A few years ago, a friend sent me a restaurant gift card for Christmas, and I picked a pretty, sunny Sunday afternoon to use it. It felt good taking my two grown sons and daughter to a nice sit-down restaurant instead of the fast food places we usually ate at. The meal was delicious, and we all had a good time just being together. The gift card covered almost all of the check. I reached into my wallet to get enough cash to cover the rest. I saw two bills in the front of it. The first would cover the rest of the check. The second would cover the check and give the waitress a nice tip. I reached down to pick out the first one.
      At that moment, my mind flashed back to 30 years ago. I was working as a busboy in a restaurant much like the one were in. It was long hours of hard work for low pay. I went home just barely making enough to feed my young family. I also remembered how more than once I saw the waitresses counting their small tips while worrying about how they were going to pay the rent and buy their kids the things they needed. I remembered the pain in their eyes and saw the sadness in their faces at the end of the day.
      I blinked and was back in the present again, with my fingers touching the smaller bill in my wallet. I smiled, pushed it back down and picked out the larger bill. I folded it around the gift card and covered both of them with the check. As we all got up form the table, I handed them to the hardworking waitress. ”You keep the change,“ I said with a smile and a happy heart.
      We are all one family in this world. We live together and suffer together. Do your best to be kind. Do your best to be a good person and replace the suffering with joy.

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

​      My fifteen-year-old son has just returned from abroad with rolls of exposed film and a hundred dollars in uncashed traveler’s checks, and is asleep at the moment. His blue duffel（粗呢） bag lies on the floor where he dropped it. Obviously, he postponed as much sleep as he could: when he walked in and we hugged, his electrical system suddenly switched off, and he headed directly for the bed, where I imagine he beat his old record of sixteen hours. 

      It was his first trip overseas, so weeks before it, I pressed travel books on him, and a tape cassette of useful French phrases; drew up a list of people to visit; advised him on clothing and other things. At the luggage store where we went to buy him a suitcase, he headed for the duffels, saying that suitcases were more for old people.
      During the trip, he called home three times: from London, Paris, and a village named Ullapool. Near Ullapool, he climbed a mountain in a rainstorm that almost blew him off. In the village, a man spoke to him in Gaelic, and, too polite to interrupt, my son listened to him for ten or fifteen minutes, trying to nod in the right places. The French he learned from the cassette didn’t hold water in Paris. The French he talked to shrugged and walked on.
      When my son called, I sat down at the kitchen table and leaned forward and hung on every word. His voice came through clearly, though two of the calls were like ship-to-shore communication. When I interrupted him with a "Great!” or a “Really?”, I knocked a little hole in his communication. So l just sat and listened. I have never listened to a telephone so attentively and with so much pleasure. It was wonderful to hear news from him that was so new to me. In my book, he was the first man to land on the moon, and I knew that I had no advice to give him and that what I had already given was probably not much help.
      The unused checks are certainly evidence of that. Youth travels slight. No suitcase, not much luggage and a slim expense account, and yet he went to the scene, and came back safely. I sit here amazed. The night when your child returns with dust on his shoes from a country you’ve never seen is a night you would gladly turn into a week.

Directions:

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

     Now let us look at how we read. When we read a printed text, our eyes move across a page in short, jerky movement. We recognize words usually when our eyes are still when they fixate. Each time they fixate, we see a group of words. This is known as the recognition span or the visual span. The length of time in which the eyes stop—the duration of the fixation—varies considerably from person to person. It also varies within any one person according to his purpose in reading and his familiarity with the text. Furthermore, it can be affected by such factors as lighting and tiredness.
     Unfortunately, in the past, many reading improvement courses have concentrated too much on how our eyes move across the printed page. As a result of this misleading emphasis on the purely visual aspects of reading, numerous exercises have been devised to train the eyes to see more words at one fixation. For instance, in some exercises, words are flashed on to a screen for, say, a tenth or a twentieth of a second. One of the exercises has required students to fix their eyes on some central point, taking in the words on either side. Such word patterns are often constructed in the shape of rather steep pyramids so the reader takes in more and more words at each successive fixation. All these exercises are very clever, but it’s one thing to improve a person’s ability to see words and quite another thing to improve his ability to read a text efficiently. Reading requires the ability to understand the relationship between words. Consequently, for these reasons, many experts have now begun to question the usefulness of eye training, especially since any approach which trains a person to read isolated words and phrases would seem unlikely to help him in reading a continuous text.

