Part Ⅰ Vocabulary Directions: Choose the word or expression below each sentence that best completes the statement, and mark the corresponding letter of your choice with a single bar across the square brackets on your Machine-scoring Answer Sheet.
1. He worked as a builder in London and ______ half his monthly wage to his family in the Philippines.
3. The stadium has been specifically designed as a ______ for European Cup matches.
A.vet
B.verdure
C.venue
D.venison
A B C D
C
vet是“兽医”;verdure是“新鲜;欣欣向荣或茂盛的状况”,如:the verdure of childhood童年时期的朝气蓬勃;venue是“大型集会的地点”;venison是“野味,鹿肉”。句子大意是:“这个运动场是专门为欧洲杯的比赛而设计兴建的。”
4. She ______ at the thought of picking up the dead animal.
A.whined
B.blenched
C.wreathed
D.sapped
A B C D
B
whine是“报怨,哭诉,发牢骚,”;blench是“畏缩,退缩”,如:She blenched before her accuser.她在(她的)指控者面前畏缩了;wreathe是“环绕,盘旋”;sap是“挖掘坑道;通过坑道接近敌人阵地”。根据句子大意“她一想到要捡动物尸体就退缩了”,只有blench符合。
5. Three dinosaurs have already been found on the ______ site.
17. Although her mind was in a ______, she tried to stay calm for the sake of her children.
A.solace
B.yew
C.capillary
D.turmoil
A B C D
D
turmoil完全混乱或极端骚动的状态,如:a country in turmoil over labor strikes处于工人罢工造成的动乱中的国家;solace安慰,如:The invalid bund solace in music.那病人从音乐中得到安慰;yew紫杉,红豆杉;capillary毛细管。
18. The meaning of some ______ forms of writing is not always well understood to-day.
20. The book would have been more useful if a ______ of technical terms and abbreviation had been included.
A.gibbon
B.glut
C.glucose
D.glossary
A B C D
D
glossary术语表;gibbon长臂猿;glut是供应过剩,充斥;glucose葡萄糖。
Part Ⅱ Cloze Directions: For each blank in the following passage, choose the best answer from the four choices given below. Mark the corresponding letter of your choice with a single bar across the square brackets on your Machine-scoring Answer Sheet. Dinosaurs were reptiles which became extinct about 65 million years ago. The most intriguing question about dinosaurs has always been " 1 did they die out?" There is no simple answer to this question, 2 many hundreds of scientists are studying the problem. They are not studying the extinction of the dinosaurs 3 , but the whole question of extinction. Many other plants and animals have 4 in the past, and it is important to understand 5 this happened. Having this information could help save many species that are 6 in the modern world. Humans are causing extinctions now, because of pollution and other damage 7 the environment. Maybe the dinosaurs can tell us how to save the earth today, 8 their extinction 65 million years ago! Some of the early dinosaur scientists, 100 years ago, thought the dinosaurs died out because the 9 changed, and they could not breathe. Others thought that the dinosaurs disappeared simply because they became too big. They were 10 to move and could not find enough food 11 One theory is that a huge killer meteorite 12 the earth. Some scientists 13 that the extinction of dinosaurs was possibly due to rapid 14 of the planet's climate. Perhaps huge amounts of lava pours out of volcanoes in India. This sent up vast 15 of dust that blacked out the sun, and made the earth icy cold.
cloud of dust云状物(如烟雾、尘雾等),例如:The freight truck caused a cloud of dust as it went down the dirt road.运货卡车驶过那条肮脏的道路时卷起了一片尘土。
Part Ⅲ Reading Comprehension
Section A Directions: Below each of the following passages you will find some questions or incomplete statements. Each question or statement is followed by four choices marked A, B, C, and D. Read each passage carefully, and then select the choice that best answers the question or completes the statement. Mark the letter of your choice with a single bar across the square brackets on your Machine-scoring Answer Sheet.
