The practical business of finding highly productive agents and joint ventures in the foreign market for many still remains an enigma. Often, US companies are relying on luck instead of strategy in identifying their international representation. Many companies get into exporting almost by happenstance: Most export sales are simply a spin-off from domestic contracts. Simply, most agent and distributor relationships are born from random inquiries or chance meetings at trade shows. When asked how they obtained their international representation, many companies have no recollection whatsoever of how or why the relationship began. Strange as it may seem, the same is true of joint venture relationships. With the growing use of the internet, one could be fooled into thinking the odds of success in finding that elusive, top-performing trade partner will be increased. The key is to remember at all times that promotional materials are not stand-alone, clean "information". The Internet can be used to provide indicators of activity and reach; however, these benefits in no way eliminate the more conventional, strategic wisdom that highly successful sales organizations, in one way or another, employ.

Corporate America has long known that the best defense is a good offense. It's no wonder then that the healthcare industry has rallied the troops in recent weeks in anticipation of Michael Moore's newest documentary, Sicko, due out in theaters nationwide on Friday. Though few people have actually seen Sicko yet, there's been wide-ranging speculation that the film and its maker could be the catalysts Americans need in order to demand reform of their ailing medical care system. With an emphasis on the 47 million uninsured in the US, Moore not only presents a chilling assessment of the status quo but goes on to advocate for the socialist approach of Canada, France and Cuba as a more effective alternative. "We're in a battle with these corporations who want to maintain their position," Moore said recently. "They don't want to give an inch on this, and we're out to upset the apple cart." The healthcare industry is on red alert. Jeff McWaters, CEO of the HMO Amerigroup, has listed the film's June 29 release among the "headline risks" for the industry. Sicko has already sparked heated debate and more is certain to come. "People see Moore as uniquely honest and truthful in a corporate landscape," says Pat Aufderheide, a communications professor at American University. "He has a way of saying the things his audience has already been thinking to themselves and making them seriously consider acting on those thoughts." Both of Moore's first two major films—1998's Roger & Me, about General Motors, and 2002's Bowling for Columbine, on the gun industry—brought unprecedented attention to their respective topics. And the director achieved a new level of success with his 2004 Bush-bashing hit Fahrenheit 9/11, which marked the tipping point of the popular resentment against the Iraq war. Moore's current opponents have tried to launch pre-emptive strikes at the director and his moviemaking practices. On June 13, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which represents leading drugmakers such as Eli Lilly, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, issued a statement dismissing Moore as "a political activist with a track record for sensationalism". PhRMA went on to say "a review of America's health care system should be balanced, thoughtful and well-researched" before adding, "Unfortunately, you won't get that from Michael Moore." America's Health Insurance Plans, whose members include HMOs Aetna and Cigna, handed its own news releases last week emphasizing the need for "a uniquely American solution". Health CareAmerica, a non-profit financed in part by pharmaceutical and hospital companies, held briefings to document the long wait-times common to government-run healthcare, such as those run by France and Cuba, and posted videos on its Web site detailing horror stories from Canada's system. "Mr. Moore is not telling the whole story. He plays fast and loose with the facts," says the group's executive director Sarah Berk. "We're here to educate the public on what he has left out." Moore, meanwhile, has built up vocal support in his corner as well. The director and his producers have hired a team of political operatives to respond to industry attacks, including Chris Lehane, best known for his role as a consultant on the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns. Moore has held several well-attended press conferences in weeks leading up to the film's release, and publicity for Sicko has included private screening on both Capitol Hill and Wall Street. The film has also gained the backing of many healthcare labor groups, such as the California Nurses Association (CAN), which aims to place a nurse in each of the 3,000 theaters across the country where Sicko is shown in a campaign called "Scrubs for Sicko". The film is "not just an indictment of an indefensible healthcare industry in the US," says CAN'S executive director Rose Ann DeMoro. "It's a rejoinder for those who think we can fix the soulless monster by tinkering with an unconscionable system that puts us further in thrall to those who created the crisis."

