Everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. —the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. If everybody can serve, what makes people take the first step? "It's fun, and it's better than watching TV," says Michael Cruz, 17, a l0th-grader at Grace Dodge High School in the South Bronx. At an age when most kids are more interested in sleeping late and hanging out, Michael and more than 1,000 other middle and high schoolers in 16 cities across the country are getting up early on Saturday mornings for a full day of community service in the City Year Young Heroes program. Each Saturday from January to June, teams of mostly middle school students spend the morning learning about an important social issue and exploring opportunities for citizen activism. In the afternoon they perform a service project and reflect on solutions for positive change. Issues they tackle include hunger and homelessness, ageism, HIV/AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse, racism and personal conflict. City Year, founded in 1988, is best known for its program for 17-to-24-year-olds who volunteer for a full year of service in schools in underserved communities. The Young Heroes component was started in 1995 when Liana Gonzalez, a precocious 13-year-old, asked why she couldn't volunteer in her Boston neighborhood like the older City Year corps members. The youth program has recently gone national thanks to a major investment by Bank of America. Young Heroes is based on the idea that no one is too young to make a positive" difference in the world around him or her, and that service, if begun early, can become a life-long commitment. "Middle school is a crucial time in life. You are making a lot of decisions about what kind of person you are going to be," says Vera Garrity, 24, a Young Heroes and City Year alumna now in her second year at the University of Virginia Law School. "After being in City Year, no matter what I do, I will always do service," says Garrity, who is planning a career in public-interest law. "After seeing people who are so committed and who are sacrificing so much or struggling so hard, it is impossible not to think about how you can help. It just becomes part of you." On a recent Saturday morning in the Bronx, where there are more people living with HIV/AIDS than in most states, a team of about 15 Young Heroes gathered in a circle, trading colored candies with one another. Each student started with 10 colored candies and directions on whether they could trade freely or on a restricted basis. But one student had only green candies, which, unknown to the group, symbolized HIV. After about 10 minutes of talking and joking, the group leader called the team to order, directed the students to count their colored candies and revealed what the green ones represented. The kids were shocked to discover how many of them ended up with a green candy. They then discussed facts and myths surrounding AIDS, issues of prevention, testing, transmission, safe sex and tolerance. But the project didn't end with the classroom component. That afternoon some of the students visited an AIDS clinic, while others stuffed and decorated bags for delivery to homebound AIDS patients. Doing good can become a habit. Cruz, a high school swimmer who works part-time at the Bronx Zoo, has been in the Young Heroes program for three years. He joined in middle school and despite his busy schedule asked to continue as a Young Hero until City Year gets its planned high school program, City Heroes, under way. He says his favorite service day so far has been visiting a local nursing home, where he played cards with the elderly residents, listened to their stories and even gave a few of them manicures. City Year CEO and co-founder Michael Brown calls Young Heroes "an adventure in idealism" that begins "a continuum of service" and says he hopes that one day national service will become a standard part of growing up in the US "We need to spark a sense of civic identity in young people and turn them on to being citizens," he says. "Our culture encourages them to become materialistic and self-involved, but they are really looking for meaning, adventure and personal power. All the research shows that students who get engaged at a young age are more likely to volunteer, to vote and to join a community group or civic organization later in life. We all understand the benefits of being on a sports team. Kids need a structured experience, and they want to be with their peers. Young Heroes is like being on a community-service team."

{{B}}SECTION 5 READING TESTDirections: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

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{{B}}SECTION 3 TRANSLATION TESTDirections: Translate the following passage into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

