CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     One of the qualities that most people admire in others is the willingness to admit one’s mistakes. It is extremely hard sometimes to say a simple thing like “I was wrong about that,” and it is even harder to say,“ I was wrong, and you were right about that.”
     I had an experience recently with someone admitting to me that he had made a mistake fifteen years ago. He told me he had been the manager of a certain grocery store in the neighborhood where I grew up, and he asked me if I remembered the egg cartons. Then he related an incident and I began to remember vaguely the incident he was describing.
     I was about eight years old at the time, and I had gone into the store with my mother to do the weekly grocery shopping. On that particular day, I must have found my way to the dairy food department where the incident took place. There must have been a special sale on eggs that day because there was an impressive display of eggs in dozen and half-dozen cartons. The cartons were stacked three or four feet high. I must have stopped in front of a display to admire the stacks. Just then a woman came by pushing her grocery cart and knocked off the stacks of cartons. For some reason, I decided it was up to me to put the display back together, so I went to work.
     The manager heard the noise and came rushing over to see what had happened. When he appeared, I was on my knees inspecting some of the cartons to see if any of the eggs were broken, but to him it looked as though I were the culprit. He severely reprimanded me and wanted me to pay for the broken eggs. I protested my innocence and tried to explain, but it did no good. Even though I quickly forgot all about the incident, apparently the manager did not.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     Blaming the media for violence is misguided. To better understand the issue of violence and society, it is helpful to examine its historical roots. Certainly not all tribal societies were violent. For example, many native tribes in the American southwest were entirely peaceful. However, for most tribal people throughout most of the world, war and violence have always been part of life. One of our oldest books, the Old Testament, tells of constant tribal wars among the peoples of the Middle East. Likewise, ancient texts such as the Greek Iliad, the Indian Bhagavad-Gita and the Nordic Beowulf all tell tales of war and violence. Certainly the peoples of ancient Babylonia, Greece, India, and Scandinavia were not influenced by the media, yet most of the earliest human records indicate that violence has been an ever-present part of human life. Since violence was with us long before modern media, it seems unlikely that controlling the media now would have much impact on stopping human violence.
     A comparison of violence in nations around the world indicates that there is no relationship between media violence and real violence. In the United States, in 1996, there were 9,390 gun-related deaths. In the same year, Japan had 15 gun-related deaths. Yet the level of violence on television in Japan is higher than that in the U.S.. Japanese TV often depicts graphic violence that would not be allowed on U.S. television, and Japanese movie-goers see the same major Hollywood films that Americans see, but street crime is so rare in Tokyo that most people do not worry about it. In contrast, in American cities, people in general, and women in particular, are afraid to walk alone at night. Security is an ever-present concern in the U.S., where citizens limit their lives in numerous ways to reduce the chances of joining the 11,000 people who are killed by guns in America each year. However, the number of murders in the U.S. is small compared to Columbia, where, for example, 23,000 people were murdered in 1999. Columbians have much less exposure to media violence than either Americans or Japanese; they have fewer TV stations and watch fewer films. Indeed, those committing murders in Columbia are often people from the countryside who have the least exposure to the media. Thus people who are not exposed to the media are often more likely to commit violent crimes than those exposed to it. Since Canada borders the U.S., Canadians receive the same TV and radio programs that Americans receive, yet gun violence in Canada is nearly one hundred times lower than that in the U.S. Clearly there is no significant relationship between media violence and real-life violence. We need to look elsewhere for solutions to real-life violence.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

（1）In the 1760s, Mathurin Roze opened a series of shops that boasted（享有）a special meat soup called consomme. Although the main attraction was the soup, Roze's chain shops also set a new standard for dining out, which helped to establish Roze as the inventor of the modern restaurant.
（2）Today, scholars have generated large amounts of instructive research about restaurants. Take visual hints that influence what we eat: diners served themselves about 20 percent more pasta（意大利面食）when their plates matched their food.  When a dark-colored cake was served on a black plate rather than a white one, customers recognized it as sweeter and more tasty.
（3）Lighting matters, too. When Berlin restaurant customers ate in darkness, they couldn't tell how much they'd had: those given extra-large shares ate more than everyone else, but were none the wiser—they didn't feel fuller, and they were just as ready for dessert.
（4）Time is money, but that principle means different things for different types of restaurants. Unlike fast-food places, fine dining shops prefer customers to stay longer and spend. One way to encourage customers to stay and order that extra round: put on some Mozart（莫扎特）.When classical, rather than pop, music was playing, diners spent more. Fast music hurried diners out. Particular scents also have an effect: diners who got the scent of lavender（薰衣草）stayed longer and spent more than those who smelled lemon, or no scent.
（5）Meanwhile, things that you might expect to discourage spending — "bad" tables, crowding, high prices — don't necessarily. Diners at bad tables — next to the kitchen door, say — spent nearly as much as others but soon fled. It can be concluded that restaurant keepers need not "be overly concerned about 'bad' tables," given that they're profitable. As for crowds, a Hong Kong study found that they increased a restaurant's reputation, suggesting great food at fair prices. And doubling a buffet's price led customers to say that its pizza was 11 percent tastier.   

