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America has seen a drop in crime rates that in earlier years would have been universally viewed as impossible. The overall crime rate has plummeted by 45% since peaking in 1991 and by 13% just since 2007—counter intuitively continuing to drop through the recession and sharp spike in unemployment. Since 1991, according to FBI data, the number of violent crimes has fallen 36% nationally and 64% in the nation’s largest cities. And in New York and Los Angeles, the nation’s two largest cities, it has fallen even further. Property crime has also become increasingly rare. Incredibly, in New York City, car thefts have plunged 94% in the past two decades. How is this possible In the mid-1990s, few saw this decline coming, and many warned that crime would surge once again as teens of that era grew into young adults. Today, criminologists still differ on what has caused the nationwide turnaround in crime rates and why those dire predictions never came to pass. But crime-fighting technology, better policing, aging societies, growing urban populations and declining usage of hard drugs are widely cited. For many Americans, the drop in crime has resulted not only in a much higher quality of life but in a reduced economic burden as well. Safer cities generally mean stronger urban economies. In the same category of big surprises, teen-pregnancy rates have fallen to their lowest level in more than 30 years, according to the widely respected Guttmacher Institute. They have declined 51% from their 1990 peak, based on the latest available data, and the teenage birthrate is down 43% from that year’s level. Today, fewer teens are becoming pregnant and becoming mothers than at any point since reliable data has been collected by the National Center for Health Statistics. This is also true for women in the 20-to-24 age group. To put it mildly, there were very few predictions to this effect a generation ago. In addition, overall birth rates in the U.S. have turned up for the first time since 2007—including for children born to women in a college education—to just shy of 4 million. According to Paragraph 2, which form of crime is not mentioned in the text
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急性肾衰少尿、无尿期的血化验可能出现
Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. March 11th marks the second anniversary of the tsunami that killed 18,500 people in Japan. Good news is scant. Almost 315,000 evacuees still 1 in cramped temporary housing, and need new 2 . A different kind of suffering weighs on about 20m people (a sixth of the 3 ) at this time of year which, though less than anguish-filled, is not trivial. 4 late February until May they 5 pollen allergies, mostly 6 by Japanese cedar, or sugi, trees. Usually the affliction, entailing sneezing, eye irritation and huge medical bills, is shrugged off—it can’t be helped. 7 a way could be found to ease the allergies that could also 8 rebuild homes. It would involve thinning out the sugi and other conifer plantations that 9 about 40% of Japan’s forest, most of which are now 10 as uneconomic. The timber could be used to restore and beautify lost villages. The sugi were planted across Japan after the war as material to 11 destroyed cities and 12 . Sugi, straight and tall, are 13 for construction. But after taxes fell, imported wood put the sugi foresters out of business. The higher they grow, the more pollen the magnificent, abandoned trees emit. Officials say some owners, many now in their 70s, reject 14 to plant new ones that emit less pollen 15 the payback is too long. As a result, 16 Kevin Short, a columnist for the Daily Yomiuri, an English-language newspaper, "immense clouds of yellow-green sugi pollen dust 17 down onto the urban areas, like some amorphous monster out of a science-fiction movie." 18 Kiyohito Onuma of the Forestry Agency says his sneezing wife and children often ask him to do more to 19 the problem, the public pressure is muted. Partly this is because the sugi have always 20 near temples and shrines, and are part of national folklore.
Directions: Read the following text and choose the best answer from the right column to complete each of the unfinished statements in the left column. There are two extra choices in, the right column. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET.The human voice, like any sound produced by thrumming a stretched string, has a fundamental frequency. For voice, the centre of that frequency lies mostly below 300Hz depending on the speaker’s sex. Information is conveyed through simultaneous higher-frequency overtones and additional components that can stretch up to 20,000 Hz (20kHz). Modern hearing aids are able to distinguish only a small part of that range, typically between 300Hz and 6kHz, reducing noise and amplifying those frequencies where the wearer’s hearing is weakest. But differentiating elements of many common parts of speech occur in higher frequencies. This is the result both of harmonics that ripple out from the main tone, and from non-voiced elements used to utter consonants, which employ the tongue, teeth, cheeks and lips. Take the words "sailing" and "failing". Cut off the higher frequencies and the two are indistinguishable. The problem is compounded on telephone calls, which do not transmit frequencies below 300Hz or above 3.3kHz. People with hearing aids experience this problem constantly, says Brian Moore of the University of Cambridge. Typical hearing loss tends to be most acute at frequencies above 10kHz, which contain quieter sounds but where speech can still include important cues. Older hearing aids cut off at no higher than 6kHz, but much modern equipment stretches this range to 8-10kHz. However, a problem remains, Dr. Moore says, because bespoke hearing-aid calibrations for individual users, called "fittings", do not properly boost the gain of these higher frequencies. So Dr. Moore and his colleagues have come up with a better method. Their approach can be applied to many existing devices, and is also being built into some newer ones. A key step in any fitting involves testing an individual’s ability to hear sounds in different frequency bands. Each hearing loss is unique, and for most users a standard profile would be too loud in some ranges and too soft in others. But current tests pay scant attention to the higher frequencies that a device’s tiny speaker can produce, regardless of whether the user needs a boost. Dr. Moore’s new test, known as CAM2, which is both a set of specifications and an implementation in software, extends and modifies fittings to include frequencies as high as 10kHz. When the results are used to calibrate a modem hearing aid, the result is greater intelligibility of speech compared with existing alternatives. CAM2 also improves the experience of listening to music, which makes greater use of higher frequencies than speech does. A．be applied to many existing devices B．use the tongue, teeth, cheeks and lips C．enhance the gain of higher frequencies D．pays little attention to the higher frequencies E．reduce noise and amplify certain frequencies F．transmit frequencies below 300Hz or above 3.3kHz G．extends and modifies fittings to include high frequencies To speak consonants, we need to ______.
One reason why shareholder activism has been increasing is that regulators have encouraged it, especially on pay. For a decade Britain has required firms to give shareholders a non-binding annual vote on executive pay. The colossal Dodd-Frank act of 2010 gave shareholders in American companies a "say on pay", too. Now comes two new moves. On March 3rd the Swiss voted to oblige firms to hold a binding annual vote on director’s pay: in the small print, the referendum also banned golden handshakes and severance packages for board members, and bonuses that encourage the buying or selling of firms. Then on March 5th E.U. finance ministers (with only Britain objecting) agreed to cap bankers’ bonuses to 100% of their basic salary, or 200% if shareholders vote for it. If the Swiss had merely given shareholders an annual vote on pay, it would have been a good thing; but the accompanying bans are not. There are times when a golden handshake to a talented manager can be in shareholders’ interests: far better to let the owners vote on it than restrict the firm from trying it. The E.U.’s proposal has less still to recommend it. The rationale for it is that banking bonuses have encouraged risk taking, because they reward bankers hugely for bets that come off and punish them only slightly for those that don’t. But banks have come a long way since the crisis, by deferring bonuses and making them partly payable in their own debt and equity. Blunt laws could undermine such progress. And bonus caps will either hold pay down, thus sending clever people elsewhere, or push up salaries, thus making pay less responsive to performance. Enpowering shareholders is a good idea; requiring them to channel populist fury is not. We know from the last paragraph that a bonus cap may achieve all except ______.
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