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

In the ruins of the Palm Beach Hotel you get a powerful sense that an era is drawing to a close that Israel's attempt to settle its people on the Gaza Strip is in its last days. 【C1】______ the fine sand in front of the beach hotel. But since the Palestinians launched their uprising against Israel—the intifada—【C2】______, Gaza has become a violent, dangerous place. People don't come on holiday anymore. The Palm Beach resort complex was abandoned【C3】______. The reception area and the dining room have been stripped of their fixtures and fittings. The wind off the sea blows in across floors【C4】______. A similar fate awaits everything that Israel has built here—if【C5】______ in August, as planned. Some young settlers have been squatting in the hotel as it's decayed around them. For Elazaar Elchiam, life is good. He lives for nothing in【C6】______. The Mediterranean waves are just metres away, and Elazaar has a passion for surfing. 【C7】______ in one of the nearby settlements—where red-roofed bungalows surrounded by lawns bake in the summer sun. Elazaar dreads the thought that this may well be his 【C8】______. The settlers say Israel is making a mistake. That it's handing victory to the Palestinian militants who have been attacking Gush Katif for years.【C9】______ the possibility that the settler's homes will be treated as the spoils of victory by groups 【C10】______. To prevent that, it's possible that the army will demolish everything in the days before the Israelis leave. Debbie Rosen, a mother【C11】______ in Gush Katif, said she hates the thought of her home being destroyed. But at the same time she couldn't bear the idea of what she called "【C12】______" taking over the house as they celebrate Israel's retreat. Since the Israeli army captured Gaza 【C13】______—in the Six Day War—it's been occupied territory. When it moved civilian settlers into the Strip it was breaching the Geneva Conventions— 【C14】______. This means nothing to settlers like Debbie Rosen. She said she never thought of her home as being 【C15】______. For her, Gaza is part of the land that God promised the Jews. The occupation may mean nothing to the settlers of Gush Katif—but it means everything【C16】______, in the Palestinian town of Khan Younis. For decades, for Palestinian families, the occupation 【C17】______ and limits and humiliations in many areas of life—and it's hated. Along the western side of Khan Younis Israeli troops man watchtowers that are part of【C18】______. And the area has seen many clashes between the army and Palestinian militants. They frequently 【C19】______ on the settler communities that they see as being so symbolic of the Israeli presence. The beach used to be an escape from the heat and 【C20】______ of Khan Younis. But to keep the militants out of the settlement zone, the army has blocked the Palestinian road to the sea. Khan Younis has lost its beach.

In barely one generation we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them—often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once. The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. "Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries," the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, "and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. " He also famously remarked that all of man's problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Passage 1

In A short story by Ian McEwan, Reflections of a Kept Ape, a woman takes a pet chimpanzee as her lover. Although truth is often stranger than fiction, a study published this week by scientists in America demonstrates that both can be pretty odd. The research concludes that humans and chimpanzees interbred after the two species first separated, before eventually going their different ways some 5.4 million years ago. Humans are thus much more recently related to their closest relatives than was previously thought. The researchers, led by David Reich of the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examined the genetic record of humans and chimpanzees. The sequencing of the human genome was completed in 2001 whereas that of the chimpanzee genome was finished last autumn. The two genomes are alike, differing by only 1.2% over the course of some 3 billion pairs of the genetic "letters" in which the language of genes is written. In fact, almost a third of the shared genes (each of which is several thousand letters long) are identical in the two species. Instead of looking at average genetic differences, though, Dr. Reich and his colleagues used the complete sequences to reveal the evolutionary history of the genomes. Scientists have long suspected that some regions of the human (and chimpanzee) genome must be older than others—that some sections trace their origins far back to the common ancestral population that gave rise to humans and chimps. Dr. Reich and his colleagues examined these common sequences, mindful of the assumption that genes steadily collect mutations as time goes by. They aligned sections of the human and chimpanzee genomes and identified how much they diverged. At different genes, humans share a common genetic ancestor with chimpanzees at different times. By studying more than 31,000 bits of the genome and measuring how closely humans are related to chimpanzees in different places, the scientists were able to study how quickly the species became different from each other. The results were published online this week in Nature. The team found that it took at least hundreds of thousands of years and, perhaps, 4 million years for human and chimpanzee ancestors to stop interbreeding after they began to be differentiated. Humans and chimpanzees were interbreeding for all this time, before finally separating no more than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. This is more recent than was thought. Moreover, the argument that the two species were interbreeding over such a long time is, to say the least, controversial. Most interesting was what the scientists discovered about the X chromosome in humans and chimpanzees. The X is one of two chromosomes that determine a person's (or a chimp's) sex. Females carry two copies of the X chromosome while males carry one X and one Y chromosome. The progeny of interbreeding start with a big evolutionary disadvantage. It is thought that if human and chimp ancestors initially became separate species and then started to interbreed, then the hybrid males produced tended to be infertile. (No one knows exactly why males are more affected than females, just that they are in groups ranging from mammals to insects.) A viable hybrid population could only be created if the fertile females mated back to one of the ancestral populations. The scientists found that human and chimpanzee X chromosomes are relatively similar. Indeed, their differences are roughly some 1.2 million years younger than the average of all the non-sex chromosomes. This lends weight to the theory that a viable hybrid population was sustained by interbreeding over a long time. Further evidence could come from the fossil record. Fossil finds are notoriously difficult to classify—people disagree on which physiological features are important; and each new find represents a class of one. The Toumai skull, found in Chad in 2001 and thought to be the earliest hominid, is between 6 million and 7.4 million years old. However, Dr. Reich points out, if humans and chimpanzees had undergone an initial separation at this time, it could account for why the skull has human-like features, including a relatively flat face without a protruding snout. The interbreeding came after this time. The researchers, along with other scientists across the world, are now working to sequence the complete genome of other close relatives to humans, including gorillas and orangutans. Primate evolution could yet reveal plenty more oddities.