Passage One As women demonstrate a growing appetite for consumer tech products, retailers and manufacturers are still only beginning to cater to this potentially huge reservoir of customers. High-tech businesses and electronics retailers are changing store designs, increasing their marketing toward women, focusing on gadget accessories and boosting advertising in women's magazines--all in a pitch to get women to walk the aisles and walk out with cell phones, MP3 players and plasma televisions. To draw women in, stores have been turning down the music, changing the color schemes and adding staff trained to meet women's needs. Radio Shack has gussied up its gray and black decor with bright purple, orange and green at its newer stores. Aisles have been widened and the product arrangements redone to make the place look less like a cluttered electronics hardware store. The company also has put more women on the sales floor. "The store doesn't feel like a men's club anymore," said Charles Hodges, a spokesman for Radio Shack. "Now women can walk in and be helped by women just as knowledgeable as guys." Most technology manufacturers have few women among their top executives, and that translates into the kinds of products on the shelves and the way they are marketed, according to Quinlan, author of "Just Ask a Woman-cracking the Code of What Women Want and How They Buy". Few devices-iPods and Palm handheld computers are among the exceptions--tap into a woman's sense of style, she said. "Design is key-attractive, holdable, showable design." she said. Women often are swayed to buy a product for reasons far different than those that drive men. They will choose a gadget not because they want to be a pioneer but be-cause they and their friends have discovered the usefulness of the thing. "Where men like to be the only one with a product, women like to bring more of her friends into their find--they want to share the good news of what's working for them," Quinlan said. But friends are only one of the ways that women are discovering what's important to them when it comes to tech. There's also a growing number of outside influences--product-specific or trend articles in magazines that target women of all ages, for example. Recently, Radio Shack worked with Seventeen magazines--known for its fashion, beauty and relationship features for young women--on a story about MP3 players.
1. What's the main idea of the passage?
A.Women would rather shop in a calmer, colorful environment.
B.The manufacturers realized their wrong ways of catering to women.
C.The tech retailers and manufactures are reaching out to women.
D.The shopping for a woman is more practical than it is for a man.
Passage Two Bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War Ⅱ, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon's waiting room. Bedbugs are back and spreading like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat. "It's becoming an epidemic," said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, a business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. Last year the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July, there have been 449. "It's definitely a fast-emerging problem," said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency. In the bedbug resurgence, entomologists and exterminators blame increased immigration from the developing world, the advent of cheap international travel and the recent banning of powerful pesticides. Other culprits include the recycled mattress industry and those thrifty citizens who revel in the discovery of a free sofa on the sidewalk. Unlike mice and roaches, which are abetted by filthy surroundings, bedbugs do just fine in a well-scrubbed home. And they don't dwell just in mattresses and box springs: any wall or floor crack--the thickness of a playing card--can accommodate a bedbug. The modern bedbug is immune to insecticides, and setting off a cockroach bomb in the bedroom will only scatter them farther afield. And because they are active only at night, many people don't discover them until their population has grown into the hundreds, or even thousands. Exterminators recommend bagging and washing every bit of clothing and fabric in the room and taking apart bureau drawers and bed frames in preparation for the application of four kinds of chemicals. The process often needs to be repeated. Worst of all, bedbug sufferers say, is the stigma of living with an insect that feeds on blood--though it does not transmit disease--and leaves behind a trail of red bumps. In interviews with more than a dozen bedbug sufferers, only a handful would speak on the record, saying they feared the condemning glares of neighbors or the shunning of co-workers. A bedbug infestation, many say, puts a strain on relationships, all but ruling out staying the night. Kellianne Scanlan, 30, a hairstylist who lives in Washington Heights, has been living like a nomad since last month. "My life has become all about bedbugs." she said. To calm her friends and to ensure that she does not spread the bugs, she takes an extra set of clothing and changes when she arrives at their homes for overnight visits.
1. What's the main idea of the opening paragraph?
A.People are being tortured by the bedbugs all the way.
B.The resurgence of bedbugs is serious and bothersome.
C.Infestations of bedbugs have been reported sporadically.
D.People begin to hire exterminators to treat bedbugs.
