______

This is what Africa has in abundance, space, almost 12 million square miles of desert, savanna, coastline, and people, 700 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 11% of the planets population, more than half of them children, and almost all of them poor. This too is what Africa has in abundance, poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is【C1】______, almost half the people here live on less than 65 cents a day, not enough money, not enough food. One in three Africans is undernourished, malnutrition is a【C2】______ here, one in five children die before reaching the age of five. So many lives are short,【C3】______ is just over 45 years, often less for women, who die bearing children, die of AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa has just【C4】______, but close to 70% of all people living with HIV, more than 29 million people. 58% of them, women. More than 16 million Africans【C5】______, that's the population of Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland combined. 12 million children have【C6】______, many of them like these in Uganda HIV positive. HIV, AIDS is only one disease plaguing Africa. Malaria kills almost 【C7】______. Measles kills more than a thousand children every day. That's one child nearly every minute. Measles can【C8】______, but in sub-Saharan Africa only about a half of all children are immunized during the first year of life.【C9】______ in Nigeria let polio, which was nearly eradicated in the world, takes route again, spread to 17 previously polio-free countries. There is no vaccine【C10】______; the best prevention is clean water, which more than 300 million Africans don't have. Water of any kind 【C11】______, or so distant, that the working years of many lives are spent hauling water. Work for most is hard.【C12】______, labour as farmers, grow what they can, where they can, and get it to market however they can. Across sub-Saharan Africa economic growth is low, slow, and【C13】______. Corruption is another kind of plague here. And so is war. One in every five Africans lives in a society【C14】______, armed conflict has ruptured nearly half of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the past 5 years. Most horribly in Liberia, Congo, Darfur, and Sudan. Uncounted millions have【C15】______. Without stability and good government progress is limited, so is the willingness of donors to give and investors to invest to bring【C16】______ into the modern world. To improve education, 41% of Africans cannot read or write, as many as half of all African children【C17】______. Even those who complete high school are ill-equipped to be part of a 21st-century work force, or the technological age. Less than one percent of the African population has a computer; only one in forty owns a telephone. Yet Africa【C18】______ beneath the surface, literally in minerals, gold, cobalt, copper, diamonds and in oil. Sub-Saharan African countries will earn more than 200 billion dollars in oil revenues【C19】______. And Africa has incalculable wealth in its people, who are among the most perseverant and resilient on Earth, who want and have【C20】______, and in a growing number of African countries free elections.

{{B}}Part A Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. After you have heard each paragraph, interpret it into Chinese. Start interpreting at the signal.., and stop it at the signal...You may take notes while you are listening. Remember you will hear the passages ONLY ONCE. Now let us begin Part A with the first passage.{{/B}}

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______

From its birth, three powerful images have coloured ideas of what the United States was and what it stood for. One was "a city on a hill", a model commonwealth for the rest of humankind. Another, in Walt Whitman's phrase, was a "teeming nation of nations": a near-empty continent of immigration and fresh starts. A third, given currency by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, was of a new and exceptional kind of society not bound by prevailing rules of history. Each picture stresses what makes America different from other countries. Thomas Bender, a professor of history and humanities at New York University, wants us to focus instead on what makes the United States the same. More exactly, he is urging us to re-think key episodes in America's past by relating them to what was happening elsewhere in the world. The United States, he suggests, is less of a nation apart than super-patriots or America-haters might want to believe. His aim is not to belittle the American achievement but to break the habit of treating it as a virtually isolated feat of self-creation. National histories, he argues, are always local responses to broader trends, and to that rule the United States is no exception. Five episodes form the core of this challenging essay. "The Ocean World" contrasts the conventional account of American beginnings, which stresses political ideals, religious freedom and economic opportunity, with a wider view that brings in sea-borne trade and slavery. Next, Mr. Bender treats the American Revolution as a by-product of the "great war" mat France and Britain fought off and on throughout the 18th century until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The American civil war (1861-1865) becomes part of the democratic era of nation building that began with the European revolutions of 1848. The United States did not join Europe's scramble for empire at the end of the 19th century as a colonising power. But it fought a terrible war to control the Philippines, set a pattern of intervention in its own hemisphere and in Asia, and established a doctrine of untrammeled sea power that survives to this day. For his fifth episode, Mr. Bender likens the progressive social reforms of the 1890s onwards to changes Europeans also made to temper the free market. The breadth of view is exhilarating, and the reading daunting in scope. Mr. Bender dots his essay with awkward reminders that the American past was not a smooth, inevitable rise to superpowerdom and moral beaconhood. Yet "A Nation Among Nations" suffers from an ambiguity of aim. At several points Mr. Bender talks of a global story in which the United States has a local part. What is that story? He does not say. This is not his fault. Only the rashest of historians would nowadays dream of telling us, Hegel-wise, where the spirit of world history had come from and where it was headed. Nor is gesturing towards "global trends" much help: ocean trade, nationalism and democracy, for example, are such broad categories they explain little of the local variation that puzzles us, especially when the locale is the United States, with its oddities—a high birth rate and strong religions, for example—that modern states are supposed not to have. For the rest, Mr. Bender is more modest, and more successful. American failures and successes are usually so large it is easy to forget that they are seldom unique or insulated from events elsewhere. The simple-sounding truth that the United States never was, and never could be, isolated from the world is worth repeating, and Mr. Bender repeats it well.

