问答题我将明白只有低能者才会江郎才尽，我并非低能者。我必须不断对抗那些企图摧垮我的力量。失望与悲伤一眼就会被识破，而其他许多敌人是不易察觉的，他们往往面带微笑，伸出友谊之手，却随时有可能将我摧垮。对他们，我永远不能放松警惕。
有了这项新本领，我也更能体察别人的情绪变化。我宽容怒气冲冲的人，因为他尚未懂得控制自己的情绪，我可以忍受他的指责和辱骂，因为我知道明天他会改变，重新变得随和。
我从此领悟到人类和我自己情绪变化的奥秘。对于自己干变万化的个性，我不再听之任之，我将积极主动地控制情绪，从而掌握自己的命运。
问答题Directions:
In this part of the test, you will hear 5 English sentences. You will hear the sentences only once. After you have heard each sentence, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space on your Answer Sheet.
问答题 Questions 4～6 When Dana Hale
adopted her son four years ago, she says she had to "play hardball" with her
boss to get the same paid leave granted colleagues who give birth. The
Washington employment lawyer knew then that if she and her self-employed husband
adopted again, it would be under new management. So Hale began researching
adoption-friendly workplaces, and soon focused on Capital One. The big
financial-services company, headquartered in McLean, Va., offers $ 5,000 in
assistance per adopted child, plus six weeks of paid leave. More important to
Hale, the company fosters a supportive culture for adoptive parents, who network
through a corporate intranet site. "I specifically chose Capital One so I could
adopt more children," says Hale, 44, on the eve of a trip to Ukraine to bring
home two teenage sisters. Adoption has become an employment
issue. Because more women delay parenthood to pursue careers during their prime
childbearing years, some seek alternative avenues to build their families. With
each adoption costing up to $ 30,000 and often demanding mounds of paperwork and
weeks of travel, workers are asking their employers for help. They're getting
it, mainly from companies in competitive industries hungry to attract and keep
talent. Google, JPMorgan Chase, Abbott Laboratories, Avon and Motorola have all
added adoption assistance to their buffet of benefits. In 1990, only 12% of
1,000 companies surveyed by Hewitt Associates offered financial assistance for
adoption. By 2006, 45% of companies did. Rita Sorensen, executive director of
the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, estimates that in 2007 fully half of
employers provide adoption benefits and that within five years those offerings
will be considered standard. Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's,
may have kicked off the trend 15 years ago when he began urging other CEOs to
assist employees with adoption. Himself an adoptee, Thomas started his
foundation to help find permanent homes for children in the US foster-care
system. (More than 140,000 currently await adoption, according to Sorensen.)
This year the foundation began tracking corporations and ranking them according
to the generosity of their benefits. Of companies that provide adoption
assistance, it found that $ 4,700 is offered on average per adoption and about
double that if a child has special needs or is from foster care. Companies are
also giving workers an average of five weeks of paid parental leave.
Even as employers retreat from providing expensive benefits like lifetime
health coverage, they are finding that adoption assistance is relatively
inexpensive—and yields disproportionately high rewards in employee loyalty,
community goodwill and solid-gold p. r. Unlike maternity benefits, adoption
assistance isn't covered by medical or disability insurance, meaning the entire
cost must come directly from an employer's pocket. Still, only 0.5% of employees
tap adoption benefits, but the assistance is so appreciated that workers gush
about it to colleagues, spreading the warm, fuzzy corporate feelings. "Not to
cheapen it, but it's cost-effective goodwill," says Sorensen, "one that doesn't
hit the bottom line very hard. " Greg Rasin, a partner with Proskauer Rose who
advises employers on benefits, points out that at the very least, the Families
and Medical Leave Act compels employers with more than 50 workers to provide up
to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Legal bonus: offering adoption benefits might
shield them from lawsuits by workers seeking parity with those who receive
maternity leave. Offering adoption assistance was an easy call
for Steve Steinour, CEO of Citizens Financial Group and the father of two
adopted children. "We knew from experience that for most Americans, adoption is
an unaffordable option," he says. Citizens—a bank based in Providence, R. I. ,
with 25,000 employees—provides up to $ 21,000 in aid, a sum that helped put it
at the top of the Dave Thomas Foundation's list of adoption-friendly workplaces.
Though Steinour says retention is much greater among the 100 or so workers who
have used the benefits, he admits that this impact is hard to quantify for
shareholders. "You can't translate everything into a direct payback," he says.
