Text 1 Killing oneself has been legal in Britain since 1961, but it is a serious crime to help someone else to die. Anyone who "aids, assists, counsels or procures" a suicide out of compassion or something more sinister—risks up to 14 years in prison. It is a risk that many are willing to take. About 120 Britons have committed suicide at Dignitas, a Zurich suicide clinic that takes advantage of liberal Swiss laws, and many have had relatives or friends with them for moral or practical support. None of these companions has been charged with a crime. But such cases are not unknown. Since April 2005, 16 people have been prosecuted for assisting suicide in England and Wales, and some of them have gone on to be convicted. The uncertainty as to whether helpers will be prosecuted heaps agony on those who already face the appalling decision whether to end their lives. Debbie Purdy, who has multiple sclerosis, asked prosecutors last year to clarify whether her husband would be charged if he went with her to Zurich. When they declined, she appealed to the House of Lords, which ruled in her favour in July. On September 23rd the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, duly published guidelines to enlighten her and the thousands like her. Mr Starmer listed 16 factors that would weigh in favour of prosecution and 13 against. Helpers are less likely to be prosecuted if they were close friends or relatives; if the person who died was severely ill physically; if he had a "settled" wish to die; and so on. Charges are more likely if the victim was under 18 or mentally ill, or if the suspect stood to gain from his death (though, campaigners note, this is often the case because helpers tend to be spouses or offspring). A British version of Dignitas is ruled out. serial assisters can expect to be prosecuted, as can members of groups whose main purpose is facilitating suicide. One consequence of leaving the matter to lawyers, rather than getting a bill through Parliament, is that the guidelines are framed in broader terms than a new law would have been. Earlier this year Lord Falconer and others proposed an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill that would have legalised assisting suicide overseas in cases of terminal illness. It was voted down by peers who considered it dangerously radical. The new guidelines, though they do not make assisting suicide legal, apply at home as well as abroad and cover suicide by the seriously as welt as the terminally ill. It remains to be seen whether the rules will satisfy the demand for reform or will trigger more change. It seems too important an issue for people not to have their say.
Text 2 There aren't a whole lot of scientific disciplines that haven't had something to say about climate change over the years—and with good reason. When a problem is global in scale there's a universe of specialists and subspecialists who have to try hard to fix it. But one field—psychology—has never had much skin in the game. It's less important to consider how humans feel about the mess we've made of our planet, after all, than how we clean it up. That, at least, has always been the thinking. Increasingly, however, psychologists are making the case that the best way to resolve any crisis and prevent it from happening again is to understand the minds of the people who caused it. And that means all six billion of US. The newest issue of the American Psychologist is devoted largely to making that case, with a series of articles by a team of psychologists from around the country exploring the thinking, feelings and other cognitive processes that have allowed us to be so neglectful of our world—and could be harnessed to help us take better care of it. The papers are by and large illuminating, surprising and, well, occasionally absurd—which is what often happens when scientists are feeling their way in a relatively new field and fall back on jargon and other linguistic terms to try to make it make sense. Still, with climate change only growing worse and the U.S. in particular seeming unable or unwilling to do much about it, new perspectives are always welcome and badly needed. One of the first things scientists do in trying to wrestle a big problem to the ground is simplify and clarify it, with a nice, clear equation if possible—and the climate psychologists are no exception. If you want to devise policies to make people more climate conscious, they argue, all you have to remember is I=tpn. More specifically put, that means the impact of any behavioral change will be equal its technical potential to fix the problem, times the behavioral plasticity required to comply with it, times the number of people who actually do comply. "Behavioral science understandably focuses on the p," writes psychologist Paul Stern of the National Research Council, "though in setting policy priorities, t and n are critical to take into account." Insulating your attic is technically simple and very effective, but it takes a lot of behavioral plasticity before anyone will actually get up and do it. Buying a hybrid car can do a lot of good too—but until the prices come way down and the selection goes way up not a lot of people are going to do it. There's still time, of course, to reverse—or at least slow—our environmental decline. Psychologists may always play more of a supporting than leading role in making that happen, but it's a critical role nonetheless.
