问答题Questions 4～6 You may have read news reports saying that America"s Main Streeters want revenge on Wall Street for the financial meltdown and recession and mortgage foreclosures and lost life savings. That hardly makes fields like finance and insurance hazardous to be in, though. You"re much, much likelier to get killed in other lines of work. Recently released Department of Labor data show that fishermen (and fisherwomen) and other workers in fishing-related professions were the most likely to die on the job in 2008. Of 39,000 fishing workers in the nation, 50 were killed, a rate of 128.9 per 100,000 full-time workers. Rough seas, unpredictable deadly weather and isolation during emergencies all make the job more unsafe than any other. It" s no wonder that the industry" s perils have given rise to a popular documentary TV series, Deadliest Catch, and a best-selling book and hit Hollywood film, The Perfect Storm . The Bureau of Labor Statistics" National Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries counted 5,071 fatal work injuries in 2008. That was 7.6% fewer than in 2007, and 13% less than in 2006, which marked a five-year high for workplace fatalities. That"s the good news in the numbers. Logging workers and aircraft pilots have the second and third deadliest jobs. Eighty-two loggers died last year from work injuries, some of them caused by falling trees and malfunctioning cutting equipment. Ninety aircraft pilots died in crashes and other accidents. Transportation incidents are the most common cause of fatalities, overall. This year, 40.5% of the worker deaths, 2,053 of them, were transportation-related. More than half were highway incidents, which have been the most common killer every year since the Labor Department started tracking workplace fatalities in 1992. Equipment-and objects-related injuries came in a distant second, accounting for 923 fatalities, or 18.2%. While putting in 57% of the total hours worked by Americans, men made up 92.7% of the workplace fatalities. The relatively few women killed were more likely to die from on-the-job homicide, though. 26% of the female workplace deaths were murders, compared with only 9% of the male deaths. "For several occupations with high fatality rates, including truck drivers and farmers, and several industries with high fatality rates, like construction and mining, men constitute a much larger part of the total employment," Stephen Pegula, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, explains. "In addition, women are often employed in occupations and industries, like trade and leisure/hospitality, where homicides are more prevalent. " The construction industry suffered the largest number of deaths. Its fatality rate per 100,000 full-time workers was only 9.6, less than a 10th of that of people in fishing, but that added up to 969 deaths in 2008, no less than 19.1% of all U. S. workplace fatalities. What about those Wall Streeters? People in finance and insurance actually had the lowest fatality rate of any occupation—0.3 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers, or just 24 people across the nation. Top 5 America"s Deadliest Jobs 1. Fishers and Related Fishing Workers The Job: Capture aquatic animals in large quantities. The Dangers: Extreme weather, large equipment, drowning The Fatality Rate *: 128.9 Total Fatalities in 2008: 50 * per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers 2. Logging Workers The Job: Cut down and trim trees for sale and transport. The Dangers: Falling trees, cutting equipment, difficult terrain The Fatality Rate *: 115.7 Total Fatalities in 2008: 82 * per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers 3. Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers The Job: Operate planes and helicopters. The Dangers: Testing equipment, emergency response, crashes The Fatality Rate*: 72.4 Total Fatalities in 2008: 90 * per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers 4. Structural Iron and Steel Workers The Job: Mold, set and handle metal construction materials. The Dangers: Heights, heavy materials, welding The Fatality Rate *: 46.4 Total Fatalities in 2008: 36 * per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers 5. Farmers and Ranchers The Job: Grow and cultivate livestock and crops. The Dangers: Heavy machinery. The Fatality Rate * : 39.5 Total Fatalities in 2008: 317 * per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers

