阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage 3Small increases in temperature found to add power to storms in the Atlantic.Hurricanes that form in the Atlantic Ocean are expected to gain considerable strength as the global temperature continues to rise, a new study has found.Using modeling data focused on the conditions in which hurricanes form, a group of international researchers based at Beijing Normal University found that for every 1.8℉(1℃)rise of the Earth’s temperature, the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic that are as strong or stronger than Hurricane Katrina will increase twofold to sevenfold.Hurricane strength is directly related to the heat of the water where the storm forms. More water vapor in the air from evaporating ocean water adds fuel to hurricanes that build strength and head toward land.Hurricane Katrina is widely considered the measure for a destructive storm, holding the maximum Category 5 designation for a full 24 hours in late August 2005. It lost strength as it passed over the Florida peninsula, but gained destructive power fight before colliding with New Orleans, killing more than 200 people and causing $ 80 billion in damage.The study points to a gradual increase of Katrina-like events. The warming experienced over the 20th century doubled the number of such debilitating(将人类摧垮的) storms. But the ongoing warming of the planet into the 21st century could increase the frequency of the worst kinds of storms by 700 percent, threatening coastlines along the Atlantic Ocean with multiple Category 5 storms every year.“Our results support the idea that changes in regional sea surface temperatures is the primary cause of hurricane variability,” said Aslak Girnstead, a researcher with the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen. The large impact of small sea-surface temperature increases was more than Girnstead and his colleagues had anticipated. The entire study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Global temperatures have steadily increased, making the past decade the warmest on record. Earlier this year, climate researchers reported that the Earth’s temperatures have risen faster in the last century than at any point since the last ice age, 11,300 years ago. The primary cause, a consensus of scientists has said, is the rising emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.Past hurricanes have supported the study’s finding that global temperature rise is linked to more destructive storms. According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, while the frequency of storms doesn’t appear to have increased, the percentage of strong ones has risen sharply over the past few decades. The trend may be similar further back in time, but comprehensive hurricane data doesn’t exist.

阅读理解Passage 5 The economy of the United States after 1952 was the economy of a wellfed, almost fully employed people

阅读理解Passage 2 If you look under the Self-Help heading on Amazon, youll find roughly 5,000 books listed under the subhead Self-Esteem

阅读理解Passage 3 Every year thousands of people are arrested and taken to court for shoplifting

阅读理解Directions: There are three passages in (his section. Eachpassage is followed by some questions or unfinishedstatements. For each of them there are four choices markedA, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice andthen blacken the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet.Passage TwoPretty in pink: adult women do not remember being so obsessed with the color, yet it is pervasive in our young girls lives. It is not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is a tiny slice of the rainbow and. though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fused girls’ identity to appearance. Then it presents that connection, even among two-year olds, between girls as not only innocent but as evidence of innocence. Looking around, despaired at the singular lack of imagination about girls’ lives and interests.Girls’ attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American Studies, it’ s not. Children were not color-coded at all until the early 20th century: in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’ s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine color, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolized femininity. It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children’ s marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem innately attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years.I had not realized how profoundly marketing trends dictated our perception of what is natural to kids, including our core beliefs about their psychological development. Take the toddler. I assumed that phase was something experts developed after years of research into children s behavior: wrong. Turns out, according to Daniel Cook, a historian of childhood consumerism, it was popularized as a marketing gimmick by clothing manufacturers in the 1930s.Trade publications counseled department stores thin, in order to increase sales, they should create a “third stepping stone” between infant wear and older kids’ clothes. It was only after “toddler” became common shoppers’ term that it evolved into a broadly accepted developmental stage. Splitting kids, or adults, into ever- tinier categories has proved a sure-fire way to boost profits. And one of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences or invent them where they did not previously exist.