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

    Our culture has caused most Americans to assume not only that our language is universal but that the gestures we use are understood by everyone. We do not realize that waving good-bye is the way to summon a person from the Philippines to one’s side, or that in Italy and some Latin-American countries, curling the finger to oneself is a sign of farewell.
    Those private citizens who sent packages to our troops occupying Germany after World War II and marked them GIFT to escape duty payments did not bother to find out that “Gift” means poison in German. Moreover, we like to think of ourselves as friendly, yet we prefer to be at least 3 feet or an arm’s length away from others. Latins and Middle Easterners like to come closer and touch, which makes Americans uncomfortable.
    Our linguistic (语言上的) and cultural blindness and the casualness with which we take notice of the developed tastes, gestures, customs and languages of other countries, are losing us friends, business and respect in the world.
    Even here in the United States, we make few concessions to the needs of foreign visitors. There are no information signs in four languages on our public buildings or monuments; we do not have multilingual (多语言的) guided tours. Very few restaurant menus have translations, and multilingual waiters, bank clerks and policemen are rare. Our transportation systems have maps in English only and often we ourselves have difficulty understanding them.
    When we go abroad, we tend to cluster in hotels and restaurants where English is spoken. Then attitudes and information we pick up are conditioned by those natives—usually the richer—who speak English. Our business dealings, as well as the nation’s diplomacy, are conducted through interpreters.
    For many years, American dollars no longer buy all good things, and we are slowly beginning to realize that our proper role in the world is changing. A 1979 Harris poll reported that 55 percent of Americans want this country to play a more significant role in world affairs; we want to have a hand in the important decisions of the next century, even though it may not always he the upper hand.

      In September, a tragedy happened on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia. As many as 380 pilot whales became stranded （搁浅） in shallow water there and later died. This might have been Australia's largest stranding event on record, the BBC reported.
      But mass whale stranding is not uncommon. For centuries, it has happened all over the world and has puzzled scientists. Scientists say the cause is often unknown. But they have offered many different explanations.
      Some say the whales chase small fish for food and end up in shallow water because they are not paying attention to where they are going.
      Others think the stranding has something to do with Earth's geomagnetic field. They say that a geomagnetic compass in whales' brains controls their position. Unusual changes in Earth's magnetic field can affect the whales' compasses and send them in the wrong direction.
      Another explanation suggests that mass stranding is caused by the close relationships that whales have. Pilot whales travel in large groups. One lead whale might mistakenly lead the whole group to shallow water.“And if one gets into trouble, the others will not leave," said Sheryl Gibney, a leading biologist from New Zealand."Some will come in and try to help, they get trapped on the beach, then more will come."
      The whales are trapped by mistake or out of sympathy. Once they get stranded, they will likely die. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the US, less than 10 percent of all stranded whales survive.

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

     Roughly the size of a soda can, sitting on a bookshelf, a relatively harmless gadget may be turning friends away from your home. The elephant in your living room is your Internet-connected security camera, a device people are increasingly using for peace of mind in their homes. But few stop to think about the effect these devices may have on house guests. Should you tell your friends, for instance, that they're being recorded while you all watch the big game together?
     "It's certainly new territory, especially as home security cameras become easier to install, "says Lizzie Post, president of the Emily Post Institute, America's foremost manners advisors. "I think it will be very interesting to see what etiquette（礼仪）emerges in terms of whether you tell people you have a camera or not, and whether guests have a right to ask that it be turned off, if it's not a security issue."
     Post wants to make clear that she's not talking about legal rights, but rather personal preferences. She also wants to explain that there are no right or wrong answers regarding manners on this front yet, because the technology is just now becoming mainstream. Besides, the Emily Post Institute doesn't dictate manners.
     When it comes to security cameras, Post says it's a host's responsibility to make sure guests feel comfortable within their home. "I'm always a fan of being open and honest." For instance, if the host casually acknowledges that there is a camera in the room by telling a story about it, that may be enough to provide an opening for a guest to say if they are uncomfortable.
     However, if a contractor is working in your home, you don't need to tell them that there are cameras watching. Then again, the air of accountability that the camera generates can also work in contractors' favor. "If anything does go wrong while they're in the house, they don't want to be blamed for it," she says. "In fact, the camera could be the thing that proves that they didn't steal the $20, or knock the vase off the table."