{{B}}A: 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}}

In Bolivia, life is slowly returning to normal after almost a month of demonstrations.【C1】______—from poor peasant farmers to miners have been demanding【C2】______ and calling for constitutional reform. The protesters are angry at what they see as【C3】______ natural resources by foreign companies and governments. There's a long history of the country's rich natural resources being exploited by foreigners with【C4】______, 60 per cent of whom are native residents. Many now hope the new president, Eduardo Rodriguez, may find a solution to the country's problems. Rebecca Hampson has been visiting La Paz and【C5】______. "Put your hands over your ears!" shouted the boy in the hotel.【C6】______ was marching past the front door letting off【C7】______ as they went. A few minutes later the sting of police tear gas seeped under the door frame. That was【C8】______, then no one imagined that the protests and gradual shutting down of the country would last this long. "It'll all calm down in a few days," people kept telling us. But we decided to 【C9】______, on what turned out to be one of the last buses, to Sorata, a small town in the beautiful Cordillera Real mountains. Two weeks later the whole country had【C10】______, and the only way we could get back to La Paz was to join a convoy of protestors.【C11】______ the night before with an official from the local Aymara—the largest indigenous group in Bolivia. "【C12】______ with scarves and hats so that our brothers at the road blockades don't question you," he told us, "and be here in the square at 4:30 in the morning." I had no idea how I,【C13】______ and short hair, could be mistaken for an Aymara woman with their bowler hats, long plaits and【C14】______! But it was an offer we gratefully accepted. Next morning we were eventually bundled into the back of a crowded bus. The few words of Aymara we'd picked up went down very well with our fellow passengers and【C15】______ Spanish conversation. Eduardo, a high school teacher, explained how the local council leader【C16】______ from every organisation—schools, hospitals, farms, tour agencies, etc.—to go to La Paz to march. There was a long list of names, and anyone extra trying to sneak onto the buses would be kicked off. This list might also be checked at【C17】______ between Sorata and La Paz. Our presence on the bus【C18】______ as dedicated protestors at risk so the warm welcome we received showed real generosity. Eduardo and his friends were very keen to start marching. "It's the only way to get the government to listen to us," they all said.【C19】______—first: nationalisation of Bolivia's oils and gas reserves "so that we can keep the revenue ourselves to 【C20】______". Second: a change in the constitution "to give equal rights and opportunities to us.

