What impact can mobile phones have on their users' health? Many individuals are concerned about the supposed ill effects caused by radiation from handsets and base stations,【C1】______ the lack of credible evidence of any harm. But evidence for the beneficial effects of mobile phones on health is rather more【C2】______ Indeed, a systematic review【C3】______ by Rifat Atun and his colleagues at Imperial College, London , gathers【C4】______ of the use of text-messaging in the 【C5】______ of health care. These uses【C6】______ three categories: efficiency gains; public-health gains; and direct benefits to patients by【C7】______ text-messaging into treatment regimes. Using texting to【C8】______ efficiency is not profound science, but big savings can be achieved. Several【C9】______ carried out in England have found that the use of text-messaging reminders【C10】______ the number of missed appointments with family doctors by 26-39% , and the number of missed hospital appointments by 33-50%. If such schemes were【C11】______ nationally, this would translate【C12】______ annual savings of ￡256-364 million. Text messages can also be a good way to deliver public-health information, particularly to groups【C13】______ are hard to reach by other means. Text messages have been used in India to【C14】______ people about the World Health Organization's strategy to control tuberculosis(肺结核) . In Iraq, text messages were used to support a【C15】______ to immunize nearly 5 million children【C16】______ polio(小儿麻痹症). 【C17】______ , there are the uses of text-messaging as part of a treatment regime. These involve sending reminders to patients to【C18】______ their medicine, or to encourage compliance with exercise regimes or efforts to stop smoking. However, Dr. Rifat notes that the evidence for the effectiveness of such schemes is generally【C19】______ . More quantitative research is【C20】______ —which is why his team also published three papers this week looking at the use of mobile phones in health care in more detail.

Sustainable development is applied to just about everything from energy to clean water and economic growth, and as a result it has become difficult to question either the basic assumptions behind it or the way the concept is put to use. This is especially true in agriculture, where sustainable development is often taken as the sole measure of progress without a proper appreciation of historical and cultural perspectives. To start with, it is important to remember that the nature of agriculture has changed markedly throughout history, and will continue to do so. Medieval agriculture in northern Europe fed, clothed and sheltered a predominantly rural society with a much lower population density than it is today. It had minimal effect on biodiversity, and any pollution it caused was typically localized. In terms of energy use and the nutrients(营养成分) captured in the product it was relatively inefficient. Contrast this with farming since the start of the industrial revolution. Competition from overseas led farmers to specialize and increase yields. Throughout this period food became cheaper, safer and more reliable. However, these changes have also led to habitat (栖息地) loss and to diminishing biodiversity. What's more, demand for animal products in developing countries is growing so fast that meeting it will require an extra 300 million tons of grain a year by 2050. Yet the growth of cities and industry is reducing the amount of water available for agriculture in many regions. All this means that agriculture in the 21st century will have to be very different from how it was in the 20th. This will require radical thinking. For example, we need to move away from the idea that traditional practices are inevitably more sustainable than new ones. We also need to abandon the notion that agriculture can be "zero impact". The key will be to abandon the rather simple and static measures of sustainability, which centre on the need to maintain production without increasing damage. Instead we need a more dynamic interpretation, one that looks at the pros and cons(正反两方面) of all the various ways land is used. There are many different ways to measure agricultural performance besides food yield: energy use, environmental costs, water purity, carbon footprint and biodiversity. It is clear, for example, that the carbon of transporting tomatoes from Spain to the UK is less than that of producing them in the UK with additional heating and lighting. But we do not know whether lower carbon footprints will always be better for biodiversity. What is crucial is recognizing that sustainable agriculture is not just about sustainable food production.

