1 . Traditionally uniforms were manufactured to protect the worker. When they were first designed, it is also likely that all uniforms made symbolic sense---those for the military, for example, were at first_________to terrify the enemy; other uniforms indicated a distinction in ___________---chefs wore white because they worked with flour, but the main chef wore a black hat to show he inspected and supervised.

The last 30 years, however, have seen an increasing__________on their role in mirroring the image of an organization and in uniting the workforce, particularly in “customer facing” industries. From uniforms and workwear has appeared “___________clothing”. “The people you employ are your ambassadors，” says Peter Griffin, managing director of a major retailer in the UK.

“What they say, how they look, and how they behave is of vital importance.” From being a simple means of _______ who is a member of staff, the uniform is emerging as a new channel of marketing communication.

Truly effective marketing through___________images such as uniforms is a subtle art, however. How we look sends all sorts of powerful messages to other people. Dark colours give a sense of _________while lighter colour shades suggest people are approachable. Certain dress style creates a sense of conservatism(守旧)，while others a sense of _________to new ideas. If the company is selling quality, then it must have quality uniforms. If it is selling style, its uniforms must be stylish. If it wants to appear_________, everybody can’t look exactly the same.

But turning corporate philosophies into the right combination of colour, style, degree of branding and uniformity is not always _________. According to Company Clothing magazine, there are 1,000 companies supplying the workwear and corporate clothing market. Of these, 22 ________ for 85% of the total sales---￡380 million in 1994.

A successful uniform needs to _________two key sets of needs. On one hand, no uniform will work if staff feel uncomfortable or ugly. On the other hand, it is ________if the look doesn’t express the business’s marketing strategy. The greatest challenge in this respect is time. When it comes to human awareness, first impression counts. Customers will assess the way staff look in just a few seconds, and that few seconds will_________their attitudes from then on. Those few seconds can be so important that big companies are prepared to ________years, and millions of pounds, getting them right.

1.

A．intended

B．pretended

C．extended

D．attended

2.

A．age

B．gender

C．education

D．status

3.

A．preference

B．argument

C．interest

D．emphasis

4.

A．educational

B．political

C．corporate

D．academic

5.

A．checking

B．identifying

C．operating

D．introducing

6.

A．studio

B．audio

C．visual

D．factual

7.

A．clarity

B．authority

C．responsibility

D．possibility

8.

A．kindness

B．safeness

C．quickness

D．openness

9.

A．ambitious

B．serious

C．creative

D．similar

10.

A．easy

B．wrong

C．difficult

D．tough

11.

A．exchange

B．call

C．stand

D．account

12.

A．establish

B．balance

C．neglect

D．quit

13.

A．pointless

B．important

C．useful

D．careless

14.

A．keep

B．shape

C．draw

D．value

15.

A．develop

B．take

C．cost

D．spend

2 . This Is How Scandinavia Got Great

Almost everybody admires the Nordic model. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness.

Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous(同质的) in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established.     1    

The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in our country recently. They realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful “folk schools” for the least educated among them. They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society.

    2     The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives.

Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — the student can read, do math and recite the facts of biology.     3     It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town.

The Nordic educators worked hard to cultivate each student’s sense of connection to the nation. Before the 19th century, most Europeans identified themselves in local and not national terms.     4     The idea was to create in the mind of the student a sense of wider circles of belonging — from family to town to nation — and an eagerness to assume shared responsibility for the whole.

That educational push seems to have had a lasting influence on the culture. Whether in Stockholm or Minneapolis, Scandinavians have a tendency to joke about the way their sense of responsibility is always nagging at them. They have the lowest rates of corruption in the world. They have a distinctive sense of the relationship between personal freedom and communal responsibility.

A．Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger academic responsibility.

B．What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.

C．Bildung is designed to change the way students see the world.

D．But the Nordic curriculum conveyed to students a pride in, say, their Danish history, folklore and heritage.

E．They look at education differently than we do.

F．The Nordic educators also worked hard to develop the student’s internal awareness.

