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Nobody really knows how big Lagos is. What’s indisputable is that it’s growing very quickly. Between now and 2050, the urban population of Africa could triple. Yet cities in sub-Saharan Africa are not getting richer the way cities in the rest of the world have. Most urban Africans live in slums （贫民窟）; migrants are often not much better off than they were in the countryside. Why?The immediate problem is poverty. Most of Africa is urbanising at a lower level of income than oth¬er regions of the world did. That means there’s little money around for investment that would make cities liveable and more productive. Without upgrades and new capacity, bridges, roads and power sys¬tems are unable to cope with expanding populations. With the exception of South Africa, the only light rail metro system in sub-Saharan Africa is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Traffic jam leads to expense and unpredictability, things that keep investors away.In other parts of the world, increasing agricultural productivity and industrialisation went together. More productive fanners meant there was a surplus that could feed cities; in turn, that created a pool of labour for factories. But African cities are different. They are too often built around consuming natural resources. Government is concentrated in capitals, so is the money. Most urban Africans work for a small minority of the rich, who tend to be involved in either cronyish（有裙带关系的）businesses or politics. Since African agriculture is still broadly unproductive, food is imported, consuming a portion of revenue.So what can be done? Though African countries are poor, not all African cities are. In Lagos, foreign oil workers can pay as much as $65,000 per year in rent for a modest apartment in a safe part of town. If that income were better taxed, it might provide the revenue for better infrastructure. If city leaders were more accountable to their residents, they might favour projects designed to help them more. Yet even as new roads are built, new people arrive. When a city’s population grows by 5% a year, it is difficult to keep up.What do we learn from the passage about cities in sub-Saharan Africa?What does the author imply about urbanisation in other parts of the world?Why is sub-Saharan Africa unappealing to investors?In what way does the author say African cities are different?What might be a solution to the problems facing African cities?

The Health Benefits of Knitting[A] About 15 years ago, I was invited to join a knitting group. I agreed to give it a try.[B] My mother had taught me to knit at 15, and I knitted in class throughout college and for a few years thereafter. Then decades passed without my touching a knitting needle. But within two Mondays in the group, I was hooked, not only on knitting but also on crocheting (钩织)，and I was on my way to becoming a highly productive crafter.[C] I’ve made countless baby blankets, sweaters, scarves, hats, caps for newborns. I take a knitting project with me everywhere, especially when I have to sit still and listen. As I discovered in college, when my hands are busy, my mind stays focused on the here and now.[D] It seems, too, that I’m part of a national renewal of interest in needle and other handicrafts (手工艺).The Craft Yam Council reports that a third of women ages 25 -35 now knit or crochet. Even men and schoolchildren are swelling the ranks, among them my friend’s three small grandsons. Last April, the council created a “Stitch Away Stress” campaign in honor of National Stress Awareness Month. Dr. Herbert Benson, a pioneer in mind/body medicine and author of The Relaxation Response, says that the repetitive action of needlework can induce a relaxed state like that, associated with meditation (沉思) and yoga. Once you get beyond the initial learning curve, knitting and crocheting can lower heart, rate and blood pressure.[E] But unlike meditation, craft activities result in tangible and often useful products that can enhance self-esteem. I keep photos of my singular accomplishments on my cellphone to boost my spirits when needed.[F] Since the 1990s, the council has surveyed hundreds of thousands of knitters and crocheters, who routinely list stress relief and creative fulfillment as the activities’ main benefits. Among them is the father of a prematurely born daughter who reported that during the baby’s five weeks in the inten¬sive care unit, “learning how to knit infant hats gave me a sense of purpose during a time that I felt very helpless. It’s a hobby that I’ve stuck with, and it continues to help me cope with stress at work, provide a sense of order in hectic （忙乱的）days, and allow my brain time to solve problems.”[G] A recent email from the yarn （纺纱）company Red Heart titled “Health Benefits of Crocheting and Knitting” prompted me to explore what else might be known about the health value of activities like knitting. My research revealed that the rewards go well beyond replacing stress and anxiety with the satisfaction of creation.[H] For example, Karen Hayes, a life coach in Toronto, conducts knitting therapy programs, including Knit to Quit to help smokers give up the habit, and Knit to Heal for people coping with health crises, like a cancer diagnosis or serious illness of a family member. Schools and prisons with craft programs report that they have a calming effect and enhance social skills. And having to follow instructions on complex craft projects can improve children’s math skills.[I] Some people find that craftwork helps them control their weight. Just as it’s challenging to smoke while knitting, when hands are holding needles and hooks, there’s less snacking and mindless eating out of boredom.[J] I’ve found that my handiwork with yarn has helped my arthritic （患关节炎的）fingers remain more dexterous （灵巧的）as I age. A woman encouraged to try knitting and crocheting after developing an autoimmune disease that caused a lot of hand pain reported on the Craft Yarn Council site that her hands are now less stiff and painful.[K] A 2009 University of British Columbia study of 38 women with an eating disorder who were taught to knit found that learning the craft led to significant improvements. Seventy-four percent of the women said the activity lessened their fears and kept them from thinking about their problem.[L] Betsan Corkhill, a wellness coach in Bath, England, and author of the book Knit for Health & Wellness, established a website, Stitchlinks, to explore the value of what she calls therapeutic knitting. Among her respondents, 54 percent of those who were clinically depressed said that knitting made them feel happy or very happy. In a study of 60 self-selected people with persistent pain, Ms. Corkhill and colleagues reported that knitting enabled them to redirect their focus, reducing their awareness of pain. She suggested that the brain can process just so much at once, and that activities like knitting and crocheting make it harder for the brain to register pain signals. Perhaps most exciting is research that suggests that crafts like knitting and crocheting may help to keep off a decline in brain function with age. In a 2011 study, researchers led by Dr. Yonas Geda at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester interviewed a random （随机的）sample of 1,321 people ages 70-89, most of whom were cognitively （在认知方面）normal, about the cognitive activities they engaged in late in life. The study, published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences, found that those who engaged in crafts like knitting and crocheting had a diminished chance of developing mild cognitive disorder and memory loss.[M] Although it is possible that only people who are cognitively healthy would pursue such activities, those who read newspapers or magazines or played music did not show similar benefits. The researchers speculate that craft activities promote the development of nerve pathways in the brain that help to maintain cognitive health.[N] In support of that suggestion, a 2014 study by Denise C. Park of the University of Texas at Dallas and colleagues demonstrated that learning to knit or do digital photography enhanced memory function in older adults. Those who engaged in activities that were not intellectually challenging, either in a social group or alone, did not show such improvements.[O] Given that sustained social contacts have been shown to support health and a long life, those wishing to maximize the health value of crafts might consider joining a group of like-minded folks. I for one try not to miss a single weekly meeting of my knitting group.

