Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. 
    Madrid was hailed as a public health beacon last November when it rolled out ambitious restrictions on the most polluting cars. Seven months and one election day later, a new conservative city council suspended enforcement of the clean air zone, a first step toward its possible demise.
    Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida made opposition to the zone a centrepiece of his election campaign, despite its success in improving air quality. A judge has now overruled the city's decision to stop levying fines, ordering them reinstated. But with legal battles ahead, the zones future looks uncertain at best.
    Among other weaknesses, the measures cities must employ when left to tackle dirty air on their own are politically contentious, and therefore vulnerable. That's because they inevitably put the costs of cleaning the air on to individual drivers—who must pay fees or buy better vehicles—rather than on to the car manufacturers whose cheating is the real cause of our toxic pollution.
    It's not hard to imagine a similar reversal happening in London. The new ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is likely to be a big issue in next year's mayoral election. And if Sadiq Khan wins and extends it to the North and South Circular roads in 2021 as he intends, it is sure to spark intense opposition from the far larger number of motorists who will then be affected.
    It's not that measures such as London's Ulez are useless. Far from it. Local officials are using the levers that are available to them to safeguard residents' health in the face of a serious threat. The zones do deliver some improvements to air quality, and the science tells us that means real health benefits—fewer heart attacks, strokes and premature births, less cancer, dementia and asthma. Fewer untimely deaths.
    But mayors and councilors can only do so much about a problem that is far bigger than any one city or town. They are acting because national governments—Britain's and others across Europe—have failed to do so.
    Restrictions that keep highly polluting cars out of certain areas—city centres, "school streets" even individual roads—are a response to the absence of a larger effort to properly enforce existing regulations and require auto companies to bring their vehicles into compliance. Wales has introduced special low speed limits to minimise pollution. We're doing everything but insist that manufacturers clean up their cars.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D. 

     Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dia Mirza and Adrian Grenier have a message for you: It's easy to beat plastic. They're part of a bunch of celebrities starring in a new video for World Environment Day-encouraging you, the consumer, to swap out your single-use plastic staples like straws and cutlery to combat the plastics crisis. The key messages that have been put together for World Environment Day do include a call for governments to enact legislation to curb single-use plastics. But the overarching message is directed at individuals.
     My concern with leaving it up to the individual, however,is our limited sense of what needs to be achieved. On their own, taking our own bags to the grocery store or quitting plastic straws, for example, will accomplish little and require very little of us. They could even be detrimental, satisfying a need to have "done our bit" without ever progressing onto bigger, bolder, more effective actions-a kind of "moral licensing" that allays our concerns and stops us doing more and asking more of those in charge.
     While the conversation around our environment and our responsibility toward it remains centered on shopping bags and straws, we're ignoring the balance of power that implies that as "consumers" we must shop sustainably, rather than as "citizens" hold our governments and industries to account to push for real systemic change.
     It's important to acknowledge that the environment isn't everyone's priority-or even most people's. We shouldn't expect it to be. In her latest book, Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things, Wellesley College professor Elizabeth R. DeSombre argues that the best way to collectively change the behavior of large numbers of people is for the change to be structural.
     This might mean implementing policy such as a plastic tax that adds a cost to environmentally problematic action, or banning single-use plastics altogether. India has just announced it will "eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022." There are also incentive-based ways of making better environmental choices easier, such as ensuring recycling is at least as easy as trash disposal.
     DeSombre isn't saying people should stop caring about the environment. It's just that individual actions are too slow, she says, for that to be the only, or even primary, approach to changing widespread behavior.
     None of this is about writing off the individual. It's just about putting things into perspective. We don't have time to wait. We need progressive policies that shape collective action (and rein in polluting businesses), alongside engaged citizens pushing for change. 

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. 
    It is true that CEO pay has gone up-top ones may make 300 times the pay of typical workers on average, and since the mid-1970s CEO pay for large publicly traded American corporations has, by varying estimates, gone up by about 500% The typical CEO of a top American corporation now makes about S18.9 million a year. 

