READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minute...

第1题

【填空题】Agricultural development in different areas are primarily based on their natural resources and their methods in ______________（充分利用）them.

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第2题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3. Question 27-33 Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 27 - 33 on your answer sheet. List of Headings i. Disputes over financial arrangements regarding senior managers ii. The impact on companies of being subjected to close examination iii. The possible need for fundamental change in every area of business iv. Many external bodies being held responsible for problems v. The falling number of board members with broad enough experience vi. A risk that not all directors take part in solving major problems vii. Boards not looking far enough ahead viii.A proposal to change the way the board operates 27 Paragraph A 28 Paragraph B 29 Paragraph C 30 Paragraph D 31 Paragraph E 32 Paragraph F 33 Paragraph G UK companies need more effective boards of directors A After a number of serious failures of governance (that is, how they are managed at the highest level), companies in Britain, as well as elsewhere, should consider radical changes to their directors’ roles.It is clear that the role of a board director today is not an easy one.Following the 2008 financial meltdown, which resulted in a deeper and more prolonged period of economic downturn than anyone expected, the search for explanations in the many post-mortems of the crisis has meant blame has been spread far and wide.Governments, regulators, central banks and auditors have all been in the frame. The role of bank directors and management and their widely publicised failures have been extensively picked over and examined in reports, inquiries and commentaries. B The knock-on effect of this scrutiny has been to make the governance of companies in general an issue of intense public debate and has significantly increased the pressures on, and the responsibilities of, directors. At the simplest and most practical level, the time involved in fulfilling the demands of a board directorship has increased significantly, calling into question the effectiveness of the classic model of corporate governance by part-time, independent non-executive directors. Where once a board schedule may have consisted of between eight and ten meetings a year, in many companies the number of events requiring board input and decisions has dramatically risen. Furthermore, the amount of reading and preparation required for each meeting is increasing. Agendas can become overloaded and this can mean the time for constructive debate must necessarily be restricted in favour of getting through the business. C Often, board business is devolved to committees in order to cope with the workload, which may be more efficient but can mean that the board as a whole is less involved in fully addressing some of the most important issues. It is not uncommon for the audit committee meeting to last longer than the main board meeting itself. Process may take the place of discussion and be at the expense of real collaboration, so that boxes are ticked rather than issues tackled. D A radical solution, which may work for some very large companies whose businesses are extensive and complex, is the professional board, whose members would work up to three or four days a week, supported by their own dedicated staff and advisers. There are obvious risks to this and it would be important to establish clear guidelines for such a board to ensure that it did not step on the toes of management by becoming too engaged in the day-to-day running of the company. Problems of recruitment, remuneration and independence could also arise and this structure would not be appropriate for all companies. However, more professional and better-informed boards would have been particularly appropriate for banks where the executives had access to information that part-time non-executive directors lacked, leaving the latter unable to comprehend or anticipate the 2008 crash. E One of the main criticisms of boards and their directors is that they do not focus sufficiently on longer-term matters of strategy, sustainability and governance, but instead concentrate too much on short-term financial metrics. Regulatory requirements and the structure of the market encourage this behaviour. The tyranny of quarterly reporting can distort board decision-making, as directors have to ’make the numbers’ every four months to meet the insatiable appetite of the market for more data. This serves to encourage the trading methodology of a certain kind of investor who moves in and out of a stock without engaging in constructive dialogue with the company about strategy or performance, and is simply seeking a short- term financial gain. This effect has been made worse by the changing profile of investors due to the globalisation of capital and the increasing use of automated trading systems. Corporate culture adapts and management teams are largely incentivized to meet financial goals. F Compensation for chief executives has become a combat zone where pitched battles between investors, management and board members are fought, often behind closed doors but increasingly frequently in the full glare of press attention. Many would argue that this is in the interest of transparency and good governance as shareholders use their muscle in the area of pay to pressure boards to remove underperforming chief executives. Their powers to vote down executive remuneration policies increased when binding votes came into force. The chair of the remuneration committee can be an exposed and lonely role, as Alison Carnwath, chair of Barclays Bank’s remuneration committee, found when she had to resign, having been roundly criticised for trying to defend the enormous bonus to be paid to the chief executive; the irony being that she was widely understood to have spoken out against it in the privacy of the committee. G The financial crisis stimulated a debate about the role and purpose of the company and a heightened awareness of corporate ethics. Trust in the corporation has been eroded and academics such as Michael Sandel, in his thoughtful and bestselling book What Money Can’t Buy, are questioning the morality of capitalism and the market economy. Boards of companies in all sectors will need to widen their perspective to encompass these issues and this may involve a realignment of corporate goals. We live in challenging times. Question 34-37 Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 34 - 37 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer FALSE if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 34.Close scrutiny of the behaviour of boards has increased since the economic downturn. 35.Banks have been mismanaged to a greater extent than other businesses. 36.Board meetings normally continue for as long as necessary to debate matters in full. 37.Using a committee structure would ensure that board members are fully informed about significant issues. Question 38-40 Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 38 - 40 on your answer sheet. 38.Before 2008, non-executive directors were at a disadvantage because of their lack of ________. 39.Boards tend to place too much emphasis on　________ considerations that are only of short-term relevance. 40.On certain matters, such as pay, the board may have to accept the views of　________.

