1 . In the 19th century, three pioneering women struggled to find their place in a male-controlled field. Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake—among the first female doctors—are the heroines of Olivia Campbell’s new book. The story is lively and interesting, and the main characters are full of personality and individualism. Jex-Blake is described as “big and confident, a determined educational reformer with large eyes and an even lager personality”. Garrett Anderson, referred to as “Lizzie” throughout, was equally determined but also educated, and polite. The result is a great read for anyone looking for an introduction to the history of medical women.
The biographies of the three women are woven into a bigger, grander story about medicine in the 19th century and it is slow and unwilling acceptance of female physicians (医师). Though British, Blackwell attended medical school in the US. “Lizzie” was admitted to the medical school only via a loophole (漏洞) in the admissions policy. And Jex-Blake’s attempt to sit a medical exam in Edinburgh was met with a storm of protest.
Unsurprisingly, the three heroines faced many difficulties, but their efforts finally proved successful. Women in White Coats is, therefore, a successful tale of social progress. The final concluding chapter paints a sunny picture of present-day equality within the medical profession. However, in its efforts to tell an inspiring story, the book glosses over continuing problems within the profession today. Though more women than men now graduate from medical school, they face struggles with career progression and sexism.
We need more books that don’t offer a “great white men” approach to history. However, they have to deal with the incomplete and uneven nature of progress. Inspiring as it is to read stories of heroines trying hard and succeeding against the odds, that isn’t the whole picture. Medicine might be better for women now than in the past, but the problems of the Victorian era continue to exist and we still have far to go.
1. Who might particularly enjoy reading Women in white Coats?| A．People favoring science fiction novels. |
| B．Researchers studying great white men in history. |
| C．Those interested in female pioneers in medicine. |
| D．Students curious about the development of medicine. |
| A．To praise their strong personality. |
| B．To state the success of women in medicine. |
| C．To prove their determination and confidence. |
| D．To show the challenges faced by female physicians. |
| A．Solves. | B．Ignores. | C．Stresses. | D．Defends. |
| A．Gender equality has been achieved in medicine. |
| B．The problems faced by women are a thing of the past. |
| C．History books should inspire people with women’s success. |
| D．History books should cover the successes and struggles of women. |
2 . Albert Einstein’s 1915 masterpiece “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” is the first and still the best introduction to the subject, and I recommend it as such to students. But it probably wouldn’t be publishable in a scientific journal today.
Why not? After all, it would pass with flying colours the tests of correctness and significance. And while popular belief holds that the paper was incomprehensible to its first readers, in fact many papers in theoretical physics are much more difficult.
As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “There was a time when the newspapers said that only 12 men understood the theory of relativity. I do believe there might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than 12.”
No, the problem is its style. It starts with a leisurely philosophical discussion of space and time and then continues with an exposition of known mathematics. Those two sections, which would be considered extraneous today, take up half the paper. Worse, there are zero citations of previous scientists’ work, nor are there any graphics. Those features might make a paper not even get past the first editors.
A similar process of professionalization has transformed other parts of the scientific landscape. Requests for research time at major observatories or national laboratories are more rigidly structured. And anything involving work with human subjects, or putting instruments in space, involves piles of paperwork.
We see it also in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the Nobel Prize of high school science competitions. In the early decades of its 78-year history, the winning projects were usually the sort of clever but naive, amateurish efforts one might expect of talented beginners working on their own. Today, polished work coming out of internships(实习) at established laboratories is the norm.
These professionalizing tendencies are a natural consequence of the explosive growth of modern science. Standardization and system make it easier to manage the rapid flow of papers, applications and people. But there are serious downsides. A lot of unproductive effort goes into jumping through bureaucratic hoops(繁文缛节), and outsiders face entry barriers at every turn.
Of course, Einstein would have found his way to meeting modern standards and publishing his results. Its scientific core wouldn’t have changed, but the paper might not be the same taste to read.