Passage Three An ethics crisis at one of the world's most successful human embryonic stem cell laboratories has plunged the controversial field of research into a new swirl of uncertainty. The accusations surrounding Korean cloning expert Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University--the first scientist to grow stem cells inside cloned human embryos--has already killed a spate of planned studies that sought to prove the cells' medical potential. The claims that Hwang may have obtained human eggs for his studies from women who felt pressured to donate are also reigniting a long-smoldering debate in the United States over the ethics of paying young women for their eggs, which are difficult to obtain but essential to the production of stem cells tailored to individuals. Egg donation, which is generally safe but occasionally leads to serious and even life-threatening complications, has been a wedge issue in the stem cell debates, linking feminists and other liberal thinkers to conservatives who favor tighter limits on stem cell research. "We're in danger of making women into guinea pigs for this research even before there are any treatments to be tested," said Marcy Darnovsky, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, Calif. "We really need clear rules that someone is enforcing." With current techniques, it takes dozens of eggs to make a single cloned human embryo, which is destroyed in the process of extracting the stem cells. That means that if the field of therapeutic cloning is to advance--a field involving the creation of cloned embryos as sources of stem cells that would be genetically matched to particular patients--a significant number of eggs will be needed both to fuel the initial research and eventually to satisfy the demands of patients. Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Mass. , made the decision to pay women only after a long analysis by an ethics board created by the company, said scientific director Robert Lanza. He still thinks it is the right way to go, Lanza said, given the painful injections involved, the uncomfortable egg suction procedure, and the approximately 5 percent chance of a serious case of hormonal over-stimulation, which can require hospitalization. Others say such payments cannot help but be coercive, especially for poor women who might feel compelled to take on those risks just to make ends meet. In April, the National Academies, chartered by Congress to advise the nation on matters of science, released a report that recommended against payments for human eggs beyond expenses incurred by the donors, in part because of the "sensitivities" inherent in the creation of embryos destined for destruction. But the report's impact remains uncertain as research institutions, fertility clinics and the biggest wild card of them all--Congress--mull the Academies' findings.
1. What can we learn from the opening paragraph?
A.Hwang paid the women for their eggs in his studies.
B.The charge of Hwang re-activized the debate in U. S..
C.The debate in U. S. is about whether or not pay for eggs.
D.The planned studies will continue without interruption.
A B C D
B
这篇文章的第1段告诉我们一个干细胞实验室里发生的一些事情引起了大家的关注和辩论。一位韩国科学家受到的指控带来了一系列的后果。B对Hwang的起诉再次掀起了美国国内的一场辩论。文中对应的信息是:The claims are also reigniting a long-smoldering debate in the United States,因此是正确的答案。
2. What can we learn about the egg donation?
A.It will leave a life-threatening disease to unhealthy donors.
B.It is extremely important to the creation of human embryo.
C.It will make the donors feel ashamed when they donate eggs.
D.Its importance to the stem cell research lies on its rareness.
Passage Four More than 11,000 traffic lights and "Don't Walk" signals in New York City have been switched to light-emitting diodes that use 90 percent less energy than conventional fixtures. More than 180,000 energy-guzzling refrigerators in public housing projects have been replaced with new ones that use a quarter of the power of the old ones. For years, New York has been the city that not only never sleeps, but the city that hardly ever remembers to turn the lights out. On the coldest days of winter, New Yorkers raise their windows to let out the heat. In the dog days of summer, a husky could freeze in the open doorway of a Fifth Avenue boutique. But now, measures like more efficient traffic lights and refrigerators are speeding up a long trend making New York one of the most energy-efficient cities in the nation--and officials in cities like Portland and Seattle that might, in the public mind, seem more environmentally conscious are taking notice. Though the savings represent just a portion of the 5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity the entire city uses in a year, the innovation and ease of the efficiency measures have attracted attention. New York's energy diet is based on a simple formula--a blend of local legislation, state assistance and an awareness of the city's own position as an 800-pound gorilla in the energy market. "Eventually what happens here starts to hap-pen around the country," said Ashok Gupta, director of the air and energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The market that New Yorkers provide is clearly an important factor in moving the rest of the country. That's the way markets work." And that market dynamic helps make New York an energy efficiency laboratory. Environmental groups expend much of their own energy to help shape legislation in New York because they realize that it is an efficient way to kick-start national programs. Manufacturers are also attuned to New York's latest trends and needs because the market is simply too big to ignore. "What's different here is that we are promoting the idea of energy efficiency, using less energy and not necessarily saying that anyone has to do without," said Eugene W. Zehman, president of the New York Power Authority. "If we use energy more wisely there will be more energy for people to consume and less energy for us to produce." "Counter to what most non-New Yorkers might think, New York is a very progressive city for green building," said Jim Himes, director of the Enterprise Foundation office in New York. The mass transit system, multifamily housing, mixed neighborhoods and the fact that developments never go up on virgin land anymore, all make building in New York very energy-efficient. "It's easier to be green here." Mr. Himes said.