Payback comes in the form of loyalty and gratitude from
employees like Paula Cavallaro, a Citizens trust administrator. Already the
parents of Amanda, 12, Cavallaro and her husband had "talked and talked" about
adopting another child. The Cavallaros received $10,000 from Citizens to adopt
Anny, 13, from Colombia last summer (employees receive more for special-needs
adoptions). "We would still have done it, but having the benefit just made it so
much easier," says Cavallaro, 48. "I will always, always, always be grateful for
the help. "
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问答题The BBC is to offer staff contracts to some of its biggest names in a U-turn after months of accusations that it is enabling tax avoidance. These will be offered mainly to highly paid individuals who it had previously made to set up personal service companies. Those affected face pay cuts of up to 40 percent because the BBC will become liable for national insurance contributions among other employment costs. Lord Patten of Barnes, Chairman of the BBC Trust, said yesterday that he hoped other public sector organizations would follow the BBC"s lead.
The Times
revealed in July that Jeremy Paxman was among a number of presenters furious that they had been subjected to questions about their integrity as a result of being asked to set up personal service companies. Such arrangements can save individuals thousands of pounds as they pay corporation tax of 21 percent rather than income tax at up to 50 percent. The BBC avoids employers" national insurance payments of 13.8 percent by paying people as freelancers. However, if the Revenue decides that a worker is in reality an employee it can chase the BBC for the back tax. The corporation is considering a report it commissioned from Deloitte after criticism of its tax affairs by MPs. It is understood to have concluded that some individuals paid through service contracts should become staff.
Last week it emerged in a report by MPs that the BBC was paying 1,500 presenters, musicians and actors through private companies. The cross-party Public Accounts Committee said that this was a "staggeringly inappropriate" way of paying staff. Margaret Hodge, its chairwoman, said that paying regular contributors through service companies gave rise to "suspicions of complicity in tax avoidance". The committee found that the BBC issued 25,000 contracts to freelance contributors. Out of these, 4,500 contributors were paid through personal service companies.
Lord Patten said: "It"s undoubtedly the case that some freelancers will be put on the payroll. I am sure that we will also want more regular information going to the Revenue on service companies so that they can be absolutely clear about the tax liability. And we may wish, frankly, to go further than that. If we do ... I hope other public sector organisations will do the same." He admitted that the BBC had not given enough clarity about tax arrangements of its workforce but denied that the BBC had ever "connived at tax dodging". He said the BBC had asked its freelance workers to set up personal service companies "in order to avoid the licence fee-payer having to be liable for unpaid taxes by people being paid in that way".
A BBC source said the decision to take people on to staff had been made because it was "a publicly funded organisation and sometimes, whether or not you"re breaking any laws, you have to reflect public feeling". "This proposal will be cost neutral," the source said. "If you"re a freelancer paid by a service company now the very high likelihood is that your pay would go down, but you would get the benefits of a pension, holiday and sick pay."
Mike Warburton, director of tax at accountants Grant Thornton, calculated that the extra costs of paying national insurance, holiday pay, sick pay and pension contributions could cost the BBC an extra 40 percent. A presenter paid ￡100,000 through a personal service company would have to accept a salary of ￡60,000 to join the staff. Mr. Warburton said: "To do it on a cost neutral basis seems a sensible approach. Licence fee-payers would presumably not want the BBC saddled with extra costs." A BBC spokesman said the corporation could not comment on the Deloitte report. "The review of these arrangements is ongoing and we will report back to the BBC Trust later this autumn," he said.
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问答题When President Obama took the stage here Wednesday to address a community--and a nation-- traumatized by Saturday's shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, it invited comparisons to President George W. Bush's speech to the nation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the memorial service President Bill Clinton led after the bombing of a federal office building killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. But Mr. Obama's appearance presented a deeper challenge, reflecting the tenor of his times. Unlike those tragedies which, at least initially, united a mournful country and quieted partisan divisions--this one has, in the days since the killings, had the opposite effect, inflaming the divide. It was a political reality Mr. Obama seemed to recognize the moment he took the stage. He directly confronted the political debate that erupted after the rampage, asking people of all beliefs not to use the tragedy to turn on one another. He called for an end to partisan recriminations, and for a unity that has seemed increasingly elusive as each day has brought more harsh condemnations from the left and the right. It was one of the more powerful addresses that Mr. Obama has delivered as president, harnessing the emotion generated by the shock and loss from Saturday's shootings to urge Americans "to remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together. /
问答题In a normal recession, the to-do list is clear. Copies of Keynes are dusted off, the banks lower interest rates, the president and Congress cut taxes and hike spending. In time, purchasing, production and loans perk up, and Keynes is placed back on the shelf. No larger alterations to the economy are made, because our economy, but for the occasional bump in the road, is fundamentally sound. This has been the drill in every recession since World War Ⅱ.
