英国卫报

英国卫报 Passage one: Michael Jackson's Robert Burns songs to be released A Scottish museum may soon be home to one of Michael Jackson's unreleased albums. More than a decade after Jackson and David Gest recorded songs based on the poetry of Robert Burns, Gest reportedly intends to donate the recordings to the poet's official museum in Ayrshire. In a career of peculiar projects, it remains one of the singer's strangest: a collection of showtunes inspired by Burns's life and work. The songs have never been made public – it was either overlooked or forgotten in the Jackson estate's search for unreleased material. Now, after a visit to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Gest has reportedly agreed to donate Jackson's most Scottish songs. "[David] offered to look them out and provide copies [for us]," museum director Nat Edwards told the List. The museum hopes to "produce some sort of CD", as a fundraiser. "[It would] be a way of getting audiences interested in Burns and illustrating his international, enduring artistic legacy," Edwards said. Gest explained in a recent TV documentary for BBC Alba that he and Jackson were Burns fanatics. "I said to Michael, let's do a play [based on] Burns's life and he said he would help me with the music." Jackson ended up hiring musicians and borrowing the studio at the Jackson family home in Encino, California. "Michael believed in the project so much," Gest said. "We took about eight or 10 of Burns's poems and put them to contemporary music, such as A Red Red Rose, Ae Fond Kiss and the story of Tam O'Shanter." Although the collaboration was first revealed in 2008, it seems to have taken place in the late 80s. They originally intended to stage a musical, Gest said, produced by actor Anthony Perkins and directed by Gene Kelly. Plans were scuppered after Perkins's death in 1992. Kelly died in 1996. That year, Gest premiered a play based on Burns's life, Red Red Rose. Best known as the ex-husband of Liza Minnelli, Gest was a contestant on the 2006 series of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Last year he released a film based on Jackson's life. Passage two: David Hockney landscapes: The wold is not enough Out in all weathers (rain excepted), standing in woodlands and at roadsides, David Hockney has come a long way from the California poolside, and from the Bradford of his youth – to the east Yorkshire landscape inland from Bridlington, where he now lives for most of the year. Setting up his easels in the great outdoors, or sitting in his car recording his observations with a painting app on his iPhone or iPad, or cruising quiet lanes in a van bedecked with video cameras, Hockney's reinvention of himself as a full-blooded landscape artist is not without danger. As well as nature and the weather, he's up against history. Hockney's homecoming is recorded in A Bigger Picture, opening this Saturday at the Royal Academy in London. It is a very big exhibition. It goes on and on. It is hard to like Hockney's later work in its entirety, but then you do have to be selective when faced with any facet of his long career. Those funny, sassy, sexy 1960s paintings – caught happily between figuration, storytelling, jokiness and abstraction – are winning in all sorts of ways, as are his pools, his lawn-sprinklered buffed California, his boys in the shower and on their sun-loungers. Hockney's strengths are mostly graphic and illustrational. He can draw like Ingres (or redo Picasso redoing Ingres) and make of it something of his own. His later landscapes lack the charm, but carry the vices as well as the wit that gave his earlier work such character. They're just big and wilful. Hockney lacks the elan and notational elegance of, say, America's Alex Katz, as well as the vision of Samuel Palmer and the wonderment of Stanley Spencer, never mind the degree of perspicacity shown by dozens (if not hundreds) of lesser-known landscape artists, many of whom line the walls of the Royal Academy summer shows. And we haven't even got to the very great painters of nature: Courbet and Turner, Monet and Constable, Cézanne and Van Gogh. The best landscapes here, depicting hawthorns in full spring flower, their branches heavy with blossom, do attain an almost surreal and visionary delight, but they culminate in a painting so over the top – May Blossom on the Roman Road, from 2009 – that it looks as though giant caterpillars were climbing all over a kind of mad topiary, beneath a roaring Van Goghish sky. I wish more works could be as crazy as this: Hockney captures and amplifies something of the astonishment of hawthorns in bloom. I kept thinking of dying Dennis Potter describing in that 1994 interview with Melvyn Bragg how "nowness" had become so vivid: "Instead of saying, 'Oh, that's nice blossom' … I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom." This kind of presentness, and sense of presence, is, I think, what Hockney would like to capture. He has always been good at finding surprising and elegant ways to orchestrate differences: the palm tree against the sky, the light on the water, the splash in the still pool. These allow your eye to alight on things in different ways, just as the mind records what the eye sees with various degrees of nuance and recognition. Hockney still tries to do this but fails as often as he succeeds. Looking closely at his paintings of tunnels of trees overhanging a country track, I just get irritated by all the dibbling and dabbing, all that poking and flicking, the results of his attempts to vary the pace and the touch. What he actually lacks is touch itself. I don't mind the coarseness of his smaller and larger painterly gestures, but they seem as affected as they are impetuous. It all becomes a sort of slurry. Large or small, in watercolour or in oils, the paintings seem to sag, their variety – bright celandines under a canopy of spring foliage, a carpet of fallen beech leaves tiger-striped by shadow – becoming a sort of sameness. Often, his painterly effects work well enough in reproduction. Looking at the catalogue I get the point, but in the raw, the