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BA: Spot DictationDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear a passage and read the same passage with blanks in it. Fill in each of the blanks with the word or words you have heard on the tape. Write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Remember you will hear the passage ONLY ONCE./B

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Nobody has a good word for apathy. Arnold Toynbee, a historian, thought it defined the penultimate stage of decadence. Civilisations proceed, he said, from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage. Apathy is also anti-democratic: democracy requires the informed consent of the governed, and will not last if voters can't be bothered. Europe's leaders also fret that apathy is anti-European. Popular indifference, they fear, leaves the European Union's institutions vulnerable to the gusts of popular indignation. Their worry is understandable. The polling evidence, for what it is worth, shows that people who say they know a lot about the EU tend to support it. Those who know nothing and care less tend to be Eurosceptics. So governments and public institutions naturally seek to combat Euro-apathy as much as they can: by public-relations campaigns, by exhortations that Europe must dream (Jacques Delors's admonition against indifference)—or by stunts such as last weekend's birthday bash in Berlin to mark the 50th anniversary of the EU's founding Treaty of Rome. If apathy were indeed a threat to European integration, there would seem to be much reason to worry. Apathy is lolling about everywhere. Voter turnout has fallen in every election to the European Parliament since the institution was created. In the most recent one, in 2004, it slumped below 50%—a lower rate than India's parliamentary polls. The gap between turnout in national elections and in European ones is widening, so the problem seems especially acute for the EU. Britain's Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has a website where people can file online petitions. It is an unscientific measure of popular concerns, but intriguing nonetheless. A recent petition asking Britain to hold a referendum on any EU constitution got a few thousand electronic signatures. One opposing road pricing got a few million. It is hard to measure degrees of apathy non-anecdotally because people tend to react badly to polling questions such as "Do you care two hoots about the EU?" But lack of knowledge might be taken as a proxy for lack of concern. Here too the evidence is discouraging. Some three-quarters of Europeans, asked to rate their own knowledge of the EU, say it is modest or non-existent, and this share is rising, not falling. Yet is it really true that apathy is an obstacle to European integration? A certain amount of apathy is understandable, perhaps inevitable. The EU's institutions are remote and deliberately complex (deliberately in the sense that they seek to balance pan-European decision-making with national checks and balances). Most voters have no idea who represents them in the European Parliament and would not recognise a European commissioner if one turned up on their doorstep. There are also reasons why apathy might have grown. Historically, the term entered common use after the First World War, when it was associated with shell-shock and depression. The EU is suffering from the bombshell when French and Dutch voters rejected the draft constitution in 2005. It can also be argued that economic sluggishness and high unemployment (at least until the current recovery) have led to a continent-wide depression. More important, apathy has its compensations, especially for Europhiles. Without it, European integration would not have gone as far as it has. There was almost no debate about the content of the constitution in the referendum campaigns in Spain or Luxembourg, which approved it by wide margins. The voters who looked most closely at the text were in France and the Netherlands. Similarly, Britain debated the merits of the single currency more extensively than any other country. But Britain stayed out, while others adopted it without discussion. European integration can proceed without popular enthusiasm because of its character: the EU has a large regulatory component and much integration proceeds through rules-based co-operation. Rules and technical standards are peculiarly unsuited to mobilising popular opinion, whether for or against. Most people are content to leave them to experts. Integration by regulation proceeds under the voters' indifferent gaze. In that sense, apathy is the Europhiles' best friend. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has learned this lesson. The "Berlin declaration" to mark the 50th birthday was written in secret and signed only by the EU's own representatives: Ms. Merkel as holder of the EU presidency and the heads of the European Commission and Parliament. It seems likely that any revised constitutional treaty- will also be cooked up in semi-secret, with the aim of ratification by national parliaments, not referendums. Let sleeping voters lie. But there is a further manifestation of apathy to consider: a behavioural condition associated with it, known as "learned helplessness". In 1965 a psychologist, Martin Seligman, subjected two groups of dogs to electric shocks. The first group could end the punishment by pressing a lever. These dogs recovered quickly; in a subsequent experiment, they learned to avoid further shocks by jumping a low wall. The second group had a lever that did nothing. They became apathetic and in the subsequent experiment simply cowered on the electrified floor, unable to escape the shocks. They had "learned helplessness". In Europe, the treaties of Maastricht and Nice were rejected by Danish and Irish voters, only to be largely implemented later. If the constitution is successfully revived—a big if—it would continue this pattern. Some EU leaders may hope that, if they do this often enough, apathetic voters will learn that they are helpless to stop further integration, even when they want to.