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第3题

As for the western thinking, the best argument “wins” based on evidence and credibility.

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第4题

The aspects of body you should work on are eye contact, posture, facial expression and gestures.

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第5题

Which quotations below are analogies?

A、Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. (—Edmund Burke)

B、Potential is like a diamond in the rough. You know there is value, but it just needs to be polished first.

C、Life is like a coin. You can spend it anyway you wish, but you can only spend it once.

D、Music is fluid architecture, and architecture frozen music. (F. W. J. Schelling)

E、He has many mouths to feed in his family.

F、Nature’s first green is gold Her hardest hue to hold Her early leaf’s a flower But only so an hour. (Robert Frost)

G、A novel is usually a long piece in prose.

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第6题

READING PASSAGE 3 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. Music and the emotions Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer considers the emotional power of music Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deeply. When listening to our favourite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience by a research team in Montreal, Canada, marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of ‘the potent pleasurable stimulus' that is music.Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people who experience ‘chills' to instrumental music, the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. They then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favourite songs - virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango - and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI), they were able to obtain an impressively exact and detailed portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered is that music triggers the production of dopamine - a chemical with a key role in setting people's moods - by the neurons (nerve cells) in both the dorsal and ventral regions of the brain. As these two regions have long been linked with the experience of pleasure, this finding isn't particularly surprising. What is rather more significant is the finding that the dopamine neurons in the caudate - a region of the brain involved in learning stimulus-response associations, and in anticipating food and other ‘reward' stimuli - were at their most active around 15 seconds before the participants' favourite moments in the music. The researchers call this the ‘anticipatory phase'； and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favourite part. The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to.Why are they so active in the period preceding the acoustic climax?After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. And yet, this cluster of cells is most active when the ‘chills' have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved. One way to answer the question is to look at the music and not the neurons. While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns, it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited. This is why composers often introduce a key note in the beginning of a song, spend most of the rest of the piece in the studious avoidance of the pattern, and then finally repeat it only at the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analysed the 5th movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with - but not submission to - our expectations of order.Meyer dissected 50 measures (bars) of the masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an ingenious tonal dance, carefully holds off repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end. According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music, arising out of our unfulfilled expectations, that is the source of the music's feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a sound can refer to the real world of images and experiences - its ‘connotative' meaning - Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This ‘embodied meaning’ arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores. It is this uncertainty that triggers the surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. We can predict some of the notes, but we can't predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the pattern to be completed. Question 27-31 Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 27 - 31 on your answer sheet. The Montreal Study Participants, who were recruited for the study through advertisements, had their brain activity monitored while listening to their favourite music. It was noted that the music stimulated the brain’s neurons to release a substance called 27______　in two of the parts of the brain which are associated with feeling 28______. Researchers also observed that the neurons in the area of the brain called the 29______ were particularly active just before the participants’ favourite moments in the music — the period known as the 30______. Activity in this part of the brain is associated with the expectation of ‘reward’ stimuli such as 31______ (27-31题单词请填小写字母；此处请填写27题答案）.