Directions:

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

       Some kids start to drink alcohol at a young age. They think it is part of becoming an adult. They also think drinking is not that bad because so many people do it. They feel it is not as bad as taking drugs. It is easy for kids to get liquor (酒精饮料) by using fake identification (伪造证件).
       Parents may start to notice a change in their child's behavior if the child starts drinking. Kids who drink sometimes stop doing things they normally liked to do. They may keep telephone calls and meetings a secret and not want anybody to touch their things. They act moody (喜怒无常地) and do not have the same eating and sleeping habits.
       Parents need to stay involved in their kids' lives. They should talk to their children about their problems to be aware of any changes.
       Parents can be the best protection. Children who get a lot of love can feel good about themselves. It helps them resist (抵抗) doing bad things even when other kids are doing them. Parents can also help set a good example by not drinking. They can have firm rules in the home that everyone follows.
       Give the children good ideas on how to say “no” to drinking, even when they are at a party. Try not to overreact or panic (惊慌) if the child tries alcohol. How you handle it can affect their attitude. It may be helpful to talk to other parents about setting up curfews (宵禁令) and rules about parties or other events.

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

      Online programs to fight depression are already commercially available. While they sound efficient and cost-saving, a recent study reports that they are not effective, primarily because depressed patients are not likely to engage with them or stick with them.
      The study looked at computer-assisted cognitive （认知的）behavioral therapy (CBT) and found that it was no more effective in treating depression than the usual care patients receive from a primary care doctor.
      Traditional CBT is considered an effective form of talk therapy for depression, helping people challenge negative thoughts and change the way they think in order to change their mood and behaviors. However, online CBT programs have been gaining popularity, with the attraction of providing low-cost help wherever someone has access to a computer.
      A team of researchers from the University of York conducted a randomized （随机的）control trial with 691 depressed patients from 83 physician practices across England. The patients were split into three groups: one group received only usual care from a physician while the other two groups received usual care  from a physician plus one of two computerized CBT programs. Participants were balanced across the three groups for age, sex, educational background， severity and duration of depression, and use of antidepressants （抗抑郁药）.
      After four months, the patients using the computerized CBT programs had no improvement in depression levels over the patients who were only getting usual care from their doctors.
      "It's an important, cautionary note that we shouldn't get too carried away with the idea that a computer system can replace doctors and therapists," says Christopher Dowrick, a professor of primary medical care at the University of Liverpool. "We do still need the human touch or the human interaction, particularly when people are depressed. "
      Being depressed can mean feeling "lost in your own small' negative, dark world," Dowrick says. Having a person, instead of a computer, reach out to you is particularly important in combating that sense of isolation. "When you're emotionally vulnerable, you're even more in need of a caring human being," he says.

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

    If you’ve been in the hunt for a job in the past five years, then you’ve likely heard how important networking is to landing your next position. That’s because getting your foot in the door usually means having an “in” at the company. Studies show that 89 percent of career builders actively networked while seeking a new role. When it comes to finding a job, I tell my clients, “Your network is your net worth.” Today, LinkedIn made changes to their platform making that statement even more accurate. 

    Alumni + connections = more chances to get noticed.
    When you check job descriptions on LinkedIn, they now have the added benefit of showing you:
    A). any alumni from your school who work there.
    B). any connections from your network who work there.
    Why is this valuable?
    With a click of your mouse, you can review the profiles of these individuals and reach out to them to learn more about the company. If done right, you can even inquire if they can provide some guidance on the best way to stand out when you apply.
    Why should you bother?
    Even if you don’t know the person that well (i.e., didn’t know them in school, or have fallen out of touch with the old connection, etc.), it’s still worth reaching out. Why? Companies know their single best resource for recruiting talent is referrals via their employees. As a result, many companies offer incentives in the form of referral fees to existing employees who pass along names of qualified candidates. Thus, you could help this person earn some extra cash should you get hired.
    Premium LinkedIn members get bigger bonus.
    LinkedIn also announced today their premium members will have access to additional insights that nonpaying members won’t see. For example, when premium members open their homepage, they will see recommended jobs for which LinkedIn’s data signals they’d rank among the top 50 percent of applicants, based on the role and the experience and skills listed on their profile.
    In summary, now boasting over 433 million users, LinkedIn has given us all more reasons to find and connect with professionals in our industry, skill set, and alumni circles.