paintings aren't nearly so successful. They don't bear looking at for very long. And there are other artists, whose ambitions aren't nearly so developed as Hockney's, who do this sort of thing much better. I think he is fighting slickness, or too much style, or rote solutions to painting problems: how to do bare branches, puddles on the path, the grass under your feet, the herringbone rhythms of tractor tracks. It is clear Hockney is excited by these variations and difficulties. But all those splodges and patterns, smears and dapples and churnings get very wearying. I just can't wait to get indoors and kick the gumboots off. A Bigger Picture opens with a group of large paintings depicting three big trees near Thixendale, painted from the same vantage point in different seasons. Leaves come and go, crops grow, the autumn fields are tilled. Green hills turn blue in winter, under milky skies. We've seen this sort of thing many times. David Hockney's Winter Tunnel with Snow, March, 2006, oil on canvas. Photograph: Richard Schmidt In the catalogue, Margaret Drabble drivels on about Hockney's homecoming. "He eschews the misty elegiac pastoral mode," she says. But it is precisely this mode, updated, that gives Hockney's later work its charm, such as it is. Hockney, Drabble tells us, "has not founded a Bridlington school". But he runs very close to a school of mucky, chancy English landscape painting that is already ubiquitous – and degraded by its overfamiliarity. The show takes a detour through earlier Hockney landscapes: from mid-1950s student work depicting a dreary Bradford suburb, to a huge 1998 painting of the Grand Canyon. Along the way there are witty photocollages, including 1986's Pearblossom Highway, a desert road littered with signage and beer bottles, and a full-size photographic reproduction of his 1980 painting Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio. It is extremely unpleasant to go from real paintings, with their record of touches and accretions, to this gigantic reproduction. There are things the photograph can't record. This is the work of art in the age of electronic reproduction – and it is just a precursor to what comes later. iPad drawing No 2 from David Hockney's The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire 2011 The largest gallery is filled with a single work in many parts: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty-eleven). The piece is as cumbersome as its title, which is printed on the wall above a giant multi-panelled painting. The other walls are double-hung with blown-up, printed images of drawings made on an iPad. Hockney uses the app again, in works depicting Yosemite in the American west. It allows him to draw like Van Gogh, to blur and smear and dapple and dot, to do all the things painting can do, except paint. The images have no texture, surface or sheen. They look almost wipable. They can never hide their electronic origins, no matter how painterly they appear. There's something inescapably dead and bland and gutless about them. Hockney mistakes, I think, technology for modernity. He has worked with older technologies: the Polaroid, the colour photocopier, the fax. Lately, he has even been making multi-panelled digital videos, shot while driving along the same roads he paints. The camera doesn't linger and neither should we. Openness to technical innovation is one thing, art another. All you are left with is spectacle. The video featuring dancers in the artist's studio, hoofing, tap-dancing and generally enjoying themselves adds nothing either. These flashy films and iPad drawings feel like filler. Hockney's best landscapes carry a sense of real presence, of being there. Passage three: The British boarding school remains a bastion of cruelty Texas is a largely Christian state that appears to believe in neither forgiveness nor redemption. Last week the Guardian revealed the extent to which it has criminalised its children. Police now patrol the schools, arresting and charging pupils as young as six for breaches of discipline. Among the villainies for which they have been apprehended are throwing paper aeroplanes, using perfume in class, cheeking the teacher, wearing the wrong clothes, and arriving late for school. A 12-year-old boy with attention deficit disorder was imprisoned for turning over a desk; six years later, he's still inside. Children convicted of these enormities – 300,000 such tickets were issued by Texas police in 2010 – acquire a criminal record. This can make them ineligible for federal aid at university and for much subsequent employment. Yet most of them have committed no recognised crime. As one of the judges who hears their cases explained, "if any adult did it it's not going to be a violation". On the other hand, no charges have been brought against a Texas judge called William Adams. Last year a video was released which showed him beating the living daylights out of his daughter with a leather belt. The attack was so savage that when I watched it I nearly threw up. Adams cannot be prosecuted because the beating took place eight years ago. But even if it had happened yesterday, he might not have been charged, as he could have claimed that he was disciplining his child. In both cases the law permits people to do things to children that they could not do to adults. But before we start feeling too superior, we should remember that systematic injustice towards children is common to many nations. Consider these cases, all from the past few decades: the theft of babies and forced adoptions in Spain; the teenage girls pressed into slavery in Ireland's Magdalene laundries; the sexual abuse in its industrial schools; similar institutional abuse, also by Catholic priests, in many parts of the world; sexual abuse and beatings in Welsh children's homes; the British children told, wrongly, that they were orphans and exported to Australia, Canada and other Commonwealth countries; the assaults by staff in privately run child jails. It seems to me that such abuses have three common characteristics. The first is that the countries in which they occur appear