Technological changes brought dramatic new options to Americans living in the 1990s. During this decade new forms of entertainment, commerce, research, and communication became commonplace in the U.S. The driving force behind much of this change was a(n)（） popularly known as the Internet.The Internet was developed during the 1970s by the Department of Defense. In the case of an attack, military advisers suggested the（）of being able to operate one computer from another terminal. In the early days, the Internet was used mainly by scientists to communicate with other scientists. The Internet （） under government control until 1984.One early problem faced by Internet users was speed. Phone lines could only transmit information at a （） rate. The development of fiber-optic (光纤)cables allowed for billions of bits of information to be received every minute. Companies like Intel developed faster microprocessors, so personal computers could process the （） signals at a more rapid rate.In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was developed, m large part, for（）purposes. Cor¬porations created home pages where they could place text and graphics to sell products. Soon airline tickets, hotel（）, and even cars and homes could be purchased online. Universities （） research data on the Internet, so students could find（） information without leaving their dormitories. Companies soon discovered that work could be done at home and （） online, so a whole new class of telecommuters began to earn a living from home offices unshaven and wearing pajamas (睡衣).

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay on how to best handle the relationship between teachers and students. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English.黄山位于安徽省南部。它风景独特，尤以其日出和云海著称。要欣赏大山的宏伟壮丽，通常得向上看。但要欣赏黄山美景，就得向下看。黄山的湿润气候有利于茶树生长，是中国主要产茶地之一。这里还有许多温泉，其泉水有助于防治皮肤病。黄山是中国主要旅游目的地之一，也是摄影和传统国画最受欢迎的主题。

