1 . Time to end Santa’s “naughty list”?
Many of us have magical memories of Santa secretly bringing gifts and joy to our childhood homes — but is there a darker side to the beloved Christmas tradition?
I was — and I’m happy to admit it — a loyal believer of Santa. I absolutely loved the magic of Christmas, especially Santa Claus, and my parents went above and beyond to encourage it. However, as I begin to construct my own Santa Claus myth for my daughter, I can’t help but feel guilty. Could it undermine her trust in me?
I guess it’s not all that surprising.
The “Santa lie” can reduce trust between a parent and a child.
| A．But the biggest danger is the anti-critical thinking lessons that he is teaching. |
| B．It’s this emphasis on belief over imagination that he sees as harmful. |
| C．Interestingly, belief in Santa Claus has actually promoted children’s critical thinking. |
| D．There are plenty of cultural evidences we create for the existence of Santa. |
| E．He begins to probe and question the things he has seen and heard. |
| F．Fascinatingly, belief in Santa Claus has remained remarkably consistent. |
2 . Tipping, customers paying service workers, usually at restaurants, for services they receive, has been a regular part of American culture for well over a century, but the emergence of new technology and shifting expectations have shaken long-standing norms around the practice. That uncertainty, together with the pressure it can often create, has left some consumers feeling exhausted by the frequency with which they’re forced to decide which workers to tip and how much.
A big reason for the growth of what is being called “tip tiredness” is the increasing presence of digital payment systems, which have replaced traditional cash registers at most businesses. Suddenly, rather than being given the chance to drop a dollar in a tip jar, customers are confronted with a tablet.
Tipping also makes labor laws more complicated. In all but a handful of states, employers are allowed to pay tipped workers below minimum wage. In some cases, the standard is as low as $2.13 per hour, as long as workers make enough in tips to earn the equivalent of minimum wage.
However, defenders of the current arrangement say it’s still the best option.
| A．The frustration about such shifting wage payment has added new wrinkles to the controversy. |
| B．The diversity of tipping channels somewhat eases the conflicts in deciding the amount of tips. |
| C．No workers should have their livelihood depend on their customers’ mercy. |
| D．The popularity of digital point-of-sale systems has also meant consumers are being asked to tip more frequently. |
| E．Tipping, against many people’s wills, establishes a new customer-server relationship. |
| F．It’s believed that tipping is the ultimate profit-sharing plan. |
3 . One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all.
Before you go deep into the puzzle, consider this: If you measure the height of your male friends, for example, the average is about 170 centimeters. You are 172 and your friends are all about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical concept of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data set.
But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.
Exactly this situation occurs on social networks. On average, your coauthors will be cited more often than you, and the people you follow will post more frequently than you, and so on.
Now Lerman from University of Southern California has discovered a related paradox, which they call the majority illusion. They illustrate this illusion with an example. They take 14 nodes linked up to form a small network. They then color three of these nodes and count how many of the remaining nodes link to them in a single step.
In one situation, the uncolored nodes see more than half of their neighbors as colored. This is the majority illusion — the local impression that a specific feature is common when the global truth is entirely different.
So how popular is it in the real world? It’s found out that the majority illusion occurs in almost all network scenarios. “The effect is largest in the political blogs network, where 60% of nodes will have majority active neighbours, even when only 20% of the nodes are truly active,” says Lerman.
It immediately explains many interesting phenomena. For a start, it shows how some content can spread globally while other similar content does not — the key is to start with a small number of well-connected early adopters fooling the rest of the network into thinking it is common. The affected nodes then find it natural to follow the trend. A real spread finally comes into being.
But it is not yet a marketer’s charter. For that, marketers must first identify the popular nodes that can create the majority illusion for the target audience. These influencers must then be persuaded to adopt the desired behavior or product, which is essential to the prospect of the marketing plan.
