Text 3 It’s easy to get the sense these days that you’ve stumbled into a party with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren’t. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They’ve changed into something like their own opposite. There’s Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy(慈善事业) with him. There’s historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. To flip-flopis human. It can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological(病态的). He’s a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush:" He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday -- no matter what happened on Tuesday." Over the past three years, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I’ve got it all wrong. It looked at first like a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that we’re all connected. Everything leans on something, is both dependent and depended on. "The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago," is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line." The remark prompted the professor to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences between the Western and the Asian mind. To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it’s solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn’t a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star. What can we infer from first two paragraphs
A. Some people have changed into someone another.
B. Rhere are some drugs that can change one’s identity.
C. Some moneybags are pulled to act as philanthropist.
D. francis Fukuyama has become a great traveler.
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Part ADirections: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. Text 1 When a Shanghai ad consultant was recently asked to recommend young local designers to an international agency, he sent three candidates with years of work experience. But the company decided they weren’t good enough and had to import designers from the West. It’s a common problem that Chinese vocational grads simply haven’t had good enough teaching. Most of the lecturers don’t have any real work experience, so they can’t teach useful things. When graduates do get hired, they basically have to be re-educated. China’s rapid economic expansion has exposed many frailties in its education system, especially on the vocational side. The country can’t produce enough skilled workers. In part that’s because it invests far more in academic than vocational programs. Funding has fallen significantly since the 1990s. Partly as a result, today only 38 percent or so of China’s high-school-age students attend vocational schools, well below the official target of 50 percent. To address this deficit, last year Beijing pledged to spend almost $2 billion on 100 new vocational colleges and 1,000 high schools. And this year it started offering annual subsidies to vocational students. But China’s training is too abstract, what’s urgently required are technicians who can come up with a good idea and turn it into a marketable product. Parts of the country are already adapting; in Shenzhen, local institutes offer" made to order" training for particular businesses. And some vocational colleges have introduced practical research projects. But vocational education faces a deeper problem: its image. China’s middle class is eager to forget its experience with physical labor, and few allow their children to become technical workers. Everyone thinks these are things that low-class people do. Thus China now produces record numbers of college grads--who struggle to find work because they lack the skills for manufacturing, where demand is greatest. One fix would be to re-brand vocational subjects as" professional," not" manual," skills. At the other end of the spectrum are China’s 100 million-plus rural migrant workers, many of whom have little schooling. They have never learned how to work with others, to live in the city, save money or choose the right job. Thus they find it hard to learn from their jobs or plan their careers. This results in extremely high labor turnover. Teaching and training" life skills" to complement vocational programs would help. Yet the urgency of China’s skilled-labor shortfall will force a rethink. For now, China is relying on cheap, low-skilled, labor-intensive production, but it’s not sustainable in the long term, We must raise our skills level, and it’s impossible for state-run colleges to do all the training. Indeed, with the demand for skilled workers growing all the time, China will need all the help it can get. By mentioning the problems of Chinese vocational education, the author tends to ______.
A. emphasize that China’s vocational training is too abstract
B. inform that the image of vocational work is negative
C. warn that the rural immigrant workers lack vocational training
D. suggest that the government investment on it is not enough
Text 3 It’s easy to get the sense these days that you’ve stumbled into a party with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren’t. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They’ve changed into something like their own opposite. There’s Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away--and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy(慈善事业) with him. There’s historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. To flip-flopis human. It can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological(病态的). He’s a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush:" He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday -- no matter what happened on Tuesday." Over the past three years, I found people who had pulled a big U-turn in their lives. Often the insight came in a forehead-smiting moment in the middle of the night: I’ve got it all wrong. It looked at first like a sprinkling of outliers beyond the curve of normal human experience. But when you stepped back, a pattern emerged. What these personal turns had in common was the apprehension that we’re all connected. Everything leans on something, is both dependent and depended on. "The difference between you and me," a visiting Chinese student told University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett not long ago," is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line." The remark prompted the professor to write a book, The Geography of Thought, about the differences between the Western and the Asian mind. To Western thinking, the world is linear; you can chop it up and analyze it, and we can all work on our little part of the project independently until it’s solved. The classically Eastern mind, according to Nisbett, sees things differently: the world isn’t a length of rope but a vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. I realized this was what almost all the U-turns had in common: people had swung around to face East. They had stopped thinking in a line and started thinking in a circle. Morality was looking less like a set of rules and more like a story, one in which they were part of an ensemble cast, no longer the star. Which of the following is the best title for this text
