In August, environmentalists in the Philippines vandalized a field of Golden Rice, an experimental grain whose genes had been modified. Its seeds will be handed out free to farmers. The aim is to improve the health of children in poor countries by reducing vitamin A deficiency, which contributes to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and cases of blindness each year. Environmentalists claim that these sorts of actions are justified because genetically modified crops pose health risks. Now the main ground for those claims has crumbled. Last year a paper which was published in a respected journal found that unusual rates of tumours and deaths in rats that had been fed upon a variety of genetic modification(GM)corn. Other studies found no such effects. But this one enabled campaigners to make a health-and-safety argument against GM crops— one persuasive enough to influence governments. After the study appeared, Russia suspended imports of the grain in question. Kenya banned all GM crops. And the French prime minister said that if the results were confirmed he would press for a Europe-wide ban on the GM maize. There is now no serious scientific evidence that GM crops do any harm to the health of human beings. There is plenty of evidence, though, that they benefit the health of the planet. One of the biggest challenges facing mankind is to feed the 9 billion-10 billion people who will be alive and richer in 2050. This will require doubling food production on roughly the same area of land, using less water and fewer chemicals. It will also mean making food crops more resistant to the droughts and floods that seem likely if climate change is as bad as scientists fear. If the Green revolution had never happened, and yields had stayed at 1960 levels, the world could not produce its current food output even if it ploughed up every last acre of cultivable land. In contrast, GM crops boost yields, protecting wild habitat from the plough. They are more resistant to the vagaries of climate change, and to diseases and pests, reducing the need for agrochemicals. Genetic research holds out the possibility of breakthroughs that could vastly increase the productivity of farming, such as grains that fix their own nitrogen. Vandalizing GM field trials is a bit like the campaign of some religious leaders to prevent smallpox inoculations: it causes misery, even death, in the name of obscurantism and unscientific belief.

The unhealthy ingredients and low nutrition content of the food can make you less active and lazy, new research shows. No surprises there.【C1】______, what is more shocking is that the energy-weakening effects of a junk food diet can persist,【C2】______after you switch to a healthy【C3】______. Two groups of female rats were fed different diets by researchers for a six-month period. One group ate unprocessed foods such as corn and fish meal【C4】______the other ate a diet【C5】______to imitate junk food; high in sugar, and lower in【C6】______. While understandably the group eating the "junk food" diet gained more weight than the other, they also【C7】______from fatigue and became less active and less【C8】______—ie: lazier. In fact, those rats fed junk food took twice as many, and longer breaks during tasks than the rats eating a healthy diet, even tasks which【C9】______rewards. What is even more【C10】______is that switching these rats back onto a nutritious diet at the end of six months for nine days didn"t seem to reverse their weight gain or their "learnt" laziness. This could suggest that while an【C11】______case of bad food—say on holiday, will not have too much of a【C12】______effect if you generally eat a good diet and lead a healthy lifestyle. But those who eat a poor diet【C13】______the long term may actually become lazy and fatigued, as well as gaining weight and suffering the health consequences【C14】______being overweight. The research shows that switching【C15】______a healthy diet in the short term is unlikely to be【C16】______to reverse any of the side effects of a diet high in junk food. "Overweight people are often regarded as lazy and lacking【C17】______," says Blaisdell, a professor of psychology at UCLA "We【C18】______our results as suggesting that the idea commonly【C19】______in the media that people become fat because they are lazy is wrong. Our data suggest that diet-induced obesity is a cause,【C20】______an effect, of laziness. Either the highly processed diet causes fatigue or the diet causes obesity, which causes fatigue."

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

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. 如今有很多大学鼓励学生参与志愿者工作。多数人表示赞同，认为它对大学生有很大的好处。你同意吗?

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

You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr. Wrangham's opinion is that its food is so often cooked. Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body's energy) could not keep running. Dr. Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity have developed alongside. In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity's "killer application" : the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent— changes that have made people such unusual animals. Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8 million years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modem man's—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man' s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain. Dr. Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modem "raw foodists", members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved. Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It "denatures" protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.