3 . There was a time when we thought humans were special in so many ways. Now we know better. We are not the only species that feels emotions, or follows a moral code. Neither are we the only ones with personalities, cultures and the ability to design and use tools. Yet we have all agree that one thing, at least, makes us unique: we alone have the ability of language.

It turns out that we are not so special in this aspect either. Key to the revolutionary reassessment of our talent for communication is the way we think about language itself. Where once it was seen as an unusual object, today scientists find it is more productive to think of language as a group of abilities. Viewed this way, it becomes apparent that the component parts of language are not as unique as the whole.

Take gesture, arguably the starting point for language. Until recently, it was considered uniquely human - but not any more. Mike Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others have collected a list of gestures observed in monkeys and some other animals, which reveals that gestures plays a large role in their communication. Ape(猿) gestures can involve touch, vocalising or eye movement, and individuals wait until they have another ape’s attention before making visual or auditory gestures. If their gestures go unacknowledged, they will often repeat them.

In an experiment carried out in 2006 by Erica Cartmill and Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews in the UK, they got a person to sit on a chair with some highly desirable food such as banana to one side of apes and some undesirable food such as vegetables to the other. The apes, who could see the person and the food from their enclosures, gestured at their human partners to encourage them to push the desirable food their way. If the person showed incomprehension and offered the vegetables, the animals would change their gestures - just as a human would in a similar situation. If the human seemed to understand while being somewhat confused, giving only half the preferred food, the apes would repeat and exaggerate their gestures - again in exactly the same way a human would. Such findings highlight the fact that the gestures of the animals are not merely inborn but are learned, flexible and under voluntary control - all characteristics that are considered preconditions for human-like communication.

1. It is agreed that compared with all the other animals, only human beings ________.

A．own the ability to show their personalities

B．are capable of using language to communicate

C．have moral standards and follow them in society

D．are intelligent enough to release and control emotions

2. According to the passage, humans are not so special in language ability because language ________.

A．involve some abilities that can be mastered by animals

B．is a talent impossibly owned by other animals

C．can be divided into different components

D．are productive for some talented animals

3. What can we learn from that experiment by Cartmill and Byrne?

A．Apes can use language to communicate with the help of humans.

B．Repeating and exaggerating gestures is vital in language communication.

C．Some animals can learn to express and communicate through some trials.

D．The preferred food stimulates some animals to use language to communicate.

4. What is probably the best title of the language?

A．Language involves gestures!	B．Animals language - gestures!
C．So you think humans are unique?	D．The similarity between humans and apes.

4 . Never in recorded history has a language been as widely spoken as English is today. The reason why millions are learning it is simple: it is the language of international business and,     _______, the key to prosperity.

David Graddol, the author of English Next, says it is _______ to view the story of English simply as success for its native speakers in North America, Britain and Ireland, and Australasia — but that would be a mistake. Global English has entered a more complex stage, changing in ways that the English-speaking countries cannot control and might not _______.

An important question one might ask is: whose English will it be in the future? Non-native speakers now _______ native English speakers by three to one. The majority of encounters in English today take place between non-native speakers. According to David Graddol, many business meetings held in English appear to run more smoothly when no native English speakers are _______. This is because native speakers are often poor at ensuring that they are understood in international discussions. They tend to think they need to avoid longer Latin-based words, but in fact _______ problems are more often caused by their use of idioms, metaphors, phrasal verbs, etc.

Professor Barbara Seidlhofer, Professor of English and Applied Linguistic at the University of Vienna, records and transcribes spoken English interactions between speakers of the language around the world. She says her team has noticed that non-native speakers are _______ standard English grammar in several ways. Even the most experienced speakers sometimes omit the “s” in the third person singular. Many omit definite and indefinite articles where they are _______ in standard English, or put them in where standard English does not use them. Nouns that are not plural in native-speaker English are used as plurals by non-native speakers (e.g, “informations,” “knowledges,” “advices”). Other variations include “make a discussion,” “discuss about something,” or “phone to somebody.” Many native English speakers will insist these are just _______. “Knowledges” and “phone to somebody” are simply wrong. Many non-native speakers who teach English around the world would __________. But language changes, and so do concepts of grammatical __________.