In 2014, America's education system marked an important milestone. For the first time, children of color became a majority among K-12 public school students nationwide. Today schools are crossing a second, more troubling, barrier. The latest figures show that 51% of public school students attend schools in which a majority of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income under federal guidelines. This deepening concentration of economic need complicates the intertwined challenges of equipping America's increasingly diverse young people with the education they need to reach the middle class and developing the skilled workers the U. S. needs to maintain its competitiveness. Without progress in addressing the hardening isolation of low-income families, school reform alone is unlikely to produce the educational results America needs. Two converging trends are driving this confluence of negative factors. One is the overall trajectory of poverty. When Bill Clinton left office, the poverty rate for children under 18 stood just over 16%. That rose to 19% under George W. Bush and peaked at 22% under President Obama in 2010. The poverty rate is now 21%. However, it is about 33% for both African Americans and Latinos. The second trend is the growing isolation of poor people. In an important paper this fall, Century Foundation scholar Richard Kahlenberg noted that both rich and poor families are more separated from families in other income brackets today than in 1970. Figures compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Kids Count project show that over the last decade, the share of kids living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty(defined as places where at least 30% of the residents are poor)has increased in most major cities—for example, from 25% to 34% in Los Angeles and 29% to 36% in Chicago. These intersecting trends have swelled the portion of kids in schools that also experience concentrated economic need. In 1999, 28% of public school students attended schools where most of their classmates qualified as poor or low-income—their families earned about $ 45,000 or less for a family of four. That number has rocketed to almost 51% , roughly 25 million kids. For students of color, the figures are even higher. Nationwide, about three-fourths of African American and Latino students attend majority-low-income schools. By contrast, only about one-third of whites attend such economically strained schools. In the Chicago school system, where 85% of students are black or Latino, the concentration of economic need is overwhelming. In 77 of the city's roughly 680 public schools, at least 99% of the students qualify as poor or low-income. The share tops 90% in another 388 schools. In only 50 schools do less than half of students qualify as low-income. " You' re a fourth-grade teacher and coming into that door is 30 students from poverty, broken homes, crime and you are supposed to just, on your own, turn that around," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told me at a forum I moderated here this week. "That's impossible. " Innovative and tenacious educators can make progress despite these trends. Chicago has developed a creative program of early intervention that has dramatically increased high school graduation rates from about 55% in 2009 to 70% now, with both African American and Latino students demonstrating significant gains. Since 2003, the share of the city' s fourth-graders who score as "proficient" on National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP)tests has tripled in math and more than doubled in reading(though in each case to only around 30%). Gregory Jones, principal of Chicago's Kenwood Academy High School, a school where two-thirds of students are low-income, says that slightly more than half of their graduates now finish with some college credit. Likewise, across all large cities, African American, Latino and low-income students have posted gains in reading and math since 2003. But the larger trend is the durability of income and racial disparities. The latest NAEP results for large cities found that only about one-fifth of students who qualified as low-income reached the(highest)proficient level in fourth-grade reading or math, compared to just over half of more affluent classmates in reading and nearly three-fifths in math. It's fair to demand that schools rethink and reform to ensure that the interests of children take precedence over the priorities of the adults who run the system. But it's unrealistic to ask schools to equalize opportunity alone, without more aggressive efforts to revitalize poor neighborhoods and to help more families relocate to more stable communities. Despite heroic exceptions, any national strategy that hopes to improve schools without improving neighborhoods simply won't add up.

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An imposing theatre has stood on the banks of the River Avon in William Shakespeare's home town since 1879. The first theatre burned down in 1926; a second, now known as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), opened in 1932. From the start, the building was scorned by most of the directors and many of the actors who worked there. "Sink it and start again," said Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a director, in 1950. They will soon have their way. After a final performance of a gripping production of "Coriolanus" on March 31st, the RST will close until 2010, and the theatre will be extensively remodelled before it reopens. However, instead of being a cause for celebration in the profession and among audiences, the closure is being accompanied by real regret. This imperfect theatre has been so influential in the lives of three generations of English theatre people that it has become the stuff of legend. Consequently, the fabric of the old building will be retained, wrapped around a newly designed theatre. "You wouldn't want to get rid of all your ghosts," says Simon Harper, the deputy project director. The old theatre was designed by a young woman called Elisabeth Scott in 1920s Modernist style. It was built of red brick and had fine art-deco decoration. The foyer box-office, for instance, is a gorgeous piece of early 20th-century design in stainless steel, green marble, bronze and silver bronze with ornamental grilles. The whole was rated Grade 2 (denoting a particularly important building of more than special interest) by English Heritage, the agency that lists historic buildings. But the auditorium is like a cinema, with the circle and the balcony isolated from the stage. Although successive artistic directors insisted on internal alterations to create a closer relationship between the actors and their audience, the company has long regarded the internal space as a relic. For modern audiences, which have grown up with television, the relationship with the actors is not intimate enough. Even so, audiences today remember a remarkable range of productions in the old theatre. "It's curious that such a dreadful theatre holds such memories of great events," says Sir Peter Hall, whose own begin with Peter Brook's Love's Labour's Lost in 1946. Sir Peter became artistic director in 1960, and he immediately had a forestage installed, like an Elizabethan apron stage. His regime is probably best remembered for its version of Shakespeare's history plays. Most directors since then have repeated this testing exercise in producing Shakespeare. Michael Boyd, the present artistic director, is in the middle of his version of the histories right now. During the closure of the RST, performances will take place in a new theatre up the road, called the Courtyard. This basic rusted steel box (it rises to 15.2 metres or 50 feet), which was built in 11 months and opened in the summer of 2006, is an ingenious way of managing the transition between the old and the new. Studies by a major accounting firm suggest that the presence of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) benefits the local economy by ￡57 million ($112 million) a year. Complete closure for three years would have dire consequences for the smart shops in the town centre. So Arts Council England released ￡6 million from the ￡50 million it is contributing to the whole project to build the Courtyard. (The Stratford theatre's commercial significance explains the contribution of ￡20 million by Advantage West Midland, a regional development agency, to the ￡100 million development budget. Only ￡15 million has still to be found, and the RSC has not yet begun to tap its loyal supporters.) The Courtyard is a model for the new auditorium. Because it is so different from the old, the directors and actors wanted to work out how best to perform in it. The audience of 1,050 sits in three shallow tiers of seats on three sides of a stage that juts out over ten metres from the proscenium. This is known as a thrust stage, and it is controversial—actors often have their backs to the audience, making audibility a problem. But, because of the intimacy it allows between audience and actors, the RSC is wedded to it. Sir Peter, for example, prefers the less prominent apron stage in his new theatre in Kingston upon Thames, but a thrust stage has been used successfully in the smaller Swan theatre, part of the old theatre building. (It will be mothballed during the redevelopment.) Since the Swan has been where directors and actors have preferred to work and the audience has been enthusiastic, Mr. Boyd decided to recreate it on a larger scale in the new theatre. "Our inspiration is the crowded, secular complexity of the Elizabethan courtyard," he says. The final planning application for the project will be considered next month. Apparently, the only controversial item is a 35-metre tower with lifts and a bridge to the theatre to take the audience to the circle and balcony. On top of the tower is an observation platform that some councilors say is obtrusive. But there is no argument about plans for Scott's distinguished red-brick monument to the Bard. "Knocking it down would have been quicker and cheaper," says Vikki Heywood, the RSC's executive director. But it was not an option. Thank goodness.

