1 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words asfar as possible.

How to Be a Successful Team Leader?

Every well-organized team needs to have an outstanding leader with specific skills. Sometimes the leader’s abilities can come to affect the whole team. Although we students are still young, it’s never too early to cultivate leadership skills.

A team consists of both leaders and followers. Neither side can exist and work effectively without the other. What is essential to the role of leader is the ability to unite the whole team. A great leader enables their team to achieve a common goal through the giving of clear directions and support. Meanwhile, everyone on a team also desires personal success, so a balance can be hard to strike. If a leader doesn’t have fierce determination, the followers will lose their confidence and things will not be done well.

What’s more, a successful and charming leader ought to be able to handle interpersonal relationships well. They should be honest, fair, objective and impartial (公正的) when it comes to both rewards and punishments. These kinds of leaders are trustworthy, and thus, the working atmosphere will only come to be improved. They are role models who can have a strong influence on the whole team.

To become a powerful leader at school, students have to take the initiative in connecting with their fellow students. Good communication skills allow people to build good relationships, which is an essential part of being a good leader. If you find it hard to express your ideas clearly to those who you collaborate with, it may be rather difficult for you to be a good leader.

It’s a well-known fact that, whatever field you wish to work in, leadership skills are necessary for anyone who desires to have a successful career. So it’s never too early to train yourselves as promising future leaders.

71. Click to download teacher

“Books will soon disappear in schools,” Thomas Edison announced in 1913: they would, he believed, soon be replaced by silent films. Each new wave of information technology - radio, television, computers - has led to similar predictions.

Like teachers, digital educational technology comes in many forms, from wonderful to awful. But, used properly, it now deserves more prominence (重要性) in schools - especially in poor countries where human teachers are often ignorant, absent or both.

According to a recent World Bank study of seven sub - Saharan African countries, half of nine - year - olds cannot read a simple word and three - quarters cannot read a simple sentence. The reason is terrible. The same study found that only 7% of teachers had the minimum knowledge needed to teach reading and writing effectively. When classrooms were inspected to see whether a teacher was present, half the time the answer was no. As for the absence of teachers, if expensive teachers do not turn up to class, government would, surely, fire them? Easier said than done. Poor governments often lack the money to check on teachers in distant villages.

Several recent studies suggested - tech can help. It seems to bring about bigger improvements in poor countries than in rich ones. Some of the scarce resources being spent on teachers could therefore be better spent on ed - tech. That does not mean dumping computers on schools in the hope that children will understand how to use them. Instead, it means providing schools with software that children can use with minimal help from an adult, that sends teachers prompts about what they are supposed to be teaching and that allows the authorities to check on whether the teacher is in the classroom.

Technology is no cure - all. Good traditional teachers are not outdated, and are never likely to be. And authorities need to hold teachers to account. But ed - tech can help greatly - by monitoring pupils and teachers alike, assisting the best teachers and, most important, making up for the failings of the worst.

Is Fridge Really Necessary?

The fridge is considered necessary. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food list appeared with the label: “Store in the refrigerator.”

In my fridgeless Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus (剩余) bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have ceased, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country.

The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed -natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling….

What refrigeration did promote was marketing-marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the globe in search of a good price.

Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum(嗡嗡响) away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-coo1ed space inside an artificially-heated house -while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge.

The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been insignificant. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

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Will people reduce car use in 20 years？

Nowadays, the ownership of cars is no longer being recognized as a symbol of one’s wealth and social position. Tracking back to the past when only the rich were qualified to possess private cars, we couldn’t help marveling at the historic change such a convenient invention brought to people’s daily lives. Nevertheless, the increase in the number of car owners is spelling many negative effects. These rising problems also cause some people to predict that the use of cars might be reduced in two decades.

Above all, the use of cars remarkably threatens our environment, if such a tendency is not brought under control in time, the Earth will no longer be a suitable place for humans to survive in the future. People have to face the consequence. It is a reality from which no one is able to escape. Every day, thousands of private cars are emitting tons of exhausted gas that seriously pollutes the air. The carbon dioxide leads to the worldwide greenhouse effect, which causes the sea level to rise and produces negative impacts on weather. In addition, more energy is being wasted because of the production of private cars. In order to build a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society, people ought to reduce the use of cars.

In fact, diversified measures are being taken by the government to limit the use of cars. If such a tendency continues, the effect will be shown in the near future. For example, to reach the goal of building a safe and harmonious society, Beijing Traffic Management Bureau has restricted regional traffic in rush hours on working days. A number of private cars are prohibited on no-driving-days.

Last, the advancement of public transportation systems also helps change car owners’ way of travelling. Efforts are being made to construct more agreeable networks of buses, subways, trains and airplanes. In the meanwhile, advances in technology might help cut down the cost of travelling in public vehicles.