Female applicants to postdoctoral positions in geosciences were nearly half as likely to receive excellent letters of recommendation, compared with their male counterparts. Christopher Intagliata reports.As in many other fields, gender bias is widespread in the sciences. Men score higher starting salaries, have more mentoring (指导)，and have better odds of being hired. Studies show they’re also perceived as more competent than women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. And new research reveals that men are more likely to receive excellent letters of recommenda¬tion, too.“Say, you know, this is the best student I’ve ever had, ” says Kuheli Dutt, a social scientist and diversity officer at Columbia University’s Lamont campus. “Compare those excellent letters with a merely good letter: ‘ The candidate was productive, or intelligent, or a solid scientist or something that’s clearly solid praise,’ but nothing that singles out the candidate as exceptional or one of a kind.”Dutt and her colleagues studied more than 1,200 letters of recommendation for postdoctoral positions in geoscience. They were all edited for gender and other identifying information, so Dutt and her team could assign them a score without knowing the gender of the student. They found that female applicants were only half as likely to get outstanding letters, compared with their male counterparts. That includes letters of recommendation from all over the world, and written by, yes, men and women. The findings are in the journal Nature Geoscience.Dutt says they were not able to evaluate the actual scientific qualifications of the applicants using the data in the files. But she says the results still suggest women in geoscience are at a potential disadvantage from the very beginning of their careers starting with those less than outstanding letters of recommendation.“We’re not trying to assign blame or criticize anyone or call anyone consciously sexist. Rather, the point is to use the results of this study to open up meaningful dialogues on implicit gender bias, be it at a departmental level or an institutional level or even a discipline level.” Which may lead to some recommendations for the letter writers themselves.What do we learn about applicants to postdoctoral positions in geosciences?What do studies about men and women in scientific research show?What do the studies find about the recommendation letters for women applicants?What did Dutt and her colleagues do with the more than 1,200 letters of recommendation?What does Dutt aim to do with her study?

Aging happens to all of us, and is generally thought of as a natural part of life. It would seem silly to call such a thing a “disease.”On the other hand, scientists are increasingly learning that aging and biological age are two different things, and that the former is a key risk factor for conditions such as heart disease, cancer and many more. In that light, aging itself might be seen as something treatable, the way you would treat high blood pressure or a vitamin deficiency.Biophysicist Alex Zhavoronkov believes that aging should be considered a disease. He said that describing aging as a disease creates incentives to develop treatments.“It unties the hands of the pharmaceutical 药的)industry so that they can begin treating the disease and not just the side effects,” he said.“Right now, people think of aging as natural and something you can’t control,” he said. “In academic circles, people take aging research as just an interest area where they can try to develop interventions. The medical community also takes aging for granted, and can do nothing about it except keep people within a certain health range.”But if aging were recognized as a disease, he said, "It would attract funding and change the way we do health care. What matters is understanding that aging is curable."“It was always known that the body accumulates damage,” he added. “The only way to cure aging is to find ways to repair that damage. I think of it as preventive medicine for age-related conditions.”Leonard Hayflick, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said the idea that aging can be cured implies the human lifespan can be increased, which some researchers suggest is possible. Hayflick is not among them.“There’re many people who recover from cancer, stroke, or heart disease. But they continue to age, because aging is separate from their disease,” Hayflick said. "Even if those causes of death were eliminated, life expectancy would still not go much beyond 92 years.”What do people generally believe about aging?How do many scientists view aging now?What does Alex Zhavoronkov think of “describing aging as a disease”?What do we learn about the medical community?What does Professor Leonard Hayflick believe?

