Bluetooth is the newest kid on the technology block, and it holds a lot of promise for the assistive technology industry. Named for a 10th Century King of Denmark who unified the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, Bluetooth is a shot-range wireless communication specification that promises to improve and increase electronic access to a number of environments by overcoming some of the obstacles typical of current technology. Bluetooth technology will enable devices to communicate and transfer data wirelessly and without the line-of-site issues of infra red technology. So how does it work? Bluetooth devices search each other out within their given operational range. Unlike devices that are wired together, Bluetooth devices do not have to e of the capabilities or properties of the devices to which they will connect beforehand. Bluetooth devices have a built-in mechanism that lets each device identify itself as well as its capabilities as it connects into this new Bluetooth network. This dynamic network does have a controlling device that designates itself as the master for the connection. Its programming and the capabilities necessary for the given task determine whether or not a device can be a master. For example, a cell phone may act as a master device when connecting to a headset, an ATM, or an information kiosk. However, the same cell phone or headset may act as a slave device to the information kiosk, now acting as the master device, broadcasting emergency evacuation information. The cell phone and kiosk can function in either capacity depending on the required function and their programming.

{{B}}Task 2 Passage TranslationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 English passages. You will hear the passages ONLY ONCE. After you have heard each passage, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. You may take notes while you are listening.{{/B}}

Spring in Japan this year heralds a rash of more than 1,000 local elections across the country: on April 8th some 13 out of Japan's 47 prefectures hold gubernatorial elections, including Tokyo, Hokkaido in the north and Fukuoka in the south. Nearly every prefecture elects a new assembly on the same day. On April 22nd mayoral and municipal-assembly elections take place, along with two closely watched by-elections for the House of Councilors, the upper house of the Diet (national parliament). The results will give a clue about the prospects for the country's governing coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and New Komeito when they attempt to keep their majority in crucial upper-house elections in July. A strengthened majority then would be a welcome boost for Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister who has seen his popularity slump since he came to office six months ago. Defeat would put Mr. Abe's future in question. The governor's race in Tokyo has a motley collection of candidates that include an inventor who has photographed and analysed every meal he has eaten for the past 35 years. It is seen as the bellwether election. Officially, the LDP does not endorse the two-term incumbent, Shintaro Ishihara. Nor does the opposition Democratic Party of Japan openly back his main challenger, Shiro Asano, a former governor of Miyagi prefecture. Tokyo has many independent-minded voters, and the candidates think that party ties put them off. Yet both parties are putting their organisations behind their respective men. Defeat for Mr. Ishihara would be a blow for Mr. Abe. Mr. Ishihara, at 74, has offended plenty of constituencies in his long political career. The affronted include: foreigners of every stripe; women beyond child-bearing age, who he says are a drain on the country; schoolteachers who resent his insistence on flag-raising ceremonies each morning; and urban crows whose extermination he ordered after being pecked by one. Yet plenty of Tokyo folk take his straight-talking style as a mark of integrity, even if his clean reputation has recently been tainted by an expenses scandal and whiffs of nepotism. The governor's latest obsession is perhaps his most divisive. He passionately wants to bring the Olympic games back to Tokyo in 2016, arguing that they will do wonders for the city's infrastructure, prosperity and international reputation. Opponents say that Tokyo, whose 1964 Olympics represented a coming-out party for Japan after the devastation of war, no longer has anything to prove with such a costly proposition. Health care, pensions and schooling are the pressing issues. Most contenders for the governorship, including Mr. Asano, oppose the Olympics bid. Caught up in this debate is the future of the Tsukiji fish market, the world's biggest, with 2,000 tonnes of seafood passing through each day. It is hugely popular with overseas and Japanese visitors, and its gritty verve stands in contrast to many of the capital's sanitised routines. But Mr. Ishihara wants to move the market to Toyosu wharf, on reclaimed land three kilometres (two miles) further out in Tokyo bay. Tsukiji will then become the site for a giant Olympics media centre. Tsukiji was built as the replacement for the fish market that had stood at central Nihonbashi for over 300 years until a huge earthquake in 1923. Hideji Otsuki, the market's city-appointed boss, says that it is now outdated, having been built for rail freight. Today's giant refrigerated lorries have difficulty squeezing in. Meanwhile, the three-wheeled motorised carts used to move boxes of fish about the narrow alleys are forever bumping into each other. Many market traders oppose the move. Katsuji Takeda, the owner of a sushi business, says that at a stroke the "Tsukiji brand" will be destroyed. City managers proposing the move, he says, are bureaucrats who confuse a sterile distribution centre with the social and commercial vitality of a true market. Opposition has recently grown further over the toxic benzene that contaminates the soil at the new site. Tokyo Gas, the utility whose land it was, is removing 2m (6.6 feet) of topsoil, and 2.5m of fresh soil is going on top, but environmentalists say that an earthquake or a tidal surge would bring the benzene straight back up to the surface again. Even Mr. Ishihara has agreed to put off a decision about the move until experts have been heard. Still Mr. Ishihara—backed by construction companies drooling over the Tsukiji site, so close to the fashionable heart of Tokyo—seems to be ahead in the election race. Few doubt what will happen to the fish market if he wins. An irony for visiting journalists looking for good stories in 2016: the last visible link with an earlier Tokyo might have made a good story, and they will find themselves literally sitting on it.

