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中等

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

     On a five to three vote, the Supreme Court knocked out much of Arizona's immigration law Monday—a modest policy victory for the Obama Administration. But on the more important matter of the Constitution, the decision was an 8-0 defeat for the Administration’s effort to upset the balance of power between the federal government and the states.
     In Arizona v. United States, the majority overturned three of the four contested provisions of Arizona's controversial plan to have state and local police enforce federal immigration law. The Constitutional principles that Washington alone has the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization" and that federal laws precede state laws are noncontroversial. Arizona had attempted to fashion state policies that ran parallel to the existing federal ones.
     Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court's liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to the federal sun. On the overturned provisions the majority held the congress had deliberately "occupied the field" and Arizona had thus intruded on the federal's privileged powers.
     However, the Justices said that Arizona police would be allowed to verify the legal status of people who come in contact with law enforcement. That’s because Congress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement and explicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate with federal colleagues.
     Two of the three objecting Justice—Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—agreed with this Constitutional logic but disagreed about which Arizona rules conflicted with the federal statute. The only major objection came from Justice Antonin Scalia, who offered an even more robust defense of state privileges going back to the Alien and Sedition Acts.
     The 8-0 objection to President Obama turns on what Justice Samuel Alito describes in his objection as “a shocking assertion of federal executive power”. The White House argued that Arizona’s laws conflicted with its enforcement priorities, even if state laws complied with federal statutes to the letter. In effect, the White House claimed that it could invalidate any otherwise legitimate state law that it disagrees with.
     Some powers do belong exclusively to the federal government, and control of citizenship and the borders is among them. But if Congress wanted to prevent states from using their own resources to check immigration status, it could. It never did so. The Administration was in essence asserting that because it didn't want to carry out Congress's immigration wishes, no state should be allowed to do so either. Every Justice rightly rejected this remarkable claim.

中等

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

     An old saying has it that half of all advertising budgets are wasted—the trouble is, no one knows which half. In the internet age, at least in theory, this fraction can be much reduced. By watching what people search for, click on and say online, companies can aim “behavioural” ads at those most likely to buy.
     In the past couple of weeks a quarrel has illustrated the value to advertisers of such fine-grained information: Should advertisers assume that people are happy to be tracked and sent behavioural ads? Or should they have explicit permission?
     In December 2010 America's Federal Trade Commission(FTC) proposed adding a "do not track" (DNT) option to internet browsers, so that users could tell advertisers that they did not want to be followed. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari both offer DNT; Google's Chrome is due to do so this year. In February the FTC and Digital Advertising Alliance(DAA) agreed that the industry would get cracking on responding to DNT requests.
     On May 31st Microsoft set off the row: It said that Internet Explorer 10, the version due to appear windows 8, would have DNT as a default.
     Advertisers are horrified.Human nature being what it is, most people stick with default settings. Few switch DNT on now, but if tracking is off it will stay off. Bob Liodice, the chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, says consumers will be worse off if the industry cannot collect information about their preferences. People will not get fewer ads,he says.“They'll get less meaningful, less targeted ads.”
     It is not yet clear how advertisers will respond. Getting a DNT signal does not oblige anyone to stop tracking, although some companies have promised to do so. Unable to tell whether someone really objects to behavioural ads or whether they are sticking with Microsoft’s default, some may ignore a DNT signal and press on anyway.
     Also unclear is why Microsoft has gone it alone. After all, it has an ad business too, which it says will comply with DNT requests, though it is still working out how. If it is trying to upset Google, which relies almost wholly on advertising, it has chosen an indirect method: there is no guarantee that DNT by default will become the norm. DNT does not seem an obviously huge selling point for windows 8—though the firm has compared some of its other products favorably with Google's on that count before. Brendon Lynch, Microsoft's chief privacy officer, blogged: "we believe consumers should have more control." Could it really be that simple?

