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Directions: For this part, you are required to write a composition of 200 words on the following topic and write your composition on the ANSWER SHEET.My Views on Chinese Culture Going abroad

Directions: For this part you are required to summarize the main idea of the following passage in no more than 60 words. Write your summary on the ANSPVER SHEET .As researchers in psychology, economics and organizational behavior have been gradually discovering, the experience of being happy at work looks very similar across professions. People, who love their jobs, feel challenged by their work but in control of it. They have bosses who make them feel appreciated and co-workers they like. They can find meaning in whatever they do. And they aren’t just lucky. It takes real effort to reach that Sublime State.An even bigger obstacle, though, may be our low expectations on the job. Love, family, community—hose are supposed to be the true sources of happiness, while work simply gives us the means to enjoy them. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow, which adherents of positive psychology would use to describe the job-induced highs, says that distinction is a false one.“Anything can be enjoyable if the elements of now are present,” he writes in his book Good Business.” Within that framework, doing a seemingly boring job can be a source of greater fulfillment than one ever thought possible.”Csikszentmihalyi encourages us to reach a state in which work is an extension of what we naturally want to do. Immersed in the pleasure of work, we don’t worry about its ultimate reward. If that sounds out of reach, take heart. You may soon get some encouragement from the head office. A growing body of research is demonstrating that happy workers not only are happier in life but are also crucial to the health of a company.Thirty-five years ago, the Gallup Organization started researching why people in certain work groups, even within the same company, were so much more effective than others. Donald Clifton, the Gallup researcher who pioneered that work, conducted a series of extensive interviews with highly productive teams of workers. From those interviews, Gallup developed a set of 12 statements designed to measure employees’ overall level of happiness with their work, which Gallup calls ’’engagement". Some of the criteria reflect the obvious requirements of any worker (Do you have what you need to do your job? Do you know what's expected of you at work?), while others reveal more subtle variables (Do you have a best friend at work? Does your supervisor or someone else at work care about you as a person?). Gallup started the survey in 1998, and it now includes 5.4 million employees at 474 organizations; Gallup also does periodic random polls of workers in different countries.The polls paint a picture of a rather disaffected U-S. work force. In the most recent poll, from September 2004, only 29% of workers said they were engaged with their work. More than half, 55%, were not engaged, and 16% were actively disengaged. Still, those numbers are better than those in many other countries. The percentage of engaged workers in the U. S. is more than twice as large as Germany's and three times as great as Singapore's. But neither the late 1990s boom nor the subsequent bust had much impact in either direction, indicating that the state of worker happiness goes much deeper than the swings of the economy.James Harter, a psychologist directing that research at Gallup, says many companies are simply misreading what makes people happy at work. Beyond a certain minimum level, it isn’t pay or benefits; it’s strong relationships with co-workers and a supportive boss. ’’These are basic human needs in the workplace, but they're not the ones thought by managers to be very important." Harter says. Gallup has found that a strong positive response to the statement” I have a best friend at work”, for example, is a powerful predictor for engagement at work and is correlated with profitability and connection with customers. "It indicates a high level of belonging," Hatter says.Without it, a job that looks good on paper can make a worker miserable. Martina Radix, 41, traded a high-pressure job as an executive assistant at a company where she liked her colleagues for a less taxing position as a clerical worker in a law firm six years ago. She has more time and flexibility but feels stifled by her co-workers and unappreciated by her boss. nI am a misfit in that department,” she says. "No matter how good your personal life is, if you go in to a bad atmosphere at work, it takes away from it.”In fact, engagement at work is less a function of your personality than is happiness in general. Harter estimates that individual disposition accounts for only about 30% of the difference between employees who are highly engaged and those who are not. The rest of it is shaped by the hundreds of interactions that employees have every day with co-workers, supervisors and customers.The most direct fix, then, is to seek out a supportive workplace. Finding a job that fits a life calling unlocks the door to happiness. Lissette Mendez, 33, says her job coordinating the annual book fair at Miami Dade College is the one she was born to do. "Books are an inextricable part of my life," she says.Even if your passion does not easily translate into a profession, you can still find happiness on the job. Numerous studies have shown correlations between meaningful work and happiness, job satisfaction and even physical health. That sense of meaning, however, can take many different forms. Some people find it in the work itself; others take pride in their company's mission rather than in their specific job. People can find meaning in anything.The desire for meaning is so strong that sometimes people simply create it, especially to make sense of difficult or unpleasant work. In a recently completed six-year study of physicians during their surgical residency, for example, it was found that the surgeons were extremely dissatisfied in the first year, when the menial work they were assigned, like filling out endless copies of patient records, seemed pointless. Once they started to think of the training as part of the larger process of joining an elite group of doctors, their attitude changed. They're able to reconstruct and make sense of their work and what they do. By the end of year one, they've started to create some meanings.While positive psychology has mostly focused on the individual pursuit of happiness, a new field -positive organizational scholarship -has begun to examine the connection between happy employees and happy businesses. Instead of focusing on profitability and competition to explain success, researchers in this field are studying meaningfulness, authentic leadership and emotional competence. Not the typical B-school buzzwords, but they may soon become part of the language spoken by every M. B. A.Until recently, business people would dismiss employee well-being as "outside their domain and kind of fringe-ish, says Thomas Wright, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Nevada, Reno. Early hints of the importance of worker happiness were slow to be accepted. A 1920s study on the topic at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Co. in Cicero. It looked at whether increased lighting, shorter workdays and other worker-friendly fixes would improve productivity. While the workplace changes boosted performance, the experimenters eventually discovered that the differences workers were responding to not in the physical environment but in the social one. In other words, the attention they were getting was what made them happier and more effective. This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect. "The researchers came to realize that it was people’s happiness that made the difference," Wright says. But later studies that looked at job-satisfaction ratings were inconsistent. Broader measures of happiness, it turns out, are better predictors of productivity.Making any of those changes depends on the boss, although not necessarily, the CEO. So a handful of business schools are trying to create a new kind of frontline manager, based on the idea of "authentic leadership’'. Instead of imposing faddish management techniques on each supervisor, authentic leadership begins with self-awareness. Introverted bosses have to know their own style and then find strategies to manage people that feel natural. In other words, by figuring out theirstrengths, they learn to recognize those of employees.