    The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America's highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It's not popular to say, but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.
    Today's CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many mere skills than simply being able to“run the company" CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them. They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant. Then there' s the fact that large American companies are much more globalized than ever before,with supply chains spread across a larger number of countries. To lead in that system requires knowledge that is farly mind-boggling plus, virtually all major American companies are beyond this major CEOs still have to do all the day-to-day work they have always done.
    The common idea that high CEO pay is mainly about ripping people off doesn't explain history very well. By most measures, corporate governmance has become a lot tighter and more rigorous since the 1970s. Yet it is principally during this period of stronger govemnance that CEO pay has been high and rising. That suggests it is in the broader corporate interest to recruit top candidates for increasingly tough jobs.”
    Furthermore, the highest CEO salaries are paid to outside candidates, not to the cozy insider picks, another sign that high CEO pay is not some kind of depredation at the expense of the rest of the company. And the stock market reacts positively when companies tie CEO pay to, say, stock prices, a sign that those practices build up corporate value not just for the CEO.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D. 

     Forests give us shade, quiet and one of the harder challenges in the fight against climate change. Even as we humans count on forests to soak up a good share of the carbon dioxide we produce, we are threatening their ability to do so. The climate change we are hastening could one day leave us with forests that emit more carbon than they absorb.
     Thankfully, there is a way out of this trap-but it involves striking a subtle balance. Helping forests flourish as valuable "carbon sinks" long into the future may require reducing their capacity to absorb carbon now. California is leading the way, as it does on so many climate efforts, in figuring out the details.
     The state's proposed Forest Carbon Plan aims to double efforts to thin out young trees and clear brush in parts of the forest. This temporarily lowers carbon-carrying capacity. But the remaining trees draw a greater share of the available moisture, so they grow and thrive, restoring the forest's capacity to pull carbon from the air. Healthy trees are also better able to fend off insects. The landscape is rendered less easily burnable. Even in the event of a fire, fewer trees are consumed.
     The need for such planning is increasingly urgent. Already, since 2010, drought and insects have killed over 100 million trees in California, most of them in 2016 alone, and wildfires have burned hundreds of thousands of acres.
     California plans to treat 35,000 acres of forest a year by 2020, and 60,000 by 2030-financed from the proceeds of the state's emissions-permit auctions. That's only a small share of the total acreage that could benefit, about half a million acres in all, so it will be vital to prioritize areas at greatest risk of fire or drought.
     The strategy also aims to ensure that carbon in woody material removed from the forests is locked away in the form of solid lumber or burned as biofuel in vehicles that would otherwise run on fossil fuels. New research on transportation biofuels is already under way.
     State governments are well accustomed to managing forests, but traditionally they've focused on wildlife, watersheds and opportunities for recreation. Only recently have they come to see the vital part forests will have to play in storing carbon. California's plan, which is expected to be finalized by the governor next year, should serve as a model. 

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D. 

     Unlike so-called basic emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger, guilt emerges a little later, in conjunction with a child’s growing grasp of social and moral norms. Children aren’t born knowing how to say "I’m sorry"; rather, they learn over time that such statements appease parents and friends—and their own consciences. This is why researchers generally regard so-called moral guilt, in the right amount, to be a good thing.
     In the popular imagination, of course, guilt still gets a bad rap. It is deeply uncomfortable—it's the emotional equivalent of wearing a jacket weighted with stones. Yet this understanding is outdated. "There has been a kind of revival or a rethinking about what guilt is and what role guilt can serve," says Amrisha Vaish, a psychology researcher at the University of Virginia, adding that this revival is part of a larger recognition that emotions aren’t binary-feelings that may be advantageous in one context may be harmful in another. Jealousy and anger, for example, may have evolved to alert us to important inequalities. Too much happiness can be destructive.
     And guilt, by prompting us to think more deeply about our goodness, can encourage humans to make up for errors and fix relationships. Guilt, in other words, can help hold a cooperative species together. It is a kind of social glue.
     Viewed in this light, guilt is an opportunity. Work by Tina Malti, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, suggests that guilt may compensate for an emotional deficiency. In a number of studies, Malti and others have shown that guilt and sympathy may represent different pathways to cooperation and sharing. Some Kids who are low in sympathy may make up for that shortfall by experiencing more guilt, which can rein in their nastier impulses. And vice versa: High sympathy can substitute for low guilt.
     In a 2014 study, for example, Malti looked at 244 children. Using caregiver assessments and the children’s self-observations, she rated each child’s overall sympathy level and his or her tendency to feel negative emotions after moral transgressions. Then the kids were handed chocolate coins, and given a chance to share them with an anonymous child. For the low-sympathy kids, how much they shared appeared to turn on how inclined they were to feel guilty. The guilt-prone ones share more, even though they hadn’t magically become more sympathetic to the other child’s deprivation.
     “That’s good news,” Malti says. "We can be prosocial because we caused harm and we feel regret.” 