Republicans and Democrats argue over whose taxes should be cut the most and which projects should be funded, but under public pressure to do something, they usually find some mutually acceptable midpoint and enact a stimulus package. This time, though, don't expect that to be the end of the story — because the coming recession will not be normal, and our economy is not fundamentally sound. This time around, the nation will have to craft new versions of some of the reforms that Franklin Roosevelt created to steer the nation out of the Great Depression.
问答题In the 5,000 years since Ancient Egyptians experimented with scented plants, aromatherapy has been credited with a plethora of powers. Today it is a multimillion-pound industry, recognized as effective by three quarters of the adult population and hailed as a cure for problems from nicotine addiction to baldness. But aromatherapy could be little more than an illusion, psychologists argue. Neil Martin, from Middlesex University, a specialist in the psychology of olfaction, has a less polite word for it. "bunkum". Dr. Martin enlisted 60 volunteers and subjected them all to experimentally induced pain by getting them to plunge their forearms into ice-cold water for 15 minutes. A third of participants were exposed to a pleasant lemon odour, a third to the odour of machine oil and the rest were in an odourless room. They were asked to rate the amount of pain they felt on a scale of 0 (painless) to 11 (unbearable) every five minutes. At the first time of asking, those exposed to an odour reported significantly higher pain levels, with a score of 8 for both groups, than the control group, which had an average of 6. After 15 minutes the pain level of the no-odour group had fallen to 5. Among the lemon-odour group it had fallen to 6, while for the machine oil group it remained at 8. Dr. Martin said his findings showed not merely that aromatherapy had no effect but that it could be positively harmful. "Aromatherapy appears to be counter-productive. Most claims by aroma therapists have no basis in science," he said. "The effect it has on real hard illnesses are non-existent. It is a waste of time and money. Exposure to both odours increased the pain. It could be that the odours had a stimulant effect and drew attention to the pain because it made the experience of being in the room with the bucket of water more noticeable. " He accepted, however, that aromatherapy may have a powerful placebo effect. "People going to aromatherapy have a mental problem or a physical disorder that they want to have treated and the belief that they want to get better can overcome the inefficacy of the treatment," he said. He added that previous research into aromatherapy had been largely inconclusive. Dr. Martin's research, presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference in Cardiff, comes after the release of a study last week claiming that spinal manipulation, another popular form of complementary medicine, did not work and could make matters worse. Both papers are highly contentious. The British public now spends more than ￡24 million a year on over-the-counter aromatherapy products such as essential oils, and 75 per cent of the population believe that the treatment works. Carole Preen, the secretary of the Aromatherapy Consortium, disputed Dr. Martin's findings. "This research didn't involve aromatherapy because they simply used a certain smell to try and gain an effect. Aromatherapy is not a cure and no one would ever make that claim, but there is a wealth of scientific research published in journals to show that it can be beneficial. It can lift mood, alleviate pain and helps very many people," she said. WHAT'S IN A SMELL ·The British public spends more than 24 million a year on over-the-counter aromatherapy products such as essential oils ·75 per cent of the population believes that the treatment works ·Aromatherapy had been hailed as a cure for problems ranging from nicotine addiction to baldness ·The Prince of Wales is a fan. Peterborough prison last year hired two holistic therapists for its inmates ·There are 7,000 therapists registered with the Aromatherapy Organisations Council ·Hammersmith Hospital, in West London, offers aromatherapy massages for NHS cancer patients
