Directions: 

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

     Against a backdrop of drastic changes in economy and population structure, younger Americans are drawing a new 21st-century road map to success, a latest poll has found. 
     Across generational lines, Americans continue to prize many of the same traditional milestones of a successful life, including getting married, having children, owning a home, and retiring in their sixties. But while young and old mostly agree on what constitutes the finish line of a fulfilling life, they offer strikingly different paths for reaching it.
     Young people who are still getting started in life were more likely than older adults to prioritize personal fulfillment in their work, to believe they will advance their careers most by regularly changing jobs, to favor communities with more public services and a faster pace of life, to agree that couples should be financially secure before getting married or having children, and to maintain that children are best served by two parents working outside the home, the survey found. 
     From career to community and family, these contrasts suggest that in the aftermath of the searing Great Recession, those just starting out in life are defining priorities and expectations that will increasingly spread through virtually all aspects of American life, from consumer preferences to housing patterns to politics.
     Young and old converge on one key point: Overwhelming majorities of both groups said they believe it is harder for young people today to get started in life than it was for earlier generations. While younger people are somewhat more optimistic than their elders about the prospects for those starting out today, big majorities in both groups believe those “just getting started in life” face a tougher a good-paying job, starting a family, managing debt, and finding affordable housing.
     Pete Schneider considers the climb tougher today. Schneider, a 27-yaear-old auto technician from the Chicago suburbs says he struggled to find a job after graduating from college. Even now that he is working steadily, he said “I can’t afford to pay monthly mortgage payments on my own, so I have to rent rooms out to people to make that happen.” Looking back, he is struck that his parents could provide a comfortable life for their children even though neither had completed college when he was young. “I still grew up in an upper middle-class home with parents who didn’t have college degrees,” Schneider said “I don’t think people are capable of that anymore.”

Directions:

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

    Professor Smith recently persuaded 35 people, 23 of them women, to keep a diary of all their absent-minded actions for a fortnight. When he came to analyse their embarrassing lapses (差错) in a scientific report, he was surprised to find that nearly all of them fell into a few groupings. Nor did the lapses appear to be entirely random (随机的).
    One of the women, for instance, on leaving her house for work one morning threw her dog her earrings and tried to fix a dog biscuit on her ear. “The explanation for this is that the brain is like a computer,” explains the professor. “People programme themselves to do certain activities regularly. It was the woman’s custom every morning to throw her dog two biscuits and then put on her earrings. But somehow the action got reversed in the programme.” About one in twenty of the incidents the volunteers reported were these “programme assembly failures”.
    Altogether the volunteers logged 433 unintentional actions that they found themselves doing—an average of twelve each. There appear to be peak periods in the day when we are at our zaniest (荒谬可笑的). These are two hours some time between eight a.m. and noon, between four and six p.m. with a smaller peak between eight and ten p.m. “Among men the peak seems to be when a changeover in brain ‘programmes’ occurs, as for instance between going to and from work.” Women on average reported slightly more lapses— 12.5 compared with 10.9 for men—probably because they were more reliable reporters.
    A startling finding of the research is that the absent-minded activity is a hazard of doing things in which we are skilled. Normally, you would expect that skill reduces the number of errors we make. But trying to avoid silly slips by concentrating more could make things a lot worse—even dangerous.

Directions:

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

      Children with attention problems in early childhood were 40% less likely to graduate from high school, says a new study from Duke University.
      The study included 386 kindergarteners from schools in the Fast Track Project, a multi-site clinical trial in the U. S. that in 1991 began tracking how children developed across their lives.
      With this study, researchers examined early academic attention and socio-emotional skills and how each contributed to academic success into young adulthood.
      They found that early attention skills were the most consistent predictor of academic success, and that likability by peers also had a modest effect on academic performance.
      By fifth grade, children with early attention difficulties had lower grades and reading achievement scores than their peers. As fifth-graders, children with early attention problems obtained average reading scores at least 3% lower than their contemporaries' and grades at least 8% lower than those of their peers. This was after controlling for IQ, socio-economic status and academic skills at school entry.
      Although these may not seem like large effects, the impact of early attention problems continued throughout the children's academic careers. Lower reading achievement scores and grades in fifth grade contributed to reduced grades in middle school and thereby contributed to a 40% lower high school graduation rate.
      "The children we identified as having attention difficulties were not diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (注意力缺乏多动症）(ADHD), although some may have had the disorder. Our findings suggest that even more modest attention difficulties can increase the risk of negative academic outcomes", said David Rabiner, an associate dean of Duke's Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, whose research has focused on ADHD and interventions to improve academic performance in children with attention difficulties.
        Social acceptance by peers in early childhood also predicted grades in fifth grade. Children not as liked by their first-grade peers had slightly lower grades in fifth grade, while those with higher social acceptance had higher grades.
       "This study shows the importance of so-called ‘non-cognitive' or soft skills in contributing to children's positive peer relationships, which, in turn, contribute to their academic success, " said Kenneth Dodge, director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy.
       The results highlight the need to develop effective early interventions to help those with attention problems stay on track academically and for educators to encourage positive peer relationships, the researchers said.
       "We're learning that student success requires a more comprehensive approach, one that incorporates not only academic skills but also social, self-regulatory and attention skills, " Dodge said. "If we neglect any of these areas, the child's development lags. If we attend to these areas, a child's success may reinforce itself with positive feedback loops. "