Translate the following passage into English. 研究表明，与20年前相比，尽管社交媒体越来越受人们欢迎，但是青少年的朋友却日益减少。一份历时12年、涵盖20万高中生的研究发现，虽然年轻人的朋友越来越少，但是他们更多交友的意向并无增多。该研究认为，经济变化在促使个人主义增长的同时，可能导致人们交友兴趣减弱，使人们更多转向自立、增强自尊、减少孤独感。

Translate the following passage into Chinese. The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind: it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanations. The difference between the operations and methods of a baker weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist by means of his balance is not that the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working, but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement that the former.Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion of a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.

Whenever two or more unusual traits or situations are found in the same place, it is tempting to look for more than a coincidental relationship between them. The high Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau certainly have extraordinary physical characteristics and the cultures which are found there are also unusual, though not unique. However there is no intention of adopting Montesquieu's view of climate and soil as cultural determinants. The ecology of a region merely poses some of the problems faced by the inhabitants of the region, and while the problems facing a culture are important to its development, they do not determine it.The appearance of the Himalayas during the late Tertiary Period and the accompanying further raising of the previously established rages had a marked effect on the climate of the region. Primarily, of course, it blocked the Indian monsoon from reaching Central Asia at all. Secondarily, air and moisture from other directions were also reduced.Prior to the raising of the Himalayas, the land now forming the Tibetan uplands had a dry, continental climate with vegetation and animal life similar to that of much of the rest of the region on the same parallel, but somewhat different than that of the areas farther north, which were already drier. With the coming of the Himalayas and the relatively sudden drying out of the region, there was a severe thinning out of the animal and plant population. The ensuing incomplete Pleistocene glaciations had a further thinning effect, but significantly did not wipe out life in the area. Thus after the end of the glaciations there were only a few varieties of life extant from the original continental species. Isolated by the Kunlun range from the Tarim basin and Turfan depression, species which had already adapted to the dry steppe climate, and would otherwise have been expected to flourish in Tibetan, the remaining native fauna and flora multiplied. Armand describes the Tibetan fauna as not having great variety, but being "striking*' in the abundance of the particular species that are present. The plant life is similarly limited in variety, with some observers finding no more than seventy varieties of plants in even the relatively fertile Eastern Tibetan valleys, with fewer than ten food crops. Tibetan "tea" is a major staple, perhaps replacing the unavailable vegetables.The difficulties of living in an environment at once dry and cold, and populated with species more usually found in more hospitable climates, are great. These difficulties may well have influenced the unusual polyandrous (一妻多夫制) societies typical of the region. Lattimore sees the maintenance of multiple-husband households as being preserved from earlier forms by the harsh conditions of the Tibetan uplands, which permitted no experimentation and "froze" the cultures which came there. Kawakita, on the other hand, sees the polyandry as a way of easily permitting the best householder to become the head husband regardless of age. His detailed studies of the Bhotea village of Tsumje do seem to support this idea of polyandry as a method of talent mobility is a situation where even the best talent is barely enough for survival.In sum, though arguments can be made that a pre-existing polyandrous system was strengthened and preserved (insofar as it has been) by the rigors of the land, it would certainly be an overstatement to lay causative factors of any stronger nature to the ecological influences in this case.1.What are the “unusual traits or situations” referred to in the first sentence?2.The purpose of the passage is to（）.3.The author’s knowledge of Tibet is probably （）. 4.According to the passage, which of the following would probably be the most agreeable to Montesquieu?5.The species of fauna and flora remaining in Tibet after the Pleistocene glaciations can properly be called continental because they（）.