1. According to Richard Feynman, Einstein’s 1915 paper ________.| A．was a classic in theoretical physics |
| B．turned out to be comprehensible |
| C．needed further improvement |
| D．attracted few professionals |
| A．Unrealistic. | B．Irrelevant. |
| C．Unattractive. | D．Imprecise. |
| A．The application of research findings. |
| B．The principle of scientific research. |
| C．The selection of young talents. |
| D．The evaluation of laboratories. |
| A．What makes Einstein great? |
| B．Will science be professionalized? |
| C．Could Einstein get published today? |
| D．How will modern science make advances? |
3 . The expression, "everybody's doing it," is very much at the center of the concept of peer pressure. It is a social influence applied on an individual in order to get that person to act or believe in a(n)
People are social creatures by nature, and so it is hardly
For certain individuals, seeking social acceptance is so important that it becomes a(n)
However, peer pressure is not always negative. A student whose friends are good at
Although peer pressure is sometimes quite obvious, it can also be so
| A．traditional | B．similar | C．peculiar | D．opposite |
| A．understandable | B．believable | C．acceptable | D．surprising |
| A．disapproval | B．failure | C．absence | D．independence |
| A．uncertain | B．practical | C．impossible | D．vague |
| A．promotes | B．prevents | C．simplifies | D．increases |
| A．challenge | B．inspiration | C．promise | D．addiction |
| A．recognize | B．abandon | C．decrease | D．define |
| A．avoid | B．encourage | C．decline | D．punish |
| A．pressured | B．respected | C．delighted | D．regretted |
| A．catch sight of | B．stay away from | C．make fun of | D．keep up with |
| A．competitions | B．interaction | C．academics | D．adaptation |
| A．knowledge | B．interest | C．assistance | D．influence |
| A．abstract | B．ridiculous | C．subtle | D．reasonable |
| A．consciousness | B．motivation | C．instinct | D．encouragement |
| A．motivation | B．danger | C．support | D．achievement |
1. How does the man feel about joining the association?
| A．Uninterested. | B．Relaxed. | C．Worried. |
| A．£5. | B．£10. | C．£35. |
| A．Once a month. | B．Twice a month. | C．Once a week. |
| A．Students doing sports after study. |
| B．Senior students helping other students out. |
| C．Students making speeches on various topics. |
5 . Microsoft announced this week that its facial-recognition system is now more accurate in identifying people of color, touting (吹嘘）its progress at tackling one of the technology’s biggest biases (偏见).
But critics, citing Microsoft’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly seized on how that improved technology might be used. The agency contracts with Microsoft for cloud-computing tools that the tech giant says is largely limited to office work but can also include face recognition.
Columbia University professor Alondra Nelson tweeted, “We must stop confusing ‘inclusion’ in more ‘diverse’ surveillance (监管）systems with justice and equality.”
Facial-recognition systems more often misidentify people of color because of a long-running data problem： The massive sets of facial images they train on skew heavily toward white men. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study this year of the face-recognition systems designed by Microsoft, IBM and the China-based Face++ found that facial-recognition systems consistently giving the wrong gender for famous women of color including Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Shirley Chisholm, the first black female member of Congress.
The companies have responded in recent months by pouring many more photos into the mix, hoping to train the systems to better tell the differences among more than just white faces. IBM said Wednesday it used 1 million facial images, taken from the photo-sharing site Flickr, to build the “world’s largest facial data-set” which it will release publicly for other companies to use.
IBM and Microsoft say that allowed its systems to recognize gender and skin tone with much more precision. Microsoft said its improved system reduced the error rates for darker-skinned men and women by “up to 20 times,” and reduced error rates for all women by nine times.
Those improvements were heralded（宣布）by some for taking aim at the prejudices in a rapidly spreading technology, including potentially reducing the kinds of false positives that could lead police officers misidentify a criminal suspect.
But others suggested that the technology's increasing accuracy could also make it more marketable. The system should be accurate, “but that’s just the beginning, not the end, of their ethical obligation,” said David Robinson, managing director of the think tank Upturn.
At the center of that debate is Microsoft, whose multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE came under fire amid the agency’s separation of migrant parents and children at the Mexican border.
In an open letter to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella urging the company to cancel that contract, Microsoft workers pointed to a company blog post in January that said Azure Government would help ICE “accelerate recognition and identification.” “We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits,” the letter said.
A Microsoft spokesman, pointing to a statement last week from Nadella, said the company’s “current cloud engagement” with ICE supports relatively anodyne（温和的）office work such as “mail, calendar, massaging and document management workloads.” The company said in a statement that its facial-recognition improvements are “part of our going work to address the industry-wide and societal issues on bias.”
Criticism of face recognition will probably expand as the technology finds its way into more arenas, including airports, stores and schools. The Orlando police department said this week that it would not renew its use of Amazon. com’s Rekognition system.
Companies ”have to acknowledge their moral involvement in the downstream use of their technology,”
Robinson said. “The impulse is that they’re going to put a product out there and wash their hands of the consequences. That’s unacceptable.”