Directions:

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

      ​In a few decades, artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass many of the abilities that we believe make us special. This is a grand challenge for our age and it may require an "irrational" response. 

     One of the most significant pieces of news from the US in early 2017 was the efforts of Google to make autonomous driving a reality. According to a report, Google's self-driving cars clocked 1,023,330 km, and required human intervention 124 times. That is one intervention about every 8,047 km of autonomous driving. But even more impressive is the progress in just a single year: human interventions fell from 0.8 times per thousand miles to 0.2, a 400% improvement. With such progress, Google's cars will easily surpass my own driving ability later this year.
      Driving once seemed to be a very human skill. But we said that about chess, too. Then a computer beat the human world champion, repeatedly. The board game Go（围棋）took over from chess as a new test for human thinking in 2016, when a computer beat one of the world's leading professional Go players. With computers conquering what used to be deeply human tasks, what will it mean in the future to be human? I worry about my six-year-old son. What will his place bе in a world where machines beat us in one area after another? He'll never calculate faster, never drive better, or even fly more safely. Actually, it all comes down to a fairly simple question： What's so special about us? It can't be skills like arithmetic, which machines already excel in. So far, machines have a pretty hard time emulating creativity, arbitrary enough not to be predicted by a computer, and yet more than simple randomness.
      Perhaps, if we continue to improve information-processing machines, well soon have helpful rational assistants. So we must aim to complement the rationality of the machine, rather than to compete with it. If I'm right, we should foster a creative spirit because a dose of illogical creativity will complement the rationality of the machine. Unfortunately, however, our education system has not caught up to the approaching reality. Indeed, our schools and universities are structured to mould pupils to be mostly obedient servants of rationality, and to develop outdated skills in interacting with outdated machines. We need to help our children learn how to best work with smart computers to improve human decision-making. But most of all we need to keep the long-term perspective in mind: that even if computers will outsmart us, we can still be the most creative. Because if we aren't, we won't be providing much value in future ecosystems，and that may put in question the foundation for our existence.

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

    Can dogs and cats live in perfect harmony in the same home? People who are thinking about adopting a dog as a friend for their cat are worried that they will fight. A recent research has found a new recipe of success. According to the study, if the cat is adopted before the dog, and if they are introduced when still young (less than 6 months for cats, a year for dogs), it is highly probable that the two pets will get along swimmingly. Two-thirds of the homes interviewed reported a positive relationship between their cat and dog.
    However, it wasn't all sweetness and light. There was a reported coldness between the cat and dog in 25% of the homes, while aggression and fighting were observed in 10% of the homes. One reason for this is probably that some of their body signals are just opposite. For example, when a cat turns its head away it signals aggression, while a dog doing the same signals submission.
    In homes with cats and dogs living peacefully, researchers observed a surprising behaviour. They are learning  to talk each other‘s language. It is a surprise that cats can learn how to talk 'dog', and dogs can learn how to talk 'Cat'.
    What's interesting is that both cats and dogs have appeared to develop their intelligence. They can learn how to read each other's body signals, suggesting that the two may have more in common than we previously suspected. Once familiar with each other's presence and body language, cats and dogs can play together, greet each other nose to nose, and enjoy sleeping together on the sofa. They can easily share the same water bowl and in some cases groom (梳理) each other.
    The significance of the research on cats and dogs may go beyond pets─to people who don't get along, including neighbors, colleagues at work, and even world superpowers. If cats and dogs can learn to get along, surely people have a good chance.

