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Read the following comments on a report about American museums returning artifacts to their countries of origin and a list of statements summarizing the comments. Choose the best statement from the list A-G for each numbered name (41-45). There are two extra choices which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)41.HannahSimply,there are people in Nigeria who cannot travel to the Smithsonian Institution to see that part of their history and culture represented by the Benin Bronzes.These should be available to them as part of their cultural heritage and history and as a source of national pride.There is no good reason that these artifacts should be beyond the ordinary reach of the educational objectives or inspiration of the generations to which they were left.They serve no purpose in a museum in the United States or elsewhere except as curious objects.They cannot be compared to works of art produced for sale which can be passed from hand to hand and place to place by purchase.42.BuckWe know very exact reproductions of artwork can be and are regularly produced.Perhaps museums and governments might explore some role for the use ofnearly exact reproductions as a means of resolving issues relating to retuming works of art and antiquities T.he context of any exhibit is more important to me than whether the object being displayed is 2,000 years old or 2 months old.In many cases the experts have a hard time agreeing on what is the real object and what is a forgery.Again,the story an exhibit is trying to tell is what matters.The monetary value of the objects on display is a distant second place in importance.43.SaraWhen visiting the Baltimore Museum of Art,I came across a magnificent15th-century Chinese sculpture.It inspired me to learn more about the culture that it represented.Artifacts in museums have the power to inspire,and perhaps spark that need to leam and understand the nature of their creators.Having said that,I do feel that whatever artifacts find their way to public museums should, in fact,be sanctioned as having been obtained on loan,legally purchased,or obtained by treaty. Stealing artifacts from other peoples'cultures is obscene;it robs not only the physical objects,but the dignity and spirit of their creators.44.VictorAncient art that is displayed in foreign countries by all means should be returned to the original country.The foreign countries have no right to hold back returing the items.I would ask that the foreign nations and the original country discuss the terms of transfer. Yes,there is the risk that the original will not have as good security as do the foreign-countries.But look at what happened to Boston's Gardner Museum theft in 1990,including the loss of Rembrandt Vermeer,Manet and other masterpiece.Nothing is absolutely safe,nowhere,and now ClimateChangeagitators are attacking publicly displayed work in European museum.45.JuliaTo those of you in the comments section,by all means,who are having strong feeling about artifacts being removed from cities in the US and Britain and returned to their countries of originI would ask you to consider:why do you think Americans have more of a right to easily access the Benin Bronzes than people of Nigeria?Why are people who live within a days drive of London entitled to go and see the Elgin Marbles wherever they want,but the people of Athens aren't?What intrinsic factors make the West a suitable home for these artifacts but preclude them from being preserved and displayed by their countries of origin?If your conclusion is that the West is better able to preserve these artifacts,think about why you're assuming that to be true.

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Any fair-minded assessment of the dangers of the deal between Britain's National Health Service (NHS) and DeepMind must start by acknowledging that both sides mean well. DeepMind is one of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies in the world. The potential of this work applied to healthcare is very great, but it could also lead to further concentration of power in the tech giants. It is against that background that the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has issued her damning verdict against the Royal Free hospital trust under the NHS, which handed over to DeepMind the records of 1.6 million patients in 2015 on the basis of a vague agreement which took far too little account of the patients' rights and their expectations of privacy.DeepMind has almost apologised. The NHS trust has mended its ways. Further arrangements — and there may be many — between the NHS and DeepMind will be carefully scrutinised to ensure that all necessary permissions have been asked of patients and all unnecessary data has been cleaned. There are lessons about informed patient consent to learn. But privacy is not the only angle in this case and not even the most important. Ms Denham chose to concentrate the blame on the NHS trust, since under existing law it “controlled” the data and DeepMind merely “processed” it. But this distinction misses the point that it is processing and aggregation, not the mere possession of bits, that gives the data value.The great question is who should benefit from the analysis of all the data that our lives now generate. Privacy law builds on the concept of damage to an individual from identifiable knowledge about them. That misses the way the surveillance economy works. The data of an individual there gains its value only when it is compared with the data of countless millions more.The use of privacy law to curb the tech giants in this instance feels slightly maladapted. This practice does not address the real worry. It is not enough to say that the algorithms DeepMind develops will benefit patients and save lives. What matters is that they will belong to a private monopoly which developed them using public resources. If software promises to save lives on the scale that drugs now can, big data may be expected to behave as big pharma has done. We are still at the beginning of this revolution and small choices now may turn out to have gigantic consequences later. A long struggle will be needed to avoid a future of digital feudalism. Ms Denham's report is a welcome start.1.What is true of the agreement between the NHS and DeepMind?2.The NHS trust responded to Denham's verdict with(  ).3.The author argues in Paragraph 2 that (  ).  4.According to the last paragraph, the real worry arising from this deal is(  ).  5.The author's attitude toward the application of AI to healthcare is(  ).