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     He was a funny looking man with a cheerful face, good natured and a great talker. He was described by his student, the great philosopher Plato, as “the best and most just and wisest man”. Yet this same man was condemned（判刑）to death for his beliefs. 

     The man was the Greek philosopher, Socrates, and he was condemned for not believing in the recognized gods and for corrupting young people. The second charge stemmed from his association with numerous young men who came to Athens from all over the civilized world to study under him.
     Socrates’ method of teaching was to ask questions and, by pretending not to know the answers, to press his students into thinking for themselves. His teachings had unsurpassed influence on all the great Greek and Roman schools of philosophy. Yet, despite his fame and influence, Socrates himself never wrote a word.
     Socrates encouraged new ideas and free thinking in the young, and this was frightening to the conservative people. They wanted him silenced. Yet, many were probably surprised that he accepted death so readily.
     Socrates had the right to ask for a lesser penalty, and he probably could have won over enough of the people who had previously condemned him. But Socrates, as a firm believer in law, reasoned that it was proper to submit to the death sentence. So he calmly accepted his fate and drank a cup of poison in the presence of his grief-stricken friends and students.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     As the South was beginning to find itself after the American Civil War, the North, too, focused its interest on the lands below the Mason-Dixon Line. Northerners swarmed over the South: journalists, agents of prospective investors, speculators with plans for railroads, writers anxious to expose themselves to a new environment.
     One of these was Constance Fenimore Woolson, a young woman from New Hampshire, a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, who, like many Northerners, was drawn to the unhappy South by affection, compassion, admiration, or the charm of the life there. With her singular gift of minute observation and a talent for analysis, her imagination lingered over the relics of the ancient South, the quaintly emblazoned tablets and colonial tombs, the wrecked old mansions that stood near by, perhaps in ruined rice lands, amid desolated fields and broken dikes. Such was the dwelling on the Georgia sea island that sidled and leaned in Jupiter Lights with one of its roofless wings falling into the cellar. After St. Augustine, Charleston especially attracted Miss Woolson, crumbling as it was but aristocratic still.
     In a later novel, Horace Chase, one of the best of all her books, she anticipated Thomas Wolfe in describing Asheville, in which the young capitalist from the North who falls in love with the Southern girl sees the “Lone Star” of future mountain resorts.
     Miss Woolson was a highly conscious writer, careful, skillful, subtle, with a sensitive, clairvoyant feeling for human nature, with the gift of discriminating observation that characterized Howells and Henry James, two famous realistic writers. She was surely best in her stories of the South, fascinated as she was by its splendor and carelessness, its tropical plants, flowers , odors and birds, and the pathos and beauty of the old order as she saw it in decay.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

（1）Maria Montessori based her educational plan upon the observation of children in diverse cultures. Therefore, her discoveries are not accurately described as Montessori principles. They are universal principles of human behavior, which belong to all peoples, societies, and cultures. These universal principles are a sound foundation for educational systems everywhere.
（2）As a medical student at the University of Rome, Montessori studied the origin and formation of living beings. When she returned to the University of Rome, after a successful medical career, to study education, philosophy and other subjects, Montessori remained attracted by development in all forms of life. While working with children and young adults, she recognized specific stages in human formation. Eventually, she identified four such planes of development. There are two planes of childhood, resulting at age twelve in a mature child, and two planes of adulthood, resulting at age twenty-four in adult maturity.
（3）To highlight the dramatic nature of the child's change from one stage of development to the next, Montessori compared developmental planes to the transformation of a butterfly. The various stages of larva（幼虫）, chrysalis（蛹）, and adult butterfly are so different as to be unrecognizable one from the other. So, too, the differences of each plane of human formation are so extraordinary that the young person appears in each as a re-created being. Each of these four planes of development builds upon the last so that faulty development in any one affects the successful completion of all the others.
（4）Montessori observed that regular education fails to notice these planes of development. In fact, the first stage of development, from birth to age six, is ignored because schooling does not begin until it is over. She referred to the school children of her day as so many "dried butterflies "pinned to a display board. She drew a chart depicting the linear ascent （直线上升）of education based as it is upon feeding information to children as if they were blanks to be imprinted upon.
（5）In contrast, Montessori drew a chart reflecting the actual development of children. It shows that in each plane there is an emergence or rebirth of development that reaches a peak and then declines. It emphasizes the regularity of human development in this regard. Montessori believed that schooling should correspond to the child's developmental periods. “Instead of dividing schools into nursery, primary, secondary, amid university, we should divide education in planes and each of these should correspond to the phase the developing individual goes through.”