Why aren’t you curious about what happened?[A] “You suspended Ray Rice after our video,” a reporter from TMZ challenged National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell the other day. “Why didn’t you have the curiosity to go to the casino(赌场)yourself?” The implication of the question is that a more curious commissioner would have found a way to get the tape.[B] The accusation of incuriosity is one that we hear often, carrying the suggestion that there is some¬thing wrong with not wanting to search out the truth. “I have been bothered for a long time about the curious lack of curiosity,” said a Democratic member of the New Jersey legislature back in July, referring to an insufficiently inquiring attitude on the part of an assistant to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who chose not to ask hard questions about the George Washington Bridge traffic scandal. “Isn’t the mainstream media the least bit curious about what happened?” wrote conservative writer Jennifer Rubin earlier this year, referring to the attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya.[C] The implication, in each case, is that curiosity is a good thing, and a lack of curiosity is a problem. Are such accusations simply efforts to score political points for one’s party? Or is there something of particular value about curiosity in and of itself?[D] The journalist Ian Leslie, in his new and enjoyable book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, insists that the answer to that last question is ‘Yes’. Leslie argues that curiosity is a much-overlooked human virtue, crucial to our success, and that we are losing it.[E] We are suffering, he writes, from a “serendipity deficit.” The word “serendipity” was coined by Ho¬race Walpole in an 1854 letter, from a tale of three princes who “were always making discoveries, by accident, of things they were not in search of.” Leslie worries that the rise of the Internet, among other social and technological changes, has reduced our appetite for aimless adventures. No longer have we the inclination to let ourselves wander through fields of knowledge, ready to be surprised. Instead, we seek only the information we want.[F] Why is this a problem? Because without curiosity we will lose the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. We will see unimaginative governments and dying corporations make disastrous deci¬sions. We will lose a vital part of what has made humanity as a whole so successful as a species.[G] Leslie presents considerable evidence for the proposition that the society as a whole is growing less curious. In the U.S. and Europe, for example, the rise of the Internet has led to a declining con¬sumption of news from outside the reader’s borders. But not everything is to be blamed on technol¬ogy. The decline in interest in literary fiction is also one of the causes identified by Leslie. Reading literary fiction, he says, makes us more curious.[H] Moreover, in order to be curious, "you have to be aware of a gap in your knowledge in the first place.” Although Leslie perhaps paints a bit broadly in contending that most of us are unaware of how much we don’t know, he’s surely right to point out that the problem is growing: “Google can give us the powerful illusion that all questions have definite answers.”[I] Indeed, Google, for which Leslie expresses admiration, is also his frequent whipping boy（替罪羊）. He quotes Google co-founder Larry Page to the effect that the “perfect search engine” will "under¬stand exactly what I mean and give me back exactly what I want.” Elsewhere in the book, Leslie writes: “Google aims to save you from the thirst of curiosity altogether.”[J] Somewhat nostalgically （怀旧地）, he quotes John Maynard Keynes’s justly famous words of praise to the bookstore: “One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.” If only![K] Citing the work of psychologists and cognitive （认知的）scientists, Leslie criticizes the received wisdom that academic success is the result of a combination of intellectual talent and hard work. Curiosity, he argues, is the third key factor — and a difficult one to preserve. If not cultivated, it will not survive: “Childhood curiosity is a collaboration between child and adult. The surest way to kill it is to leave it alone.”[L] School education, he warns, is often conducted in a way that makes children incurious. Children of educated and upper-middle-class parents turn out to be far more curious, even at early ages, than children of working class and lower class families. That lack of curiosity produces a relative lack of knowledge, and the lack of knowledge is difficult if not impossible to compensate for later on.[M] Although Leslie’s book isn’t about politics, he doesn’t entirely shy away from the problem. Political leaders, like leaders of other organizations, should be curious. They should ask questions at crucial moments. There are serious consequences, he warns, in not wanting to know.[N] He presents as an example the failure of the George W. Bush administration to prepare properly for the after-effects of the invasion of Iraq. According to Leslie, those who ridiculed former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his 2002 remark that we have to be wary of the "unknown un¬knowns" were mistaken. Rumsfeld’s idea, Leslie writes, “wasn’t absurd— it was smart.” He adds, “The tragedy is that he didn’t follow his own advice.”[O] All of which brings us back to Goodell and the Christie case and Benghazi. Each critic in those examples is charging, in a different way, that someone in authority is intentionally being incurious. I leave it to the reader’s political preference to decide which, if any, charges should stick. But let’s be careful about demanding curiosity about the other side’s weaknesses and remaining determinedly incurious about our own. We should be delighted to pursue knowledge for its own sake—even when what we find out is something we didn’t particularly want to know.

We all know there exists a great void (空白)in the public educational system when it comes to（） to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses. One educator named Dori Roberts decided to do something to change this system. Dori taught high school engineering for 11 years. She noticed there was a real void in quality STEM education at all （） of the public educational system. She said, “I started Engineering For Kids (EFK) after noticing a real lack of math, science and engineering programs to （） my own kids in.”She decided to start an afterschool program where children （） in STEM-based competitions. The club grew quickly and when it reached 180 members and the kids in the program won several state （） , she decided to devote all her time to cultivating and （） it. The global business EFK was born.Dori began operating EFK out of her Virginia home, which she then expanded to （） recreation centers. Today, the EFK program （）over 144 branches in 32 states within the United States and in 21 countries. Sales have doubled from $5 million in 2014 to $10 million in 2015, with 25 new branches planned for 2016. The EFK website states, "Our nation is not （） enough engineers. Our philosophy is to inspire kids at a young age to understand that engineering is a great （） .”