It's widely known that more than half of all corporate mergers and acquisitions end in failure. Like many marriages, they are often fraught with irreconcilable cultural and financial differences. Yet M&A activity was up sharply in 2013 and reached pre-recession levels this year. So why do companies keep at it? Because it's an easy way to make a quick buck and please Wall Street. Increasingly, business is serving markets rather than markets serving business, as they were originally meant to do in our capitalist system. For a particularly stark example, consider American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's recent bid to buy British drugmaker AstraZeneca. The deal made little strategic sense and would probably have destroyed thousands of jobs as well as slowed research at both companies.(Public outcry to that effect eventually helped scuttle the plan.)Rut it would have allowed Pfizer to shift its domicile to Britain, where companies pay less tax. That, in turn, would have boosted share prices in the short term, enriching the executives paid in stock and the bankers, lawyers and other financial intermediaries who stood to gain about half a billion dollars or so in fees from the deal. Pfizer isn't alone. Plenty of firms engage in such tax wizardry. This kind of short-term thinking is starting to dominate executive suites. Besides tax avoidance. Wall Street's marching orders to corporate America include dividend payments and share buybacks, which sap long-term growth plans. It also demands ever more globalized supply chains, which make balance sheets look better by cutting costs but add complexity and risk. All of this hurts longer-term, more sustainable job and value creation. As a recent article on the topic by academic Gautam Mukunda in the Harvard Business Review noted, "The financial sector's influence on management has become so powerful that a recent survey of chief financial officers showed that 78% would give up economic value and 55% would cancel a project with a positive net present value—that is, willingly harm their companies—to meet Wall Street's targets and fulfill its desire for 'smooth' earnings. " Some of this can be blamed on the sheer size of the financial sector. Many thought that the economic crisis and Great Recession would weaken the power of markets. In fact, it only strengthened finance's grip on the economy. The largest banks are bigger than they were before the recession, while finance as a percentage of the economy is about the same size. Overall, the industry earns 30% of all corporate profit while creating just 6% of the country's jobs. And financial institutions are still doing plenty of tricky things with our money. Legendary investor Warren Buffett recently told me he's steering well clear of exposure to commercial securities like the complex derivatives being sliced and diced by major banks. He expects these "weapons of mass destruction" to cause problems for our economy again at some point. There's a less obvious but equally important way in which Wall Street distorts the economy: by defining "shareholder value" as short-term returns. If a CEO misses quarterly earnings by even a few cents per share, activist investors will push for that CEO to be fired. Yet the kinds of challenges companies face today—how to shift to entirely new digital business models, where to put operations when political risk is on the rise, how to anticipate the future costs of health, pensions and energy— are not quarterly problems. They are issues that will take years, if not decades, to resolve. Unfortunately, in a world in which the average holding period for a stock is about seven months, down from seven years four decades ago, CEOs grasp for the lowest-hanging fruit. They label tax-avoidance schemes as "strategic" and cut research and development in favor of sending those funds to investors in the form of share buybacks. All of this will put American firms at a distinct disadvantage against global competitors with long-term mind-sets. McKinsey Global Institute data shows that between now and 2025, 7 out of 10 of the largest global firms are likely to come from emerging markets, and most will be family owned businesses not beholden to the markets. Of course, there's plenty we could do policy-wise to force companies and markets to think longer term—from corporate tax reform to bans on high-speed trading to shifts in corporate compensation. But just as Wall Street has captured corporate America, so has it captured Washington. Few mainstream politicians on either side of the aisle have much interest in fixing things, since they get so much of their financial backing from the Street. Unfortunately for them, the fringes of their parties—and voters—do care.