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第7题

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

HIGHS & LOWS

Hormone levels - and hence our moods - may be affected by the weather. Gloomy weather can cause depression, but sun shine appears to raise the spirits. In Britain, for example, the dull weather of winter drastically cuts down the amount of sunlight that is experienced which strongly affects some people. They become so depressed and lacking in energy that their work and social life are affected. This condition has been given the name SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Sufferers can fight back by making the most of any sunlight in winter and by spending a few hours each day under special, full-spectrum lamps. These provide more ultraviolet and blue green light than ordinary fluorescent and tungsten lights. Some Russian scientists claim that children learn better after being exposed to ultraviolet light. In warm countries, hours of work are often arranged so that workers can take a break, or even a siesta, during the hottest part of the day. Scientists are working to discover the links between the weather and human beings' moods and performance.

It is generally believed that tempers grow shorter in hot, muggy weather. There is no doubt that 'crimes against the person' rise in the summer, when the weather is hotter and fall in the winter when the weather is colder. Research in the United States has shown a relation- ship between temperature and street riots. The frequency of riots rises dramatically as the weather gets warmer, hitting a peak around 27-30℃. But is this effect really due to a mood change caused by the heat？ Some scientists argue that trouble starts more often in hot weather merely because there are more people in the street when the weather is good.

Psychologists have also studied how being cold affects performance. Re searchers compared divers working in icy cold water at 5℃ with others in water at 20℃ (about swimming pool tempera ture). The colder water made the divers worse at simple arithmetic and other mental tasks. But significantly, their performance was impaired as soon as they were put into the cold water - before their bodies had time to cool down. This suggests that the low temperature did not slow down mental functioning directly, but the feeling of cold distracted the divers from their tasks.

Psychologists have conducted studies showing that people become less sceptical and more optimistic when the weather is sunny. However, this apparently does not just depend on the temperature. An American psychologist studied customers in a temperature-controlled restaurant. They gave bigger tips when the sun was shining and smaller tips when it wasn't, even though the temperature in the restaurant was the same. A link between weather and mood is made believable by the evidence for a connection between behaviour and the length of the daylight hours. This in turn might involve the level of a hormone called melatonin, produced in the pineal gland in the brain. The amount of melatonin falls with greater exposure to daylight. Research shows that melatonin plays an important part in the seasonal behaviour of certain animals. For example, food con sumption of stags increases during the winter, reaching a peak in February/ March. It falls again to a low point in May, then rises to a peak in September, before dropping to another minimum in November. These changes seem to be trig gered by varying melatonin levels.

In the laboratory, hamsters put on more weight when the nights are getting shorter and their melatonin levels are falling. On the other hand, if they are given injections of melatonin, they will stop eating altogether. It seems that time cues provided by the changing lengths of day and night trigger changes in animals' behaviour - changes that are needed to cope with the cycle of the seasons. People's moods too, have been shown to react to

A．They were less able to concentrate.

B．Their body temperature fell too quickly.

C．Their mental functions were immediately affected by the cold.

D．They were used to swimming pool conditions.

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第8题

Qustions 1-5 are based on Text B, please choose the best answer to each of the following questions: Why does the daughter find it difficult to help her father stand up?

A、Because he is tired.

B、Because he is reluctant to stand up.

C、Because he has hurt one of his legs.

D、Because he is heavy and weak.

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READING PASSAGE 1You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Re