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Write an essay of 160-270 words based on the pictures below. In your essay, you should:（1） Describe the pictures briefly,（2） Interpret the implied meaning, and（3） Give your commentsWrite your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.

Let’s say you come home from work one day and log on to your computer, but you can’t open any of your files. No matter what you do or how hard you try, you simply can’t retrieve them. Regrettably, you realize that you’ve never backed up your important information, such as photographs, documents, music, videos, and contacts, and now it might be gone forever. Or maybe you did try to back it up recently but, for whatever reason, it didn’t work. What if you’d been writing a thesis paper for months to complete your graduate degree? What if you were an author who had already written 80 percent of your next novel? What if you were a bookkeeper? A lawyer? A doctor? How much would you be willing to pay to get your clients’ files back, instead of losing them forever? Would you pay $200? Or maybe $500? Or even $1,000? （1） What if you found yourself in this quandary and were suddenly presented with a solution and opportunity to get all of your stuff back? It sounds like a great business decision—especially for the bad guys who are holding your information hostage.Encryption has been a wonderful thing in the digital world. It was designed to keep our computers safe, so, as long as your information was encrypted, any would-be thieves who found your laptop （or stole it） wouldn’t be able to gain access. Unless your password is extremely weak, such as jordan2005 or password123, a bad guy would probably have a difficult time accessing your files. As a result, cybercriminals figured out a way to subvert the value of encryption and use it against you to make money. Hackers created what we now call ransomware; you may have heard of some recent examples, such as the Cryptolocker virus, Crypto Wall, Locky, Cerber, KeyRanger, SamSam, TeslaCrypt, TorrentLocker, and Reveton. （2） Ransomware is a type of malware that targets both human and technical weaknesses in an effort to block users from accessing important data and/or systems—until the victim pays a ransom in exchange for a decryption key that unlocks the captive files and/or system.Here’s how ransomware works: You log in to your computer and can’t access any of the information. After you figure out that you can’t remove a nasty virus to open your files, you’ll find a note in your system that says something like, “Hi, my name is Boris Badenov. If you don’t pay me $500 in bitcoin in the next twenty-four hours, you’ll never get your information back.” （3） You, like most people, may not even know that bitcoin is untraceable virtual electronic currency. Because Boris is so nice, he has presented you with a low-cost solution that will allow you to retrieve your files. It’s like he’s giving you a magic wand to make the nightmare go away, right?How did you get ransomware on your computer? （4） You most likely received a spear-phished email with a link, and when you clicked the link you were taken to a website where the malicious payload was installed. There’s a good chance there was a vulnerability in one of your software programs, and either you didn’t patch the program or the crooks discovered it before the vendor did. Once a malicious payload is installed on your computer, it locates all of your important files—documents, photos, videos, databases, and music. The ransomware is designed to encrypt all of that information and lock you out; some variations of ransomware even impact your operating system and prevent the computer from starting. The encryption is sophisticated and usually unbreakable; a super computer at a university isn’t even powerful enough to defeat it. Ransomware can be especially damaging to your computer at work, which is probably connected to a network. If the network is poorly configured, the infection can spread through an entire organization.