阅读理解Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage OneMy Views on GamblingMost of life is a gamble. Very many of the things we do involve taking some risk in order to achieve a satisfactory result. We undertake a new job with no idea of the more indirect consequences of our action. Marriage is certainly a gamble and so is the bringing into existence of children, who could prove sad liabilities. A journey, a business transaction, even a chance remark may result immediately or ultimately in tragedy. Perpetually we gamble—against life, destiny, chance, the unknown—call the invisible opponent what we will. Human survival and progress indicate that usually we win.So the gambling instinct must be an elemental one. Taking risks achieve something is a characteristic of all form of life, including humanity. As soon as man acquired property, the challenge he habitually issued to destiny found an additional expression in a human contest. Early may well have staked his flint axe, his bearskin, his wife, in the hope of adding to his possessions. The acquirement of desirable but non-essential commodities must have increased his scope enormously, while the risk of complete disaster lessened.So long as man was gambling against destiny, the odds were usually in his favor, especially when he used common sense. But as the methods of gambling multiplied, the chances of success decreased. A wager against one person offered on average even chances and no third party profited by the transaction. But as soon as commercialized city life developed, mass gambling becomes common. Thousands of people now compete for large prizes, but with only minute chances of success, while the organizers of gambling concerns enjoy big profits with, in some cases, no risk at all. Few clients of the betting shops, football pools, state lotteries, bingo sessions, even charity raffles, realize fully the flimsiness of their chances and the fact that without fantastic luck they are certain to lose rather than gain.Little irreparable harm results for the normal individual. That big business profits from the satisfaction of a human instinct is a common enough phenomenon. The average wage-earner, who leads a colorless existence, devotes a small percentage of his earnings to keeping alive with extraordinary constancy the dream of achieving some magic change in his life. Gambling is in most cases a non-toxic drug against boredom and apathy and many well preserve good temper, patience and optimism in dreary circumstances. A sudden windfall may unbalance a weaker, less intelligent person and even ruin his life. And the lure of something for nothing as an ideal evokes criticism from the more rigidly upright representative of the community. But few of us have the right to condemn as few of us can say we never gamble—even it is only investing a few pence a week in the firm’s football sweep or the church bazaar “lucky dip”.Trouble develops, however, when any human instinct or appetite becomes overdeveloped. Moderate drinking produces few harmful effects but drunkenness and alcoholism can have terrible consequences. With an unlucky combination of temperament and circumstances, gambling can only become an obsession, almost a form of insanity, resulting in the loss not only of a man’s property but of his self-respect and his conscience. Far worse are the sufferings of his dependents, deprived of material comfort and condemned to watching his deterioration and hopelessness. They share none of his feverish excitement or the exhilaration of his rare success. The fact that he does not wish to be cured makes psychological treatment of the gambling addict almost impossible. He will use any means, including stealing, to enable him to carry on. It might be possible to pay what salary he can earn to his wife for the family maintenance but this is clearly no solution. Nothing—education, home environment, other interest, wise discouragement—is likely to restrain the obsessed gambler and even when it is he alone who suffers the consequences , his disease is a cruel one, resulting in a wasted, unhappy life.Even in the case of the more physically harmful of human indulgences, repressive legislation often increase the damage by causing more vicious activities designed to perpetuate the indulgence in secret. On the whole, though negative, gambling is no vice within reasonable limits. It would still exist in an ideal society. The most we can hope for is control over exaggerated profits resulting from its business exploitation, far more attention and research devoted to the unhappy gambling addict and the type of education which will encourage an interest in so many other constructive activities that gambling itself will lose its fascination as an opiate to a dreary existence. It could be regarded as an occasional mildly exciting game, never to be taken very seriously.

阅读理解Passage 2 A few years back, the decision to move the Barnes, a respected American art institution, from its current location in the suburban town of Merion, Pa

阅读理解Questions 33-35 In most of the earliest books for children, illustrations were an afterthought

阅读理解Passage A Museum is a slippery word

阅读理解Questions 46-50 are based on the following passage: Australias foreign language skills are declining, voice of America has reported

阅读理解Passage A The scene: A business meeting between Chinese and Spanish company representatives

阅读理解Passage 3 For me, scientific knowledge is divided into mathematical sciences, natural sciences or sciences dealing with the natural world (physical and biological sciences), and sciences dealing with mankind (psychology, sociology, all the sciences of cultural achievements, every kind of historical knowledge)

阅读理解Passage A They poison the mind and corrupt the morals of the young, who waste their time sitting on sofas immersed in dangerous fantasy worlds