BSECTION 1: LISTENING TEST/B

In even the bleakest climate change scenarios for the end of this century, science has offered hope that global warming would eventually slow down. But a new study published Monday snuffs out such hope, projecting temperatures that rise with carbon emissions until the last drops of oil and lumps of coal are used up. Global temperatures will increase on average by 8°C(14. 4°F)over pre-industrial levels by 2300 if all of Earth's fossil fuel resources are burned, adding five trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere, according to the research by Canadian scientists published in Nature Climate Change. In the Arctic, average temperatures would rise by 17°C(30. 6 °F). Those conclusions are several degrees warmer than previous studies have projected. If these temperatures do become reality, greenhouse gases would transform Earth into a place where food is scarce, parts of the world are uninhabitable for humans, and many species of animals and plants are wiped out, experts say. "It would be as unrecognizable to us as a fully glaciated world," says Myles Allen, head of a climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Allen was not involved in the new study, but his research has focused on carbon's cumulative impacts on climate. Noting that it took less warming, 6°C(10. 8 °F), to lift the world out of the Ice Age, Allen said, "That's the profundity of the change we're talking about." The 8-degree rise in global temperatures would blast past the 2°C(3. 8 ° F)limit that nations agreed upon last year in the Paris talks. It also would heat the world to a level approaching that of the early Eocene Period, 52 million to 56 million years ago, when palm trees grew as far north as Alaska? and crocodiles swam in the Arctic. Mammals survived Eocene temperatures: this is when early primates appeared. Some horses, however, shrank to the size of house cats, adjusting through evolution to a diet altered either by heat or carbon. Today's organisms and ecosystems may not be able to adapt to warming over the next 200 to 300 years—an instant on the geological time scale, says Scott Wing, the Smithsonian Institution's curator of fossil plants. Also, Wing notes that when the Eocene heat began, the Earth's poles weren't covered with ice as they are today. "In the future, warming will melt ice caps, which will expose bare ground, increase heat absorption at high latitudes, and cause more warming," Wing says. The study predicts that precipitation would quadruple in the tropical Pacific, while it would be reduced by up to third in the Americas and a factor of two over parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and the Amazon. Allen says not only could tropical rain forest systems collapse, but drought in southern Europe and the United States would be " completely catastrophic for agriculture. " Wealthy nations might maintain food supply, but not places like southern Africa. "A lot of people would have to leave, or a lot of people would die," Allen says.

Fifty years ago, Robert Solow published the first of two papers on economic growth that eventually won him a Nobel prize. Celebrated and seasoned, he was thus a natural choice to serve on an independent "commission on growth" announced last month by the World Bank. (The commission will weigh and sift what is known about growth, and what might be done to boost it.)Natural, that is, except for anyone who takes his 1956 contribution literally. For, according to the model he laid out in that article, the efforts of policymakers to raise the rate of growth per head are ultimately futile. A government eager to force the pace of economic advance may be tempted by savings drives, tax cuts, investment subsidies or even population controls. As a result of these measures, each member of the labour force may enjoy more capital to work with. But this process of "capital deepening", as economists call it, eventually runs into diminishing returns. Giving a worker a second computer does not double his output. Accumulation alone cannot yield lasting progress, Mr. Solow showed. What can? Anything that allows the economy to add to its output without necessarily adding more labour and capital. Mr. Solow labeled this font of wealth "technological progress" in 1956, and measured its importance in 1957. But in neither paper did he explain where it came from or how it could be accelerated. Invention, innovation and ingenuity were all "exogenous" influences, lying outside the remit of his theory. To practical men of action, Mr. Solow's model was thus an impossible tease: what it illuminated did not ultimately matter; and what really mattered, it did little to illuminate. The law of diminishing returns holds great sway over the economic imagination. But its writ has not gone unchallenged. A fascinating new book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh, tells the story of the rebel economics of increasing returns. A veteran observer of dismal scientists at work, first at the Boston Globe and now in an online column called Economic Principals, Mr. Warsh has written the best book of its kind since Peter Bernstein's Capital Ideas.Diminishing returns ensure that firms cannot grow too big, preserving competition between them. This, in turn, allows the invisible hand of the market to perform its magic. But, as Mr. Warsh makes clear, the fealty economists show to this principle is as much mathematical as philosophical. The topology of diminishing returns is easy for economists to navigate: a landscape of declining gradients and single peaks, free of the treacherous craters and crevasses that might otherwise entrap them. The hero of the second half of Mr. Warsh's book is Paul Romer, of Stanford University, who took up the challenge ducked by Mr. Solow. If technological progress dictates economic growth, what kind of economics governs technological advance? In a series of papers, culminating in an article in the Journal of Political Economy in 1990, Mr. Romer tried to make technology "endogenous", to explain it within the terms of his model. In doing so, he steered growth theory out of the comfortable cul-de-sac in which Mr. Solow had so neatly parked it. The escape required a three-point turn. First, Mr. Romer assumed that ideas were goods—of a particular kind. Ideas, unlike things, are "non-rival": Everyone can make use of a single design, recipe or blueprint at the same time. This turn in the argument led to a second: the fabrication of ideas enjoys increasing returns to scale. Expensive to produce, they are cheap, almost costless, to reproduce. Thus the total cost of a design does not change much, whether it is used by one person or by a million. Blessed with increasing returns, the manufacture of ideas might seem like a good business to go into. Actually, the opposite is true. If the business is free to enter, it is not worth doing so, because competition pares the price of a design down to the negligible cost of reproducing it. Unless idea factories can enjoy some measure of monopoly over their designs—by patenting them, copyrighting them, or just keeping them secret—they will not be able to cover the fixed cost of inventing them. That was the final turn in Mr. Romer's new theory of growth. How much guidance do these theories offer to policymakers, such as those sitting on the World Bank's commission? In Mr. Solow's model, according to a common caricature, technology falls like "manna from heaven", leaving the bank's commissioners with little to do but pray. Mr. Romer's theory, by contrast, calls for a more worldly response: educate people, subsidies their research, import ideas from abroad, carefully gauge the protection offered to intellectual property. But did policymakers need Mr. Romer's model to reveal the importance of such things? Mr. Solow has expressed doubts. Despite the caricature, he did not intend in his 1956 model to deny that innovation is often dearly bought and profit-driven. The question is whether anything useful can be said about that process at the level of the economy as a whole. That question has yet to be answered definitively. In particular, Mr. Solow worries that some of the "more powerful conclusions" of the new growth theory are unearned, flowing as they do from powerful assumptions. At one point in Mr. Warsh's book, Mr. Romer is quoted comparing the building of economic models to writing poetry. It is a triumph of form as much as content. This creative economist did not discover anything new about the world with his 1990 paper on growth. Rather, he extended the metre and rhyme-scheme of economics to capture a world—the knowledge economy—expressed until then only in the loosest kind of doggerel. That is how economics makes progress. Sadly, it does not, in and of itself, help economies make progress.