As the twentieth century began, the importance of formal education in the United States increased. The frontier had mostly disappeared and by 1910 most Americans lived in towns and cities. Industrialization and the bureaucratization of economic life combined with a new emphasis upon credentials and expertise to make schooling increasingly important for economic and social mobility. Increasingly, too, schools were viewed as the most important means of integrating immigrants into American society.The arrival of a great wave of southern and eastern European immigrants at the turn of the century coincided with and contributed to an enormous expansion of formal schooling. By 1920 schooling to age fourteen or beyond was compulsory in most states, and the school year was greatly lengthened. Kindergartens, vacation schools, extracurricular activities, and vocational education and counseling extended the influence of public schools over the lives of students, many of whom in the larger industrial cities were the children of immigrants. Classes for adult immigrants were sponsored by public schools, corporations, unions, churches, settlement houses, and other agencies.Reformers early in the twentieth century suggested that education programs should suit the needs of specific populations. Immigrant women were once such population. Schools tried to educate young women so they could occupy productive places in the urban industrial economy, and one place many educators considered appropriate for women was the home.Although looking after the house and family was familiar to immigrant women, American education gave homemaking a new definition. In preindustrial economies, homemaking had meant the production as well as the consumption of goods, and it commonly included income-producing activities both inside and outside the home, in the highly industrialized early-twentieth-century United States, however, overproduction rather than scarcity was becoming a problem. Thus, the ideal American homemaker was viewed as a consumer rather than a producer. Schools trained women to be consumer homemakers cooking, shopping, decorating, and caring for children “efficiently” in their own homes, or if economic necessity demanded, as employees in the homes of others. Subsequent reforms have made these notions seem quite out-of-date.11. .It can be inferred from paragraph 1 that one important factor in the increasing importance of education in the United States was （）.12. The word “means” in line 5 is closest in meaning to （）.13. The phrase “coincided with” in line 8 is closest in meaning to （）.14. .According to the passage, one important change in United States education by the 1920’s was that （）.15. Vacation schools and extracurricular activities are mentioned in lines 10 to illustrate （）.

In Death Valley, California, one of the hottest, most arid places in North America, there is much salt, and salt can damage rocks impressively. Inhabitants of areas elsewhere, where streets and highways are salted to control ice, are familiar with the resulting rust and deterioration on cars. That attests to the chemically corrosive nature of salt, but it is not the way salt destroys rocks. Salt breaks rocks apart principally by a process called crystal prying and wedging. This happens not by soaking the rocks in salt water, but by moistening their bottoms with salt water. Such conditions exist in many areas along the eastern edge of central Death Valley. There, salty water rises from the groundwater table by capillary action through tiny spaces in sediment until it reaches the surface. Most stones have capillary passages that suck salt water from the wet ground. Death Valley provides an ultra-dry atmosphere and high daily temperatures, which promote evaporation and the formation of salt crystals along the cracks or other openings within stones. These crystals grow as long as salt water is available. Like tree roots breaking up a sidewalk, the growing crystals exert pressure on the rock and eventually pry the rock apart along planes of weakness, such as banding in metamorphic rocks, bedding in sedimentary rocks, or preexisting or incipient fractions, and along boundaries between individual mineral crystals or grains. Besides crystal growth, the expansion of halite crystals （the same as everyday table salt） by heating and of sulfates and similar salts by hydration can contribute additional stresses. A rock durable enough to have withstood natural conditions for a very long time in other areas could probably be shattered into small pieces by salt weathering within a few generations. The dominant salt in Death Valley is halite, or sodium chloride, but other salts, mostly carbonates and sulfates, also cause prying and wedging, as does ordinary ice. Weathering by a variety of salts, though often subtle, is a worldwide phenomenon. Not restricted to arid regions, intense salt weathering occurs mostly in salt-rich places like the seashore, near the large saline lakes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and in desert sections of Australia, New Zealand, and central Asia.6. What is the passage mainly about?7. The word “it” in line 8 refers to （）.8. The word “exert” in line 12 is closest in meaning to （）.9. In lines 12-15, why does the author compare tree roots with growing salt crystals?10. In lines 15-16, the author mentions the “expansion of halite crystals... by heating and of sulfates and similar salts by hydration” in order to （）.