中等

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

     All around the world, lawyers generate more hostility than the members of any other profession—with the possible exception of journalism. But there are few places where clients have more grounds for complaint than America.
     During the decade before the economic crisis, spending on legal services in America grew twice as fast as inflation. The best lawyers made skyscrapers-full of money, tempting ever more students to pile into law schools. But most law graduates never get a big-firm job. Many of them instead become the kind of nuisance-lawsuit filer that makes the tort system a costly nightmare.
     There are many reasons for this. One is the excessive costs of a legal education. There is just one path for a lawyer in most American states: a four-year undergraduate degree at one of 200 law schools authorized by the American Bar Association and an expensive preparation for the bar exam. This leaves today’s average law-school graduate with $100,000 of debt on top of undergraduate debts. Law-school debt means that they have to work fearsomely hard.
     Reforming the system would help both lawyers and their customers. Sensible ideas have been around for a long time, but the state-level bodies that govern the profession have been too conservative to implement them. One idea is to allow people to study law as an undergraduate degree. Another is to let students sit for the bar after only two years of law school. If the bar exam is truly a stern enough test for a would-be lawyer, those who can sit it earlier should be allowed to do so. Students who do not need the extra training could cut their debt mountain by a third.
     The other reason why costs are so high is the restrictive guild-like ownership structure of the business. Except in the District of Columbia, non-lawyers may not own any share of a law firm. This keeps fees high and innovation slow. There is pressure for change from within the profession, but opponents of change among the regulators insist that keeping outsiders out of a law firm isolates lawyers from the pressure to make money rather than serve clients ethically.
     In fact, allowing non-lawyers to own shares in law firms would reduce costs and improve services to customers, by encouraging law firms to use technology and to employ professional managers to focus on improving firms’ efficiency. After all, other countries, such as Australia and Britain, have started liberalizing their legal professions. America should follow. 

中等

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

     Of all the components of a good night’s sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears; by the late 1970s, neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just “mental noise”—the random byproducts of the neural-repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind’s emotional thermostat, regulating moods while the brain is “off-line.” And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but actually brought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better, “It’s your dream,” says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago’s Medical Center. “If you don’t like it, change it.”
     Evidence from brain imaging supports this view. The brain is as active during REM(rapid eye movement) sleep—when most vivid dreams occur—as it is when fully awake, says Dr. Eric Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain are equally involved; the limbic system (the “emotional brain”) is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex (the center of intellect and reasoning) is relatively quiet. “We wake up from dreams happy or depressed, and those feelings can stay with us all day.” says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement.
     The link between dreams and emotions shows up among the patients in Cartwright’s clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily life we don’t always think about the emotional significance of the day’s events—until, it appears, we begin to dream.
     And this process need not be left to the unconscious. Cartwright believes one can exercise conscious control over recurring bad dreams. As soon as you awaken, identify what is upsetting about the dream. Visualize how you would like it to end instead; the next time it occurs, try to wake up just enough to control its course. With much practice people can learn to, literally, do it in their sleep.
     At the end of the day, there’s probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep us from sleeping or “we wake up in a panic,” Cartwright says. Terrorism, economic uncertainties and general feelings of insecurity have increased people’s anxiety. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep—or rather dream—on it and you’ll feel better in the morning. 

中等

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

     In order to “change lives for the better” and reduce “dependency,” George Osbome, Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced the “upfront work search” scheme. Only if the jobless arrive at the job centre with a CV register for online job search, and start looking for work will they be eligible for benefit-and then they should report weekly rather than fortnightly. What could be more reasonable?
     More apparent reasonableness followed. There will now be a seven-day wait for the jobseeker’s allowance. “Those first few days should be spent looking for work, not looking to sign on.” he claimed. “We’re doing these things because we know they help people say off benefits and help those on benefits get into work faster” Help? Really? On first hearing, this was the socially concerned chancellor, trying to change lives for the better, complete with “reforms” to an obviously indulgent system that demands too little effort from the newly unemployed to find work, and subsides laziness. What motivated him, we were to understand, was his zeal for “fundamental fairness”-protecting the taxpayer, controlling spending and ensuring that only the most deserving claimants received their benefits.
     Losing a job is hurting: you don’t skip down to the jobcentre with a song in your heart, delighted at the prospect of doubling your income from the generous state. It is financially terrifying psychologically embarrassing and you know that support is minimal and extraordinarily hard to get. You are now not wanted; you support is minimal and extraordinarily hard to get. You are now not wanted; you are now excluded from the work environment that offers purpose and structure in your life. Worse, the crucial income to feed yourself and your family and pay the bills has disappeared. Ask anyone newly unemployed what they want and the answer is always: a job.
     But in Osborneland, your first instinct is to fall into dependency- permanent dependency if you can get it-supported by a state only too ready to indulge your falsehood. It is as though 20 years of ever—tougher reforms of the job search and benefit administration system never happened. The principle of British welfare is no longer that you can insure yourself against the risk of unemployment and receive unconditional payments if the disaster happens. Even the very phrase ‘jobseeker’s allowance’—invented in 1996—is about redefining the unemployed as a “jobseeker” who had no mandatory right to a benefit he or she has earned through making national insurance contributions. Instead, the claimant receives a time-limited “allowance,” conditional on actively seeking a job; no entitlement and no insurance, at £71.70 a week, one of the least generous in the EU.

