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In many classrooms around the country, teachers are emphasizing, and periodically testing, students’ reading fluency, the current buzzword in reading instruction. The problem is that speed isn’t the only element to fluency, educators said, Key elements are also accuracy and expressiveness. "The food was delectable" is different from "the food was detestable," and Shakespeare should not sound like a chemistry textbook. It is a complicated process teaching students to recognize enough words and read at a consistent rate so they can spend their time concentrating on meaning rather than decoding, educators said. And when tackling a book such as "The Giver," one that deals with a boy’s discovery that his utopian world comes at the expense of the stifling of intellectual and emotional freedom, meaning is critical. "Fluent readers are readers who know how to dig into a book and pull out just what they are looking for—whether it is information, a part with strong language, a part with good character development, or just a chance to read for fun," said Susan Marantz, a longtime teacher now at a suburban school in Columbus, Ohio. Yet u combination of politics, insufficient teacher development and an inherent difficulty in capturing all aspects of fluency have led to questionable instruction practices, according to Richard Allington, a reading researcher and University of Tennessee professor. Many students are asked by teachers to reread the same passages over and over—often with constant interruptions from the teacher. And some struggling readers are given books—including textbooks—that are above their reading level and soon become a source of frustration. "You can make any adult a disfluent reader by giving them books that are too hard and jump in and interrupt them a lot," Allington said. "What do you think it does to kids" As a result, some kids are motivated to read only to beat a test clock, he and other researchers said. "The more important question to ask is: Are teachers focusing on all three parts of fluency" Beers, vice president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, wrote in an e-mail. "When fluency is only about building automaticity (and therefore speed), then some (teachers) do mistakenly believe that the point of reading is fast decoding. That’s no more the best measure of a skilled reader than fast driving is the best measure of skilled driver." The current interest in reading fluency illustrates the complexities in the long national argument about how best to teach reading, dubbed the "reading wars." Advocates of phonics and literature-based instruction have been at odds for years, with the argument only intensifying after a controversial 2000 report by the National Reading Panel. Many reading experts said the panel relied on a limited set of studies that supported, among other things, intensive drilling in phonics. Reading fluency also was one of the key areas for instruction, along with phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, comprehension, teacher education and computer technology. President Bush used the report as a basis for Reading First, a program to improve reading scores that became the centerpiece of his No Child Let Behind law. Although fluency had long been identified by experts as important, it then became a hot issue. Reading researchers began devising programs to help teachers improve students’ fluency. And although there was no consensus definition of fluency, panels approving Reading First money accepted programs that used tools that stressed reading speed, according to some educators. A report by the Department of Education’s inspector general this month slammed the grant-approval processing, saying it was riddled with problems and conflicts of interest. The result, said fluency expert Tim Rasinski of Kent State University, was a massage strut to schools to concentrate on speed. "The influence of No Child Left Behind has been such that even schools that aren’t Reading First schools are doing periodic (speed reading) testing of kids," he said. In Ottumwa, Iowa, Evans Middle School did it a different way. Evans was declared a school in need of improvement in reading in 2004, and Principal Davis Eidahl said he adopted a program focused on reading fluency using a model constructed by Rasinski aimed at improving comprehension. Some students, he said, came into the school reading fast but understanding little. "They read so fast, with no punctuation and no expression that we’d go back and ask comprehension questions and they weren’t very successful answering them." he said. To slow them down and teach them to talk with expression and comprehension, various exercises were used, including having children read passages to each other and listen to how they sound when reading, asking students to repeat passages, and adding 45 more minutes of reading time each day, he said. Now, 71 percent of the kids am reading at grade level, up from 58 percent two years ago. What worked, Eidahl said, was addressing all aspects of fluency, maintaining consistency and most importantly, having a quality teacher. "It all comes down to the teacher," he said. "It’s people, not programs.\ It can be inferred from tile passage that "Giver" is a book which ______.