By far the most important United States export product in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was cotton, favored by the European textile industry over flax or wool because it was easy to process and soft to tile touch. Mechanization of spinning Line and weaving allowed significant centralization and expansion in the textile industry during this period, and at the same time the demand for cotton increased dramatically. American producers were able to meet this demand largely because of tile invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793. Cotton could be grown throughout the South, but separating the fiber—or lint—from the seed was a laborious process. Sea island cotton was relatively easy to process by hand, because its fibers were long and seeds were concentrated at the base of the flower, but it demanded a long growing season, available only along the nation’s eastern seacoast. Short-staple cotton required a much shorter growing season, but the shortness of the fibers and their mixture with seeds meant that a worker could hand-process only about one pound per day. Whitney’s gin was a hand-powered machine with revolving drums and metal teeth to pull cotton fibers away from seeds. Using the gin, a worker could produce up to 50 pounds of lint a day. The later development of larger gins, powered by horses, water, or steam, multiplied productivity further. The interaction of improved processing and high demand led to the rapid spread of the cultivation of cotton and to a surge in production. It became the main American export, dwarfing all others. In 1802, cotton composed 14 percent of total American exports by value. Cotton had a 36 percent share by 1810 and over a 50 percent share in 1830. In 1860, 61 percent of the value of American exports was represented by cotton. In contrast, wheat and wheat flour composed only 6 percent of the value of American exports in that year. Clearly, cotton was king in the trade of the young republic. The growing market for cotton and other American agricultural products led to an unprecedented expansion of agricultural settlement, mostly in the eastern half of the United States—west of the Appalachian Mountains and east of the Mississippi River.1. The main point of the passage is that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a time when （）.2. The word “favored” in line 2 is closest in meaning to （）.3. All of the following are mentioned in the passage as reasons for the increased demand for cotton EXCEPT （）.4. The word “laborious” in line 7 is closest in meaning to （）.5. According to the passage, the Mississippi River was （）.

TOPICThe Halo Effect （光环效应） is a classic finding in social psychology. It is the idea that general evaluations about a person influence judgments about their specific traits. How does the Halo Effect apply in our life? Please use specific examples to illustrate your point.

In most organizations, what the executive teams typically fail to do is to connect the company’s culture with how the company makes its strategy work.（1） Take Starbucks: The cafe chain positions itself not just as a seller of coffee but as an experience provider, creating a “third place” for fun beyond home and the workplace. Walk into a Starbucks anywhere in the world and you will find a consistently comfortable and welcoming ambiance. But you don’t get that simply by telling your staff to be warm and friendly. Starbucks culture is powerful because it is tightly linked to the company’s distinctive capabilities. （2） The feel of Starbucks stores isn’t created merely by the layout and the décor—it exists because the people behind the counter understand how their work fits into a common purpose, and recognize how to accomplish great things together without needing to follow a script.（3） Over many years, Starbucks has built a capability to foster a relationship-driven, employees-first approach, which encourages staff to form close bonds with each other. Called “partners” rather than employees, even part-time staff （in the U.S.） receive stock options and health insurance. （4） At the height of the global companies were cutting Human Resource costs wherever they could, Starbucks invested in staff training, including coffee tastings and courses at higher education institutions. Former company president Howard Behar believed that employees who feel cared for will care about their customers. One former Starbucks worker noted that “nobody at Starbucks ever ordered anyone to do anything. It was always: ‘Would you do me a favor?’ or something similar.”Companies whose culture and strategy are not aligned in this way often struggle to understand how they can make the linkage. （5） Every company has its own distinctive culture—the reservoir of behaviors, traits, values and mind-sets that people in an enterprise share. But cultures are complicated, with hundreds of disparate elements. Often, these elements are not good or bad in and of themselves, but they have aspects with both positive and negative implications.

