BPart B/B

If you intend using humor in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify shared experiences and problems. Your humor must be relevant to the audience and should help to show them that you are one of them or that you understand their situation and are in sympathy with their point of view. Depending on whom you are addressing, the problems will be different. If you are talking to a group of managers, you may refer to the disorganized methods of their secretaries; alternatively if you are addressing secretaries, you may want to comment on their disorganized bosses. Here is an example, which I heard at a nurses' convention, of a story which works well because the audience all shared the same view of doctors. A man arrives in heaven and is being shown around by St. Peter. He sees wonderful accommodations, beautiful gardens, sunny weather, and so on. Everyone is very peaceful, polite and friendly until, waiting in a line for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed aside by a man in a white coat, who rushes to the head of the line, grabs his food and stomps (跺脚) over to a table by himself. "Who is that?" the new arrival asked St. Peter. "Oh, that's God," came the reply, " but sometimes he thinks he's a doctor. " If you are part of the group which you are addressing, you will be in a position to know the experiences and problems which are common to all of you and it'll be appropriate for you to make a passing remark about the inedible canteen food or the chairman's notorious bad taste in ties. With other audiences you mustn't attempt to cut in with humor as they will resent an outsider making disparaging remarks about their canteen or their chairman. You will be on safer ground if you stick to scapegoats (替罪羊) like the Post Office or the telephone system. If you feel awkward being humorous, you must practice so that it becomes more natural. Include a few casual and apparently off-the-cuff remarks which you can deliver in a relaxed and unforced manner. Often it's the delivery which causes the audience to smile, so speak slowly and remember that a raised eyebrow or an unbelieving look may help to show that you are making a light-hearted remark. Look for the humor. It often comes from the unexpected. A twist(旋转) on a familiar quote " If at first you don't succeed, give up" or a play on words or on a situation. Search for exaggeration and understatements. Look at your talk and pick out a few words or sentences which you can turn about and inject with humor.

When people talk about a "north-south divide" in Britain, they usually refer to house prices, employment and the ratio of private-sector to public-sector jobs. The south scores higher on all such measures. But new data from the British Trust for Ornithology(BTO), a research charity, implies the growth of another north-south divide—this time to the north"s benefit. Every 20 years the BTO produces a detailed picture of bird life in Britain and Ireland. The 2007 to 2011 edition is cheery: more species are recorded than in previous pictures, and many birds are increasing in number. Compared with two decades ago, 45% of regular native species are ranging more widely while 32% are living in smaller areas; the rest have stayed put. But the most striking news comes from the north. The overall populations of woodland, farmland and migrant perching birds are up in northern England and Scotland but down in the south. The same is true of individual species such as the garden warbler, bullfinch and swallow. The number of cuckoos, a closely-watched species, declined by 63% in England between 1995 and 2010 but by only 5% in Scotland. Raptors are faring especially well in the south, but their numbers are rising in most parts of Britain. Partly this reflects climate change, suggests Simon Gillings of the BTO. Some birds are drawn to warmer winters in Scotland and northern England; visiting migrants may stick around for longer. Hard though it may be to believe during a week of rain, the south is becoming drier, pushing snipe northward. More efficient farming has squeezed some farmland species. Some birds find it harder to make homes in the south, too. Pressure on housing means deserted buildings and barns, handy for nesting, have been converted into human dwellings. Between 2006 and 2012 the number of vacant dwellings fell by 17% in London and by 12% in Kent. Over the same period the number of empty houses increased by 16% in Derbyshire and by 10% in Lancashire. Northern mining villages once full of workers are now sparsely populated, points out Ian Bart-lett, a birdwatcher in Hartlepool, in north-east England. They have become hot spots for birds and the people who watch them. Cultural difference also plays a part, thinks Mark Cocker, an expert on birds. The "obsession with tidiness" is stronger in the south, he says. Fewer people cultivate gardens; they prefer to cover them in decking and remove weeds from between concrete slabs. Village greens are mowed short. In contrast, Scotland and northern England have more trees, grassland and wind-swept moors. Less popular with humans, rugged parts of the countryside are filling up with a winged population instead.

Inthissection,youareaskedtowriteanessaybasedonthefollowingchart.Inyourwriting,youshould1)interpretthechartand2)giveyourcomments.Youshouldwriteatleast150words.WriteyouressayonANSWERSHEET2.