G8 summit is discussing【B1】______ aid,【B2】______ debt and【B3】______ fairer trading systems. Meanwhile,【B4】______ of Africa's former leaders are to discuss development issues although many of them have already been putting their skills to good use. African presidents used to be 【B5】______ for only leaving State House feet first. Some were【B6】______ while others clung on grimly to power. Ex-presidents used to be rare as hen's 【B7】______. But Nigeria was an exception because the leaders had all been to【B8】______ college together. Besides, President Nyerere of Tanzania went into voluntary【B9】______. But under it all lay a serious issue—how to find a 【B10】______ afterwards and how to live in【B11】______ with the successor. Some simply go back and pick up the【B12】______ of their old lives. For instance, Amos Sawyer returned to【B13】______ life, Albert Zafy of Madagascar is once again a【B14】______, and Sam Nujoma is studying【B15】______ at university in Namibia ex-presidents can also make very good【B16】______ while others have campaigned on 【B17】______. For example, Jerry Rawlings is a much younger【B18】______ who plays on these social【B19】______ for deliberate effect, as a UN representative on sexually【B20】______ diseases.

{{B}}Talks and ConversationsDirections: In this part of the test, you will hear several short talks and conversations. After each of these, you will hear a few questions. Listen carefully because you will hear the talk or conversation and questions ONLY ONCE, when you hear a question, read the four answer choices and choose the best answer to that question. Then write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

The Great Barrier Reef is more than worthy of its name. Coral of all shapes, sizes and colors cover more than 130,000 sq. mi. off the coast of Australia, making it the world's largest reef system and supporting an astounding variety of marine life. But today the Great Barrier Reef is dying. The temporary warming effect of a major El Nino event—combined with ongoing climate change—has heated the waters around the reef to nearly unprecedented levels. That warming has in turn driven a mass bleaching that has sucked the color— and the life—out of the coral. And the Great Barrier Reef isn't alone. "This is the longest bleaching event ever recorded," says David Kline, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist. "It's truly global, and it's looking very severe. " Bleaching occurs when ocean disruptions—warm water, pollution, algae overgrowth-drive away the symbiotic organisms that live on the coral and give it color. Within weeks, the reef could die, leaving behind a forest of lifeless, bone white coral. Scientists believe the bleaching now under way may kill more than 15% of the world's coral. It's not just a matter of aquatic aesthetics. Reefs act as natural barriers that protect coastal communities from storms and flooding. Marine life depends on coral reefs as habitats, while coastal towns depend on them as tourist draws. But a bigger worry may be what the bleaching suggests about future climate change. The rapid death of coral reefs demonstrates that climate change is irreversibly affecting the world right now, even as policymakers treat warming as something to be dealt with in the future. "Climate change may be slow-creeping sometimes, but other times it takes great leaps forward," says Steve Palumbi, an ocean scientist at Stanford University. "This is one of those leaps. " Local solutions—like reducing fishing and cleaning up pollution-can help slow reef loss, but scientists say a global problem requires a global solution. Nearly 200 countries agreed last year to work to keep global temperatures from rising more than 3. 6°F by 2100, but that goal will be tough to reach. And if governments fail, coral reefs will be only the first victims.

