in real time, what forms of media they were using,【C16】______television, music, video games, Internet, magazines and books. On average, teens were most likely to be watching a movie or TV when researchers called (26% of the time). Teens reported listening to music 9% of the time, followed by Internet use and video gaming (6% each) and,【C17】______, reading printed media (0.2%). Of all the media reported, only music showed【C18】______associations with increased depression risk,【C19】______researchers had control of【C20】______like age, sex and race.

The news about vitamins keeps getting worse. Many studies published in the last few years shows that a variety of popular supplements don"t do anything to reduce the risk of developing heart disease, stroke or a variety of cancers. But what about multivitamins? These combination pills, which【C1】______10 to 30 vitamins and【C2】______, are the most popular supplements sold in America. A report published recently suggests they shouldn"t be. The study【C3】______161,808 participants in the Women"s Health Initiative, a long-term effort to【C4】______risk factors for cancer, heart disease and bone health in elderly women.【C5】______in the nationwide study included white, black, Asian and Native American women. They were followed for an average of nearly eight years.【C6】______, 41.5% of study participants took some version of a multivitamin. Those women were more likely to be white and college-educated, live in the West, exercise and have a lower body mass index. However, women who took multivitamins weren"t any more likely to【C7】______a diagnosis of breast, lung, stomach, and other cancers than were women who didn"t take multivitamins. Nor were multivitamins in general helpful in【C8】______heart attacks, strokes or reducing the risk of death from any【C9】______during the study period. The research team did find one【C10】______benefit: The 3,741 women who took stress multivitamins—formulations【C11】______higher doses of several B vitamins along with an extra amount of vitamin C—were 25% less likely to have a heart attack. No other correlations between vitamins and health outcomes were statistically【C12】______. The study provides【C13】______evidence that multivitamin use has little or no【C14】______on the risk of common cancers, heart disease or total mortality in elderly women.【C15】______, researchers wondered, "Why do millions of Americans use a daily multivitamin for【C16】______disease prevention when the supporting scientific data are weak?" Some physicians continue to【C17】______them for patients whose diets may have nutritional【C18】______. And since they don"t require a prescription, many people simply【C19】______they are safe. But those assumptions may not be【C20】______, especially if people wind up overdosing on vitamins and minerals, the researchers wrote.

You will graduate from university and intend to be a volunteer to go to Guizhou Province, southwest China. After reading the notice of recruitment, write a letter to president of your university to 1)express your wish to go to Guizhou province, 2)state your reasons, and 3)present your plans. You should write about 100 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address.(10 points)

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