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.
     In his autobiography, Darwin himself speaks of his intellectual powers with extraordinary modesty. He points out that he always experienced much difficulty in expressing himself clearly and concisely, but (1) he believes that this very difficulty may have had the compensating advantage of forcing him to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus enabling him to detect errors in reasoning and in his own observations. He disclaimed the possession of any great quickness of apprehension or wit, such as distinguished Huxley. (2) He asserted, also, that his power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought was very limited, for which reason he felt certain that he never could have succeeded with mathematics. His memory, too, he described as extensive, but hazy. So poor in one sense was it that he never could remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry. (3) On the other hand, he did not accept as well founded the charge made by some of his critics that, while he was a good observer, he had no power of reasoning. This, he thought, could not be true, because the “Origin of Species” is one long argument from the beginning to the end, and has convinced many able men. No one, he submits, could have written it without possessing some power of reasoning. He was willing to assert that “I have a fair share of invention, and of common sense or judgment, such as every fairly successful lawyer or doctor must have, but not, I believe, in any higher degree.” (4) He adds humbly that perhaps he was “superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.”
     Writing in the last year of his life, he expressed the opinion that in two or three respects his mind had changed during the preceding twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty or beyond it poetry of many kinds gave him great pleasure. Formerly, too, pictures had given him considerable, and music very great, delight. In 1881, however, he said: “Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.” (5) Darwin was convinced that the loss of these tastes was not only a loss of happiness, but might possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character.

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.

     It is speculated that gardens arise from a basic human need in the individuals who made them: the need for creative expression. There is no doubt that gardens evidence an irrepressible urge to create, express, fashion, and beautify and that self-expression is a basic human urge; yet when one looks at the photographs of the gardens created by the homeless, it strikes one that, for all their diversity of styles, these gardens speak of various other fundamental urges, beyond that of decoration and creative expression.
​     One of these urges has to do with creating a state of peace in the midst of turbulence, a “still point of the turning world,” to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot. A sacred place of peace, however crude it may be, is a distinctly human need, as opposed to shelter, which is a distinctly animal need. This distinction is so much so that where the latter is lacking, as it is for these unlikely gardeners, the former becomes all the more urgent. Composure is a state of mind made possible by the structuring of one’s relation to one’s environment. The gardens of the homeless which are in effect homeless gardens, introduce form into an urban environment where it either didn’t exist or was not discernible as such. In so doing they give composure to a segment of the inarticulate environment in which they take their stand.
     Another urge or need that these gardens appear to respond to, or to arise from, is so intrinsic that we are barely ever conscious of its abiding claims on us. When we are deprived of green, of plants, of trees, most of us give into a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological conditions, until one day we find ourselves in garden and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic. In most of the homeless gardens of New York City the actual cultivation of plants is unfeasible, yet even so the compositions often seem to represent attempts to call forth the spirit of plant and animal life, if only symbolically, through a clumplike arrangement of materials, an institution of colors, small pool of water, and a frequent presence of petals or leaves as well as of stuffed animals. On display here are various fantasy elements whose reference, at some basic level, seems to be the natural world. It is this implicit or explicit reference to nature that fully justifies the use of word garden, though in a “liberated” sense, to describe these synthetic constructions. In them we can see biophysical—a yearning for contact with nonhuman life-assuming uncanny representational forms.