A. The Age of U-Turns.
B. Western and Eastern Cultural Differences.
C. A Circle World.
D. The Importance of Change.
Text 4 Short of money Need an instant loan Since the early 1990s your best bet has been to go to the low-rent end of town and find an appointed loan-shop. There you can borrow money in small amounts, generally not much more than $500, against your post-dated pay-cheque. You will be charged around $15 interest for every $100 you borrow--and that is per month. For many people, there is no alternative. Banks refuse to make small loans because there is no money in it, and completely unregulated lending, via the internet or loan sharks, is too alarming. According to the Community Financial Services Association, an advocacy group for the industry, most borrowers are responsible and pay off their loans in a timely manner. But some don’t. The Centre for Responsible Lending, a consumer group, says that many borrowers routinely roll over their loans. This quickly brings them into debt traps. A typical borrower may end up paying $793 for a $325 loan. The centre estimates that payday loans cost Americans $4.2 billion a year in interest and fees. The industry thrives, in large part, because it operates mostly outside state usury laws that prohibit excessive interest rates. Its spokesmen say lenders need such exemptions to make a profit on their basic service, small loans. Lenders say that their returns would amount to pennies on the dollar if interest rates were capped. In fact, they say, such restrictions would put them out of business. And that is exactly what many of their opponents would like to see--particularly when it comes to loans made to the families of soldiers. In one of the last acts of the Republican Congress, payday lenders were restricted to interest rates of 36% on loans to military personnel and their spouses. The Pentagon is worried that uniformed personnel, especially those serving in Iraq, have been losing their security clearances because of excessive debt at home. This, among other things, was leading to the costly reassignment of highly trained troops, such as communications experts, to ordinary low-skill jobs. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, wrote recently in the New York Times that the industry -- not unlike the sub-prime mortgage sector -- is a beneficiary of the sweeping deregulation of the financial-services industry that has made credit more accessible. Its adverse consequences, he says, were" completely predictable". Once poor people get in over their heads, they will borrow themselves into bankruptcy if the law permits; and" if we are unhappy about that, the only solution is to change the rules." Which of the following circumstances is most unlikely to be realized
A man who got a small loan has to pay three times back after a period.
B. A skilled serviceman is free of loan interest for his expertise.
C. A new act on the rules of small loans is issued by the Congress.
D. A poor man who has no other choice borrows money until bankruptcy.
Directions:In the following article, some sentences have been removed. For Question 41--45, choose the most suitable one the list A--G to fit into each of the numbered blank. There are extra choices, which do not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.It has often been remarked that the saddest thing about youth is that it is wasted on the young. Reading a recent newspaper report on a survey conducted among college freshmen, I recalled the regret,"If only I knew then what I know now."The survey disclosed what I had already suspected from informal polls of students. According to the survey, which was based on the responses of over 188,000 students, today’s traditional-age college freshmen are" more materialistic and less altruistic".41. ______. It follows then that today the most popular course is not literature or history but accounting. Interest in teaching, social service and the" altruistic" fields is at a low, along with ethnic and women’s studies. On the other hand, enrollment in business programs, engineering and computer science is way up.42. ______.Frankly, I’m proud of the young lady (not her attitude but her success). But why can’t we have it both ways Can’t we educate people for life as well as for a career I believe we can. If we’re not, then that is a fault of our educational system--elementary, secondary and higher. In a time of increasing specialization, a time when 90 percent of all the scientists who have ever lived are currently alive, more than ever we need to know what is truly important in life.43. ______.Most of us finally come to realize that quality of life is not entirely determined by how much we earn. Sure, everyone wants to be financially comfortable, but we also want to feel that we have a perspective on the world beyond the confines of our occupation; we want to be able to render service to our fellow man and to the world.44. ______.It is equally true that, in studying the diverse wisdom of others, we learn how to think. More important, perhaps, education teaches us to see the connections between things, as well as to see beyond our immediate needs.45. ______.In the long run that’s what education really ought to be about. And I think it can be. That’s the way it should be. Oscar Wilde had it right when he said that we ought to give our ability to our work but our genius to our lives. Let’s hope our educators answer the students cries for career education, but at the same time, let’s ensure that the students are prepared for the day when they realize their folly. There’s a lot more to life than a job.[A] Academic emphasis on competition, rationality and externals acknowledges only one kind of knowing. It makes students devalue their inner selves or larger social purposes.[B] Not surprising in these hard times, the student’s major objective" is to be financially well off." Less important than ever is developing a meaningful philosophy of life.[C] Education must meet the needs of the human spirit. It must assist students to develop a satisfactory personal philosophy and sense of values; to cultivate tastes for literature, music and the arts; to grow in ability to analyze problems and arrive at thoughtful conclusions.[D] That’s no surprise either. A friend of mine (a sales representative for a chemical company)was making twice the salary of her college instructors during her first year on the job. And that was four years ago; She must be earning much more now.[E] Most people, somewhere between the ages of 30 and 50, finally arrive at the inevitable conclusion that they could do more than serving a corporation, a government agency, or whatever.[F] But the most important argument for a broad education is that in studying the accumulated wisdom of the ages, we improve our moral sense.[G] While it’s true that we all need a career, preferably a profitable one, it is equally true that our civilization has accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge -- be it scientific or artistic. 42