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        France, which prides itself as the global innovator of fashion, has decided its fashion industry has lost an absolute right to define physical beauty for women. Its lawmakers gave preliminary approval last week to a law that would make it a crime to employ ultra-thin models on runways. The parliament also agreed to ban websites that “incite excessive thinness” by promoting extreme dieting.        Such measures have a couple of uplifting motives. They suggest beauty should not be defined by looks that end up impinging on health. That's a start. And the ban on ultra-thin models seems to go beyond protecting models from starving themselves to death—as some have done. It tells the fashion industry that it must take responsibility for the signal it sends women, especially teenage girls, about the social tape-measure they must use to determine their individual worth.        The bans, if fully enforced, would suggest to women (and many men) that they should not let others be arbiters of their beauty. And perhaps faintly, they hint that people should look to intangible qualities like character and intellect rather than dieting their way to size zero or wasp-waist physiques.        The French measures, however, rely too much on severe punishment to change a culture that still regards beauty as skin-deep—and bone-showing. Under the law, using a fashion model that does not meet a government-defined index of body mass could result in a $85,000 fine and six months in prison.        The fashion industry knows it has an inherent problem in focusing on material adornment and idealized body types. In Denmark, the United States, and a few other countries, it is trying to set voluntary standards for models and fashion images that rely more on peer pressure for enforcement.        In contrast to France's actions, Denmark's fashion industry agreed last month on rules and sanctions regarding the age, health, and other characteristics of models. The newly revised Danish Fashion Ethical Charter clearly states: “We are aware of and take responsibility for the impact the fashion industry has on body ideals, especially on young people.” The charter's main tool of enforcement is to deny access for designers and modeling agencies to Copenhagen Fashion Week (CFW), which is run by the Danish Fashion Institute. But in general it relies on a name-and-shame method of compliance.        Relying on ethical persuasion rather than law to address the misuse of body ideals may be the best step. Even better would be to help elevate notions of beauty beyond the material standards of a particular industry. 1.According to the first paragraph, what would happen in France?2.The phrase “impinging on” (Paragraph 2) is closest in meaning to(  ).3.Which of the following is true of the fashion industry?4.A designer is most likely to be rejected by CFW for(  ).  5.Which of the following may be the best title of the text?

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The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) continues to bleed red ink. It reported a net loss of $5.6 billion for fiscal 2016, the 10th straight year its expenses have exceeded revenue. Meanwhile, it has more than $120 billion in unfunded liabilities, mostly for employee health and retirement costs. There are many reasons this formerly stable federal institution finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy. Fundamentally, the USPS is in a historic squeeze between technological change that has permanently decreased demand for its bread-and-butter product, first-class mail, and a regulatory structure that denies management the flexibility to adjust its operations to the new reality.And interest groups ranging from postal unions to greeting-card makers exert self-interested pressure on the USPS's ultimate overseer — Congress — insisting that whatever else happens to the Postal Service, aspects of the status quo they depend on get protected. This is why repeated attempts at reform legislation have failed in recent years, leaving the Postal Service unable to pay its bills except by deferring vital modernization.Now comes word that everyone involved — Democrats, Republicans, the Postal Service, the unions and the system's heaviest users — has finally agreed on a plan to fix the system. Legislation is moving through the House that would save USPS an estimated $28.6 billion over five years, which could help pay for new vehicles, among other survival measures. Most of the money would come from a penny-per- letter permanent rate increase and from shifting postal retirees into Medicare. The latter step would largely offset the financial burden of annually pre-funding retiree health care, thus addressing a long-standing complaint by the USPS and its unions.If it clears the House, this measure would still have to get through the Senate 一 where someone is bound to point out that it amounts to the bare, bare minimum necessary to keep the Postal Service afloat, not comprehensive reform. There's no change to collective bargaining at the USPS, a major omission considering that personnel accounts for 80 percent of the agency's costs. Also missing is any discussion of eliminating Saturday letter delivery. That common-sense change enjoys wide public support and would save the USPS $2 billion per year. But postal special-interest groups seem to have killed it, at least in the House. The emerging consensus around the bill is a sign that legislators are getting frightened about a politically embarrassing short-term collapse at the USPS. It is not, however, a sign that they're getting serious about transforming the postal system for the 21st century. 1.The financial problem with the USPS is caused partly by(  ).2.According to Paragraph 2, the USPS fails to modernize itself due to (  ).  3.The long-standing complaint by the USPS and its unions can be addressed by (  ).  4.In the last paragraph, the author seems to view legislators with (  ).  5.Which of the following would be the best title for the text?