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.

     The study of law has been recognized for centuries as a basic intellectual discipline in European university. However, only in recent years has it become a feature of undergraduate programs in Canadian universities.(1)Traditionally, legal learning has been viewed in such institutions as the special preserve of lawyers, rather than a necessary part of the intellectual equipment of an educated person. Happily, the older and more continental view of legal education is establishing itself in a number of Canadian universities and some have even begun to offer undergraduate degrees in law.
     If the study of law is beginning to establish itself as part and parcel of a general education, its aims and methods should appeal directly to journalism educators. Law is a discipline which encourages responsible judgment. On the one hand, it provides opportunities to analyze such ideas as justice, democracy and freedom. (2) On the other hand, it links these concepts to everyday realities in a manner which is parallel to the links journalists forge on a daily basis as they cover and comment on the news. For example, notions of evidence and fact, of basic rights and public interest are at work in the process of journalistic judgment and production just as in courts of law. Sharpening judgment by absorbing and reflecting on law is a desirable component of a journalist’s intellectual preparation for his or her career.
     (3) But the idea that the journalist must understand the law more profoundly than an ordinary citizen rests on an understanding of the established conventions and special responsibilities of the news media. Politics or more broadly, the functioning of the state, is a major subject for journalists. The better informed they are about the way the state works, the better their reporting will be.(4) In fact, it is difficult to see how journalists who do not have a clear grasp of the basic features of the Canadian Constitution can do a competent job on political stories.
     Furthermore, the legal system and the events which occur within it are primary subjects for journalists. While the quality of legal journalism varies greatly, there is an undue reliance amongst many journalists on interpretations supplied to them by lawyers. (5) While comment and reaction from lawyers may enhance stories, it is preferable for journalists to rely on their own notions of significance and make their own judgments. These can only come from a well-grounded understanding of the legal system.

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.

     Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual, or mathematical, but in any case it must, in my view, have something to do with the soul of the human being. Hence it is metaphysical; but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. I believe it is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music. It is also the reason why when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.
     Beethoven’s importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity. The music is abrupt and seemingly disconnected, as in the last piano sonata. In musical expression, he did not feel restrained by the weight of convention. By all accounts he was a freethinking person, and a courageous one, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of his works.
     This courageous attitude in fact becomes a requirement for the performers of Beethoven’s music. His compositions demand the performer to show courage, for example in the use of dynamics. Beethoven’s habit of increasing the volume with an extreme intensity and then abruptly following it with a sudden soft passage was only rarely used by composers before him.
     Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society. Especially significant was his view of freedom, which, for him, was associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual: he advocated freedom of thought and of personal expression.
     Beethoven’s music tends to move from chaos to order as if order were an imperative of human existence. For him, order does not result from forgetting or ignoring the disorders that plague our existence; order is a necessary development, an improvement that may lead to the Greek ideal of spiritual elevation. It is not by chance that the Funeral March is not the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, but the second, so that suffering does not have the last word. One could interpret much of the work of Beethoven by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to fight it renders life worth living. 

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.
    Following the explosion of creativity in Florence during the 14th century known as the Renaissance, the modern world saw a departure from what it had once known. It turned from God and the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and instead favoured a more humanistic approach to being. Renaissance ideas had spread throughout Europe well into the 17th century, with the arts and sciences flourishing extraordinarily among those with a more logical disposition. (1)With (the gap between) the Church's teachings and ways of thinking being eclipsed by the Renaissance, the gap between the Medieval and modern periods had been bridged, leading to new and unexplored intellectual territories.
    During the Renaissance, the great minds of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei demonstrated the power of scientific study and discovery. (2)Before each of their revelations, many thinkers at the time had sustained more ancient ways of thinking, including the geocentric view that the Earth was at the centre of our universe. Copernicus theorized in 1543 that in actual fact, all of the planets that we knew of revolved not around the Earth, but the Sun, a system that was later upheld by Galileo at his own expense. Offering up such a theory during a time of high tension between scientific and religious minds was branded as heresy, and any such heretics that continued to spread these lies were to be punished by imprisonment or even death. Galileo was excommunicated by the Church and imprisoned for life for his astronomical observations and his support of the heliocentric principle.
    (3)Despite attempts by the Church to strong-arm this new generation of logicians and rationalists, more explanations for how the universe functioned were being made, and at a rate that the people could no longer ignore. It was with these great revelations that a new kind of philosophy founded in reason was born.
    The Church's long-standing dogma was losing the great battle for truth to rationalists and scientists. This very fact embodied the new ways of thinking that swept through Europe during most of the 17th century. (4)As many took on the duty of trying to integrate reasoning and scientific philosophies into the world, the Renaissance was over and it was time for a new era—the Age of Reason.
    The 17th and 18th centuries were times of radical change and curiosity. Scientific method, reductionism and the questioning of Church ideals was to be encouraged, as were ideas of liberty, tolerance and progress. (5)Such actions to seek knowledge and to understand what information we already knew were captured by the Latin phrase 'sapere aude' or 'dare to know’, after Immanuel Kant used it in his essay "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?". It was the purpose and responsibility of great minds to go forth and seek out the truth, which they believed to be founded in knowledge.

