CAREFUL READING 

Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter.

        The history of the U.S. from Lincoln's death to the wave of assassinations in the 1960s can be seen as a struggle to realize Lincoln's vision of a society whose citizens are not held back by parentage or origin. The struggle to secure this chance for all Americans has been bitter and bloody, and it is far from over. After Lincoln's death, the Fourteenth Amendment promised that the Federal Union would guarantee the rights of all persons against violation by the states. However, this guarantee was exploited by business corporations while remaining a hollow promise to millions of actual persons. Women did not get the vote until five amendments later, and their legal rights were often lost in marriage. As for blacks, political equality remained mostly something unreal until the passage of the Voting Rights Act one hundred years after Lincoln's death.
        The struggle to realize Lincoln's ideal was undertaken not only by workers against capital but also by immigrants against the political system. In less than one human life span following the Civil War, the U.S. absorbed a great number of immigrants who formed the next wave of what Lincoln had called “prudent and penniless” beginners. They found that social services were forgotten by a political system that ran on graft (腐败). The risk of injury, disease, and early death were largely ignored, forcing millions to rely on themselves, on family, and on the charity of friends.

        To some who watched the immigrants pour in, it seemed that America would have to reorganize itself according to the multicultural principle that we hear so much about today. The term “multiculturalism” was popularized by Horace Kallen. He wrote in his book The Nation in 1915 that with the growth of large immigrant communities, the rate of mixed marriage would drop (he was wrong) and the likelihood of a new American race would decline. The U.S” he predicted, would turn into a democracy of nationalities in which “selfhood is ancestrally determined.” To other observers, however, the country was simply sliding into disorder, as it seemed to Henry Adams in 1905 when he looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue and felt himself in the disorderly Rome as witnessed by Emperor Diocletian. 

I. CAREFUL READING Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET. 

         The complex topic “social class” is difficult to avoid when discussing British society, which is often seen as a society in which “social class” is more important than in other countries. This is true to a certain extent, but should probably not be exaggerated. Most countries have some kind of class structure. There exist broad groups within society which share types of employment, income levels, and certain cultural characteristics. But important in the idea of “class” is that it makes a difference to an individual’s “life-chances” which group or class he or she is born into. So if a middle-class couple, perhaps a doctor and a teacher, have a child, it is more likely that that child will also acquire middle-class education, employment and income levels than will the child of working-class factory workers. This is certainly the case in the UK, though it should be stressed that it is far from impossible for the working-class child to acquire middle-class status: it is simply statistically much more unlikely than for his middle-class school-friend.
          If asked, about half the British population would describe themselves as middle-class, and half as working-class. Employment would be the main guide they would use: manual (or “blue-collar”) workers would usually call themselves working-class, and office (or “white-collar”）workers would usually call themselves middle-class. However, there is a hazy area around unskilled office-work and skilled well-paid manual work which leads to sub-divisions such as “lower middle class” being used; and the term “upper middle class” might be used to describe doctors and lawyers and so on who have relatively high incomes and high status professions—especially in families with long traditions of such employment. This would differentiate them from the majority of middle-class people today, most of whom have working-class parents or grandparents. This reflects the huge expansion of the middle class over the twentieth century and especially since 1945, when more equal social policies were adopted by the government.