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

        The garden city was largely the invention of Ebenezer Howard(1850 – 1928). After immigrating from England to the USA, and an unsuccessful attempt to make a living as a farmer, he moved to Chicago, where he saw the reconstruction of the city after the disastrous fire of 1871. In those days, it was nicknamed "the Garden City", almost certainly the source of Howard's name for his later building plan of towns. Returning to London, Howard developed his design in the 1880s and 1890s, drawing on ideas that were popular at the time, but creating a unique combination of designs. 

       The nineteenth-century poor city was in many ways a terrible place, dirty and crowded; but it offered economic and social opportunities. At the same time, the British countryside was in fact equally unattractive: though it promised fresh air and nature, it suffered from agricultural depression（萧条） and it offered neither enough work and wages, nor much social life. Howard's idea was to combine the best of town and country in a new kind of settlement, the garden city. Howard's idea was that a group of people should set up a company, borrowing money to establish a garden city in the depressed countryside; far enough from existing cities to make sure that the land was bought at the bottom price.
        Garden cities would provide a central public open space, radial avenues and connecting industries. They would be surrounded by a much larger area of green belt, also owned by the company, containing not merely farms but also some industrial institutions. As more and more people moved in, the garden city would reach its planned limit—Howard suggested 32,000 people; then, another would be started a short distance away. Thus, over time, there would develop a vast planned house collection, extending almost without limit; within it, each garden city would offer a wide range of jobs and services, but each would also be connected to the others by a rapid transportation system, thus giving all the economic and social opportunities of a big city. 

Directions:

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

      Chinese have been in the United States for almost two hundred years. In fact. the Chinese had business relations with Hawaii prior to relations with the mainland when Hawaii was not yet part of the United States. But United States investments controlled the capital of Hawaii at that time. In 1788,a ship sailed from Guangzhou to Hawaii. Most of the crewmen were Chinese. They were considered the pioneers of Hawaii. The Immigration Commission reported that the first Chinese arrived in the United States in 1820. eight in 1830 and seven hundred and eighty in 1850. The Chinese population gradually increased and reached 64,199 in 1870.
　　For many years it was common in the United States to associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into these occupations by the prejudice and discrimination that faced them in this country.
　　The First Chinese to reach the mainland United States came during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for gold. In that largely unoccupied land,the men staked a claim for themselves by placing markers in the ground. However. either because the Chinese were so different from the others or because they worked so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they became the scapegoats of their envious competitors. They were harassed in many ways. Often they were prevented from working their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding them to own claims. The Chinese therefore started to seek out other ways of earning a living. Some of them began to do the laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants. (There were almost no women in California in those days,and the Chinese filled a real need by doing this“woman's work”.) Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen.
　　In the early 1860's many more Chinese arrived in California.This time the men were imported as work crews to construct the first transcontinental railroad.They were sorely needed because the work was so strenuous and dangerous, and it was carried on in such a remote part of the country that the railroad company could not find other laborers for the job. As in the case of their predecessors,these Chinese were almost all males; and like them, too, they encountered a great deal of prejudice. The hostility grew especially strong after the railroad project was complete, and the imported laborers returned to California-thousands of them, all out of work. Because there were so many more of them this time,these Chinese drew even more attention than the earlier group did. They were so very different in every respect: in their physical appearance, including a long“pigtail”at the back of their otherwise shaved heads; in the strange, non-Western clothes they wore; in their speech (few had learned English since they planned to go back to China); and in their religion. They were contemptuously called “heathen Chinese” because there were many sacred images in their houses of worship.
　　When times were hard. they were blamed for working for lower wages and taking jobs away from white men. who were in many cases recent immigrants themselves. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in several cities. culminating in arson and bloodshed. Chinese were barred from using the courts and also from becoming American citizens. Californians began to demand that no more Chinese be permitted to enter their state. Finally. in 1882. they persuaded Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which stopped the immigration of Chinese laborers. Many Chinese returned to their homeland, and their numbers declined sharply in the early part of this century. However. during the World War II,when China was an ally of the United States. the Exclusion laws were ended; a small number of Chinese were allowed to immigrate each year, and Chinese could become American citizens. In 1965, in a general revision of our immigration laws,may more Chinese were permitted to settle here,as discrimination against Asian immigration was abolished.