1. The phrase skew the average in the passage most probably refers to the action of ________.| A．hiding the real average to be unrecognizable to others |
| B．producing an average against the general feature of data |
| C．working out the common feature suggested by the average |
| D．ignoring the average because of the frequency by which it is reviewed |
| A．Majority illusion rarely has impacts except in political blogs field. |
| B．The majority illusion on social networks relies on that people you follow post more than you. |
| C．The essence of successful opinion spread is to initiate the trend with well-connected sharers. |
| D．The spread scale of ideas on networks mainly depends on the quality of content. |
| A．thoroughly understand the concept of majority illusion |
| B．accurately figure out who is the powerful person to affect others |
| C．definitely decide who are the target audience for the promotion |
| D．successfully convince the influencers to practice certain action |
| A．The social network vision that tricks your mind. |
| B．Who is stealing your network identity? |
| C．Minority network opinion spread, curse or blessing? |
| D．Have you been misled during the last political voting? |
4 . As Christmas approached, the price of turkey went wild. It didn’t rocket, as some might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started waving. We live in the age of the variable prices. In the eyes of sellers, the right price—the one that will draw the most profit from consumers’ wallets—has become the focus of huge experiments. These sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price.
It may come as a surprise that, in buying a pie, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping has brought. Simply put, the convenience to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that sellers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are trying to “comparison shopping” us.
They have enough means to do so: the huge data tracks you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart with top data scientists capable of turning the information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unimaginable in the history of economics.”
In result, not coincidentally, normal pricing practices—an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices” are giving way to far more crazy strategies.
“In the Internet era, I don’t think anyone could have predicted how complicated these strategies have become,” says Robert Dolan, a professor at Harvard. The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be. The price may even be affected by the price of the mobile phone you use for item search. For shoppers, that means price—not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor—may become an increasingly unknowable thing. “There used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the true price of pumpkin-pie spice is subject to a level of uncertainty.
1. Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?| A．When holidays come, prices are usually increased. |
| B．The right price to sellers is the one to bring biggest profits. |
| C．The right price is fixed although it’s hard to find it. |
| D．To buy a pie, customers have to become an expert in economy. |
| A．reflect on the effect of the Internet |
| B．analyze customers’ online buying history for price strategy |
| C．double check the existence of the purchase |
| D．find out online where the lowest prices are |
| A．The instant mood of the buyer at the time of purchase. |
| B．The necessity level of the item at the time of purchase. |
| C．The extent to which the buyer is sensitive to the price. |
| D．The price of the facility the buyer uses to look for the item. |
| A．The advantages of online shopping over traditional shopping. |
| B．Measures sellers take to maximize profits. |
| C．The analysis of pricing mechanism. |
| D．The battle between buyers and sellers in Internet age. |
5 . It’s difficult to think about how to spend money, and deciding money value in the future is almost impossible to many people. That’s because it is hard for us to consider the opportunity costs of objects we purchase.
A study was conducted with people who wanted to purchase a car to determine their ability to assess the opportunity cost of that purchase. When asked “If you buy this car today, what will you not be able to do in the future as a result?”, the majority said, “If I buy this SUV today, I will not be able to buy a sports car tomorrow.” Nobody said that he would not be able to buy 300 lunches at a restaurant because they were, though unconsciously, restricted within the car field, not even attempting to think of an item from another field.
The nature of modern spending makes things even harder by making money less concrete. If I give you $1,000 in an envelope each week, you will see in the shop that what you’re buying comes at the expense of other things of the same price. After all, you have the real experience because you have to hand out the real money note if you want to get the object. But with credit cards and loans, financial mechanisms have become increasingly unclear, making it more difficult for people to compare the value of spending now with the value of money in the future as they are allowed to pay for the purchases later.
Irrelevant influences and considerations, such as a person’s present emotions or preferences, can influence how much worth someone places on an object too.
In a study, Professor Dan Ariely and his team asked participants to determine the value of objects like wine, chocolates and electronics.
“We first told them to consider whether they would pay the amount equivalent to the last two digits of their social security numbers,” he says. “We found a significant relation between the amount they were willing to pay and these digits.”
For instance, someone whose social security number (SSN) ends in 25 valued the objects much lower than someone with the last two digits of 78. For no logical reasons, the test subjects leaned toward the most recent number they had access to when valuing the items. Even with full information about the objects, some people had no logical point of reference for the value of the objects. Instead, they used their own irrelevant experiences as references.
