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When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015, it picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the start-ups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smart phone world.Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acquit-hires”that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech talent.To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their.path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.Like other start-up investors, Mr Arnold’ s own business often depends on selling start-ups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result:“I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on. But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tn, rifling through such small deals—many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise—might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google,Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years—a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill”. tactic to simply close them down.1.What is true about Wunderlist and sunrise after their acquisitions（）.2. Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to （） . 3.PaulArnold is concerned that small acquisitions might（）.4.The US Federal Trade Commission intend to（）.5.For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisition have（）.

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in, some regions will need to nearly double to keep pace, food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently too, for rather particular reason: Brexit.Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 percent of the food it eats,down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s.A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation's health. Sounds great—but bow feasible is this vision?According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds,UK,85 per cent of the country's total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn't allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self- sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods,and probably also farm more intensively—meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn't help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn't have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 percent of the county's land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg—which would involve taking out all the nature reserves and removing thousands of people from their homes—we would achieve only a 30 percent boost in crop production.Just 23 percent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 percent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains,sugars,seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.1.Some people argue that food self-sufficient in UK would2.The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK3.Crop-growing in he UK is restricted due to4.It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people5.The author's attitude to food self-sufficient in the UK is

“Reskilling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the World Economic Forum finds that on average 42 per cent of the “core skills” within job roles will change by 2022. That is a very short timeline.The question of who should pay for reskilling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company that decided to do a massive reskilling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy. Other companies had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy, though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical field, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: When forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.1.Research by the World Economic Forum suggests（）.2.AT&T is cited to show（）.3.Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada（）.4.We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was（）.5.Scandinavian Airlines decided to（）.

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, _1_, to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. _2_ one and the others become distorted.Travel on a London bus and you’ll _3_ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to _4_ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are _5_. How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.Why? Because the target is _6_. People complained that buses were late and infrequent. _7_, the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were _8_ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they _9_ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to _10_, you would have more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to safety, you would get more _11_ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.There is another _12_: people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you _13_ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a _14_ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now ballad as a two-hour flight.The _15_ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well _16_ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a _17_. Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria _18_ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to _19_ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better _20_ the objective.

Write an essay based on the chart below. In your writing, you should1) interpret the chart, and2) give your comments.You should write about 150 words on the ANSWER SHEET. (15 points)

Suppose you are planning a tour of a historical site for a group of international students. Write an email to1) tell them about the site, and 2) give them some tips for the tour Please write you answer on the ANSWER SHEET.Do not use your own name, use “Li Ming” instead. (10 points)

It’s almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. But, the wonderful thing about failure is that it’s entirely up to us to decide how to look at it.We can choose to see failure as “the end of the world”. Or, we can look at failure as the incredible learning experience that it often is. Every time we fail at something, we can choose to look for the lesson we’re meant to learn. These lessons are very important; they’re how we grow, and how we keep from making that same mistake again. Failures stop us only if we let them.Failure can also teach us things about ourselves that we would never have learned otherwise. For instance, failure can help you discover how strong a person you are. Failing at something can help you discover your truest friends, or help you find unexpected motivation to succeed.

Five Ways to Win Over Everyone in the OfficeIs it possible to like everyone in your office? Think about how tough it is to get together 15 people, much less 50, who all get along perfectly. But unlike in friendships, you need coworkers. You work with them every day and you depend on them just as they depend on you. Here are some ways that you can get the whole office on your side（1）__If you have a bone to pick with someone in your workplace, you may try stay tight-lipped around them. But you won’t be helping either one of you. A Harvard Business School study found that observers consistently rated those who were frank about themselves more highly, while those who hid lost trustworthiness. The lesson is not that you should make your personal life an open book, but rather, when given the option to offer up details about yourself or painstakingly conceal them, you should just be honest.（2）_Just as important as being honest about yourself is being receptive to others. We often feel the need to tell others how we feel, whether it’s a concern about a project, a stray thought, or a compliment. Those are all valid, but you need to take time to hear out your coworkers, too. In fact, rushing to get your own ideas out there can cause colleagues to feel you don’t value their opinions. Do your best to engage coworkers in a genuine, back- and-forth conversation, rather than prioritizing your own thoughts.（3）_It’s common to have a “cubicle mate” or special confidant in a work setting. But in addition to those trusted coworkers, you should expand your horizons and find out about all the people around you. Use your lunch and coffee breaks to meet up with colleagues you don’t always see. Find out about their lives and interests beyond the job. It requires minimal effort and goes a long way. This will help to grow your internal network, in addition to being a nice break in the work day.（4）_Positive feedback is important for anyone to hear. And you don’t have to be someone’s boss to tell them they did an exceptional job on a particular project. This will help engender good will in others. But don’t overdo it or be fake about it. One study found that people responded best to comments that shifted from negative to positive, possibly because it suggested they had won somebody over.（5）____This one may be a bit more difficult to pull off, but it can go a long way to achieving results. Remember in dealing with any coworker what they appreciate from an interaction. Watch out for how they verbalize with others. Some people like small talk in a meeting before digging into important matters, while other are more straightforward. Jokes that work one person won’t necessarily land with another. So, adapt your style accordingly to type. Consider the person that you’re dealing with in advance and what will get you to your desired outcome.

Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring — the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year — the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. GenZs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that’s tighter than it’s been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them.If “entitled” is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren’t interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U.S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good. That's a big change from the previous generation. “Millennials wanted more flexibility in their lives,” notes Tanya Michelsen, Associate Director of YouthSight, a UK-based brand manager that conducts regular 60-day surveys of British youth, in findings that might just as well apply to American youth. “Generation Z are looking for more certainty and stability, because of the rise of the gig economy. They have trouble seeing a financial future and they are quite risk averse.”（1）Generation Zs graduating college this spring（）.（2）Generation Zs are keenly aware（）.（3）The word “assuage” (line 9, para 2) is closet in meaning to（）.（4）It can be learned from Paragraph 3 that Generation Zs（）.（5）Michelsen thinks that compared with millennials, Generation Zs are（）.

Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon last November when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone, a first step toward its possible demise.Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida made opposition to the zone a centerpiece of his election campaign, despite its success in improving air quality. A judge has now overruled the city’s decision to stop levying fines, ordering them reinstated. But with legal battles ahead, the zone’s future looks uncertain at best.Among other weaknesses, the measures cities must employ when left to tackle dirty air on their own are politically contentious, and therefore vulnerable. That’s because they inevitably put the costs of cleaning the air on to individual drivers — who must pay fees or buy better vehicles — rather than on to the car manufacturers whose cheating is the real cause of our toxic pollution.It’s not hard to imagine a similar reversal happening in London. The new ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is likely to be a big issue in next year’s mayoral election. And if Sadiq Khan wins and extends it to the North and South Circular roads in 2021 as he intends, it is sure to spark intense opposition from the far larger number of motorists who will then be affected.It’s not that measures such as London’s Ulez are useless. Far from it. Local officials are using the levers that are available to them to safeguard residents’ health in the face of a serious threat. The zones do deliver some improvements to air quality, and the science tells us that means real health benefits — fewer heart attacks, strokes and premature births, less cancer, dementia and asthma. Fewer untimely deaths.But mayors and councilors can only do so much about a problem that is far bigger than any one city or town. They are acting because national governments — Britain’s and others across Europe — have failed to do so.Restrictions that keep highly polluting cars out of certain areas — city centres, “school streets”, even individual roads — are a response to the absence of a larger effort to properly enforce existing regulations and require auto companies to bring their vehicles into compliance. Wales has introduced special low speed limits to minimize pollution. We’re doing everything but insist that manufacturers clean up their cars.（1）Which of the following is true about Madrid’s clean air zone?（2） Which is considered a weakness of the city-level measures to tackle dirty air?（3）The author believes that the extension of London’s Ulez will（）.（4）Who does the author think should have addressed the problem?（5）It can be inferred from the last paragraph that auto companies .

It is true that CEO pay has gone up — top ones may make 300 times the pay of typical workers on average, and since the mid-1970s CEO pay for large publicly traded American corporations has, by varying estimates, gone up by about 500%. The typical CEO of a top American corporation —from the 350 largest such companies — now makes about $18.9 million a year.The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America’s highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It’s not popular to say, but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.Today’s CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many mere skills than simply being able to “run the company”. CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them. They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant. Then there’s the fact that large American companies are much more globalized than ever before, with supply chains spread across a larger number of countries. To lead in that system requires knowledge that is fairly mind-boggling plus, virtually all major American companies are beyond this major CEOs still have to do all the day-to-day work they have always done. The common idea that high CEO pay is mainly about ripping people off doesn’t explain history very well. By most measures, corporate governance has become a lot tighter and more rigorous since the 1970s. Yet it is principally during this period of stronger governance that CEO pay has been high and rising. That suggests it is in the broader corporate interest to recruit top candidates for increasingly tough jobs.Furthermore, the highest CEO salaries are paid to outside candidates, not to the cozy insider picks, another sign that high CEO pay is not some kind of depredation at the expense of the rest of the company. And the stock market reacts positively when companies tie CEO pay to, say, stock prices, a sign that those practices build up corporate value not just for the CEO.（1）Which of the following has contributed to CEO pay rise?（2）Compared with their predecessors, today’s CEOs are required to（） .（3）CEO pay has been rising since the 1970s despite（）.（4）High CEO pay can be justified by the fact that it helps（）.（5）The most suitable title for this text would be（）.

Rats and other animals need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so they can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Loleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats.They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat — one social and one asocial — for four days.The robots rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels to move around and colorful markings.During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened caged doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave the rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a lever.Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 percent more likely on average to set the social robot free than the asocial one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being. They may have bonded more with the social robot because it displayed behaviors like communal exploring and playing. This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped, says Quinn.The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design. The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. “We’d assumed we’d have to give its moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scene on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn’t necessary,” says Janet Wiles at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research.The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals. “We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too,” says Wiles.（1）Quinn and her colleagues conducted a test to see if rats can （）.（2）What did the asocial robot do during the experiment?（3）According to Quinn, the rats released the social robot because they （）.（4）James Wiles notes that rats（）.（5）It can be learned from the text that rats（）.