1. What is “one of the technology’s biggest biases” in Paragraph 1?| A．Class bias. | B．Regional difference. |
| C．Professional prejudice. | D．Racial discrimination. |
| A．Justice and equality have been truly achieved. |
| B．It is due to the expansion of the photo database. |
| C．It has already solved all the social issues on biases. |
| D．The separation of immigrant parents from their children can be avoided. |
| A．Data problems. | B．The market value. |
| C．The application field. | D．A moral issue |
| A．Skeptical. | B．Approval. |
| C．Optimistic. | D．Neutral. |
| A．companies had better hide from responsibilities |
| B．companies deny problems with its technical process |
| C．companies should not launch new products on impulse |
| D．companies should be responsible for the new product and the consequences |
| A．The wide use of Microsoft system | B．Fears of facial-recognition technology |
| C．The improvement of Microsoft system | D．Failure of recognizing black women |
1. What is the talk mainly about?
| A．A town. | B．A hospital. | C．An organization. |
| A．It is interesting. | B．It is successful. | C．It is difficult. |
| A．The ability to handle pressure. |
| B．The ability to get along with others. |
| C．The ability to cope with emergency incidents. |
| A．Doctors. | B．Building engineers. | C．Food experts. |
7 . For the second time in two years, an American has won one of the most respected global awards in literature. At a ceremony in London on Tuesday night, George Saunders accepted the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel.
The book is an impressive and experimental ghost story set in 1862. It explores the death of Willie Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, who died of fever during the second year of the Civil War. Saunders, a Tibetan Buddhist, imagines Willie’s experiences in the “bardo,” a Buddhist state between the worlds of the living and the dead where Willie communicates with other dead souls, and where he watches his father visit his entombed body.
Writing in The Guardian earlier this year, Saunders described the process of creating the novel: “There is something wonderful in watching a figure appear from the stone, feeling the presence of something within you ... and also beyond you — something consistent, willful, kind and generous, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground.”
Saunders was the bookmakers’ favorite to win the award, but the victory by an American writer immediately after Paul Beatty claimed the prize for his novel The Sellout is controversial. Before 2014, the Man Booker was qualified only to writers from the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland. The decision to allow American writers to enter has disappointed authors including A.S. Byatt and Julian Barnes, who argue that the award’s main purpose was giving exposure to writers who were little-known in the broader American literary market. “The Americans have got enough prizes of their own,” Barnes told the Radio Times last year. Ron Charles, the book critic for The Washington Post, has also argued against the inclusion of Americans. “For any serious reader of fiction in this country,” Charles wrote in September, “the Americanization of the Booker Prize is a lost opportunity to learn about great books that haven’t already been publicly announced.”
Baroness Young, The Telegraph reported, stated that the judging panel was concerned only with the worth of the books on the shortlist (入围名单), which also included Mohsin Hamid’s refugee parable Exit West, Paul Auster’s complex epic 4321, Emily Fridlund’s coming-of-age tale The History of Wolves, and Fiona Mozley’s rural fable Elmet. “We’re only concerned with the book and what that book is telling us,” Young said. “Nationality is just not an issue.”
For Saunders, the prize is an extraordinary recognition of his first attempt into full-length novels. The 58-year-old writer was previously best-known for his short stories, which have won him four National Magazine Awards for fiction and a MacArthur Fellowship. He came to writing relatively late in life after studying geophysical engineering and working as a technical writer until 1996. The idea for Lincoln in the Bardo came to him, he wrote in The Guardian, during a visit to Washington, D.C., when his wife told him the story of a grief-stricken President Lincoln visiting Willie’s tomb to hold his son’s body. Saunders has often noted that the experience of writing for him feels like a way to transform pain and division into something positive. The author Zadie Smith, speaking with Saunders for Interview, noted that “what sets him apart is his willingness not only to go into the heart of darkness but to suggest possible routes out.”
1. Ron Charles’ words intended to tell us that ________.| A．Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo was not serious |
| B．the Man Booker shouldn’t include works written by American |
| C．the Man Booker lost the opportunity to learn about great works from America |
| D．the judging panel was concerned only with the worth of books |
| A．Mohsin Hamid. | B．Paul Beatty. |
| C．Julian Barnes. | D．Emily Fridlund. |
| A．the prize was awarded based more on content than on nationality |
| B．people should pay more attention to the nationality of the writers |
| C．the Telegraph supports Baroness Young’s opinion on the books on the shortlist |
| D．4321, The History of Wolves and Elmet were of the same significance as Exit West |
| A．The experience of travelling in Washington D.C. |
| B．To lead himself to his own higher ground. |
| C．To go into the hearts of darkness and to suggest possible routes out. |
| D．His wife’s description of Lincoln holding his son’s body. |
8 . Millions of Americans sit behind a computer screen, chained to their desk all day because the vast majority of stable, high-paying professions(职业) are “office jobs”. However, having a successful career does not require you to sit behind a desk and plug away at a computer all day.
In fact, there are a large number of non-desk jobs in a variety of industries that are growing and offering workers a direct path to the middle class, according to a new analysis of labor market information from CareerBuilder. While most of the highest-paying non-desk jobs are medical professions that require a doctoral or professional degree, there are 170 non-desk professions that pay $15 per hour or more, do not require a bachelor’s degree(学士学位) for a typical entry-level position, and have seen at least 6 percent job growth over the last four years.