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Last year marked the third year in a row that Indonesia’s bleak rate of deforestation has slowed in pace. One reason for the turnaround may be the country's antipoverty program.In 2007, Indonesia started phasing in a program that gives money to its poorest residents under certain conditions, such as requiring people to keep kids in school or get regular medical care. Called conditional cash transfers or CCTs, these social assistance programs are designed to reduce inequality and break the cycle of poverty. They're already used in dozens of countries worldwide. In Indonesia, the program has provided enough food and medicine to substantially reduce severe growth problems among children.But CCT programs don't generally consider effects on the environment. In fact, poverty alleviation and environmental protection are often viewed as conflicting goals, says Paul Ferraro, an economist at Johns Hopkins University.That's because economic growth can be correlated with environmental degradation, while protecting the environment is sometimes correlated with greater poverty. However, those correlations don't prove cause and effect. The only previous study analyzing causality, based on an area in Mexico that had instituted CCTs, supported the traditional view. There, as people got more money, some of them may have more cleared land for cattle to raise for meat, Ferraro says.Such programs do not have to negatively affect the environment, though. Ferraro wanted to see if Indonesia’s poverty-alleviation program was affecting deforestation. Indonesia has the third-largest area of tropical forest in the world and one of the highest deforestation rates. Ferraro analyzed satellite data showing annual forest loss from 2008 to 2012 — including during Indonesia's phase-in of the antipoverty program — in 7,468 forested villages across 15 provinces and multiple islands. The duo separated the effects of the CCT program on forest loss from other factors, like weather and macroeconomic changes, which were also affecting forest loss. With that, “we see that the program is associated with a 30 percent reduction in deforestation,” Ferraro says.That's likely because the rural poor are using the money as makeshift insurance policies against inclement weather, Ferraro says. Typically, if rains are delayed, people may clear land to plant more rice to supplement their harvests. With the CCTs, individuals instead can use the money to supplement their harvests.Whether this research translates elsewhere is anybody's guess. Ferraro suggests the importance of growing rice and market access. And regardless of transferability, the study shows that what's good for people may also be good value of the avoided deforestation just for carbon dioxide emissions alone is more than the program costs.1.According to the first two paragraphs, CCT programs aim to (  ).2.The study based on an area in Mexico is cited to show that (  ).3.In his study about Indonesia, Ferraro intends to find out (  ).4.According to Ferraro, the CCT program in Indonesia is most valuable in that (  ). 5.What is the text centered on?

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    The weather in Texas may have cooled since the recent extreme heat, but the temperature will be high at the State Board of Education meeting in Austin this month as officials debate how climate change is taught in Texas schools.    Pat Hardy, a conservative member of the board who sympathises with the views of the energy sector, is resisting proposed changes to science standards for pre-teen pupils. These would emphasise the primacy of human activity in recent climate change and encourage discussion of mitigation measures. “In the national standards, everything has to do with climate change — that’s very lopsided,” she claims. “There are as many scientists working against all the panic of global climate change as there are those who are pushing it. Texas is an energy state and we need to recognise that. You need to remember where your bread is buttered.”    Most scientists and independent experts sharply dispute her views. “What millions of Texas kids learn in their public schools is determined too often by the political ideology of partisan board members, rather than facts and sound scholarship,” says Dan Quinn, senior communications strategist at the Texas Freedom Network, a non-profit group that monitors public education. “They casually dismiss the career work of scholars and scientists as just another misguided opinion.”    Such debates reflect fierce discussions across the US and around the world, as researchers, policymakers, teachers and students step up demands for a greater focus on teaching about the facts of climate change in schools.    A study last year by the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit group of scientists and teachers, looking at how state public schools across the country address climate change in science classes, gave barely half of US states a grade B+ or higher. Among the 10 worst performers were some of the most populous states, including Texas, which was given the lowest grade (F) and has a disproportionate influence because its textbooks are widely sold elsewhere.    Glenn Branch, the centre’s deputy director, cautions that setting state-level science standards is only one limited benchmark in a country that decentralises decisions to local school boards. Even if a state is considered a high performer in its science standards, “that does not mean it will be taught”, he says.    Another issue is that, while climate change is well integrated into some subjects and at some ages — such as earth and space sciences in high schools — it is not as well represented in curricula for younger children and in subjects that are more widely taught, such as biology and chemistry. It is also less prominent in many social studies courses.    Branch points out that, even if a growing number of official guidelines and textbooks reflect scientific consensus on climate change, unofficial educational materials that convey more slanted perspectives are being distributed to teachers. They include materials sponsored by libertarian think-tanks and energy industry associations.21.In paragraph 1, the weather in Texas is mentioned to22.What does Quinn think of Hardy?23.The study mentioned in Paragraph 524.According to Branch, state-level science standards in the US25.It is implied in the last paragraph that climate change teaching in some schools

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    Communities throughout New England have been attempting to regulate short-term rentals since sites like Airbnb took off in the 2010s. Now, with record-high home prices and historically low inventory, there’s an increased urgency in such regulation, particularly among those who worry that developers will come in and buy up swaths of housing to flip for a fortune on the short- term rental market.    In New Hampshire, where the rental vacancy rate has dropped below 1 percent, housing advocates fear unchecked short-term rentals will put further pressure on an already strained market. The state Legislature recently voted against a bill that would’ve made it illegal for towns to create legislation restricting short-term rentals.    “We are at a crisis level on the supply of rental housing,” said Nick Taylor, executive director of the Workforce Housing Coalition of the Greater Seacoast. Without enough affordable housing in southern New Hampshire towns,“ employers are having a hard time attracting employees, and workers are having a hard time finding a place to live,” Taylor said.    However, short-term rentals also provide housing for tourists, pointed out Ryan Castle, CEO of a local association of realter. “A lot of workers are servicing the tourist industry, and the tourism industry is serviced by those people coming in short term,” Castle said, “and so it’s a cyclical effect.”    Short-term rentals themselves are not the crux of the issue, said Keren Horn, an affordable housing policy expert at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “I think individuals being able to rent out their second home is a good thing. If it’s their vacation home anyway, and it’s just empty, why can’t you make money off it?” Horn said. Issues arise, however, when developers attempt to create large-scale short-term rental facilities — de facto hotels — to bypass taxes and regulations. “I think the question is, shouldn’t a developer who’s really building a hotel, but disguising it as not a hotel, be treated and taxed and regulated like a hotel?” Horn said.    At the end of 2018, Governor Charlie Baker signed a bill to rein in those potential investor- buyers. “The bill requires every rental host to register with the state, mandates they carry insurance, and opens the potential for local taxes on top of a new state levy,” the Globe reported. Boston took things even further, limiting who is authorized to rent out their home, and requiring renters to register with the city’s Inspectional Services Department.    Horn said similar registration requirements could benefit other struggling cities and towns. The only way to solve the issue, however, is by creating more housing.“If we want to make a change in the housing market, the main one is we have to build a lot more.”26.Which of the following is true of New England?27.The bill mentioned in Paragraph 2 was intended to28.Compared with Castle, Taylor is more likely to support29.What does Horn emphasize in Paragraph 5?30.Horn holds that imposing registration requirements is