1. From the first paragraph we learn that ______
A.every discipline has tried to avoid talking about climate change
B.psychology as a discipline hasn't had much to say about climate change
C.experts in other disciplines than climatology know little about climate change
D.no discipline is concerned about how people actually feel about climate change
A B C D
B
[解析] 第一段第一句是一个双重否定句,因此应该被理解为每个学科都曾经谈论过气候变化。本文从心理学的角度探讨了人们对气候变化的心理感受和反应。心理学很少谈论这个话题,主要是因为有人认为人们如何感受环境灾难是次要的,更重要的是如何克服环境灾难,或清除我们给环境留下的烂摊子(clean up the mess)。
2. With which of the issues are the articles not concerned?
A.how people deliberately change the climate to their advantage
B.what makes people mentally indifferent to their environment
C.how we think about the earth in order to preserve or protect it
D.why are Americans unwilling to do something about climate change
3. What does the author think of the psychologists' approach to climate change in general?
A.Informative and enlightening.
B.Intriguing but absurd.
C.Ridiculous and unintelligible.
D.Insightful but unpractical.
A B C D
A
[解析] 第三段中作者称这些心理学上的探讨总体上来说(by and large)是illuminating(这个词指通过解释或澄清某个问题使人获得智力上的启迪),虽然它们有时有些荒唐:这主要体现在它们过多地依赖一些专业术语来解释自己的观点,在作者看来,这种做法常见于刚刚涉猎某个新学科领域的人。
4. In the formula, p stands for ______
A.the policy made for wrestling with environmental problems
B.the change in the climate patterns that causes disaster
C.the ability to identify and solve a technical problem
D.the adaptive power of people to changes in the environment
A B C D
D
[解析] 名词plasticity指柔韧性或适应性。其实,在第四段中,comply with的意思即为“顺应、服从”;第五段中也举出了两个例子(insudating your attic指使你的阁楼隔热,达到少开空调并节约能源的目的;混合燃料汽车指汽油和其他燃料均能使用的汽车,达到节约燃料能源的目的),用来说明技术上的进步(即t因素)需要一段时间的适应才能获得广泛使用。
5. The best title for the text might be ______
A.Why Should We Put Our Solution into a Formula
B.Why Psychologists Could Do Nothing about Climate Change
C.How the Mind Can Save the Planet from Potential Disasters
D.How Environmental Decline Can Be Reversed before it Is Too Late
Text 3 Scot Case was not happy. Vice president of the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, Case last year sent his researchers into a big retail store to evaluate the green advertising claims of some of the products on its shelves. The results were startling, of the 1,018 products TerraChoice surveyed, all but one failed to live up fully to their green boasts. Words like nontoxic were used in meaninglessly vague ways. Terms like Energy Star certified were in fact not backed up by certification. Many consumers may not have heard the term greenwashing, but they've surely experienced it—misleading marketing about the environmental benefits of a product. Greenwashing isn't new—ever since the environment emerged as an issue in the early 1970s, there have been advertising firms trying to convince consumers that buying Brand X is the only way to save the earth. But as going green has become big business—sales of organic products alone went from $10 billion in 2003 to more than $20 billion in 2007—companies appear eager to associate themselves with the environment, deservedly or not. If you're not yet sick of seeing rotating wind turbines and solar panels on TV, you will be. the new fall season is likely to feature a flood of green advertising. It's gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been holding hearings over the past year to define the difference between genuine environmental claims and empty greenwash. It's not easy—and environmental advocates worry that truly green companies could get lost in all the clamor. "We have such a challenge ahead of us on climate change," says Kevin Tuerff, a co-founder of the marketing consultancy EnviroMedia. "Greenwashing harms the effort we need to be making." The first step to cleaning up greenwashing is to identify it, and Tuerff and his partners have hit on an innovative way to direct public attention to particularly bad examples. They've launched the Greenwashing Index (www.yinfu.com), a website that allows consumers to post ads that might be examples of greenwashing and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5—1 is a little green lie; 5 is an outright falsehood. It's a simple device, but it shows the power of the Internet to trace misleading ads; with a simple Web search, any consumer can find out if a car manufacturer boasting of its fuel-efficient hybrids actually earns the majority of its revenue selling gas-consuming trucks and SUVs. "We try to make it a little more transparent with the index," says Kim Sheehan, a communications professor at the University of Oregon and a co-founder of the site. "It teaches people to be a little more cautious about the claims they hear."
1. Why is Scot not happy?
A.His company was found cheating in advertising.
B.The accusation against his company was not justifiable.
C.The green claims made of most products turned out to be false.
D.The terms used for describing green products were not clearly defined.
