The question facing Swiss voters on March 3rd was called the "people"s initiative against fat-cat pay ". With a billing like that, who wouldn"t vote yes? As it happened, 68% of the electorate did, passing a measure that requires listed companies to offer shareholders a binding vote on senior managers" pay and appointments at each annual general meeting. The penalty for bosses who fail to comply is up to three years in jail or the forfeit of up to six years" salary. Switzerland"s penchant for direct democracy has trumped its tolerance for tycoons. Swiss business is shaken. It had backed a "counter-initiative" giving shareholders more voting powers without threatening criminal sanction. That was rejected by voters. The new law, which will be written into the constitution, endangers Switzerland as an investment destination, the business lobby claims. Economiesuisse, the Swiss Business Federation, now accepts the popular verdict but warns that such complex and highly charged changes must be implemented carefully. The laws needed to put the vote into practice will take ten years to write, some cynics suggest. The initiative is the brainchild of Thomas Minder, who runs his family"s toiletries business. He has apparently never forgiven Swissair for backing out of a contract when it nearly went bankrupt 12 years ago and then awarding its former boss a big pay-off. Mr Minder"s campaign gained momentum last month on news that Novartis, a Swiss drug firm, intended to pay its departing chairman, Daniel Vasella, a severance package of SFr72m($ 76m). Mr Vasella later refused the package. After Mr Minder"s victory it will become harder to extend such corporate generosity. Some of the new restrictions seem sensible. Shareholder votes on executive pay, hitherto ad hoc and advisory, will become routine and binding. Pension funds will be required to vote in the interests of their members and make their votes public. Board members will not be permitted to have consulting or other contracts with firms in the same group. But other provisions are more burdensome. The law will ban incentives that can be useful, such as "golden hellos" and severance packages for board members. It will also bar them from accepting rewards for buying or selling company divisions.

A candlelit dinner works wonders for romance. Now scientists say it could also be good for your heart. Breathing in candle smoke causes beneficial【C1】______in your heart rhythm, they claim. It is thought that tiny salt particles released when the candle burns are【C2】______the effect The researchers monitored the hearts of 13 men and women as they breathed in air【C3】______into a small chamber. In some【C4】______the air included smoke from candles in a second room. The volunteers didn"t know which type of air they were breathing, but when it included candle smoke, their heart rate variability【C5】______. Everyone"s heart rate varies【C6】______all the time, beating a little bit faster when we breathe in than when we breathe out This is perfectly healthy and a sign that the brain is【C7】______and able to regulate the heart But this variation【C8】______as we get older and if we【C9】______heart problems. In the study, it was increased by【C10】______candle smoke. Researcher Christina Isaxon said the concentration of smoke【C11】______during the study was similar to that created by a candlelit dinner. As the volunteers could not see the candles and weren"t told what they were breathing, the effect could not be explained【C12】______by the calming effect of candlelight. Dr Isaxon believed that tiny particles of the candle smoke could be responsible for the beneficial effects. These particles are【C13】______regulating the heart"s rhythm and in sending messages between cells in the body. More salts are produced when a【C14】______is still. The study did not find any【C15】______health effects of the smoke—【C16】______she admitted she did not "make a huge effort" to find any. Soot, black powder in the smoke, from lit candles has been【C17】______health problems in the past. The American Chemical Society has warned that common wax candles release【C18】______harmful chemicals linked to cancer and other illnessea It recommends using beeswax. Dr Isaxon used candles made of a natural fat in her study. She recommended using candles that are as natural as possible and avoiding【C19】______and dyes as they may give off【C20】______chemicals when burned.