问答题How Green is your orange juice? More than a year ago, PepsiCo enlisted Columbia University's Earth Institute and the environmental-auditing firm Carbon Trust to help assess the carbon footprint of each half gallon of its Tropicana orange juice. The sustainability initiative found that on average the process, from growing the oranges to getting a 64-oz. carton of healthy goodness into your fridge, involved emitting 3.75 Ib. of greenhouse gases. And the single biggest contributor to Tropicana's carbon footprint wasn't the gas-guzzling trucks that deliver the cartons to stores or the machinery used to run a modern citrus facility. It was the fertilizer for the orange trees, which accounted for a whopping 35% of the OJ's overall emissions. That came as a surprise even to the people doing the accounting. "We thought it might be transport or packaging," says Tim Carey, PepsiCo's sustainability director. "But the agricultural aspects of the operation are more important than we expected. " So to make a greener OJ, Pepsico knew it needed to start looking for a greener fertilizer. Inorganic nitrogen fertilizer--the sort used by most farms in the U. S. --is very carbon-intensive because of all the natural gas used in the production process. (Agriculture eats up as much as 5% of natural-gas consumption worldwide, and the cost of fertilizer is closely linked to that of natural gas, leaving farmers vulnerable to huge price swings. ) Given how much nitrogen fertilizer is used on U. S. farms--more than 13 million tons in 2007 alone--developing a greener way to help pIants grow could put a serious dent in the country's carbon emissions. That's why Pepsico is testing two low-carbon fertilizers at a citrus farm in Bradenton, Fla. Yara International, the world's largest fertilizer producer, is supplying PepsiCo with an experimental calcium- nitrate-based fertilizer that emits much less nitrous oxide-which, pound for pound, has a far more powerful greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide--than conventional fertilizer does. The change in ingredients, plus a push to improve the energy efficiency at its production plants, could cut Yara's fertilizer's emissions by up to 90%. The other fertilizer Pepsico is testing is an organic product made by Outlook Resources, a Toronto- based sustainable-agriculture company that uses biofuels, food waste and other renewable materials. Outlook is eschewing natural gas, a fossil fuel that often has to be transported long distances, and instead the firm is actively seeking out locally sourced ingredients that help cut its carbon footprint even further. And since Outlook' s fertilizer is also more efficient than conventional fertilizer, less of it has to be used on crops, which helps prevent the water pollution linked to fertilizer runoff. Backyard gardeners who want to cut their carbon footprint can emulate Outlook's organic approach: skip the bag of fertilizer and make some biochar by smashing used charcoal bricks and sprinkling the dust on flower beds and vegetabIe patches. As for PepsiCo, the company will try out Yara and Outlook's alterna-fertilizers for five years to see if they can cut Tropicana's carbon footprint without diminishing overall crop yield, which would likely raise operating costs. "Sustainability is ultimately about being a better company," says Carey. If the pilot study works, the greener fertilizers could shrink the carbon footprint of PepsiCo's citrus growers by as much as 50% and reduce the total carbon footprint of a glass of its orange juice by up to 20%. Now that's something we can all drink to.1.Explain the beginning question of the passage: "How green is your orange juice?"(para. 1) What do we know from the investigation of Earth Institute and Carbon Trust ?
问答题Even on paper, urban sprawl looks ugly. It looks more so from the 110th floor of Chicago"s Sears Tower. From there you can survey, into the misty distance, a metropolitan area that now encompasses no fewer than 265 separate municipalities and covers 3,800 square miles in six northeastern Illinois counties.
The expansion of the region is sometimes described as growth. More accurately, Chicago has simply spread out. Between 1970 and 1990 the population of the metro area increased by only 4%, while land used for housing increased by 46%. More telling, land used for commercial development increased by a whopping 74%.
The drawbacks of sprawl need no repetition: the isolation of less mobile (usually poorer) groups in the inner cities, and the premature abandonment of infrastructure. Worse, these problems are now overtaking the very suburbs that were once supposed to escape them. Between 1970 and 1990, the city of Chicago lost 17% of its population while the suburbs gained by 24%. But the inner suburbs lost people too. Over the past ten years, 70 inner-suburban towns have lost residents to towns on the periphery.
A recent series in the Chicago Tribune, "The Graying of Suburbia", documented the population decline of inner-ring towns ranging from dilapidated Dolton and Harvey to relatively up-market Elmhurst and Skokie. In the harder-hit cases, population loss has been compounded by falling property values along with rising crime and unemployment. (Several inner suburbs have banned out-door "For Sale" signs to curb the growing sense of panic.) Their fate contrasts with Naperville, a booming outer suburb, which is currently developing a 10,000- acre site for 22 more housing tracts and several shopping malls. Since 1980, Naperville"s population has more than doubled.