Directions:

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

     Biologists estimate that as many as 2 million lesser prairie chickens---a kind of bird living on stretching grasslands—once lent red to the often gray landscape of the midwestern and southwestern United States. But just some 22,000 birds remain today, occupying about 16% of the species’ historic range.
     The crash was a major reason the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)decided to formally list the bird as threatened “The lesser prairie chicken is in a desperate situation,” said USFWS Director Daniel Ashe. Some environmentalists, however, were disappointed. They had pushed the agency to designate the bird as “endangered,” a status that gives federal officials greater regulatory power to crack down on threats. But Ashe and others argued that the “threatened” tag gave the federal government flexibility to try out new, potentially less confrontational conservations approaches. In particular, they called for forging closer collaborations with western state governments, which are often uneasy with federal action and with the private landowners who control an estimated 95% of the prairie chicken’s habitat.
     Under the plan, for example, the agency said it would not prosecute landowner or businesses that unintentionally kill, harm, or disturb the bird, as long as they had signed a range-wide management plan to restore prairie chicken habitat. Negotiated by USFWS and the states, the plan requires individuals and businesses that damage habitat as part of their operations to pay into a fund to replace every acre destroyed with 2 new acres of suitable habitat. The fund will also be used to compensate landowners who set aside habitat, USFWS also set an interim goal of restoring prairie chicken populations to an annual average of 67,000 birds over the next 10 years. And it gives the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA), a coalition of state‘ agencies, the job of monitoring progress. “Overall, the idea is to let ‘states’ remain in the driver’s seat for managing the species,” Ashe said. 
     Not everyone buys the win-win rhetoric. Some Congress members are trying to block the plan, and at least a dozen industry groups, four states, and three environmental groups are challenging it in federal court. Not surprisingly, industry groups and states generally argue it goes too far; environmentalist say it doesn’t go far enough. “The federal government is giving responsibility for managing the bird to the same industries that are pushing it to extinction,” says biologist Jay Lininger.

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

      In modern society, receiving systematic college education seems a necessary way for success as a graduate from first-class university may always get more opportunities than others. However, if it is gold, it will shine one day. In this article, we will get to know three most successful people in U.S. who never finished their college education. Following experiences of these successful dropouts may give you some inspiration.
1. Bill Gates
      Harvard’s campus paper “Harvard Crimson” called Bill Gates “Harvard’s most successful dropout,” while the rest of the world preferred to name him “the world’s richest man” for more than a decade. Now, even not on the top, he is still among the list of the world’s wealthiest people.Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973. Two years later, he dropped out to found Microsoft with friend Paul Allen. And in 2007, he finally received an honorary doctorate from Harvard.
2. Steve Jobs
      The iPad, even Buzz Lightyear probably wouldn’t have existed if Steve Jobs stayed in school. Because his family couldn’t afford his college education, Jobs had to drop out of Reed College just after entering for 6 months. Then he found Apple, NeXT Computer and Pixar, which had made great influences on development of modern technique and culture. However, this wizard thought that his brief college education was not worthless.
3. Frank Lloyd Wright
      As the America’s most celebrated architect, Wright spent more time on designing colleges rather than attending classes in them. Once spent one year in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then he left for Chicago and started to learn from Louis Sullivan, the “father of modernism." Wright’ s splendid resume included more than 500 works, most famous of which are Fallingwater and New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

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

      London—coffee protects mice from radiation and could get the same way in humans, according to Indian scientists.

      Scientist at India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center discovered that mice injected with caffeine （咖啡因）remained alive after high doses（剂量）of normally lethal radiation.Although the study was limited to animals, Kachadillilli George, head of the research team, believes the findings could have implications (something suggested ) for humans .