中等

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. 

     With its theme that "Mind is the master weaver," creating our inner character and outer circumstances, the book As a Man Thinking by James Allen is an in-depth exploration of the central idea of self-help writing. 

     Allen’s contribution was to take an assumption we all share—that because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughts—and reveal its erroneous nature. Because most of us believe that mind is separate from matter, we think that thoughts can be hidden and made powerless; this allows us to think one way and act another. However, Allen believed that the unconscious mind generates as much action as the conscious mind, and while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a question: "Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? "
      Since desire and will are damaged by the presence of thoughts that do not accord with desire, Allen concluded: "We do not attract what we want, but what we are." Achievement happens because you as a person embody the external achievement; you don’t "get" success but become it. There is no gap between mind and matter.
     Part of the fame of Allen’s book is its contention that "Circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him." This seems a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority of those at the top and the inferiority of those at the bottom.
     This, however, would be a knee-jerk reaction to a subtle argument. Each set of circumstances, however bad, offers a unique opportunity for growth. If circumstances always determined the life and prospects of people, then humanity would never have progressed. In fact, circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us, and if we feel that we have been "wronged" then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation. Nevertheless, as any biographer knows, a person’s early life and its conditions are often the greatest gift to an individual.
     The sobering aspect of Allen’s book is that we have no one else to blame for our present condition except ourselves. The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible.

中等

Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.

     ​Mental health is our birthright. we don’t have to learn how to be mentally healthy; it is built into us in the same way that our bodies know how to heal a cut or mend a broken bone. Mental health can’t be learned, only reawakened. It is like immune system of the body, which under stress or through lack of nutrition or exercise can be weakened, but which never leaves us. When we don’t understand the value of mental health and we don’t know how to gain access to it, mental health will remain hidden from us. Our mental health doesn’t really go anywhere; like the sun behind a cloud, it can be temporarily hidden from view, but it is fully capable of being restored in an instant. 

     Mental health is the seed that contains self-esteem —confidence in ourselves and an ability to trust in our common sense. It allows us to have perspective on our lives—the ability to not take ourselves too seriously, to laugh at ourselves, to see the bigger picture, and to see that things will work out. It’s a form of innate or unlearned optimism. Mental health allows us to view others with sympathy if they are having troubles, with kindness if they are in pain, and with unconditional love no matter who they are. Mental health is the source of creativity for solving problems, resolving conflict, making our surroundings more beautiful, managing our home life, or coming up with a creative business idea or invention to make our lives easier. It gives us patience for ourselves and toward others as well as patience while driving, catching a fish, working on our car, or raising a child. It allows us to see the beauty that surrounds us each moment in nature, in culture, in the flow of our daily lives.
     Although mental health is the cure-all for living our lives, it is perfectly ordinary as you will see that it has been there to direct you through all your difficult decisions. It has been available even in the most mundane of life situations to show you right from wrong, good from bad, friend from foe. Mental health has commonly been called conscience, instinct, wisdom, common sense, or the inner voice, we think of it simply as a health and helpful flow of intelligent thought. As you will come to see, knowing that mental health is always available and knowing to trust it allow us to slow down to the moment and live life happily. 