“The US workforce has gradually changed to office-based work because of the rise of the professional service economy and productivity gains associated with information technology,” Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources Officer at CareerBuilder, said in a statement. “But some of the healthiest areas of job growth year after year are in middle-skill professions that don’t require workers to sit in front of computer monitors and phones for 40 hours a week.”
Here are the top-paying jobs that don’t require you to work at a desk in various kinds — none of which require a four-year college degree — and their hourly salary(工资) and growth rate since 2010: professional assistants(助理) : $26.57, 14 percent; elevator repairers: $37.81, 6 percent; mechanical engineering technicians: $25.19, 10 percent; and electromechanical(电动机械的) technicians: $24.68, 8 percent.
While they tend to pay less than traditional office jobs, non-desk professions provide a variety of benefits. Haefner points to a 2014 CareerBuilder survey that discovered workers who don’t work at a desk all day are less likely to complain about their work environment and less likely to report being overweight.
1. What does the underlined phrase “plug away” in the first paragraph probably mean?| A．Turn off a switch. | B．Look for a job. |
| C．Keep on working | D．Give up working |
| A．A non-desk job may provide you with a middle-class life. |
| B．The last four years has seen an increase in desk jobs. |
| C．The college degree is the ticket to a position. |
| D．A non-desk job cannot offer you a secure life. |
| A．High salary. | B．Medicine. |
| C．Information technology. | D．Service industries. |
| A．Elevator repairers. | B．Professional assistants. |
| C．Electromechanical technicians. | D．Mechanical engineering technicians. |
9 . Technological change is everywhere and affects every aspect of life, mostly for the better. However, social changes brought about by new technology are often mistaken for a change in attitudes.
An example at hand is the involvement of parents in the lives of their children who are attending college. Surveys (调查) on this topic suggests that parents today continue to be “very” or “somewhat” overly-protective even after their children move into college dormitories. The same surveys also indicate that the rate of parental involvement is greater today than it was a generation ago. This is usually interpreted as a sign that today’s parents are trying to manage their children’s lives past the point where this behavior is appropriate.
However, greater parental involvement does not necessarily indicate that parents are failing to let go of their “adult” children.
In the context (背景) of this discussion, it seems valuable to first find out the cause of change in the case of parents’ involvement with their grown children. If parents of earlier generations had wanted to be in touch with their college-age children frequently, would this have been possible? Probably not. On the other hand, does the possibility of frequent communication today mean that the urge to do so wasn’t present a generation ago? Many studies show that older parents - today’s grandparents - would have called their children more often if the means and cost of doing so had not been a barrier.
Furthermore, studies show that finances are the most frequent subject of communication between parents and their college children. The fact that college students are financially dependent on their parents is nothing new; nor are requests for more money to be sent from home. This phenomenon is neither good nor bad; it is a fact of college life, today and in the past.
Thanks to the advanced technology, we live in an age of bettered communication. This has many implications well beyond the role that parents seem to play in the lives of their children who have left for college. But it is useful to bear in mind that all such changes come from the technology and not some imagined desire by parents to keep their children under their wings.
1. The surveys inform us of ______.| A．the development of technology |
| B．the changes of adult children’s behavior |
| C．the parents’ over-protection of their college children |
| D．the means and expenses of students’ communication |
| A．parents today are more protective than those in the past |
| B．the disadvantages of new technology outweigh its advantages |
| C．technology explains greater parental involvement with their children |
| D．parents’ changed attitudes lead to college children’s delayed Independence |
| A．negative | B．supportive |
| C．understandable | D．sceptical |
| A．Technology or Attitude |
| B．Dependence or Independence |
| C．Family Influence or Social Changes |
| D．College Management or Communication Advancement |
A． | B． |
C． | D． |
China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS)（中国公安部） has urged police nationwide to strengthen checks and punishment on the motorists who do not give way to pedestrians.
During the past three years, 3,898 people were killed in 14,000 accidents happened on crosswalks in China, 90 percent of which involved motorists failing to give way to pedestrians, according to the Traffic Management Bureau of the MPS.
Traffic police should step up patrols and strengthen monitoring with surveillance cameras （摄像头）on streets, said the bureau, calling for tougher enforcement and serious punishment.
For a safer environment for pedestrians, traffic bureaus(交通局） nationwide will provide better traffic signs, install more traffic lights, and help build more underground passages or pedestrian bridges.
Beijing traffic police on Thursday began enforcing a fine of 200 yuan ($29) for motorists who fail to give way to pedestrians on crosswalks.
The violation will also result in a loss of three demerit points. When motorists loose all 12 points they must retake the driver’s license test.
【写作内容】
1. 用约30个单词写出上文概要；
2. 用约120个单词发表你的观点，内容包括：
（1）分析要“礼让行人”的原因，（至少两点）；
（2）写出你的解决措施。
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