[解析] 第二段第一句破折号后面部分对greenwashing进行了定义,它指misleading marketing about the environmental benefits of a product。从这个词的构成来看,它指把要出售的东西放在绿色中“洗一洗”,以便使其带上绿色,但其实质无法改变。第一段最后三句实际上举例说明了这种“漂绿”现象。
3. One danger in letting greenwashing go without control is that ______
A.many consumers will get poisoned by the advertised products
B.truly green firms will he tempted to abandon their efforts
C.companies will stop taking any notice of the environment
D.no companies will make genuine environmental claims any more
Text 4 For the typical American, the past decade has been economically brutal, the first time since the 1930s, according to some calculations, that inflation-adjusted incomes declined. While there are many causes, from declining unionization to the changing mix of needed skills, globalization has had the greatest impact. The phenomenon that free traders like me adore has created a nation of winners (think of those low-priced imported goods) but also many losers. Nowhere have these pressures been more intense than in the manufacturing sector. A typical General Motors worker costs the company about $56 per hour, which includes benefits. In Mexico, a worker costs the company $7 per hour, and in India, $1 per hour. Pressed by high unemployment and eager to keep jobs in this country, the United Auto Workers agreed that companies could cut their costs by hiring some workers at $14 an hour, with lower benefits. In these troubled times, any jobs are surely welcome. But we need to reverse the decline in incomes, and this requires a more thoughtful approach than the pervasive, politically attractive happy talk sentimentally centered on restoring lost manufacturing jobs. So let's start by acknowledging that just as it occurred decades ago with agriculture, the declining role in our economy of manufacturing, which over the last half-century is down from 32 percent of the work force to 9 percent, will continue. Let's also recognize that retreating into protectionism would turn a win-lose into a lose-lose. And even if organized labor could force wage rates back up, that would hardly help domestic manufacturing compete against lower-cost imports. Instead, we should follow the example of successful high-wage exporters in concentrating on products where we have an advantage, as Germany has done with products like sophisticated machine tools. While America still leads in sectors like defense and aviation, our greatest strength, and a source of high-paying jobs, lies in service industries with high intellectual content, like education, entertainment, digital media, and yes, even financial services. Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all American creations, as are the global credit card companies American Express, Visa and MasterCard. Achieving higher wages also requires a greater commitment to education. Following the German model of greater emphasis on engineering and technical training would also be advantageous. And there is the tricky question of what role government should play. While countries like China have put large resources behind industries they want to nurture, we should resist the temptation to plunge deeply into industrial policy. Particularly in its current dysfunctional condition, Washington is ill-equipped to pick winners and should concentrate its capital on infrastructure and other public investments that the private sector won't make. To assist the private sector, particularly young companies, which are the biggest source of new hiring, tax incentives could be used to foster the creation of well-paying jobs. With global competition and its pressure on American wages intensifying, American workers deserve a more focused approach from Washington.
1. The example of the General Motors worker illustrates ______
A.the American workers are actually victims to those in Mexico
B.globalization has created many losers in the manufacturing sector
C.the decline of the union leaves the manufacturing workers powerless
D.the skilled workers are most likely to be influenced by globalization
4. Should America learn from China concerning the government's role?
A.Yes, it should, since China's economy has been going well.
B.No, it should not, since it has no idea what role to play.
C.Yes, it should invest its money into infrastructure and education.
D.No, it should not, because China has richer resources than it has.