It is a well-known fact that there are constant conflicts among different groups of people, and that people tend to blame their misfortunes on some outside other groups for their misfortunes. What are the causes of group prejudice? There seems to be little doubt that one of the principal causes of prejudice is fear; in particular the fear that the interests of our own group are going to be endangered by the actions of another. This is less likely to be the case in a stable, relatively unchanging society in which the members of different social and occupational groups know what to expect of each other, and know what to expect for themselves. In times of rapid social and economic change, however, new occupations and new social roles appear, and people start looking jealously at each other to see whether their own group is being left behind.

It used to be so straightforward (直接的). A team of researchers working together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the author's names and affiliations(附属机构) from the paper and send it to their peers for review, depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal publishers, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have to subscribe to the journal. No longer. The Internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are questioning why commercial publishers are making money from government-funded research by restricting access to it— is making access to scientific results a reality. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just issued a report describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. But it goes further than that. It signals a change in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavor. The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publisher says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specializing in these subjects. They publish more than 1.2 million articles each year in some 16,000 journals. This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of scholarly journals are now online. Entirely new business models are emerging; three main ones were identified by the report's authors. There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing agreements. There is open-access publishing, typically supported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be published. Finally, there are open-access archives (档案) , where organizations such as universities or international laboratories support institutional repositories (仓库). Other models exist that are hybrids of these three, such as delayed open-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months, before making it freely available to everyone who wishes to see it. All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process, at least for the publication of papers.

"Project gold" and "Project Nexus" sound like plans for bank robberies of military attacks. In reality, they are the names for KPMG's ongoing attempt to squeeze its 6,700 London employees into ever smaller spaces. Since 2006 the professional-services firm has reduced the number of offices it uses in London from seven to two; By the spring of 2015 everybody will be crammed into one building in CanaryWharf. Firms have long known that only about half of all desks are in use at any moment, as employees work odd hours or disappear to meetings, but it was difficult to fill the spares. Better IT systems now mean that people need not be tied to a particular desk. They need not even be in the office at all: as cloud computing and virtual offices take off, more people are working from home or from other places, further reducing the need for desks. Aside from cheapness, there is a motive behind this squashing. Inspired by Silicon Valley, firms are trying to make their offices into "collaborative spaces", where people bump into each other and chat usefully. KPMG's redesigned CanaryWharf offices will include lots of "breakout spaces" where employees can relax, and quiet rooms Where people can get away from hubbub, says Alastair Young, who is planning the move. He thinks this will both improve productivity and save money. In this happy new world, offices are not just places to work but also a way of expressing corporate identity and a means of attracting and retaining staff. At the offices of Bain the crowds have also put pressure on the air-conditioning system.

Jobs' genius for creating products and his marketing talent have long been hailed. All of that comes through in Becoming Steve Jobs, Schlender's and Tetzeli's new book. They contend that Jobs was a far more complex and interesting man than the half-genius / half-jerk stereotype, and a good part of their book is an attempt to craft a more rounded portrait. What makes their book important is that they also contend—persuasively, I believe—that, the stereotype notwithstanding, he was not the same man in his prime that he had been at the beginning of his career. The inexperienced, impulsive, arrogant youth who co-founded Apple was very different from the mature and thoughtful man who returned to his struggling creation and turned it into a company that made breathtaking products while becoming the dominant technology company of our time. Had he not changed, they write, he would not have succeeded.

When next year's crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2009, they'11 be joined by a new face: Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old provost(教务长) of Yale, who'll become Oxford's vice-chancellor—a position equivalent to university president in America.Hamilton isn't the only educator crossing the Atlantic. Schools in France, Egypt, Singapore, etc. have also recently made top-level hires from abroad. Higher education has become a big and competitive business nowadays, and like so many businesses, it's gone global. Yet the talent flow isn't universal. High-level personnel tend to head in only one direction: outward from America. The chief reason is that American schools don't tend to seriously consider looking abroad. For example, when the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, a major source of the university's budget. "We didn't do any global consideration," says Patricia Hayes, the board's chair. The board ultimately picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and political activist who is likely to do well in the main task of modern university presidents; fund-raising. Fund-raising is a distinctively American thing, since U.S. schools rely heavily on donations. The fund-raising ability is largely a product of experience and necessity. Many European universities, meanwhile, are still mostly dependent on government funding. But government support has failed to keep pace with rising student number. The decline in government support has made funding-raising an increasing necessary ability among administrators and has hiring committees hungry for Americans. In the past few years, prominent schools around the world have joined the trend. In 2003, when Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard, another former Yale provost, as its vice-chancellor, the university publicly stressed that in her previous job she had overseen " a major strengthening of Yale's financial position." Of course, fund-raising isn't the only skill outsiders offer. The globalization of education means more universities will be seeking heads with international experience of some kind to promote international programs and attract a global student body. Foreigners can offer a fresh perspective on established practices.