Read the following passage. Answer the questions below each passage by choosing A, B, C and D.　　

     That everyone’s too busy these days is a cliché. But one specific complaint is made especially mournfully: There’s never any time to read.
     What makes the problem thornier is that the usual time-management techniques don’t seem sufficient. The web’s full of articles offering tips on making time to read: “Give up TV” or “Carry a book with you at all times”. But in my experience, using such methods to free up the odd 30 minutes doesn’t work. Sit down to read and the flywheel of work-related thoughts keeps spinning-or else you’re so exhausted that a challenging book’s the last thing you nee The modern mind, Tim Parks, a novelist and critic, writes, “is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication…It is not simply that one is interrupted; it is that one is actually inclined to interruption”. Deep reading requires not just time, but a special kind of time which can’t be obtained merely by becoming more efficient.
     In fact, “becoming more efficient” is part of the problem. Thinking of time as a resource to be maximised means you approach it instrumentally, judging any given moment as well spent only in so far as it advances progress toward some goal immersive reading, by contrast, depends on being willing to risk inefficiency, goallessness, even time-wasting. Try to slot it as a to-do list item and you’ll manage only goal-focused reading-useful, sometimes, but not the most fulfilling kin “The future comes at us like empty bottles along an unstoppable and nearly infinite conveyor belt,” writes Gary Eberle in his book Sacred Time, and “we feel a pressure to fill these different-sized bottles (days, hours, minutes)as they pass, for if they get by without being filled, we will have wasted them”. No mind-set could be worse for losing yourself in a book.
     So what does work? Perhaps surprisingly, scheduling regular times for reading. You’d think this might fuel the efficiency mind-set, but in fact, Eberle notes, such ritualistic behaviour helps us “step outside time’s flow” into “soul time”. You could limit distractions by reading only physical books, or on single-purpose e-readers. “Carry a book with you at all times” can actually work, too-providing you dip in often enough, so that reading becomes the default state from which you temporarily surface to take care of business, before dropping back down. On a really good day, it no longer feels as if you’re “making time to read,” but just reading, and making time for everything else.

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

      For inexperienced speakers, the physical act of being onstage can be the most difficult part of giving a presentation—but people tend to overestimate its importance. Getting the words, story, and substance right is a much bigger determinant of success or failure than how you stand or whether you're visibly nervous. And when it comes to stage presence, a little coaching can go a long way.
      The biggest mistake we see in early rehearsals is that people move their bodies too much. They sway from side to side, or shift their weight from one leg to the other. People do this naturally when they're nervous, but it's distracting and makes the speaker seem weak. Simply getting a person to keep his or her lower body motionless can dramatically improve stage presence. There are some people who are able to walk around a stage during a presentation, and that's fine if it comes naturally. But the vast majority are better off standing still and relying on hand gestures for emphasis.
       Perhaps the most important physical act onstage is making eye contact. Find five or six friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and look them in the eye as you speak. Think of them as friends you haven't seen in a year, whom you're bringing up to date on your work. That eye contact is incredibly powerful, and it will do more than anything else to help your talk land. Even if you don't have time to prepare fully and have to read from a script, looking up and making eye contact will make a huge difference.
       Another big hurdle for inexperienced speakers is nervousness—both in advance of the talk and while they're onstage. People deal with this in different ways. Many speakers stay in the audience until the moment they go onstage; this can work well, because keeping your mind engaged in the earlier speakers can distract you and limit nervousness. Amy Cuddy, a Harvard Business School professor who studies how certain body poses can affect power, utilized one of the more unusual preparation techniques I've seen. She recommends that people spend time before a talk striding around, standing tall, and extending their bodies; these poses make you feel more powerful. It's what she did before going onstage, and she delivered a phenomenal talk. But I think the single best advice is simply to breathe deeply before you go onstage. It works.
       In general, people worry too much about nervousness. Nerves are not a disaster. The audience expects you to be nervous. It's a natural body response that can actually improve your performance: It gives you energy to perform and keeps your mind sharp. Just keep breathing, and you'll be fine.
       Acknowledging nervousness can also create engagement. Showing your vulnerability, whether through nerves or tone of voice, is one of the most powerful ways to win over an audience, provided it is authentic. Susan Cain, who wrote a book about introverts (内向的人) and spoke at our 2012 conference, was terrified about giving her talk. You could feel her fragility onstage, and it created this dynamic where the audience was rooting for her—everybody wanted to hug her afterward. The fact that we knew she was fighting to keep herself up there made it beautiful, and it was the most popular talk that year.