1. According to the passage, the opportunity cost in consumption field refers to ______.| A．the cost to pay for various opportunities |
| B．what a person is willing to give up if he buys a specific item |
| C．the opportunities to invest in costly items |
| D．the comparison of prices of the same item from different sources |
| A．they won’t have trouble in paying for meals |
| B．300 meals are not equal to the car in value |
| C．they can’t compare money values across categories |
| D．they personally prefer the car to food |
| A．items paid by credit cards are cheaper than paid by cash |
| B．it’s easier for people to save money through credit cards |
| C．people have to pay an interest when buying through credit cards. |
| D．delay in payment may confuse people’s judgement of money value. |
| A．Because they were not good at predicting values and counting numbers. |
| B．Because they made predictions with most convenient hints available. |
| C．Because they believed that their SSN digits were very valuable. |
| D．Because they tended to consult others and copy peers’ choices. |
6 . Academic learning is usually in the spotlight at school, but teaching elementary-age students “soft” skills like self-control and how to get along with others might help to keep at-risk kids out of criminal trouble in the future, a study finds.
Duke University researchers looked at a program called Fast Track, which was started in the 1990s for children who were identified by their teachers and parents to be at high risk for developing aggressive behavioral problems.
The students were randomized into two groups; half took part in the intervention (干预), which included a teacher-led curriculum, parent training groups, academic tutoring and lessons in self-control and social skills. The program, which lasted from first grade through tenth grade, reduced arrests and use of health and mental health services as the students aged through adolescence and young adulthood, as researchers explained in a separate study.
In the latest study, researchers looked at the “why” behind those previous findings. In looking at the data from nearly 900 students, the researchers found that about a third of the impact on future crime outcomes was due to the social and self-regulation skills the students learned from ages 6 to 11.
The academic skills that were taught as part of Fast Track turned out to have less of an impact on crime than did the soft skills, which are associated with emotional intelligence.
“The conclusion that we would make is that these soft skills should be emphasized even more in our education system and in our system of socializing children,” says Kenneth Dodge, a professor at Duke who was a principal investigator in this study as well as in the original Fast Track project.
Parents should do all they can to promote these skills with their children, Dodge says, as should education policymakers.
To Neil Bernstein, a psychologist in Washington, D.C., who specializes in child and adolescent behavior disorders, the researchers’ findings seem to match what he’s seen among the general public in working with children for more than 30 years. And while he says he agrees with the importance of teaching self-control and social skills, he would add empathy to the list, too.
“Empathy is what makes us aware of the feelings of others, and when you’re empathic, you’re much less likely to hurt someone else’s feelings,” says Bernstein, who serves on the advisory board for the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. “Being in tune with how someone else feels might also make adolescents avoid bullying and other behaviors of concern,” Bernstein says.
While Bernstein thinks the study’s findings are meaningful and could potentially serve as a model for schools, he says that collectively getting a school system, teachers, parents and students all motivated enough to take part in an intervention like Fast Track is challenging.
1. Fast Track is aimed to ________.| A．improve children’s academic skills | B．help the children with behavior disorders |
| C．identify the problematic children | D．classify children into different groups |
| A．empathic children are more likely to have higher emotional intelligence |
| B．the findings of the studies disagree with what he has found in his work |
| C．empathy is equally essential in educating and socializing children |
| D．self-control and social skills are not as important as empathy |
| A．It’s hard to involve everyone concerned in applying the findings. |
| B．Soft skills were not part of the education system in the past. |
| C．The findings are meaningless unless guided by Fast Track. |
| D．Adolescence is the most critical stage in a person’s life. |
| A．Academic skills are paid too much attention at schools. |
| B．Academic skills have no influence on children’s behaviors. |
| C．Soft skills are much harder to develop than academic skills. |
| D．Soft skills play a significant role in preventing future crimes. |
7 . Handwriting has existed for about 6,000 years. It’s one of our most important inventions. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to record knowledge or pass ideas from one generation to the next.
Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. It’s not like seeing or talking, which are what we are born with. In early America, only wealthy men and businessmen learned to write. A “good hand” became a sign of class and intelligence as well as morality. Most, meanwhile, signed legal documents with a mere “X” and the presence of a witness. Writing only spread to the masses in the 19th century, after schools began teaching handwriting.
________— left-handed students often had their arm tied tightly to their bodies, so they’d learn to write with the “correct” hand. In more modern times, you may remember spending hours learning the correct stroke (笔画), formation and spacing of upper- and lower-case letters.
But today, schools are shifting the focus to coursework in STEM — short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. With limited hours and an increased pressure to meet higher standards, teachers are emphasizing technology and tablets and less of the written word.