1. Which one can best describes New York's public image?
4. Which one is WRONG about the market that New Yorkers provide?
A.Manufactures like it because it demands more energy-efficient production.
B.Government officials like it because it may help ease the energy problem in U. S.
C.Environmental groups like it because it may help the policy-making in U. S.
D.Researchers like it because it may help set up energy conservation laboratories.
A B C D
D
在文章里有这样一句话:The market that New Yorkers provide is clearly an important factor in moving the rest of the country.说明纽约市采取了措施之后出现了一种市场。考的就是对于这个市场的理解。D是针对文中:这种市场上的活跃也帮助纽约变成了一个节约能源的实验室。因此本题的答案是D。
Passage Five More than a year has passed since the space shuttle Columbia broke into pieces over central Texas. This past January President Bush announced a long-term program of space exploration that would return human beings to the Moon, and thereafter send them to Mars and beyond. As this magazine (Natural History) goes to press, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are wowing the scientists and engineers at the rovers' birthplace--NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)--with their skills as robotic field geologists. JPL's official rover Web site is being stampeded by visitors. The confluence of these and other events resurrects a perennial debate: with two shuttle failures out of 112 missions, and the astronomical expense of the manned space program, can sending people into space be justified, or should robots do the job alone? Modern societies have been sending robots into space since 1957, and people since 1961. Fact is, it's vastly cheaper to send robots: in most cases, a fiftieth the cost of sending people. Robots don't much care how hot or cold space gets; give them the fight lubricants, and they'll operate in a vast range of temperatures. They don't need elaborate life-support systems, either. Robots can spend long periods of time moving around and among the planets, more or less unfazed by ionizing radiation. They do not lose bone mass from prolonged exposure to weightlessness, because, of course, they are boneless. You don't even have to feed them. Best of all, once they've finished their jobs, they won't complain if you don't bring them home. But there's a flip side to this argument. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the days of NASA's manned Apollo flights to the Moon, no robot could decide which pebbles to pick up and bring home. But when the Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, the only geologist to have walked on the Moon, noticed some odd, orange and black soil on the lunar surface, he immediately collected a sample. It turned out to be minute beads of volcanic glass. Today a robot can perform staggering chemical analyses and transmit amazingly detailed images, but it still can't react, as Schmitt did, to a surprise. By contrast, packed inside the 150-pound mechanism of a field geologist are the capacities to walk, run, dig, hammer, see, communicate, interpret, and invent. And of course when something goes wrong, an on-the-spot human being becomes a robot's best friend. After landing on Mars this past January 3, did the Spirit rover just roll right off its lander platform and start checking out the neighborhood? No, its air-bags were blocking the path. Not until January 15 did Spirit's remote controllers man-age to get all six of its wheels rolling on Martian soil. Anyone on the scene on January 3 could have just lifted the airbags out of the way and given Spirit a little shove.
1. The word "stampeded" (Line 7, Para. 1) most probably means ______ .
2. Which one is NOT the factor leading to the public debate?
A.The high expense of the manned space program.
B.The inefficient work of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
C.The heavy casualties in the space shuffle wreckage.
D.The announcement of a long-term space exploration.
A B C D
B
在第1段中有这样一句话:The confluence of these and other events resurrects a perennial debate.关键在于these和other events是指什么。文章一开头就提到了哥伦比亚号航天飞船的失事,以及另一项长期的太空探险计划。因此本题的答案是B。
3. Why some people don't agree to send robots into space?
A.Astronauts can react to unforeseen circumstances.
B.Men can find the valuable sample while robots can't.
C.Robots don't have such feeling as surprise like men.
D.Robots can't collect the samples as exactly as men.
5. Which of the following can best serve as the title of the passage?
A.Launching the right stuff.
B.Better space explorer-robot.
C.The great space exploration.
D.Prospect of space exploration.