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

       The socialization function of the family is a generalized one, and is aimed at preparing us for membership of the kinship group and the community. The way in which the process operates will depend largely upon the views taken by the parents of what their children ought to be like when they are grown up. This, in turn, will depend on the environment of the home and the community in which it is established. For example, an agricultural village family is likely to be living in a very different setting from a professional family in the city.
       In the rural community emphasis will be placed upon values such as group solidarity and the belief in the natural superiority of the male. The family will transmit these values to the children in order to prepare them for their future roles as adults. Thus the child will grow up placing greater value upon the family as a unit than upon himself as an individual; more emphasis upon a segregation of the roles of husband and wife than upon equality, and so on.
       In the case of the city family educated to professional standards, the process is likely to take a different form. The child is more likely to be taught the values necessary for success in a world dominated by individual achievement. He will be taught that hard work is necessary to bring about academic success, which is the forerunner to occupational success. To make the best of occupational success he will be taught the value of having an educated wife who can share in this, either by working at her own trained profession to contribute to the material status of his marriage or by entertaining his friends and colleagues and maintaining his home to level of high social standing
       But the family cannot hope to socialize the child in every aspect of life and this is where the other agencies come in. Of these, school is perhaps the most important. The family is concerned with socializing its members into the group while the school is concerned with socializing its pupils into the wider society. School is very closely linked with our participation in the economic system, in other words, there is a very close link between school and the occupation we take up in adult life.
       The peer group also operates as an agency of socialization. In the peer group we associate with others who are approximately of our own age and social status. Peer group associations can be particularly influential at college and university level and are often carried through to adult working life. This means that the peer group takes over in influence where the family and school leave off.

Directions:

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

          Most kids grow up learning they cannot draw on the walls. But it might be time to unlearn that training—this summer, a group of culture junkies, artists and community organizers are inviting New Yorkers to write all over the walls of an old house on Governor’s Island.
         The project is called Writing On It All, and it’s a participatory writing project and artistic experiment that has happened on Governor’s Island every summer since 2013.
        "Most of the participants are people who are just walking by and are on the island for other reasons, like they came for the jazz festival, and they just kind of stumble in," artistic director of Writing On It All, Alexandra Chasin tells Smithsonian.com.
        The 2016 season runs through June 26 and features sessions facilitated by everyone from dancers to domestic workers. Each session has a theme, and participants are given a variety of materials and prompts and asked to cover surfaces with their thoughts and art. This year, the programs range from one that turns the house into a collaborative essay to one that explores the meanings of exile.
        Governor’s Island is a national historic landmark district long used for military purposes. Now known as “New York’s shared space for art and play,” the island, which lies between Manhattan and Brooklyn in Upper New York Bay, is closed to cars but open to summer tourists who flock for festivals, picnics, adventures, as well as these "legal graffiti" sessions.
         The notes and art scribbled on the walls are an experiment in self-expression. So far, participants have run the gammit in ages, with participants as young as 2 years old to as old as 85. Though Chasin says the focus of the work is on the activity of writing, rather than the text that ends up getting written, some of the work that comes out of the sessions have stuck with her.
       "One of the sessions that moved me the most was state violence on black women and black girls," says Chasin, explaining that in one room, people wrote down the names of those killed because of it. "People do beautiful work and leave beautiful messages."

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

       On Jan. 9, 2007, 10 years ago today, Steve Jobs formally announced Apple's "revolutionary mobile phone" — a device that combined the functionality of an iPod, phone and Internet communication into a single unit, navigated by touch. 

