问答题Questions 7～10 College rankings are dead! Long live college rankings! At a meeting of the country's leading liberal arts schools this week in Annapolis, Md., a majority of the 80 or so college presidents in attendance said they would no longer participate in the popular annual rankings conducted by US News and World Report. Instead, the Annapolis Group announced it will help develop an alternative set of data to aid students and their families in the bewildering quest to figure out how one school differs from the next. College presidents have long been critical of the US News rankings, in part because 25% of a school's score is based on a survey filled in by roughly half of college presidents and other top administrators, who rate schools based on reputation but often only selectively, leaving most of the list blank and unjudged. The peer survey strikes many in higher education as silly. But they believe the rankings have an additional and more nefarious component. Several college presidents have publicly complained that the rankings' emphasis on the average SAT scores of incoming freshmen has led colleges to fight over high-achieving (and often wealthy) students by offering them merit scholarships and thus leaving fewer financial-aid dollars available to low-income students. But now the Annapolis Group, whose 124 members take up most of the slots in U. S. News's list of the top 100 liberal arts schools, is putting its collective weight behind a web-based alternative to the rankings that is being spearheaded by the 900-member National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU). NAICU's easy-to-read template, which is expected to be rolled out by hundreds of schools in September, allows students and their families to pull up extensive information organized in an objective format that includes such data as what percentage of students graduate in four years compared to those who graduate in five or six years. It plans to provide a level of detail that is not included in the US News rankings, but that could be very important to parents' checkbooks. The NAICU template also lists the four most common majors at each school and gives a complete breakdown on class sizes, revealing how many classes have fewer than 20 students, fewer than 40, fewer than 100 or more than 100. NAICU is trying to provide a more complete picture than US News, and the new format doesn't gloss over unpleasant details. For example, it will list a school's current tuition alongside the sticker price from each of the previous four years (Parents, get ready to watch those bar charts keep climbing upwards over time!). It will also include the percentage of students who receive financial aid as well as what the average net tuition is for financial aid recipients. The new set of ratings also contains links to such sought-after details as a school's campus safety report, internship and career-placement services and information about how many of its graduates go on to graduate school or are employed in the field of their choice within a certain amount of time after graduation. However, NAICU stops short of ranking schools in numerical order and although the association will serve as a central repository for all the new data, which can also be accessed through an individual school's site, students and their families will have to print out the two-page profiles if they want to see how one institution stacks up against another. "We're letting consumers rank the institutions based on their needs," says NAICU spokesman Tony Pals. Of course, there's nothing to keep US News or anyone else from plugging all this new data into a rankings formula. And more than a few college presidents think that isn't such a bad thing. "Some of my colleagues are ethical purists, and I applaud them," Millsaps College President Dr. Frances Lucas says of the US News rankings' most strident critics at the Annapolis meeting. "But many of us live in the real world." And since the US News rankings are likely here to stay, Lucas and other presidents are hoping that if schools provide more data in a more meaningful, transparent manner, the rankings will become more meaningful, too.1.Why are people criticizing the annual college rankings conducted by US News and World Report?

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问答题The British government says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. "The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions" —you name it, it"s been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn"t changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years. England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge. To misquote Woody Allen, those who can"t do, teach; those who can"t teach, run the schools. Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD"s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea. Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question, what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries. Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold- McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things, get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind": schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don"t. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically. Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else. Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm. A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class size and educational achievement. McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a master"s degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

问答题What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented, has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality. You may say: "If one wants truth, why not go to the literally true book? Biography or documentary, these amazing accounts of amazing experiences which people have. " Yes, but I am suggesting to you that there is a distinction between truth and so-called reality. The novel does not simply recount experience; it adds to experience. And here comes in what is the actual livening spark of the novel: the novelist's imagination has a power of its own It does not merely invent, it perceives. It intensifies, therefore it gives power, extra importance, and greater truth to what may well be ordinary and everyday things.