to possess a sacrificial caste of children, whose rights can be denied and whose interests can be disregarded with impunity. The second is that these countries have a powerful resistance towards confronting and addressing this injustice: discussing it often amounts to a taboo. (These two traits were chillingly dramatised in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go.) The third is that systematic abuse becomes widely acknowledged only after determined people – such as Margaret Hurmphreys (who campaigned on behalf of the child migrants) and Alison Taylor (the Welsh care homes) – spend years trying to force it into the open, in the face of official denial. So I want to try once more to begin a discussion about an issue we still refuse to examine: early boarding. It is as British as warm beer, green suburbs and pointless foreign wars. Despite or because of that we won't talk about it. Those on the right will not defend these children as they will not criticise private schools. Those on the left won't defend them, as they see them as privileged and therefore undeserving of concern. But children's needs are universal; they know no such distinctions. The UK Boarding Schools website lists 18 schools which take boarders from the age of eight, and 38 which take them from the age of seven. I expect such places have improved over the past 40 years; they could scarcely have got worse. Children are likely to have more contact with home; though one school I phoned last week told me that some of its pupils still see their parents only in the holidays. But the nature of boarding is only one of the forces that can harm these children. The other is the fact of boarding. In a paper published last year in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, Dr Joy Schaverien identifies a set of symptoms common among early boarders that she calls boarding school syndrome. Her research suggests that the act of separation, regardless of what might follow it, "can cause profound developmental damage", as "early rupture with home has a lasting influence on attachment patterns". When a child is brought up at home, the family adapts to accommodate it: growing up involves a constant negotiation between parents and children. But an institution cannot rebuild itself around one child. Instead, the child must adapt to the system. Combined with the sudden and repeated loss of parents, siblings, pets and toys, this causes the child to shut itself off from the need for intimacy. This can cause major problems in adulthood: depression, an inability to talk about or understand emotions, the urge to escape from or to destroy intimate relationships. These symptoms mostly affect early boarders: those who start when they are older are less likely to be harmed. It should be obvious that this system could also inflict wider damage. A repressed, traumatised elite, unable to connect emotionally with others, is a danger to society: look at the men who started the first world war. Over the past few days, I have phoned the education department, the Boarding Schools Association and the headteachers of several schools to ask them a simple question: how did they decide that seven or eight was an appropriate age for children to start boarding? In every case the answer was the same: they didn't. This, they all told me, is just the way it has always been done. No inquiry, no committee, no board, no ethics council has, as far as they know, ever examined this question. Very young children are being sent away from home in a complete vacuum of professional advice. Compare this with the ethical agonising over whether or not children should be taken into care and you encounter the class prejudice common to all British governments: the upper classes require no oversight. So yes, rage against Texas and its monstrosities, and wonder at the cruel, authoritarian system a nominal democracy can produce. But remember that this is not the only place in which governments endorse the damage done to children.A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com China's success challenges a failed economic consensus How the tables are turned. As Britain tips back towards recession and the eurozone hovers on the brink of implosion, George Osborne hurried off to the former British colony of Hong Kong this week to drum up business for the City as a future trading centre for the Chinese currency. On Tuesday he was in Beijing to lobby China to do what neither the British private nor public sector is prepared to do – invest in crisis-ridden Britain. The chancellor's quest follows the European Union's fruitless attempt to convince China to use some of its colossal reserves to back the eurozone's bailout fund. And given the relative performances of the European, US and Chinese economies in recent years, it's not hard to see why western politicians now feel the need for Chinese support. It's a commonplace that China is the world's emerging economic giant. After 30 years averaging more than 9% annual growth, China is now the world's second largest economy and its fastest-growing market. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been taken out of poverty, as its international share of manufacturing has risen from 2% to 20% in 20 years. But it has been the slump in Europe, the US and Japan that has most dramatically underlined the yawning gap in performance between the world's long-established economic powers and China. In the four years from 2007 to 2011, US national income increased by less than 0.6% (the figure is still being revised down), the EU shrank by 0.3% and Japan declined by 5.2%. In the same period, despite the decline in export markets in those economies, China grew by more than 42%. But there is a deep reluctance in the austerity-afflicted western world to consider the reasons for such an astonishing gap. Europe is already heading ever deeper into the second phase of the crisis that erupted in 2007-8, now centred on the eurozone. When the credit agency S&P downgraded nine states' creditworthiness and the eurozone's own bailout fund, warning that "fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating", Angela Merkel's response was to press for the adoption of even tighter austerity. It is a recipe for economic disaster. Meanwhile, western analysts are predicting that China is heading in the same direction – as they have consistently and wrongly done for the past decade, but especially since the crash of 2008. The latest predictions of a "hard landing" for China focus on inflationary pressure, a legacy of bad bank loans, an overheated housing market, and the impact of stagnation or worse in Europe and the US. Maybe the pessimists will be proved right at last, but there are powerful reasons to suggest otherwise. Chinese growth for 2011 was 9.2%, compared with forecasts for Britain of around 1%. It's expected to drop back this year to between 7% and 8% – the kind of crisis to dream for. Last year's inflation is cooling off, as is the property bubble which, unlike in the US and Britain, was funded by savings rather than borrowing. As the Shanghai-based British economist John Ross argues, China has a strong record of absorbing bad loans in the wake of the 1997 Asian debt crisis, and is cushioned from the collapse in western demand by the fact that most of its trade is with the developing world. But crucially – unlike Britain, the US and the stricken eurozone economies – China has a modest budget deficit of around 2%. Which points to the central reason why China was able to ride out the global crisis of 2007-8 with such dramatic success. China's response was to launch the biggest stimulus programme in the world, investing heavily in infrastructure. But instead of doing it through deficit spending and printing money, the Chinese government was able to use its ownership and control of the banks and large state companies to increase lending and investment. Which is why China has grown by 10% a year since the crash, while the west and Japan have shrunk or stagnated. China has travelled a vast distance from the socialised economy of the Maoist period and has a huge private sector and large-scale foreign investment. But its hybrid economic model continues to be based around a publicly owned core of banks and corporations. So while in Europe and the US governments rely on indirect (and so far entirely ineffective) mechanisms to reverse the collapse of private investment at the heart of the crisis – and private banks and corporations hoard bailout cash – China has the leverage directly to boost investment, jobs and incomes. And that state-owned core has been central to the country's extraordinary growth over the past three decades. Of course that advance has also been based around the largest migration of workers in human history. And the costs of its economic rise have been massive: from rampant corruption and exploitation of low-wage labour to environmental degradation, decline in health and education provision, an explosion of inequality and serious restrictions on civil rights. Strikes and rural upheavals across China – as well as political shifts – are now challenging and having their impact on those failures. But China's authoritarian system can also lead people elsewhere to ignore some powerful lessons about its economic experience. And one of those is that what used to be celebrated across the political mainstream in Britain and Europe as a "mixed economy" – along with long-discarded levers such as capital controls – can deliver results that a privatised, deregulated economy is utterly unable to do. There's no sense in which the evolving Chinese economic model could or should be transplanted to Britain or Europe. And having long ago sold off public stakes across the economy, most European states don't have anything like the financial or industrial leverage that China does to drive economic growth. But it would also be obtuse not to recognise that a private-sector and market failure is at the heart of the current crisis; or to reconsider the role that new forms of public ownership could play in a modern economy in the light of China's experience; or to refuse to use publicly owned institutions that do exist, such as Britain's part state-owned banks, to forge a way out of the crisis. China's success represents a global opportunity, as George Osborne has grasped. But it should also be a challenge to a failed and discredited economic consensus. Applied Arts and Fine Arts (OG Example) Although we now tend to refer to the various crafts according to the materials used to construct them—clay, glass, wood, fiber, and metal—it was once common to think of crafts in terms of function, which led to their being known as the "applied arts." Approaching crafts from the point of view of function, we can divide them into simple categories: containers, shelters and supports. There is no way around the fact that containers, shelters, and supports must be functional. The applied arts are thus bound by the laws of physics, which pertain to both the materials used in their making and the substances and things to be contained, supported, and sheltered. These laws are universal in their application, regardless of cultural beliefs, geography, or climate. If a pot has no bottom or has large openings in its sides, it could hardly be considered a container in any traditional sense. Since the laws of physics, not some arbitrary decision, have determined the general form of applied-art objects, they follow basic patterns, so much so that functional forms can vary only within certain limits. Buildings without roofs, for example, are unusual because they depart from the norm. However, not all functional objects are exactly alike; that is why we recognize a Shang Dynasty vase as being different from an Inca vase. What varies is not the basic form but the incidental details that do not obstruct the object's primary function. Sensitivity to physical laws is thus an important consideration for the maker of applied-art objects. It is often taken for granted that this is also true for the maker of fine-art objects. This assumption misses a significant difference between the two disciplines. Fine-art objects are not constrained by the