It"s difficult to imagine a world without antibiotics. They cure diseases that killed our ancestors in crowds, and enable any number of medical procedures and treatments that we now take for granted. Yet in 1945, while accepting a Nobel Prize for【C1】______penicillin, Alexander Fleming【C2】______a future in which antibiotics had been used with【C3】______and bacteria had grown resistant to them. Today, this future is approaching. Speaking to reporters last fall, Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,【C4】______a similar alarm: "If we"re not【C5】______, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era. In fact, for some patients and some bacteria, we are already there." The problem【C6】______overuse. Recent research by doctors at Harvard and Women"s Hospital found that the vast majority of antibiotics【C7】______for sore throats and acute bronchitis—an illness almost always caused by a【C8】______, not bacteria—are useless. Up to 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. each year,【C9】______, are given to animals. Antibiotics are the lifeline of the meat and poultry industries, which have used drugs to domestic animals as a means of【C10】______growth and preventing illnesses caused by overcrowding and poor conditions. An increasing number of bacterial【C11】______have taken the opportunity to evolve【C12】______the reach of antibiotics. The CDC"s 2013 threat report listed 17 antibiotic-resistant microorganisms that directly cause at least 23,000 deaths each year in the U.S.【C13】______Globally, drug-resistant pneumonia is an ever-increasing threat. Reported cases have【C14】______over the past nine years, killing an estimated 170,000 people last year. Although anti-bacterial resistance can be slowed, it is【C15】______. As a result, medicine companies have found antibiotics to be less【C16】______investments than drugs for chronic illnesses, which can be used over the long term. If we don"t【C17】______our use of existing antibiotics and commit to developing new ones, the risks are not just medical, but【C18】______. The CDC estimates that, in the United States, antibiotic resistance already costs $20 billion in【C19】______health-care spend and $35 billion in lost productivity【C20】______.

Most people would not pay two cents for something worth one. But America"s government spent $ 116m last year doing just that. The money-losing purchase was money itself; the penny, which has cost more than a cent to produce since 2006, due mainly to the price of zinc, the coin"s primary ingredient. Steel is not much better, as Canada has learned. The government there recently ditched its steel-based penny. American politicians, while loth to take lessons from their northern neighbours, may have noticed. In an online forum on February 14th Barack Obama intimated that the penny was no longer change he believes in. Fifty years ago a handful of pennies would buy a hamburger at McDonald"s, but inflation means the coin won"t even get you one French fry today. Relegated to jars and lost behind cushions, the penny is failing to perform its primary function; to facilitate commerce. Vending machines and parking meters don"t accept it. Penny scourges note that fiddling with them adds some two seconds to each transaction, costing the economy many millions of dollars a year. Penny lovers and zinc-industry lobbyists counter that the coin"s demise would cost consumers, as merchants would round prices up to the nearest nickel. Some economists disagree, suggesting that shop keepers might in fact round down in order to avoid moving from a price of, say, $ 9. 99 to $ 10. Americans anyway seem willing to accept a fee for penny removal, as evidenced by the self-imposed cost of leaving them idle and the success of coin-counting machines, which take a cut when turning them into bills. Other countries have eliminated low-value coins with less-than-dire results, and indeed, so has America. In 1857 it ditched the half-cent, then worth nearly as much in real terms as today"s dime. This has led some to suggest killing the nickel, which costs about ten cents to make, as well as the penny.

If the online service is free then you are the product, technicians say. Google and Facebook make a【C1】______collecting personal information to help them target their advertisements more【C2】______Free smart-phone apps typically【C3】______all the data they can, such as the person's location or their【C4】______address book. More than ever, individual privacy is【C5】______threat. Julia Angwin, who oversaw a pioneering series of Wall Street Journal articles called "What They Know", starting last year,【C6】______many of the questionable activities that damage privacy—activities that most people know nothing about. Hundreds of unregulated data-agents【C7】______in America, for example, selling personal files to marketing companies. One company runs a fleet of camera—equipped cars that【C8】______the number plates of 1 million vehicles a month, mostly to find those wanted for repossession—【C9】______it sells the data to insurers or private investigators as well. Ms Angwin condemns this shadowy business. Her book tracks her attempts to【C10】______it. She gets a credit card using a fake name; she uses a(n)【C11】______search engine and conceals her e-mail and texts; she leaves LinkedIn. When she turns off basic web-browsing functions that enable tracking she becomes digitally【C12】______. Amazon items appear to be out of【C13】______and she is unable set up an appointment at an Apple store. "My daughter would stand next to me and laugh while I tried to【C14】______a page and browse through all the【C15】______," she writes. Yet "Dragnet Nation" has its【C16】______. It ignores how exciting the【C17】______uses of personal data can be to companies, governments and NGOs. It mixes state scrutiny and privacy-damaging business practices, weakening the study of both. Ms Angwin's analysis of the problems and【C18】______regulatory remedies is shallow, and her attempts to【C19】______the dragnet eventually become wearisome. Her【C20】______is to have made herself a subject in an experiment to avoid the scrutiny found everywhere. But the real story about the e-conomy of personal information and protecting privacy in an age of big data has yet to be written.