You are going to read a list of headings and a text. Choose the most suitable heading from the list[A]to[G]for each numbered paragraph (41-45) . There are two extra subheadings which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)[A]Control those who talk too much[B]Control time[C]Plan the meeting[D]Move the discussion along[E]Summarize at appropriate places[F]Follow the plan[G]Encourage participation from those who talk too little A key to conducting a successful meeting is to plan it thoroughly. That is, you develop an agenda by selecting the items that need to be covered to achieve the goals of the meeting. Then arrange these items in the most logical order. You can tailor an agenda to whatever will best help you accomplish your goals. 【R1】______ You should follow the plan for the meeting item by item. In most meetings the discussion tends to stray and new items tend to come up. As a leader, you should keep the discussion on track. If new items come up during the meeting, you can take them up at the end or perhaps postpone them for a future meeting. 【R2】______ As a leader, you should control the agenda. After one item has been covered, bring up the next item. When the discussion moves off subject, move it back on subject. In general, do what is needed to proceed through the items efficiently, but do not cut off discussion before all the important points have been made. You will have to use your good judgment. Your goal is to permit complete discussion on the one hand and to avoid repetition, excessive details, and off-topic comments on the other. 【R3】______ Keeping certain people from talking too much is likely to be one of your harder tasks. A few people usually tend to dominate the discussion. Your task as a leader is to control them. Of course, you want the meeting to be democratic, so you will need to let these people talk as long as they contribute to the goals of the meeting. However, when they begin to stray, duplicate, or bring in irrelevant matter, you should step in. You can do this tactfully by asking for other viewpoints or by summarizing the discussion and moving on to the next topic. 【R4】______ Just as some people talk too much, some talk too little. In business groups, those who say little are often in positions lower than those of other group members. Your job as a leader is to encourage these people to participate by asking them for their viewpoints and by showing respect for the comments they make. 【R5】______ When your meeting time is limited, you need to determine in advance how much time will be needed to cover each item. Then, at appropriate times, you should end discussion of the items. You may find it helpful to announce the time goals at the beginning of the meeting and to remind the group members of the time status during the meeting.

"If Congress won"t act soon to protect future generations, I will," Barack Obama said last month in his state-of-the-union speech. "I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy. " This week Mr Obama named the officials charged with fulfilling that directive; Gina Mc Carthy, his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ernest Moniz, the prospective new secretary of energy. Their selection suggests that Mr Obama is indeed serious about tackling climate change, but not doctrinaire in his approach. Ms Mc Carthy already works at the EPA, where she is in charge of air quality. That has given her a leading role drafting the administration"s most ambitious and controversial environmental rules, including limits on emissions of greenhouse gases for new power plants and strict fuel-efficiency requirements for cars. She is the natural candidate to oversee the most obvious and consequential step Mr Obama could take to stem global warming: a regulation curbing emissions from existing power plants. Republicans do not fancy that idea at all, and have introduced bills in Congress to strip the EPA of its regulatory authority over greenhouse gases. They often accused Lisa Jackson, the agency"s previous boss, of disregarding the cumulative impact of its many clean-air rules, and suffocating industry as a result. Yet Ms Mc Carthy makes an unlikely target. She has worked for Republican governors in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Industry groups mustered kind words about her nomination. As Mr Obama put it," She"s earned a reputation as a straight-shooter. "