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

     If culture is learned, there must be channels of transmission. This is the task of agents of socialization—people and organizations charged with conveying the rules. Chief among these are parents, peers, teachers, the media, and religious authorities.
     The first and most important agent of socialization is those who care for infants. In the earliest months, messages from nurturers(抚养人) constitute the child's basic understanding of the world around it. This is the infant's first introduction to the language that shapes perception and elicits emotions. What the child learns is the culture as mediated through others. A desire for continued interaction with the nurturers, combined with a fear of losing these sources of pleasure, motivates the infant to become sensitive to the cues of those entrusted with its care.
     Another powerful source of information and socialization is the friendship group of age peers. Peers are equals, whereas parents are superiors in relation to the child. The greater power of parents makes some kinds of learning difficult. A distance and formality must be observed even in the most indulgent (宽容) homes. Peers, on the other hand, are those one can deal with on the same level as oneself: tease, insult, let imagination loose upon, share dreadful mistakes with , and so on, but without the heavy emotional overlay of family relationship.
     Much formal socialization is placed in the hands of professionals. Teachers from kindergarten on are specifically designated agents of socialization, and are paid for the task. Ideally, a teacher is one who has both knowledge and the skills to present it.
     In an earlier time, parents, friends, and teachers would comprise the list of primary childhood socializers. Children's books, comics, and magazines might also have been mentioned as sources of information on norms and role models. Today one must add four powerful indirect socialization agents: radio, movie, television and computer. Many people learn about politics, form a vision of the good life, and develop attitudes toward others from what they see on the screen and hear through loudspeakers.

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

     Eugenics（优生学）could be found everywhere in the U. S. in the 1920s. It influenced American politics, social sciences and medicine. It shaped public policy, aesthetic theory and literature, and affected popular culture. Eugenic thinking was so popular in the modern era that it attained the status of common sense. From the beginning of eugenics in the late-nineteenth-century England to its peak in the U. S. during the postwar years of the late 1910s and 1920s, few challenged the notion that modern nations, especially those troubled by immigration, must improve their population in order to remain competitive in the modern world.
     Scholars have recently begun to acknowledge the profound influence of eugenic thought on modern white American and British writers, yet it remains unknown to most of them that some versions of eugenics also appeared in the writings of modern African American intellectuals, including not only Du Bois and Dunbar-Nelson but also Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, and E. Franklin Frazier. In the end, there were not nearly as many refutations of eugenics in modern U. S. as there were competing versions of it. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, the ideal of weeding out defective individuals and races deeply affected the U. S. and remained arguably the most outstanding feature of its collective spirit. 

     Eugenics in some form shows up in various writings between 1890 and 1940. It was so widespread that it serves as an ideal perspective for examining often ignored aspects in American public policy, class politics, racial politics, literature, and even Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, in the U. S. of the 1910s and 1920s, eugenics became so widely accepted that it might be considered the guiding principle of modern American discourse （话语）.
     There were a number of reasons for this particular success of eugenics in the U. S. First, it was a combination of scientism and progress that appealed to a wide variety of modern American intellectuals. Second, the U. S. 's particular historical circumstances in the early twentieth century——including widespread immigration, a shift to an urban industrial economy, and the country's emergence as a dominant global power—help further explain the rise of an ideology that promised to increase national competitiveness and efficiency. Finally, Americans accepted eugenics because it provided them with a theory that supported racism around the turn of the twentieth century.

I. CAREFUL READING Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.

          The average population density of the world is 47 persons per square mile. Continental densities range from no permanent inhabitants in Antarctica to 211 per square mile in Europe. In the western hemisphere, population densities range from 4 per square mile in Canada to 675 per square mile in Puerto Rico. In Europe the range is from 4 per square mile in Iceland to 831 per square mile in the Netherlands. Within countries there are wide variations of population densities. For example, in Egypt, the average is 55 persons per square mile, but l,300 persons inhabit each square mile in settled portions where the land is arable(可耕种的 ).
          High population densities generally occur in regions of developed industrialization, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Great Britain, or where lands are intensively used for agriculture, as in Puerto Rico and Java.
           Low average population densities, which are characteristic of most underdeveloped countries, are generally associated with a relatively low percentage of cultivated land. This generally results from poor quality lands. It may also due to natural obstacles to cultivation, such as deserts, mountains or malaria-infected jungles; to land uses other than cultivation, as pasture and forested land; to primitive methods that limit cultivation, to social obstacles; and to land ownership systems which keep land out of production.
           More economically advanced countries of low population density have, as a rule, large proportions of their populations living in urban areas. Their rural population densities are usually very low. Poorer developed countries of correspondingly low general population density, on the other hand, often have a concentration of rural population living on arable land, which is great as the rural concentration found in the most densely populated industrial countries.

