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Direction: Write an English composition of about 200 words as instructed below:Please choose ONE specific type of job you would like to do upon completion of your PHD studies and justify your choice. You should give at least 2 reasons with elaborations. Write your composition on the answer sheet.Your composition will be marked for its content, organization, grammar and appropriateness.Failure to follow the instructions may result in a loss of marks.

A man may usually be known by the books he reads as well as by the company he keeps, for there is a companionship of books as well as of men; and one should always live in the best company, whether it be of books or of men. A good book may be among the best of friends. It is the same today as it always was, and it will never change. It is the most patient and cheerful of companions. It does not turn its back upon us in times of adversity or distress. It always receives us with the same kindness, amusing and instructing us in youth and comforting and encouraging us in old age.

人们常常因为同爱一本书而结为知己，就像有时两个人因为敬慕同一个人而交为朋友一样。古谚说：“爱屋及乌”。但是，“爱我及书”这句话却有更深的哲理。书是更为坚实而高尚的情谊纽带。人们可以通过共同爱好的作家沟通思想感情，彼此息息相通。他们的思想共同在作者的著述里得到体现，而作者的思想反过来又化为他们的思想。

The Tapestry of FriendshipEllen GoodmanIt was, in many ways, a slight movie. Nothing actually happened. There was no big-budget chase scene, no bloody shoot-out. The story ended without any cosmic conclusions.Yet she found Claudia Weill’s film Girlfriends gentle and affecting. Slowly, it panned across the tapestry of friendship—showing its fragility, its resiliency, its role as the connecting tissue between the lives of two young women.When it was over, she thought about the movies she had seen this year—Julia, The Turning Point and now Girlfriends. It seemed that the peculiar eye, the social lens of the cinema, had drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male Buddy movies had been replaced by the Female Friendship flicks.This wasn’t just another binge of trendiness, but a kind of cinema vérité. For once the movies were reflecting a shift, not just from men to women but from one definition of friendship to another.Across millions of miles of celluloid, the ideal of friendship had always been male—a world of sidekicks and “partners” of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kids. There had been something almost atavistic about these visions of attachments—as if producers culled their plots from some pop anthropology book on male bonding. Movies portrayed the idea that only men, those direct descendants of hunters and Heming ways, inherited a primal capacity for friendship. In contrast, they portrayed women picking on each other, the way they once picked berries.Well, that duality must have been mortally wounded in some shootout at the You’re OK, I’m OK Corral. Now, on the screen, they were at least aware of the subtle distinction between men and women as buddies and friends.About 150 years ago, Coleridge had written, “A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts, whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of attachment.”Well, she thought, on the whole, men had buddies, while women had friends. Buddies bonded, but friends loved. Buddies faced adversity together, but friends faced each other. There was something palpably different in the way they spent their time. Buddies seemed to “do” things together: friends simply “were” together.Buddies came linked, like accessories, to one activity or another. People have golf buddies and business buddies, college buddies and club buddies. Men often keep their buddies in these categories, while women keep a special category for friends.A man once told her that men weren’t real buddies until they had been “through the wars together—corporate or athletic or military. They had to soldier together, he said. Women, on the other hand, didn’t count themselves as friends until they had shared three loathsome confidences.Buddies hang tough together; friends hang onto each other.It probably had something to do with pride. You don’t show off to a friend, you show need. Buddies try to keep the worst from each other; friends confess it.A friend of hers once telephoned her lover, just to find out if he was home. She hung up without a hello when he picked up the phone. Later, wretched with embarrassment, the friend moaned, “Can you believe me? A thirty-five-year-old lawyer, making a chicken call?” Together they laughed and made it better.Buddies seek approval. But friends seek acceptance.She knew so many men who had been trained in restraint, afraid of each other’s judgment or awkward with each other’s affection. She wasn’t sure which. Like buddies in the movies they would die for each other, but never hug each other.She had reread Babbitt recently, that extraordinary catalogue of male grievances. The only relationship that gave meaning to the claustrophobic life of George Babbitt had been with Paul Riesling. But not once in the tragedy of their lives had one been able to say to the other: You make a difference.Even now men shocked her at times with their description of friendship. Does this one have a best friend? “Why, of course, we see each other every February.” Does that one call his most intimate pal long distance? “Why, certainly, whenever there’s a real reason.” Do those two old chums ever have dinner together? “You mean alone? Without our wives?”Yet, things were changing. The ideal of intimacy wasn’t this parallel playmate, this teammate, this trench mate. Not even in Hollywood. In the double standard of friendship, for once the female version was becoming accepted as the general ideal.After all, a buddy is a fine life-companion. “But one’s friends”, as Santayana once wrote, “are that part of the race with which one can be human.”Judge, according to the passage, whether the following statements are true or false:

In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences that it is not even questioned. There are countries where the white man imposes his rule by brute force: there are countries where the black man protests by setting fire to cities and by looting and pillaging. Important people on both sides who would in other respects appear to be reasonable men, get up and calmly argue in favor of violence—as if it were a legitimate solution, like any other. What is really frightening, what really fills you with despair is the realization that when it comes to the crunch, we have made no actual progress at all. We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged: The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed, the suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us.The truly reasonable men who know where the solutions lie are finding it harder and harder to get a hearing. They are despised, mistrusted and even persecuted by their own kind because they advocate such apparently outrageous things as law enforcement. If half the energy that goes into violent acts were put to good use, if our efforts were directed at cleaning up the slums and ghettos, at improving living-standards and providing education and employment for all, we would have gone a long way to arriving at a solution. Our strength is sapped by having to mop up the mess that violence leaves in its wake. In a well-directed effort, it would not be impossible to fulfill the ideals of a stable social programme. The benefits that can be derived from constructive solutions are everywhere apparent in the world around us. Genuine and lasting solutions are always possible, providing we work within the framework of the law.Before we can even begin to contemplate peaceful co-existence between the races, we must appreciate each other’s problems. And to do this, we must learn about them: it is a simple exercise in communication, in exchanging information. “Talk, talk, talk,” the advocates of violence say, “all you ever do is talk, and we are none the wiser.” It’s rather like the story of the famous barrister who painstakingly explained his case to the judge. After listening to a lengthy argument the judge complained that after all this talk, he was none the wiser. “Possibly, my Lord,” the barrister replied, “none the wiser, but surely far better informed.” Knowledge is the necessary prerequisite to wisdom: the knowledge that violence creates the evils it pretends to solve.1. What is the best title for this passage?2. Recorded history has taught us .3. It can be inferred that truly reasonable men .4. “He was none the wiser” means .

War has escaped the battlefield and now can, with modern guidance systems on missiles, touch virtually every square yard of the earth’s surface. War has also lost most of its utility in achieving the traditional goals of conflict. Control of territory carries with it the obligation to provide subject peoples certain administrative, health, education, and other social services; such obligations far outweigh the benefits of control. If the ruled population is ethnically or racially different from the ruler, tensions and chronic unrest often exist which further reduce the benefits and increase the costs of domination. Large populations no longer necessarily enhance state power and, in the absence of high levels of economic development, can impose severe burden on food supply, jobs and the broad range of services expected of modern governments, the non-economic security reasons for the control of territory have been progressively undermined by the advances of modern technology. The benefits of forcing another nation to surrender its wealth are vastly outweighed by the benefits of persuading that nation to produce and exchange goods and services. In brief, imperialism no longer pays.Making war has been one of the most persistent of human activities in the 80 centuries since men and women settled in cities and thereby became “civilized”, but the modernization of the past 80 years has fundamentally changed the role and function of war. In premodernized societies, successful warfare brought significant material rewards, the most obvious of which was the stored wealth of the defeated. Equally important was human labor control over people as salves or levies for the victor’s army, and there was the productive capacity—agricultural lands and mines. Successful warfare also produced psychic benefits. The removal-or destruction of a threat brought a sense of security, and power gained over others created and national self-esteem.War was accepted in the premodernized society as a part of the human condition, a mechanism of change, and an unavoidable, even noble, aspect of life. The excitement and drama of war made it a vital part of literature and legends.1. According to the passage, leaders of premodernized society considered war to be .2. The author most likely places the word “civilized” in quotation marks (line 13) in order to .3. The author mentions all of the following as possible reasons for going to war in a premodernized society EXCEPT .4. Which of the following best describes the tone of the passage?

I was just a boy when my father brought me to Harlem for the first time, almost 50 years ago. We stayed at the Hotel Theresa, a grand brick structure at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue Once, in the hotel restaurant, my father pointed out Joe Louis. He even got Mr. Brown, the hotel manager to introduce me to him, a bit paunchy but still the champ as far as I was concerned.Much has changed since then. Business and real estate are booming. Some say a new renaissance is under way. Others decry what they see as outside forces running roughshod over the old Harlem.New York meant Harlem to me and as a young man I visited it whenever I could. But many of my old haunts are gone. The Theresa shut down in 1966. National chains that once ignored Harlem now anticipate yuppie money and want pieces of this prime Manhattan real estate. So here I am on a hot August afternoon, sitting in a Starbucks that two years ago opened a block away from the Theresa, snatching at memories between sips of high-priced coffee. I am about to open up a piece of the old Harlem the New York Amsterdam News when a tourist asking directions to Sylvia, prominent Harlem restaurant, penetrates my daydreaming. Hon carrying a book: Touring Historic Harlem.History. I miss Mr. Michaux’s bookstore, his House of Common Sense, which was Across from the Theresa. He had a big billboard out front with brown and black aces pained on it that said in large letters:” World History Book Outlet on 2,000,000,000 Africans and Nonwhite Peoples. “An ugly state office building has swallowed that space.I miss speaker like Carlos Cooks, who was always on the southwest comer of 125th and Seventh, urging listeners to support Africa. Harlem’s powerful political electricity seems unplugged—although the streets are still energized, especially by West African immigrants.Hardworking southern newcomers formed the bulk of the community back in the 1920s and 30s, when Harlem renaissance artists, writers, and intellectuals gave it a glitter and renown that made it the capital of black America. From Harlem, WE. B, Dubois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Zora Neal Hurston, and others helped power America’s cultural influence around the world.By the 1970s and 80s drugs and crime had ravaged parts of the community. And the life expectancy for men in Harlem was less than that of men in Bangladesh Harlem had become a symbol of the dangers of inner-city life.Now, you want to shout “Lookin’ good!” at this place that has been neglected for so long. Crowds push into Harlem USA, a new shopping centre on 125th, where a Disney store shares space with HMV Records, the New York Sports Club and a nine-screen Magic Johnson theatre complex. Nearby, A Rite Aid drugstore also opened. May he part of the reason Harlem seems to be undergoing a rebirth is that it is finally getting what most people take for granted.Harlem is also part of an empowerment zone-a federal designation aimed at fostering economic growth that will bring over half a billion in federal, state, and local dollars. Just the shells of once elegant old brownstones now can cost several hundred thousand dollars. Rents are skyrocketing. An improved economy, tougher law enforcement, and community efforts against drugs have contributed to a 60 percent drop in crime since 1993.1. At the beginning the author seems to indicate that Harlem .2. When the author recalls Harlem in the old days, he has a feeling of .3. Harlem was called the capital of Black America in the 1920s and 30s mainly because of its .4. From the passage we can infer that, generally speaking, the author .