laws of physics in the same way that applied-art objects are. Because their primary purpose is not functional, they are only limited in terms of the materials used to make them. Sculptures must, for example, be stable, which requires an understanding of the properties of mass, weight distribution, and stress. Paintings must have rigid stretchers so that the canvas will be taut, and the paint must not deteriorate, crack, or discolor. These are problems that must be overcome by the artist because they tend to intrude upon his or her conception of the work. For example, in the early Italian Renaissance, bronze statues of horses with a raised foreleg usually had a cannonball under that hoof. This was done because the cannonball was needed to support the weight of the leg. In other words, the demands of the laws of physics, not the sculptor's aesthetic intentions, placed the ball there. That this device was a necessary structural compromise is clear from the fact that the cannonball quickly disappeared when sculptors learned how to strengthen the internal structure of a statue with iron braces (iron being much stronger than bronze). Even though the fine arts in the twentieth century often treat materials in new ways, the basic difference in attitude of artists in relation to their materials in the fine arts and the applied arts remains relatively constant. It would therefore not be too great an exaggeration to say that practitioners of the fine arts work to overcome the limitations of their materials, whereas those engaged in the applied arts work in concert with their materials. 2009年12月大学英语六级考试真题 Part ? Writing (30 minutes) Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below. 1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班 2. 对这种做法有人示支持，也有人并不赞成 3. 我认为„„ Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? www.cet6.net Part ?Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage. Bosses Say ―Yes‖ to Home Work www.cet6.net Rising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the office—all are strong arguments for letting staff work from home. For the small business, there are additional benefits too—staff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but don’t have the budget to offer huge salaries. While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking policies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business. Yet this is now changing. When communications provider InterTel researched the use of remote working solutions among small and mediumsized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago. The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer some form of remote working support to their workforces. Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake. “If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, ebusiness advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this.‖ One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). ―This is the enabler,‖ Poulton says. Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masquerading (伪装) as businessfriendly broadband. “Broadband is available for as little as ,15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the northeast of England. “Providers offering broadband for rockbottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a businessonly provider that can offer more reliability, with good support.” Such services don’t cost too much—quality services can be found for upwards of ,30 a month. www.cet6.net The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internetbased backup or even internetbased phone services. www.cet6.net Internetbased telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but because of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote worker—facilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners. By law, companies must ―consider seriously‖ requests to work flexibly made by a parent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to provide connectivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time. Marketing director Jack O’Hern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from maternity leave. She was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacity—now she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone highly qualified.‖ For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its feeearners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether that’s from home, or while on the road), this strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but enabling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life. O’Hern says: “Although most of our work is clientbased and must fit around this, we can’t see any reason why a parent can’t be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later in the day.” Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating its systems anyway, the company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the company networks and access all their usual resources. Although Wright Vigar hasn’t yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save feeearners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days. That staff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With WiFi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our feeearners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the shops,‖ he adds. The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon. Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworking strategy, which has involved handing her company’s data management over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the company’s consultants over broadband internet connections. It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the realisation that it just didn’t need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11yearold,” says Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at offsite meetings, we didn’t need our offices at all. We’re now saving ,16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.