Directions: For this part，you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay on how to best handle the relationship between parents and children. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English. 华山位于华阴市，距西安120公里。华山是秦岭的一部分，秦岭不仅分隔陕南与陕北，也分隔华南与华北。与从前人们常去朝拜的泰山不同，华山过去很少有人光临，因为上山的道路极其危险。然而，希望长寿的人却经常上山，因为山上生长着许多药草，特别是一些稀有的药草。自上世纪90年代安装缆车以来，参观人数大大增加。

It’s time to reevaluate how women handle conflict at work. Being overworked or over-committed at home and on the job will not get you where you want to be in life. It will only slow you down and hinder your career goals.Did you know women are more likely than men to feel exhausted? Nearly twice as many women than men ages 18-44 reported feeling “very tired” or “exhausted”, according to a recent study.This may not be surprising given that this is the age range when women have children. It’s also the age range when many women are trying to balance careers and home. One reason women may feel exhausted is that they have a hard time saying “no.” Women want to be able to do it all— volunteer for school parties or cook delicious meals— and so their answer to any request is often “Yes, I can.”Women struggle to say “no” in the workplace for similar reasons, including the desire to be liked by their colleagues. Unfortunately, this inability to say “no” may be hurting women’s health as well as their career.At the workplace, men use conflict as a way to position themselves, while women often avoid conflict or strive to be the peacemaker, because they don’t want to be viewed as aggressive or disruptive at work. For example, there’s a problem that needs to be addressed immediately, resulting in a dispute over who should be the one to fix it. Men are more likely to face that dispute from the perspective of what benefits them most, whereas women may approach the same dispute from the perspective of what’s the easiest and quickest way to resolve the problem—even if that means doing the boring work themselves.This difference in handling conflict could be the deciding factor on who gets promoted to a leadership position and who does not. Leaders have to be able to delegate and manage resources wisely—including staff expertise. Shouldering more of the workload may not earn you that promotion. Instead, it may highlight your inability to delegate effectively.What does the author say is the problem with women?Why do working women of child-bearing age tend to feel drained of energy?What may hinder the future prospects of career women?Men and women differ in their approach to resolving workplace conflicts in that（）.What is important to a good leader?

That people often experience trouble sleeping in a different bed in unfamiliar surroundings is a phe¬nomenon known as the “first-night” effect. If a person stays in the same room the following night they tend to sleep more soundly. Yuka Sasaki and her colleagues at Brown University set out to investigate the origins of this effect.Dr. Sasaki knew the first-night effect probably has something to do with how humans evolved. The puzzle was what benefit would be gained from it when performance might, be affected the following day. She also knew from previous work conducted on birds and dolphins that these animals put half of their brains to sleep at a time so that they can rest while remaining alert enough to avoid predators （捕食者）. This led her to wonder if people might be doing the same thing. To take a closer look, her team studied 35 healthy people as they slept in the unfamiliar environment of the university’s Department of Psychological Sciences. The participants each slept in the department for two nights and were carefully monitored with techniques that looked at the activity of their brains. Dr. Sasaki found, as expected, the participants slept less well on their first night than they did on their second, taking more than twice as long to fall asleep and sleeping less overall. During deep sleep, the participants’ brains behaved in a similar manner seen in birds and dolphins. On the first night only, the left hemispheres （半球）of their brains did not sleep nearly as deeply as their right hemispheres did.Curious if the left hemispheres were indeed remaining awake to process information detected in the surrounding environment, Dr. Sasaki re-ran the experiment while presenting the sleeping participants with a mix of regularly timed beeps (蜂鸣声)of the same tone and irregular beeps of a different tone during the night. She worked out that, if the left hemisphere was staying alert to keep guard in a strange environment, then it would react to the irregular beeps by stirring people from sleep and would ignore the reg¬ularly timed ones. This is precisely what she found.What did researchers find puzzling about the first-night effect?What do we learn about Dr. Yuka Sasaki doing her research?What did Dr. Sasaki do when she first did her experiment?What did Dr. Sasaki do when re-running her experiment?What did Dr. Sasaki find about the participants in her experiment?