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.

Air pollution killed about seven million people last year, making it the world's single biggest environmental health risk, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says. The【C1】______a doubling of previous estimates, means one in eight of all global deaths were linked to polluted air. This means air pollution has【C2】______poor diet, high blood pressure and tobacco smoke as the leading【C3】______of preventable death worldwide. It also shows how【C4】______pollution inside and outside of people's homes could save millions of lives in future. Air pollution deaths are most【C5】______from heart disease, strokes or lung disease. It is also linked to deaths from lung cancer and【C6】______breathing infections. "The evidence【C7】______the need for concerted action to clean up the air we all breathe," said Maria Neira, an official from WHO. "The risks from air pollution are now far greater than previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and strokes." Poor and middle-income countries in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region had the largest number of air pollution-related deaths, with 3.3 million deaths linked to indoor air pollution and 2.6 million deaths to outdoor air pollution. Indoor pollution is mostly caused by cooking【C8】______coal, wood stoves. The WHO estimates that around 2.9 billion people worldwide live in homes using wood or coal as their【C9】______cooking fuel. Outdoors, air is mainly polluted by transport, power generation, industrial and agricultural emissions and residential【C10】______and cooking. Research suggests outdoor air pollution【C11】______levels have risen significantly in some parts of the world, particularly in【C12】______countries with large populations【C13】______rapid industrialization. Carlos Dora, a WHO public health expert, called on governments and health【C14】______to act on the evidence and【C15】______policies to reduce air pollution, which【C16】______would improve health and reduce humans'【C17】______on climate change. "Excessive air pollution is often a by-product of unsustainable policies in【C18】______such as transport, energy, waste management and industry, " he said. "In most cases, healthier【C19】______will also be more economical in the long term due to healthcare cost savings as well as climate【C20】______."

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

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. 很多人认为学语言是非常需要天赋的。当人们试图表达他们对语言天赋看法时，有的人会说，没有天赋就难以学好外语。你的看法如何?

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

Suppose you want to apply for admission to Washington University, but you can't get all your materials ready before the stated deadline. Write a letter with your application materials to Washington University to 1) explain, and 2) earn a chance for yourself. You should write about 100 words. Do not use your own name. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write your address.

"It' s such a simple thing," said John Spitzer, managing director of equipment standards for the United States Golf Association. "I'm amazed that so many people spend so much time and energy on trying to change it." The simple thing to which he refers is the humble golf tee, a peg made of wood that most of us grab by the handful or buy for a few pennies each, stick in our pockets, and don't give a second thought to. The road to the tee began with a Boston-area dentist named George F. Grant, who received a patent in 1899 for "an Improvement in Golf-Tees." Grant's tees consisted of a small piece of rubber tubing attached to a tapered wooden peg to be pushed into the ground. The rubber held the ball, and yielded when the club contacted it. He had them produced by a nearby manufacturing concern and gave them out to his friends but never tried to sell or market them. That fell to William Lowell—another tooth doctor, coincidentally—who created the Reddy Tee in 1921. It was a one-piece implement of solid wood, painted red at the top so it could be easily found and cleverly named. He paid Walter Hagen and trick-shot artist Joe Kirkwood to endorse and use the device, and it was a commercial success, with more than $100,000 in sales by the time it was patented in 1925. The introduction of the oversize metal driver in the 1980s led most golfers to adopt longer tees to go along with the larger and higher sweet spot of those clubs. The USGA has banned tees longer than 4 inches, a height that is well past the point of diminishing returns. Even back in the 1960s, Jack Nicklaus understood the value of teeing the ball high, which he explained by saying, "Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt." Golfers who have fairly steep swings(like me)break a lot of tees. We can only envy the legendary Canadian pro Moe Norman, who could play for weeks with a single tee. When his playing partners asked him how he managed to stripe his drives without dislodging the peg, he answered, "I'm trying to hit the ball, not the tee." So are we all, Moe. So are we all.