“It is important for us to understand that the computing platforms of today will not be able to sustain at-scale implementations of AI algorithms on massive datasets,” said Thirumalai Venkatesan, one of the authors of a paper published in Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing.

“Today’s computing is way too energy-intensive to handle big data. We need to rethink our approaches to computation on all levels: materials, devices and architecture that can enable ultralow energy computing.”

Brain-inspired electronics with organic memristors could offer a functionally promising and cost-effective platform, according to Venkatesan. Memristive devices are electronic devices with an inherent memory that are capable of both storing data and performing computation. Since memristors are functionally analogous to the operation of neurons, the computing units in the brain, they are optimal candidates for brain-inspired computing platforms.

Until now, oxides have been the leading candidate as the optimum material for memristors. Different material systems have been proposed but none have been successful so far.

“Over the last 20 years, there have been several attempts to come up with organic memristors, but none of those have shown any promise,” said Sreetosh Goswami, lead author on the paper. “The primary reason behind this failure is their lack of stability, reproducibility and ambiguity in mechanistic understanding. At a device level, we are now able to solve most of these problems.”

This new generation of organic memristors is developed based on metal azo complex devices, which are the brainchild of Sreebata Goswami, a professor at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Kolkata and another author on the paper.

“In thin films, the molecules are so robust and stable that these devices can eventually be the right choice for many wearable and implantable technologies or a body net, because these could be bendable and stretchable,” said Sreebata Goswami. A body net is a series of wireless sensors that stick to the skin and track health.

The next challenge will be to produce these organic memristors at scale, said Venkatesan.

“Now we are making individual devices in the laboratory. We need to make circuits for large-scale functional implementation of these devices.”

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Blowing a Few Tops

Ever stopped to consider the upside of volcanic eruptions? It’s not all deaths, destruction and hot lava---scientists have a plan to cool the planet by simulating one. It would probably work, but it could have devastating consequence, and there is nothing to stop any country or company from deploying the technology.

Solar geo-engineering(气候工程) involves simulating an erupting volcano by spraying aerosols (气溶胶) into the atmosphere. When they combine with oxygen, droplets of acid form. These droplets reflect sunlight away from Earth, cooling the planet. All good in theory, but the consequences are largely unknown and a few could be disastrous. In a study recently published, researchers led by Anthony Jones, a climate scientist from the University of Exeter, found that using this technology in the Northern hemisphere could reduce the number of tropical cyclones hitting the U.S. and Caribbean. But there’s a worrying problem: more cyclones in the Southern hemisphere and a drought across the Sahel region of Africa. That’s because the entries climate system is linked--- disrupting one region will invariably affect another. How would a nation react if another was causing its weather to get much worse? Would that be an act of war?

There is, however, a case for using solar geo-engineering on a global case. Jones says it could be used to “take the edge of “the temperature increases scientists are predicting. It could be used while the world searches for more effective strategies.

The study also highlights a far bigger problem with solar geo-engineering: its complete lack of regulation. “There is nothing that could stop one country just doing it,” Jones says. “It’s deeply disturbing that we have this technology that could have such a massive influence in the climate, yet there’s just no regulation to stop countries or even organizations from doing it.”

Jones cautions that there is much about the climate system we do not understand, as well as more work that will need to be done before solar geo-engineering is deemed safe—or too dangerous to even discuss.

Advertising plays a major role in the competitive business world. Many industries take advantage of the power of advertising to attract or to win customers away from their business competitors. The influence of advertising is so huge that it causes many people to buy things that they don't want at the start.

Advertising encourages people to buy things they don't want through misleading ideas. Advertising is proven to be a successful tool to stress the features of their product to the public even though it's regarded undesirable such as cigarettes，drugs，alcohol and so on. For example，Dunhill，a cigarette company which sponsors many football teams，seems to be promoting cigarettes to the public. Without the sponsorship，the company will be less known to the public，resulting in fewer sales of cigarettes.

Besides that，advertising has a large influence on the decisions made by the people in their everyday life. Many businesses use advertising as a form of promoting to create awareness about their product in the market. For instance，in a fast food industry，the introduction of a new flavor of burger needs advertising to reach the public while the other burgers require advertising to increase sales. Children，especially，are easily influenced by advertisements and will have the desire to dine at fast food restaurants after that. Although fast food is bad for health，it has successfully become appealing to the public through advertising.

However, advertising plays a part in helping customers to compare a product in terms of price, quality, reliability and so on. Without advertising, it will be very difficult for customers to judge the worthiness of a product. For example, advertisements published by various companies have given the customers the opportunity to choose wisely when they are purchasing an item. Without the power of advertising, customers will be stuck to a brand which may not offer the best choice.