A. contains many new and difficult words
B. has many levels of meaning
C. is easy to read
D. is about a boy’s discovery

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David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world’s economic and social progress over the last thousand years to "Western civilization and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented systematic economic development Landes adds that three unique aspects of European culture were crucial ingredients in Europe’s economic growth. First, science developed as an autonomous method of intellectual inquiry that successfully disengaged itself from the social constraints of organized religion and from the political constraints of centralized authority. Though Europe lacked a political center, its scholars benefited from the use of a single vehicle of communication: Latin. This common tongue facilitated an adversarial discourse in which new ideas about the physical world could be tested, demonstrated, and then accepted across the continent and eventually across the world. Second, Landes espouses a generalized form of Max Weber’s thesis that the values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe. Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of rationality as such. In his view, "what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, [and] tenacity." The only route to economic success for individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and investing the rest in productive capacity. This is his fundamental explanation of the problem posed by his book’s subtitle: "Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor." For historical reasons—an emphasis on private property, an experience of political pluralism, a temperate climate, an urban style—Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered. Third, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They "learned rather greedily," as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes’s book. Even if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage (spectacles, for example), as Landes believes they did, their most vital asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world. and put it to use—as in borrowing the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle’s Logic from the Arabs and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century and remains the greatest handicap of Arab countries today. Although his analysis of European expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: "When one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." In contrast to the new school of world historians, Landes believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that could have been put into productive work and investment. If one could sum up Landes’s advice to these states in one sentence, it might be "Stop whining and get to work." This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would argue, because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market signals. Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but developed countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current situation "will press hard" on them. The thrust of studies like Landes’s is to identify those distinctive features of European civilization that lie behind Europe’s rise to power and the creation of modernity more generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features as liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art historian Craig Clunas listed some of the less well known linkages that have been proposed between Western culture and modernity, including the propensities to think quantitatively, enjoy pornography, and consume sugar. All such proposals assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What elements of European civilization led to European success It is a short leap from this assumption to outright triumphalism. The paradigmatic book of this school is, of course, The End of History and the Last Man, in which Francis Fuknyama argues that after the collapse of Nazism in the twentieth century, the only remaining model for human organization in the industrial and communications ages is a combination of market economics and limited, pluralist, democratic government. Lands believes that ______.

A. Europeans set out to bring civilization to an unfortunate world
B. the Europeans dominated other countries simply because they were strong
C. the desire of Europeans to colonize other countries stemmed from specific cultural values
D. the colonized countries themselves were to blame for being victimized by Europeans

David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world’s economic and social progress over the last thousand years to "Western civilization and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented systematic economic development Landes adds that three unique aspects of European culture were crucial ingredients in Europe’s economic growth. First, science developed as an autonomous method of intellectual inquiry that successfully disengaged itself from the social constraints of organized religion and from the political constraints of centralized authority. Though Europe lacked a political center, its scholars benefited from the use of a single vehicle of communication: Latin. This common tongue facilitated an adversarial discourse in which new ideas about the physical world could be tested, demonstrated, and then accepted across the continent and eventually across the world. Second, Landes espouses a generalized form of Max Weber’s thesis that the values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe. Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of rationality as such. In his view, "what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, [and] tenacity." The only route to economic success for individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and investing the rest in productive capacity. This is his fundamental explanation of the problem posed by his book’s subtitle: "Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor." For historical reasons—an emphasis on private property, an experience of political pluralism, a temperate climate, an urban style—Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered. Third, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They "learned rather greedily," as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes’s book. Even if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage (spectacles, for example), as Landes believes they did, their most vital asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world. and put it to use—as in borrowing the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle’s Logic from the Arabs and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century and remains the greatest handicap of Arab countries today. Although his analysis of European expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: "When one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." In contrast to the new school of world historians, Landes believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that could have been put into productive work and investment. If one could sum up Landes’s advice to these states in one sentence, it might be "Stop whining and get to work." This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would argue, because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market signals. Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but developed countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current situation "will press hard" on them. The thrust of studies like Landes’s is to identify those distinctive features of European civilization that lie behind Europe’s rise to power and the creation of modernity more generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features as liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art historian Craig Clunas listed some of the less well known linkages that have been proposed between Western culture and modernity, including the propensities to think quantitatively, enjoy pornography, and consume sugar. All such proposals assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What elements of European civilization led to European success It is a short leap from this assumption to outright triumphalism. The paradigmatic book of this school is, of course, The End of History and the Last Man, in which Francis Fuknyama argues that after the collapse of Nazism in the twentieth century, the only remaining model for human organization in the industrial and communications ages is a combination of market economics and limited, pluralist, democratic government. In discussing Landes’ s work, the author’ s tone is ______.

A. matter-of-fact
B. skeptical
C. reproachful
D. enthusiastic

Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following 5 questions. Now listen to the interview. What is Edward’s attitude when talking about gardens attached to houses

A. Disapproval.
B. Excitement.
C. Uncertainty.
D. Indifference.

Questions 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions. Now listen to the news. Health experts meet in Geneva to

A. draw a map of affected area.
B. make a plan for fighting against bird flu.
C. make a combat.
D. find ways to prevent human flu.

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