A B C D
A
通读全文我们发现文中自始至终都在就送谁上太空的问题展开讨论,因此A是正确的答案。
Passage Six Although solutions to a problem are often the. fruit of direct investments in targeted research, the most revolutionary solutions tend to emerge from cross-pollination with other disciplines. Medical investigators might never have known of X rays, since they do not naturally occur in biological systems. It took a physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, to discover them--light rays that could probe the body's interior with nary a cut from a surgeon. Here's a more recent example of cross-pollination. Soon after the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in April 1990, NASA engineers realized that the telescope's primary mirror--which gathers and reflects the light from celestial objects into its cameras and spectrographs-had been ground to an incorrect shape. In other words, the billion-and-a-half-dollar telescope was producing fuzzy images. As if to make lemonade out of lemons, though, computer algorithms came to the rescue. Investigators developed a range of clever and innovative image-processing techniques to compensate for some of Hubble's shortcomings. Tums out, maximizing the amount of information that could be extracted from a blurry astronomical image is technically identical to maximizing the amount of information that can be extracted from a mammogram. Soon the new techniques came into common use for detecting early signs of breast cancer. In 1997, for Hubble's second servicing mission, shuttle astronauts swapped in a brand-new, high-resolution digital detector-designed to the demanding specs of astronomers whose careers are based on being able to see small, dim things in the cosmos. That technology is now incorporated in a minimally invasive, low-cost system for doing breast biopsies, the next stage after mammograms in the early diagnosis of cancer. Today, cross-pollination between science and society comes about when you have ample funding for ambitious, long-term projects. America has profited immensely from a generation of scientists and engineers who, instead of becoming lawyers or investment bankers, responded to a challenging vision posed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. "We intend to land a man on the Moon," proclaimed Kennedy, welcoming the citizenry to aid in the effort. That generation, and the one that followed, was the same generation of technologists who invented the personal computer. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was thirteen years old when the U. S. landed an astronaut on the Moon; Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, was fourteen. The PC did not arise from the mind of a banker or artist or professional athlete. It was invented and developed by a technically trained workforce, who had responded to the dream unfurled before them, and were thrilled to become scientists and engineers.
1. The word "cross-pollination" (Line2, Para. 1) denotes ______ .
Section B Directions: In each of the following passages, five sentences have been removed from the original text. They are listed from A to F put below the passage. Choose the most suitable sentence from the list to fill in each of the blanks numbered 66 to 75. For each passage, there is one sentence that does not fit in any of the blanks. Mark your answers on your Machine-scoring Answer Sheet.
Passage One Between 5,000 million and 4,000 million years ago the Earth was formed, By 3,000 million years ago life had arisen and we have fossils of microscopic bacteria-like creatures to prove it. 1 Nobody knows what happened, but theorists agree that the key was the spontaneous arising of self-replicating entities, i. e. something equivalent to "genes" in the general sense. The atmosphere of the early Earth probably contained gases still abundant today on other planets in the solar system. Chemists have experimentally reconstructed these ancient conditions in the laboratory. If plausible gases are mixed in a flask with water, and energy is added by an electric discharge (simulated lightning), organic sub-stances are spontaneously synthesized. These include the building blocks of RNA and DNA. It seems probable that something like this happened on the early Earth. Consequently, the sea would have become a "soup" of prebiological organic compounds. 2 Today the most famous self-replicating molecule is DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), but it is widely thought that DNA itself could not have been present at the origin of life because its replication is too dependent on support from specialized machinery, which could not have been available before evolution itself began. DNA has been described as a" high-tech" molecule which probably arose some time after the origin of life itself. Perhaps the related molecule RNA, which still plays various vital roles in living cells, was the original self-replicating molecule. Or perhaps the primordial replicator was a different kind of molecule altogether. 3 Variants that were particularly good at replication would automatically have come to predominate in the primeval soup. Varieties that did not replicate, or that did so inaccurately, would have become relatively less numerous. This led to ever-increasing efficiency among replicating molecules. As the competition between replicating molecules warmed up, success must have gone to the ones: hat happened to hit upon special tricks or devices for their own self-preservation and their own rapid replication. The rest of evolution may be regarded as a continuation of the natural selection of replicator molecules, now called genes, by virtue of their capacity to build for themselves efficient devices (cells and multicellular bodies) for their own preservation and reproduction. 