The expanding towns on the edges make no apology for their prosperity. Sprawl is natural, they argue ; Americans live in smaller households ( true-house-holds increased by 20% when population grew by only 4%) and they want bigger houses (also true—and they want three-car garages ). Businesses in turn follow the outwardly mobile workers. They also appreciate the cheaper land and better roads. As a case in point, ask Sears. The very company that built the magnificent downtown skyscraper relocated 5,000 workers to the outer suburb of Hoffman Estates in 1992.
Critics of sprawl argue that government deals an unfair hand. An article published this summer by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shows that various incentives in the federal tax code, including the deductibility of mortgage payments, promote over-consumption of housing. The code also allows taxpayers to defer capital-gains taxes if they buy a new home of equal or greater value, which pushes buyers towards higher-priced houses—most of them on the edges of cities. Another subsidy is provided for cars, the sine qua non of suburban life. By some estimates, existing taxes on motorists cover only 60% of the real costs of government road-related services.
Far from expanding under one central authority, almost all metro areas are tended by a hotch-potch of city, town and other smaller governments. (Metropolitan Chicago has over 1,200 separate tax districts, more than any other in the country.) The quality of the services provided by these governments depends on the quality of the local property that they have to tax; so aggressive jurisdictions offer rebates or subsidies to win juicy new developments.
The outcome, on one front, is often the premature development of new land. Towns on the outskirts, armed with subsidies and plenty of space, lure development away from the center. In the past 20 years 440 square miles of farmland have been developed, with sites further in are abandoned. The city of Chicago alone has over 2,000 vacant manufacturing sites.
Tax-base competition also encourages sprawl in other ways. When the taxing jurisdictions are so small, the departure of wealthier residents and business increased the strain on those left behind. Taxes must go up just to maintain the same level of services. Thus in Harvey, a declining suburb, the property tax on a $ 50,000 house is $1,400—whereas in booming Naperville, if it had such cheap houses, the rate would be around $900. At the same time, the Harvey property taxes do not stretch very far. Last year, the local school district was able to raise only $1,349 per elementary school pupil, compared with $7,178 in wealthy Wilmette. Although state funds help to even things out, the disparities become another reason to move.
Over the long term, there is a chance that sprawl will not go unmanaged for ever: that the price of inner-city decline will eventually become too high. But it has not reached that point yet. The inner areas would like to see a regionally coordinated effort to pursue economic development (to diminish tax-base competition), or a region-wide sharing of commercial tax revenues, as has been tried to good effect in the Minneapolis—St Paul metropolitan area. But the deeper incentives to sprawl will still remain. Subsidies for home ownership are well guarded by lobbyists in Washington, and local governments are rightly jealous of their self- determination. For the time being, metropolitan areas like Chicago will just keep expanding. So what if it means loosening another notch on the belt?
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问答题LONDON—Down in the mall, between the fast-food joint and the bagel shop, a group of young people huddles in a flurry of baggy combat pants, skateboards, and slang. They size up a woman teetering past wearing DKNY, carrying Time magazine in one hand and a latte in the other. She brushes past a guy in a Yankees' baseball cap who is talking on his Motorola cell phone about the Martin Scorsese film he saw last night.
It's a standard American scene—only this isn't America, it's Britain. US culture is so pervasive, the scene could be played out in any one of dozens of cities. Budapest or Berlin, if not Bogota or Bordeaux. Even Manila or Moscow.
As the unrivaled global superpower, America exports its culture on an unprecedented scale. From music to media, film to fast food, language to literature and sport, the American idea is spreading inexorably, not unlike the influence of empires that preceded it.
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问答题Directions:
In this part of the test, you will hear 2 English passages. You will hear the passages ONLY ONCE. After you have heard each passage, translate it into Chinese and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. You may take notes while you are listening.
问答题北京奥运会火炬创意灵感来自“渊源共生，和谐共融”的“祥云”图案。祥云的文化概念在中国具有数千年的时间跨度，是具有代表性的中国文化符号。火炬造型的设计灵感来自中国传统的纸卷轴。纸是中国四大发明之一，通过丝绸之路传到西方。人类文明随着纸的出现得以更好地传播。源于汉代的漆红色在火炬上的运用使之明显区别于往届奥运会火炬设计，红银对比的色彩产生醒目的视觉效果，有利于各种形式的媒体传播。火炬上下比例均匀分割，祥云图案和立体浮雕式的工艺设计使整个火炬高雅华丽、内涵厚重。