I firstly【B1】______ to write the letter when the producer called because FOOC was about other people's【B2】______ and【B3】______. But the producer【B4】______ so I just started to write. In writing I spoke not just about becoming a【B5】______, but also about my own【B6】______, about loss and the failure of【B7】______, about the pain of different【B8】______I had met along the roads of war, and how alcohol had taken my father from me... There was just one 【B9】______ of the letter. Much has happened in the nearly【B10】______ years since the letter was broadcast. I eventually came to live in【B11】______. And I found myself gradually becoming lost in alcohol. For me it went from being the【B12】______,【B13】______ presence to a self-destructive【B14】______. Listening back now I see that at the time, he inhabited my life as a【B15】______, a paradoxical【B16】______, far from me, yet always there... I was lucky to【B17】______ in time. When I read the letter now, I see a young father about to start out on the greatest【B18】______ of his life. He doesn't know that yet, of course. But that child will be the【B19】______ of him, the 【B20】______ of him.

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Wild claims on labels of worthless medicines are much less frequent than they were years ago. But some over-the-counter drugs are still being promoted by tall stories, sometimes told in booklets or through advertising, rather than on the label. One tall story is that every American today suffers from a vitamin or mineral deficiency and needs vitamin supplements. This isn't so. Vitamins and minerals are plentiful in our food supply. Eating a variety of foods makes it almost certain that you will get a full quota of these nutrients. Infants, pregnant women, the sick or convalescent, and those who are dieting may need special supplements. But the family physician is the best authority on what vitamin supplements are needed. If your doctor does recommend supplements, take the suggested dose—no more. Some people take or give vitamins on the principle that if a little is good, twice as much is better. Excessive doses of certain vitamins are known to be toxic. If you are overweight, don't fall for a formula that promises you a slim, trim figure without dieting or calorie counting. To reduce, you must consume fewer calories than you use up in daily living. If calories are not used in producing heat or energy, they are stored as fat. If you need to lose only a few pounds, you can probably work out your own diet. But if you need to lose many pounds, have your doctor plan a diet for you. Crash diets can break down your health, not your weight. Beware of cosmetics that make exaggerated claims or promises. There are no quick or easy cures for acne. Acne is a complex disease caused by a combination of factors. No creams from a drugstore can cure it. Don't trust any cream or gadget that promises to give you curves where you want them, or take them from where they are not wanted. Any cream that could do this would not be safe to use and there are no gadgets that are effective for spot reducing. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act protects the consumer by prohibiting any statements on labels or packages that are false or misleading.

The college board's recently announced changes to its SAT college entrance exam bring to mind the familiar phrase too little, too late. As the president of a selective liberal-arts college, I can state without much hesitation that the SAT is part hoax and part fraud. It needs to be abandoned and replaced. The College Board has successfully marketed its exams to parents, students, colleges and universities as arbiters of educational standards. The nation, however, needs fewer such exam schemes. They damage the high school curriculum and terrify both students and parents. The blunt fact is that high school grades, as long as they are adjusted to account for the curriculums and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates, are a much better predictor of academic achievement in college than the SAT. The essential mechanism of the SAT—the multiple-choice test question—is a bizarre relic of long-outdated 20th century social-scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something, or knowing how to do something, in real life is never defined by being able to choose a "right" answer from a set of possible options(some of them intentionally misleading)put forward by faceless test designers. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist or physician pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity. These tests actually violate the basic justification for any test. First, despite the changes, the SAT remains divorced from what is taught in high school and what ought to be taught in high school. Second, the test taker never really finds out whether he or she got any answer right or wrong—nor does he or she ever find out why. No baseball coach would train a team by accumulating an aggregate comparative numerical score of errors and well-executed plays by each player, rating the players and then sending them the results weeks later. What purpose is served by putting young people through an ordeal from which they learn nothing? The new changes to the SAT are harmless. But these modest reforms will do little to stem the rising tide against such testing. There is more and more resistance to pressuring students and parents into paying money to take a senseless exam that claims to be objective when, in fact, the most striking persistent statistical result from the SAT is the correlation between high income and high test scores. The richer one is, the better one does on the SAT. Nothing that is now proposed by the College Board breaks the fundamental role the SAT plays in perpetuating economic and therefore educational inequality. So why do we remain addicted to the College Board's near monopoly on tests? Why do they have an undue influence on college placement? We pretend that the SAT is an objective instrument that measures one's ability to succeed in college. But the truth is less principled. The SAT is used by selective institutions for a much more practical and cynical reason— to help them sort applicants and justify dismissing many from consideration. Of course, SAT scores also have become an integral part of another moneymaking racket: college rankings. Institutions can boost their scores by admitting more higher-scoring students. The victims in this unholy alliance between the College Board(a rather lucrative nonprofit)and our elite institutions of higher education are the students—and our nation's educational standards. What is needed is not minor so-called improvements to the SAT but an entirely new generation of testing instruments that use modern technology not only to measure the performance of our students but also to teach them. The truth is that the only legitimate test is one in which a question is put forward and an answer is required with no options or hints. The time has come for colleges and universities to join together with the most innovative software designers to fundamentally reinvent the college entrance examination system. We need to come up with one that puts applicants through a rigorous but enlightening process that reveals what they can and cannot do and what they know and do not know. Only then can we reverse the unacceptable low standard of learning among high school graduates that we now tolerate and inspire prospective college students with the joy of serious learning.