4 Fossils were not laid down on more than a small scale until the Cambrian era, nearly 600 million years ago. The first vertebrates may date back 530 million years, according to fossil evidence--primitive, lawless fishes with fins, gills, and fish-like muscle patterns--found in China in 1999. Vertebrates appear abundantly in fossil beds between 300 and 400 million years ago. 5 Mammals and, later, birds, arose from two different branches of reptiles. The rapid divergence of mammals into the rich variety of types that we see today, from opossums to elephants, from anteaters to monkeys, seems to have been unleashed into the vacuum left by the catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. A. Among vertebrates, the land was first colonized by lobe-finned and lung-bearing fish about 250 million years ago, then by amphibians and, in more thoroughgoing fashion, by various kinds of animals that we loosely lump together as reptiles. B. Once self-replicating molecules had been formed by chance, something like Darwinian natural selection could have begun: variation would have come into the population because of random errors in copying. C. It is not enough, of course, that organic molecules appeared in the primeval soup. The crucial step, as noted above, was the origin of self-replicating molecules, molecules capable of copying themselves. D. Although we naturally emphasize the evolution of our own kind--the vertebrates, the mammals, and the primates--these constitute only a small branch of the great tree of life. E. Three thousand million years is a long time, and it seems to have been long enough to have produced such astonishingly complex contrivances as the vertebrate body and the insect body. F. Some time between these two dates--independent molecular evidence suggests about 4,000 million years ago--that mysterious event, the origin of life, must have occurred.
Passage Two Some rituals of modern domestic living vary little throughout the developed world. One such is the municipal refuse collection, usually once a week, your rubbish bags or the contents of your bin disappear into the bowels of a special lorry and are carted away to the local tip. To economists, this ceremony is peculiar, because in most places it is free. Yes, households pay for the service out of local taxes. 1 Yet the marginal cost of rubbish disposal is not zero at all. The more people throw away, the more rubbish collectors and trucks are needed, and the more the local council has to pay in landfill and tipping fees. 2 But as Don Fullerton and Thomas Kinnaman, two American economists, have found, this seemingly easy application of economic sense to an everyday problem has surprisingly intricate and sometimes disappointing results. In the past few years several American towns and cities have started charging households for generating rubbish. The commonest system is to sell stickers or tags which householders attach to rubbish bags or cans. Only bags with these labels are picked up in the weekly collection. In the paper published last year Fullerton and Kinnaman studied the effects of one such scheme, introduced in July 1992 in Charlottesville, Virginia, a town of about 40,000 people. Residents were charged 80 cents for each sticker. This may sound like the sensible use of market forces. In fact, the authors conclude, the scheme's benefits did not cover the cost of printing stickers, the sticker sellers' commissions, and the wages of the people running the scheme. 3 This is inefficient: compacting is done better by machines at landfill sites than by individuals, however enthusiastically. The weight of rubbish collected in Charlottesville fell by a modest 14%. 4 The one bright spot in all this seems to have been a 15% increase in the weight of materials recycled, suggesting that people chose to recycle free rather than pay to have their refuse carted away. But the fee may have little to do with the growth in recycling, as many citizens were already participating in Charlottesville's voluntary recycling scheme. 5 To discourage dumping, for instance, local councils might have to spend more on catching litterers, or raise fines for littering, or cut the price of legitimate rubbish collection. A. True, the number of bags or cans collected did fall sharply, by 37% between May and September 1992. But rather than buy more tags, people simply crammed more garbage--about 40% more into each container. B. This looks like the most basic of economic misunderstandings: if rubbish disposal is free, people will produce too much rubbish. The obvious economic solution is to make households pay the marginal cost of disposing of their waste. That will give them an incentive to throw out less and recycle more. C. City authorities are now considering a project to teach Government waste collectors the skills, such as what rubbish to collect and how to classify it. If approved, the project will help ease the financial burden of the city's waste treatment. D. It would be foolish to generalize from this one case, but the moral is clear, economic incentives sometimes produce unforeseen responses. E. Less pleasing still, some people resorted to illegal dumping rather than pay to have their rubbish removed. This is hard to measure directly. But the authors, ob-serving that a few households in the sample stopped putting rubbish out, guess that illegal dumping may account for 30%-40% of the reduction in collected rubbish. F. But at the margin the price is zero: the family that fills four bins with rubbish each week pays no more than the elderly couple that fills one.