If you've ever pushed back your bedtime to watch just one more episode of Orange Is the New Black, or lay in bed wide-eyed after streaming three exhilarating hours of Game of Thrones, this new research probably won't surprise you. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine is the first to link binge-watching with poorer sleep quality, more fatigue, and increased insomnia. Not only does on-demand TV tempt us to keep watching episode after episode, say the study's authors , but the shows are also designed to draw us in, boost suspense, and emotionally invest in plotlines and characters. This can lead to excitement and increased arousal, the research shows, which can translate into "increased cognitive alertness" and consequently an inability to get the shuteye you need. Interestingly, no relationship was found between sleep problems and regular television watching, during which viewers typically switch from one program to another. Co-author Jan Van den Bulck, PhD, professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan, says his study does not prove that binge-watching directly affects sleep quality, but it provides good evidence that the two are linked. There are several ways in which streaming shows might keep us from scoring slumber, he adds. The study involved 423 young adults, ages 18 to 25, who completed online surveys about how often they watched television, both conventional TV and streaming services. They were also asked how frequently they " binge-watched" shows, defined as watching multiple consecutive episodes of the same show in one sitting, on any type of screen. They also answered questions about their sleep quality and how tired (or alert) they felt throughout the day. More than 80% of the participants identified themselves as binge watchers, with 20% of that group binge-watching at least a few times a week in the previous month. A little more than half of binge-watchers said they tended to view three to four episodes in one sitting, and the average binge session was just over 3 hours. Men binged less frequently than women, but their viewing sessions were nearly twice as long on average.

BSection III Writing/B

Immigration stirs up strong enough fears to justify questionable measures of protection against it— from arrests at the doors of French schools to the border wall that separates the USA from Mexico. Economic research suggests that the intensity of these reactions seems completely disproportionate to immigration's real economic impact on the local population. David Card has shown that even massive waves of immigration don't result in lower salaries or fewer jobs for local people in the US. In a recent survey article, he concluded that the " new immigration" assimilates just as well as previous waves had, and that the wages and employment prospects of natives are not any lower in cities that received more migrants. Furthermore, Patricia Cortes also showed that an increase in the number of immigrants causes a price-drop in the sectors where they're concentrated.

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

Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have【C1】______, the former dean of Stanford's business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns【C2】______. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessy, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle【C3】______mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on【C4】______. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are【C5】______of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an【C6】______in which students drop out in order to do something that will【C7】______the faculty. Stanford has been【C8】______in this direction for a while. As Ken Auletta reported in this magazine a year ago, the【C9】______between Stanford and Silicon Valley are【C10】______. Federal Telegraph was started by a Stanford grad a hundred and four years ago. William Hewlett and David Packard started inventing things as students, as did the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Stanford feeds Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley【C11】______Stanford. You can't have one【C12】______the other. But what's the point of having a great university among the palm trees【C13】______students feel like they have to treat their professors as【C14】______investors, found companies before they can legally drink, and drop out in an effort to get rich fast? Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever【C15】______you? And Stanford has, in its day, produced a great variety of graduates: hippies, novelists, politicians,【C16】______dropouts, and, of course, athletes. Now,【C17】______, it seems like all the countless identities are being included. Students can still study Chaucer, and there are still lovely palm trees. But the center of【C18】______at the university appears to have【C19】______. The school now【C20】______a giant tech incubator with a football team.

Instant foods, instant communication, faster transportation—all of these recent developments are designed to save time. Ironically, though, instead of making more leisure time available, these developments have contributed to a pace of human affairs that is more rushed than ever before. In this section, you are asked to write an essay on a major disadvantage of "instant" technology. You can provide specific reasons and examples to support your idea. You should write at least 150 words.

BSection II Reading Comprehension/B