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    If you’re heading for your nearest branch of Waterstones in search of the Duchess of Sussex’s new children’s book The Bench, you might have to be prepared to hunt around a bit; the same may be true of The President's Daughter, the new thriller by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. Both of these books are published next week by Penguin Random House, a company currently involved in a stand-off with Waterstones.    The problem began late last year, when Penguin Random House confirmed that it had introduced a credit limit with Waterstones “at a very significant level”. The trade magazine The Bookseller reported that Waterstones branch managers were being told to remove PRH books from prominent areas such as tables, display spaces and windows, and were “quietly retiring them to their relevant sections”.    PRH declined to comment on the issue, but a spokesperson for Waterstones told me: “Waterstones are currently operating with reduced credit terms from PRH, the only publisher in the UK to place any limitations on our ability to trade. We are not boycotting PRH titles but we are doing our utmost to ensure that availability for customers remains good despite the lower overall levels of stock. We do this generally by giving their titles less prominent positioning within our bookshops.    In the meantime, PRH authors have been the losers - as have customers, who might expect the new titles from the country’s biggest publisher to be prominently displayed by its biggest book retailer. Big-name PRH authors may suffer a bit, but it’s those mid-list authors, who normally rely on Waterstones staff’s passion for promoting books by lesser-known writers, who will be praying for an end to the dispute.    It comes at a time when authors are already worried about the consequences of the proposed merger between PRH and another big publisher, Simon & Schuster - the reduction in the number of unaligned UK publishers is likely to lead to fewer bidding wars, lower advances, and more conformity in terms of what is published. And one wonders if PRH would have been confident enough to deal with Waterstones in the way it has if it weren’t quite such a big company (it was formed with the merger of Penguin and Random House in 2013) and likely to get bigger.    “This is all part of a wider change towards concentration of power and cartels. Literary agencies are getting bigger to have the clout to negotiate better terms with publishers, publishers consolidating to deal with Amazon,” says Lownie. “The publishing industry talks about diversity in terms of authors and staff but it also needs a plurality of ways of delivering intellectual contact, choice and different voices. After all, many of the most interesting books in recent years have come from small publishers.”We shall see whether that plurality is a casualty of the current need among publishers to be big enough to take on all-comers.31.the author mentions two books in the paragraph 1 to present32.Why did Waterstones shops retire PRH books to their relevant sections?33.What message did the spokesman of Waterstones seem to convey?34.What can be one consequence of the current dispute?35.Which of the following statements best represents Lownie's view?

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“There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” wrote Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize-winning economist,“ That is, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.’’ But even if you accept Friedman's premise and regard corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies as a waste of shareholders' money, things may not be absolutely clear-cut. New research suggests that CSR may create monetary value for companies—at least when they are prosecuted for corruption.The largest firms in America and Britain together spend more than $15 billion a year on CSR, according to an estimate by EPG, a consulting firm. This could add value to their businesses in three ways. First, consumers may take CSR spending as a “signal” that a company's products are of high quality. Second, customers may be willing to buy a company's products as an indirect way to donate to the good causes it helps. And third, through a more diffuse “halo effect,” whereby its good deeds earn it greater consideration from consumers and others.Previous studies on CSR have had trouble differentiating these effects because consumers can be affected by all three. A recent study attempts to separate them by looking at bribery prosecutions under America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). It argues that since prosecutors do not consume a company's products as part of their investigations, they could be influenced only by the halo effect.The study found that, among prosecuted firms, those with the most comprehensive CSR programmes tended to get more lenient penalties. Their analysis ruled out the possibility that it was firms' political influence, rather than their CSR stand, that accounted for the leniency: Companies that contributed more to political campaigns did not receive lower fines.In all, the study concludes that whereas prosecutors should only evaluate a case based on its merits, they do seem to be influenced by a company's record in CSR. “We estimate that either eliminating a substantial lab our-rights concern, such as child labour, or increasing corporate giving by about 20% results in fines that generally are 40% lower than the typical punishment for bribing foreign officials,” says one researcher.Researchers admit that their study does not answer the question of how much businesses ought to spend on CSR. Nor does it reveal how much companies are banking on the halo effect, rather than the other possible benefits, when they decide their do-gooding policies. But at least they have demonstrated that when companies get into trouble with the law, evidence of good character can win them a less costly punishment.1.The author views Milton Friedman's statement about CSR with(  ).2.According to Paragraph 2, CSR helps a company by (  ).  3.The expression “more lenient”(Paragraph 4) is closest in meaning to (  ).  4.When prosecutors evaluate a case, a company's CSR record (  ).  5.Which of the following is true of CSR, according to the last paragraph?