For years, studies have found that first-generation college students-those who do not have a parent with a college degree-lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit lore of them. This has created ’’a paradox" in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has "continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close” achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students.The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree.Their thesis-that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact—was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap.Many first-generation students struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the "rules of the game," and "take advantage of college resources," they write. And this becomes more of a problem when colleges don’t talk about the class advantage and disadvantages of different groups of students. Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students’ educational experience, many first-generation students lack insight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students like them can improve.1.Recruiting more first-generation students has（）.2.The author of the paper believes that first-generation students （）. 3.We may infer from the last paragraph that（）.

One of the most alarming things about the crisis in the global financial system is that the warning signs have been out there for some time, yet no one heeded them. Exactly 10 years ago, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed to convince investors that it could repay its debts, thereby bringing the world to the brink of a similar “liquidity crisis” to the one we now see. Disaster was averted then only because regulators managed to put together a multi-billion-dollar bailout package.LTCM’s collapse was particularly notable because its founders had set great store by their use of statistical models designed to keep tabs on the risks inherent in their investments. Its fall should have been a wake-up call to banks and their regulatory supervisors that the models were not working as well as hoped-in particular that they were ignoring the risks of extreme events and the connections that send such events reverberating around the financial system. Instead, they carried on using them?Now that disaster has struck again, some financial risk modelers-the "quant’s" who have wielded so much influence over modern banking-are saying they know where the gaps in their knowledge are and are promising to fill them. Should we trust them?Their track record does not inspire confidence. Statistical models have proved almost useless at predicting the killer risks for individual banks, and worse than useless when it comes to risks to the financial system as a whole. The models encouraged bankers to think they were playing a high-stakes card game, when what they were actually doing was more akin to lining up a row of dominoes.How could so many smart people have gotten it so wrong? One reason is that their faith in their model’s predictive power led them to ignore what was happening in the real world. Finance offers enormous scope for dissembling: almost any failure can be explained away by a judicious choice of language and data. When investors do not behave like the self-interested homo economics that economists suppose them to be, they are described as being "irrationally exuberant" or blinded by panic. An alternative view-that investors are reacting logically in the face of uncertainty-is rarely considered. Similarly, extreme events are described as happening only "once in a century"-even though there is insufficient data on which to base such an assessment.The quant’s' models might successfully predict the movement of markets most of the time, but the bankers who rely on them have failed to realize that the occasions on which the markets deviate from normality are much more important than those when they comply. The events of the past year have driven this home in a spectacular fashion: by some estimates, the banking industry has lost more money in the current crisis than it has made in its entire history.1.What happened a decade ago in the financial world（）.2.The statistical models used by LTCM （）. 3.What does the author think is the major cause of the current financial crisis?4.It can be inferred from the passage that risk control of the financial market（）.