Do In-Class Exams Make Students Study Harder?Research suggests they may study more broadly for the unexpected rather than search for answers. [A] I have always been a poor test-taker. So it may seem rather strange that I have returned to college to finish the degree I left undone some four decades ago. I am making my way through Columbia University, surrounded by students who quickly supply the verbal answer while I am still processing the question.[B] Since there is no way for me to avoid exams, I am currently questioning what kind are the most taxing and ultimately beneficial. I have already sweated through numerous in-class midterms and finals, and now I have a professor who issues take-home ones. I was excited when I learned this, figuring I had a full week to do the research, read the texts, and write it all up. In fact, I was still rewriting my midterm the morning it was due. To say I had lost the thread is putting it mildly.[C] As I was suffering through my week of anxiety, overthinking the material and guessing my grasp of it, I did some of my own polling among students and professors. David Eisenbach, who teaches a popular class on U.S. presidents at Columbia, prefers the in-class variety. He believes students ultimately learn more and encourages them to form study groups. “That way they socialize over history outside the class, which wouldn’t happen without the pressure of an in-class exam," he explained. “Furthermore, in-class exams force students to learn how to perform under pressure, an essential work skill.”[D] He also says there is less chance of cheating with the in-class variety. In 2012, 125 students at Harvard were caught up in a scandal when it was discovered they had cheated on a take-home exam for a class entitled “Introduction To Congress.” Some colleges have what they call an “honor code," though if you are smart enough to get into these schools, you are either smart enough to get around any codes or hopefully, too ethical to consider doing so. As I sat blocked and clueless for two solid days, I momentarily wondered if I couldn’t just call an expert on the subject matter which I was tackling, or someone who took the class previously, to get me going.[E] Following the Harvard scandal, Mary Miller, the former dean of students at Yale, made an impas¬sioned appeal to her school’s professors to refrain from take-home exams. "Students, risk health and well being, as well as performance in other end-of-term work, when faculty offers take-home exams without clear, time-limited boundaries,” she told me. “Research now shows that regular quizzes, short essays, and other assignments over the course of a term better enhance learning and retention.”[F] Most college professors agree the kind of exam they choose largely depends on the subject. A quantitative-based one, for example, is unlikely to be sent home, where one could ask their older brothers and sisters to help. Vocational-type classes, such as computer science or journalism, on the other hand, are often more research-oriented and lend themselves to take-home testing. Chris Koch, who teaches “History of Broadcast Journalism” at Montgomery Community College in Rockville, Maryland, points out that reporting is about investigation rather than the memorization of minute details. “In my field, it’s not what you know—it’s what you know how to find out,” says Koch. “There is way too much information, and more coming all the time, for anyone to remember. I want my students to search out the answers to questions by using all the resources available to them.”[G] Students’ test-form preferences vary, too, often depending on the subject and course difficulty. “I prefer take-home essays because it is then really about the writing, so you have time to edit and do more research,” says Elizabeth Dresser, a junior at Barnard. Then there is the stress factor. Francesca Haass, a senior at Middlebury, says, “I find the in-class ones are more stressful in the short term, but there is immediate relief as you swallow information like mad, and then you get to forget it all. Take-homes require thoughtful engagement which can lead to longer term stress as there is never a moment when the time is up.” Meanwhile, Olivia Rubin, a sophomore at Emory, says she hardly even considers take-homes true exams. “If you understand the material and have the ability to articulate（说出）your thoughts, they should be a breeze.”[H] How students ultimately handle tests may depend on their personal test-taking abilities. There are people who always wait until the last minute, and make it much harder than it needs to be. And then there are those who, not knowing what questions are coming at them, and having no resources to refer to, can freeze. And then there are we rare folks who fit both those descriptions.[I] Yes, my advanced age must factor into the equation（等式），in part because of my inability to access the information as quickly. As another returning student at Columbia, Kate Marber, told me, “We are learning not only all this information, but essentially how to learn again. Our fellow students have just come out of high school. A lot has changed since we were last in school.”[J] If nothing else, the situation has given my college son and me something to share. When I asked his opinion on this matter, he responded, “I like in-class exams because the time is already reserved, as opposed to using my free time at home to work on a test,” he responded. It seems to me that a compromise would be receiving the exam questions a day or two in advance, and then doing the actual test in class with the ticking clock overhead.[K] Better yet, how about what one Hunter College professor reportedly did recently for her final exam: She encouraged the class not to stress or even study, promising that, “It is going to be a piece of cake.” When the students came in, sharpened pencils in hand, there was not a blue book in sight. Rather, they saw a large chocolate cake and they each were given a slice.

A rat or pigeon might not be the obvious choice to tend to someone who is sick, but these creatures have some（） skills that could help the treatment of human diseases.Pigeons are often seen as dirty birds and an urban （） but they are just the latest in a long line of animals that, have been found to have abilities to help humans. Despite having a brain no bigger than the （）of your index finger, pigeons have a very impressive （） memory. Recently it was shown that they could be trained to be as accurate as humans at detecting breast cancer in images.Rats are often （） with spreading disease rather than （） it, but this long-tailed animal is highly （） . Inside a rat’s nose are up to 1,000 different types of olfactory receptors (嗅觉感受器)， whereas humans only have 100 to 200 types. This gives rats the ability to detect （）smells. As a result, some rats are being put to work to detect TB (肺结核).When the rats detect the smell, they stop and rub their legs to （） a sample is infected.Traditionally, a hundred samples would take lab technicians more than two days to （） , but for a rat it takes less than 20 minutes. This rat detection method doesn’t rely on specialist equipment. It is also more accurate—the rats are able to find more TB infections and, therefore, save more lives.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay on how to best handle the relationship between doctors and patients. You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English. 黄河是亚洲第三、世界第六长的河流。“黄”这个字描述的是其河水浑浊的颜色。黄河发源于青海，流经九个省份，最后注入渤海。黄河是中国赖以生存的几条河流之一。黄河流域(river basin)是中国古代文明的诞生地，也是中国早期历史上最繁荣的地区。然而，由于极具破坏力的洪水频发，黄河曾造成多次灾害。在过去几十年里，政府采取了各种措施防止灾害发生。