      “It does suggest that coffee might have some beneficial effects in protecting against radiation,” he told New Scientist magazine late last month. George and his team injected 471 mice with caffeine and left them uncovered to 7.5 grays of gamma radiation（伽玛射线）,enough to kill most mice. But 25 days later 70 percent of the mice that had received 80 milligrams（毫克）of caffeine per kilogram of body weight were still alive.

      On the contrary, all 196 mice that had been left uncovered to the same radiation but had not been given any caffeine died.

Directions:

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

     It’s true that high-school coding classes aren’t essential for learning computer science in college. Students without experience can catch up after a few introductory courses, said Tom Cortina, the assistant dean at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.
     However, Cortina said, early exposure is beneficial. When younger kids learn computer science, they learn that it’s not just a confusing, endless string of letters and numbers — but a tool to build apps, or create artwork, or test hypotheses. It’s not as hard for them to transform their thought processes as it is for older students. Breaking down problems into bite-sized chunks and using code to solve them becomes normal. Giving more children this training could increase the number of people interested in the field and help fill the jobs gap, Cortina said.
     Students also benefit from learning something about coding before they get to college, where introductory computer-science classes are packed to the brim, which can drive the less-experienced or determined students away.
     The Flatiron School, where people pay to learn programming, started as one of the many coding bootcamps that’s become popular for adults looking for a career change. The high-schoolers get the same curriculum, but “we try to gear lessons toward things they’re interested in,” said Victoria Friedman, an instructor. For instance, one of the apps the students are developing suggests movies based on your mood.
     The students in the Flatiron class probably won’t drop out of high school and build the next Facebook. Programming languages have a quick turnover, so the “Ruby on Rails” language they learned may not even be relevant by the time they enter the job market. But the skills they learn — how to think logically through a problem and organize the results — apply to any coding language, said Deborah Seehorn, an education consultant for the state of North Carolina.
     Indeed, the Flatiron students might not go into IT at all. But creating a future army of coders is not the sole purpose of the classes. These kids are going to be surrounded by computers — in their pockets, in their offices, in their homes — for the rest of their lives. The younger they learn how computers think, how to coax the machine into producing what they want — the earlier they learn that they have the power to do that — the better.

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

        I'm afraid of heights but two summers ago I climbed to a high place. Most of our high school had come along on a day trip to a beautiful beach village in Peru. After eating our lunches, many of us wanted to make the climb to an area around the village.
        Do I turn back? “Yes！” Will I regret (后悔) it late? I really want to get to the top, but ... At last, I decided at least to have a try.
        My friend Tom was in front of me. Then, suddenly, he slipped (滑倒) and was about 10 feet back! My heart was beating faster until he stopped himself. Knowing that my friend Seth would be right behind me, I began the climb. I was soon past the first challenge safely, but not feeling much better about the rest of the climb. Looking down, I saw rocks everywhere. My breathing sped up, and my heart beat even faster, growing loud in my ears.
        My friends kept climbing. But they did not forget me. Someone was always behind me to help hold my feet when necessary, and someone else was always in front to offer a hand up. With friends helping me by words and actions, I slowly gained ground.
        Then we came to the worst part. The climb looked very close to vertical (垂直的). To me, the wise choice was to go back down. Melody encouraged me to go on and she made it safely first. I stopped, unsure of my footing. “You can do it, Jean! I'm right here，” Melody called. She waited patiently, not asking me to hurry. I took a few deep breaths and kept climbing.
        With no more mistakes, we came to the top finally. I was dirty and tired. But it didn't matter. I was at the top! I had never felt so alive.

        In an essay entitled “Making It in America”, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: “The average mill has only two employees today, a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog , and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.” 
       Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and declining middle-class incomes today is also because of the advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign worker.

       In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But , today ,average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra-their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment.
       Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “ In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.
       There will always be changed-new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average.
       In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to support employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I.Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.