With so much focus on children's use of screens, it's easy for parents to forget about their own screen use. “Tech is designed to really suck on you in,”says Jenny Radesky in her study of digital play, "and digital products are there to promote maximal engagement. It makes it hard to disengage, and leads to a lot of bleed-over into the family routine."Radesky has studied the use of mobile phones and tablets at mealtimes by giving mother-child pairs a food-testing exercise. She found that mothers who used devices during the exercise started 20 percent fewer verbal and 39 percent fewer nonverbal interactions with their children. During a separate observation, she saw that phones became a source of tension in the family. Parents would be looking at their emails while the children would be making excited bids for their attention.Infants are wired to look at parents' faces to try to understand their world, and if those faces are blank and unresponsive-as they often are when absorbed in a device-it can be extremely disconcerting for the children. Radesky cites the "still face experiment" devised by developmental psychologist Ed Tronick in the 1970s. In it, a mother is asked to interact with her child in a normal way before putting on a blank expression and not giving them any visual social feedback: The child becomes increasingly distressed as she tries to capture her mother’s attention. "Parents don’t have to be exquisitely present at all times, but there needs to be a balance and parents need to be responsive and sensitive to a child's verbal or nonverbal expressions of an emotional need," says Radesky.On the other hand, Tronick himself is concerned that the worries about kids ' use of screens are born out of an "oppressive ideology that demands that parents should always be interacting" with their children: "It’s based on a somewhat fantasized, very white, very upper-middle-class ideology that says if you’re failing to expose your child to 30,000 words you are neglecting them." Tronick believes that just because a child isn't learning from the screen doesn't mean there’s no value to it-particularly if it gives parents time to have a shower, do housework or simply have a break from their child. Parents, he says, can get a lot out of using their devices to speak to a friend or get some work out of the way. This can make them feel happier, which lets them be more available to their child the rest of the time.1.Radesky cites the "still face experiment" to show that（）.2.The oppressive ideology mentioned by Tronick requires parents to （）. 3.According to Tronick, kid's use of screens may（）.

Antarctica has actually become a kind of space station--- a unique observation post for detecting important changes in the world's environment. Remote from major sources of pollution and the complex geological and ecological systems that prevail elsewhere, Antarctica makes possible scientific measurements that are often sharper and easier to interpret than those made in other parts of the world.Growing numbers of scientists therefore see Antarctica as a unique observation distant-early-warning sensor, where potentially dangerous global trends may be spotted before they show up to the north. One promising field of investigation is glaciology. Scholars from the United States, Switzerland, and France are pursuing seven separate but related projects that reflect their concern for the health of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a concern they believe the world at large should share.The Transantarctic Mountain, some of them more than 14,000 feet high, divide the continent into two very different regions. The part of the continent to the "east” of the mountains is a high plateau covered by an ice sheet nearly two miles thick. "West" of the mountain, the half of the continent south of the Americas is also covered by an ice sheet, but there the ice rests on rock that is mostly well below sea level. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared, the western part of the continent would be reduced to a sparse cluster of island.While ice and snow are obviously central to many environmental experiments, others focus on the mysterious "dry valley" of Antarctica, valleys that contain little ice or snow even in the depths of winter. Slashed through the mountains of southern Victoria Land, these valleys once held enormous glaciers that descended 9,000 feet from the polar plateau to the Ross Sea. Now the glaciers are gone, perhaps a casualty of the global warming trend during the 10,000 years since the ice age. Even the snow that falls in the dry valleys is blasted out by vicious winds that roar down from the polar plateau to the sea. Left bare are spectacular gorges, rippled fields of sand dunes, clusters of boulders sculptured into fantastic shapes by 100-mile-an-hour winds, and an aura of extraterrestrial desolation.Despite the unearthly aspect of the dry valleys, some scientists believe they may carry a message of hope of the verdant parts of the earth. Some scientists believe that in some cases the dry valleys may soak up pollutants faster than pollutants enter them.1.What is the point the author made in Paragraph One?2.How are east and west of Transantarctic Mountain different from each other?3.What would the result be if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet disappeared?4.Which of the following about dry valleys is true?5.What is the best title for this passage?

Many people invest in the stock market hoping to find the next Microsoft and Dell. However, I know（1）personal experience how difficult this really is. For more than a year, I was （2） hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a day in investing in the market. It seemed so easy, I dreamed of （3）my job at the end of the year, of buying a small apartment in Paris, of traveling around the world. But these dreams （4）to a sudden and dramatic end when a stock I （5）,Texas cellular phone wholesaler, fell by more than 75 per cent （6）a one year period. On the（7）day, it plunged by more than $15 a share. There was a rumor the company was （8）sales figures. That was when I learned how quickly Wall street （9）companies that, in one way or another, misrepresent the（10） .In a （11）, I sold all my stocks in the company, paying （12）margin debt with cash advances from my （13）card. Because I owned so many shares, I （14）a small fortune, half of it from money I borrowed from the brokerage company. One month, I am a （15）, the next, a loser. This one big loss was my first lesson in the market.My father was a stockbroker, as way my grandfather （16）him (In fact, he founded one of Chicago's earliest brokerage firms.) But like so many things in life, we don’t learn anything, until we （17）for ourselves. The only way to really understand the inner（18）of the stock market is to invest your own hard-earned money. When all your stocks are doing （19）and you feel like a winner, you learn very little. It’s when all your stocks are losing and everyone is questioning your stock picking （20）that you find out if you have what it takes to invest in the market.