        When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015, it picked two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft's own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the start-ups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.
        Both apps, however, were later scrapped after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their great hunger for tech talent.
        To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Amold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting an end to businesses that might one day turn into competitors Microsoft declined to comment.
        Like other start-ups investors. Mr. Amold’s own business often depends on selling start-ups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result: “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on. But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”
        The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.
        Given their combined market value of more than $5.5 trillion, rifling through such small deals—many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise—might seem beside the point. Between them, the five biggest tech companies have spent an average of only $3.4 billion a year on sub-$1 billion acquisitions over the past five years—a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130 billion of venture capital that was invested in the US last Year.
        However, critics say the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. 
    Rats and other animals need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so that can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings，  Loleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats.
    They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat—one social and one asocial—for 5 our days. The robots rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels—to move around and colorful markings.
    During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened caged doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.
    Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave the rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a lever.
    Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 percent more likely on average to set the social robot free than the asocial one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being. They may have bonded more with the social robot because it displayed behaviours like communal exploring and playing. This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped, says Quinn.
    The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design. The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. "We'd assumed we'd have to give it a moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scene on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn't necessary," says Janet Wiles at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research.
    The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals. "We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too," says Wiles.

        With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in, some regions will need to nearly double to keep pace, food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently too, for rather particular reason: Brexit. 

        Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 percent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great—but how feasible is this vision?
        According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country's total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn't allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.
        There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively—meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.
        But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn't help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn't have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 percent of the county's land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg—which would involve taking out all the nature reserves and removing thousands of people from their homes—we would achieve only a 30 percent boost in crop production.
        Just 23 percent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 percent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

        We're fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed "thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly with students end-of-semester ratings. Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.
        Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. Accuracy dropped dramatically. Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading clues, such as certain gestures of utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. She found similar. interference where participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.
        Other research shows we 're better at detecting deception and sexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. "It' s as if you' re driving a stick shift," says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, " and if you start thinking about it too much, you can' t remember what you' re doing. But if you go on automatic pilot, you re fine. Much of our social life is like that."
        Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts' opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex - when they had a lot of information to process.
        Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech). Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition ( "gut feelings," "hunches," "my heart" ). Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. 
    Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring—the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year—the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. GenZs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that's tighter than it's been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U.S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them.
    If "entitled" is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and 1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, GenZs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren't interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U.S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.
    One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. 

     It is curious that Stephen Koziatek feels almost as though he has to justify his efforts to give his students a better future.
     Mr. Koziatek is part of something pioneering. He is a teacher at a New Hampshire high school where learning is not something of books and tests and mechanical memorization, but practical. When did it become accepted wisdom that students should be able to name the 13th president of the United States but be utterly overwhelmed by a broken bike chain?
     As Koziatek knows, there is learning in just about everything. Nothing is necessarily gained by forcing students to learn geometry at a graffitied desk stuck with generations of discarded chewing gum. They can also learn geometry by assembling a bicycle.
     But he’s also found a kind of insidious prejudice. Working with your hands is seen as almost a mark of inferiority. Schools in the family of vocational education “have that stereotype...that it’s for kids who can’t make it academically,”he says.
     On one hand, that viewpoint is a logical product of America’s evolution. Manufacturing is not the economic engine that it once was. The job security that the US economy once offered to high school graduates has largely evaporated. More education is the new principle. We want more for our kids, and rightfully so.
     But the headlong push into bachelor’s degrees for all and the subtle devaluing of anything less-misses an important point: That’s not the only thing the American economy needs. Yes, a bachelor’s degree opens more doors. But even now, 54 percent of the jobs in the country are middle-skill jobs, such as construction and high-skill manufacturing. But only 44 percent of workers are adequately trained.
     In other words, at a time when the working class has turned the country on its political head, frustrated that the opportunity that once defined America is vanishing, one obvious solution is staring us in the face.There is a gap in working-class jobs, but the workers who need those jobs most aren’t equipped to do them. Koziatek’s Manchester School of Technology High School is trying to fill that gap.
     Koziatek’s school is a wake-up call.When education becomes one-size-fits-all,it risks overlooking a nation’s diversity of gifts.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D.