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There will eventually come a day when The New York Times ceases to publish stories on newsprint. Exactly when that day will be is a matter of debate. “Sometime in the future,” the paper's publisher said back in 2010.Nostalgia for ink on paper and the rustle of pages aside, there's plenty of incentive to ditch print. The infrastructure required to make a physical newspaper—printing presses, delivery trucks—isn't just expensive; it's excessive at a time when online-only competitors don't have the same set of financial constraints. Readers are migrating away from print anyway. And though print ad sales still dwarf their online and mobile counterparts, revenue from print is still declining.Overhead may be high and circulation lower, but rushing to eliminate its print edition would be a mistake, says BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti.Peretti says the Times shouldn't waste time getting out of the print business, but only if they go about doing it the right way.“ Figuring out a way to accelerate that transition would make sense for them,” he said, “but if you discontinue it, you're going to have your most loyal customers really upset with you.”Sometimes that's worth making a change anyway. Peretti gives the example of Netflix discontinuing its DVD-mailing service to focus on streaming. “It was seen as a blunder," he said. The move turned out to be foresighted. And if Peretti were in charge at the Times? “I wouldn't pick a year to end print,” he said. “I would raise prices and make it into more of a legacy product.”The most loyal customers would still get the product they favor, the idea goes, and they'd feel like they were helping sustain the quality of something they believe in. “So if you're overpaying for print, you could feel like you were helping,” Peretti said. “Then increase it at a higher rate each year and essentially try to generate additional revenue.” In other words, if you're going to make a print product, make it for the people who are already obsessed with it. Which may be what the Times is doing already. Getting the print edition seven days a week costs nearly $500 a year—more than twice as much as a digital-only subscription.“It's a really hard thing to do and it's a tremendous luxury that BuzzFeed doesn't have a legacy business,” Peretti remarked. “But we're going to have questions like that where we have things we're doing that don't make sense when the market changes and the world changes. In those situations, it's better to be more aggressive than less aggressive.” 1.The New York Times is considering ending its print edition partly due to(  ).2.Peretti suggests that, in face of the present situation, the Times should(  ).  3.It can be inferred from Paragraphs 5 and 6 that a “legacy product” (  ).  4.Peretti believes that, in a changing world (  ).  5.Which of the following would be the best title of the text?

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The journal Science is adding an extra round of statistical checks to its peer-review process, editor-in-chief Marcia McNutt announced today. The policy follows similar efforts from other journals, after widespread concern that basic mistakes in data analysis are contributing to the irreproducibility of many published research findings. “Readers must have confidence in the conclusions published in our journal,” writes McNutt in an editorial. Working with the American Statistical Association, the journal has appointed seven experts to a statistics board of reviewing editors (SBoRE). Manuscript will be flagged up for additional scrutiny by the journal's internal editors, or by its existing Board of Reviewing Editors or by outside peer reviewers. The SBoRE panel will then find external statisticians to review these manuscripts. Asked whether any particular papers had impelled the change, McNutt said: “The creation of the ‘statistics board’ was motivated by concerns broadly with the application of statistics and data analysis in scientific research and is part of Science's overall drive to increase reproducibility in the research we publish.” Giovanni Parmigiani, a biostatistician at the Harvard School of Public Health, a member of the SBoRE group, says he expects the board to “play primarily an advisory role.” He agreed to join because he “found the foresight behind the establishment of the SBoRE to be novel, unique and likely to have a lasting impact. This impact will not only be through the publications in Science itself, but hopefully through a larger group of publishing places that may want to model their approach after Science.”John Ioannidis, a physician who studies research methodology, says that the policy is “a most welcome step forward” and “long overdue.”“Most journals are weak in statistical review, and this damages the quality of what they publish. I think that, for the majority of scientific papers nowadays, statistical review is more essential than expert review,” he says. But he noted that biomedical journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet pay strong attention to statistical review.Professional scientists are expected to know how to analyze data, but statistical errors are alarmingly common in published research, according to David Vaux, a cell biologist. Researchers should improve their standards, he wrote in 2012, but journals should also take a tougher line, “engaging reviewers who are statistically literate and editors who can verify the process.” Vaux says that Science's idea to pass some papers to statisticians “has some merit, but a weakness is that it relies on the board of reviewing editors to identify ‘the papers that need scrutiny’ in the first place.”1.It can be learned from Paragraph 1 that(  ).2.The phrase “flagged up” (Paragraph 2) is the closest in meaning to (  ).  3.Giovanni Parmigiani believes that the establishment of the SBoRE may (  ).  4.David Vaux holds that what Science is doing now (  ).  5.Which of the following is the best title of the text?                    