‖ 1. What is the main topic of this passage? A) How business managers view hitech. B) Relations between employers and employees. C) How to cut down the costs of small businesses.D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking. 2. From the research conducted by the communications provider InterTel, we learn that . A) more employees work to full capacity at home B) employees show a growing interest in small businesses C) more businesses have adopted remote working solutions D) attitudes toward IT technology have changed 3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to Andy Poulton? A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.B) Improved reliability of internet service. C) Availability of the VoIP service. D) Access to broadband everywhere. 4. What is Neil Stephenson’s advice to firms contracting internet services? A) They look for reliable businessonly providers.B) They contact providers located nearest to them. C) They carefully examine the contract.D) They contract the cheapest provider. 5. Internetbased telecoms facilitates remote working by . A) offering sophisticated voice servicesB) giving access to emailing in real time C) helping clients discuss business at homeD) providing calls completely free of charge 6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to . A) present a positive image to prospective customers B) support its employees with children to take care of C) attract young people with IT expertise to work for it D) reduce operational expenses of a second office 7. According to marketing director Jack O’Hern, teleworking enabled the company to . A) enhance its market image B) reduce recruitment costs C) keep highly qualified staffD) minimise its office space 8. Wright Vigar’s practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only benefits the company but helps improve employees’ . 9. With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be while traveling. 10. Single mother Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to . Part ? Listening Comprehension (35 minutes) Section A www.cet6.net Directions: In this section, you will hear 8 short conversations and 2 long conversations. At the end of each conversation, one or more questions will be asked about what was said. Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once. After each question there will be a pause. During the pause, you must read the four choices marked A), B), C) and D), and decide which is the best answer. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. 11. A) They would rather travel around than stay at home. B) They prefer to carry cash when traveling abroad. C) They usually carry many things around with them. D) They don’t like to spend much money on traveling. 12. A) The selection process was a little unfair.B) He had long dreamed of the dean’s position. C) Rod was eliminated in the selection process.D) Rod was in charge of the admissions office. 13. A) Applause encourages the singer. B) She regrets paying for the concert. C) Almost everyone loves pop music.D) The concert is very impressive. 14. A) They have known each other since their schooldays. B) They were both chairpersons of the Students’ Union. C) They have been in close touch by email. D) They are going to hold a reunion party. 15. A) Cook their dinner.B) Rest for a while. C) Get their car fixed.D) Stop for the night. 16. A) Newlylaunched products.B) Consumer preferences. C) Survey results.D) Survey methods. 17. A) He would rather the woman didn’t buy the blouse. B) The woman needs blouses in the colors of a rainbow. C) The information in the catalog is not always reliable. D) He thinks the blue blouse is better than the red one. 18. A) The course is open to all next semester.B) The notice may not be reliable. C) The woman has not told the truth.D) He will drop his course in marketing. Questions 19 to 22 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 19. A) A director of a sales department. B) A manager at a computer store. C) A sales clerk at a shopping center.D) An accountant of a computer firm. 20. A) Handling customer complaints. B) Recruiting and training new staff. C) Dispatching ordered goods on time.D) Developing computer programs. 21. A) She likes something more challenging.B) She likes to be nearer to her parents. C) She wants to have a betterpaid job.D) She wants to be with her husband. 22. A) Right away. B) In two months. C) Early next month.D) In a couple of days. Questions 23 to 25 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 23. A) It will face challenges unprecedented in its history. B) It is a resolute advocate of the antiglobal movement. C) It is bound to regain its full glory of a hundred years ago. D) It will be a major economic power by the mid21st century. 24. A) The lack of overall urban planning. B) The huge gap between the haves and havenots. C) The inadequate supply of water and electricity. D) The shortage of hitech personnel. 25. A) They attach great importance to education. B) They are able to grasp growth opportunities. C) They are good at learning from other nations. D) They have made use of advanced technologies. Section B Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. Passage One Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard. 26. A) She taught chemistry and microbiology courses in a college. B) She gave lectures on how to become a public speaker. C) She helped families move away from industrial polluters. D) She engaged in field research on environmental pollution. 27. A) The job restricted her from revealing her findings. B) The job posed a potential threat to her health. C) She found the working conditions frustrating. D) She was offered a better job in a minority community. 28. A) Some giant industrial polluters have gone out of business. B) More environmental organizations have appeared. C) Many toxic sites in America have been cleaned up. D) More branches of her company have been set up. 29. A) Her widespread influence among members of Congress. B) Her ability to communicate through public speaking. C) Her rigorous training in delivering eloquent speeches. D) Her lifelong commitment to domestic and global issues. Passage Two Questions 30 to 32 are based on the passage you have just heard. 