Those who insist on standard English grammar remain in a(n) __________ position. Academics who want their work published in international journals have to obey the grammatical rules followed by native English-speaking elites (精英).

But spoken English is another matter. Why should non-native speakers bother with what native speakers regard as correct? Their main aim, __________, is to be understood by one another, and in most cases there is no native speaker present.

Professor Seidlhofer says, “I think that what we are looking at is the __________ of a new international attitude, the recognition and awareness that in many international contexts non-native speakers do not need to speak like native speakers, to compare themselves to them, and thus always feel ‘__________’.”

1.

A．however

B．therefore

C．otherwise

D．instead

2.

A．relieving

B．shocking

C．tempting

D．disappointing

3.

A．accept

B．oppose

C．mind

D．doubt

4.

A．outnumber

B．overlook

C．upgrade

D．underestimate

5.

A．attentive

B．agreeable

C．energetic

D．present

6.

A．diagnosis

B．comprehension

C．disturbance

D．concentration

7.

A．creating

B．improving

C．varying

D．obeying

8.

A．edited

B．neglected

C．avoided

D．required

9.

A．mistakes

B．coincidences

C．exceptions

D．excuses

10.

A．fear

B．object

C．agree

D．fight

11.

A．ignorance

B．evolution

C．correctness

D．guidance

12.

A．honored

B．mysterious

C．falling

D．powerful

13.

A．by comparison

B．after all

C．on purpose

D．in reality

14.

A．disappearance

B．emergence

C．criticism

D．evaluation

15.

A．less good

B．less lonely

C．more alive

D．more adapted

5 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. broadcast        B. estimates          C. involves          D. performing E. barriers        F. themes        G. amateur        H. hire I. boost          J. demanding       K. proving

“MEN ARE adorable,” begins Yang Li in a sketch first aired last year. “But mysterious...After all, they can look so average and yet be so full of confidence.” It seemed a gentle dig by the newly crowned “punchline queen” of “Rock and Roast”, a television show starring     1     comics. But as Ms Yang’s fans spread the joke, male netizens threw a tantrum. Last month a group of them reported the 28-year-old to the     2     regulator for “sexism”.

Long the stars of Chinese joke-making, men are unhappy about being the butt (笑柄) of it. Chizi, a popular male contestant on “Rock and Roast” with a special liking for boorish jokes, sniffed that Ms Yang was “not     3     comedy”. Guo Degang, a master of xiangsheng, recently said he would not     4     women for his troupe (剧团) (“out of respect”, he said).

Western-style stand-up comedy has taken off since it appeared in China a decade ago. It is     5     to be a more accessible art form for female comics. With stand-up, says Evangeline Z, a 27-year-old comedian in Shanghai, “there are no     6     to joining as long as you can talk.” Moreover, women bring new     7     to the stage.

The show, which began in 2017, has been a(n)     8     for Chinese stand-up and female participation in it. Evangeline Z says the form of comedy is “huge” in Shanghai. And she     9     up to half of the city’s 50-odd weekly performances are by women. But male and female comics alike warn spectators that what they are about to say could be offensive and they should not take offence. Xiao Ju, a 22-year-old part-time comedian, also in Shanghai, says that showgoers expect to come in for “a bit of easy laughter”, so are angry when the joke reveals something about themselves.

Ms Yang has used the backlash against her gag to create a new one. It     10     an exchange with a male colleague who approvingly notes her testing of men’s limits. Her mock-incredulous riposte: “Do men have limits?”

7 . This era of “Industry 4. 0” is being driven by the same technological advances that enable the capabilities of the smartphones in our pockets. It is a mix of low-cost and high-power computers, high-speed communication and artificial intelligence. This will produce smarter robots with better sensing and communication abilities that can _________ different tasks, and even adjust their work to meet demand without the input of humans.