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    Scientific papers are the recordkeepers of progress in research. Each year researchers publish millions of papers in more than 30,000 journals. The scientific community measures the quality of those papers in a number of ways, including the perceived quality of the journal (as reflected by the title’s impact factor) and the number of citations a specific paper accumulates. The careers of scientists and the reputation of their institutions depend on the number and prestige of the papers they produce, but even more so on the citations attracted by these papers.    Citation cartels, where journals, authors, and institutions conspire to inflate citation numbers, have existed for a long time. In 2016, researchers developed an algorithm to recognize suspicious citation patterns, including groups of authors that disproportionately cite one another and groups of journals that cite each other frequently to increase the impact factors of their publications. Recently, another expression of this predatory behavior: so-called support service consultancies that provide language and other editorial support to individual authors and to journals sometimes advise contributors to add a number of citations to their articles.    The advent of electronic publishing and authors’ need to find outlets for their papers resulted in thousands of new journals. The birth of predatory journals wasn’t far behind. These journals can act as milk cows where every single article in an issue may cite a specific paper or a series of papers. In other instances, there is absolutely no relationship between the content of the article and the citations. The peculiar part is that the journal that the editor is supposedly working for is not profiting at all—it is just providing citations to other journals. Such practices can lead an article to accrue more than 150 citations in the same year that it was published.    How insidious is this type of citation manipulation? In one example, an individual—acting as author, editor, and consultant—was able to use at least 15 journals as citation providers to articles published by five scientists at three universities. The problem is rampant in Scopus, which includes a high number of the new “international” journals. In fact, a listing in Scopus seems to be a criterion to be targeted in this type of citation manipulation.Scopus itself has all the data necessary to detect this malpractice. Red flags include a large number of citations to an article within the first year. And for authors who wish to steer clear of citation cartel activities: when an editor, a reviewer, or a support service asks you to add inappropriate references, do not oblige and do report the request to the journal.36.According to Paragraph1, the careers of scientists can be determined by37.The support service consultancies tend to38.The Function of the“milk cow”journals is to39.What can be learned about Scopus From the last two paragraphs ?40.What Should an author do to deal with citation manipulators?

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In Cambodia, the choice of a spouse is a complex one for the young male. It may involve not only his parents and his friends,(1)those of the young woman, but also a matchmaker. A young man can(2)  a likely spouse on his own and then ask his parents to (3)the marriage negotiations, or the young man's parents may make the choice of a spouse, giving the child little to say in the selection. (4), a girl may veto the spouse her parents have chosen. (5)a spouse has been selected, each family investigates the other to make sure its child is marrying(6)a good family.The traditional wedding is a long and colorful affair. Formerly it lasted three days, (7)by the 1980s it more commonly lasted a day and a half. Buddhist priests offer a short sermon and (8)  prayers of blessing. Parts of the ceremony involve ritual hair cutting, (9)cotton threads soaked in holy water around the bride's and groom's wrists, and (10)a candle around a circle of happily married and respected couples to bless the (11). Newlyweds traditionally move in with the wife's parents and may(12)with them up to a year,(13)they can build a new house nearby.Divorce is legal and easy to (14), but not common. Divorced persons are (15)with some disapproval. Each spouse retains(16)property he or she(17)into the marriage, and jointly-acquired property is(18)equally. Divorced persons may remarry, but a gender prejudice (19)up: The divorced male doesn't have a waiting period before he can remarry(20)the woman must wait ten months.

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In a rare unanimous ruling, the US Supreme Court has overturned the corruption conviction of a former Virginia governor, Robert McDonnell. But it did so while holding its nose at the ethics of his conduct, which included accepting gifts such as a Rolex watch and a Ferrari automobile from a company seeking access to government.The high court's decision said the judge in Mr. McDonnell's trial failed to tell a jury that it must look only at his “official acts,” or the former governor's decisions on “specific” and “unsettled” issues related to his duties.Merely helping a gift-giver gain access to other officials, unless done with clear intent to pressure those officials, is not corruption, the justices found.The court did suggest that accepting favors in return for opening doors is “distasteful” and “nasty”. But under anti-bribery laws, proof must be made of concrete benefits, such as approval of a contract or regulation. Simply arranging a meeting, making a phone call, or hosting an event is not an “official act.’’The court's ruling is legally sound in defining a kind of favoritism that is not criminal. Elected leaders must be allowed to help supporters deal with bureaucratic problems without fear of prosecution for bribery. “The basic compact underlying representative government, ” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the court, “assumes that public officials will hear from their constituents and act on their concerns.”But the ruling reinforces the need for citizens and their elected representatives, not the courts, to ensure equality of access to government. Officials must not be allowed to play favorites in providing information or in arranging meetings simply because an individual or group provides a campaign donation or a personal gift. This type of integrity requires well-enforced laws in government transparency, such as records of official meetings, rules on lobbying, and information about each elected leader's source of wealth.Favoritism in official access can fan public perceptions of corruption. But it is not always corruption. Rather officials must avoid double standards, or different types of access for average people and the wealthy. If connections can be bought, a basic premise of democratic society— that all are equal in treatment by government — is undermined. Good governance rests on an understanding of the inherent worth of each individual.The court's ruling is a step forward in the struggle against both corruption and official favoritism. 1.The underlined sentence (Paragraph 1) most probably shows that the court(  ).2.According to Paragraph 4, an official act is deemed corruptive only if it involves (  ).  3.The court's ruling is based on the assumption that public officials are (  ).  4.Well-enforced laws in government transparency are needed to (  ).  5.The author's attitude toward the court's ruling is(  ).