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.
     The relation of language and mind has interested philosophers for many centuries. The Greeks assumed that the structure of language had some connection with the process of thought, which took root in Europe long before people realized how diverse languages could be.
     Only recently did linguists begin the serious study of languages that were very different from their own. Two anthropologist-linguists, Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, were pioneers in describing many native languages of North and South America during the first half of the twentieth century. We are obliged to them because some of these languages have since vanished, as the peoples who spoke them died out or became assimilated and lost their native languages. Other linguists in the earlier part of this century, however, who were less eager to deal with bizarre data from "exotic" language, were not always so grateful. The newly described languages were often so strikingly different from the well-studied languages of Europe and Southeast Asia that some scholars even accused Boas and Sapir of fabricating their data. Native American languages are indeed different, so much so in fact that Navajo could be used by the US military as a code during World War II to send secret messages.
     Sapir’s pupil, Benjamin Lee Whorf, continued the study of American Indian languages. Being interested in the relationship of language and thought, Whorf developed the idea that the structure of language determines the structure of habitual thought in a society. He reasoned that because it is easier to formulate certain concepts and not others in a given language, the speakers of that language think along one track and not along another. Whorf came to believe in a sort of linguistic determinism which, in its strongest form, states that language imprisons the mind, and that the grammatical patterns in a language can produce far-reaching consequences for the culture of a society. Later, this idea became to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but this term is somewhat inappropriate. Although both Sapir and Whorf emphasized the diversity of languages, Sapir himself never explicitly supported the notion of linguistic determinism. 

中等

Directions:
Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.

     The growth of the use of English as the world's primary language for international communication has obviously been continuing for several decades. But even as the number of English speakers expands further there are signs that the global predominance of the language may fade within the foreseeable future.
     Complex international, economic, technological and culture change could start to diminish the leading position of English as the language of the world market, and UK interests which enjoy advantage from the breath of English usage would consequently face new pressures. Those realistic possibilities are highlighted in the study presented by David Graddol. His analysis should therefore end any self-contentedness among those who may believe that the global position of English is so stable that the young generation of the United Kingdom do not need additional language capabilities.
     David Graddol concludes that monoglot English graduates face a bleak economic future as qualified multilingual youngsters from other countries are proving to have a competitive advantage over their British counterparts in global companies and organizations. Alongside that, many countries are introducing English into the primary-school curriculum but British schoolchildren and students do not appear to be gaining greater encouragement to achieve fluency in other languages.
     If left to themselves, such trends will diminish the relative strength of the English language in international education markets as the demand for educational resources in languages, such as Spanish ,Arabic or Mandarin grows and international business process outsourcing in other language such as Japanese, French and German, spreads.
     The changes identified by David Graddol all present clear and major challenges to UK’s providers of English language teaching to people of other countries and to broader education business sectors. The English language teaching sector directly earns nearly £1.3 billion for the UK in invisible exports and our other education related explores earn up to £10 billion a year more. As the international education market expands, the recent slowdown in the number of international students studying in the main English-speaking countries is likely to continue, especially if there are no effective strategic policies to prevent such slippage.
     The anticipation of possible shifts in demand provided by this study is significant: It gives a basis to all organizations which seek to promote the learning and use of English, a basis for planning to meet the possibilities of what could be a very different operating environment. That is a necessary and practical approach. In this as in much else, those who wish to influence the future must prepare for it.

中等

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.

     Since the days of Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the scientific enterprise. In some ways, this quest for commonalities defines science. Newton’s laws of motion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of different phenomena into a single explicatory framework.
     In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything—a single generative equation for all we see. It is becoming less clear, however, that such a theory would be a simplification, given the dimensions and universes that it might entail. Nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal.
     This tendency in the natural sciences has long been evident in the social sciences too. Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification, for if all humans share common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings. Just as the bewildering variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered forms of sexual selection, perhaps the world’s languages, music, social and religious customs and even history are governed by universal features. To filter out what is unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behavior arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms.
     That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland and his colleagues consider the evolution of grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in language.
     The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that humans are born with an innate language—acquisition capacity that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly.
      The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality, identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many language which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints.
     Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000 languages. Chomsky’s grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it, whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations. Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lineage-specific and not governed by universals.