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

The country's inadequate mental health system gets the most attention after instances of mass violence that the nation has seen repeatedly over the past few months. Not all who【C1】______these sorts of cruelties are mentally ill, but 【C2】______ have been. After each, the national discussion quickly, but temporarily, turns toward the mental health services that may have 【C3】______to prevent another attack. Mental illness usually is not as dangerous or dramatic. 【C4】______ 23 million Americans live with mental disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Very few of these men and women are 【C5】______ mass-murderers; they need help for their own well-being and for that of their【C6】______. The Affordable Care Act has significantly increased insurance coverage 【C7】______ mental health care. But that may not be enough to expand 【C8】______ to insufficient mental-health-care resources. Rep. Tim Murphy has a bill that would do so. The Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act is more【C9】______than other recent efforts to reform the system and perhaps has the brightest prospects in a divided Congress. The【C10】______would reorganize the billions the federal government pours into mental health services. It would【C11】______the way Medicaid pays for certain mental health treatments. It would fund mental health clinics that【C12】______certain medical standards. And it would【C13】______states to adopt policies that allow judges to order some severely mentally ill people to undergo treatment. Not everyone is satisfied. Some patients' advocates have【C14】______Mr. Murphy's approach as coercive and【C15】______to those who need help. The government should not be expanding the system' s capability to hospitalize or impose treatment on those【C16】______severe episodes, they say. It should instead be investing in community care that【C17】______the need for more serious treatment.【C18】______, for a small class who will not accept treatment between hospital visits or repeat arrests, they say, states have good reason to【C19】______them to accept care, under judicial supervision. Mr. Murphy's reform package may not prevent the next Sandy Hook.【C20】______the changes would help relieve a lot of suffering that does not make the front page.

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

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

Directions: Many people think name is very important for a person, but others don't agree. In this section, you are asked to write an essay on the importance of a name. You can provide specific reasons and examples to support your idea. You should write at least 150 words.

About 3 billion people live within 100 miles (160km) of the sea, a number that could double in the next decade as humans flock to coastal cities. The oceans produce $3 trillion of goods and services each year and untold【C1】______for the Earth"s ecology. Life could not exist【C2】______these vast water reserves—and, if anything, they are becoming even more important to humans than before. Mining is about to begin under the seabed in the high seas. New summer shipping lanes are opening【C3】______the Arctic Ocean. The genetic resources of marine life promise a big【C4】______: the number of patents has been rising at 12% a year. But these developments are【C5】______compared with vaster forces reshaping the Earth, both on land and at sea It has long been clear that people are damaging the oceans—【C6】______the melting of the Arctic ice in summer and the death of marine lives. Now, the【C7】______of that damage are starting to be felt onshore. Thailand provides a【C8】______example. In the 1990s it cleared coastal plants to set up fish farms. Ocean storm surges in 2011, no longer【C9】______by the plants, rushed in to【C10】______the country"s industrial heartland, causing billions of dollars of damage. More【C11】______is the global mismanagement of fish stocks. About 3 billion people get a fifth of their protein from fish, making it a more important protein source than beef.【C12】______a vicious cycle has developed as fish stocks decline and fishermen【C13】______to grab what they can of the remainder.【C14】______the Food and Agriculture Organization, a third of fish stocks in the oceans are over-exploited. People could be eating much better, were fishing stocks【C15】______managed. The forests are often called the lungs of the Earth, but the description better fits the oceans. They produce half the world"s【C16】______of oxygen. At the moment, the oceans are moderating the【C17】______of global warming— though that may not【C18】______This cannot be good news,【C19】______scientists are still debating the likely consequences.【C20】______, the decades of damage imposed on the oceans are now damaging the environment on land.

Don't talk: your cell phone may be eavesdropping. Thanks to recent developments in "spy phone" software, a do-it-yourself spook can now wirelessly transfer a wiretapping program to any mobile phone. The programs are inexpensive, and the transfer requires no special skill. The would-be spy needs to get his hands on your phone to press keys authorizing the download, but it takes just a few minutes—about the time needed to download a ringtone. This new generation of user-friendly spy-phone software has become widely available in the last year—and it confers stunning powers. The latest programs can silently turn on handset microphones even when no call is being made, allowing a spy to listen to voices in a room halfway around the world. Targets are none the wiser: neither call logs nor phone bills show records of the secretly transmitted data. More than 200 companies sell spy-phone software online, at prices as low as $ 50. Vendors are loath to release sales figures. But some experts claim that a surprising number of people carry a mobile that has been compromised, usually by a spouse, lover, parent or co-worker. Many employees, experts say, hope to discover a supervisor's dishonest dealings and tip off the top boss anonymously. Max Maiellaro, head of Agata Christie Investigation, a private-investigation firm in Milan, estimates that 3 percent of mobiles in France and Germany are tapped, and about 5 percent or so in Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain. James Atkinson, a spy-phone expert at Granite Island Group, a security consultancy in Gloucester, Massachusetts, puts the number of tapped phones in the U.S. at 3 percent. Even if these numbers are inflated, clearly many otherwise law-abiding citizens are willing to break wiretapping laws. Spyware thrives on iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones because they have ample processing power. In the United States, the spread of GSM networks, which are more vulnerable than older technologies, has also enlarged the pool of potential victims. Spyware being developed for law-enforcement agencies will accompany a text message and automatically install itself in the victim' s phone when the message is opened, according to an Italian developer who declined to be identified. One worry is that the software will find its way into the hands of criminals. The current embarrassment is partly the result of decisions by Apple, Microsoft and Research In Motion (producer of the BlackBerry) to open their phones to outside application-software developers, which created the opening for spyware. Antivirus and security programs developed for computers require too much processing power, even for smart phones. Although security programs are available for phones, by and large users haven't given the threat much thought. If the spying keeps spreading, that may change soon.