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It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful, provocative magazine cover story, “I love My Children, I Hate My Life,” is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that “the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and delight.” The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive—and newly single—mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual “Jennifer Aniston is pregnant” news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands. In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the children. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn't have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world: obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives. Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake. It's hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it's interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress-free, happiness-enhancing parenthood aren't in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting “the Rachel” might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston. 1.Jennifer Senior suggests in her article that raising a child can bring (  ).  2.We learn from Paragraph 2 that(  ).3.It is suggested in Paragraph 3 that childless folks (  ).  4.According to Paragraph 4, the message conveyed by celebrity magazines is (  ).  5.Which of the following can be inferred from the last paragraph? 

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King Juan Carlos of Spain once insisted “kings don't abdicate, they dare in their sleep.” But embarrassing scandals and the popularity of the republican left in the recent Euro-elections have forced him to eat his words and stand down. So, does the Spanish crisis suggest that monarchy is seeing its last days? Does that mean the writing is on the wall for all European royals, with their magnificent uniforms and majestic lifestyle? The Spanish case provides arguments both for and against monarchy. When public opinion is particularly polarised, as it was following the end of the Franco regime, monarchs can rise above “mere” politics and “embody” a spirit of national unity. It is this apparent transcendence of politics that explains monarchs' continuing popularity polarized. And also, the Middle East excepted, Europe is the most monarch-infested region in the world, with 10 kingdoms (not counting Vatican City and Andorra). But unlike their absolutist counterparts in the Gulf and Asia, most royal families have survived because they allow voters to avoid the difficult search for a non-controversial but respected public figure. Even so, kings and queens undoubtedly have a downside. Symbolic of national unity as they claim to be, their very history—and sometimes the way they behave today—embodies outdated and indefensible privileges and inequalities. At a time when Thomas Piketty and other economists are warning of rising inequality and the increasing power of inherited wealth, it is bizarre that wealthy aristocratic families should still be the symbolic heart of modern democratic states. The most successful monarchies strive to abandon or hide their old aristocratic ways. Princes and princesses have day-jobs and ride bicycles, not horses (or helicopters). Even so, these are wealthy families who party with the international 1%, and media intrusiveness makes it increasingly difficult to maintain the right image. While Europe's monarchies will no doubt be smart enough to survive for some time to come, it is the British royals who have most to fear from the Spanish example. It is only the Queen who has preserved the monarchy's reputation with her rather ordinary (if well-heeled) granny style. The danger will come with Charles, who has both an expensive taste of lifestyle and a pretty hierarchical view of the world. He has failed to understand that monarchies have largely survived because they provide a service–as non-controversial and non-political heads of state. Charles ought to know that as English history shows, it is kings, not republicans, who are the monarchy's worst enemies. 1.According to the first two Paragraphs, King Juan Carlos of Spain(  ).  2.Monarchs are kept as heads of state in Europe mostly (  ).    3.Which of the following is shown to be odd, according to Paragraph 4? 4.The British royals “have most to fear” because Charle (  ).    5.Which of the following is the best title of the text?  

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Scientific publishing has long been a licence to print money. Scientists need journals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other scientists perform the specialized work of peer review also for free, because it is a central element in the acquisition of status and the production of scientific knowledge.With the content of papers secured for free, the publisher needs only find a market for its journal. Until this century, university libraries were not very price sensitive. Scientific publishers routinely report profit margins approaching 40% on their operations, at a time when the rest of the publishing industry is in an existential crisis.The Dutch giant Elsevier, which claims to publish 25% of the scientific papers produced in the world, made profits of more than £900m last year, while UK universities alone spent more than £210m in 2016 to enable researchers to access their own publicly funded research; both figures seem to rise unstoppably despite increasingly desperate efforts to change them.The most drastic, and thoroughly illegal, reaction has been the emergence of Sci-Hub, a kind of global photocopier for scientific papers, set up in 2012, which now claims to offer access to every paywalled article published since 2015. The success of Sci-Hub, which relies on researchers passing on copies they have themselves legally accessed, shows the legal ecosystem has lost legitimacy among its users and must be transformed so that it works for all participants.In Britain the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.Yet the new system has not worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to $5,000. A report last year pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” had been steadily rising at a rate above inflation. In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power.1.Scientific publishing is seen as "a licence to print money" partly because(  ).2. According to Paragraphs 2 and 3, scientific publishers Elsevier have(  ).3.How does the author feel about the success of Sci-Hub?4.It can be learned from Paragraphs 5 and 6 that open access terms(  ).5.Which of the following characterises the scientific publishing model?