中等

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

     A deal is a deal—except, apparently, when Entergy is involved. The company, a major energy supplier in New England, provoked justified outrage in Vermont last week when it announced it was reneging on a longstanding commitment to abide by the strict nuclear regulations.
     Instead, the company has done precisely what it had long promised it would not: challenge the constitutionality of Vermont’s rules in the federal court, as part of a desperate effort to keep its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant running. It’s a stunning move.
     The conflict has been surfacing since 2002, when the corporation bought Vermont’s only nuclear power plant, an aging reactor in Vernon. As a condition of receiving state approval for the sale, the company agreed to seek permission from state regulators to operate past 2012. In 2006, the state went a step further, requiring that any extension of the plant’s license be subject to Vermont legislature’s approval. Then, too, the company went along.
     Either Entergy never really intended to live by those commitments, or it simply didn’t foresee what would happen next. A string of accidents, including the partial collapse of a cooling tower in 2007 and the discovery of an underground pipe system leakage, raised serious questions about both Vermont Yankee’s safety and Entergy’s management—especially after the company made misleading statements about the pipe. Enraged by Entergy’s behavior, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 last year against allowing an extension.
     Now the company is suddenly claiming that the 2002 agreement is invalid because of the 2006 legislation, and that only the federal government has regulatory power over nuclear issues. The legal issues in the case are obscure: whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that states do have some regulatory authority over nuclear power, legal scholars say that Vermont case will offer a precedent-setting test of how far those powers extend. Certainly, there are valid concerns about the patchwork regulations that could result if every state sets its own rules. But had Entergy kept its word, that debate would be beside the point.
     The company seems to have concluded that its reputation in Vermont is already so damaged that it has nothing left to lose by going to war with the state. But there should be consequences. Permission to run a nuclear plant is a public trust. Entergy runs 11 other reactors in the United States, including Pilgrim Nuclear station in Plymouth. Pledging to run Pilgrim safely, the company has applied for federal permission to keep it open for another 20 years. But as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviews the company’s application, it should keep it mind what promises from Entergy are worth.

中等

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

     In the 2006 film version of The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, scolds her unattractive assistant for imagining that high fashion doesn’t affect her. Priestly explains how the deep blue color of the assistant’s sweater descended over the years from fashion shows to department stores and to the bargain bin in which the poor girl doubtless found her garment.
     This top-down conception of the fashion business couldn’t be more out of date or at odds with the feverish would described in Overdressed, Eliazabeth Cline’s three-year indictment of “fast fashion”. In the last decade or so, advances in technology have allowed mass-market labels such as Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo to react to trends more quickly and anticipate demand more precisely. Quicker turnarounds mean less wasted inventory, more frequent release, and more profit. These labels encourage style-conscious consumers to see clothes as disposable—meant to last only a wash or two, although they don’t advertise that—and to renew their wardrobe every few weeks. By offering on-trend items at dirt-cheap prices, Cline argues, these brands have hijacked fashion cycles, shaking an industry long accustomed to a seasonal pace.
     The victims of this revolution, of course, are not limited to designers. For H&M to offer a $5.95 knit miniskirt in all its 2,300-plus stores around the world, it must rely on low-wage overseas labor, order in volumes that strain natural resources, and use massive amounts of harmful chemicals.
     Overdressed is the fashion world’s answer to consumer-activist bestsellers like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Mass-produced clothing, like fast food, fills a hunger and need, yet is non-durable and wasteful,” Cline argues. Americans, she finds, buy roughly 20 billion garments a year—about 64 items per person—and no matter how much they give away, this excess leads to waste.
     Towards the end of Overdressed, Cline introduced her ideal, a Brooklyn woman named Sarah Kate Beaumont, who since 2008 has made all of her own clothes—and beautifully. But as Cline is the first to note, it took Beaumont decades to perfect her craft; her example can’t be knocked off. 

     Though several fast-fashion companies have made efforts to curb their impact on labor and the environment—including H&M, with its green Conscious Collection line—Cline believes lasting change can only be effected by the customer. She exhibits the idealism common to many advocates of sustainability, be it in food or in energy. Vanity is a constant; people will only start shopping more sustainably when they can’t afford not to.

