泰祺教育

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.(10 points)

The human nose is an underrated tool. Humans are often thought to be insensitive smellers compared with animals,  1  this is largely because,  2  animals, we stand upright. This means that our noses are   3   to perceiving those smells which float through the air,   4  the majority of smells which stick to surfaces. In fact,   5  , we are extremely sensitive to smells,  6   we do not generally realize it. Our noses are capable of   7   human smells even when these are   8   to far below one part in one million.

Strangely, some people find that they can smell one type of flower but not another,   9  others are sensitive to the smells of both flowers. This may be because some people do not have the genes necessary to generate   10   smell receptors in the nose. These receptors are the cells which sense smells and send   11   to the brain. However, it has been found that even people insensitive to a certain smell   12   can suddenly become sensitive to it when   13   to it often enough.

The explanation for insensitivity to smell seems to be that the brain finds it   14   to keep all smell receptors working all the time but can   15   new receptors if necessary. This may   16   explain why we are not usually sensitive to our own smells——we simply do not need to be. We are not   17   of the usual smell of our own house, but we   18   new smells when we visit someone else’s. The brain finds it best to keep smell receptors   19  for unfamiliar and emergency signals   20   the smell of smoke, which might indicate the danger of fire.

Part A

Directions:

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

In the villages of English countryside, there are still people who remember the good old days when no one bothered to lock their doors. There simply wasn't any crime to worry about.

Amazingly, these happy times appear still be with us in the world's biggest community, a new study by Dan Farmer, a gifted programmer, using automated investigative program of his own called SATAN, shows that owners of well over half of World Wide Web sites have set up home without fitting locks to their doors.

SATAN can try out a variety of well-known hacking tricks on an Internet site without actually breaking in. Farmer has made programs publicly available, among much criticism. A person with evil intent could use it to break down sites that are easy to burgle.

But Farmer is very concerned about the need to alert the public to poor security, and so far, events have proved him right. SATAN has done more to alert people to tricks rather than cause new disorder.

So is Net becoming more secure? Far from it. In the early days, when you visited a website, your browser simply looked at the content. Now the Web is full of tiny programs that automatically download when you look at a web page, and run on your own machine. These programs could, if their others wished, for all kinds of nasty things to your computer.

At the same time, the Net is increasingly populated with spiders, worm agents, and other types of automated beasts designed to penetrate the size and seek out and classify information. All these make wonderful tools for antisocial people who want to invade weak sites and cause damage.

But let's look on the bright side. Given the lack of locks, the Internet is surely the world's biggest crime free society. Maybe that is because hackers are fundamentally honest. Or that there are currently isn't much to steal. Or because that vandalism isn't much fun unless you have a peculiar dislike for someone.

Whatever the reason, let's enjoy it while we can. But expect it all to change, and security to become the number one issue, when most influential inhabitants of the Net are selling services they want to be paid for.

Text 2

Judy Carter Davis and her husband, Dwight, recently got back from a trip to Scotland — the “Home of Golf” — with its tourist must-sees like Edinburgh and the Old Course in St. Andrews. But the couple didn’t travel 4,508 miles in late May to go sightseeing. They crossed the Atlantic and spent $4,800 over 10 days to watch their son Ian, who turned 14 last month, compete in the U.S. Kids Golf European Championship 2017 at the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club. The couple recently sold their Dallas home and moved to Orlando, Fla., so Ian could hone his skills at Bishops Gate Golf Academy, where annual tuition, including academics at Montverde Academy, costs $60,000.The goal: an athletic scholarship and good education for Ian. Playing pro on the PGA Tour one day, Dwight Davis adds, would be a “bonus.”

Welcome to the expensive world of elite youth sports. Nearly 20% of U.S. families spend more than $12,000 a year, or $1,000 per month, on youth sports, per child, according to a TD Ameritrade survey of parents between 30 and 60 years old with $25,000 in investable assets with kids currently playing youth sports or ones that did. That’s in line with the median mortgage payment of $1,030 that Americans make monthly, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

But it shouldn’t come at the expense of your own retirement account or other family funding needs, says Mike Trombley, a former ballplayer at Duke University who went on to pitch 11 pros seasons for the Minnesota Twins and who now runs Trombley Associates, an investment and retirement planning firm in Wilbraham, Mass. “We all love our kids,” Trombley says. “But you’ve got to put yourself and your retirement first.”

But that’s often not the case, the TD Ameritrade survey found. One in three parents (33%) say they “do not contribute regularly to a retirement account” due to sports-related expenses. Forty percent say they don’t have an emergency fund. And 60% say they worry that paying for sports “may impact their ability to save for retirement.”

Judy Carter Davis, 52, is 100% behind the investment in her son’s golf career, but is still keenly aware that the family’s dreams for their son are akin to a risky investment. “It’s like putting all your money into one stock on Wall Street, and not knowing if your investment will be successful,” she says.

Text 3

Come on ---- Everybody’s doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good ---- drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word.

Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of example of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers.

The idea seems promising，and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many pubic-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. “Dare to be different, please don’t smoke!” pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers ---- teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure.

But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it’s presented here is that it doesn’t work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed.

There’s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits ---- as well as negative ones ---- spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day.

Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It’s like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that’s the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.

Text 4

When next year’s crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2019, they’ll be joined by a new face; Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old provost (教務(wù)長(zhǎng)) of Yale, who’ll become Oxford’s vice-chancellor — a position equivalent to university president in America.

Hamilton isn’t the only educator crossing the Atlantic. Schools in France, Egypt, Singapore, etc, have also recently made top-level hires from abroad. Higher education has become a big and competitive business nowadays, and like so many businesses, it’s gone global. Yet the talent flow isn’t universal. These days, high-level personnel tend to head in only one direction: from America.

The chief reason is that American schools don’t tend to seriously consider looking abroad. When the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, a major source of the university’s budget. “We didn’t do any global consideration,” says Patricia Hayes, the board’s chair. The board ultimately picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and political activist. The president is likely to do well in the main task of modern university counterparts: fund-raising. Fund-raising is a distinctively American thing, since U.S. schools rely heavily on donations. The fund-raising ability is largely a product of experience and necessity.

Many European universities, meanwhile, are still mostly dependent on government funding. But government support has failed to keep pace with rising student number. The decline in government support has made funding-raising an increasing necessary ability among administrators and has hiring committees hungry for Americans.

In the past few years, prominent schools around the world have joined the trend. In 2013, when Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard, another former Yale provost, as its vice-chancellor, the university publicly stressed that in her previous job she had overseen “a major strengthening of Yale’s financial position.”

Of course, fund-raising isn’t the only skill outsiders offer. The globalization of education means more universities will be seeking heads with international experience of some kind of promoting foreign programs and attract a global student body. Foreigners can offer a fresh perspective on established practices.

Part B

Directions:

Read the following text and answer the questions by choosing the most suitable subheading from the list A—G for each numbered paragraph (41—45 ). There are two extra subheadings which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)

A. Follow on Lines

B. Whisper: Keep It to Yourself

C. Word of Experience: Stick to It

D. Code of Success: Freed and Targeted

E. Efficient Work to Promote Efficient Workers

F. Done: Simplicity Means Everything

G. Efficiency Comes from Control

    Every decade has its defining self-help business book. In the 1940s it was How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the 1990s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. These days we’re worried about something much simpler: Getting Things Done.