It took some time to figure out just the right shopping complex, off just the right highway interchange and just the right distance from Seoul, that could accommodate a 624,000-square-foot store—that is to say, one more than three times the size of the average Wal-Mart Supercenter. It took more time to solve certain mysteries, like how big to make the store' s children' s section in a country where kids are often given ample space in the family living quarters. It took more time to figure out how to showcase kitchens that incorporate kimchi refrigerators, a uniquely Korean appliance— and even more time to untangle nuances of the market, like the South Korean's preference for metal chopsticks. In all, it took about six years for Ikea to unveil its inaugural store in South Korea, in Gwangmyeong, starting from the first scouting trip. The lag was typically Ikean. But six years? "The more global, the more complex it gets," replies Mikael Palmquist, the regional manager of retail for Asia Pacific. "We need to get these things right or we will never be taken seriously." Today the Gwangmyeong store, which is the company's largest in the world by shopping area, is on track to become one of Ikea's top-performing outlets for 2015. The success is hardly a fluke. Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea—flat packing, transporting, and reassembling its quirky Swedish styling all across the planet. The furniture and furnishings brand is in more countries than Wal-Mart and Carrefour. China, where Ikea has eight of its 10 biggest stores, is the company's fastest-growing market. An outlet in Morocco is coming soon, and there are hints that Brazil may not be far off. Meanwhile, Ikea is going meatballs out in India, where it plans to invest about $2 billion over a decade to open 10 stores. Getting it right in emerging markets like China and India, where Ikea is well-positioned to capitalize on a growing middle class, is a key factor in its goal of hitting ￠50 billion in sales by 2020. That's up from ￠28.7 billion in its fiscal 2014 and almost double its 2005 sales level. Today the Ikea Group has 318 stores, not including the brand's some four dozen franchised locations; it's aiming for around 500 by 2020.

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

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the moon, their cargo included nearly fifty pounds of rock and soil, which were packed in an aluminum box with seals designed to maintain the lunar surface"s low-pressure environment. But back at Johnson Space Center, in Houston, scientists discovered that the seals had been【C1】______—by moon dust. Lunar dust is fine, like a powder,【C2】______it cuts like glass. It"s formed when shooting stars【C3】______on the moon"s surface, heating its rocks and dirt and reducing them to fine particles. Since there"s no wind or water to smooth【C4】______edges, the tiny grains are sharp and uneven, and【C5】______nearly everything. "The intruding【C6】______of lunar dust represents a more challenging engineering design issue, as well as a【C7】______issue for settlers, than does radiation," wrote Harrison Schmitt, an Apollo 17 astronaut, in his 2006 book, "Return to the Moon." The dust damaged space-suits and ate away layers of moon boots. Over the【C8】______of six Apollo missions, not one rock box【C9】______its vacuum seal. Dust followed the astronauts back into their ships, too. According to Schmitt, it smelled like gunpowder and made breathing【C10】______. No one knows precisely what the extremely small particles do to human lungs. The dust not only【C11】______the moon"s surface, but floats up to sixty miles【C12】______it—as an outer part of its atmosphere, where particles【C13】______the moon by gravity, but are so thin that they【C14】______collide. In the nineteen-sixties, Surveyor probes filmed a glowing cloud floating just above the lunar surface during sunrise. Later, Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, while orbiting the moon, recorded a【C15】______phenomenon at the sharp line where lunar day meets night. Cernan【C16】______a series of pictures illustrating the changing【C17】______; streams of particles popped【C18】______the ground and hovered, and the resulting cloud came into sharper focus as the astronauts" orbiter approached daylight. Since there"s no wind to form and【C19】______the clouds, their origin is something of a mystery. It"s【C20】______that they"re made of dust, but no one fully understands how or why they do their thing.

