1 . Hardware in general, and smartphones in particular, have become a huge environmental and health problem in the Global South’s landfill sites(垃圾填埋场).
Electronic waste (e-waste) currently takes up 5 percent of all global waste, and it is set to increase rapidly as more of us own more than one smartphone, laptop and power bank. They end up in places like Agbogbloshie on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital, Accra. It is the biggest e-waste dump in the world, where 10,000 informal workers walk through tons of abandoned goods as part of an informal recycling process. They risk their health searching for the precious metals that are found in abandoned smartphones.
But Agbogbloshie legally should not exist. The Basel Convention, a 1989 treaty, aims to prevent developed nations from unauthorized dumping of e-waste in less developed countries. The e-waste industry, however, circumvents regulation by exporting e-waste labelled as “secondhand goods” to poor countries like Ghana, knowing full well that it is heading for a landfill site.
A recent report found Agbogbloshie contained some of the most dangerous chemicals. This is not surprising: smart phones contain chemicals like mercury(水银), lead and even arsenic(砷). Reportedly, one egg from a free-range chicken in Agbogbloshie contained a certain chemical which can cause cancer and damage the immune system at a level that’s about 220 times greater than a limit set by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Most worryingly, these poisonous chemicals are free to pollute the broader soil and water system. This should concern us all, since some of Ghana’s top exports are cocoa and nuts.
Some governments have started to take responsibility for their consumers’ waste. For example, Germany has started a project that includes a sustainable recycling system at Agbogbloshie, along with a health clinic for workers. However, governments cannot solve the problem alone, as there is an almost limitless consumer demand for hardware, especially when governments’ green policies are focused on issues like climate change.
Only the manufacturers can fix this. A more economically sustainable and politically possible solution is through encouraging hardware manufacturers to make the repair, reuse and recycling of hardware profitable, or at least cost-neutral.
1. What can we infer from Paragraph 2?| A．Electronic waste requires more landfill sites. |
| B．Electronic waste is too complex to get fully recycled. |
| C．Electronic products need to be improved immediately. |
| D．Electronic pollution is a burning question in Agbogbloshie. |
| A．Relaxes. | B．Abolishes. | C．Avoids. | D．Tightens. |
| A．The violation of EFSA’s standards. | B．The threat of polluted food worldwide. |
| C．The lack of diversity in Ghana’s exports. | D．The damage to chicken’s immune system. |
| A．Letting governments take on the main responsibility. |
| B．Reducing customers’ demands for electronic products. |
| C．Governments adjusting their green policies about e-waste. |
| D．Manufacturers’ developing a sustainable hardware economy. |
增加：在缺词处加一个漏字符号(∧ )，并在其下面写出该加的词。
删除：把多余的词用斜线(\)划掉。
修改：在错的词下画一横线，并在该词下面写出修改后的词。
注意：1.每处错误及其修改均仅限一词；
2.只允许修改10处，多者(从第11处起)不计分。
Dear Editor,
I'm writing to tell you about how we students use computers in our daily lives. Some use them in a good way when some others don't. As far as I am concerned, more and more students now use computers help with their study. If we meet some difficulties when they are doing their homework, they always got help from the Internet. To spend their spare time, they look for more informations with the computers to have much more knowledge. At the same time, however, the great number of students are still so interested in PC games and chatted with others on the Internet that they can not return to their study. They are really in dangerous. Computers can either do good and harm to us.
Best wishes.
Yours truly,
Li Hua
成长道路上难免遇到来自同伴的压力(peer pressure)。同伴压力可能给我们带来积极或消极的影响。请结合自己生活中的一个具体事例, 谈谈你的体会。
注意:请勿透露本人真实姓名和学校名称。
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4 . Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, believed that men are divided into three classes: gold, silver and bronze. Vifredo Pateto, an Italian economist, argued that “the vital few” account for most progress. In the private sector, best companies struggle relentlessly to find and keep the vital few. They offer them fat pay packets, extra training, powerful mentors and more challenging assignments.
As the competition in business is getting increasingly fierce, companies are trying harder to nurture raw talent, or to poach it from their vitals. Private-equity firms rely heavily on a few stars. High-tech firms, for all their egalitarianism (平均主义), are ruthless about recruiting the brightest. Firms in emerging markets are desperate to find young high-flyers to cope with rapid growth and fast-changing environment.