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Text 4 ①From the early days of broadband, advocates for consumers and web-based companies worried that the cable and phone companies selling broadband connections had the power and incentive to favor affiliated websites over their rivals.②That’s why there has been such a strong demand for rules that would prevent broadband providers from picking winners and losers online, preserving the freedom and innovation that have been the lifeblood of the internet. ①Yet that demand has been almost impossible to fill — in part because of pushback from broadband providers, anti-regulatory conservatives and the courts. ②A federal appeals court  weighed in again Tuesday, but instead of providing a badly needed resolution, it only prolonged the fight. ③At issue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was the latest take of the Federal Communications Commission(FCC) on net neutrality, adopted on a party-line vote in 2017. ④The Republican-penned order not only eliminated the strict net neutrality rules the FCC had adopted when it had a Democratic majority in 2015, but rejected the commission’s authority to require broadband providers to do much of anything. ⑤The order also declared that  state and local governments couldn’t regulate broadband providers either. ①The commission argued that other agencies would protect against anti-competitive behavior, such as a broadband-providing conglomerate like AT&T favoring its own video-streaming service at the expense of Netflix and Apple TV. ②Yet the FCC also ended the investigations of broadband providers that imposed data caps on their rivals’ streaming services but not their own. ①On Tuesday, the appeals court unanimously upheld the 2017 order deregulating broadband providers, citing a Supreme Court ruling from 2005 that upheld a similarly deregulatory move.  ②But Judge Patricia Millett rightly argued in a concurring opinion that "the result is unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service," and said Congress or the Supreme Court could intervene to "avoid trapping Internet regulation in technological anachronism." ①In the meantime, the court threw out the FCC’s attempt to block all state rules on net neutrality, while preserving the commission’s power to preempt individual state laws that undermine its order. ②That means more battles like the one now going on between the Justice Department and California, which enacted a tough net neutrality law in the wake of the FCC’s abdication. ①The endless legal battles and back-and-forth at the FCC cry out for Congress to act. ②It needs to give the commission explicit authority once and for all to bar broadband providers from meddling in the traffic on their network and to create clear rules protecting openness and innovation online. 1、There has long been concern that broadband provides would ______ . 2、Faced with the demand for net neutrality rules, the FCC ______ . 3、What can be learned about AT&T from Paragraph 3? 4、Judge Patricia Millett argues that the appeals court's decision______. 5、What does the author argue in the last paragraph?

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In 1924 America's National Research Council sent two engineers to supervise a series of industrial experiments at a large telephone-parts factory called the Hawthorne Plant near Chicago. It hoped they would learn how stop-floor lighting (1)workers' productivity. Instead, the studies ended (2) giving their name to the "Hawthorne effect", the extremely influential idea that the very (3) to being experimented upon changed subjects' behavior. The idea arose because of the behavior of the women in the (4) Hawthorne plant. According to (5) of the experiments, their hourly output rose when lighting was increased, but also when it was dimmed. It did not (6) what was done in the experiment; (7)something was changed, productivity rose. A(n) (8) that they were being experimented upon seemed to be (9) to alter workers' behavior (10) itself. After several decades, the same data were (11) to econometric the analysis. Hawthorne experiments has another surprise in store (12) the descriptions on record, no systematic (13) was found that levels of productivity were related to changes in lighting. It turns out that peculiar way of conducting the experiments  may have led to (14) interpretation of what happened. (15), lighting was always changed on a Sunday. When work started again on Monday, output (16) rose compared with the previous Saturday and (17) to rise for the next couple of days. (18), a comparison with data for weeks when there was no experimentation showed that output always went up on Monday, workers (19) to be diligent for the first few days of the week in any case, before (20) a plateau and then slackening off. This suggests that the alleged "Hawthorne effect" is hard to pin down.

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Financial  regulators in Britain have imposed a rather unusual rule on the bosses of big banks. Starting next year, any guaranteed bonus of top executives could be delayed 10 years if their banks are under investigation for wrongdoing. The main purpose of this “clawback” rule is to hold bankers accountable for harmful risk-taking and to restore public trust in financial institution. Yet officials also hope for a much larger benefit: more long term decision-making not only by banks but also by all corporations, to build a stronger economy for future generations.“ Short-termism” or the desire for quick profits, has worsened in publicly traded companies, says the Bank of England's top economist, Andrew Haldane. He quotes a giant of classical economies, Alfred Marshall, in describing this financial impatience as acting like “Children who pick the plums out of their pudding to eat them at once” rather than putting them aside to be eaten last.The average time for holding a stock in both the United States and Britain, he notes, has dropped from seven years to seven months in recent decades. Transient investors, who demand high quarterly profits from companies, can hinder a firm's efforts to invest in long-term research or to build up customer loyalty. This has been dubbed "quarterly capitalism" In addition, new digital technologies have allowed more rapid trading of equities, quicker use of information, and thus shortens attention spans in financial markers. "There seems to be a predominance of short-term thinking at the expense of long-term investing," said Commissioner Daniel Gallagher of the US Securities and Exchange Commission in speech this week.In the US, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 has pushed most public companies to defer performance bonuses for senior executives by about a year, slightly helping reduce “short-termism”. In its latest survey of CEO pay, The Wall Street Journal finds that "a substantial part” of executive pay is now tied to performance.Much more could be done to encourage “long-termism,” such as changes in the tax code and quicker disclosure of stock acquisitions. In France, shareholders who hold onto a company investment for at least two years can sometimes earn more voting rights in a company.Within companies, the right compensation design can provide incentives for executives to think beyond their own time at the company and on behalf of all stakeholders. Britain rule is a reminder to bankers that society has an interest in their performance, not just for the short term but for the long term.1.According to Paragraph 1, one motive in imposing the new rule is the(  ) .2.Alfred Marshall is quoted to indicate(  ).3.It is argued that the influence of transient investment on public companies can be(  ).4.The US and France examples are used to illustrate(  ).5.Which of the following would be the best title for the text?

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