问答题Questions 7～10 School teacher Shana Richey misses the play room she decorated with Glamour Girl decals for her daughters. Fireman Jay Fernandez misses the custom putting green he installed in his back yard. But ever since they quit paying their mortgages and walked away from their homes, they"ve discovered that giving up on the American dream has its benefits. Both now live on the 3,100 block of Club Rancho Drive in Palmdale, where a terrible housing market lets them rent luxurious homes—one with a pool for the kids, the other with a golf-course view—for a fraction of their former monthly payments. "It"s just a better life. It really is," says Ms. Richey. Before defaulting on her mortgage, she owed about $ 230,000 more than the home was worth. People"s increasing willingness to abandon their own piece of America illustrates a paradoxical change wrought by the housing bust: Even as it tarnishes the near-sacred image of home ownership, it might be clearing the way for an economic recovery. Thanks to a rare confluence of factors—mortgages that far exceed home values and bargain-basement rents—a growing number of families are concluding that the new American dream home is a rental. Some are leaving behind their homes and mortgages right away, while others are simply halting payments until the bank kicks them out. That"s freeing up cash to use in other ways. Ms. Richey"s family of five used some of the money to buy season tickets to Disneyland, and plans to take a Carnival cruise to Mexico in March. Mr. Fernandez takes his girlfriend out to dinner more frequently. "We"re saving lots of money," Ms. Richey says. The U. S. home-ownership rate has charted its biggest decline in more than two decades, falling to 67.6% as of September from a peak of 69.2% in 2004. And more renters are on the way: Credit firm Experian and consulting firm Oliver Wyman forecast that "strategic defaults" by homeowners who can afford to pay are likely to exceed one million in 2009, more than four times 2007"s level. Stiffing the bank is bad for peoples" credit, and bad for banks. Swelling defaults could also mean more losses for taxpayers through bank bailouts. Analysts at Deutsche Bank Securities expect 21 million U. S. households to end up owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth by the end of 2010. If one in five of those households default, the losses to banks and investors could exceed $ 400 billion. As a proportion of the economy, that"s roughly equivalent to the losses suffered in the savings-and-loan debacle of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The flip side of those losses, though, is massive debt relief that can help offset the pain of rising unemployment and put cash in consumers" pockets. For the 4. 8 million U. S. households that data provider LPS Applied Analytics estimates haven"t paid their mortgages in at least three months, the added cash flow could amount to about $ 5 billion a month—an injection that in the long term could be worth more than the tax breaks in the Obama administration"s economic-stimulus package. "It"s a stealth stimulus," says Christopher Thornberg of Beacon Economics, a consulting firm specializing in real estate and the California economy. "The quicker these people shed their debts, the faster the economy is going to heal and move forward again. " As the stigma of abandoning a mortgage wanes, the Obama administration could face an uphill battle in its effort to keep people in their homes by pressuring hanks to cut their mortgage payments. Some analysts argue that"s not always the right approach, particularly if it prevents people from shedding onerous debts and starting a fresh. "The effect of these programs is often to lead homeowners to make decisions that are not in their economic best interests," says Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona who has studied mortgage defaults.

问答题中国正处在经济的高速发展时期，从现在开始的未来20年内，中国将全面建设小康社会，人民的生活质量不断提高。上海正在为建成国际经济、金融、贸易、航运中心之一的目标而努力，未来上海将以结构调整、功能提升和布局优化为着眼点，大踏步向建设世界城市的战略设想迈进。上海拥有优越的地理位置、完善的基础设施、独特的文化和较高的消费水平，并以长江三角洲地区为依托，已经成为中国目前最大的旅游市场之一。2001年，上海接待国际游客204万人次，接待国内游客8254万人次，上海发展超大型主题公园的时机已经成熟。

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问答题I see from the current columns of the daily press that "Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the essential nutritive elements are put together in the form of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The Professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system." Now this kind of thing may be all very well in its way, but it is going to have its drawbacks as well. In the bright future anticipated by Professor Plumb, We can easily imagine such incidents as the following: The smiling family were gathered round the hospitable board. The table bucket of hot water stood before the radiant mother, and at the head of the board was the Christmas dinner of the happy home, warmly covered by a thimble and resting on a poker chip. The expectant whispers of the little ones were hushed as the father, rising from his chair, lifted the thimble and disclosed a small pill of concentrated nourishment on the chip before him. Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, plum pudding, mince pie—it was all there, all jammed into that little pill and only waiting to expand. Then the father with deep reverence, and a devout eye alternating between the pill and heaven, 1ifted his voice in a benediction. At this moment there was an agonized cry from the mother. "Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!" It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus of the unthinking child. "Clap him on the back!" cried the distracted mother. "Give him water!" The idea was fatal. The water striking the pill caused it to expand. There was a dull rumbling sound and then, with an awful bang, Gustavus Adolphus exploded into fragments! And when they gathered the little corpse together, the baby"s lips were parted in a lingering smile that could only be worn by a child who had eaten thirteen Christmas dinners.