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage OneDepartment Store MagicFor most of the 20th century Smithson’s was one of Britain’s most successful department stores, but by the mid-1990s, it had become dull. Still profitable, thanks largely to a series of successful advertising campaigns, but decidedly boring. The famous were careful not to be seen there, and its sales staff didn’t seem to have changed since the store opened in 1908. Worst of all, its customers were buying fewer and fewer of its own-brand products, the major part of its business, and showing a preference for more fashionable brands.But now all this has changed, thanks to Rowena Baker, who became Smithson’s first woman Chief Executive three years ago. Since then, while most major retailers in Britain have been losing money, Smithson’s profits have been rising steadily. When Baker started, a lot of improvements had just been made to the building, without having any effect on sales, and she took the bold decision to invite one of Europe’s most exciting interior designers to develop the fashion area, the heart of the store. This very quickly led to rising sales, even before the goods on display were changed. And as sales grew, so did profits.Baker had ambitious plans for the store from the start. ‘We’re playing a big game, to prove we’re up there with the leaders in our sector, and we have to make sure people get that message. Smithson’s had fallen behind the competition. It provided a traditional service targeted at middle-aged, middle- income customers, who’d been shopping there for years, and the customer base was gradually contracting. Our idea is to sell such an exciting variety of goods that everyone will want to come in, whether they plan to spend a little or a lot. Baker’s vision for the store is clear, but achieving it is far from simple. At first, many employees resisted her improvements because they just wouldn’t be persuaded that there was anything wrong with the way they’d always done things, even if they accepted that the store had to overtake its competitors. It took many long meetings, involving the entire workforce, to win their support. It helped when they realized that Baker was a very different kind of manager from the ones they had known.Baker’s staff policies contained more surprises. The uniform that had hardly changed since day one has now disappeared. Moreover, teenagers now get young shop assistants, and staffs in the sports departments are themselves sports fans in trainers. As Baker explains, ‘How can you sell jeans if you’re wearing a black suit? Smithson’s has a new identity, and this needs to be made clear to the customers.’ She’s also given every sales assistant responsibility for ensuring customer satisfaction, even if it means occasionally breaking company rules in the hope that this will help company profits.Rowena Baker is proving successful, but the City’s big investors haven’t been persuaded. According to retail analyst, John Matthews, ‘Money had already been invested in refurbishment of the store and in fact that led to the boost in sales. She took the credit, but hadn’t done anything to achieve it. And in my view the company’s shareholders are not convinced. The fact is that unless she opens several more stores pretty soon, Smithson’s profits will start to fall because turnover at the existing store will inevitably start to decline.

阅读理解1. If you lock a bunch of high-IQ people in a room and tell them to get on with a simple task, what will they emerge with? Lower IQs, for one thing. A study done by Virginia Tech and a few other institutions, written up over the winter in a publication of the Royal Society, tried to replicate how people think under social pressure. Subjects with an average IQ of 126 were clustered into problem-solving groups and exposed to judgments about their work. A pecking order formed.The low performers sho

阅读理解Passage 1 The UK is made up of four countries-England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland-which have widely differing cultures and languages

阅读理解Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. You should decide on the best choice and write your answers on the Answer Sheet.Passage 1He emerged, all of a sudden, in 1957: the most explosive new poetic talent of the English post-war era. Poetry specialized, at that moment, in the wry chronicling of the everyday. The poetry of Yorkshire-born Ted Hughes, first published in a book called “The Hawk in the Rain” when he was 27, was unlike anything written by his immediate predecessors. Driven by an almost Jacobean rhetoric, it had a visionary fervour. Its most eye-catching characteristic was Hughes’s ability to get beneath the skins of animals: foxes, otters, pigs. These animals were the real thing all right, but they were also armorial devices—symbols of the countryside and lifeblood of the earth in which they were rooted. It gave his work a raw, primal stink.It was not only England that thought so either. Hughes’s book was also published in America, where it won the Galbraith prize, a major literary award. But then, in 1963, Sylvia Plath, a young American poet whom he had first met at Cambridge University in 1956, and who became his wife in the summer of that year, committed suicide. Hughes was vilified for long after that, especially by feminists in America. In 1998, the year he died, Hughes broke his own self-imposed public silence about their relationship in a book of loose-weave poems called “Birthday Letters”. In this new and exhilarating collection of real letters, Hughes returns to the issue of his first wife’s death, which he calls his “big and unmanageable event”. He felt his talent muffled by the perpetual eavesdropping upon his every move. Not until he decided to publish his own account of their relationship did the burden begin to lighten.The analysis is raw, pained and ruthlessly self-aware. For all the moral torment, the writing itself has the same rush and vigour that possessed Hughes’s early poetry. Some books of letters serve as a personalized historical chronicle. Poets’ letters are seldom like that, and Hughes’s are no exception. His are about a life of literary engagement: almost all of them include some musing on the state or the nature of writing, both Hughes’s own or other people’s. The trajectory of Hughes’s literary career had him moving from obscurity to fame, and then, in the eyes of many, to life-long notoriety. These letters are filled with his wrestling with the consequences of being the part-private, part-public creature that he became, desperate to devote himself to his writing, and yet subject to endless invasions of his privacy.Hughes is an absorbing and intricate commentator upon his own poetry, even when he is standing back from it and good-humouredly condemning himself for “its fantasticalia, its pretticisms and its infinite verballifications”. He also believed, from first to last, that poetry had a special place in the education of children. “What kids need”, he wrote in a 1988 letter to the secretary of state for education in the Conservative government, “is a headfull [sic] of songs that are not songs but blocks of refined and achieved and exemplary language.” When that happens, children have “the guardian angel installed behind the tongue”. Lucky readers, big or small.

阅读理解Passage 1 The United States is on the verge of losing its leading place in the worlds technology

阅读理解Questions 31-35 are based on the following passage: In spite of endless talk of difference, American society is an amazing machine for homogenizing people

阅读理解Our bodies and nonverbal signals are powerful symbols