中等

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

     An old saying has it that half of all advertising budgets are wasted—the trouble is, no one knows which half. In the internet age, at least in theory, this fraction can be much reduced. By watching what people search for, click on and say online, companies can aim “behavioural” ads at those most likely to buy.
     In the past couple of weeks a quarrel has illustrated the value to advertisers of such fine-grained information: Should advertisers assume that people are happy to be tracked and sent behavioural ads? Or should they have explicit permission?
     In December 2010 America's Federal Trade Commission(FTC) proposed adding a "do not track" (DNT) option to internet browsers, so that users could tell advertisers that they did not want to be followed. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari both offer DNT; Google's Chrome is due to do so this year. In February the FTC and Digital Advertising Alliance(DAA) agreed that the industry would get cracking on responding to DNT requests.
     On May 31st Microsoft set off the row: It said that Internet Explorer 10, the version due to appear windows 8, would have DNT as a default.
     Advertisers are horrified.Human nature being what it is, most people stick with default settings. Few switch DNT on now, but if tracking is off it will stay off. Bob Liodice, the chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, says consumers will be worse off if the industry cannot collect information about their preferences. People will not get fewer ads,he says.“They'll get less meaningful, less targeted ads.”
     It is not yet clear how advertisers will respond. Getting a DNT signal does not oblige anyone to stop tracking, although some companies have promised to do so. Unable to tell whether someone really objects to behavioural ads or whether they are sticking with Microsoft’s default, some may ignore a DNT signal and press on anyway.
     Also unclear is why Microsoft has gone it alone. After all, it has an ad business too, which it says will comply with DNT requests, though it is still working out how. If it is trying to upset Google, which relies almost wholly on advertising, it has chosen an indirect method: there is no guarantee that DNT by default will become the norm. DNT does not seem an obviously huge selling point for windows 8—though the firm has compared some of its other products favorably with Google's on that count before. Brendon Lynch, Microsoft's chief privacy officer, blogged: "we believe consumers should have more control." Could it really be that simple?

中等

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

     First two hours, now three hours — this is how far in advance authorities are recommending people show up to catch a domestic flight, at least at some major U.S. airports with increasingly massive security lines.
     Americans are willing to tolerate time-consuming security protocols in return for increased safety. The crash of Egypt-Air Flight 804, which terrorists may have downed over the Mediterranean Sea, provides another tragic reminder of why. But demanding too much of air travelers or providing too little security in return undermines public support for the process. And it should: Wasted time is a drag on Americans' economic and private lives, not to mention infuriating.
     Last year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) found in a secret check that undercover investigators were able to sneak weapons — both fake and real — past airport security nearly every time they tried. Enhanced security measures since then, combined with a rise in airline travel due to the improving economy and low oil prices, have resulted in long waits at major airports such as Chicago's O'Hare International. It is not yet clear how much more effective airline security has become — but the lines are obvious.
     Part of the issue is that the government did not anticipate the steep increase in airline travel, so the TSA is now rushing to get new screeners on the line. Part of the issue is that airports have only so much room for screening lanes. Another factor may be that more people are trying to overpack their carry-on bags to avoid checked-baggage fees, though the airlines strongly dispute this.
     There is one step the TSA could take that would not require remodeling airports or rushing to hire: Enroll more people in the PreCheck program. PreCheck is supposed to be a win-win for travelers and the TSA. Passengers who pass a background check are eligible to use expedited screening lanes. This allows the TSA to focus on travelers who are higher risk, saving time for everyone involved. TSA wants to enroll 25 million people in PreCheck.
     It has not gotten anywhere close to that, and one big reason is sticker shock: Passengers must pay $85 every five years to process their background checks. Since the beginning, this price tag has been PreCheck's fatal flaw. Upcoming reforms might bring the price to a more reasonable level. But Congress should look into doing so directly, by helping to finance PreCheck enrollment or to cut costs in other ways.
     The TSA cannot continue diverting resources into underused PreCheck lanes while most of the traveling public suffers in unnecessary lines. It is long past time to make the program work.