问答题王冕学画 王冕自此只在秦家放牛，每到黄昏，回家跟着母亲歇息。或遇秦家煮些腌鱼、腊肉给他吃，他便拿块荷叶包了来家，递与母亲。每日点心钱，他也不买了吃，聚到一两个月，便偷个空，走到村学堂里，见那闯学堂的书客，就买几本旧书，日逐把牛拴了，坐在柳树荫下看。 弹指又过了三四年，王冕看书，心下也着实明白了。那日，正是黄梅时节，天气烦躁，王冕放牛倦了，在绿草地上坐着。须臾，浓云密布，一阵大雨过了。那黑云边上镶着白云，渐渐散去，透出一派日光来，照耀得满湖通红。湖边山上，青一块，紫一块，绿一块。树枝上都像水洗过一番的，尤其绿得可爱。湖里有十来枝荷花，苞子上清水滴滴，荷叶上水珠滚来滚去。 王冕看了一会，心里想道：“古人说‘人在画图中’，其实不错。可惜我这里没有一个画工，把这荷花画他几枝，也觉有趣。”又心里想道：“天下哪有个学不会的事，我何不画他几枝?” 王冕见天色晚了，牵了牛回去。自此，聚的钱不买书了，托人向城里买些胭脂、铅粉之类，学画荷花。初时画得不好，画到三个月之后，那荷花精神颜色无一不像，只多着一张纸，就像是湖里长的，又像才从湖里摘下来贴在纸上的。乡间人见画得好，也有拿钱来买的。王冕得了钱，买些好东西，孝敬母亲。 一传两，两传三，诸暨一县都晓得是一个画没骨花卉的名笔，争着来买。到了十七八岁，不在秦家了，每日画几笔画，读古人的诗文，渐渐不愁衣食，母亲心里欢喜。 这王冕天性聪明，年纪不满二十岁，就把那天文、地理、经史上的大学问，无一不通。但他性情不同，既不求官爵，又不交纳朋友，终日闭户读书。

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问答题News report: Between 2005 and 2007, the China Development Bank offered 1.66 billion yuan worth of loans to 243,000 students from poor families in central China' s Henan Province. Last May, the Bank and the Henan Provincial Education Department jointly issed an ultimatum requiring 223 college graduates to pay off the interest on their student loan within 30 days. Nevertheless, the students failed to repay the debts as required. Now the colleges and banks cannot contact these students after their graduation as they have not notified banks of their changes of address. It is in this situation that the China Development Bank and the Education Department decided to publish the personal information of these students in accordance with relevant regulations concerning student loans. Topic: Does blacklisting student loan defaulters help repayments to banks? Questions for reference : 1. Should the personal information of these students be published or not? Give your reasons. 2. How should the student loan system be improved and perfected? 3. What are the possible consequences that might follow if the personal information of such students are published?

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问答题Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear 2 passages in English. After you have heard each sentence or 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.