​Reading Comprehension 

Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

    Children as young as ten are becoming dependent on social media for their sense of self-worth, a major study warned.
    It found many youngsters(少年）now measure their status by how much public approval they get online, often through "like". Some change their behavior in real life to improve their image on the web.
    The report into youngsters aged from 8 to 12 was carried out by Children's Commissioner（专员）Anne Longfield. She said social media firms were exposing children to major emotional risks, with some youngsters starting secondary school ill-equipped to cope with the tremendous pressure they faced online.
    Some social apps were popular among the children even though they supposedly require users to be at least 13.The youngsters admitted planning trips around potential photo-opportunities and then messaging friends — and friends of friends — to demand "likes" for their online posts.
    The report found that youngsters felt their friendships could be at risk if they did not respond to social media posts quickly, and around the clock.
    Children aged 8 to 10 were "starting to feel happy" when others liked their posts. However, those in the 10 to 12 age group were "concerned with how many people like their posts", suggesting a "need" for social recognition that gets stronger the older they become.
    Miss Longfield warned that a generation of children risked growing up "worried about their appearance and image as a result of the unrealistic lifestyles they follow on platforms, and increasingly anxious about switching off due to the constant demands of social media.
    She said: "Children are using social media with family and friends and to play games when they are in primary school. But what starts as fun usage of apps turns into tremendous pressure in real social media interaction at secondary school."
    As their world expanded, she said, children compared themselves to others online in a way that was "hugely damaging in terms of their self-identity, in terms of their confidence, but also in terms of their ability to develop themselves".
    Miss Longfield added: "Then there is this push to connect — if you go offline, will you miss something, will you miss out, will you show that you don't care about those people you are following, all of those come together in a huge way at once."
    "For children it is very, very difficult to cope with emotionally." The Children's Commissioner for England's study — life in Likes — found that children as young as 8 were using social media platforms largely for play.
    However, the research — involving eight groups of 32 children aged 8 to 12 — suggested that as they headed toward their teens, they became increasingly anxious online.
    By the time they started secondary school — at age 11 — children were already far more aware of their image online and felt under huge pressure to ensure their posts were popular, the report found.
    However, they still did not know how to cope with mean-spirited jokes, or the sense of incompetence they might feel if they compared themselves to celebrities（名人）or more brilliant friends online. The report said they also faced pressure to respond to messages at all hours of the day — especially at secondary school when more youngsters have mobile phones.
    The Children's Commissioner said schools and parents must now do more to prepare children for the emotional minefield（雷区）they faced online. And she said social media companies must also "take more responsibility". They should either monitor their websites better so that children do not sign up too early, or they should adjust their websites to the needs of younger users.
    Javed Khan, of children's charity Bamardo's, said: "It's vital that new compulsory age-appropriate relationship and sex education lessons in England should help equip children to deal with the growing demands of social media.
    "It's also hugely important for parents to know which apps their children are using."

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

      “High tech” and “state of the art” are two expressions that describe very modern technology. High tech is just a shorter way of saying high technology. And high technology describes any invention, system or device that uses the newest ideas or discoveries of science and engineering.
     What is high tech? A computer is high tech. So is a communications satellite. A modern manufacturing system is surely high tech.
     High tech became a popular expression in the United States during the early 1980's. Because of improvements in technology, people could buy many new kinds of products in American stores, such as home computers, microwave ovens, etc.
     “State of the art” is something that is as modern as possible. It is a product that is based on the very latest methods and technology. Something that is “state of the art” is the newest possible design or product of a business or industry. A state-of-the-art television set, for example, uses the most modern electronic design and parts. It is the best that one can buy.
     “State of the art” is not a new expression. Engineers have used it for years to describe the best and most modern way of doing something.
     Millions of Americans began to use the expression in the late 1970's. The reason was the computer revolution.
     Every computer company claimed that its computers were “state of the art”.
     Computer technology changed so fast that a state-of-the-art computer today might be old tomorrow. The expression “state of the art” became as common and popular as computers themselves. Now all kinds of products are said to be “state of the art”.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