Helping teachers to lift student achievement more effectively has become a major theme in US education. Most efforts that are now in their early stages or being planned focus either on building the skills of teachers already in the classroom or on retaining the best and dismissing the least effective performers. The question of who should actually teach and how the nation' s schools might attract more young people from the top tier of college graduates, as part of a systematic effort to improve teaching in the United States, has received comparatively little attention. McKinsey's experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the US debate. In a new report, Closing the Talent Gap : Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching , we review the experiences of the world's top-performing systems, in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. These countries recruit 100 percent of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort. Along with strong training and good working conditions, this extraordinary selectivity is part of an integrated system that promotes the prestige of teaching—and has achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that systematically recruit top students to teaching if the United States decided that it was worthwhile to do so. McKinsey's survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students and current teachers, highlighted in the report, shows that a major effort would be needed to attract and retain the best students to teaching. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that a persistent achievement gap between US students and those in top-performing nations imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. Research on whether the academic background of teachers is a useful predictor of classroom effectiveness has had mixed results, and no single reforjn can be depicted as a silver bullet. But the success of the best-performing national systems suggests that an effort to attract the country's top students to teaching deserves serious examination as part of a comprehensive human-capital strategy for the US education system.

The film-awards season, which reaches its tearful climax with the Oscars next week, has long been only loosely related to the film business. Hollywood is dedicated to the art of fun neling teenagers past popcorn stands, not art itself. But this year's awards are less relevant than ever. The true worth of a film is no longer decided by the crowd that assembles in the Kodak Theatre—or, indeed, by any American. It is decided by youngsters in countries such as Russia, China and Brazil. Hollywood has always been an international business, but it is becoming dramatically more so. In the past decade total box-office spending has risen by about one-third in North America while more than doubling elsewhere. Thanks to Harry Potter,Sherlock Holmes and "Inception", Warner Bros made $ 2.93 billion outside North America last year, smashing the studio's previous record of $ 2.24 billion. Falling DVD sales in America, by far the world's biggest home-entertainment market, mean Hollywood is even more dependent on foreign punters . The rising foreign tide has lifted films that were virtually written off in America, such as "Prince of Persia" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: the Voyage of the Dawn Treader". Despite starring the popular Jack Black, "Gulliver's Travels" had a disappointing run in North America, taking $ 42m at the box office so far. But strong turnout in Russia and South Korea helped it reach almost $ 150m in sales elsewhere. As a result, it should turn a profit, says John Davis, the film's producer. The growth of the international box office is partly a result of the dollar's weakness. It was also helped by "Avatar", and eco-fantasy that made a startling $2 billion outside North America. But three things are particularly important: a cinema boom in the emerging world, a concerted effort by the major studios to make films that might play well outside America and a global marketing push to make sure they do. Russia, with its shrinking teenage population, is an unlikely spot for a box-office boom. Yet cinema-building is proceeding apace, and supply has created demand. Last year 160m cinema tickets were sold in Russia—the first time in recent years that sales have exceeded the country's population. Ticket prices have risen, in part because the new cinemas are superior, with digital projectors that can show 3D films. The big Hollywood studios are muscling domestic film-makers aside. In 2007 American films made almost twice as much at the Russian box office as domestic films—8.3 billion roubles ( $ 325m) compared with 4.5 billion. Last year the imported stuff made some 16.4 billion roubles: more than five times as much as the home-grown product, estimates Movie Research, a Moscow outfit. Earlier this month Vladimir Putin, Russia's Prime Minister, said the government would spend less money supporting Russian film-makers and more on expanding the number of screens.