     The great recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. And ultimately, it is likely to reshape our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.
     No one tries harder than the jobless to find silver linings in this national economic disaster. Many said that unemployment, while extremely painful, had improved them in some ways; they had become less materialistic and more financially prudent; they were more aware of the struggles of others. In limited respects, perhaps the recession will leave society better off. At the very least, it has awoken us from our national fever dream of easy riches and bigger houses, and put a necessary end to an era of reckless personal spending.
     But for the most part, these benefits seem thin, uncertain, and far off. In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, the economic historian Benjamin Friedman argues that both inside and outside the U.S., lengthy periods of economic stagnation or decline have almost always left society more mean-spirited and less inclusive, and have usually stopped or reversed the advance of rights and freedoms. Anti-immigrant sentiment typically increases, as does conflict between races and classes.
     Income inequality usually falls during a recession, but it has not shrunk in this one. Indeed, this period of economic weakness may reinforce class divides, and decrease opportunities to cross them- especially for young people. The research of Till Von Wachter, the economist in Columbia University, suggests that not all people graduating into a recession see their life chances dimmed: those with degrees from elite universities catch up fairly quickly to where they otherwise would have been if they had graduated in better times; it is the masses beneath them that are left behind.
     In the internet age, it is particularly easy to see the resentment that has always been hidden within American society. More difficult, in the moment, is discerning precisely how these lean times are affecting society’s character. In many respects, the U.S. was more socially tolerant entering this recession than at any time in its history, and a variety of national polls on social conflict since then have shown mixed results. We will have to wait and see exactly how these hard times will reshape our social fabric. But they certainly will reshape it, and all the more so the longer they extend.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D. 

     In 2010, a federal judge shook America's biotech industry to its core. Companies had won patents for isolated DNA for decades—by 2005 some 20% of human genes were patented. But in March 2010 a judge ruled that genes were un-patentable. Executives were violently agitated. The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), a trade group, assured members that this was just a “preliminary step” in a longer battle. 

　　On July 29th they were relieved, at least temporarily. A federal appeals court overturned the prior decision, ruling that Myriad Genetics could indeed hold patents to two genes that help forecast a woman's risk of breast cancer. The chief executive of Myriad, a company in Utah, said the ruling was a blessing to firms and patients alike.
　　But as companies continue their attempts at personalized medicine, the courts will remain rather busy. The Myriad case itself is probably not over. Critics make three main arguments against gene patents: a gene is a product of nature, so it may not be patented; gene patents suppress innovation rather than reward it; and patents' monopolies restrict access to genetic tests such as Myriad's. A growing number seem to agree. Last year a federal task-force urged reform for patents related to genetic tests. In October the Department of Justice filed a brief in the Myriad case, arguing that an isolated DNA molecule “is no less a product of nature... than are cotton fibers that have been separated from cotton seeds. ”
　　Despite the appeals court's decision, big questions remain unanswered. For example, it is unclear whether the sequencing of a whole genome violates the patents of individual genes within it. The case may yet reach the Supreme Court.
　　As the industry advances, however, other suits may have an even greater impact. Companies are unlikely to file many more patents for human DNA molecules — most are already patented or in the public domain. Firms are now studying how genes interact, looking for correlations that might be used to determine the causes of disease or predict a drug’s efficacy. Companies are eager to win patents for “connecting the dots”, explains Hans Sauer, a lawyer for the BIO.
Their success may be determined by a suit related to this issue, brought by the Mayo Clinic, which the Supreme Court will hear in its next term. The BIO recently held a convention which included sessions to coach lawyers on the shifting landscape for patents. Each meeting was packed.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D.

