In this part, you are asked to write an essay according to the information below. You should write more than 150 words neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (15 points) 如今，名人（celebrity）在大学里当客座教授或兼职教授的现象很普遍，对于这种现象，不同的人持有不用的看法，请表明你的观点。

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

One of our expectations about education is that it will pay off in terms of upward mobility. Historically , the correlation between education and income has been strong. But in the early 1970s a contradiction developed between education and the economy. Our value of education and our average educational attainment outstripped the capacity of the economy to absorb the graduates. Since the 1970s, high-school graduates have experienced a striking decrease in earnings, making them the first generation since World War II to face a lower standard of living than their parents had. Experts have argued that this contradiction is at the heart of the problem of public education today. Business leaders claim that the schools are failing to properly educate students, that they are turning out young people who are inadequately prepared to function in the workplace. The real problem is a dearth of economic opportunities for students who are not continuing on to college. College graduates also are having difficulty finding jobs. Even when they do, the jobs may not be commensurate to their training and expectations. Part of the problem is that too many young Americans aspire to have professional jobs, making disappointment and frustration inevitable for some. Many students assumed that what was true of an individual—that the higher the education, the better the job opportunities—would also be true for an entire society. But when the numbers of better-educated young people became too great, the economy could no longer absorb them. Another part of the problem is the assumption that greater educational attainment guarantees career advancement. In fact, employers do not routinely reward educational attainment; rather, they reward it only when they believe it will contribute to the employee's productivity. We should not overlook the fact that there is still a strong correlation between education, occupation , and income. College graduates have a strong advantage over those with less education. But the payoff is neither as large nor as certain as it once was. Unfortunately, Americans have focused so strongly on the economic payoff that many consider their college education useless if it does not yield a desirable, well-paying job. Only in this sense can we speak of an "oversupply" of college graduates. We could argue that all or at least the majority of Americans would profit by some degree because higher education can enable the individual to think more deeply, explore more widely, and enjoy a greater range of experiences.

Directions: In this section, you are asked to write an essay based on the following information. Make comments and express your own opinion. You should write at least 150 words. 一些人认为高校应该提供更多关于流行音乐、电影、广告和电视节目等课程，因为当代文化比以前的艺术和文学与学生关系更加紧密。你的观点是什么?

BPart CDirections: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese./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

ThetablesandpiechartshowinpercentagetermstheresultsofasurveyofanewshoppingcomplexinLondon.Summarizetheinformationbyselectingandreportingthemainfeatures,andmakecomparisonswhererelevant.Youshouldwriteabout150wordsontheANSWERSHEET.(15points)

Just seven years ago, the Texas Legislature prescribed that all high schoolers must pass two math courses and geometry to graduate. This summer, the state reversed course, easing its【C1】______math, science, and social-studies requirements to【C2】______class time for job training. Texas legislators want to create a more【C3】______system that helps students who aren"t headed to four-year colleges enter the workforce. But that【C4】______carries some risks.【C5】______it"s true that not all students will go on to college, pulling back on college preparatory coursework has to be【C6】______carefully in a state like Texas, with its hundreds of thousands of low-income and【C7】______students. They"re the students who would benefit from college the most. New laws in Texas, as well as in Florida, de-emphasize the math class required for【C8】______to four-year colleges. Knowledge of these subjects is considered an indicator of college readiness【C9】______the Common Core standards, which have been【C10】______by 45 states, including Florida. More than half of public-school students in both states are nonwhite and from low-income families. It"s particularly【C11】______that these Hispanic and African-American students leave high school qualified to further their e-ducation—【C12】______they don"t plan on doing so right away. A college【C13】______is the most important driver of social mobility. By 2020, 65 percent of all jobs will require some kind of postsecondary education according to surveys. 【C14】______speaking, Texas"s earlier college-prep course-work recommendations didn"t fit reality.【C15】______the high bar, only about half of the state"s high school graduates immediately headed off to college of any kind. "We wanted to give students and parents more flexibility, to not only be college-prepared—which I think we"re doing a pretty good job of—but perhaps to【C16】______that preparation to folks who may not be going to college," Representative Jimmie Don Aycock, who【C17】______the Texas House"s Public Education Committee, says of the revision. The goal isn"t to dumb down the curriculum, he says, but to let kids【C18】______a path that might not have been【C19】______to them before. The state"s educational system still rewards schools when students【C20】______college readiness.