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

     American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years. Given a multi-year decline in illegal immigration, and a similarly sustained pickup in the U.S. job market, the complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for farm workers. Efforts to create a more straightforward agricultural-workers visa that would enable foreign workers to stay longer in the U.S. and change jobs within the industry have so far failed in Congress. If this doesn’t change, American businesses, communities and consumers will be the losers.
     Perhaps half of U.S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants. As fewer such workers enter the U.S., the characteristics of the agricultural workforce are changing. Today’s farm laborers, while still predominantly born in Mexico, are more likely to be settled, rather than migrating, and more likely to be married than single. They are also aging. At the start of this century, about one-third of crop workers were over the age of 35. Now more than half are. And picking crops is hard on older bodies. One oft-debated cure for this labor shortage remains as implausible as it has been all along: Native U.S. workers won’t be returning to the farm.
     Mechanization is not the answer either-not yet at least. Production of corn, cotton, rice, soybeans and wheat have been largely mechanized, but many high-value, labor-intensive crops, such as strawberries, need labor. Even dairy farms, where robots currently do only a small share of milking, have a long way to go before they are automated.
     As a result, farms have grown increasingly reliant on temporary guest workers using the H-2A visa to fill the gaps in the workforce. Starting around 2012, requests for the visas rose sharply; from 2011 to 2016 the number of visas issued more than doubled.
     The H-2A visa has no numerical cap, unlike the H-2B visa for nonagricultural work, which is limited to 66,000 annually. Even so, employers frequently complain that they aren’t allotted all the workers they need. The process is cumbersome, expensive and unreliable. One survey found that bureaucratic delays led H-2A workers to arrive on the job an average of 22 days late. And the shortage is compounded by federal immigration raids, which remove some workers and drive others underground.
     In a 2012 survey, 71 percent of tree-fruit growers and almost 80 percent of raisin and berry growers said they were short of labor. Some western growers have responded by moving operations to Mexico. From 1998-2000, 14.5 percent of the fruit Americans consumed was imported. Little more than a decade later, the share of imported fruit had increased to 25.8 percent.
     In effect, the U.S. can import food or it can import the workers who pick it. 

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

        Although ethics classes are common around the world, scientists are unsure if their lessons can actually change behavior, evidence either way is weak, relying on contrived laboratory tests or sometimes unreliable self-reports. But a new study published in Cognition found that, in at least one real-world situation, a single ethics lesson may have had lasting effects.
        The researchers investigated one class session's impact on eating meat. They chose this particular behavior for three reasons, according to study co-author Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at the University of California, Riverside: students' attitudes on the topic are variable and unstable, behavior is easily measurable, and ethics literature largely agrees that eating less meat is good because it reduces environmental harm and animal suffering. Half of the students in four large philosophy classes read an article on the ethics of factory-farmed meat, optionally watched an 11- minute video on the topic and joined a 50-minute discussion. The other half focused on charitable giving instead. Then, unbeknownst to the students, the researchers studied their anonymized meal- card purchases for that semester-nearly 14,000 receipts for almost 500 students. "It's at awesome data set," says Nina Strohminger, a psychologist who teaches business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and was not involved in the study.
        Schwitzgebel predicted the intervention would have no effect; he had previously found that ethics professors do not differ from other professors on a range of behaviors, including voting rates, blood donation and returning library books. But among student subjects who discussed meat ethics, meal purchases containing meat decreased from 52 to 45 percent-and this effect held steady for the study's duration of several weeks. Purchases from the other group remained at 52 percent.
        "That's actually a pretty large effect for a pretty small intervention,"  Schwitzgebel says .Strohminger agrees: "The thing that still blows my mind is that the only thing that's different between these two cases is just that one day in class. "She says she wants the effect to be real but cannot rule out some unknown confounding variable. And if real, Strohminger notes, it might be reversible by another nudge: "Easy come, easy go."
        Schwitzgebel suspects the greatest impact came from social influence-classmates or teaching assistants leading the discussions may have shared their own vegetarianism, showing it as achievable or more common. Second, the video may have had an emotional impact. Least rousing, he thinks, was rational argument, although his co-authors ( University of Kansas's Bradford Cokelet and Princeton University's Peter Singer) say reason might play a bigger role. Now the researchers are probing the specific effects of teaching style, T.A.s' eating habits and students' video exposure. Meanwhile Schwitzgebel---who had predicted no effect----will be eating his words.