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No matter if you're leafing through those glossy admissions brochures, attending an information session on campus or browsing a college fair with your teen, there's always one big thought at the back of the mind of every parent: Wait, how much is this college degree going to cost me? Thankfully, there are some new tools out there to make figuring out costs a little easier. This September the Department of Education released its College Scorecard, a project designed to help parents and students make more informed decisions about higher education. The tool provides information on college costs, graduation rates, average starting salaries, post-graduation and information that can help people pick the best school for their financial and academic needs. With the College Scorecard, you see a breakdown of what you'd actually pay for a college education, based on your family's income. This is the most important aspect of this tool, because while the "sticker price" of a school may be high, you most likely won't pay full price to go there. For example, although Harvard's list price is around $ 60,000 according to its admissions website, the average family will pay just over $ 14,000 per year once you factor in grants and financial aid. The tool lets you compare schools' stats side by side, including their financial information. In the search function, you can filter out what kind of degree you want(two-year or four-year), location, public or private, size, major or program and more to make a really specific comparison. If any schools catch your eye, you can click on "View More Details" for a comprehensive summary(SAT/ACT scores to get in, what typical student debt is like, etc.). You can also search for a specific school to get all the stats you want on it. You can also check out NPR's college cost calculator, which uses the College Scorecard raw data of 150 major colleges and universities to show you right off the bat the net price(price of college minus financial aid, grants and scholarships)for various incomes compared to that scary sticker price. It's a quick but less detailed summary looking specifically at costs. While these tools can't determine the exact dollar amount you'll have to pay, they do give you a better ballpark estimate of what college costs you are expected to be able to pay. Knowing that now will help you decide what school makes the best financial sense for your family.