We all know—or think we know—how important our immune system is. It works tirelessly to protect us, using an army of cells to see off infections. If our immune system is weakened, it can make us susceptible to illnesses that may overwhelm us.But in recent years, scientists’ understanding of the immune system has undergone a revolutionary change. （71） Paul-Peter Tak, chief immunology officer at GSK, says that when the millions of cells that make up the immune system work properly together, they are like a “finely tuned orchestra playing in harmony.” （72）A dysfunctional immune system can create problems in many ways: The cells may attack and destroy healthy body tissue by mistake. （73） The list of diseases that can result from an immune system that has gone away is wide-ranging and includes asthma, arthritis and cancer.“We want to unravel the complexities of the immune system to pinpoint the root cause of such diseases. This understanding will help us develop targeted medicines for a wide range of illnesses, Tak says.This new understanding of the immune system has already resulted in a range of new medicines to treat diseases. （74） These new immunotherapy drugs, also known as “biologics” are derived from a variety of natural sources, such as proteins, nucleic acids or cells, and “retune” the body’s immune system to fight off the cancer itself.As the potential for immunology is so wide, GSK is taking a broad R&D approach. （75） This innovative collaboration provides an opportunity to bring the insights of cutting-edge scientific research to the process of developing new drugs to tackle the most prevalent and persistent diseases of the modern world.A. Here they will be able to continue with their own research in collaboration with CSK scientists.B. In the case of cancer, medicines traditionally work by targeting cancer cells, often killing healthy cells in the process.C. Combining research expertise across the business will enable a deeper understanding of the way the immune system is working across all areas of research.D. But when a cell falls out of tune it can be “highly disruptive”, causing illness.E. The immune system, they have found, doesn’t just protect against disease but can, if something goes wrong, play a part in causing many diseases.F. They may fail to identify and destroy unusual cells, resulting in the growth of a tumor; or they may harbor bacteria or viruses for years, resulting in an infection that takes hold and flourishes.

If you’re black in the United States, you’re more than twice as likely as a white person to be unarmed if you’re killed in an encounter with the police. Why? Some kind of racial profiling is at work, but the precise psychological mechanism is poorly understood. Investigations into police shootings show that the officers often perceive cellphones and other non-threatening objects as weapons in the hands of a person of color. （66）The classic psychological account would ascribe these mistakes to a failure of executive control, provoked by some external stimulus. （67） Seeing a black face might automatically activate the stereotype that black men are more dangerous, leading to activity in brain areas implicated in fear responses. （68） Yet the tensions between automatic and control processes are not always readily resolved, and result in errors.（69） Researchers of “embodied cognition” focus instead on the brain’s interdependence on physiological processes that allow an organism to sustain itself. From this point of view, the mind must be understood as embedded in a body, and the body as embedded in a physical, social and cultural environment. Reality is not simply out there for the taking, but is summoned via the constant fluctuations of our own organic matter. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in Phenomenology of Perception （1945）: “The body is our general medium for having a world.”Among neuroscientists, it’s increasingly popular to think of the brain not as a passive organ that receives and reacts to stimuli, but as more of an inference machine: something that actively strives to predict what’s out there and what’s going to happen, maximizing the chances of staying alive. But the body isn’t simply controlled top-down. （70） Imagine you hear a door slamming: you’re more likely to picture an intruder if you’re watching a scary movie than if you’re listening to soothing music.A. You make that prediction because it accounts for your fast heart-rate and the sound of the door.B. But this automatic response, which could trigger a fight-or-flight reaction, should be suppressed when the fear is irrational.C. That is, the problem comes from the brain’s inability to resolve the conflict between an automatically activated stereotype, and a consciously held egalitarian belief.D. New strands of work in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind challenge this brain-centric orthodoxy.E. So do police officers misinterpret what they see, or are they actually seeing a gun where there is none?F. Rather, its signals are constantly combining with the brain’s inferences to generate our perception of the world.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” wrote Ernest Becker in his book. But we don’t need to worry so much, according to new research comparing our perception of what it’s like to die with the accounts from people facing imminent death. Researchers analyzed the writings of regular bloggers with either terminal cancer who all died over the course of the study, and compared it to blog posts written by a group of participants who were told to imagine they had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had only a few months to live. They looked for general feelings of positivity and negativity, and words describing positive and negative emotions including happiness, fear and terror. Blog posts from the terminally ill were found to have considerably more positive words and fewer negative ones than those imagining they were dying—and their use of positive language increased as they got closer to death.Lisa Iverach, a research fellow at the University of Sydney, explained that the study highlights how the participants may have been less negative because the mystery around death was removed. “Individuals facing imminent death have had more time to process the idea of death and dying, and therefore, may be more accepting of the inevitability of death.” But not all of us will know how, or when, we’re going to die in advance, and therefore will miss out on any benefits to be had by uncovering its uncertainty.Havi Carel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, agrees with the study’s findings on how adaptable we are. “The initial shock after receiving a poor prognosis is horrific, but after months or years of living with this knowledge, the dread subsides,” she said. However, Carel also pointed out that there’s an important distinction between positive responses and pleasantness, and that there are some unpleasant and painful events we’d still be positive about, such as childbirth.In Western culture, we tend to pretend death doesn’t exist, whereas research has indicated that the East Asian yin and yang philosophy of death—where life can’t exist without death—allows individuals to use death as a reminder to enjoy life. “I think the UK and the US are death-denying cultures, in that death is mostly avoided as a topic.” Heflick said. “While avoiding talking about death can reduce discomfort in the short term, it probably makes most of us much more anxious about death in the long term.”60. According to Ernest Becker, people usually （）.61. According to the researchers, people faced with close death ________ （）than those who imagined they have cancer.62. According to Lisa Iverach, people who have been diagnosed with cancer are more positive, because （）.63. According to Havi Carel, the positive feeling and unpleasant feeling （）.64. .The author’s attitude towards Western culture on death is （）.65. .In Asian culture, people take death as something （）.