问答题中国坚定不移地走和平发展道路，是基于中国国情的必然选择。1840年鸦片战争以后的 100多年里，中国受尽了列强的欺辱。消除战争，实现和平，建设独立富强、民生幸福的国家，是近代以来中国人民孜孜以求的奋斗目标。今天的中国虽然取得了巨大的发展成就，但人口多，底子薄，发展不平衡，仍然是世界上最大的发展中国家。推动经济社会发展，不断改善人民生活始终是中国的中心任务。中国人民最需要、最珍爱和平的国际环境，愿尽自己所能，为推动各国共同发展作出积极贡献。

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问答题There is an old saying, "Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks". In four historic years, America has been given great tasks and faced them with strength and courage. Our people have restored the vigor of this economy and shown resolve and patience in a new kind of war. Our military has brought justice to the enemy and honor to America. Our nation has defended itself and served the freedom of all mankind. I"m proud to lead such an amazing country, and I"m proud to lead it forward. Because we have done the hard work, we are entering a season of hope. We will continue our economic progress. We"ll reform our outdated tax code. We"ll strengthen the Social Security for the next generation. We"ll make public schools ail they can be. And we will uphold our deepest values of family and faith.

问答题三年前，中非合作论坛的创立，开启了合作新纪元。三年来，中国政府提前兑现承诺，减免了31个非洲国家105亿元人民币的债务。 我们认为，发展中国家应在全球化进程中获益，而不应被边缘化。国际社会应采取行动，帮助发展中国家解决困难，提高发展中国家自主发展、保护生态环境、实现可持续发展的能力。发达国家有义务、有责任进一步开放市场，取消贸易壁垒和农产品补贴，切实履行对发展中国家增加援助和减免债务的承诺。中国愿与非洲国家在参与国际经济规则的制定和多边贸易谈判中协调立场，维护发展中国家应有的权益。

问答题合营企业设董事会，其人数组成由合营各方协商，在合同、章程中确定，并由合营各方委派。董事会是合营企业的最高权力机构，决定合营企业的一切重大问题。董事长由合营各方协商确定或由董事会选举产生。董事长是合营企业法定代表人。董事长不能履行职责时，应授权其他董事代表合营企业。 　　董事会会议由董事长负责召集并主持。董事会会议应当有2/3以上董事出席方能举行。董事不能出席的，可以出具委托书委托他人代表其出席和表决。董事会会议应用中文和英文作详细记录，并在会议结束后14日内送交每位董事，由出席董事会会议的各位董事签字确认。

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.1.Have traditional estimates succeeded in measuring the price of light? Why or why not?

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问答题维护世界和平，促进共同发展，是各国人民的共同心愿。中国人民愿与各国人民一道，推动建立公正合理的国际政治经济新秩序，提倡国际关系民主化，尊重世界多样性，促进树立新安全观，努力实现全球经济均衡可持续发展。中国人民对世界上仍陷于战火、冲突、饥饿、贫困等苦难的人民怀着深切同情，衷心祝愿他们早日走上和平发展之路，并愿为他们提供力所能及的帮助。我相信，只要各国人民和有远见的政治家，从人类的前途命运和共同利益出发，以合作谋和平，以合作促发展，携手克服前进道路上的困难，我们就一定能够共同创造人类的美好未来。

问答题In the education circles, homework opponents argue that homework damage the physical, emotional, and mental health of children by reducing the amount of time they have to play and get fresh air.

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 in your ANSWER BOOKLET.

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问答题Cultural relevance and sensitivity are key issues that American companies have to tackle as they tap into the fast-growing ethnic population in the United States, said Bill Imada, chairman of Los Angeles-based Imada Group. The agency, which, specializes in Asian language advertising, has seen meaningful growth as more American firms look for better approaches to ethnic customers whose cultures, habits, tastes and traditions have long been unexplored territory for corporate America. A rapid expansion of ethnic groups in the United States has shifted more advertising dollars toward consumers whose mother tongue is not English. Over 11 percent of the American population were foreign-born. Among them, more than 21 million speak English "less than well," according to the Census data for 2000. Of all the things that distinguish immigrants from the folks in their adopted country, language seems to be the easiest one to surmount. Yet it’s not always easy to find an equivalent expression in a foreign language. It is tough to explain "energy conservation" to someone, whose language does not contain a proper word for "electricity". Cultural difference rather than language has emerged as the crucial issue.

