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 five questions. Now listen to the interview. Samantha Heller suggests that to get benefits from chocolate, you may
A. take nutrients out of chocolate.
B. make cocoa powder on your own.
C. make hot chocolate by yourself.
D. consult an expert on chocolate.
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For admissions officers reviewing applications is like final-exam week for students--except it lasts for months. Great applications tell us we’ve done our job well, by attracting top-caliber students. But it’s challenging to maintain the frenetic pace without forgetting these are all real people with real aspirations--people whose life stories we are here to unravel, if they will let us. The essay is a key piece of learning those life stories. I live near Los Angeles, where every day screenplays are read without regard for human context. The writer’s life and dreams don’t matter--all that mat ters is the writing, the ideas, the end product. On the other hand, in reading essays, context does matter: who wrote this We are driven to put the jigsaw puzzle together because we think we are building a community, not just choosing neat stories. When I pick up a file, I want to know whether the student has siblings or not, who his parents are, where he went to high school. Then I want the essay to help the rest of the application make sense, to humanize all the numbers that flow past. I am looking for insight. A brilliantly written essay may compel me to look beyond superficial shortcomings in an application. But if no recommendation or grade or test score hints at such writing talent, I may succumb to cynicism and assume the writer had help--maybe too much. In the worst cases, I may find that I have read it before--with name and place changed--on the Internet, in an essay-editing service or a "best essays" hook. The most appealing essays take the opportunity to show a voice not rendered homogeneous and pasteurized. But sometimes the essays tell us too much. Pomona offers this instruction with one essay option: "We realize that not everything done in life is about getting into college. Tell us about something you did that was just plain fun." One student grimly reported that nothing was fun because in his family everything was about getting into college. Every activity, course choice and spare moment. It did spark our sympathy, but it almost led to a call to Child Protective Services as well. Perfection isn’t required. We have seen phenomenal errors in essays that haven’t damaged a student at all. I recall a student who wrote of the July 1969 lunar landing of--I kid you not--Louis Armstrong. I read on, shaking my head. This student was great--a jazz trumpeter who longed to study astronomy. It was a classic slip and perhaps a hurried merging of two personal heroes. He was offered admission, graduated and went on for a PhD in astrophysics. He may not have been as memorable if he had named "Nell" instead of "Louis" in his essay’s opening line. Hey, we’re human, too. An essay that is rough around the edges may still be compelling. Good ideas make an impression, even when expressed with bad punctuation and spelling errors. Energy and excitement can be communicated. I’m not suggesting the "I came, I saw, I conquered" approach to essay writing, nor the "I saved the world" angle taken by some students who write about community-service projects. I’m talking about smaller moments that are well captured. Essays don’t require the life tragedy that so many seem to think is necessary. Not all admission offers come out of sympathy! Admissions officers, even at the most selective institutions, really aren’t looking for perfection in 17-and 18-year-olds. We are looking for the human being behind the roster of activities and grades. We are looking for those who can let down their guard just a bit to allow others in. We are looking for people whose egos won’t get in the way of learning, students whose investment in ideas and words tells us--in the con-text of their records--that they are aware of a world beyond their own homes, schools, grades and scores. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. To us, an essay that reveals a student’s unaltered voice is worth much, much more. Which of the following statements is TRUE about the essay
A. To admissions officers, the structure of an essay matters much.
B. Admissions officers appreciate an essay full of high-sounding words.
C. Admissions officers expect to read an essay that can really move them.
D. Admissions officers tend to offer admission to students out of pity.
Now that the experts have agreed to give us some help, __________________ (我们有信心克服困难).
We have to admire Suzanne Somers’s persistence. She doesn’t give up--even when virtually the entire medical community is lined up against her. Three years ago, Somers wrote a best-selling book called The Sexy Years in which she promoted so-called bioidentical hormones as a more natural alternative to hormones produced by drug companies for menopausal women. Somers, now 60, claimed that these individually prepared doses of estrogen and other hormones, sold via the Internet or by compounding pharmacies, made her look and feel half her age. As the popularity of bioidenticals soared, major medical organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists grew so alarmed that they mounted publicity campaigns to convince Somers’s readers that these alternative treatments, which are usually custom made for each patient, haven’t been proven safe or more effective than traditional hormone therapy for symptoms like hot flashes. This month Somers is at it again with her latest book, Ageless. Subtitled The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones, the cover features a coquettish shot of the actress unclothed from the collarbone up. Inside, she calls bioidenticals "the juice of youth" and also promotes the questionable dosage advice of a former actress and "independent researcher" named T.S. Wiley who thinks menopausal women should have as much estrogen in their bodies as 20-year-olds. Now, even some of the pro-bioidentical doctors Somers quotes in her books are screaming foul. "Many of the claims throughout the book are scientifically unproven and dangerous," three of these doctors assert in a letter sent a few weeks ago to Somers’s publisher, Crown. Somers adamantly defends her book and bioidenticals. "From a woman’s standpoint, this is the first time we’ve gotten some relief in a non-drug way," she says in an interview with NEWSWEEK. "Doctors are embarrassed that they don’t know about this," Somers says. "When doctors don’t have an answer, they like to pooh-pooh it." The word bioidentical is a marketing term, not a scientific one, and it means different things to different people. To most doctors, bioidentical refers to a wide variety of FDA-approved drugs that are virtually identical to the hormones produced by women’s ovaries. They come in many forms and doses, some of which have been used for years. Somers uses the term to refer to made-to-order treatments created by compounding pharmacies with dosages usually determined by the results of blood tests every two weeks (the method Somers herself uses), or regular saliva tests, a method most experts say is an unreliable way to measure a women’s specific hormone needs. Somers claims that she is so "in touch" with her body’s needs that she can "tweak" her hormones even without the benefit of these tests. Proponents of Somers’s program say only hormones prepared specifically for each woman can meet her unique needs. But since the Women’s Health Initiative, the FDA has approved many new hormone products, including some in very low doses. While the FDA process isn’t perfect, it’s certainly better than what consumers get with compounding products: no black box warning about side effects, no package insert, no data on relative safety, no check on advertising claims and no manufacturing oversight. Somers says these custom-made treatments are natural and not really drugs. That’s just not true. Bioidenticals may start out as wild yams or soybeans, but by the time this plant matter has been converted into hormone therapy, it is in fact a drug. All of these products--whether or not they’re approved by the FDA--are chemicals synthesized in a lab. Another thing you should know, there are only a few labs in the world that synthesize these hormones. Everyone--from small compounding pharmacies to big pharmaceutical companies--gets their ingredients from the same places. Somers argues that bioidenticals are safer than FDA-approved hormones even though there are no high-quality studies to prove that assertion. In the absence of any reliable research to the contrary, most women’s health experts say it’s prudent to assume that all hormone products (FDA-approved or not) carry the same heart disease and cancer risks. It can be inferred from the first paragraph that
A. bioidentical hormones don’t live up to the hype.
B. many women show zeal for bioidentical hormones.
C. experts will ask for the ban on bioidentical hormones.
D. many people worry about the safety of bioidenticals.