Bill Conaty and Ram Charan’s recent book The Talent Masters provides a nice mix of portraits of well-known talent factories along with sketches of more recent converts to the cause. “Talent masters” are proud of their elitism. GE divides its employees into three groups based on their promise. Hindustan Unilever compiles a list of people who show innate leadership qualities. “Talent masters” all seem to agree on the importance of two things: measurement and differentiation. The best companies routinely subject employees to various “reviews” and “assessments.” But when it comes to high-flyers they make more effort to build up a three-dimensional picture of their personalities and to provide lots of feedback.
A powerful motivator is to single out high-flyers for special training. GE spends $1 billion a year on it. Novartis sends high-flyers to regular off-site training sessions. Many companies also embrace on-job training, speaking of “stretch” assignments or “baptisms by fire.” The most coveted are foreign postings: these can help young managers understand what it is like to run an entire company with a wide range of problems.
Successful companies make sure that senior managers are involved with “talent development.” Bosses of GE and P&G spent 40% of their time on personnel. Intel obliged senior managers to spend at least a week in a year teaching high-flyers. Involving the company’s top brass (高级职员) in the process prevents lower-level managers from monopolizing high-flyers and crates dialogues between established and future leaders. Successful companies also integrate talent development with their broader strategy to ensure that companies are more than the sum of their parts. P&G likes its managers to be both innovative and worldly. Goodyear replaced 23 of its 24 senior managers in two years as it shifted its target-consumers from carmakers to motorists.
Meanwhile, in their rush to classify people, companies can miss potential stars. Those who are singled out for special treatment can become too full of themselves. But the first problem can be fixed by flexibility; people who are average in one job can become stars in another. And people who become too smug can be discarded.
1. The author mentions the needs for talent of different firms in the second paragraph to show that _________.| A．the need for talent is universal |
| B．there is a cut-throat competition among them |
| C．the economy is more prosperous than before |
| D．the need for talent is confined to high-tech firms |
| A．How the well-known talent factories classify their staff. |
| B．How the talent factories and recent converts to the cause are like. |
| C．How to identify and recruit talent. |
| D．How to keep and foster elite employees. |
| A．checking and evaluating them frequently |
| B．compelling the senior managers to instruct the high-flyers |
| C．moving them into the positions that display their strengths |
| D．providing them with training or special mentoring classes |
| A．making sure that its senior managers spend enough time on personnel |
| B．changing the company’s strategy according to the status quo of talent |
| C．replacing most of the senior managers regularly to avoid monopoly |
| D．grooming future leaders from high-flyers rather than from lower-level managers |
| A．The importance of equality. |
| B．The necessity of flexibility. |
| C．The drawbacks of elitism. |
| D．The harm of self-conceit. |
5 . Kids nowadays are growing up “connected”, learning to use technology at a surprising speed. Technology is a regular part of school now! Kids as young as Kindergarten are using smartboards, IPads, and computers to complete tasks in the classroom. Older children rely on the Internet for research, getting homework, sending work to teachers, and even accessing（ 获得） textbooks. In fact, today’s kids have been given the name “digital（数字）natives” because they are facing technology almost from birth, so new things have never been a greater challenge in the hands of our children. The Internet，Facebook, iPods, pictures and texting on cell phones and all of these are the ways kids communicate today. They have become a central part of their lives. It allows them a private life that most of us know very little about.
Kids just don’t think about the results of the new world of social networking and text messaging. They don’t think that it is dangerous to send a photo of a particular person to a foolish person, who might send it to some friends that may send it to a hundred others and the next thing you know, it’s on many Facebook sites and all over the Internet forever. They don’t think that way because they don’t have the life experience that we do. We have to help them.
The key to knowing how they manage this privacy（隐私） is our “connection” to them. How closely do we connect with our kids and pay attention to what they’re doing? And how often do we talk to our children... and really listen to them? If they believe in us and know that we will be there for them, they are more likely to follow our advice. If we talk openly about what we believe in, what we stand for, those values will become their own before long.
1. What is the author’s opinion about children?| A．They are good at accepting modern things. | B．They are well understood by their parents. |
| C．They almost like to surf on the Facebook. | D．They know the Internet dangers well. |
| A．Kids. | B．Adults. | C．Internet users. | D．Internet teachers. |
| A．They only understand their own private lives. | B．They are badly influenced by new things. |
| C．They do not have life experience. | D．They don’t depend on their parents. |
| A．When they are surfing on the Internet. | B．When they meet some dangerous situations. |
| C．When parents believe in what they are doing. | D．When parents communicate with them deeply. |
To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. Decades after Mao Zedong declared that women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts (对应者)in the United States.
Rjpa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth “creates this excitement”， and builds on a cultural and historical legacy (遗产)in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to.
One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China’s power elite ( 精 英 ). In the US, that shift followed decades of battles over equality and women’s rights. In China, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally.