问答题A BABYLONIAN lamp, by modern standards, shed little light on its surroundings. Nearly 4000 years later it sheds far more on an issue of great interest: the pace of mankind"s material progress. In a new paper, William Nordhaus of Yale University starts by asking what may seem a dull question: do statisticians measure prices accurately? To find out, he studies the economic history of light from Neolithic times to the present. His answer and its implications are startling. Traditional estimates have failed to track the fall in the price of light, especially over the past 200 years. As a result, they overstate today"s price, relative to the price in 1800, not by a few percentage points, nor even by a factor of one or two, but by a factor of about 1000. Even by the standards of economics, that is a large error. The implications are of corresponding size. If the prices of other things are measured as badly as the price of light, it follows that traditional estimates of economic growth are way off the mark. Economists are familiar with the difficulty of measuring changes in prices over time. It seems easy to measure the price of, say, a ball-point pen. But suppose that. a new version comes along that costs twice as much and lasts four times as long. If it catches on, the price of a pen has doubled—but the price of pen-services, as it were, has halved. This second price is the one that should be used to calculate the change in living standards. However, it is often difficult to observe. You need to know not just the change in the prices of the goods but also the change in the services that the goods provide. Measuring that is especially hard when the range of services itself changes over time. (Compare the communication-services provided by a modern telephone with those of one from the 1950s, for instance.) Mr. Nordhaus points out that light has a useful property in this respect. Its service— illumination—does not vary. Babylonians used lamps for much the same reason that modern Americans use incandescent bulbs. With diligence and great ingenuity, Mr. Nordhaus has collected data on the light-services provided down the ages by: burning sticks; fat-and-oil- burning lamps; candles (tallow, sperm-oil, etc); gas lights (various); kerosene lamps; and the many different kinds of electric light. (The unit of measurement is the lumen; a wax candle emits about 13 lumens, a modern 100-watt bulb on 110 bolts about 1,200.) Mr. Nordhaus has also collected data on the prices of these sources of light: the price of a candle, the price of a given quantity of gas or electricity, and so on. Putting the two together yields a true measure for the price of light. In nominal terms, the price of 1,000 lumen-hours has fallen from about 40 cents in 1800 to about one-tenth of a cent today. The black line in the chart plots this series as an index. (The sharp fall at the end of the line marks the introduction of the compact fluorescent bulb.) In real terms, of course, the fall is even sharper: 40 cents in 1800 is worth more than $4 in today"s money. Compare this with a price series calculated using the conventional methods of official statistics—that is, by looking at the prices of goods that provide light rather than at the price of light itself. Mr. Nordhaus stitches together such a series from a variety of official sources. According to this measure, the price of light has fallen in real terms since 1800, but has gone up by 180% in nominal terms (as shown by the white line in the chart). In other words, conventional estimates would put the price of light in 1800 at about four-hundredths of a cent per 1,000 lumen-hour. Mr. Nordhaus" first series shows that the price of light in 1800 was about 1,000 times dearer than that. This staggering difference is par@ an illustration of the effect of compound interest. It represents a drift of roughly 3.6% a year between the official and the true measures of inflation in the price of light, sustained for nearly 200 years. Even so, 3.6% a year is still a lot. If that difference applied across the board, and not just to light, America"s present rates of inflation and economic growth would not be 3% and 4% , respectively. Inflation would be less than zero; and true output (ie, output of the services provided by goods) would be rising at a correspondingly faster rate, of more than 7% a year. All is revealed. How typical is light? The chief cause of the drift between its two price series is technological progress: the efficiency of sources of light has increased continuously and rapidly since 1800, partly because existing techniques were improved and partly because entirely new ones appeared. Conventional measures, even when prepared by careful statisticians who understand the problem, fail to capture these improvements. The question is whether other goods are as strongly affected by technological progress. Many are. Other studies suggest that the upward bias in the measured price of computers is 15% a year, and for capital goods 3%-4% a year. A wide range of big inventions and improvements have been underrepresented or altogether ignored in official price figures; examples cited by Mr. Nordhaus include cars, radios, televisions, air-conditioning, telephones, photocopiers and zippers. The list could be extended indefinitely. To explore the implications, Mr. Nordhaus next calculates two new indices for real wages (wages adjusted for price rises) since 1800. He simply assumes a price bias, good by good, allowing it to vary according to how susceptible each good is to technological change. The "low-bias" index assumes a drift that ranges from zero for goods experiencing little change up to two-thirds of that of light for goods undergoing the most rapid change. The "high-bias" index assumes a drift of 0.5% a year across the board, plus a drift equal to that of light for the most rapidly changing goods. Conventional methods say that America"s real wages have increased by a factor of 13 since 1800. Mr. Nordhaus" low estimate says that the true increase is more than four runes greater. According to his high estimate, it is 75 times greater. America and the world have traveled much farther in the past 200 years than economists have realized—and they are still leaving official statistics far behind.

问答题Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we"d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S. , but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually. We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. At present, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don"t use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas, and when they"re demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it"s something we"ll never do exceptionally well, it"s almost certainly something we can learn to do better.

问答题Introduce briefly the development of RFID and its possible prospects.

