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

     Those who had the pleasure of watching Benny Goodman at work saw a rather ordinary-looking man in rimless glasses and a conservative business suit; but they also saw a human being who could play the clarinet on stage like no one before or since. This made Benny Goodman a unique individual.
     Other Americans who have stood out from the flock include Joe DiMaggio, Clarence Darrow, and Jonas Salk. They, like Benny Goodman, were recognized and honored for no other reason than excellence.
     It is doing something better than other people that makes us unique. Yet a surprising number of people still see individuality as a surface thing. They wear garish clothes, dye their hair strange colors and decorate their skin with tattoos to make some kind of social statement. But an ordinary guy who has dyed his hair purple or orange is nothing more than the same person with a funny-looking head.
     The whole purpose of individuality is excellence. The people who comprehend the simple principle of being unique through performance make our entire political-economic system work. Those who invent, who know more about a subject than other people do, and who take something that doesn’t work and make it work - these people are the very soul of progress.
     Fortunately, enough Americans have been inspired to do something with their uniqueness that we have developed in less than three centuries from a frontier outpost onto not only the stronghold of freedom but a country strong enough to protect that freedom. These people prized the notions of individuality and excellence about all things and thus kept the great machine functioning. The ones with the purple hair and the shining jewelry are just along for the ride, trying to be “different” and not knowing how to go about it.
     The student who earns A’s on his report card has grasped the idea and has found the real meaning of individuality. So has the youngster who has designed his own spaceship, who gives piano recitals, who paints pictures of the world around him, or who can name all the states and their capitals.
     Benny Goodman understood it too. This is why he was at his best, blowing his clarinet, in a blue suit and black shoes.

Reading Comprehension: In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.

Reading Comprehension:

In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.

Reading Comprehension: In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.

        Men are spending more and more time in the kitchen encouraged by celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, according to a report from Oxford University. The effect of the celebrity role models, who have given cookery a more manly image, has combined with a more general drive towards sexual equality, to mean men now spend more than twice the amount of time preparing meals than they did in 1961.
        According to research by Prof. Jonathan Gershuny, who runs the Centre for Time Research at Oxford, men now spend more than half an hour a day cooking, up from just 12 minutes a day in 1961.
        Prof. Gershuny said: “The man in the kitchen is part of a much wider social trend. There has been 40 years of gender equality, but there is another 40 years probably to come.”
        Women, who a generation ago spent a fraction under two hours a day cooking, now spend just one hour and seven minutes - a dramatic fall, but they still spend far more time at the stove than men. Some critics say men have been inspired to pick up a spatula by the success of Ramsay, Oliver as well as other male celebrity chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White and Keith Floyd.
        The report, commissioned by frozen food company Birds Eye, also makes clear that the family meal is limping on in far better health than some have suggested, thanks in part to a resurgence in cooking by some consumers. Two-thirds of adults claim that they come together to share at least three times a week, even if it is not necessarily around a kitchen or dining room table.
        Anne Murphy, general manager at Birds Eye, said: “The evening meal is still clearly central to family life and with some saying family time is on the increase and the appearance of a more frugal consumer, we think the return to tradition will continue as a trend.”
        However, Prof. Gershuny pointed out that the family meal was now rarely eaten by all of its members around a table - with many “family meals” in fact taken on the sofa in the sitting room, and shared by completely different members of the family.
        “The family meal has changed very substantially, and few of us eat - as I did when I was a child - at least two meals a day together as a family. But it has survived in a different format.”

        It’s early August and the countryside appears peaceful. Planting has long been finished and the fields are alive with strong, healthy crops. Soybeans and wheat are flourishing under the hot summer sun, and the corn, which was “knee-high by the fourth of July”, is now well over six feet tall. Herds of dairy and beef cattle are grazing peacefully in rolling pastures which surround big, red barns and neat, white farmhouses. Everything as far as the eye can see radiates a sense of prosperity. Welcome to the Midwest - one of the most fertile agricultural regions of the world.
       The tranquility of the above scene is misleading. Farmers in the Midwest put in some of the longest workdays of any profession in the United States. In addition to caring for their crops and livestock, they have to keep up with new farming techniques, such as those for combining soil erosion and increasing livestock production. It is essential that farmers adopt these advances in technology if they want to continue to meet the growing demands of a hungry world.
         Agriculture is the number one industry in the United States and agricultural products are the country’s leading export. American farmers manage to feed not only the total population of the United States, but also millions of other people throughout the rest of the world. Corn and soybean exports alone account for approximately 75 percent of the amount sold in world markets.
        This productivity, however, has its price. Intensive cultivation exposes the earth to the damaging forces of nature. Every year wind and water remove tons of rich soil from the nation’s croplands, with the result that soil erosion has become a national problem concerning everyone from the farmer to the consumer.
         Each field is covered by a limited amount of topsoil, the upper layer of earth which is richest in the nutrient and minerals necessary for growing crops. Ever since the first farmers arrived in the Midwest almost 200 years ago, cultivation and, consequently, erosion have been depleting the supply of topsoil. In the 1830s, nearly two feet of rich, black top soil covered the Midwest. Today the average depth is only eight inches, and every decade another inch is blown or washed away. This erosion is steadily decreasing the productivity of valuable cropland. A United States Agricultural Department survey states that if erosion continues at its present rate, com and soybean yields in the Midwest may drop as much as 30 percent over the next 50 years.