（1）A ritual is any "have-to" behavior that is predictably and compulsively engaged in. Personal feelings are secondary to these mandates. You give the birthday gift or celebrate Mother’s Day whether you feel like it or not.
（2）Transgressing（违反）a ritual usually causes discomfort or hostility. For example, a husband gets angry when dinner is late. Or the wife gets angry because her husband forgot to kiss her at the door or does not wish to visit his in-laws on Sunday afternoon. Often there is a furious outburst. The one who did not carry out the ritual is made to feel guilty while the “denied” person feels rejected and angry.
（3）Rituals disguise the process of the relationship, what it would look like if left to spontaneous interaction. The resistance and resentment surrounding a ritualistic “should" response emerges indirectly. A man who comes home for dinner at six, though he would have preferred being elsewhere, may show resentment through distraction, forgetting things, non-participation in the conversation at the table, or may suddenly explode over a minor incident.
（4）In my research on people’s honeymoon experiences, a large percentage of those looking back years later expressed disappointment, particularly women, who felt freer to be honest about their feelings. Giving the good-night kiss, doing things together, and " being nice” to each other are all a part of the rituals of honeymoons. There is great pressure to suppress any resistances, boredom, or conflicting feelings. Consequently, it is not uncommon for one partner or both to drink too much or become ill during the honeymoon, shortening the length of the trip. The honeymoon experience is full of ritualistic behavior and expectations that produce sudden, unpredictable outbursts of anger over petty incidents.
（5）In general, the more polarized（两极化的）the couple in their masculine- feminine（男女的）conditioning, the less they can share on an active, daily basis. Consequently, they require a maximum of ritualistic behavior to structure the relationship. On the contrary, the more two people choose each other as partners out of genuine liking rather than ability to play a role, the less ritualized their interaction will need to be. A good-night kiss can be joyfully and passionately given, but it becomes a ritual if no real choice is being made.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

（1）Everyone is trying to convince you of something. And you spend a lot of time trying to decide what you should do, that is, trying to convince yourself. Thinking critically is a defense against a world of too much information and too many people trying to convince us. But it is more. Reasoning is what distinguishes us from beasts. Many of them can see better, can hear better, and are stronger. But they cannot plan, they cannot think through, they cannot discuss in the hopes of understanding better.
（2）A student majoring in anthropology（人类学）took the course of critical thinking. Then he went over his term paper, analyzing it as we would in class, and made some changes in it. He showed me the professors' comments, which were roughly "Beautifully reasoned, clear. A+." He said it was the first A+ he'd ever gotten. I can't promise that you'll get an A on all your term papers after taking this course. But you'll be able to comprehend better what you're reading and write more clearly and convincingly.

（3）Once in a while I'll tune into a sports talk show on the radio. All kinds of people call in. Some of them talk nonsense, but more often the comments are clear and well reasoned. The callers know the details, the facts, and make serious projections （推测）about what might be the best strategy based on past experience. They comment on what caused a team to win or lose; they reason with great skill and reject bad arguments. I expect that you can too, at least on subjects you consider important. What we hope to do in this course is hone（磨炼）that skill, sharpen your judgment, and show you that the methods of evaluating reasoning apply to much in your life.

（4）In trying to understand how to reason well, we’ll also study bad ways to convince, ways we wish to avoid, ways that misuse emotions or rely on deception. You could use that knowledge to become a bad trial lawyer, but I hope you will learn a love of reasoning well, for it is not just ethical to reason well; it is more effective in the long run. Critical thinking is part of the study of philosophy: the love of wisdom. We might not reach the truth, but we can be searchers, lovers of wisdom, and treat others as if they are, too.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(anxiety) The whole country was now so to return to normal conditions that it took little notice of events in Europe.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

​(approve) The new play won immediate from critics and audiences.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(conventional) His view of sexuality is so radically that most people cannot take it.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

​(profession) Since you're a nurse, so can I ask your opinion on bandaging ankles?

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(sure) Our programs daily opportunities for all learners to practice the language with native speakers.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(build) It's not a very beautiful , but it's comfortable to be in.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(norm) Upbringing is  used to refer to the treatment and training of the child within the home.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(definite) The peace talk between the two countries has been postponed for a(n) period.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

(consume)Medical experts agree that everyone should practice reasonable moderation in salt.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

​(efficient) Although examinations do the job quite , their side effects are also enormous.