“One of the reasons I find this topic very interesting is because my mom was a smoker when I was younger,” says Lindson-Hawley, who studies tobacco and health at the University of Oxford.By studying about 700 adult smokers, she found out that her mom quit the right way — by stopping abruptly and completely.In her study, participants were randomly (随机地)assigned to two groups. One had to quit abruptly on a given day, going from about a pack a day to zero. The other cut down gradually over the course of two weeks. People in both groups used nicotine (尼古丁)patches before they quit, in addition to a second form of nicotine replacement, like gum or spray. They also had talk therapy with a nurse before and after quit day.Six months out, more people who had quit abruptly had stuck with it — more than one-fifth of them, compared to about one-seventh in the other group. Although these numbers appear low, it is much higher than if people try without support.And the quit rates were particularly convincing given that before the study started, most of the peo¬ple had said they’d rather cut down gradually before quitting. “If you’re training for a marathon, you wouldn’t expect to turn up and just be able to run it. And I think people see that for smoking as well. They think, ‘Well, if I gradually reduce, it’s like practice,”’ says Lindson-Hawley. But that wasn’t the case. Instead of giving people practice, the gradual reduction likely gave them cravings (癌)and withdrawal symptoms before they even reached the quit day, which could be why fewer people in that group actual¬ly made it to that point. “Regardless of your stated preference, if you’re ready to quit, quitting abruptly is more effective,” says Dr. Gabriela Ferreira. “When you can quote a specific number like a fifth of the patients were able to quit, that’s compelling. It gives them the encouragement, I think, to really go for it,” Ferreira says.People rarely manage to quit the first time they try. But at least, she says, they can maximize the odds of success.What does Lindson-Hawley say about her mother?What kind of support did smokers receive to quit smoking in Lindson-Hawley’s study?How does Dr. Gabriela Ferreira view the result of Lindson-Hawley's experiment?The idea of “a marathon” (Line 2, Para. 5) illustrates the popular belief that quitting smoking（） .What happens when people try to quit smoking gradually?

Shoppers in the UK are spending less money on toilet paper to save money, research has shown. Penny-pinching UK consumers choose cheaper products from discounters such as Aldi and Lidl rather than luxury alternatives.This has wiped 6% off the value of the soft tissue paper market in the UK. It has shrunk from £1.19 billion in 2011 to £1.12 billon in 2015, according to a new report from market research company Mintel. Furthermore, the future of the market looks far from rosy, with sales expected to fall further to £1.11 billion in 2016.In the last year alone, despite an increase in the UK population and a subsequent rise in the num¬ber of households, sales of toilet paper fell by 2%, with the average household reducing their toilet roll spending from £43 in 2014 to £41 in 2015.Overall, almost three in five people say they try to limit their usage of paper — including facial tis¬sue and kitchen roll — to save money. “Strength, softness and thickness remain the leading indicators of toilet paper quality, with just a small proportion of consumers preferring more luxurious alternatives, such as those with flower patterns or perfume,” said Mintel analyst Jack Duckett. “These extra features are deemed unnecessary by the majority of shoppers, which probably reflects how these types of prod¬ucts are typically more expensive than regular toilet paper, even when on special offer.”While consumers are spending less on toilet paper, they remain fussy — in theory at least — when it comes to paper quality. Top of Britons’ toilet paper wish list is softness (57%) followed by strength (45%) and thickness (36%).One in 10 buyers rank toilet rolls made from recycled paper among their top considerations, high¬lighting how overall the environment is much less of a consideration for shoppers than product quality. In a challenge for manufacturers, 81% of paper product users said they would consider buying recycled toilet tissue if it were comparable in quality to standard paper.The market sales of toilet paper have decreased because（）.What does the author think of the future of the tissue paper market in the UK?What does Jack Duckett say about toilet paper?What do we learn about Britons concerning toilet paper?What can we infer from the last paragraph?