The ability to negotiate successfully, to reach agreements with other people or parties, is a key skill in any business. This negotiation could be with a buyer or seller and it almost always involves an element of compromise. But, when entering negotiations, you should always keep in mind that it is almost impossible to negotiate and make agreements successfully if you think you can't afford to "lose" or walk away from what is on offer. This will result in your avoiding asking for anything more than what you think the other side will give without a dispute. You become a passive observer, with the other side dictating the terms. In most negotiations one side has more to offer than the other and proper planning can help minimize the effects of this imbalance. Decide on set limits for what you can offer before negotiations begin. There are always advantages you can offer the other side, and you clearly have benefits they want or need or they would not be negotiating with you. In fact, the buyer or seller often wants you more than you think, so it is to your advantage to try and see things from their point of view. The better you know their real needs or wants—not just the ones they have told you—the more successful you will be, and the less likely you are to fall into the trap of giving them more than you really need to. But it is also true that a concession they really need or will value from you won't cost you as much as it benefits them, and yet may still leave you with everything you want. If you know the other side must reach agreement on a deal by a certain date for financial reasons, your willingness to comply with that date could be worth a great deal of money to them, without costing you much, if anything at all. It is up to you to find out what the other side really needs. Untrained negotiators often allow their feelings to become too involved and they may take each rejection of a proposal as personal rejection. So they become angry with the other person, or blame them for failing to reach an agreement. While it is important to be yourself and, on occasion, not be afraid to express how you honestly feel, it is important to judge carefully when to do this. It is particularly important to maintain a polite and friendly personal relationship when you are facing a difficult negotiation, but keeping negative personal feelings out of negotiation doesn't mean hiding your personality. Think carefully about your negotiation schedule. Take breaks, particularly during times when you cannot agree over a particular point. But if you have to continue the negotiation on another day, make it soon, and keep the momentum of the negotiations. As long as you are still talking and meeting, you build rapport with the other party; learn more about what they need and ensure that your company is the one most likely to make the deal. This may require both patience and perseverance—but patience pays! To 'win' a negotiation then, means that neither side should feel that they have "lost". You should know what you can offer the other side and know exactly what they want. If you have done everything you can and the deal remains outside the limits you have defined for yourself beforehand, then walk away from it. Either way, you're a winner!

Free trade is always a hard sell. In all of social science, the idea that comes closest to being scientific, in terms of being theoretically provable and true in real life, is that a society benefits from allowing its citizens to buy what they wish—even from foreigners. The principle of free trade may be true, but it's not obviously true. Skeptics think that free trade is more like an article of religious faith than a sound policy recommendation. It's by considering all these things—the risk of losing your job one may minus the risk of losing it another, the extra money you make if your industry is protected from foreign competition minus the extra money you pay for goods and services that are protected— that you reach the conclusion that on average, free trade benefits us all. Still, a half-century of general prosperity in the US has created a climate of toleration, if not enthusiasm, for the free trade. Alarm about imports tends to ebb and flow with the economy—less in good times, more in bad. Part of the explanation is the special nature of the current prosperity, which is widening the income gap rather than narrowing it. Part is the growth of global economic forces that have an impact on national sovereignty. But the WTO isn't responsible for either of these trends, both of which are probably inevitable and neither of which undermines the basic case for free trade or for an organization empowered to promote trade through binding arbitration of trade disputes.