Zoe, your current colleagues, is leaving for a new position at a different company. Write a letter to congratulate her on the new job. You should write about 100 words neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

As Valentine's Day approaches, many single people begin to feel a little sorry for themselves. On a day【C1】______by couples, this can lead to feelings of【C2】______and loneliness, say researchers.【C3】______, don't worry—they say it could【C4】______be good for you. "On the【C5】______of everyday life, it is understandable how something as personally【C6】______as loneliness could be regarded as a plague on human existence," John Cacioppoat and his fellow researchers at the University of Chicago write in the journal Cognition & Emotion. "Research【C7】______the past decade suggests a very different view of loneliness than suggested by personal experience, one in which loneliness【C8】______a variety of adaptive functions in【C9】______habitats." "Although it may feel like loneliness has no redeeming【C10】______, it promotes behavior change to increase the likelihood of the survival of one's genes. The pain of loneliness served to【C11】______us to renew the connections we needed to ensure survival and to promote social trust, co-hesiveness, and collective action." However, there was also bad news—researchers found the 'lonely' are viewed more negatively in terms of their psychosocial functioning and attractiveness. "In a social environment non-lonely people form a negative impression【C12】______lonely people, which then affects their behavior and【C13】______the lonely individual's perceived isolated existence," the researchers wrote. "【C14】______, individuals rated opposite-gender partners who they expected to be lonely as less sociable, and【C15】______towards them in a less sociable【C16】______than they did toward partners they expected not to be-lonely." The team even say loneliness could be behind many sports fans decision to【C17】______their team. "The emergence of a collective connectedness factor underlying loneliness, therefore, suggests that we may have evolved the capacity for and motivation to form relationships not only with other individuals but also with groups (e.g., a Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox fan), with the【C18】______being the promotion of co-operation in【C19】______conditions (e.g., competition, warfare). The identification with and investments in the group, in turn, may increase the likelihood of the continuity of the group, its members, and their individual genetic【C20】______."

BPart ADirections: Write a composition/letter of no less than 100 words on the following information./B

In the past 35 years, hundreds of millions of Chinese have found productive, if often exhausting, work in the country"s growing cities. This extraordinary mobilization of labour is the biggest economic event of the past half-century. The world has seen nothing on such scale before. Will it see anything like it again? The answer lies across the Himalayas in India. India is an ancient civilization but a youthful country. Its working-age population is rising by about 12m people a year, even as China"s shrank last year by 3m. Within a decade India will have the biggest potential workforce in the world. Optimists look forward to a bumper "demographic dividend" , the result of more workers per dependant and more saving out of income. This combination accounted for perhaps a third of the East Asian miracle. India "has time on its side, literally," boasted one prominent politician, Kamal Nath, in a 2008 book entitled "India"s Century". But although India"s dreamers have faith in its youth, the country"s youngest have growing reason to doubt India. The economy raised aspirations that it has subsequently failed to meet. From 2005 to 2007 it grew by about 9% a year. In 2010 it even grew faster than China(if the two economies are measured consistently). But growth has since halved. India"s impressive savings rate, the other side of the demographic dividend, has also slipped. Worryingly, a growing share of household saving is bypassing the financial system altogether, seeking refuge from inflation in gold, bricks and mortar. The last time a Congress-led government liberalized the economy in earnest—in 1991—over 40% of today"s Indians had yet to be born. Their anxieties must seem remote to India"s elderly politicians. The average age of cabinet minister is 65. The country has never had a prime minister born in independent India. One man who might buck that trend, Rahul Gandhi, is the son, grandson and the great-grandson of former prime ministers. India is run by gerontocrats(老年统治者)and epigones(子孙): grey hairs and groomed heirs . The apparent indifference of the police to the way young women in particular are treated has underlined the way that old India fails to protect new India.