Technology has threatened writing long before every man, woman and child carried a phone. It came with the invention of the typewriter, which standardized written communication, and that same argument will reappear as technology advances.
I don’t know if handwriting will ever die. But today, the growing emphasis on typing is having far-reaching effects. To get a glimpse of the future, just look at the youth. Instead of curly Qs or crazy Ls, kids are using emoticons such as ☺ or  to give a personal touch.
Typing is more democratic, too — it isn’t a complicated skill to master. Keyboards are changing the physical connection between writers and text, and people who can’t write by hand, like the blind, can now use tools to communicate only by touch.
I suppose it’s easy to grieve over the passing of one era (年代) into another. Sure, I’ll miss the writing of letters, and the beautiful and well-practiced signature written with a pen. And while some pathways in our brains will weaken with the decline of handwriting, we’ll develop new ones as we swipe (滑动) and double-click our way into the future.
1. Before the 19th century in America, ________.| A．only intelligent people could learn handwriting in schools |
| B．legal documents were signed with the presence of a witness |
| C．most of the people didn’t even know how to write their names |
| D．people would spend hours learning how to write every day |
| A．Writing was a means of human communication |
| B．Writing has always been serious business |
| C．Schools tried different ways to force students to write |
| D．Young people worked hard to improve handwriting |
| A．the invention of cellphones started the decline of handwriting |
| B．handwriting will disappear because young people write poorly |
| C．typing makes it possible for blind people to communicate |
| D．typing is comparatively easy to learn, even for the disabled |
| A．The era of handwriting is leaving and that of typing is coming. |
| B．Letters and signatures are gradually disappearing for sure. |
| C．The decline of writing has drawn much attention from the public. |
| D．Our brains will weaken with the decline of handwriting. |
8 . Use phones respectfully
You probably spend more time with your smart phone than any other possession. You take it everywhere --- to school, to meals, and even to the bathroom.
Use “do not disturb” instead of “vibrate（振动）”
Loud vibrations in your pants are disturbing. People can hear your phone vibrate, depending on how severely it vibrates.
Tell others what you are doing
Sometimes, you will be in a situation in which you need to use your smart phone. Just tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. If you don’t, people will think that you are either interacting with someone else or just getting bored.
Respect others’ privacy as text and e-mail senders by not letting what they type appear on the home screen of your phone when you receive a new message. While you are at it, use a password to make sure the information you share with others stays between you.
Ask permission to swipe（滑动）
When someone hands you their phone to look at a photo, this doesn’t mean you can swipe through all of their photo albums.
| A．So it is exciting to look through all their photos. |
| B．Of course, a smart phone is a great way to keep in touch and share life events. |
| C．They probably want you to see one photo they hand to you, not every photo they have taken. |
| D．You should use your smart phone secretly. |
| E．It is difficult to ignore and distracts people from whatever they are doing. |
| F．Don’t use the text preview feature on your home screen. |
9 . You may be familiar with the statistic that 90% of the world’s data were created in the last few years. The biggest setback with such a rate of information increase is that the present moment will always emerge far larger than the past. Short-sightedness is built into the structure, in the form of an overwhelming tendency to over-estimate near-term messages at the expense of history.
To understand why this matters, consider the findings from social science about ‘recency bias (倾向)’, which describes the tendency to assume that future events will closely resemble recent experience. People tend to base thinking disproportionately on whatever comes most easily to mind.
It’s also worth remembering that novelty tends to be a dominant consideration when deciding what data to keep or delete. Out with the old and in with the new. That’s the digital trend in a world where search algorithms (算法) are systematically biased towards freshness. They are designed in line with human preference. Such a bias towards the present is structurally rooted in the human weakness that we keep deserting things we once cherished simply because we grow tired of them.
What’s really needed is something thought of as “intelligent forgetting”: learning to let go of the immediate past in order to keep its larger continuities in view. It’s an act similar to organising a photograph album— although with more maths. When are two million photographs less valuable than two thousand?