In the manufacturing industry, where robots have arguably made the most headway of any division, this will mean a(n) _________ shift from centralized to decentralized cooperative production. _________ robots focused on single, fixed, high - speed operations and required a highly skilled human workforce to operate and maintain them. Industry 4. 0 machines are flexible, cooperative and can operate more independently which _________ removes the need for a highly skilled workforce.

For large-scale manufacturers, Industry 4. 0 means their robots will be able to sense their environment and communicate in an industrial network that can be run and _________ remotely. Each machine will produce large amounts of data that can be _________ studied using what is known as “big data” analysis. This will help _________ ways to improve operating performance and production quality across the whole plat, for example by better predicting when repairing is needed and automatically _________ it.

For _________ manufacturing businesses, Industry 4. 0 will make it cheaper and easier to use robots. It will create machines that can be rearranged to perform __________ jobs and adjusted to work on a more diverse product range and different production volumes. This part is already beginning to benefit from robots designed to cooperate with human workers and analyse their own work to look for __________.

While these machines are getting smarter, they are still not as smart as us. Today's industrial artificial intelligence operates at a __________ level, which gives the appearance of human intelligence exhibited by machines, but designed by humans.

What's coming next is known as “deep learning”. Similar to big data analysis, it involves processing large quantities of data in real time to __________ what is the best action to take, The __________ is that the machine learns from the data so it can improve its decision making. A perfect example of deep learning was __________   by Google's Alpha Go software, which taught itself to beat the world's greatest Go players.

1.

A．compare with

B．adapt to

C．pick out

D．hold on

2.

A．extensive

B．accidental

C．convenient

D．dramatic

3.

A．Traditional

B．Removable

C．Fashionable

D．Potential

4.

A．temporarily

B．thoroughly

C．eventually

D．initially

5.

A．arranged

B．evaluated

C．monitored

D．composed

6.

A．gradually

B．collectively

C．similarly

D．approximately

7.

A．identify

B．reserve

C．exploit

D．indicate

8.

A．dominating

B．imposing

C．eliminating

D．scheduling

9.

A．high-speed

B．mass-produced

C．small-to-medium

D．multi-cultural

10.

A．multiple

B．feasible

C．profitable

D．independent

11.

A．promotions

B．improvements

C．highlights

D．resolutions

12.

A．separate

B．peculiar

C．narrow

D．mysterious

13.

A．come up with

B．account for

C．give way to

D．make decisions about

14.

A．difference

B．commission

C．phenomenon

D．expectation

15.

A．introduced

B．described

C．prepared

D．demonstrated

8 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. cultivate       B. reassuring       C. opposing       D. objective       E. confidence F. evidence       G. perceived       H. functioning       I. estimate       J. existing K. scientism

Why Doubt Is Essential To Science

The confidence people place in science is frequently based not on what it really is, but on what people would like it to be. When I asked students at the beginning of the year how they would define science, many of them replied that it is a(n)     1     way of discovering certainties about the world. But science cannot provide certainties. For example, a majority of Americans trust science as long as it does not challenge their     2     beliefs. To the question “When science disagrees with the teachings of your religion, which one do you believe?” 58 percent of North Americans favor religion; 33 percent science; and 6 percent say “it depends.”

But doubt in science is a feature, not a bug. Indeed, science, when properly     3     , questions accepted facts and leads to both new knowledge and new questions — not certainty. Doubt does not     4     trust, nor does it help public understanding. So why should people trust a process that seems to require a troublesome state of uncertainty without always providing solid solutions?

As a historian of science, I would argue that it's the responsibility of scientists and historians of science to show that the real power of science lies precisely in what is often     5     as its weakness: its drive to question and challenge a possible explanation. Indeed, the scientific approach requires changing our understanding of the natural world whenever new     6     emerges from either experimentation or observation. Scientific findings are hypotheses that contain the state of knowledge at a given moment. In the long run, many of are challenged and even overturned. Doubt might be troubling, but it stimulates us towards a better understanding; certainties, as     7     as they may seem, in fact block the scientific process.