In Australia, reports about Aboriginal people often make for depressing reading. Just a few days ago, the latest official report oh the community documented increases in child abuse, and【C1】______ than that of other Australians. But on a pair of remote islands off 【C2】______ the continent, Aboriginal life is very different. From the outside, the church【C3】______. It was built in the 1930s and its white timber walls dazzle in the tropical sunshine.【C4】______ and ancient mango trees provide shade at one end. At the top of【C5】______ is the front door. It's only when you enter that you realise this is no ordinary place of worship. 【C6】______ is decorated with an extraordinary array of Aboriginal art work. The walls are covered in【C7】______, and above them is a parade of animals—stingrays, crocodiles, turtles and pelicans. There's a painting of【C8】______ being held aloft by a bearded tribesman flanked by two【C9】______. The warrior wears a head dress and a red loincloth. In front of that is a tabernacle made of【C10】______. The most unusual of churches is the focal point of the tiny town of Nguiu, on Bathurst Island. Bathurst and neighbouring Melville are together known as the Tiwi islands. They lie【C11】______, the capital of the Northern Territory. "My people have lived on the islands forever," John Munkara, 【C12】______, tells me. "We were isolated for so long that we're different to the Aborigines 【C13】______." So different, in fact, that the Tiwis knew neither the didgeridoo nor the boomerang,【C14】______ believed they were the only people on earth. In the past, the only contact the Tiwis had with the tribes across the water was when they【C15】______ and carried out raids to steal women. These days relations are a bit more genial, but the two and a half thousand Tiwis are still very different from their mainland cousins.【C16】______ as soon as you set foot on the islands. In a lot of Aboriginal communities there's【C17】______. You can hardly blame them—crime, domestic violence, unemployment and poor health are huge problems for many indigenous people. On the Tiwis, though, people smile as soon as they see you.【C18】______, adults wave and there's a real warmth in the welcome. Part of the reason is that the supply of alcohol is strictly controlled. The only place you can get a drink is the town's social club. The other reason for the【C19】______ is their isolation. They have a long history of repelling outsiders—first Macassan traders who【C20】______, or beche-de-mer, and then Dutch explorers. The British established a settlement here in the 1820s but disease, the heat and the hostility of the locals drove them away after five years.

{{B}}Part B Listening ComprehensionDirections: In this part of the test there will be some short talks and conversations. After each one, you will be asked some questions. The talks, conversations and questions will be spoken ONLY ONCE. Now listen carefully and choose the right answer to each question you have heard and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

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BB: Listening Comprehension/B