A new study shows that the three biggest frog groups—the hyloidea, microhylidae and the natatanura—all trace their origins to an expansion that occurred after 66 million years ago. This impressive diversification of species appears to have occurred on the heels of the asteroid, which struck what is now the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.The scientists sampled a core set of 95 genes from the DNA of 156 frog species. They then combined this data with genetic information from an additional 145 species to produce a detailed “family tree” of frogs, based on their genetic relationships.“Nobody had seen this result before,” said co-author Peng Zhang, from Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. “We re-did the analysis using different parameter settings, but the result remained the same. I realized the signal was very strong in our data. What I saw could not be a false thing.”Another author, David Blackburn, from the Florida Museum of Natural History, explained: “Frogs have been around for well over 200 million years, but this study shows it wasn’t until the extinction of the dinosaurs that we had this burst of frog diversity that resulted in the vast majority of frogs we see today.” Dr. Blackburn said the speed at which frogs diversified after the impact suggests that the survivors were probably filling up new ecological niches.The Chicxulub event would have destroyed a large proportion of the vegetation on Earth. But as forests began to recover after the event, frogs seem to have been one of the groups that made the most of the new habitats. The researchers point out that none of the frog lineages that originate before the extinction and survive through the asteroid impact happen to be adapted to living in trees.The study also indicates that global frog distribution tracks the break-up of the supercontinents beginning with Pangaea about 200 million years ago and then Gondwana, which split into South America and Africa. Frogs likely used Antarctica, not yet encased in ice sheets, as a stepping stone from South America to Australia.“I think the most exciting thing about our study is that we show that frogs are such a strong animal group. They survived... the mass extinction that completely erased dinosaurs, said Peng Zhang. However, frogs—like other amphibians—face many challenges today, including habitat loss due to logging and diseases such as the chytrid fungus and ranavirus.54. The underlined phrase “on the heels of” in Paragraph 1 most probably means （）.55. Peng Zhang’s remarks show that （）.56. According to Paragraph 4, frogs diversified probably because （）.57. What is the main idea of Paragraph 5?58. What can be inferred from Paragraph 6?59. The author’s attitude towards frogs’ future is （）.