Scientists understand this, but in the     8     fore between the public and science, there are two significant traps. One is a form of blind     9     — that is, a belief in the capacity of science to solve all problems. And the other is a form of relativism borne out of a lack of     10     in the very existence of truth.

9 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Ocean exploration changed human history

One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans. Communities separated by thousands of miles     1    (bring) into contact and religious ideas have spread across the waters, while artistic creativity has been motivated by the experience of seeing the products of different civilizations. Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but     2     contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became popular with millions of people from Sweden to the United States.

We tend to hold the view     3     the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the lands of the Indies. These were sailors     4     Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men     5     give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans — and there were also scores of merchants who followed in     6     route, taking full advantage of new knowledge about the open ocean to develop trade links across the world,     7     laid the foundation for modern globalization. These were the people who really mastered the oceans and brought the continents into contact.

Since then, the oceans have only continued     8    (tie) the world together — most dramatically when new routes were literally carved out, with the building of the Sues Canal in the 19th century and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The first goods to pass through the Panama Canal consisted of a cargo of     9    (tin) pineapples from Hawaii. The Pacific and the Atlantic were     10    (closely) tied together than ever before.

10 . For the longest time, the predominant description about renewable energy featured awkward technologies, high costs, and burdensome allowance. In the _______ of strict and far-reaching policy changes, the chances for mass adoption seemed slim. Electric vehicles (EVs) simply couldn’t go the distance, and LED lights were unattractive and _______.

But now that these technologies have come of age, a new story is being written. Around the world, businesses, governments, and households are taking advantage of more cost-effective low-carbon technologies.

_______ advances in information technologies (IT), green solutions can be introduced into business operations successfully. And as public support for these technologies has grown, so have the _______ for scaling up to a fully sustainable energy system.

As in any rapid transition, a full understanding of what is happening has _______ events. Many present energy producers find it hard to believe that their world is undergoing a revolutionary change, so they insist that their heavily polluting technologies will remain _______ and necessary for some time to come. Journalists, too, describe the transition with a degree of _______, because it is their job to be suspicious. And politicians and regulators are cautious to adopt a new perspective, _______ they are already struggling to keep up with the pace of change in the energy industry.

To be sure, _______ doesn’t come without setbacks, as the recent growth in energy-related greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions shows. Yet there is no doubt that the future of energy will be __________ different from the recent past. In fact, the __________ is happening even faster than we think, for example, coal-fired power plants are shutting down faster than ever, and plans for new natural-gas plants are being replaced with more cost-effective wind and solar options. And as the shift toward renewables gains good trends, it will be easier for elected officials to pursue more climate-friendly policies and regulations, thereby creating a(n) __________ circle of change.

As the green transition comes of age, it will offer solutions to all of humanity’s energy needs, placing a clean, prosperous and secure low-carbon future well within reach. Yet even as we hug __________, we must not lose sight of the fact that climate change is speeding up. With GHG emissions __________ to rise, the future of humanity hangs in the balance. One hopes that the shift to __________ energy will tip the scale in our favor.

1.

A．license

B．absence

C．application

D．promotion

2.

A．invisible

B．unbelievable

C．inevitable

D．unaffordable

3.

A．Instead of

B．Owing to

C．In case of

D．According to

4.

A．resources

B．revolutions

C．prospects

D．priorities

5.

A．caught up with

B．compared with

C．taken place of

D．fallen behind

6.

A．relevant

B．inferior

C．synthetic

D．experimental

7.

A．mixture

B．caution

C．conflict

D．approval

8.

A．in case

B．so that

C．even though

D．the moment

9.

A．significance

B．invention

C．happiness

D．progress

10.

A．dramatically

B．economically

C．independently

D．equivalently

11.

A．interaction

B．modernization

C．motivation

D．transformation

12.

A．natural

B．potential

C．positive

D．original

13.

A．influence

B．optimism

C．estimation

D．extension

14.

A．starting

B．failing

C．emerging

D．continuing

15.

A．sustainable

B．traditional

C．available

D．industrial