BPart B/B

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

You've now heard it so many times, you can probably repeat it in your sleep. President Obama will no doubt make the point publicly when he gets to Beijing: the Chinese need to consume more; they need — believe it or not — to become more like Americans, for the sake of the global economy. And it's all true. But the other side of that equation is that the U.S. needs to save more. For the moment, American households actually are doing so. After the personal-savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, the shock of the economic crisis last year prompted people to snap shut their wallets. In China, the household-savings rate exceeds 20%. It is partly for policy reasons. As we've seen, wage earners are expected to care for not only their children but also their aging parents. And there is, to date, only the flimsiest (脆弱的) of publicly-funded health care and pension systems, which increases incentives for individuals to save while they are working. But China is a society that has long esteemed personal financial prudence(谨慎)for centuries. There is no chance that will change anytime soon, even if the government creates a better social safety net and successfully encourages greater consumer spending. Why does the U.S. need to learn a little frugality(节俭) ? Because healthy savings rates are one of the surest indicators of a country's long-term financial health. High savings lead, over time, to increased investment, which in turn generates productivity gains, innovation and job growth. In short, savings are the seed corn of a good economic harvest. The U.S. government thus needs to act as well. By running constant deficits, it is dis-saving, even as households save more. Peter Orszag, Obama's Budget Director, recently called the U.S. budget deficits unsustainable and he's right. To date, the U.S. has seemed unable to see the consequences of spending so much more than is taken in. That needs to change. China's leaders might gently hint that Beijing is getting a little nervous about the value of the dollar — which has fallen 15% since March, in large part because of increasing fears that America's debt load is becoming unmanageable. That's what happens when you're the world's biggest creditor; you get to drop hints like that, which would be enough by themselves to create international economic chaos if they were ever leaked. (Every time any official in Beijing deliberately publicly talks about seeking an alternative to the U.S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans saved more and spent less, consistently over time, they wouldn't have to worry about all that.

Amazon today unveiled Dash Buttons, an easy way for customers to【C1】______select bulk goods 【C2】______ an internet-connected button, and yesterday 【C3】______ Home Services, an on-demand installation and handyman service. Combined, they show that the e-commerce giant has a clear understanding of how the Internet-of-things will 【C4】______ its business. And it isn' t going to be shy about capitalizing on connectivity to build its bottom line. Dash Buttons are an adaptation of Amazon's 【C5】______ -controlled Dash ordering system that lets people speak to order new【C6】______items. So 【C7】______ Amazon has is a retrofit strategy for connecting smart appliances to its e-commerce operations and a future-facing strategy for the coming flood of 【C8】______ devices. And all of this is geared around making buying products from Amazon as easy as possible. The 【C9】______ of one-button tasks are appealing,【C10】______it could lead to a【C11】______of packages ending up at people's doors if Amazon doesn't try to【C12】______waste on its end, by grouping shipments together when possible. People on Twitter seem mostly【C13】______about pets and small children playing with the Dash Buttons and ordering multiples of their Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes, although Amazon notes that【C14】______the button is pressed more than once, the order doesn't go【C15】______on the second time, and you'll get a smartphone notification about it. Amazon also recently launched Home Services, following up on last year's opening of a home automation e-store devoted to connected gadgets for the home—many of which require a【C16】______in staller. So now Amazon can sell these devices along with the person who can install them. It also is【C17】______on maintenance, via a network of service providers that it can call 【C18】______ for its network of suppliers or for its own planned connected home play. With Dash, it's【C19】______an offensive play to【C20】______up more sales as devices come online. With Amazon Home Services, it's making a defensive play as other large companies try to become more vertically integrated.

Come on—everybody's doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us thinking of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good—drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the world. Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of examples of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers. The idea seems promising, and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many public-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. "Dare to be different, please don't smoke!" pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers—teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure. But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it's presented here is that it doesn't work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program prodvices lasting changes is limited and mixed. There' s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits—as well as negative ones—spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day. Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It's like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that's the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.