Reading Comprehension

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

    The theft by a Russian syndicate of 1.2 billion username and password combinations from 420,000 websites around the world means that the personal details of almost half of all users of the internet must now be considered severely compromised. It can be only a matter of time before the victims find nasty surprises in their bank statements and credit-card accounts. To be on the safe side, anyone who uses financial and shopping websites should change their passwords forthwith—preferably to something longer, more jumbled, and including no word found in any dictionary. The more nonsensical the better. 

    Heads may nod in agreement, but the advice is then promptly ignored. Human nature, being what it is, has a habit of making people the weakest link in any security chain. For instance, passwords that are easy to remember—the ones most people choose—tend to be the easiest for cybercrooks to guess. By contrast, passwords comprising long, random strings of uppercase and lowercase letters plus numbers and other keyboard characters are far more difficult to fathom. Unfortunately, they are also difficult to remember. As a result, users write them down on scraps of paper that get left lying around for prying eyes to see.
    Basically, two factors determine a password’s strength. The first is the number of guesses an attacker must try to find the correct one. This depends on the password’s length, complexity and randomness. The second factor concerns how easy it is to check the validity of each guess. This depends on how the password is stored on a website’s server.
    What can individuals do to protect themselves? Apart from choosing passwords that are strong enough (i.e. long, complex and random mixtures of ASCII characters) to make cracking their hashes too time consuming for thieves to bother with, there is actually not all that much more. Passwords get stolen and broken mainly because of poor choices made by those responsible for a website’s security—especially the way it stores customers’ validation details.

    Given the pace of innovation in graphics processors, coupled with the increasing power of cracking software (mostly available for free on the internet), even the best password defences are destined to be overwhelmed in due course. After two thousand years of development, the password’s days would finally seem numbered. Time to start investing in spoof-proof biometric factors that characterise each person uniquely as an individual. 

I. Reading Comprehension. Directions: In this part of the test, there are five passages. Following each passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.
Passage 1

           American Sports represent a fabric of American culture. Sports act as a unifying factor between people of all ages. Of all the sports that America has to offer, baseball is considered the pastime of this country. Americans did not always regard baseball and other sports in such a benign manner. Rather, sports during the early colonial times were seen as pagan and devilish things to do. Many elite and wealthy gentry who embodied the Victorian ideals regarded any type of games or sports as ill vices. It was the common people who directly related sports to their religion. On days of religious celebration, early Americans joined together 10 play games. These folk games were unstructured and unruly; however, the unity that these games brought, created a need for professional sporting games. Folk games provided the foundation of sports. They created a sense of companionship and unison among individuals. These unorganized folk games created the threshold for organized sports and led to the transformation of the players’ roles and the role of the audience. Amateurs became professional athletes, and the game an organized business. The game of baseball evolved from the English game of cricket and rounders. It was not until the time of the Civil War that baseball began to be played frequently. 

          However with the transformation of the nation, society and technology, folk games too began to evolve into spectator sports. After the Civil War, baseball became a popular sport and no longer an archaic folk game. Structure and organization were introduced gradually into the game and increased public participation. The sport at first excluded the public, but as economic interests infiltrated the game, the need for audiences and spectators arose. The audience of baseball was instrumental in the transformation of baseball. The bottling leagues and team rivalries created a sector for the American public to participate in baseball The process of the transformation of American folk games into spectator games was due to capitalisrn, evolution of American society, urban settings, level of player performance, technological advances and the addition of structure and organization to the games; thus, transforming the sport of baseball into a monopolized and professional business.
         Organized Baseball and the Commission have propagated the myth that General Abner Doublday invented the game of baseball. This was an attempt to make baseball an American game. The Commission warned to distinguish baseball as a truly American game that originated in Cooperstown, New York.

        Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics, the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.
        As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with sub-millimeter accuracy - far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone.
       But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves - goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,” says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can’t yet give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world.”
        Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries.
        What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented - and human perception far more complicated - than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t know quite how we do it.

        Cord cutting is growing in popularity, with more and more people deciding to ditch cable or satellite television in favor of other options. According to Experian Marketing Services, cord-cutters grew by 44 percent in the past four years. Instead of using cable or satellite television, 7.6 million households are using high-speed Internet for videos. SNL Kagan predicts that 12 million households will cut the cord by 2015. 

        Although cable and satellite television companies are still doing well, this new trend in cord cutting is threatening their futures. Customers are finding that companies like Netflix, as well as other services that provide free or affordable video streaming, allow them to watch the shows they enjoy without paying for extra channels or fees. Although customers still need to have online access, just paying for the Internet (and possibly a Netflix or Hulu account) is tempting to many customers.
          Streaming and downloaded videos are becoming very popular. Experian’s study showed that during a typical week, 48 percent of U.S. adults and 67 percent of young adults watch streaming or downloaded videos. In addition, the fact that tablets and other mobile devices are making it so easy to watch streaming videos is adding to the charm of saying goodbye to traditional television for cord-cutters. Each week, 24 percent of all U.S. adults and 42 percent of smartphone owners watch videos on a mobile device. The greatest amount smartphone viewing occurs between 8 and 9 p.m. each night.
          The abundance of wireless technology has also made cord cutting more possible. Tablets and smartphones can now be used almost anywhere, from the home to the office to airports to many different restaurants. Because wireless service is so easy to access, video streaming is attractive because people can watch a video almost anywhere. In addition, because most portable electronic devices are easy to bring along, customers can easily lake their tablet and catch up on their favorite television show or video whenever they want.
         Of course, there are also disadvantages to cutting cable or satellite television service. Some shows are not easy to stream online legally, and many of the bigger companies that stream TV shows require a subscription fee. Movies are sometimes even harder to find, and although Netflix and other companies offer a large selection of movies as part of their streaming options, many movies are still only available through renting. In addition, these companies usually don’t offer live sporting events or live television shows, which do keep some people watching cable and satellite television.

         Like many other small boys, I was fascinated by cars, not least because my oldest brother was a bit of a car guy and subscribed to cool magazines like Car and Driver and Motor Trend. Every so often, one of those magazines would run an article on the “Car of the Future”. They featured unconventional styling and things like small nuclear reactors as power sources. Yet, frankly, my car doesn’t do anything that my brother’s Studebaker didn’t do. It goes, it stops, it burns gasoline, and it plays music. I still have to steer it, and it still runs into things if I don’t steer it carefully.
        But guess what? All of these things are subject to change in the not-so-distant future. It will still go and stop, but it may not burn gasoline, I may not have to steer it, and it may be a lot better at not running into things.
        Airbags aren’t the be-all and end-all in safety. In fact, considering the recent news about people occasionally being killed by their airbags in low-speed collisions, they obviously still need some development. But they aren’t going away, and in fact, you can expect to see cars appearing with additional, side-impact airbags, something some European car manufacturers already offer.
        Better than systems to minimize injury in the event of an accident, however, are systems that minimize the likelihood of an accident happening in the first place. Future cars may be able to eliminate many of the major causes of accidents, including drunk-driving, tailgating and sleepiness. Cars could be equipped with sensors that can detect alcohol in a driver’s system and prevent the car from being started, for example. Many accidents are caused by people following the car in front too closely. As early as next year, you’ll be able to buy cars with radar-equipped control systems. If the radar determines you’re closing too quickly with the car in front, it will ease up on the throttle. For city streets, expect other radar devices that will give advance warning that the car in front of you has slowed abruptly and you should step on the brakes - or that may even brake for you.
        Will cars eventually be able to drive themselves? There’s no reason to think it won’t be technically possible, and Mercedes is working on a system that can brake, accelerate and steer a vehicle down a highway on its own. Nobody really expects people to give up all control to their cars, but such system could be used as failsafe system to keep cars on the road and bring them safely to a stop even if the driver suddenly became disabled.