Many data sets are irreducible and most precious when complete: gene sequences; demographic (人口的) data; the raw, hard knowledge of geography and physics. The softer the science, however, the more that scale is likely to be reversely connected with quality. In these cases, time itself is rather important as a touch stone to judge the value of data. Either we choose carefully what endures, matters and meaningfully captures our past— or its toot print is silently replaced by the present’s growing noise. Mere gathering is no cure-all answer. In an era of bigger and bigger data, the leading warning for those who have to make decisions is that what you choose not to know matters just as much as what you do.
1. What is the major problem with the explosion of recent information?| A．Trends are too quickly produced. |
| B．People have poor eyesight alter viewing too much information. |
| C．Present information is given too much emphasis. |
| D．Prediction for future development largely depends on the past information. |
| A．That algorithms requires the latest to make accurate prediction. |
| B．That humans are accustomed to losing interest in old things. |
| C．That short renewed period is the feature of modern data. |
| D．That search algorithms keep uncovering the value of the newness. |
| A．Recent past experience is rarely used to provide reference for future events. |
| B．The quality of geographic knowledge depends on photo sorting rather than full data. |
| C．Intelligent forgetting refers to replacing the immediate past with far-back data. |
| D．Time helps us to evaluate data when the quality isn’t in line with quality. |
| A．The side effect of digital innovation. |
| B．The values of complete data in softer subjects. |
| C．The data discrimination caused by algorithms. |
| D．The faulty preference for fresh data and ways out. |
10 . Scots are more likely to drink themselves to death than people from any other nation in Western Europe except Austria and Portugal. Every day, six Scots die from alcohol-related conditions. Our hospitals and health services struggle with the wider damage. An estimated 51,600 Scots suffer from drink-related illness. Incidence of liver disease has shot up 40 percent in the past seven years. Most knife attacks and most adult murders occur under the influence of alcohol. And drink abuse (嗜酒) has ruined thousands of families, a personal, psychological and social cost on top of the £1 billion already estimated through work absence.
As if all this were not bad enough, problems with alcohol abuse are now spreading to an ever-younger age group. The proportion of pupils aged 12-15 who had had an alcoholic drink in the previous week rose in the last decade from 14 percent to 21 percent. Today, more than 40 percent of all 15-year-olds admit to having had a drink in the past week. Much teenage crime and destruction is drink related.
To his credit, the Executive has focused his attention on alcohol abuse problem. Behind the scenes, the Executive is discussing how far it should go in trying to persuade Scots to drink in a more sensible fashion. The First Minister is known to be against an alcohol ban on the lines of prohibition on public smoking. He is correct that such a move would not be accepted by the people and, anyway, general prohibition tends to drive substance abuse underground rather than eliminate it.
Nevertheless, a debate is emerging on what controls to put on the easy availability of alcohol, especially to the young. As we report today, Donald Gorrie, the senior Liberal Democrat MSP, is launching a campaign in the Scottish Parliament(议会)to prohibit supermarkets from offering cut-price promotions on alcoholic drinks, in line with a similar ban on such promotions to off-licences and public houses introduced earlier this year.
It remains to be seen if it is technically feasible to define sales promotions of alcohol in a supermarket in such a way as to control them. There is also a reasonable argument that it is better to have people buy drinks at a supermarket, where the likelihood is that they will consume the alcohol at home rather than drink in public. On the other hand, much of the alcohol consumed by underground drinkers comes from the family supply. Perhaps the real solution is to question the cheapness of alcohol across the board.
Nevertheless, Mr. Gorrie has opened an important public discussion. He has a talent for making parliament confront awkward issues, and alcohol is one such issue.
1. It can be inferred from the passage that ________.| A．banning alcohol may make alcohol abuse exist secretly. |
| B．Donald Gorrie held a debate on limiting alcohol. |
| C．40 percent of all 15-year-olds are involved in criminal activity after drinking. |
| D．the influence of alcohol cost £1 billion through drink-related disease. |
| A．young people debate over whether they should control the availability of alcohol. |
| B．unless a debate of controlling alcohol is held, young people will drink too much alcohol. |
| C．a debate on how to keep young people from easy access to alcohol appears. |
| D．there is a discussion on how young people could give up alcohol abuse. |
| A．To change the cheapness of alcohol. |
| B．To prohibit people from going to pubs. |
| C．To persuade them to drink in a more sensible fashion. |
| D．To strike secret pubs. |
| A．a medical magazine. | B．the society page of a newspaper. |
| C．an introduction to Scotland. | D．an official document from British government. |