Directions: For this part, you are required to write a composition of 200 words on the following topic. According to your own experience, has appearance really become so important for success nowadays? You should write your composition on the answering sheet. My Views on the Importance of Appearance

Directions: For this part, you are required to summarize the main idea of the following passage in plain language in no more than 50 words. You should write your summary on the answering sheer.Whether we like it or not, the world we live in has changed a great deal in the last hundred years, and it is likely to change even more in the next hundred. Some people would like to stop these changes and go back to what they see as a purer and simpler age. But as history shows, the past was not that wonderful. It was not so bad for a privileged minority, though even they had to do without modern medicine, and childbirth was highly risky for women. But for the vast majority of the population, life was nasty, brutish, and short.If we accept that we cannot prevent science and technology from changing our world, we can at least try to ensure that the changes they make are in the right directions. In a democratic society, this means that the public needs to have a basic understanding of science. So that it can make informed decisions and not leave them in the hands of experts. At the moment, the public is in two minds about science. It has come to expect the steady increase in the standard of living that new developments in science and technology have brought to continue, but it also distrusts science because it doesn’t understand it. This distrust is evident in the cartoon figure of the mad scientist working in his laboratory to produce a Frankenstein. It is also an important element behind support for the Green parties. But the public also has a great interest in science, particularly astronomy, as is shown by the large audiences for television series such as The Sky at Night and for science fiction.What can be done to harness this interest and give the public the scientific background it needs to make informed decisions on subjects like acid rain, the greenhouse effect, nuclear weapons, and genetic engineering? Clearly, the basis must lie in what is taught in schools. But in schools science is often presented in a dry and uninteresting manner. Children learn it by rote to pass examinations, and they don't see its relevance to the world around them. Moreover, science is often taught in terms of equations. Although equations are a brief and accurate way of describing mathematical ideas, they frighten most people. When I wrote a popular book recently, I was advised that each equation I included would halve the sales. I included one equation, Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. Maybe I would have sold twice as many copies without it.Scientists and engineers tend to express their ideas in the form of equations because they need to know the precise values of quantities. But for the rest of us, a qualitative grasp of scientific concepts is sufficient, and this can be conveyed by words and diagrams, without the use of equations.The science people learn in school can provide the basic framework. But the rate of scientific progress is now so rapid that there are always new developments that have occurred since one was at school or university. I never learned about molecular biology or transistors at school, but genetic engineering and computers are two of the developments most likely to change the way we live in the future. Popular books and magazine articles about science can help to put across new developments. But even the most successful popular book is read by only a small proportion of the population. Only television can reach a truly mass audience. There are some very good science programmers on TV, but others present scientific wonders simply as magic, without explaining them or showing how they fit into the framework of scientific ideas. Producers of television science programmers should realize that they have a responsibility to educate the public, not just entertain it.

中国有许多不同的宗教，如外来的佛教、基督教和伊斯兰教，以及本土的道教。寺庙是中国人为尊重佛教，对佛教建筑的新称呼。它是我国悠久历史文化的象征，也是宝贵的艺术珍品。寺庙文化完整地保存了我国各个朝代的历史文物，也渗透到国民生活的各个方面。各地一年一度的庙会不仅丰富了文化氛围，也同时促进了地方旅游业的发展。