That’s true, too, in the executive suite. Grant Thornton International, the tax consultancy, found that roughly eight out of 10 companies in China had women in senior management roles, compared with approximately half in the European Union and two thirds in the US. Similarly, in China, 31 percent of top executives are female, compared with 20 percent in America.
Thirdly, child care is easily accessible in China, enabling them to pursue their careers after giving birth to their children. Fourthly, ambition has become a matter of necessity in fast-paced China, and both the husband and wife have to work in order to keep up with the skyrocketing housing prices.
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7 . Each stage of life has different major demands mainly because our needs change. As children, a period of deep uncertainty and sensitivity,
At each stage, although everyone may
For each period of life, the needs are decided by that stage, and as we grow older, whether we like it or not, we gain
Physically, even when we stay fit and able, the body cannot deliver in quite the same way as youth. This comes as a(n)
| A．finance | B．security | C．marriage | D．education |
| A．testing | B．sharing | C．changing | D．setting |
| A．financial advisor | B．childhood companion | C．life partner | D．household keeper |
| A．take action | B．calm down | C．look forward | D．pay attention |
| A．believe | B．persevere | C．vary | D．persist |
| A．easy | B．random | C．formal | D．similar |
| A．noble | B．fresh | C．reasonable | D．superior |
| A．experience | B．responsibility | C．respect | D．agreement |
| A．individualism | B．materialism | C．idealism | D．socialism |
| A．resist | B．enjoy | C．evolve | D．strengthen |
| A．unexpectedly | B．terribly | C．comparatively | D．necessarily |
| A．inquiry | B．instinct | C．refusal | D．shock |
| A．worsen | B．manage | C．judge | D．feel |
| A．wrinkled | B．depressed | C．impressive | D．serious |
| A．with high requirements | B．in full circle | C．without difficulty | D．on a large scale |
8 . Gender Stereotypes Are Messing with Your Kid
Gender stereotypes are messing with your kid. It’s not just one movie. It’s not just one TV show. It’s constant exposure to the same dated concepts in the media over and over, starting before preschool and lasting a lifetime --- concepts like: Boys are smarter than girls: certain jobs are best for men and others for women; and even that girls are responsible for their own sexual assaults.
According to a recent report, which analyzed more than 150 articles, interviews, books, and other social-scientific research, gender stereotypes in moves and on TV shows are more than persistient.
Think of preschoolers who are just beginning to identify as boys or girls. The characters they see on TV often have an obvious masculine or feminine appearance, such as a superhero’s big muscles or a princess’ long hair. These characters also are often associated with specific traits---for example, being strong and brave or fearful and meek.
For young audiences who absorb ideas from the media on how to behave and what to become, these characterizations can lead to false assumptions and harmful conclusions. These oversimplified characterizations play out in many ways over and over. According to the report, a lifetime of viewing stereotypical media becomes so ingrained that it can ultimately affect kids’ career choices, self-worth, relationships, and ability to achieve their full potential.
And lots of parent are concerned about these issues, too. We polled nearly 1,000 parents across the country and found that they believe the media has a significant influence on their kids, from how girls should look and behave to how seeing violence can affect boys’ beliefs about themselves.
While there are movies and TV shows that defy gender stereotypes---and Hollywood is making some progress on this front --- you’re not going to be able to prevent your kids from seeing everything that sends the wrong message. And your kids probably like a lot of media that reinforces stereotypes.
| A．Luckily, parents can assert control over the messages that Hollywood dishes out. |
| B．You have a lot of control over your kids’ media --- mostly when they’re little, but even as they grow. |
| C．Fortunately, the most powerful messages kids absorb are from you. |
| D．Ideally, self-segregate based on gender --- boys want to play with boys, and girls want to play with girls. |
| E．They’re incredibly effective at teaching kids what the culture expects of boys and girls. |
| F．Fast-forward to the tween and teen years, when characters begin to wrestle with relationships, life, and job prospects. |
9 . What is it about kids these days that makes older generations so easily angry? In some way or another, older generations have been disappointed at the youth's decline since the earliest days of civilization. Even Aristotletalked smack abouthow young folks thought they knew everything back in the 4th century BC.
So why do people throw all the shade on the next generation? A study out last month in Science Advances shows that negative opinions about kids aren't always based on their actions; it's more about how adults praise their past and current selves.