     Should a leader strive to be loved or feared? This question, famously posed by Machiavelli, lies at the heart of Joseph Nye’s new book. Mr. Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and one-time chairman of America’s National Intelligence Council, is best known for promoting the idea of "soft power", based on persuasion and influence, as a counterpoint to "hard power", based on coercion(强迫) and force. 

     Having analyzed the use of soft and hard power in politics and diplomacy in his previous books, Mr. Nye has now turned his attention to the relationship between power and leadership, in both the political and business spheres. Machiavelli, he notes, concluded that "one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved." In short, hard power is preferable to soft power. But modern leadership theorists have come to the opposite conclusion.
     The context of leadership is changing, the observe, and the historical emphasis on hard power is becoming outdated. In modern companies and democracies, power is increasingly diffused and traditional hierarchies(等级制) are being undermined, making soft power ever more important. But that does not mean coercion should now take a back seat to persuasion. Mr. Nye argues. Instead, he advocates a synthesis of these two views. The conclusion of The Powers to Lead, his survey of the theory of leadership, is that a combination of hard and soft power, which he calls "smart power", is the best approach.
     The dominant theoretical model of leadership at the moment is, apparently, the "transformational leadership pattern". Anyone allergic(反感) to management term will already be running for the exit, but Mr. Nye has performed a valuable service in rounding up and summarizing the various academic studies and theories of leadership into a single, slim volume. He examines different approaches to leadership, the morality of leadership and how the wider context can determine the effectiveness of a particular leader. There are plenty of anecdotes and examples, historical and contemporary, political and corporate.
     Also, leadership is a slippery subject, and as he depicts various theories, even Mr. Nye never quite nails the jelly to the wall. He is at his most interesting when discussing the moral aspects of leadership, in particular, the question of whether it is sometimes necessary for good leaders to lie — and he provides a helpful 12-points summary of his conclusion. A resuming theme is that as circumstances change, different sorts of leaders are required; a leader who thrives in one environment may struggle in another, and vice versa. Ultimately that is just a fancy way of saying that leadership offers no easy answers.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D.

     Homework has never been terribly popular with students and even many parents, but in recent years it has been particularly scorned. School districts across the country, most recently Los Angeles Unified, are revising their thinking on his educational ritual. Unfortunately, L.A. Unified has produced an inflexible policy which mandates that with the exception of some advanced courses, homework may no longer count for more than 10% of a student’s academic grade.
     This rule is meant to address the difficulty that students from impoverished or chaotic homes might have in completing their homework. But the policy is unclear and contradictory. Certainly, no homework should be assigned that students cannot do without expensive equipment. But if the district is essentially giving a pass to students who do not do their homework because of complicated family lives, it is going riskily close to the implication that standards need to be lowered for poor children.
     District administrators say that homework will still be a pat of schooling: teachers are allowed to assign as much of it as they want. But with homework counting for no more than 10% of their grades, students can easily skip half their homework and see very little difference on their report cards. Some students might do well on state tests without completing their homework, but what about the students who performed well on the tests and did their homework? It is quite possible that the homework helped. Yet rather than empowering teachers to find what works best for their students, the policy imposes a flat, across-the-board rule.
     At the same time, the policy addresses none of the truly thorny questions about homework. If the district finds homework to be unimportant to its students’ academic achievement, it should move to reduce or eliminate the assignments, not make them count for almost nothing. Conversely, if homework does nothing to ensure that the homework students are not assigning more than they are willing to review and correct.
     The homework rules should be put on hold while the school board, which is responsible for setting educational policy, looks into the matter and conducts public hearings. It is not too late for L.A. Unified to do homework right.