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

If there is one person to blame for economists' habit of commenting on everything, it is Gary Becker, who died on May 3rd. Not content with studying the world's economies, he was the first prominent economist to apply economic tools to all aspects of life. He revealed that people are often purposeful and rational in their decisions, whether they are changing jobs, taking drugs or divorcing their spouses. This insight, and the work that followed from it, earned him a Nobel prize in 1992. No less an eminence than Milton Friedman declared in 2001 that Mr Becker was "the greatest social scientist who has lived and worked in the last half-century". At the heart of Mr Becker's work was the view that " individuals maximise welfare as they conceive it. " Welfare need not mean income; it could derive from the pleasure of selflessness.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B

You are going to study at a foreign university. Write a letter inquiring about the specific information as regards accommodation, fees and qualifications there. 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)

A self-described socialist and former shop steward, Sir Alex was an odd fit with the centrist Mr Blair. Yet he was much less impressed by Blair"s successor, Gordon Brown—though he was also born in Glasgow and is a lifelong football fan. Nor could Sir Alex quarrel with New Labour"s embrace of the market. English football has become the world"s best because it pays the most: the average weekly wage in the premiership rose by 1,500% between 1992 and 2010. Sir Alex was well rewarded, too; he named his mansion Fairfields, after the ship-making factory where his father once laboured. Sir Alex"s success was based on his enthusiastic embrace of globalisation, something too many people in Labour are still uncomfortable with. He inherited a team that contained two Danes, four Irishmen and 18 Britons. He leaves a squad with players from a dozen countries, including Serbia, Ecuador and Japan. In public-policy terms, United runs both a superb domestic education system and a liberal immigration policy. This is a lesson Labour"s current leader, Ed Miliband, badly needs to learn—having expressed regret, in a vague but toe-curling(令人厌恶的)way, that his New Labour forebears let so many foreigners in. Oddly, perhaps the politician Sir Alex most resembles was not of Labour at all; but rather its Tory female, Margaret Thatcher. He claimed to dislike her. Yet they are similar. Both won global successes through a combination of simple truths and constant drive. Both shared aspiration and opportunity. Both made Britain great. Sir Alex would now do well to avoid Lady Thatcher"s biggest mistake: by lingering at the scene of his triumph. He plans to stay on at United as a director and perhaps instructor to his successor, David Moyes, another able manager and working-class Scot. But such arrangement rarely works. It would be better, after such a glorious career, if he conceded that Fergie time is now over.

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

Data are everywhere these days; the problem is making sense of them. That is the role of statistics, the university course that so many people skip or forget. Charles Wheelan, a professor at Dartmouth College, does something unique here: he makes statistics interesting and fun. His latest book strips the subject of its complexity to expose the attractive stuff underneath. Statistics is an important intellectual tool which allows the compression of a massive amount of information to a few meaningful numbers. It is the bedrock of modem society, from putting rockets into orbit to managing junk e-mail filters. People from all fields are finding that they need a familiarity with figures and statistics. But the problem is that the subject is typically taught by people who like statistics, rather than those who simply care about putting them to use. "Naked Statistics" is interesting because it focuses on the purpose of stats, not their inner elegance.

Britain's private schools are one of its most successful exports. The children of the well-heeled flock to them, whether from China, Nigeria or Russia: the number of foreign pupils rose by 1. 4% in the last year alone. One headmaster recently asked a room full of pupils whether they flew business class to Britain. Only a few hands went up, suggesting they were not quite as spoiled as he had thought. Then a boy explained; many of the pupils fly first class instead. Yet foreign students, whether educated in British private schools or elsewhere, are decreasingly likely to go to English universities. According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, 307,200 overseas students began their studies in the country in 2012-2013, down from 312,000 two years earlier and the first drop in 29 years. Student numbers from the rest of the EU fell—probably a result of the increase in annual tuition fees in England from 6,000 a year to 9,000. But arrivals from India and Pakistan declined most sharply. In contrast to the visa regime for private schools, which is extremely lax (the Home Office counts private schools as favoured sponsors) , student visas have been tightened. Foreign students used to be allowed to work for up to two years after graduating. They now have only four months to find a job paying upwards of 20,600 if they want to stay in Britain. This change was intended to deal with sham colleges that were in effect offering two-year work visas. But it seems to have put off serious students too. Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute says the government has sent unclear messages about the sort of immigration it wants to restrict. An emphasis on holding down net immigration influences young Indians and Pakistanis in particular. Australia and America, which have more relaxed entry criteria for students, are becoming more favoured destinations. Colin Riordan, Cardiff University's vice-chancellor, adds that Britain's student-visa regime has become more strict and difficult. As a result, Britain is losing out to other countries in the contest for talent—an oddity, given how often the prime minister bangs on about the " global race". Its unwelcoming standpoint will harm its long-term prospects. And the drift of foreign students from leading British private schools to American colleges may have another, somewhat happier, consequence: America might become rather better at cricket.