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

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

While western governments worry over the threat of Ebola, a more pervasive but far less harmful【C1】______is spreading through their populations like a winter sniffle: mobile personal technology. The similarity between disease organisms and personal devices is【C2】______. Viruses and other parasites control larger organisms, 【C3】______ resources in order to multiply and spread. Smartphones and other gadgets do the same thing, 【C4】______ever-increasing amounts of human attention and electricity supplied 【C5】______ wire umbilici. It is tempting to【C6】______a "strategy" to both phages and phablets, neither of which is sentient.【C7】______, the process is evolutionary, consisting of many random evolutions, 【C8】______experimented with by many product designers. This makes it all the more powerful. Tech【C9】______occurs through actively-learnt responses, or "operant conditioning" as animal be haviourists call it. The scientific parallel here also involves a rodent, typically a rat, which occupies a【C10】______cage called a Skinner Box. The animal is【C11】______with a food pellet for solving puzzles and punished with an electric shock when it fails. "Are we getting a positive boost of hormones when we【C12】______look at our phone, seeking rewards?" asks David Shuker, an animal behaviourist at St Andrews university, sounding a little like a man withholding serious scientific endorsement【C13】______an idea that a journalist had in the shower. Research is needed, he says. Tech tycoons would meanwhile 【C14】______ that the popularity of mobile devices is attributed to the brilliance of their designs. This is precisely what people whose thought processes have been【C15】______by an invasive pseudo-organism would believe. 【C16】______, mobile technology causes symptoms less severe than physiological diseases. There are even benefits to【C17】______sufferers for shortened attention spans and the caffeine overload triggered by visits to Starbucks for the free Wi-Fi. Most importantly, you can【C18】______the Financial Times in places as remote as Alaska or Sidcup. In this【C19】______, a mobile device is closer to a symbiotic organism than a parasite. This would make it【C20】______to an intestinal bacterium that helps a person to stay alive, rather than a virus that may kill you.

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

Directions:Writeanessaybasedonthechart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)interpretthechart,and2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.

Directions:Writeanessaybasedonthechart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)describethediagram,and2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteabout150words.

Directions: We often donate money to the needy in many ways. But sometimes people are worried about where the money actually goes. What do you think? In this section, you are asked to write an essay on donating. You can provide specific reasons and examples to support your idea. You should write at least 150 words.

Many of the tech industry's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the leader for artificial intelligence(A.I.). In the industry's term, the companies are engaged in a "platform war." A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow. Microsoft dominated personal computers because its Windows software became the center of the consumer software world. Google has come to dominate the Internet through its ubiquitous search bar. If true believers in A.I. are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls A.I. could steer the tech industry for years to come. "Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age," said Pedro Domingos, a machine learning specialist and the author of "The Master Algorithm," a 2015 book that contends that A.I. and big-data technology will remake the world. In this fight—no doubt in its early stages—the big tech companies are engaged in tit-for-tat publicity stunts, circling the same start-ups that could provide the technology pieces they are missing and, perhaps most important, trying to hire the same brains. Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in computer vision, said one of her Ph.D. candidates had an offer for a job paying more than $1 million a year, and that was only one of four from big and small companies. For years, tech companies have used man-versus-machine competitions to show they are making progress on A.I. In 1997, an IBM computer beat the chess champion Garry Kasparov. Five years ago, IBM went even further when its Watson system won a three-day match on the television trivia show "Jeopardy!" Today, Watson is the centerpiece of IBM's A.I. efforts. By 2020, the market for machine learning applications will reach $40 billion, IDC, a market research firm, estimates. And 60 percent of those applications, the firm predicts, will run on the platform software of four companies—Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft. Intelligent software applications will become commonplace, said Jeff Dean, a computer scientist who oversees Google's A.I. development. "And machine learning will touch every industry."