　　It was a huge milestone in the development of smartphones, which are now owned by a majority of American adults and are increasingly common across the globe.
　　As smartphones have proliferated, so have questions about their impact on how we live and how we work. Often the advantages of convenient, mobile technology are both obvious and taken for granted, leaving more subtle topics for concerned discussion: Are smartphones disturbing children's sleep? Is an inability to get away from work having a negative impact on health? And what are the implications for privacy?
　　But today, on the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, let's take a moment to consider a less obvious advantage: the potential for smartphone technology to revolutionize behavioral science. That's because, for the first time in human history, a large proportion of the species is in continuous contact with technology that can record key features of an individual's behavior and environment. To quote a recent article published in Perspectives in Psychological Science: "Psychology has a great deal of data on what people believe they do... but little data on what people actually do."
　　Researchers have already begun to use smartphones in social scientific research, either to query people regularly as they engage in their normal lives or to record activity using the device's built-in sensors. These studies are confirming, challenging and extending what's been found using more traditional approaches, in which people report how they behaved in real life or participate in relatively short and artificial laboratory-based tasks.
　　To illustrate the use of smartphone-based data collection, consider a forthcoming study that combined queries embedded in everyday life with sensor data to paint a more accurate picture of how mood is affected by a person's location. The data for the study came from more than 12,000 members of the general public who downloaded a free Android app to participate in the research. Twice during the day, they were prompted to report their mood and location, with location information additionally collected from the phone's location sensors. Using both kinds of location data, the study found that people reported significantly more positive moods in locations that typically involve social interactions (such as a café or friend's house) than at home, and more positive moods at home than at work.
　　Other studies have used sensor data to draw more subtle kinds of inferences. For instance, a study published in 2015 followed 48 students over the course of a 10-week school term. Using a combination of location, activity and audio sensors, the researchers could infer students' patterns of class attendance, study time, physical activity and socializing. These variables, in turn, predicted student GPA with surprisingly high accuracy. Another 2015 study used mobile phones to track 40 adult participants over a two-week period. Using patterns of movement and phone usage, the researchers were able to identify behaviors that predicted symptoms of depression.
　　These studies are just first steps. As more data are collected and methods for analysis improve, researchers will be in a better position to identify how different experiences, behaviors and environments relate to each other and evolve over time, with the potential to improve people's productivity and wellbeing in a variety of domains. Beyond revealing population-wide patterns, the right combination of data and analysis can also help individuals identify unique characteristics of their own behavior, including conditions that could indicate the need for some form of intervention — such as an uptick in behaviors that signal a period of depression.
　　Smartphone-based data collection comes at an opportune time in the evolution of psychological science. Today, the field is in transition, moving away from a focus on laboratory studies with undergraduate participants towards more complex, real-world situations studied with more diverse groups of people. Smartphones offer new tools for achieving these ambitions, offering rich data about everyday behaviors in a variety of contexts.
　　So here's another way in which smartphones might transform the way we live and work: by offering insights into human psychology and behavior and, thus, supporting smarter social science.

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

        Walking is just not enough, according to a new review of the evidence from Public Health England (PHE) which reveals a major disconnect between the exercise people need and what they actually do.
        Those who thought 10,000 steps day or brisk daily trudge (跋涉) from further bus stop meant they were doing enough to stay fit and healthy have got it wrong. People should also all be doing tai chi, weight lifting or ballroom dancing.
        Aerobic (有氧的) exercise, such as walking or gardening, is good for the heart and improves the circulation. PHE's review said that muscle and bone strengthening and balance activities are also vital for health and future wellbeing, but they are neglected. Strengthening and balance activities not only help prevent falls, but also help improve mood, sleeping patterns, increase energy levels and reduce the risk of an early death.
        Muscles tend to be at their peak in our 30s, said Louise Ansari from the Centre for Ageing Better, and the muscle tone is going by the time we reach 40 unless we actively work on it. The best forms of exercise, according to the review of evidence, are ball games, tennis, dance, Nordic (北欧人的) walking and resistance training——usually training with weights.These exercise both arms and legs, strengthening muscles and helping us keep our balance.
         Ansari said the type of exercise required depends on a person's fitness. "If you are a reasonably fit adult and you do walking, you should also do yoga or tai chi or tennis or resistance training which could be in a structured exercise class."
         But exercise doesn't have to be in a gym, she added. "You can also make sure you go up and down stairs a lot instead of taking the lift. That is resistance training. Your body is providing the resistance. You don't have to go to the gym. As long as you are feeling the ache in your muscles."
         Dance of all sorts is good for muscles and balance, from folk to ballroom. "If you don't feel you can go to a full-on dance class because you are a bit weak, standing on one leg for 30 seconds a day or tai chi is very good."
         Ansari said she doesn't use gym. "I don't go and lift weights, but make sure I'm carrying shopping home and carrying things around——consciously lifting weight."
         The advice is not just for the elderly. "Alongside aerobic exercise, all adults should be aiming to do strengthening and balancing activities twice per week," said Ansari. " On average we're all living longer and this mixture of physical activities will help us stay well in our youth and remain independent as we age."