      A wise man once said that the only thing necessary for triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. So, as a police officer I have some urgent things to say to good people.
      Days after days my men and I struggle to hold back a tidal wave of crime. Something has gone terribly wrong with our once-proud American way of life. It has happened in the area of values. A key ingredient is disappearing, and I think I know what it is: accountability.
      Accountability isn’t hard to define. It means that every person is responsible for his or her actions and liable for their consequences. Of the many values that hold civilization together - honesty, kindness, and so on - accountability may be the most important of all. Without it, there can be no respect, no trust, no law - and, ultimately, no society.
      My job as a police officer is to impose accountability on people who refuse, or have never learned, to impose it on themselves. But as every policeman knows, external controls on people’s behavior are far less effective than internal restraints such as guilt, shame and embarrassment.
      Fortunately, there are still communities - smaller towns, usually - where schools maintain discipline and where parents hold up standards that proclaim: “In this family certain things are not tolerated - they simply are not done!”
      Yet more and more, especially in our larger cities and suburbs, these inner restraints are loosening. Your typical robber has none. He considers your property his property; he takes what he wants, including your life if you enrage him.
      The main cause of this breakdown is a radical shift in attitudes. Thirty years ago, if a crime was committed, society was considered the victim. Now, in a shocking reversal, it’s the criminal who is considered victimized: by his underprivileged upbringing, by the school that didn’t teach him to read, by the church that failed to teach him with moral guidance, by the parents who didn’t provide a stable home.
      I don’t believe it. Many others in equally disadvantaged circumstances choose not to engage in criminal activities. If we free the criminal, even partly, from accountability, we become a society of endless excuses where no one accepts responsibility for anything.
      We in America desperately need more people who believe that the person who commits a crime is the one responsible for it.

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

     Although Beethoven could sit down and make up music easily, his really great compositions did not come easily at all．They cost him a great deal of hard work．We know how often he rewrote and corrected his work because his notebooks are still kept in museums and libraries．He always found it hard to satisfy himself．
     When he was 28, the worst difficulty of all came to him. He began to notice a strange humming in his ears. At first he paid little attention; but it grew worse, and at last he consulted doctors. They gave him the worst news any musician can hear: he was gradually going deaf. Beethoven was in despair; he was sure that he was going to die.
     He went away to the country, to a place called Heiligenstadt, and from there he wrote a long farewell letter to his brothers. In this he told them how depressed and lonely his deafness had made him. “It was impossible for me to ask men to speak louder or shout, for I am deaf,” he wrote. “How could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense (hearing) which should have been more perfect in me than in others ... I must live like an exile.” He longed to die, and said to death, “Come when you will, I shall meet you bravely.”
     In fact, Beethoven did something braver than dying. He gathered his courage and went on writing music, though he could hear what he wrote only more and more faintly. He wrote his best music, the music we remember him for, after he became deaf. Instead of the elegant and stately music that earlier musicians had written for their wealthy listeners, Beethoven wrote stormy, exciting, revolutionary music, which reminds us of his troubled and courageous life. He grew to admire courage more than anything, and he called one of his symphonies the “Eroica” or heroic symphony, “to celebrate the memory of a great man”. Describing the dramatic opening notes of his famous Fifth Symphony, he said, “thus fate knocks on the door”.
     In those years when he went completely deaf he wrote more gloriously than ever. He could “hear” his music with his mind, if not with his ears. His friends had to write down what they wanted to say to him. He was lonely and often unhappy, but in spite of this, he often wrote joyful music. In his last symphony, the Ninth, a choir sings a wonderful Hymn of Joy. Because of his courage and determination to overcome his terrible disaster, his music has given joy and inspiration to millions of people.

Reading Comprehension

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

     Animal life first appeared on the earth about 400 million years ago. Through the passing millennia, thousands of animal species have come and gone. Until recently, this process was gradual, the result of changes in climate, in habitat, or in the genes of the animals themselves. But the tremendous expansion of modern civilization now threatens to upset this natural balance, putting unprecedented pressure on the survival of our wildlife.
     Of all the continents, the most drastic reduction in wildlife has occurred in North America, where the transition from a rural to a highly industrialized society has been most rapid. Among the victims are birds, mammals, and fish. We will never again see the passenger pigeon or the eastern elk. They have been wiped out. Of many other species, only a few representatives still survive in the wild. The U.S. Department of the Interior has put no fewer than 109 species on the endangered species list. This list includes everything from the timber wolf to the whooping crane. Even the bald eagle, our national symbol, is threatened.
     Animals that kill other game for food are called predators. The predators include the wolf, mountain lion, fox, bobcat, and bear. Attack against these animals began with the arrival of the first European settlers, who wished to protect their livestock. Eventually, a reward was offered to hunters for every predator that was killed. This reward is called a bounty. Ironically, the Federal government was the chief funder of predator-control programs.
     The settlers also brought with them their Old World fears and superstitions concerning predators．Whether preying on livestock or not，predators were shot on sight．This attitude continues to this day for coyotes，eagles，foxes，mountain lions，and bobcats，and is largely responsible for placing the eastern timber wolf, grizzly bear, and bald eagle on the endangered species list.
     Yet every animal，including the predator, has its place in nature’s grand design．Predators help maintain the health of their prey species by eliminating the diseased，young，old，and injured．Predators like the mountain lion and the wolf help to keep the deer herds healthy．Their kill also provides food for scavengers that feed on carrion．Occasional loss of livestock must be weighed against the good these animals do in maintaining the balance of nature.

