1 . 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. prey     B. internalize     C. attachment     D. initial       E. insufficient F. struggling G. capped H. edge I. imposed     J. suspected   K. ignorance

As colleges and universities nationwide revealed their admission decisions, news broke of a dramatic decline in acceptance rates-and not just at Ivy League schools. The shift meant that many high school students who pinned all their hopes on particular dream schools might find themselves     1     with real disappointment.

Why were admissions so low these years? It’s a number game. These years, colleges saw the number of applicants soar to record-high levels. But considering     2     budgets, the number of spots colleges could offer had to be     3    . As a result, both state schools and private colleges kept seeing their acceptance rates fall rapidly.

It’s not that most students won’t get into colleges at all. Instead, there are more than enough spots nationwide for every qualified applicant to find a place for study. But for many, the school they end up enrolling in may not have been their first, or even third choice. The     4     strike of rejection, in some cases, could be heartbreaking. These are kids who are used to being the best of the best.

But some of the pressure is     5    , without excuses, by students themselves, according to Laurence Steinberg, professor of Psychology. He thinks that Americans fall     6     to their own addiction to school rankings and fame. Students and their parents have formed strong commitments to particular schools long before admission decisions are made. “When they are rejected, it’s like being rejected by a boyfriend or girlfriend,” Steinberg says. “They     7     it: What’s the matter with me? What could I have done differently?”

That emotional     8     is often only about what school name students will paste on their parents’ cars but it may also lead to families’     9     of what may actually be the suitable school for the students.

Actually, painful as the rejection is, in the long run, getting into a high-ranking university doesn’t necessarily mean competitive     10     in terms of job prospects and earnings. A research shows that many students rejected by highly selective schools earn as much as Ivy League graduates. What really matters is how seriously students take their studies.

2 . 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. mobility        B. concerning        C. joblessness        D. upcoming        E. unemployed F. automated       G. deliberately       H. inequality       I. quoted        J. assumed        K. significantly

Will a Robot Really Take Your Job?

It is one of the most widely quoted data of recent years. No report or conference presentation on the future of work is complete without it. It has been pointed to as evidence of a(n)     1     jobs disaster by think-tanks and government agencies. The finding that 47 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being     2     by the mid-2030s comes from a paper written by two Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne. It has since been     3     in more than 4,000 other academic articles. Such misunderstandings reflect the polarized (两极分化的) debate     4     the nature of automation and the future of jobs.

At one extreme are the negativists. They warn of mass technological     5     just around the corner. One advocate of this position, Martin Ford, has written two best-selling books on the dangers of unemployment caused by automation. He worries that middle-class jobs will disappear, economic     6     will cease, and the richest people in a country could “shut themselves away in gated communities, perhaps guarded by self-directed military robots and drones.” The     7     masses will live on a universal basic income.

At the positive end of the debate, classical economists argue that in the past, new technology has always ended up creating more jobs than it has destroyed. It was several decades before industrialization led to     8     higher wages for British workers in the early 1800s. While automation is likely to increase     9     in the short run by pushing some people into lower-paid jobs, it eventually increases the overall size of the economic pie.

Frey is often     10     to be in the first camp. His paper simply wanted to point out that 47 percent of the current jobs in America were more likely to be affected by automation. It got more attention than they would ever have expected. In part, this is because fear sells, particularly when it is stirred up by a misunderstanding.