The Blessing and Curse of the People Who Never ForgetA handful of people can recall almost every day of their lives in enormous detail—and after years of research, neuroscientists are finally beginning to understand how they do it.[A] For most of us, memory is a mess of blurred and faded pictures of our lives. As much as we would like to cling on to our past, even the saddest moments can be washed away with lime.[B] Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the details of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work. “My memory is like a library of video tapes, walk-throughs of every day of my life from waking to sleeping," he explains.[C] Veiseh can even put a date on when those tapes started recording: 15 December 2000, when he met his first, girlfriend at his best friend’s 16th birthday party. He had always had a good memory, but the thrill of young love seems to have shifted a gear in his mind: from now on, he would start recording his whole life in detail. “I could tell you everything about every day after that.”[D] Needless to say, people like Veiseh are of great interest to neuroscientists （神经科学专家）hoping to understand the way the brain records our lives. A couple of recent papers have finally opened a window on these people’s extraordinary minds. And such research might even suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity.[E] ‘Highly superior autobiograpliical memory’ （or HSAM for short）, first came to light in the early 2000s, with a young woman named Jill Price. Emailing the neuroscientist and memory researcher Jim McGaugh one day, she claimed that she could recall every day of her life since the age of 12. Could he help explain her experiences?[F] McGaugh invited her to his lab, and began to test her: he would give her a date and ask her to tell him about the world events on that day. True to her word, she was correct almost every time.[G] It didn’t take long for magazines and documentary film-makers to come to understand her “total recall”, and thanks to the subsequent media interest, a few dozen other subjects （including Veiseh） have since come forward and contacted the team at the University of California, Irvine.[H] Interestingly, their memories are highly self-centred: although they can remember “autobiographical” life events in extraordinary detail, they seem to be no better than average at recalling impersonal information, such as random （任意选取的）lists of words. Nor are they necessarily better at remembering a round of drinks, say. And although their memories are vast, they are still likely to suffer from “false memories”. Clearly, there is no such thing as a “perfect” memory—their extraordinary minds are still using the same flawed tools that the rest of us rely on. The question is, how?[I] Lawrence Patihis at the University of Southern Mississippi recently studied around 20 people with IISAM and found that they scored particularly high on two measures: fantasy proneness （倾向）and absorption. Fantasy proneness could be considered a tendency to imagine and daydream, whereas absorption is the tendency to allow your mind to become fully absorbed in an activity — to pay complete attention to the sensations（感受）and the experiences. “I’m extremely sensitive to sounds, smells and visual detail,” explains Nicole Donohue, who has taken part in many of these studies. “I definitely feel things more strongly than the average person.”[J] The absorption helps them to establish strong foundations for recollection, says Patihis, and the fantasy proneness means that they revisit those memories again and again in the coming weeks and months. Each time this initial memory trace is “replayed”, it becomes even stronger. In some ways, you probably go through that process after a big event like your wedding day—but the difference is that thanks to their other psychological tendencies, the HSAM subjects are doing it day in, day out, for the whole of their lives.[K] Not everyone with a tendency to fantasise will develop HSAM, though, so Patihis suggests that something must have caused them to think so much about their past. “Maybe some experience in their childhood meant that they became obsessed （着迷）with calendars and what happened to them,” says Patihis.[L] The people with HSAM I’ve interviewed would certainly agree that it can be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, it allows you to relive the most transformative and enriching experiences. Veiseh, for instance, travelled a lot in his youth. In his spare time, he visited the local art galleries, and the paintings are now lodged deep in his autobiographical memories.[M] “Imagine being able to remember every painting, on every wall, in every gallery space, between nearly 40 countries,” he says. “That’s a big education in art by itself.” With this comprehensive knowledge of the history of art, he has since become a professional painter.[N] Donohue, now a history teacher, agrees that it helped during certain parts of her education: “I can definitely remember what I learned on certain days at school. I could imagine what the teacher was saying or what it looked like in the book.”[O] Not everyone with IISAM has experienced these benefits, however. Viewing the past in high definition can make it very difficult to get over pain and regret. "It can be very hard to forget embarrassing moments,” says Donohue. “You feel same emotions—it is just as raw, just as fresh... You can’t turn off that stream of memories, no matter how hard you try.” Veiseh agrees: “It is like having these open wounds — they are just a part of you,” he says.[P] This means they often have to make a special effort to lay the past to rest. Bill, for instance, often gets painful “flashbacks”, in which unwanted memories intrude into his consciousness, but overall he has chosen to see it as the best way of avoiding repeating the same mistakes. “Some people are absorbed in the past but not open to new memories, but that’s not the case for me. I look forward to each day and experiencing something new.”

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