Doing a PhD is certainly not for everybody, and I do not recommend it for most people. However, I am really glad I got my PhD rather than just getting a job after finishing my Bachelor’s. The number one reason it that I learned a hell of a lot doing the PhD, and most of the things I learned I would never get exposed to in a typical software engineering job.The process of doing a PhD trains you to do research, to read research papers, to run experiments, to write papers, to give talks. It also teaches you how to figure out what problem needs to be solved. You gain a very sophisticated technical background doing the PhD, and having your work subject to the intense scrutiny of the academic peer-review process - not to mention your thesis committee.I think of the PhD a little like the Grand Tour, a tradition in the 16th and 17th centuries where youths would travel around Europe, getting a rich exposure to high society in France, Italy and Germany, learning about art, architecture, language, literature, fencing, riding, ect... all of the essential liberal arts that a gentlemen was expected to have experience with to be an influential member of society. The top PhD programs set an incredibly high bar: a lot of coursework, teaching experience, qualifying exams, a thesis defense and of course making a groundbreaking research contribution in your area. Having to go through this process give you a tremendous amount of technical breadth and depth.Some important stuff I learned doing a PhD is as follows.How to write papers and give talks. Being fluent in technical communications is a really important skill for engineers. I've noticed a big gap between the software engineers I’ve worked with who have PhDs and those who don’t in this regard. PhD-trained folks tend to give clear well-organized talks and know how to write up their work and visualize the result of experiments. As a result, they can be much more influential.How to figure out what problem to work on. This is probably the most important aspect of PhD training. Doing a PhD will force you to cast away from shore and explore the boundary of human knowledge. (Matt Might’s cartoon on this is a great visualization of this.) I think that at least 80% of making a scientific contribution is figuring out what problem to tackle - a problem that is at once interesting, open and going to have impact if you solve it. There are lots of open problems that the research community is not interested in. There are many interesting problems that have been solved over and over and over. There’s a real trick to picking good problems and developing a taste for it is a key skill if you want to become a technical leader.So I think it’s worth having a PhD, especially if you want to work on the hardest and most interesting problems. This is true whether you want a career in academia, a research lab or more traditional engineering role, but as my PhD advisor was fond of saying, “doing a PhD costs you a house.” (In term of the lost salary during the PhD years)

No woman can be too rich or too thin. This saying often attributed to the late Duchess of Windsor embodies much of the odd spirit of our times. Being thin is deemed as such a virtue.The problem with such a view is that some people actually attempt to live by it. I myself have fantasies of slipping into narrow designer clothes. Consequently, I have been on a diet for the better - or worse - part of my life. Being rich wouldn't be bad either, but that won't happen unless an unknown relative dies suddenly in some distant land, leaving me millions of dollars.Where did we go off the track? When did eating butter become a sin, and a little bit of extra flesh unappealing, if not repellent? All religions have certain days when people refrain from eating, and excessive eating is one of Christianity's seven deadly sins. However, until quite recently, most people had a problem getting enough to eat. In some religious groups, wealth was a symbol of probable salvation and high morals, and fatness a sign of wealth and well-being.Today the opposite is true. We have shifted to thinness as our new mark of virtue. The result is that being fat - or even only somewhat overweight - is bad because it implies a lack of moral strength.Our obsession with thinness is also fueled by health concerns. It is true that in this country we have more overweight people than ever before, and that, in many cases, being overweight correlates with an increased risk of heart and blood vessel disease. These diseases, however, may have as much to do with our way of life and our high-fat diets as with excess weight. And the associated risk of cancer in the digestive system may be more of a dietary problem—too much fat and a lack of fiber—than a weight problem.The real concern, then, is not that we weigh too much, but that we neither exercise enough nor eat well. Exercise is necessary for strong bones and both heart and lung health. A balanced diet without a lot of fat can also help the body avoid many diseases. We should surely stop paying so much attention to weight. Simply being thin is not enough. It is actually hazardous if those who get (or already are) thin think they are automatically healthy and thus free from paying attention to their overall life-style. Thinness can be pure vainglory.1.Swept by the prevailing trend, the author（）.2.In the eyes of the author, and odd phenomenon nowadays is that （）. 3.In human history people’s views on body weight （）. 4.What’s the author's advice to women who are absorbed in the idea of thinness?5.The author criticizes women's obsession with thinness（）.