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

     Several months ago I decided it would be wise to investigate the possibilities of buying a life insurance policy, if for no other reason than because I understood it might be a good investment. I got the name of an insurance agent from a friend and called the agent to get some information. From the kinds of questions I put to him, the agent would tell that I knew nothing about insurance so he kindly offered to explore the matter with me in more detail — to help me determine the kind of policy I ought to be considering. 

     That evening he appeared at my door promptly at 7:30; without wasting time on amenities, he spread his papers out on the kitchen table and launched into a lengthy explanation. I listened attentively as he talked about the difference between various types of policies, and he explained the kind of coverage he felt I ought to have because of my age bracket and financial objectives. Toward the end of the evening (after three or four hours of talking), he kindly helped me fill out an application for a 50,000 dollar policy, and then he asked if I could go to a Dr. Luther’s office on Friday for a physical examination.
     I don’t know why, but it was not until the mention of the doctor’s appointment that I realized fully what was happening. I was about to sign a lifetime contract, yet I had not really made a decision about whether I wanted to buy the policy or not. As a matter of fact, the question of the need for a decision from me one way or the other had not even come up. Suddenly I felt sure that I definitely did not want to buy the policy. However, since he had spent so much time with me, I didn’t want to make him feel that he had wasted his time. So I invented an excuse about things I had to do on Friday, and I assured him I would call him in a few days. Actually, I had no intention of going to see Dr. Luther or of calling the agent again. I wanted to forget the whole thing.
     It’s been over three months now since our meeting, and my friendly insurance agent still calls at my office faithfully two or three times a week. My secretary knows that I don’t want to talk to him, so when he calls she tells him that I’m in a meeting or that I’m out of the office or that I’m away on a business trip. I realize now that it was a mistake not to tell him outright that I’m not interested, and please not to bother me any more, all I can do is to avoid his calls and hope I don’t run into him someplace.

Reading Comprehension Directions: In this part of the test, there are five passages. Following each passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose tile best answer and then write the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet. 

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

     “Everyone has an idea,” says 21-year-old serial entrepreneur Ben Kaufman. “Every day, people walk around going ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if...’. I want to harness those ideas and let people have a forum.”
     Kaufman did that as the founder of Mophie, a start-up that makes innovative iPod accessories. But he needed to outdo himself. Instead of setting up a traditional display booth at last year’s Macworld convention, Kaufman handed out pads and pencils and invited attendees to sketch the products they wanted. Hundreds of people participated. Within 72 hours, Kaufman and his team had created three finished products, including one by 17-year-old Jared Fiovorich. The Bevy – a protective case for the iPod Shuffle that multitasks as a key ring, earbud wrap, and bottle opener - has outsold Mophie’s other products four to one. That kind of response proves Kaufman’s point: “Together we can all make better decisions.”
     Kaufman started Mophie when he was a high school senior with an idea to produce the Song Sling, a case for the iPod Shuffle that you wear around your neck. Plenty of 18-year-olds have ideas; Kaufman made his happen. “I convinced my mom and dad to remortgage the house,” he says, “and they gave me the $185,000 in equity and let me give it a shot.” Says his mother, Mindy, “When you see someone who has a dream and a great idea, you don’t want to stifle it.”
     The $39.95 Song Sling turned out to be a success, and Kaufman ultimately designed and manufactured 22 other products. In order to keep the buzz going, he says, “I needed to hit the shelf with a new product within four weeks after each new iPod model dropped.” This meant a lot of trips to the factory in China. To ensure that his exacting standards were met, he’d sit in front of the machines as the parts were coming out, saying “no,” “yeah,” “maybe,” “closer.” He pushed supervisors to speed up production times and stuck to his guns when they wanted to cut corners and raise prices.
     What often motivates him, Kaufman admits, is danger. “Our accountant once called me in and said, ‘Ben, we’ll be out of money in two weeks,’ and I was like, Yes! That’s what gets me going.” Adds product engineer Peter Wadsworth, “There are two things that inspire Ben: lots of money and no money.”