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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," said that great baseball-playing philosopher, Yogi Berra. And yet we continue to try, churning out forecasts on everything from the price of oil to the next civil war. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor of the sciences of uncertainty (who gave us "known unknowns"), has no time for the "charlatans" who think they can map the future. Forget the important things: we can't even get it right when estimating the cost of a building—witness the massively over-budget Sydney Opera House or the new Wembley Stadium. The problem is that almost all forecasters work within the parameters of the Gaussian bell curve, which ignores large deviations and thus fails to take account of "Black Swans". Mr. Taleb defines a Black Swan as an event that is unexpected, has an extreme impact and is made to seem predictable by explanations concocted afterwards. It can be both positive and negative. Examples include the September 11th 2001 attacks and the rise of the Internet. Smaller shocks, such as novels and pop acts whose popularity explodes thanks to word of mouth, can also be Black Swans. Humans are bad at factoring in the possibility of randomness and uncertainty. We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict, and overestimate our own knowledge. When researchers asked a group of students to choose a range for the number of lovers Catherine the Great had had, wide enough to ensure that they had a 98% chance of being right, a staggering 45% of them got it wrong. Why didn't they guarantee being correct by picking a range of none to ten thousand? After all, there were no prizes for keeping the range tight. The answer is that humans have an uncontrollable urge to be precise, for better or (all too often) worse. That is a fine quality in a watch-repair man or a brain surgeon, but counter-productive when dealing with uncertainty. Mr. Taleb cut his philosophical teeth in the basement of his family home in Lebanon during the long civil war there (another Black Swan), devouring books as mortars flew overhead. By the time he began work as a financial-market "quant" in the 1980s, he had already become convinced that the academic mainstream was looking at probability the wrong way. He remains a maverick, promoting the work of obscure thinkers and attacking Nobel laureates. All he is trying to do, he says, is make the world see how much there is that can't be seen. Why, he asks, do we take absence of proof to be proof of absence? Why do we base the study of chance on the world of games? Casinos, after all, have rules that preclude the truly shocking. And why do we attach such importance to statistics when they tell us so little about what is to come? A single set of data can lead you down two very different paths. More maddeningly still, when faced with a Black Swan we often grossly underestimate or overestimate its significance. Take technology. The founder of IBM predicted that the world would need no more than a handful of computers, and nobody saw that the laser would be used to mend retinas. Nor do we learn the right lessons from such eruptions. Mr. Taleb argues convincingly that the spectacular collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management was caused by the inability of the hedge fund's managers to see a world that lay outside their flawed models. And yet those models are still widely used today. This is ridiculous but not surprising. Business is stuffed full of bluffers, he argues, and successful companies and financial institutions owe as much to chance as to skill.That is a little unfair. Many blockbuster products have their roots in bright ideas, rigorous research and canny marketing, rather than luck. And corporate "scenario planners" are better than they used to be at thinking about Black Swan-type events. Still, this is a small quibble about a deeply intelligent, provocative book. Deftly weaving meditation with hard-edged analysis, Mr. Taleb succeeds in bringing sceptical empiricism to the masses. Do not expect clear answers. He suspects that crises will be fewer in number but more severe in future. And he suggests concentrating on the consequences of Black Swans, which can be known, rather than on the probability that they will occur, which can't (think of earthquakes). But he never makes professional predictions because it is better to be "broadly right rather than precisely wrong".