Hostility to Gypsies has existed almost from the time they first appeared in Europe in the 14th century. The origins of the Gypsies, with little written history, were shrouded in mystery. What is known now from clues in the various dialects of their language, Romany, is that they came from northern India to the Middle East a thousand years ago, working as minstrels and mercenaries, metal-smiths and servants. Europeans misnamed them Egyptians, soon shortened to Gypsies. A clan system, based mostly on their traditional crafts and geography, has made them a deeply fragmented and fractious people, only really unifying in the face of enmity from non-Gypsies, whom they call gadje. Today many Gypsy activists prefer to be called Roma, which comes from the Roma word for “man”. But on my travels among them most still referred to themselves as Gypsies.In Europe their persecution by the gadje began quickly, with the church seeing heresy in their fortune-telling and the state seeing anti-social behavior in their nomadism. At various times they have been forbidden to wear their distinctive bright clothes, to speak their own language, to travel, to marry one another, or to ply their traditional crafts. In some countries they were reduced to slavery. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s hat Gypsy slaves were freed in Romania. In more recent times the Gypsies were caught up in Nazi ethnic hysteria, and perhaps half a million perished in the Holocaust. Their horses have been shot and the wheels removed from their wagons, their names have been changed, their women have been sterilized, and their children have been forcibly given for adoption to non-gypsy families.But the Gypsies have confounded predictions of their disappearance as a distinct ethnic group and their numbers have burgeoned. Today there are an estimated to 12 million Gypsies scattered across Europe, making them the continent s largest minority. The exact number is hard to pin down. Gypsies have regularly been undercounted, both by regimes anxious to downplay their profile and by Gypsies themselves, seeking to avoid bureaucracies. Attempting to remedy past inequities, activist groups may over count Hundreds of thousands more have migrated to the Americas and elsewhere. With very few exceptions Gypsies have expressed no great desire for a country to call their own—unlike the Jews, to whom the Gypsy experience is often compared. “Romanestan” said Ronald Lee, the Canadian Gypsy writer, “is where my two feet stand.”1. Gypsies are united only when they .2. In history hostility to Gypsies in Europe resulted in their persecution by all the following EXCEPT .3. According to the passage, the main difference between the Gypsies and the Jews lies in their concepts of .

All that we really need to plot out the future of our universe are a few good measurements. _1_ does not mean that we can sit down today and _2_ the future course of the universe _3_ anything like certainty. There are still _4_ many things we do not know about the way the universe _5_ together. But we do know exactly _6_ information we need to fill in our knowledge, and we have a pretty good idea of how to go _7_ getting it.Perhaps the best way to think of our present situation is to imagine a train _8_ into a switch yard. All of the switches are set before the train arrives, _9_ its path is completely determined. Some switches we can see; _10_ we cannot. There is no ambiguity if we can see the _11_ of a switch: we can say _12_ confidence that some possible futures will not materialize and others will. At the unseen switches, _13_ there is no such certainty. We know the train will take one of the tracks leading out but we have no _14_ which one. The unseen switches are the true decision points _15_ the future, and what happens when we _16_ at them determines the entire subsequent course of events.When we think about the future of _17_, we can see our “track” many billions of years _18_ the future, but after that there are decision points to be _19_ with and possible fates to consider. The goal of science is to reduce the ambiguity _20_ the decision points and find the true road that will be followed.

School boys always have badges on their caps.

The baby babbled happily.

Florida is famous for its warm water as well as its azure skies.

A microphone made her voice audible to the crowd.

He sells his things by auction.

The boss smiled his assent to my request.

Our candidate was defeated on the third ballot.

Cotton is packed in bales before it is sent to foreign countries.

Many of the old houses have wooden balconies.

He was assailed with questions after his lecture.

The armaments race among the great powers is a threat to world peace.

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