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How is urbanization negatively affecting our society? The answer to this question is not a simple one. Urbanism【C1】______, political instability, crime and aggressive behavior. Rapid population growth in urban areas【C2】______. In the United States, the breaking of 【C3】______is an issue that has become increasingly noticeable in recent years, particularly in urbanized areas. The【C4】______ and children are rarely seen in the inner cities any more. There is 【C5】______, and declining social family significance as America has transferred industrial, educational and recreational activities to 【C6】______outside the home. It is depriving families of their most characteristic, 【C7】______. The variations of people give rise to【C8】______by race, religious practices, ethnic heritage, as well as economic and social status. Segregation often【C9】______between social groups. This can cause【C10】______to individuals or society. People will choose their【C11】______according to many different ideals and needs, for example, what fits their budget. The government 【C12】______for development attempting to meet rapidly increasing demands for education, housing, agriculture and industrial development, transportation and employment. The government budget is 【C13】______ mainly due to differentiation in areas. Areas with higher income will obviously have【C14】______to work with. Urban areas are usually lacking【C15】______. Therefore they are not able to repair all the problems in these areas, such as【C16】______. Due to the overpopulation, the rising divorce rate and the lack of employment opportunity, 【C17】______will continue to increase in urban areas. These children grow up in poverty and usually look at crime as 【C18】______. The problems in urban areas are far more serious than can be handled 【C19】______. We can only hope to contain them, and attempt to make sure that no more problems【C20】______.

The story of Nokia's transformation from an obscure Finnish conglomerate into the world's largest maker of mobile phones is an object lesson in the virtue of specialisation. A sprawling business that once made everything from tyres to toilet paper to televisions, Nokia switched its focus to mobile phones in the 1990s under its visionary chief executive, Jorma Ollila. Under his leadership, the company overtook Motorola, its American rival, to become the world's largest handset-maker—a position it has clung to ever since. As Mr. Ollila steps down on June 1st, however, he hands his successor, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the difficult task of leading Nokia into new markets as the distinction between mobile phones and other consumer-electronics devices becomes increasingly blurred. Mr. Kallasvuo, a member of the tight-knit group that has run Nokia since the early 1990s, will inherit a company in excellent shape. Nokia has a renewed spring in its step, having recovered from a stumble in early 2004, when a lackluster product line-up caused its market share to drop below 30% for the first time in years. A pioneer in design, Nokia lost its edge when it failed to anticipate the popularity of slim "clam-shell" phones. It fought back, first by cutting prices and then by revamping its designs. Its market share is now at around 35%. The mood at the company is buoyant: in addition to the satisfaction of having bounced back so convincingly, Nokia's strong financial performance meant big bonuses for many employees. "If you look at the portfolio, I think we have regained leadership," says Mr. Kallasvuo. "The foundation is there, so that we can concentrate on what is next." And what is that? As the leader in mobile phones, Nokia now has to take a broader view of the market, he believes. "Comparison with our own industry is not adequate any more," he says. "We need to look at this in a much wider way." The rise of the camera-phone means that Nokia now sells more cameras than anyone else does, for example, and advanced handsets often also include music-playing, video-recording and computing (including e-mail). Mr. Kallasvuo does not mention names, but his drift is clear: rather than just comparing itself with rival handset-makers such as Motorola or Samsung, Nokia now considers its competitors to be Apple, Sony, Canon and other consumer-electronics firms. "The convergence of internet and media content is happening in the way everyone predicted four or five years ago," he says. "We are more and more competing against other people, against new types of competitors. We are all converging." Nokia has responded by launching a range of advanced handsets, called the Nseries, which focus on specific features in addition to being phones. The N73 camera-phone, for example, is aimed at people who maintain photo blogs, and includes software for uploading images to Flickr, a popular image-sharing website. Similarly, the N91 phone doubles as an iPod-style music player with a built-in hard disk; the N92 is a mobile television; and the N93 is a video camera. Perhaps most surprising, however, is Nokia's 770 Internet Tablet, a hand-held computer that does not contain a mobile phone at all. Instead, it supports web-browsing, e-mail and voice-over-internet calls (using Google Talk software) via short-range Wi-Fi technology. "It is the best possible illustration of convergence," says Mr. Kallasvuo. It also highlights Nokia's willingness to step outside its usual market. That sounds a pretty ambitious expansion strategy. But Mr. Kallasvuo also wants more from traditional markets. Nokia may strive to emulate Apple with its most expensive phones, but the core of its business, with its efficient logistics and huge volumes, has more in common with Dell. (Of the 900 million mobile phones that will be sold this year, 320 million of them will be made by Nokia.) Around 70% of the industry's growth this year will come in the developing economies, and Nokia's cheapest handsets are doing well in China, India and Latin America. Some critics argue that Nokia ought to focus solely on high-margin products such as the Nseries, but Mr. Kallasvuo disagrees. "With our volumes, our economies of scale, we want to be in all of these markets," he says. Even Nokia's cheapest handsets are profitable, he points out. And if your first handset is a Nokia, you are more likely to stay with the brand when moving upmarket—"so being strong at the low end has strategic importance." One market in which Nokia could plainly do better is North America. It has been weak mere, because many networks use a different wireless standard (called CDMA) rather than the GSM technology used in Europe. Nokia has devoted a lot of effort to raising its profile in North America in the past two years and has recently formed a joint venture with Sanyo of Japan to produce fancy CDMA handsets. Tellingly, Mr. Kallsvuo plans to spend one week a month in America, which is important not just as a big market but also because it is where trendsetting products, such as Apple's iPod, often appear first. The breadth of Mr. Kallasvuo's ambition—more convergence, more China, more America, more everything—looks potentially overwhelming, particularly as Nokia moves into a new and fiercely competitive market—consumer electronics. Managing the complexity of converged devices is difficult, Mr. Kallasvuo concedes, but it also provides scope for differentiation, "and overall that's an opportunity." Another danger is that Nokia may alienate wireless operators, its main customers, by helping consumers get round their proprietary networks and instead supporting open, internet-based services such as Google Talk in its devices. But the rise of Internet standards means the industry's old rules no longer apply. "We will need to be agnostic enough to make pragmatic decisions," says Mr. Kallasvuo. "Natural evolution is happening in the marketplace, and we need to act accordingly."