In August of 2001, Mitch Prinstein, a psychology professor who had just been hired at Yale University, offered his first class at the school: a course he had developed about popularity among children and adolescents. By the time the enrollment for the course was official, 550 students—a tenth of the school’s undergraduate population—had signed up to learn about that thing that is, variously, an aspiration and a scourge and a mystery: popularity. The course was popular among undergrads because they had seen popularity affecting people’s ability to find success and fulfilling friendships.There is more than one way to be popular. Prinstein, now a professor at the University of North Carolina, breaks down his own treatment of popularity across two broad dimensions: status—the kind of popularity we tend to associate with high school, the stuff of being known and admired though not necessarily liked—and interpersonal likability. Likability is related to charm, to friendliness, to inquisitiveness—it’s the charisma that draws other people to you, largely independent of status or beauty or any of the other metrics that generally give people rank in American culture.But then there is status: the kind of popularity that operates according to hierarchies. The kind that confers admiration but not necessarily true esteem. The kind most commonly associated with high school. Status, too, Prinstein argues, can affect people's brains and their bodies overall—in adolescence, and far beyond.What happens in the teenage years, Prinstein suggests, is a kind of perfect storm, neurologically speaking: At the start of puberty, the brain grows more dramatically than at any other point in one’s life. Myelin, the fatty substance that coats the neurons and allows the brain to function efficiently, increases, affording a burst of neural activity. Those shifts, along with others, aid the brain’s adolescent transition from childish ways of thought (impulsive, relatively un-self-conscious) to adulthood’s more logical, ruminative, and other-oriented modes.The result: Newfound brain capacity collides with newfound self-consciousness. The adolescent brain is primed both to take in the world around it more than ever before, and to process that information with more self-awareness than ever before. Which is another way of saying that teenagers are particularly cognizant of identity—and another way, too, of explaining why, as Jennifer Senior put it in New York Magazine, “most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.” It’s a powder keg, emotionally, and popularity—or, more specifically, teens conception of popularity—is a fuse.48. What can be learned from Paragraph 1?49. Professor Prinstein’s study of popularity shows that （）.50. The bold-faced word “charisma” in Paragraph 2 means （）.51. Status differs from interpersonal likability in that status （）.52. Growth of the brain during adolescence makes teenagers （）.53. According to the last paragraph, American high schools are unhealthy places because （）.

There is ambition and there is Silicon Valley ambition. For where else on a map could a pin be placed when asked to guess where billionaire philanthropists had declared their intention to cure, prevent or manage all human disease before the end of the century?It was clear from the start that the announcement from Priscilla Chan and her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, nudged at the boundaries of belief. Writing in praise in the US journal, Science, David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate at California Institute of Technology concedes the goal “may raise eyebrows”. Even Cori Bargmann, the renowned neurobiologist who will lead the charge, is aware how it might be perceived. It is “ambitious”, she says, “but not completely ridiculous”.It is tempting to dismiss the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as hubris. But the best part of a century is a long time in medicine. Most babies born in 1900 did not live to see the age of 50. Medicine has not been the only reason for the dramatic rise in life expectancy since, but it was a crucial factor. “By 2100 we’ll be shocked by how much we’ve achieved, and we’ll be more shocked with initiatives like this,” says Jim Smith, chief of strategy at the UK’s Medical Research Council.If not hubris, then what about one-upmanship? Bill Gates wants to eradicate malaria in a generation. Elon Musk wants a Mars colony in a decade. Yuri Milner has set his sights on sending a spacecraft to a star at one-fifth the speed of light. How better to leave your mark higher on the wall than to make every human disease obsolete within your child’s lifetime? Or at least find a way to manage awful conditions, so they no longer mar people’s lives?But audacious goals are precisely what are needed. “We have to be bold about the scale of the challenge we face in improving human health,” says Steve Caddick, professor of chemical biology at University College London and director of innovation at the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest biomedical research charity. “What is truly important about this kind of approach is that it creates the hope you need to go from exploratory science to making the world a better place.” He goes on: “Aspiration is essential. This idea that if we put our minds to it, almost anything is possible—that is what can sustain people through the peaks and troughs of decades of research.”42. .The underlined sentence in Paragraph 1 means that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs （）.43. .According to Cori Bargmann and David Baltimore, the Zuckerbergs’ project may be （）.44. .In Paragraph 3, the author emphasizes that （）.45. .In Paragraph 4, the author implies that ________ （）can leave the highest mark on the wall.46. .In Paragraph 5, “peaks and troughs” most likely means （）.47. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