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People moved quickly in April to cancel plans to bestow a lifetime achievement award on Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and a longtime NAACP contributor, who was caught on tape scolding a female friend for posting online photos with black friends. Many people were surprised to learn the civil rights organization ever meant to praise a man with a history of discriminating against blacks. They shouldn't have been. In 2009 the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter honored Sterling with its President's Award, as he agreed to pay $ 2. 8 million to settle federal civil charges that he unfairly treated blacks at L. A. apartment buildings he owns. Sterling is one of several individuals and institutions with reputations in need of repair who've received accolades or favorable treatment from the NAACP, at times before or after large donations. At the May 15 gala where Sterling was supposed to pick up his prize, the group's L. A. chapter will honor executives from Wal-Mart Stores and FedEx, both major contributors embroiled in long-running controversies involving allegations of employment discrimination. The companies deny the allegations. The group's financial disclosures show each company gave the NAACP $ 200,000- $ 999,999 in 2011. That year the U. S. Supreme Court backed Walmart in a major employment discrimination lawsuit brought against the company by women employees. The ruling made it harder to mount class actions alleging discrimination by employers. FedEx has settled many race discrimination claims, including a $ 53 million payout to truck drivers in 2007. The NAACP also accepted more than $ 1 million from Bank of America in 2011, the same year the bank agreed to pay a record $ 335 million in a federal lawsuit alleging predatory lending to minorities. Spokesmen for Walmart and FedEx said their companies have long supported the NAACP solely because of its good work. Bank of America didn't respond to requests for comment. Peter Dreier, director of the urban and environmental policy department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, says donating to the NAACP has become a painless way for corporations accused of racism to ensure a measure of sympathy, or at least silence, from the civil rights group, whose leaders rarely criticize the misbehavior of those who give it money. "The NAACP, with its glittering history of incredible activism, has become an empty shell," he says. The NAACP isn't the only organization to spruce up big companies' reputations. "It's part of every communication specialist's playbook to align clients who have particular issues with nonprofits that are strong in those issues," says crisis communications strategist Sam Singer. At times it can backfire when the relationship between sinner and redeemer seems a little too convenient—or has the whiff of quid pro quo. Environmentalists have taken the World Wildlife Fund to task for accepting money from companies that use a lot of water and other natural resources, including Coca-Cola, then lending its respected panda logo to their corporate sustainability campaigns. The NAACP hasn't been loo picky about where its donations come from. The late Benjamin Hooks once joked that the only thing "tainted" about tobacco industry money was "there ain't enough of it," according to tobacco industry documents from lawsuits against cigarette makers. A 2009 resolution condemning the industry for targeting blacks—who suffer an inordinate health toll from smoking died without a floor vote at the NAACP's centennial convention, says Carol McGruder, co chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. "When you let unethical corporations associate themselves with our organizations, it makes them look like they're doing something for our community, and they're not," McGruder says. "The harm they do to our people is not offset by their corporate giving. " The NAACP's interim president and CEO, Lorraine Miller, wrote in an e-mail that money "docs not buy corporations a free pass if their actions run afoul of our mission. We do not hesitate to stand up to, speak out against or even sue our corporate contributors when we differ on an issue of civil rights. " In 2009 the NAACP did sue a contributor. Wells Fargo, over alleged predatory lending practices targeting blacks, allegations Wells Fargo denied. But the group dropped the case in 2010, saying it would instead "work constructively" with the bank. Wells Fargo announced it would donate $ 2. 5 million a year for five years to fund an NAACP financial literacy campaign. "The more we learned about each other, the more we decided to collaborate," says Wells Fargo Senior Vice President Gigi Dixon. The federal government didn't let the bank off so easily. In 2012, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $ 184 million to settle allegations that it steered black borrowers into subprime loans.

Passage 1