A B C D
B
[解析] 第五段提到,美国应该向德国学习,学习它对教育的重视。但是在作者看来,美国在确立自己的角色上不应该向中国学习,应该抵挡住诱惑,不应该深深地涉入产业政策(resist the temptation to plunge deeply into industrial policy)。尤其是在目前政府失灵的状况下(指债务危机等状况),美国政府更没有能力找出谁是胜利者加以支持(pick winners指找出哪些企业能在市场上胜出),所以它最好不要涉入企业领域,而应该投资公共部门或公共领域。
5. Under the present circumstances, the government should ______
Text 5 It's easy to condemn economics as not being a "real" science, and I try not to do things that are too easy. But in recent weeks I've really started to wonder. It is fascinating, and frightening, to me that smart economists can disagree about whether what the economy needs right now is more government spending or less. The debate isn't about how much stimulus, or how much austerity, or the way such stimulus/austerity should be applied, but rather about which one is called for in the first place. How is this possible? It's like a group of doctors not being able to agree whether a patient's blood should be thinned or coagulated. What am I supposed to make of that? Roger Backhouse, a historian and philosopher of economics at the U.K.'s University of Birmingham, helps me out in his new book, The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? I've been reading it over the past few weeks and at first I thought Backhouse was going to confirm my worst fear: that it is so difficult to employ scientific methods in understanding super-complex large-scale economic phenomena (like the U.S. economy) that ideology is pretty much necessary if you want to come to any useful conclusions about what's going on or what should be done. Most scientific disciplines don't have esteemed members regularly going after one another in the op-ed pages. Economics, in an important way, feels different. But the more I read Backhouse's book, the more I understood that it's important to distinguish economics from economics as it is typically practiced. Backhouse shows how the current mathematics-heavy top-down approach to economics is not the only one. He traces the origin of the approach—which necessarily assumes that people are rational agents trying to optimize their resources to the 1930s, but points out that it took some 30 years to really catch on. Before that, the field was rooted in empirical work. Theories tended to be tentative and not all-encompassing. Economists would gather data, and insight from other fields about how people behave (like psychology), in an attempt to come up with explanations about how the world works. The current fashion, of course, is to come up with theories about how the world is supposed to work. The obvious problem: people aren't always rational. They are, in fact, influenced by things like advertising and a sense of fairness. As a result, math-heavy top- down models can prove disastrously wrong. After all, the economy is as much a product of sociology and policy as it is pure-form economics. Yet we'd not expect a sociologist or a political scientist to be able to write a computer model to accurately capture system-wide decision-making. The conclusion I've come to: while economists may have an important perspective on whether it's time for stimulus or austerity, maybe we should stop looking to them as if they are people who are in the ultimate position to know.
1. According to the author, economists disagree on ______
A.whether the government should increase expenditure
B.whether a stimulus program is needed
C.whether austerity or stimulus should put first
D.whether economy needs a clever spending policy
A B C D
C
[解析] 第一段第四句提到,争论的焦点不是多大规模的刺激政策或紧缩政策,也不是刺激政策或紧缩政策的实施方式,而是首先需要哪一种政策(which one is called for in the first place)。在这个句子中,but rather意为“更确切地,而是”;which one指stimulus还是austerity;短语call for意为“需要”;in the first place意为“首先,起初”。
2. The author used to think that ______
A.economics was a branch of natural science
B.ideology was necessary for economic phenomena
C.scientific methods were not applicable to economics
D.some famous economists wanted economics to be a science
A B C D
B
[解析] 第二段第二句提到,在阅读Backhouse的书之初,他以为Backhouse的书confirm my worst fear,也就是说,书中表达的基本观点跟他以前的观点是一致的——虽然他不希望自己以前的观点是正确的,即理解经济问题必须借助意识形态:经济现象不能用科学的方法得以解释,而只能从意识形态的角度进行解释。
3. It can be inferred from Paragraph 3 that ______
A.the traditional theory adopted a bottom-up approach to economics
B.the current approach to economics is not rational and scientific
C.it took the current approach to economics 30 years to take form
D.the traditional theory was rooted in the economic depression of the 1930s
A B C D
A
[解析] 第三段提到现代经济学采用的是top-down approach to economics,从下文对20世纪30年代之前的经济学理论的对比可以看出,这种方法指从经济学理论或模型到实践的演绎方法。而20世纪30年代之前的理论则是一种empirical work,即注重数据的收集,重视经验或试验。所谓bottom-up approach指从数据、经验到形成理论的归纳方法。可见,第三段中提到的两种approach实际上是演绎方法和归纳方法上的区别。
4. The top-down models ______
A.are not supposed to work at all
B.are formulated by sociologists and political scientists
C.are less influenced by things like advertising
D.are also referred to as pure-form economics
A B C D
D
[解析] 最后一段对top-down经济理论进行了评价,认为它不能对目前的经济状况做出解释,无法帮助我们制定正确的经济决策。根据上一段,mathematics-heavy top-down approach to economics是目前盛行的理论,这种理论把人假定为是理性的,通过建构数学模型来解释经济现象。在第四段,这种经济理论被称作pure-form economics。
5. With regard to the present economic situation, the author advocates ______
A.substituting the bottom-up models for the top-down models
B.rejecting the sociological approaches for the math-heavy approaches
C.executing the stimulus policy before putting the austerity policy into effect
D.economic phenomena are more complicated than pure-form economists think