When a search engine guesses what you want before you finish typing it, or helpfully ignores your bad spelling, that is the result of machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Although AI has been through cycles of hype and disappointment before, big technology companies have recently been scrambling to hire experts in the field, in the hope of building machines that can learn even more sophisticated tasks. IBM said this month it would invest $ 1 billion in a new division to develop uses for Watson, its computer that understands human language. But this week Google enhanced its lead in this field by paying around $ 660 m for DeepMind Technologies, a startup in London that has yet to announce a product. The boss of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, previously created video games such as " Evil Genius" and "Theme Park". DeepMind"s 75 geniuses will join the world"s leading group of machine-learning experts, which Google has been assembling in the past few years. Google"s main source of income, its search engine and the accompanying ad-placement system, is driven by machine learning. The firm"s self-driving cars rely on it, as do the intelligent thermostats made by Nest, a firm it has just taken over, and the robots made by Boston Dynamics and other robotics outfits it has been buying. The technology is already the backbone of many other internet firms. It is why Facebook and Linkedln have that slightly creepy ability to find people you know, and why Amazon and Netflix are good at suggesting books and films you might like. It also helps intelligence agencies to identify terrorist networks. As machine learning leaves the lab and goes into practice, it will threaten white-collar, knowledge-worker jobs just as machines, automation and assembly lines destroyed factory jobs in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, the technique has been applied by researchers at Stanford University to tell whether a biopsy of breast cells is highly cancerous, something that until now has required a human expert to assess. Another of DeepMind"s founders, Shane Legg, has predicted that artificial intelligence running wildly will be the biggest existential risk to humans in this century. Its founders have asked Google to set up an "ethics board" to consider the appropriate use of machine learning in its products. The creator of "Evil Genius" is ensuring that his new overlord sticks to its motto, "Don"t be evil".

Read the following text and answer the questions by choosing the most suitable subtitle from the list A-G for each numbered paragraph(41-45). There are two extra subtitles which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET.(10 points) [A]Pick up the local paper [B]Save from the first place [C]Use a guidebook—your own [D]Pick up the phone [E]Choose cheap countries [F]Download magazines from web [G]Splurge when it matters You've mastered the art of modern-travel savings: Your airfare alerts are set up on Kayak; you flit around Europe on cheap carriers like EasyJet. You stay in apartments rented through Airbnb. You could probably shave a few more cents off travel costs by downloading five new apps and bookmarking 10 new sites. But real savings will come to those who go retro by stepping away from the screen, or using it differently, to find old-fashioned tactics that can save you big. Here are some old-school tips for getting the most out of your travel buck. 【R1】______ We think we can get everything done online these days, but sometimes a simple phone call is your best bet for saving money. Speak with an innkeeper and learn of potential discounts on extended stays or information on how to get there from the airport by public transit. Contact the specific location where you'll pick up your rental car and reserve a compact to avoid getting "upgraded" to a bigger vehicle that will increase(sometimes even double)your gas costs. Call travel agencies that strike special deals with airlines to get your prices below anything you' ll find online. 【R2】______ Goodbye Norway, hello Bolivia. Or as a blogger put it, "Cheapest dorm bed in Zurich=nice room in Bangkok." Extrapolate that to tour guides, museum entries, food and more, and the savings start to add up. Of course, keep in mind how much it will cost you to get there in the first place. Luckily, a lot of the cheaper countries are also cheap to fly to; another blogger put together a list of 10 "Cheap Places to Travel on the U.S. Dollar," which includes Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru, Hun gary and Romania. 【R3】______ Most travelers will never be across-the-board cheapskates. Street food, nosebleed-theater seats and bunk beds are not for everyone. But you don't have to be a purist. For each trip, decide on a themed "waste" or two—transportation, food, arts, lodging—and save on the rest. 【R4】______ No listings are more up-to-the-minute than Friday arts supplements, alternative weeklies or the local editions of Time Out magazine. Get them on actual paper while they last. You' 11 not only find the nontouristy scene laid out for you in one handy package, but often come across coupons or specials you certainly won't find on Yelp. 【R5】______ I still carry a travel guide around when I travel—as backup, if nothing else. But those books are pricey, and there's so much free information online that, with a little copying and pasting(and printing out), you can come pretty close to matching them with your own bespoke travel guide. So, in a retro twist, no Wi-Fi needed.