In the study, researehers looked at a trio of characteristics in three groups of US adults: respect for elders or authoritarianism（权威主义），intelligence, and enjoyment of reading. The team, led by John Protzko, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, asked the participants whether they thought kids in the modern age shared the same qualities. They found that adults who tested especially strong in one of the categories tended to see children today as weak in il. For example, if an adult got tagged or self-identified as intelligent, they were more likely to see "kids these days" as less intelligent than they used to be. This, Protzko thinks, is because they remembered their younger selves to be smarter, whether true or not. What's more, they only reserved their strong opinion for characteristics they related to.
In another stage of the study, the authors assigned random scores to participants to trick them into thinking how well-read they were. Many of the adults changed their opinions on kid's reading ability as a result, Protzko speculates that there are two reasons for the shift: How memories can go wrong and the lack of objective knowledge of what childhood is really like. "People who are high in a trail are imposing（迫使）their current high standing in that trait back in time, thinking 'Oh this must have been what all kids were like,' " he says. Over the years, the same memory bias（偏见）keeps occurring, making it seem like kids are somehow failing more and more. In fact,（he older a participant was, the more heavily this bias came into play, Protzko says.
While there's still a lot to learn about why adults might see younger generations as mediocre, this researeh can hint that an age-old phrase can boil down to one classic human trail：vanity（自负）.
―From Popular Science
1. What does the underlined phrase in the first paragraph mean?| A．Expressed his a flection for . | B．Talked positively about. |
| C．Spoke ill of. | D．Thought highly of. |
| A．Negative opinions about kids come from their ill behavior. |
| B．Adults always keeps their previous and present glories in mind. |
| C．Adults hold positive opinions about kids for their actions. |
| D．Kids are always blamed by adults who are more outstanding. |
| A．Because adults got tagged or self-indentified as intelligent. |
| B．Because adults thought they themselves much smarter. |
| C．Because adults hold the view that kids were weaker than them. |
| D．Because adults only remembered their own strengths subjectively. |
| A．Adults hold the bias that kids these days are failing. |
| B．Adults probably forgot all kids have the same characteristics. |
| C．That the same memory bias keeps occurring led to kid's failure. |
| D．The participants ignored the bias as they grew older. |
| A．①②--③④⑤ | B．①--②③④---⑤ |
| C．①②③--④---⑤ | D．①---②---③---④⑤ |
10 . HOW BIG should a business team be?It is an enormously important issue for companies, Teams that are too small may lack the skills required to get the job done:teams that are too big may be impossible to co-ordinate.
Robin Dunbar.an anthropologist at Oxford University,has done a lot of work on primate(灵长目）groups.His argument is that the size of the group is linked to the size of the brain.With their large brains,humans can cope with larger bands,A larger social group has many advantages,allowing for greater protection and specialization.
Whereas 150 is sometimes referred to as the"Dunbar number",the academic himself in fact refers to a range of figures.He observes that humans tend to have five intimate friends,15 or so good friends,around 50 social friends and 150-odd acquaintances.
Running a larger network can be difficult.The armed forces have spent more than 1,000 years experimenting with unit size.A Roman centurion(百天长）oversaw 100.The modern American army company has 180 members.Britain's equivalent numbers 120.These are rough estimates,rather than fixed figures.But it is striking that many group activities seem to be close to a Dunbar number. The Special Air Service of Britain has four-man patrols;when your life depends on it,you need to have absolute trust in your colleagues.As a result,such groups are limited in size.
For much of economic history,work was conducted in small units by peasants,tenant farmers and craftsmen.The coming of powered machinery enabled production at a much larger scale,with workers crowded into factories.These days the rise of the service economy means that workers are no longer concentrated in such large groups.
This may not be a bad thing.It was easy for employees in large factories to regard remote company owners as "them"rather than"us".The modern company may settle on a model with a small group of"core"workers and a larger group of contract workers.The result may be more united within the core staff but the non-core staff may be less well treated.The small core teams may work effectively.The big question will be the effect on morale of those outside those teams.
1. What does the first paragraph serve as in the whole article?| A．An example of the topic, |
| B．An introduction to the topic, |
| C．A guide to the whole article, |
| D．No relation to the passage at all. |
| A．Workers crowded into factories |
| B．'These days the service economy has risen. |
| C．Workers are no longer concentrated in such large groups. |
| D．Employees regard company owners as"them"rather than"us". |
| A．A large group of exact 150 workers. |
| B．A small group of less than 15 core workers. |
| C．A small group of peasants and a large group of factory workers. |
| D．A small group of efficient workers and more contract workers. |
| A．To offer companies some useful advice. |
| B．To introduce us the most suitable size of teams. |
| C．To arouse the readers' interest in Robin Dunbar. |
| D．To persuade companies to adopt the"Dunbar number". |