No one word demonstrated the shift in corporations" attention in the mid-1990s from processes to people more vividly than the single word "talent".【C1】______the word lies the idea that more and more corporate【C2】______is going to be created by knowledge and by so-called "knowledge workers".【C3】______labour is worth less; knowledge is worth more. This has significantly shifted the balance of power in the【C4】______process. Companies used to be relaxed about finding enough qualified people to【C5】______their operations. What they could not find they would train, was the【C6】______attitude. That might take some time, but in a world where people【C7】______jobs for life time was in the company"s favour. But talent is not patient, and it is not faithful. Many companies found themselves training employees【C8】______for them to go on and sell their acquired skills to their【C9】______. So now they look for talent that is ready-made. In their eagerness to【C10】______this talent, companies have gone to considerable lengths to appear especially attractive. They have,【C11】______, devoted a great deal of effort to the【C12】______of their websites, often the first port of call these days for bright young【C13】______recruits. They have in many cases【C14】______their HR departments, in part so that they can【C15】______their compensation packages more finely for the individuals that they really require. And they have altered their approach to issues such as governance and environmental responsibility【C16】______they know that many of the talented people they are seeking want to work for ethical and【C17】______employers. Talented people increasingly want to work in places where they can feel good about what they do for most of the day. What"s more, in today"s knowledge-based businesses, these young people are far more【C18】______their working environment, of "what"s going on around here", than were their grandparents. It is harder for today"s businesses to【C19】______from their employees what they are【C20】______to—even when, as in cases such as Enron and WorldCom, they put a lot of effort into it.

BSection III Writing/B

Of the 658 schools in Chicago, only 126 are charter schools—publicly funded but independently run and largely free of union rules. Fifteen more are due to open this year. More notable, though, is that four of the most recently-approved charters are in areas where the city recently decided to close 49 public schools—the largest round of such closures in America"s history. Most of the closed schools served poor black children, and were in parts of the city with a shrinking population. The city government argued that these schools were under-used, and that closing them would save $ 233m that could be reinvested. So it has been; in new science labs, computers, wireless, libraries, art rooms and air conditioning in the charters that took in children from the closed schools. Charters have worked well in Chicago. Most parents like them, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education are behind them. The Noble Network, which already runs 14 charter high schools, has just been given permission to open two new ones. Around 36% of the 9,000, mostly poor, children enrolled with Noble can expect to graduate from college, compared with 11 % for this income bracket city-wide. A 2013 study by Stanford University found that the typical Illinois charter pupil gained two weeks of additional learning in reading, and a month in maths, over their counterparts in traditional public schools. One city network of charters, Youth Connection, is credited with reducing Chicago"s dropout rate by 7% in a decade. Overall, however, the city"s public schools are in a sorry state: 51,000 out of 240,000 elementary-school pupils did not meet state reading standards in 2013. Some will always argue that charters cream off the brighter children and leave sink schools, deprived of resources, behind. The teachers" unions hate charter schools because they are non-unionised. So they remain a rarity nationwide, with only 5% of children enrolled in them. But a PDK/Gallup poll last year found that 70% of Americans support them. Small wonder; a study of charter high schools in Florida found that they boosted pupils" earning power in later life by more than 10%.

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

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.