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

Women have been driving yellow cabs in New York since the 1940s, but 99% of drivers are male. Even among drivers of cars booked by phone or online, only 4% are women. That may change with the launch of SheTaxis, an app that lets female passengers insist on female drivers, and vice versa. It will be available in New York City, Westchester and Long Island, and the firm plans to expand to other cities. Stella Mateo, the founder, is betting that quite a few women are nervous and weary of getting into cars driven by men. The service may also appeal to those whose religious beliefs forbid them to travel with unrelated men. Each driver wears a pink pashmina. Men who ask for a ride will be directed to another car service. Similar services thrive in India, South Africa and several Middle Eastern cities. Japan has had women-only railway carriages on and off since 1912. Known as hana densha (flower trains), they of fer shelter from the gropers who make rush hour in Tokyo so disagreeable. But SheTaxis faces two speed bumps. One is practical. Demand has been so great that the firm has had to decelerate its launch until it can recruit 500 drivers. The other obstacle is legal. By employing only female drivers, SheTaxis is obviously discriminating against men. Since anti-discrimination law is not always applied with common sense, that may be illegal. And there is no shortage of potential litigants. Yellow cabbies are furious at the growth of online taxi firms such as Uber. "It's not hard to imagine a guy... filing suit," says Sylvia Law of New York University Law School. "SheTaxis' defence would probably be that its drivers are all independent contractors." Because the firm caters only to women, it is discriminating against male customers, too. Is that legal? Angela Cornell of Cornell Law School thinks there could be a loophole. New York's Human Rights Commission could make an exemption on the ground that SheTaxi offers a service that is in the public interest: women feel safer not getting into cars with strange men. Women-only colleges are allowed, so why not women-only cabs? The snag is that some men may also feel safer getting into cabs with female drivers. A study in 2010 found that 80% of crashes in New York City that kill or seriously injure pedestrians involve male drivers. Women drivers are simply better.

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

Just as each wedding creates potential business for divorce lawyers, so each engagement gives insurers a chance to drum up business. Future spouses, says Alan Tuvin of Travelers, an insurer, may wish to protect themselves against something going wrong on the wedding day. It is unlikely that your intended wife will leave on horseback, as Julia Roberts did in "Runaway Bride", and most insurers wouldn't cover that anyway. But you never know what might happen. Mr. Tuvin launched the firm' s wedding-insurance business; he and his wife were its first clients. A typical American wedding costs 25,000 or so. This has fallen a bit over the past quarter-century but still seems lavish given how tight American belts are these days. Weddings are pricey because the rich are more likely to marry than the poor, and the average age of newlyweds has gone up, so couples are more prosperous when they eventually tie the knot. High prices, and the fact that many venues require couples to take out liability insurance, feed demand for wedding insurance. A fifth of couples buy it, says the Wedding Report, a trade publication. Wedding insurance began in Britain: Cornhill, an insurer, wrote its first policy in 1988. But there were few takers. The idea only took off once transplanted to America. In the early days, says Mr. Nuccio of Robert Nuccio of Wedsure, an surer, there were incidents of couples faking engagements to collect a payout. Since then, most policies have a clause that excludes "change of heart". Wedsure does insure against cold feet, but its policy will pay out only if the wedding is cancelled more than 12 months before it is due to take place, thereby guarding against fiances phoning the broker once the relationship is already on the rocks. This does not mean policies are useless. Common causes of payouts include the venue or caterers going bust after having taken a big deposit. Extreme weather, a spouse being deployed by the armed forces and an absent priest can all trigger payouts. Most policies will pay to re-stage the photos if the photographer fails to turn up or disappears with the pictures. For some, even a small risk of something going wrong on a day that has been planned for months is worth paying to avoid. Who says romance is dead?