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Homo sapiens were not always so special. In the ancient past, other human forms lived beside us. The Neanderthals in Eurasia. Small, hobbit-like humans in Indonesia. The mysterious Denisovans in the Ural mountains. But our time alone may be nearing its end. Through the power of technology, humans are set to take on the role of Intelligent Designer. We can upgrade ourselves and surmount evolution. Ultimately, we can become entirely new beings that set the stage for a posthuman future. The scenario has played out for decades in science fiction but the prospect is raised more seriously by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, in his latest book, Sapiens. In it he sees trouble ahead. The latest human enhancements will be accessible only to the rich, leading to a 21st-century society more unequal than any that came before. The revolution Harari has in mind is borne of engineering and exploits mechanical, electronic, chemical and genetic progress. In place of treatments that correct biological deficits, like failing hearts, poor hearing and weak eyesight, will be procedures that improve on natural performance, making the fortunate recipients biologically better than the rest. "In the 20th century, the main task of medicine was to bring everybody to a certain level of health and capability. It was by definition an egalitarian aim," Harari told the Guardian. "In the 21st century medicine is moving onwards and trying to surpass the norm, to help people live longer, to have stronger memories, to have better control of their emotions. But upgrading like that is not an egalitarian project, it's an elitist project. No matter what norm you reach, there is always another upgrade which is possible. " The haves and have-nots are far from new. Cochlear implants which wire directly into the auditory nervous system have transformed the lives of a minority of deaf people. But they cost ￡40,000 apiece. Similarly, genetic tests that radically change patient care are beyond the means of many individuals and countries' healthcare systems. Harari argues that as science progresses the upgrades that become available will increasingly widen the gap between rich and poor. Research on implantable devices called brain-computer interfaces(BCIs)are in trials to help disabled people move their defunct limbs or robotic prosthetics. More advanced devices could link people's brains directly to the internet, giving them vast and faithful memory storage, and seamless access to information, even if that does include endless footage of cats in hats. Genetic engineering will be more disruptive still. A new genome editing procedure called Crispr has given scientists their first real hope of making safe, precise changes to the human genome. They have already used it to correct cells with genetic faults that cause cataracts and cystic fibrosis. Similar therapies might allow improvements to human performance. Western history has made many of today's researchers flinch at studies into the genetic basis of intelligence. But the Beijing Genomics Institute, the world's largest genomics research centre, has taken on the job. If the project bears fruit, it might drive attempts to boost human intelligence by genetically modifying embryos. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University, suggests another radical possibility. He has developed tools that can scramble the genetic code leaving it functional but unrecognisable to invading viruses. His first goal is to engineer a bacterium that is resistant to viral infection. But he does not dismiss the possibility of changing human DNA too leading to a biologically new kind of human. "In the 21st century, there is a real possibility of creating biological castes, with real biological differences between rich and poor," said Harari. "The end result could be speciation. We're used to being the only human species around, but there is no law of nature that says there can only be one species of human. With this kind of upgrading treatment we could have, in the not too distant future, more than one human species on Earth again. " Anders Sandberg, a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute at the Oxford Martin School, said that while technology might drive an evolutionary split in humankind, the divide would not separate rich and poor. "Speciation might well happen, but instead of class, I think it'll be much more driven by culture. You might get a country that decides it wants to bring down its healthcare budget by subsidising an upgrade that makes people healthier. The end result might be that the Singaporeans become their own species. Or it could be a technological speciation, like Mac users versus PC users, which is probably even more horrifying," Sandberg said. Harari says the rich will always have first access to the latest enhancements. "When the aim is to upgrade, by definition, you want to be better than others. So no matter how much the cost goes down, there will always be the next treatment which is only available to the rich. The differences might become so big that if you miss the train it will be too late. "

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

BTalks 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

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Dolly was no ordinary lamb. She was cloned from a single mammary cell of an adult ewe, overturning long-held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible. Her birth set off a race in laboratories around the world to duplicate the breakthrough and raised the specter of human cloning. A decade later, scientists are starting to come to grips with just how different Dolly was. Dozens of animals have been cloned since that first little lamb and it's becoming increasingly clear that they are all, in one way or another, defective. It's tempting to think of clones as perfect carbon copies of the original—down to every hair and quirk of temperament. It turns out, though, that there are various degrees of genetic replication. Not only are clones separated from the original template by time—in Dolly's case, six years—but they are also the product of an unnatural molecular mechanism that turns out not to be very good at making identical copies. But scientists see a role for cloning in treating human diseases—and perhaps someday conquering some of man's most intractable conditions. It may be another 10 years or more before the approach yields anything safe and reliable enough to be used in real patients, and there is no guarantee that it will ever be successful. But nobody thought Dolly was possible until she made history that warm July night 10 years ago.

The first cases of the deadly H5N1 have been confirmed in【B1】______ where most efforts focus on trying to keep domestic birds away from wild【B2】______ birds and【B3】______ birds. In the Danube delta, thousands of【B4】______,【B5】______ and【B6】______ have already been slaughtered. 【B7】______ of birds, experts say, create a perfect environment for spreading disease. In the second confirmed bird-flu cluster in the delta,【B8】______ swans have died on a fish farm. In the third cluster,【B9】______ swans have died so far. But this is the【B10】______ of the avian influenza iceberg. Bird flu is believed to present in Romania,【B11】______,【B12】______, and 【B13】______ because white-fronted geese can travel【B14】______ kilometres in a single day! All expeditions to the delta have been banned and not a domestic bird in sight. They've all been gathered, 【B15】______, and buried. According to WHO, the 【B16】______ will remain for a long time in the region. The more cases to be【B17】______, the more quarantine【B18】______ will have to be launched, with【B19】______ killed, people closely【B20】______, and areas sealed off. No one can say how this story will end.

Passage 1

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{{B}}SECTION 6 TRANSLATION TESTDirections: Translate the following passage into English and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}

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{{B}}SECTION 1: LISTENING TEST{{/B}}