Being a good parent is, of course, what every parent would like to be. But defining what it means to be a good parent is undoubtedly very _1_, particularly since children respond differently to the same style of parenting. A calm, rule-following child might respond better to a different sort of parenting than, _2_, a younger sibling._3_, there’s another sort of parent that’s a bit easier to _4_: a patient parent. Children of every age benefit from patient parenting. Still, _5_ every parent would like to be patient, this is no easy _6_. Sometimes parents get exhausted and frustrated and are unable to maintain a _7_ and composed style with their kids. I understand this.You’re only human, and sometimes your kids can _8_ you just a little too far. And then the _9_ happens: You lose your patience and either scream at your kids or say something that was a bit too _10_ and does nobody any good. You wish that you could _11_ the clock and start over. We’ve all been there._12_, even though it’s common, it’s important to keep in mind that in a single moment of fatigue, you can say something to your child that you may _13_ for a long time. This may not only do damage to your relationship with your child but also _14_ your child’s self-esteem.If you consistently lose your _15_ with your kids, then you are inadvertently modeling a lack of emotional control for your kids. We are all becoming increasingly aware of the _16_ of modeling tolerance and patience for the younger generation. This is a skill that will help them all throughout life. In fact, the ability to emotionally regulate or maintain emotional control when _17_ by stress is one of the most important of all life’s skills.Certainly, it’s incredibly _18_ to maintain patience at all times with your children. A more practical goal is to try, to the best of your ability, to be as tolerant and composed as you can when faced with _19_ situations involving your children. I can promise you this: As a result of working toward this goal, you and your children will benefit and _20_ from stressful moments feeling better physically and emotionally.

Directions:It is known that text message （手机短信）has both advantages and disadvantages. Some people think it is a blessing, while others regard it as a hell. In this section, you are asked to write an essay on text message. You can take either stand and provide specific reasons and examples to support your idea. You should write at least 150 words on ANSWER SHEET 2.

With the nation’s financial system teetering （蹒跚）on a cliff, the compensation arrangements for executives of the big banks and other financial firms are coming under close examination again.Banker’s excessive risk-taking is a significant cause of this financial crisis and has contributed to others in the past. In this case, it was fueled by low interest rates and kept going by a false sense of security created by a debt-fueled bubble in the economy.Mortgage lenders gladly lent enormous sums to those who could not afford to pay them back, dividing the loans and selling them off to the next financial institution along the chain, which took advantage of the same high-tech securitization （证券化）to load on more risky mortgage-based assets.Financial regulation will have to catch up with the most irresponsible practices that led banks down in this road, in hopes of averting the next crisis, which is likely to involve different financial techniques and different sorts of assets. But it is worth examining the root problem of compensation schemes that are tied to short-term profits and revenues, and thus encourage bankers to take irresponsible levels of risk.

In 1999, the price of oil hovered around $16 a barrel. By 2008, it had（ 1 ）the $100 a barrel mark. The reasons for the surge（2） from the dramatic growth of the economies of China and India to widespread（3 ）in oil-producing regions, including Iraq and Nigeria’s delta region. Triple-digit oil prices have（4）the economic and political map of the world, （5）some old notions of power. Oil-rich nations are enjoying historic gains and opportunities, （6）major importers—including China and India, home to a third of the world’s population—（7）rising economic and social costs. Managing this new order is fast becoming a central （8）of global politics. Countries that need oil are clawing at each other to（9） scarce supplies, and are willing to deal with any government, （10）how unpleasant, to do it.In many poor nations with oil, the profits are being lost to corruption, （11）these countries of their best hope for development. And oil is fueling enormous investment funds run by foreign governments,（12）some in the West see as a new threat.Countries like Russia, Venezuela and Iran are well supplied with rising oil（13）, a change reflected in newly aggressive foreign policies. But some unexpected countries are reaping benefits, （14）costs, from higher prices. Consider Germany. （15）it imports virtually all its oil, it has prospered from extensive trade with a booming Russia and the Middle East. German exports to Russia（16）128 percent from 2001 to 2006.In the United States, as already high gas prices rose（17）higher in the spring of 2008, the issue cropped up in the presidential campaign, with Senators McCain and Obama（18）for a federal gas tax holiday during the peak summer driving months. And driving habits began to（19）, as sales of small cars jumped and mass transport systems（20）the country reported a sharp increase in riders.

As an outstanding scholar, he has become（） to the research team.　　

When a psychologist does a general experiment about the human mind, he selects people（） and asks them questions.　　

A national debate is now（） about whether we should replace golden weeks with paid Vacations.　　

Jennifer has never really（） her son’s death. It’s very hard to accept the fact that she’ll never have a child.　　

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