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问答题Why cheaper oil might help to "mitigate any slowdown"?

问答题 Last month the U.S. Army, bumped favored defense contractor L-3 Communications from a $ 4.6 billion contract to provide translators and interpreters in Iraq. A new venture called Global Linguistic Solutions (GLS), headed by retired Army Major General James (Spider) Marks and primarily formed to bid on the contract, landed the job. The surprise caused L-3 shares to fall nearly 6%; the company lowered its sales forecast this year by $ 500 million. Winning the contract may be the easy part for GLS. Luring interpreters to Iraq is another story. Job listings posted on L-3's website read like something out of a Tom Clancy thriller. Wanted. "Arabic Linguist… Ability to deal unobtrusively with the local populace… Must be able to live in a harsh environment." The pay isn't mentioned, but L-3 recently offered interpreters more than $175,000 annually to work in Iraq. Linguists usually don't carry weapons and are often called on to participate in raids and other combat-related tasks. Casualty reports show that L-3's Titan Corp, the major contractor supplying interpreters to the U.S. military, had 216 employees killed in Iraq—nearly 100 more fatalities than the entire British army stationed there. Danger is just one way that the linguistics industry—interpreters who relay live chat and translators who process documents—has changed dramatically. More benignly, the Web and the global economy have led to 7.5% annual growth in the market, now pegged as a $ 9.4 billion business, according to research group Common Sense Advisory. While much of that is due to the military, there has been renewed growth elsewhere. "Firms from Starbucks to McDonald's now have to communicate and market to customers in dozens of different languages," says Common Sense Advisory president Don DePalma. The boom in translation jobs comes because of—and despite—technology. DePalma says there has been real acceleration in demand tied to software, since Microsoft's new Vista operating system, updated versions of Mac and various other electronic devices have to conform to European standards. That requires local language to be used in everything from instruction manuals to safety standards. Add the growing use of bilingual signage aimed at Hispanics, multilingual U.S. court requirements and hospital needs, and over the next eight years, full-time linguistics employment is expected to jump more than 25%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Computers are certainly doing some of the work. Companies like eBay, GM and Motorola have all used software from Massachusetts firm Idiom Technologies to help power their efforts in localization, as language targeting is sometimes called. Still, it often takes a real brain to differentiate terms in context: the word trunk can refer to a suitcase, a car hatch or an elephant's snout, for example. The biggest player in translation services last year was publicly held Lionbridge, employing 4,000 full-time staff members and 10,000 freelancers in 25 countries, with a current market cap of $350 million. Lionbridge, based in Massachusetts, translates technology for mobile-phone companies and clients such as McDonald's, Google and Yahoo! "Computer code is code," says Lionbridge chief marketing officer Kevin Bolen. "But certain things such as metrics, time stamps and characters have to be re-engineered and hard-encoded into the software to display Japanese kanji, for instance." Lionhridge and its competitors recruit at universities and industry websites such as linguistlist, org with specialists of all stripes in demand, from automotive experts to those with a knack for medical jargon. "India has about a dozen dialects needed to capture a substantial customer base," says Bolen, "so for Nokia we? re translating applications and phones and instructions in nine different ways." Thanks to the Web, new companies become global from the get-go rather than at a later phase, Bolen explains. And localization companies don't just deal in words but also the look, feel and design of text images. "We ask if buttons and keys scale to match the size of the text," he says, noting German characters are 30% longer than those in English, while those in Japanese are 30% shorter. Although English is the language of business, there is essential need for translators who understand Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesian, Tamil and Arabic. It goes back to what Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: "There are no facts, only interpretations."