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Near the border between Florida and Georgia, lives a rare tree called a stinking cedar. Once common, Torreya taxi folia seems to have got stuck in this tiny pocket as the continent warmed after the last ice age. It cannot migrate northward because the surrounding soils are too poor. Attacked by fungi, just a few hundred stinking cedars remain there. Rising temperatures now threaten to kill them off entirely. Spying a looming extinction, a group of people is engaged in a kind of ecological vigilantism. The self-styled "Torreya Guardians" collect thousands of seeds a year and plant them in likely places across the eastern United States. Stinking cedar turns out to thrive in North Carolina. The Torreya Guardians are now trying to plant it in colder states like Ohio and Michigan as well. By the time the trees are fully grown, they reason, temperatures might be ideal there. Some are dubious. The Torreya Guardians were at first seen as "eco-terrorists spreading an invasive species", remembers Connie Barlow, the group's chief propagandist. She rejects that charge, pointing out that she is only moving the tree within America. She also thinks that drastic action of this kind will soon be widespread: "We are the radical edge of what is going to become a mainstream action. " Conservation is nearly always backward-looking. It aims to keep plants and animals not just where they are but where they were before humans meddled. The only real debate is over how far to turn back the clock. Scotland and Wales have been heavily grazed for centuries, giving them a bald beauty. Should they now be reforested, or "rewilded"? Should Wolves be encouraged to reclaim their ancient territory in America' s Rocky Mountains? In a rapidly warming world, this attitude is becoming outdated. No part of the Earth can be returned to a natural state that prevailed before human interference, because humans are so rapidly changing the climate. Conservation is being overtaken by fast-moving reality. In future the question will no longer be how to preserve species in particular places but how to move them around to ensure their survival. Global warming has already set off mass migrations. Having crossed the Baltic Sea, purple emperor butterflies are fluttering northward through Scandinavia in search of cooler temperatures. Trees and animals are climbing mountains. The most spectacular migrations have taken place in the oceans, says Elvira Poloczanska of Australia's national science agency. Many sea creatures can move quickly, which is just as well: in the oceans it is generally necessary to travel farther than on land to find lower temperatures. Phytoplankton populations are moving by up to 400km a decade. Not all plants and animals can make it to new homes, though. Some will be hemmed in by farmland, cities or coasts. Animals that live in one mountain range might be unable to cross a hot plain to reach higher mountains. And many will find that the species they eat move at a different speed from their own: carnivorous mammals can migrate more quickly than rodents, which in turn migrate faster than trees. The creatures that already inhabit the poles and the highest mountains cannot move to cooler climes and might be done for. It is not clear that climate change has yet driven any species to extinction. Frogs native to Central and South America have been wiped out by a fungus to which they may or may not have become more vulnerable as a result of changing temperatures. Yet the speed at which species' habitats are shifting suggests they are already under great pressure—which will only increase in the next few decades. Chris Thomas, an evolutionary biologist at the University of York in England, has estimated that by 2050 between 18% and 35% of species could be on the path to extinction. A few years ago Mr. Thomas helped transport hundreds of butterflies to Durham, at least 50km north of their usual range, and released them into the cooler air. The butterflies fared well. These days he thinks bigger. Why not move creatures farther, he suggests, to places where they have never lived? He suggests several candidates for "assisted colonization" to Britain. The Caucasian wingnut tree, which clings on in a few moist parts of Turkey and Iran, could probably be planted widely. De Prunner's ringlet, an endangered butterfly native to southern Europe, feeds on grasses that are common in Britain. The Iberian lynx, an endangered cat, would find lots of rabbits to eat. Britain is a highly suitable ark for other countries' endangered species: thanks to the Gulf Stream, its climate is expected to remain broadly constant over the next few decades. The notion of deliberately moving species a long way from home is starting to look a little less heretical. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which shapes biodiversity policy, recently revised its guidelines, apparently giving a slight nod to such relocations. It insists upon great caution. But "if you have too much risk assessment, nothing will happen, and these species will go extinct," says Mr. Thomas.

Passage 1

The first permanent shelters were probably built twenty or forty thousand years ago by fish-eating people who lived in the places as long as the fish supply lasted. Fish-eaters could stay in one place for several years. However, once man learned to farm, he could live longer in one place. Thus, he was able to build a permanent home. Once again, he built his home with the materials he found at hand. In Egypt, for example, wood was scarce, so most houses were built of bricks made of dried mud, with a roof supported by tree trunks. When the Norsemen came from Scandinavia to northern Europe, they found many forests, so they built homes with a framework of heavy tree trunks and then filled the space between the trunks with clay. The Eskimos, on the other hand, lived in a land where there was little or no wood. They learned to adapt their homes perfectly to their surroundings. In the wintertime, when everything was covered with snow and ice, the Eskimos built their homes with blocks of ice. When the warm weather came and melted the ice, the Eskimos lived in a tent made of animal skins. The weather is man's worst natural enemy. He has to protect himself from extremes of heat and cold and from storms, wind and rain. Where there are torrential rains, houses are either built on piles to keep them off the ground, or they have steep thatched roofs to drain off the rain. People living in the Congo River region have found that steep, heavily-thatched roofs drain off the jungle rains more quickly. Protection from danger has also influenced the type of house man builds. When enemies threatened him, man made his house as inaccessible as possible. The tree-dwellers of the Philippines protect themselves by living high above the ground. When danger threatens, they remove the ladders leading to their homes. The cliff dwellers of the American Southwest built their homes high up on the sides of cliffs, where access was very difficult. Nomad tribes must move from place to place, taking care of flocks of sheep that are always in need of fresh grass. Their houses must be simple and easy to transport. The nomads of central Asia have developed a house made of a framework of poles covered with felt. The house is round because the framework is curved, and there is a hole at the top to let the smoke out.