I. CAREFUL READING Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET. 

        “But I can't save any money.” It's an excuse I hear a lot from which I detect a note of defiance. In the past few years, it has become increasingly frequent, as more and more Americans make less than we spend, eating up the savings in our homes. The national savings rate is declining. And the situation seems to be getting worse.
        We certainly know that saving money is good for us. Yet saving for tomorrow is still a largely ignored and unappreciated skill. The question that naturally follows is: Why? Why don't Americans make saving a priority?
        To start with, saving today is much harder. The typical household income has held largely steady for a good half decade, while prices have continued to rise. If you're having to spend a disproportionate amount of income on food and gas, it’s hard to save. Besides, credit became too accessible. For years it was simply too easy to get your hands on money to spend. While banks at one time would not let you spend more than 36 percent of your total income on debt, they stretched that number to 55 percent during the housing boom. Why save when you could get that big flat-screen TV today and pay for it with mortgage debt that was both cheap and deductible? Last but not least, saving is, was, and always will be no fun. Think about it this way: Choosing to save almost always means opting for delayed gratification instead of immediate gratification. The pleasure of getting something good today is much greater than that in the future—even if the reward in the future is bigger.
          Recently, neuroeconomists, a relatively new breed of experts in economics and neuroscience, have started using MRIs (核磁共振成像) to view the brain as it is making money choices. When something we want to buy comes into view, they see the pleasure center firing up. Similarly, getting a few dollars today is more thrilling than getting a slightly larger profit tomorrow. And if you have to wait a few months for that gain, it will have to be much bigger in order to arouse the same interest in your brain. Things way off in the future—like retirement—don't jostle the pleasure center much at all.

CAREFUL READING 

Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter.

           Educating girls quite possibly yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world. Women’s education may be unusual territory for economists, but enhancing women’s contribution to development is actually as much an economic as a social issue. And economics, with its emphasis on incentives (激励), provides an explanation for why so many girls are deprived of an education.
           Parents in low-income countries fail to invest in their daughters because they do not expect them to make an economic contribution to the family; girls grow up only to marry into somebody else's family and bear children. Girls are thus seen as less valuable than boys and are kept at home to do housework while their brothers are sent to school—the prophecy(预言) becomes self-fulfilling, trapping women in a vicious circle (恶性循环) of neglect.
          An educated mother, on the other hand, earns more and faces an entirely different set of choices. She is likely to have fewer but healthier children and insist on the development of all her children, ensuring that her daughters are given a fair chance. The education of her daughters then makes it much more likely that the next generation of girls, as well as of boys, will be educated and healthy. The vicious circle is thus transformed into a virtuous circle.
         Few will dispute that educating women has great social benefits, but it has enormous economic advantages as well. Most obviously, there is the direct effect of education on the wages of female workers. Wages rise by 10 to 20 percent for each additional year of schooling. Such big returns are impressive by the standard of other available investments, but they are just the beginning.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer.

     ​I have come for a visit to an elementary classroom for six-to nine-year-olds. My strongest impression of this classroom is the purposefulness of the children in their cooperative efforts. 

     As I settle in to observe for the morning, I begin to sense that,for these children,relating to each other and working are a unified （一致的）experience.
     The children＇s voices are low, and can only overhear（偶尔听到） the directed conversation of the children at the table closest to me. I realize that the way the children use their voices contributes to the atmosphere of respect and purposefulness in this elementary classroom.
     I hear one of the four boys next to me announce”200-pound explosive shells.”He is pointing to a picture in one of the opened books on the table in front of him. “Did anything blow up?”one of the boys asks. All the boys look over at the opened book.Two of the four boys are taking notes. A third one is making a complicated pencil drawing from an illustration of a particular model of train. The fourth boy is using graph paper（方格纸） to compute a math problem.
     A few feet away from me， three children are sticking pins into holes on a poster board map of Europe. The pins have tiny red labels attached with the names of countries on them. ＂Albania，＂I overhear one boy say as he reads a label to his working partners and puts it on the map.
     Just beyond these children， five others have newspapers spread over a large table. One of the children walks over to the assistant, carrying what looks to me to be the sports sections of one of the newspapers. These children must be following basketball scores or related sports statistics.
     The only other table on which I can see the work clearly is next to this “newspapers” table. This is a small table with only two children. Their books are standing up on end so that I can see, even across the room, that they are doing a report on jungle birds and animals.
     Such is an elementary class! The children are well-occupied, learning, concentrated, interested, and purposeful. Every subject area but music is covered. The classroom is so different from my own elementary schooling. I want to know how this particular teacher helps to facilitate this outcome with this particular group of children. 