      We lead very busy lives and we too easily forget how hard it was for us to focus on homework when we were in school. Now that we have jobs to do, food to buy and cook and other errands （差事） to run, even I sometimes think it would be a welcome change to have to sit down and quietly read and write with no distractions. But, in case you don't remember-homework is pretty much every child's least favorite thing to do. In the age of Netflix, Snapchat and wifi, the distractions are almost endless. It can sometimes almost be too hard to even keep up with all the new tech advances our kids are using, so how can we make sure that those advances take a back seat to our children's education? Here are some ideas.
      There's no point in stopping the reality that young people are going to focus on their phones and tablets instead of other things at times. Your best way is to accept, actually the tech sector continues to be the most profitable and fast-growing industries and that's unlikely to change fast. There are ways to use technology to help you kid do homework. Ask your teacher and school staff what apps and websites they're using to teach lessons and supplements（补充） them with at-home activities as well.
      Even though technology has changed, the basics haven't. If you want to read, write and think properly, you need to have peace and quiet and the ability to focus, right？ Well, your kids are just the same. Try and find a space in your home to enable your kids to do work away from televisions, the Internet or other distractions. Let me be clear：this shouldn't be a prison. I feel like I'm my most productive working alone in an office or at a busy cafe with my headphones on. Getting lost in other realities helps my creativity grow. Placing kids in isolation（独处） can often have a harmful effect and doesn't always equal being more productive.
      I feel like “getting engaged” is always a big part of my advice for parents on just about everything. How can you make sure your children are being successful if you have no idea what they're doing？How can you be sure they're doing it right if you don't know what is the correct answer？ What do they need？ You should be in touch with their teachers, have a sense of where the lessons are going, what kinds of tasks are being given and what success looks like in the classroom.
      Knowing all of that is key to your child's success, especially when matched with some encouraging praise and helpful tips on how he can keep going. Thinking about how your child is best motivated（激励） by other things and using those methods here reasonably isn't a bad idea.
      And if by chance you're having trouble solving that Math problems or understanding a sentence, don't fear——you're not alone. Use the school staff, other parents or friends as your support. Better to seek help than do nothing.
      We all know that homework isn't exactly the most entertaining way anyone spends their time. And sometimes we can't help but feel that since we left school, we're done with homework forever. But the circle of life plays out in all times and it's up to us to make sure that we pass on the lessons we've picked up and that while homework might seem dull. It's how we build skills, learn real lessons and get on the road to greatness. That greatness is on the inside, it's up yo us as adults to enable the young people to bring it out. The hey to achieving greatness is to take a lifelong learning.

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

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

      My mother loves flowers. As soon as warm weather comes around, you will find her planting, watering and weeding over everything. For many years we lived next door to each other, and she spent as much time in my garden as she did her own. After the flowers became plentiful each summer, she would cut colorful bouquets（花束）to enjoy inside the house——both hers and mine. I would often come home from work and find a beautiful arrangement（布置）of fresh flowers on my coffee table.
      Shortly before Christmas one year, a local flower shop offered a bouquet a month special. It seemed to be a great way to thank her for all of the flowers she had given me through the years.
      After the holidays, in early January, I drove her to the flower shop to pick up her first month’s bouquet. The small fresh colorful bouquet would hardly fill a small vase（花瓶）.
      I was so embarrassed. However, after we returned home, she began to arrange the flowers she had received. “Mom, I'm sorry, " I told her."I cant believe how skimpy that bouquet is.” She looked at me and smiled.“Its okay,” she said. “It allows me to better enjoy the beauty of each one.”
      Mom’s words helped me to realize something bigger and more important——when we have too many good things, we often fail to enjoy the beauty of each one.
      Thanks, Mom, for helping me understand that less is sometimes more.