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What to do now? School officials around the country are asking that question following a Supreme Court decision rejecting racial integration plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. The 5-4 ruling prohibited those district plans but didn't entirely shut the door on using race as a factor when making decisions about what schools should look like. The ruling brought complaints that it allegedly betrayed the Supreme Court's most acclaimed ruling—the 53-year-old Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregated schools. Justice Anthony Kennedy went along with the court's four most conservative members in rejecting the Louisville and Seattle plans. However, he stopped short of saying race can never be a component of school efforts to achieve diversity. "A district may consider it a compelling interest to achieve a diverse student population," Kennedy said. "Race may be one component of that diversity." But Kennedy's opinion had some proponents of the integration plans cheering. "My overall view is that we dodged a bullet," said William Taylor, chairman of the Washington-based Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, who added that he expected a much more sweeping rejection of race as a factor in school district decision making. Kennedy suggested race could be a factor in deciding where to build a new school and how to draw school attendance boundaries. He also said districts should be able to find creative ways to achieve their goals without relying on widespread racial classification. One idea gaining ground is for school officials to use family income as a way to integrate schools economically. Since minorities are often more likely to be poorer then their white peers, this can produce racial integration, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington. Importantly, he added, it wouldn't be scrutinized legally so long as it didn't rely on race. "That's bulletproof," Kahlenberg said. "Using economic status is perfectly legal." About 40 school districts use income levels to make school assignments and that number is expected to rise following the court's ruling, Kahlenberg said. Income isn't the only alternative to race that educators are considering using in hopes of creating more diverse schools. In San Francisco, for example, school officials have used students' addresses and achievement levels when making school assignments as a way to create diversity. In all, there are an estimated 1,000 school districts—or one in 15 nationwide—that have racial integration programs that are comprehensive and use race to make assignments like the ones ruled unconstitutional Thursday, said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University. The court ruling appears to allow schools to try to bring about racial balance by building new schools in racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods or in areas that border several neighborhoods in hopes of drawing in a diverse population. But Wells said neighborhoods change over time and white families tend to leave schools when they become the minority group. "The minute the white parents perceive a school is 'too black', they move or they put their kids in private schools," she said. Wells said integration led to higher test scores for black students in the 1970s and into the 1980s, narrowing the achievement gap between black and white students. She said that gap then widened when integration efforts slowed. Proponents of racially integrated schools say they are motivated for reasons beyond academics. "We know that there are benefits of diversity. Those benefits are social and academic," said Vanderbilt University education researcher Claire Smrekar. "We know kids who attend racially integrated schools are far more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods and be employed in integrated workplaces." But Ross Wiener, vice president of program and Policy at Education Trust, which advocates for poor and minority children, said even inside integrated schools segregation exists. Wiener referred to a tendency for minorities to be more likely to attend special education classes, vocation classes and classes for limited English speakers than their white peers. They also are less likely to be placed in gifted or Advanced Placement courses. "There's no question that racially diverse schools provide positive educational opportunities, but the fact is we've rarely taken advantage of those opportunities," he said. "In both integrated and racially isolated schools, Black and Hispanic students too often get assigned to weaker teachers and dumbed-down coursework."