Part Ⅳ Translation Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. Write your pieces of Chinese version in the proper space on your Answer Sheet Ⅱ. In May 2004 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released its 2003-2004 book-length report, The State of Food and Agriculture: Agricultural Biotechnology: Meeting the Needs of the Poor? It immediately attracted significant press and media attention. In fact, while reporting on its survey of existing examinations of risks posed by agricultural biotechnology, the FAO report concludes that "biotechnology is capable of benefiting small resource-poor farmers" and that in numerous situations the benefits clearly outweigh the risks. In addition to attempting to re-orient biotechnology discussions and lessen the polemics attendant to them, 1. the FAO report offers and illuminates much factual information that is encompassed by biotechnology research, applications, and distribution. In fact, report lays out a coherent understanding of what biotechnology is, and offers a clear exposition for general readers--as well as policy and scientific specialists--of essential biotechnology concepts and methods such as market-assisted breeding, cell as well as genetic engineering. 2. Of particular importance, the essay has a thoughtful discussion on the health and environmental concerns associated with biotechnology. While concluding that, as to health concerns, there is a scientific consensus that biotechnology-altered foodstuffs are safe, the report stresses the scientific consensus on the need for case-by-case studies for all biotechnology products and processes. Regarding environmental concerns, of which the reports describes the science community's call for more scientific research and investigation, the FAO report surveys and describes the international instruments that are beginning to direct policy and regulatory standard development for biotechnology, such as the International Plant Protection Convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Notwithstanding its multi-faceted examination of biotechnology for the 21st century, 3. the FAO report's other major emphasis--alongside the potential of biotechnology for poor farmers--is that the mode for bringing this biotechnology potential to poor farmers is woefully deficient. Although some obstacles are indeed formidable for bringing biotechnology potential benefits to the poor, the report does not despair, and it offers ideas and even an agenda for reorienting the biotechnology enterprise for greater technology transfer and benefits for the poor. To overcome technology transfer and development obstacles, 4. the FAO report calls on all countries and the international community as a whole to: "establish transparent, predictable science-based regulatory procedures; establish appropriate intellectual property rights to insure that developers can earn an adequate return of investment." Along with these supportive measures, more direct measures for bio-technology need to be taken, and these include a dramatic increase in public research, a fostering of public-private partnerships, greater focus on the crops that poor farmers grow, and the emergence of developing world regional centers of biotechnology research and dissemination. The FAO report is hopeful that this can be done. 5. Underlying its propounding of this hopeful vision is not only an examination of what is currently amiss, but also important case studies in which biotechnology is actually helping poor farmers, in terms of economics and also human health, as is the case with biotechnology-modified cotton in China.
Part Ⅴ Writing Directions: Write an essay of no less than 200 words on the topic given below. Use the proper space on your Answer Sheet Ⅱ.
1. 父母是否应该花更多的时间同子女在一起?
In China, both of the parents have their jobs. With the development of economy, people tend to pursue high quality living conditions. Most of the parents try their best to offer their children comfortable circumstances, but they seldom have time to stay with their children. In my point of view, no matter how busy they are, they should make the best use of their time to stay with their children. First, the love between children and adults will be improved by spending more time on their children. Children could feel parents' affection through the genial conversation and sharing their pleasure with them. Every time when parents take them to amusement park, help them to prepare their birthday parties, applaud for them when they are competing in the sports meeting, the time they spend with children will be-come treasure in their memories. Second, children need the direction from their parents. There are some wrong behaviors in our society such as dishonesty, corruption, violence and eroticism and so on. Children have weak resistance in defending this detrimental influence. In this case, parents' instructions seem to be very important to children's growth. Parents should sit down and talk with them about what they should do and should not do. In addition, if parents often spend time in staying with their children, adults' good behaviors will greatly influence their children. Here I do not deny that there are some disadvantages in spending too much time on children. Some parents restrict their children, and give them little freedom to develop their interests. Therefore, I emphasize that parents should educate and instruct their children appropriately in their spare time apart from their busy works.