Visanto Melina. R.D. got the surprise of her career last year, when the Seattle-based vegetarian nutritionist was asked to give a seminar on vegetarianism at a senior citizen center. “I thought there'd be four or five people,” she says. Instead, the room was packed with seniors who had paid a $5 fee to hear her advice. And their interest in better health wasn’t only keen; it was informed. "They've obviously been paying attention to new research,” she says.If Melina studied demographic trends for a living, she probably wouldn’t have been so surprised. Trend watchers have verified an intriguing new phenomenon. Older people are turning to a vegetarian diet in ever-increasing numbers. Not surprisingly, demographics are driving the drift. By the year 2005, people born between 1949 and 1963 the Baby Boom Generation, will make up 38 percent of the American population. Furthermore, statistics suggest this educated, health-conscious, rebellious and relatively affluent contingent fits the traditional vegetarian profile. Add to the fact that older people seek natural, pleasant ways to combat problems associated with aging - weight gain, higher cholesterol and blood pressure, increased cancer risk and impaired digestion - and you have real motivation to go meatless, says Suzanne Havala, R.D., author of the American Dietetic Association's position paper on vegetarianism.Quantifying this new trend isn't easy, but a 1994 study by Health Focus Inc., an independent research organization based in Des Moines, Iowa, found that shoppers over age 50 are cutting down on their consumption of red meat or eliminating it from their diets entirely. More compelling evidence for the senior surge toward vegetarianism comes from vegetarian groups nationwide, which report a swell in the ranks of older vegetarians. For example, one out of five members of the new Syracuse (N.Y.) Area Vegetarian Education Society is over 50; unusually high for a fledgling organization. And two-thirds of the 850-member Vegetarian Society of Honolulu are also members of the American Association of Retired Persons, society executives say.An informal poll of older people suggests better health is often the main incentive and objective for turning veg. Three years ago Nancy Roberts, a 53-year-old magazine editor found herself doing what many people do over the holidays: overindulging in rich treats. However, this time it made her in. “The crash felt like the flu,” she says. By chance, Roberts was asked to edit some vegetarian recipes during that same period. She made a few at home, and her "flu” disappeared.More dramatically, Ruth Heidrich believes vegetarianism saved her life. The 61-year-old marathoner and triathlete was diagnosed with breast cancer 14 years ago, at age 47. When an initial biopsy indicated far more cancer than her doctors had thought, she was ready to take desperate measures. On the day of the diagnosis, she spotted a newspaper ad looking for volunteers to enroll in a study of breast cancer and diet, conducted by John McDougall, M.D., a leading advocate of the use of diet to fight disease. After meeting McDougall and reviewing what she says was an eight-inch thick file of statistics linking a high-fat diet with breast cancer, Heidrich converted from a traditional American diet to an extremely low-fat regimen with no animal products.” I didn't even have skim milk on my cereal,” she says. After a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, she is cancer-free. She never had to undergo radiation treatment or chemotherapy and believes her strict vegetarian diet helped speed her recovery from surgery.1.What does the author mean by saying "...demographics are driving the drift"?2.Why did Nancy Roberts fall ill?3.How did Nancy Roberts recover from her illness?

If sustainable competitive advantage depends on work-force skills. American firms have a problem. Human resource management (HRM) is not traditionally seen as central to the competitive survival of the firm in the United States. Skill acquisition is considered an individual responsibility. Labor is simply another factor of production to be hired or rented at the lowest possible cost, which is a much as one buys raw materials or equipment.The lack of importance attached to human resource management can be seen in the corporate hierarchy. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. The post of head of human resource management is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of corporate hierarchy. The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions and has no chance to move up to Chief Executive Officer (CEO). By way of contrast, in Japan the head of human resource management is central - usually the second most important executive, after the CEO, in the firm's hierarchy.While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work forces, in fact they invest less in the skills of their employees than do either Japanese or German firms. The money they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional and managerial employees. And the limited investments that are made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on the specific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make it possible to absorb new technologies.As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. If American workers, for example, take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workers in Germany (as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in the United States. More time is required before equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need for extensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which new equipment can be employed. The result is a slower pace of technological change. And in the end the skills of the bottom half of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can't effectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear.1.Which of the following applies to the HRM of American companies?2.What's the position of the executive of HRM in an American firm?3.The money most American firms put in work force training mainly goes on（）.4.What’s the main idea of the passage?

Most scholars agree that Isaac Newton, while formulating the laws of force and gravity and inventing the calculus in the late 1600s, probably knew all the science there was to know at the time. In the ensuing 350 years an estimated 50 million research papers and innumerable books have been published in the natural sciences and mathematics. The modern high school student probably now possesses more scientific knowledge than Newton did. Yet science to many people seems to be an impenetrable mountain of facts.One way scientists have tried to cope with this mountain is by becoming more and more specialized. Another strategy for coping with the mountain of information is to largely ignore it. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sure, you have to know a lot to be a scientist, but knowing a lot is not what makes a scientist. What makes a scientist is ignorance. This may sound ridiculous, but for scientists the facts are just a starting place. In science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions.By this calculus, ignorance will always grow faster the knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for all we have come to know, there is far more we don't know. More important, every day there is far more we know we don't know. One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being ignorant - not the kind of ignorance that is associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a cultivate, high-quality ignorance. This gets to the essence of what scientists do - they make distinctions between qualities of ignorance. They do it in grant proposals and over beers at meetings. As James Clerk Maxwell, probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance .... is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge.This perspective on science - that it is about the questions more than the answers - should come as something of a relief. It makes science less threatening and far more friendly and in fact, fun. Science becomes a series of elegant puzzles and puzzles within puzzles - and who doesn’t like puzzles? Questions are also more accessible and often more interesting than answers; answers tend to be the end of the process, whereas questions have you in the thick of things.Lately this side of science has taken a backseat in the public mind to what I call the accumulation view of science - that it is a pile of facts way too big for us to ever hope to conquer. But if scientists would talk about the questions, and if the media reported not only on new discoveries but the questions they answered and the new puzzles they created, and if educators stopped trafficking in facts that are already available on Wikipedia - then we might find a public once again engaged in this great adventure that has been going on for the past 15 generations.1.Which of the following is best supported in this passage?2.Why is it a relief that science is about the questions more than the answers?3.The expression "take a backseat" in paragraph 5 probably means（）.4.What is the author’s greatest concern in the passage?