Security guard, truck driver, salesperson—year after year, these jobs appear on lists of the unhappiest careers. Although many factors can make a job dismal—unusual hours, low pay, no chance for advancement—these three gigs stand out for another reason: They’re characterized either by a lack of conversation or by obligatory but meaningless small talk.Psychologists have long said that connecting with others is central to well-being, but just how much conversation we require is under investigation. In one study, researchers eavesdropped on undergraduates for four days, then cataloged each overheard conversation as either “small talk” (“What do you have there? Popcorn? Yummy!”) or “substantive” (“So did they get divorced soon after?”). They found that the second type correlated with happiness—the happiest students had roughly twice as many substantive talks as the unhappiest ones. Small talk, meanwhile, made up only 10 percent of their conversation, versus almost 30 percent of conversation among the least content students.But don’t write off chitchat just yet. Scientists believe that small talk could promote bonding. Late last year, Princeton researchers reported that ring-tailed lemurs reserve their call-and-response conversations, akin to human chitchat, for the animals they groom the most. This suggests that small talk maintains closeness with loved ones, and isn’t merely the stuff of awkward exchanges with strangers.Still, bantering with strangers could brighten your morning. In a series of experiments, psychologists gave Chicago commuters varying directions about whether to talk with fellow train passengers—something they typically avoided. Those told to chat with others reported a more pleasant journey than those told to “enjoy your solitude” or to do whatever they normally would. None of the chatters reported being rebuffed. And the results held for introverts and extroverts alike—which makes sense, since acting extroverted has a positive effect on introverts.Of course, some of us are better than others at turning small talk into something bigger. In one study, people who were rated “less curious” by researchers had trouble getting a conversation rolling on their own, and had greater luck building closeness with others when they were supplied with questions that encouraged personal disclosure (“When did you last cry in front of someone?”). But people who were deemed “curious” needed no help transforming conversations about mundane things like favorite holidays into intimate exchanges. A “curious mind-set,” the authors concluded, can lead to “positive social interactions.”36. In Paragraph 1, the primary reason why the three jobs are the unhappiest is that （）.37. What can be inferred from Paragraph 2?38. The underlined sentence in Paragraph 3 indicates that （）.39. The conclusion drawn from Paragraph 4 is that （）.40. The underlined phrase in Paragraph 5 means （）.41. The author’s attitude towards “small talk” is （）.

One day in 1945, a man named Percy Spencer was touring one of the laboratories he managed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar technology to the Allied forces. He was standing by a magnetron, a vacuum tube which generates microwaves, to （21） the sensitivity of radar, when he felt a strange sensation. Checking his pocket, he found his candy bar had melted. Surprised and （22）, he sent for a bag of popcorn, and held it up to the magnetron. The popcorn popped. Within a year, Raytheon made a patent （23） for a microwave oven.The history of scientific discovery is peppered with breakthroughs that came about （24）. The most momentous was Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, （25） when he noticed how a mould that floated into his Petri dish killed off the surrounding bacteria. Spencer and Fleming didn’t just get lucky. Spencer had the nous and the knowledge to turn his observation into （26）; only an expert on bacteria （27） ready to see the significance of Fleming’s stray spore. As Louis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance （28） only the prepared mind.”The word that best describes this subtle blend of chance and agency is “serendipity”. It was （29） by Horace Walpole, man of letters and aristocratic dilettante. Writing to a friend in 1754, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had just made by （30） to a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip”. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not （31） ... now do you understand Serendipity?” These days, we tend to （32） serendipity with luck, and we neglect the sagacity. But some conditions are more （33） to accidental discovery than others.Today’s world wide web has developed to organize, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made （34） to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, （35） an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.

The administration is willing to negotiate（）but it is not ready to make any significant changes to the legislation.

Research has found that the drug contains a toxic chemical that can cause（）problems.

I am eager to share my thoughts with you, to compare（）, and to get your opinions.

Don’t be afraid to（）yourself in the interview.

His second statement agrees（）facts as stated by the other witnesses.

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