       A century ago, the immigrants from across the Atlantic included settlers and sojourners. Along with the many folks looking to make a permanent home in the United States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make some money and then go home. Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 million people arrived while about 2 million departed. About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, for example, eventually returned to Italy for good. They even had an affectionate nickname, “uccelli di passaggio,” birds of passage.
       Today, we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide newcomers into two categories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in the making, or brand them as aliens to be kicked out. That framework has contributed mighty to our broken immigration system and the long political paralysis over how to fix it. We don’t need more categories, but we need to change the way we think about categories. We need to look beyond strict definitions of legal and illegal. To start, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving in the gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges.
       Crop pickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, home health-care aides and physicists are among today’s birds of passage. They are energetic participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work, money and ideas .They prefer to come and go as opportunity calls them .They can manage to have a job in one place and a family in another.
       With or without permission, they straddle laws, jurisdictions and identities with ease. We need them to imagine the United States as a place where they can be productive for a while without committing themselves to staying forever. We need them to feel that home can be both here and there and that they can belong to two nations honorably.
     Accommodating this new world of people in motion will require new attitudes on both sides of the immigration battle .Looking beyond the culture war logic of right or wrong means opening up the middle ground and understanding that managing immigration today requires multiple paths and multiple outcomes, including some that are not easy to accomplish legally in the existing system.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D.

     While there's never a good age to get cancer, people in their 20s and 30s can feel particularly isolated. The average age of a cancer patient at diagnosis is 67. Children with cancer often are treated at pediatric (小儿科的) cancer centers, but young adults have a tough time finding peers, often sitting side-by-side during treatments with people who could be their grandparents. 

     In her new book Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips, writer Kris Carr looks at cancer from the perspective of a young adult who confronts death just as she's discovering life. Ms. Carr was 31 when she was diagnosed with a rare from of cancer that had generated tumors on her liver and lungs.
     Ms. Carr reacted with the normal feelings of shock and sadness. She called her parents and stocked up on organic food, determined to become a "full-time healing addict." Then she picked up the phone and called everyone in her address book, asking if they knew other young women with cancer. The result was her own personal "cancer posse": a rock concert tour manager, a model, a fashion magazine editor, a cartoonist and a MTV celebrity, to name a few. This club of "cancer babes" offered support, advice and fashion tips, among other things.
     Ms. Carr put her cancer experience in a recent Learning Channel documentary, and she has written a practical guide about how she coped. Cancer isn't funny, but Ms. Carr often is. She swears, she makes up names for the people who treat her (Dr. Fabulous and Dr. Guru), and she even makes second sound fun ("cancer road trips," she calls them).
     She leaves the medical advice to doctors, instead offering insightful and practical tips that reflect the world view of a young adult. "I refused to let cancer ruin my party," she writes. "There are just too many cool things to do and plan and live for."
     Ms. Carr still has cancer, but it has stopped progressing. Her cancer tips include using time-saving mass e-mails to keep friends informed, sewing or buying fashionable hospital gowns so you're not stuck with regulation blue or gray and playing Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" so loud you neighbors call the police. Ms. Carr also advises an eyebrow wax and a new outfit before you tell the important people in your illness. "People you tell are going to cautious and not so cautiously try to see the cancer, so dazzle them instead with your miracle," she writes.
     While her advice may sound superficial, it gets to the heart of what every cancer patient wants: the chance to live life just as she always did, and maybe better.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D.

     Americans don't like to lose wars. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test patriotism and courage—and those are the kind at which the U.S. excels. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads? If American indulge in a bit of flag—when the job is done, they earned it. 

     Now there is a similar challenge. Global warming. The steady deterioration(恶化)of the very climate of this very planet is becoming a war of the first order, and by any measure, the U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases each year and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn't intend to do a whole lot about it. Although 174 nations approved the admittedly flawed Kyoto accords to reduce carbon levels, the U.S. walked away from them. There are vague promises of manufacturing fuel from herbs or powering cars with hydrogen. But for a country that tightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, the U.S. is taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It's hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of a country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and stability of its economy.
     The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there's far less agreement on how to fix it. Industry offers its pans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to native wish lists that could weaken American's growth. But let's assume that those interested parties and others will always bent the table and will always demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like—one that would leave the U.S. both environmentally safe and economically sound?
     Halting climate change will be far harder. One of the more conservative plans for addressing the problem calls for a reduction of 25 billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 52 year. And yet by devising a consistent strategy that mixes and blends pragmatism(实用主义)with ambition, the U.S. can, without major damage to the economy, help halt the worst effects of climate change and ensure the survival of its way of life for future generations. Money will do some of the work, but what's needed most is will. “I'm not saying the challenge isn't almost overwhelming,” says Fred Krupp. “But this is America, and America has risen to these challenges before.”

Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. 

     To combat the trap of putting a premium on being busy, Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, recommends building a habit of “deep work” - the ability to focus without distraction.
     There are a number of approaches to mastering the art of deep work - be it lengthy retreats dedicated to a specific task; developing a daily ritual; or taking a “journalistic” approach to seizing moments of deep work when you can throughout the day. Whichever approach, the key is to determine your length of focus time and stick to it.
     Newport also recommends “deep scheduling” to combat constant interruptions and get more done in less time. “At any given point, I should have deep work scheduled for roughly the next month. Once on the calendar, I protect this time like I would a doctor’s appointment or important meeting,” he writes.
     Another approach to getting more done in less time is to rethink how you prioritise your day-in particular how we craft our to-do lists. Tim Harford, author of Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, points to a study in the early 1980s that divided undergraduates into two groups: some were advised to set out monthly goals and study activities; others were told to plan activities and goals in much more detail, day by day.
     While the researchers assumed that the well-structured daily plans would be most effective when it comes to the execution of tasks, they were wrong: the detailed daily plans demotivated students. Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective, while leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results.
     In order to make the most of our focus and energy, we also need to embrace downtime, or as Newport suggests, “be lazy.”
     “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body...[idleness] is ,paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done,” he argues.
     Srini Pillay, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes this counter-intuitive link between downtime and productivity may be due to the way our brains operate. When our brains switch between being focused and unfocused on a task, they tend to be more efficient.
     “What people don’t realise is that in order to complete these tasks they need to use both the focus and unfocus circuits in their brain.” says Pillay.

Directions:
Read the following four texts. answer the question after each text by choosing A,B,C or D. 

     Unlike so-called basic emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger, guilt emerges a little later, in conjunction with a child’s growing grasp of social and moral norms. Children aren’t born knowing how to say "I’m sorry"; rather, they learn over time that such statements appease parents and friends—and their own consciences. This is why researchers generally regard so-called moral guilt, in the right amount, to be a good thing.
     In the popular imagination, of course, guilt still gets a bad rap. It is deeply uncomfortable—it's the emotional equivalent of wearing a jacket weighted with stones. Yet this understanding is outdated. "There has been a kind of revival or a rethinking about what guilt is and what role guilt can serve," says Amrisha Vaish, a psychology researcher at the University of Virginia, adding that this revival is part of a larger recognition that emotions aren’t binary-feelings that may be advantageous in one context may be harmful in another. Jealousy and anger, for example, may have evolved to alert us to important inequalities. Too much happiness can be destructive.
     And guilt, by prompting us to think more deeply about our goodness, can encourage humans to make up for errors and fix relationships. Guilt, in other words, can help hold a cooperative species together. It is a kind of social glue.
     Viewed in this light, guilt is an opportunity. Work by Tina Malti, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, suggests that guilt may compensate for an emotional deficiency. In a number of studies, Malti and others have shown that guilt and sympathy may represent different pathways to cooperation and sharing. Some Kids who are low in sympathy may make up for that shortfall by experiencing more guilt, which can rein in their nastier impulses. And vice versa: High sympathy can substitute for low guilt.
     In a 2014 study, for example, Malti looked at 244 children. Using caregiver assessments and the children’s self-observations, she rated each child’s overall sympathy level and his or her tendency to feel negative emotions after moral transgressions. Then the kids were handed chocolate coins, and given a chance to share them with an anonymous child. For the low-sympathy kids, how much they shared appeared to turn on how inclined they were to feel guilty. The guilt-prone ones share more, even though they hadn’t magically become more sympathetic to the other child’s deprivation.
     “That’s good news,” Malti says. "We can be prosocial because we caused harm and we feel regret.”