One of the most difficult aspects of deciding whether current climatic events reveal evidence of the impact of human activities is that it is hard to get a measure of what constitutes the natural variability of the climate. We know that over the past millennia the climate has undergone major changes without any significant human intervention. We also know that the global climate system is immensely complicated and that everything is in some way connected, and so the system is capable of fluctuating in unexpected ways. We need therefore to know how much the climate can vary of its own accord in order to interpret with confidence the extent to which recent changes are natural as opposed to being the result of human activities.Instrumental records do not go back far enough to provide us with reliable measurements of global climatic variability on timescales longer than a century. What we do know is that as we include longer time intervals, the record shows increasing evidence of slow swings in climate between different regimes. To build up a better picture of fluctuations appreciably further back in time requires us to use proxy records.Over long periods of time, substances whose physical and chemical properties change with the ambient climate at the time can be deposited in a systematic way to provide a continuous record of changes in those properties overtime, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years. Generally, the layering occurs on an annual basis, hence he observed changes in the records can be dated. Information on temperature, rainfall, and other aspects of the climate that can be inferred from the systematic changes in properties is usually referred to as proxy data. Proxy temperature records have been reconstructed from ice core drilled out of the central Greenland ice cap, calcite shells embedded in layered lake sediments in Western Europe, ocean floor sediment cores from the tropical Atlantic Ocean, ice cores from Peruvian glaciers, and ice cores from eastern Antarctica. While these records provide broadly consistent indications that temperature variations can occur on a global scale, there are nonetheless some intriguing differences, which suggest that the pattern of temperature variations in regional climates can also differ significantly from each other.What the proxy records make abundantly clear is that there have been significant natural changes in the climate over timescales longer than a few thousand years. Equally striking, however, is the relative stability of the climate in the past 10,000 years (the Holocene period).To the extent that the coverage of the global climate from these records can provide a measure of its true variability, it should at least indicate how all the natural causes of climate change have combined. These include the chaotic fluctuations of the atmosphere, the slower but equally erratic behavior of the oceans, changes in the land surfaces, and the extent of ice and snow. Also included will be any variations that have arisen from volcanic activity, solar activity, and, possibly, human activities.1.Which of the following must we find out in order to determine the impact of human activities upon climate?2.Scientists are able to reconstruct proxy temperature records by（）.3.Proxy data have suggested all of the following about the climate EXCEPT: （）. 4.The word ‘‘erratic” in the paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to（）.

Organized volunteering and work experience has long been a vital companion to university degree course. Usually it is left to（1）to deduce the potential from a list of extracurricular adventures on a graduate's resume, （2）now the University of Bristol has launched an award to formalize the achievements of students who （3）time to activities outside their courses. Bristol PLUS aims to boost students in an increasingly （4）job market by helping them acquire work and life skills alongside（5）qualifications.“Our students are a pretty active bunch but we found that they didn't （6）appreciate the value of what they did（7）the lecture hall,” says Jeff Good man, director of careers and employability at the university. “Employers are much more （8）than they used to be. They used to look for（9）and saw it as part of their job to extract the value of an applicant's skills. Now they want students to be able to explain why those skills are（10）to the job."Students who sign（11）for the award will be expected to complete 50 hours of work experience or（12）work, attend four workshops on employability- skill, take part in an intensive skill-related activity, （13）crucially, write a summary of the skills they have gained. （14）efforts will gain an Outstanding Achievement Award. Those who（15）best on the sports field can take the Sporting PLUS Award which fosters employer-friendly sports accomplishments.The experience does not have to be（16） organized. "We're not just interested in easily identifiable skills,' says Goodman." （17）one student took the lead in dealing with a difficult landlord and so（18）negotiation skills. We try to make the experience relevant to individual lives.”Goodman hopes the （19）will enable active students to fill in any gaps in their experience and encourage their less-active （20） to take up activities outside their academic area of work.

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