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

     Even in traditional offices, “the lingua franca of corporate America has gotten much more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20 years ago,” said Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. She started spinning off examples. “If you and I parachuted back to Fortune 500 companies in 1990, we would see much less frequent use of terms like journey, mission, passion. There were goals, there were strategies, there were objectives, but we didn’t talk about energy; we didn’t talk about passion.”
     Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabulary is very “team”-oriented—and not by coincidence. “Let’s not forget sports—in male-dominated corporate America, it’s still a big deal. It’s not explicitly conscious; it’s the idea that I’m a coach, and you’re my team, and we’re in this together. There are lots and lots of CEOs in very different companies, but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team and they want to win.”
     These terms are also intended to infuse work with meaning—and, as Khurana points out, increase allegiance to the firm. “You have the importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with non-profit organizations and religious organizations: Terms like vision, values, passion, and purpose,” said Khurana.
     This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated amid increasingly loud debates over work-life balance. The “mommy wars” of the 1990s are still going on today, prompting arguments about why women still can’t have it all and books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, whose title has become a buzzword in its own right. Terms like unplug, offline, life-hack, bandwidth, and capacity are all about setting boundaries between the office and the home. But if your work is your “passion,” you’ll be more likely to devote yourself to it, even if that means going home for dinner and then working long after the kids are in bed.
     But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. As Nunberg said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it.” In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.

      The mind is a wonderful thing. It's also excuse-making machine that frequently tries to convince us not yo take action we know are good for us. If we hadn't learned about these excuses,or how to overcome them, we would never have succeeded in making these positive changes.
      So why does the mind mess with us and make unreasonable excuses？ Because the mind wants comfort, that's the reason. It's afraid of discomfort, pressure and change. The mind is absorbed in its comfort zone, and anytime we try to stretch that zone too far, for too long, the mind tries desperately to get back to “ground zero” at any cost. These damaging excuses, such as “I can't do it”,“It is too hard for me”, “It's too late now“ and so on, are no strangers to our minds.
      It seems too difficult at first, so you think you can't stick to the positive change you're making. This excuse can be countered by looking at the fact that other people were no more capable than you thought you were. For example, my 60-year-old next-door neighbor finished running a marathon, so I told myself, “If she can do it, so can I！”Truth be told, the only person who tells you“I can't ”is yourself. If you hear those words echoing in the back of your mind, tune them out.
      I’ve witnessed people reinventing themselves at all age 48-year-olds starting families, 57-year-olds graduating from college for the first time, 71-year-olds starting successful businesses, and so forth.
Another common excuse is that “I've already failed too much.”If you break down, it's fine, because you are only human. Just don't stay down; take a rest, and then pick yourself up so you can go to where you'd rather be. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It is courage to continue that counts.”
      Some people feel like quitting when they have almost reached their goal, while others attain goals through their efforts until the last second. So make some necessary adjustments to get rid of the bad habit of making excuses. Keep going！No excuses！Think, work,and climb, that's how you'll move your life forward.

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

     In the classic marriage vow (誓约), couples promise to stay together in sickness and in health. But a new study finds that the risk of divorce among older couples rises when the wife—not the husband— becomes seriously ill.
     "Married women diagnosed with a serious health condition may find themselves struggling with the impact of their disease while also experiencing the stress of divorce," said researcher Amelia Karraker.
      Karraker and co-author Kenzie Latham analyzed 20 years of data on 2,717 marriages from a study conducted by Indiana University since 1992. At the time of the first interview, at least one of the partners was over the age of 50.
     The researchers examined how the onset (发生) of four serious physical illnesses affected marriages. They found that, overall, 31% of marriages ended in divorce over the period studied. The incidence of new chronic (慢性的) illness onset increased over time as well, with more husbands than wives developing serious health problems.
      "We found that women are doubly vulnerable to marital break-up in the face of illness," Karraker said. "They're more likely to be widowed, and if they're the ones who become ill, they're more likely to get divorced."
      While the study didn't assess why divorce is more likely when wives but not husbands become seriously ill. Karraker offers a few possible reasons. "Gender norms and social expectations about caregiving may make it more difficult for men to provide care to sick spouses," Karraker said. "And because of the imbalance in marriage markets, especially in older ages, divorced men have more choices among prospective partners than divorced women."
      Given the increasing concern about health care costs for the aging population, Karraker believes policymakers should be aware of the relationship between disease and risk of divorce.
      "Offering support services to spouses caring for their other halves may reduce marital stress and prevent divorce at older ages," she said. "But it's also important to recognize that the pressure to divorce may be health-related and that sick ex-wives may need additional care and services to prevent worsening health and increased health costs."

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