问答题Questions for Reference: 1. With the worsening global financial crisis, university graduates are facing a very serious employment situation. Could you say something about what you or your friends are planning to do to sort out this problem? 2. The government has adopted some measures to help university graduates seek employment. Could you mention one or two of these measures and then comment? 3. One alternative is to apply for government jobs or to set up your own business. Are you planning to become a civil servant or self-employed? Why or why not?

问答题 Henry Ford and the American Automobile Detroit has some of the most beautiful residential neighborhoods in the USA and at the same time some of the most shocking slums. Detroit owes its rapid growth and one-time prosperity to the automobile, and above all to Henry Ford. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he was the first man to mass-produce it, and this made it available to the ordinary man. Many automobiles were being built by the hand at the turn of the century and were much too expensive for all but the wealthy. In 1903 Henry Ford's first mass. produced Model T cars cost $850. By the early 1920s he was able to reduce the price to $350. Between 1903 and 1927 Ford manufactured 15 million Model T Fords and earned a profit of $700 million. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. In 1927 he produced his sedan Model A, which was much more comfortable than the open, windswept Model T. Henry Ford was himself a born mechanic and could build a car with his own hands. So he respected his workers and treated them well. In 1914, when the basic wage for an industrial worker in Detroit was $11 a week, Ford announced that he would pay his workers $5 a day. Ford believed in the dignity of work, and did not wish his men to become underpaid robots. He also built them a special town on the outskirts of the city. He is credited with "Fordism": mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford's basic wage of $5 a day caused not only a wage explosion in the city, it also caused a population explosion. Blacks from the south poured into the city, until there were almost as many blacks in Detroit as whites. Other industries connected with the automobile were attracted to Detroit, and more and more factories sprang up in and around the city. Other automobile corporations also made Detroit their headquarters. General Motors built factories in Detroit as did Chrysler. In the 1960s, one in three people who lived in Detroit worked in the automobile industry. Now many plants have been dispersed to other parts of the States, and unemployment, particularly among blacks, has become a serious problem. But the fortune of the Ford family was already made. As owner of the Ford Motor Company, Ford became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. True to the tradition of the American millionaires, Edsel and Henry Ford Ⅱ gave away half their fortune. They gave $300 million to public education, public television and to social research. Americans depend on the automobile like no other people. The total mileage traveled by American motorists in one year is about one million million miles. At the moment a revolution is going on in the American automobile world. In the 1960s there was a change in fashion in favor of small cars. Many small and medium-sized cars are still being imported especially from Germany and Japan. Now American automobile manufacturers have followed the trend. They are committed to building smaller new cars, as part of a program of energy conservation. All new cars, too, are built so that they can only take unleaded gas. Some of the most dangerous pollutants are being removed from the air in American cities. It remains to be seen, however, if the American automobile industry will ever again regain its former glory.

问答题Power means an ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what they otherwise would not. One can affect others" behavior in three main ways: threats of coercion ("sticks"), inducements and payments ("carrots"), and attraction that makes others want what you want. A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, or aspiring to its level of prosperity. Because the ability to control others is often associated with the possession of certain resources, politicians and diplomats commonly define power, as the possession of population, territory, natural resources, economic size, military forces, and political stability. For example, in the agrarian economies of eighteenth-century Europe, population was a critical power resource since it provided a base for taxes and recruitment of infantry. Traditionally, the test of a great power was its strength in war. Today, however, the definition of power is losing emphasis on military force and conquest that marked earlier eras. The factors of technology, education, and economic growth are becoming more significant in international power, while geography, population, and raw materials are becoming somewhat less important. In this sense, it is important to set the agenda and attract others in world politics through soft power, which co-opts people rather than coerces them.

问答题In the 1950s, blue jeans became a statement by those who wish to boycott the values of a consumer-based society that was concerned only with acquisition. Blue-jeans-wearing rebels of popular movies were an expression of contempt towards the empty and obedient silence of the Cold- War American; the positive images of American consumer society were under siege. What had been a piece of traditional American culture—blue jeans—became a rejection of traditional culture. These images found an eager audience among those for whom gray suits and formal dresses had been elevated as ideals of the age. In blue jeans, men and boys found relief from the underlying harness required to fit into more formal water. Even some among the middle class slipped into jeans for a sleepy afternoon on the porch.