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 CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.

     Icons are objects in our environment that evoke deeply-felt emotional responses from those for whom they have a special, shared meaning. These magical items also function in popular art as a type of expression and provide both the creator and the audience with shared cultural experiences that carry with them a deep and meaningful significance far beyond their physical reality.
     Icons have a type of religious significance. It is this religious significance that provides them with their basic power. A few years ago there was a story about a silver chalice(圣杯) brought to a small town in Brazil by a visiting American priest which bore the following words: "In memory of Marilyn Monroe."A remarkable mixture of the sacred and the secular(世俗的), an integration of the strengths of both into super icon.
     The Western romance is at its very basis religious in its implications. The hero, standing between the wilderness on the one hand and civilization on the other, balances, much like a priest, between the powers of light and darkness because he has the strengths of both and uses them against the weaknesses of the wilderness. The hero-priest functions as a nineteenth-century savior by combining New Testament mercy with Old Testament justice.
     In the Western romance the gun, the horse, and the landscape are the central icons. While the horse enables the hero to move easily about the virtue-laden(富有美德的)and vice-ridden landscape, the gun aids him in the final judgment between good and evil.The hero's gun must, of course, be special, almost magical; it is given the power with the forces of life and death, right and wrong. The hero's gun is not a tool, but a real extension of the manhood and the"rightness" of the hero-savior. Speaking of the horse as an icon, it is representative of the force of nature, mute evidence of the hero's mastery over nature, of his ability to command respect from nature's forces. Consistent with the iconic significance of the gun and the horse, is the landscape itself, which finds its most complete expression in film. The landscape is not just a backdrop against which the story is set, but rather an integral part of the action. It is the wilderness in all of its positive-negative completeness, being able to provide spiritual and physical healthfulness for the modern experience.

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

     In the past, American families tended to be quite large. Parents raising five or more children were common. Over the years, the size of the family has decreased. One reason for this is an increase in the cost of living. On the average, children attend schools for more years than they used to, making them financially dependent on their families. Moreover, children nowadays are better dressed and have more money to spend on entertainment. The parents usually take the responsibility for all the expenses. Meanwhile, families are less close than they used to be. More and more American mothers work away from home.
     The breakup of the family occurs when the parents divorce. A lot of children in the U.S. live part of their young lives with only one parent. Broken families usually result in problems for children and parents alike. Children blame themselves when their parents separate. They grow up feeling unsettled as they are moved back and forth between parents.              

     Usually one parent is responsible for raising the children. These single parents must care for the children's emotional and psychological needs while also supporting them financially. This is very demanding and leaves very little time for the parent's own personal interests. Single parents often marry other single parents. In this type of family, unrelated children are forced to develop brother or sister relationship. The situations of many American families today are not good. However, recent signs indicate that things are getting better. The divorce rate is declining. The rate of childbirth is rising. Perhaps Americans have learned how important families are.

A （ ） discussion is necessary. 

Parking can be （ ） downtown.

Parents worry about the （ ） of music on their children's behaviour.

Someone is put in （ ） of the work. 

We should train our students to speak English fluently and （ ）. 

This meeting was the Constitutional Convention, a great （ ） point in American history.

They must struggle against their circumstances to （ ） the basics of survival and human dignity.

You can hive off some of the work to us if （ ）.

The market maintains a twenty-four hour （ ）.

Then he caught （ ） of her small black hat in the crowd.