30. A) The fierce competition in the market.B) The growing necessity of staff training. C) The accelerated pace of globalisation.D) The urgent need of a diverse workforce. 31. A) Gain a deep understanding of their own culture. B) Take courses of foreign languages and cultures. C) Share the experiences of people from other cultures. D) Participate in international exchange programmes. 32. A) Reflective thinking is becoming critical.B) Labor market is getting globalised. C) Knowing a foreign language is essential. D) Globalisation will eliminate many jobs. Passage Three Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard. 33. A) Redhaired women were regarded as more reliable. B) Brownhaired women were rated as more capable. C) Goldenhaired women were considered attractive. D) Blackhaired women were judged to be intelligent. 34. A) They are smart and eloquent. B) They are ambitious and arrogant. C) They are shrewd and dishonest. D) They are wealthy and industrious. 35. A) They force people to follow the cultural mainstream. B) They exaggerate the roles of certain groups of people. C) They emphasize diversity at the expense of uniformity. D) They hinder our perception of individual differences. Section C Directions: In this section, you will hear a passage three times. When the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea. When the passage is read for the second time, you are required to fill in the blanks numbered from 36 to 43 with the exact words you have just heard. For blanks numbered from 44 to 46 you are required to fill in the missing information. For these blanks, you can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words.Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written. The ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called mnemonics. The name is (36) from their Goddess of memory ―Mnemosyne‖. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an (37) asset, particularly in public life. There were no (38) devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators(演说家) delivered long speeches with great (39) because they learned the speeches using mnemonic systems. The Greeks discovered that human memory is (40) an associative process—that it works by linking things together. For example, think of an apple. The (41) your brain registers the word ―apple‖, it (42) the shape, color, taste, smell and (43) of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word ―apple‖. (44) . An example could be when you think about a lecture you have had. This could trigger a memory about what you’re talking about through that lecture, which can then trigger another memory. (45) . An example given on a website I was looking at follows: Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not. What about Italy, though? (46) . You made an association with something already known, the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape could not be forgotten once you had made the association. Part? Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes) Section A Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2. Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage. Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a handheld mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further confirms that the danger lies less in what a motorist’s hands do when he takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “handsfree” device can divert a driver’s attention to an alarming extent. Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a handsfree call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the handsfree kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking. To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly. Punishing people for using handheld gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls. 47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered dangerous because it seriously distracts . 48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of moving tasks which were considered . 49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a handsfree call took to react than those who were not. 50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if they are required to do . 51. The author believes persuasion, rather than , might be the only way to stop people from using mobile phones while driving. Section B Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. Passage One Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage. There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the overeducated, ecoconscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly(自鸣得意 的)green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus. Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists(活跃分子)and various parentteacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steelcasting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, ―safe‖ could even mean. “There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancercausing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall. 52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal? A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley. B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings. C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor. D) Parents in Berkeley are oversensitive to cancer risks their kids face. 53. What response did USA Today’s report draw? A) A heated debate.B) Popular support. C) Widespread panic.D) Strong criticism. 54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ studies? A) They felt very much relieved.B) They were frightened by the evidence. C) They didn’t know who to believe.D) They weren’t convinced of the results. 55. What is the view of the 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics? A) It is important to quantify various concrete hazards. B) Daily accidents pose a more serious threat to children. C) Parents should be aware of children’s health hazards. D) Attention should be paid to toxic chemical exposure. 56. Of the dangers in everyday life, the author thinks that people have most to fear from . A) the uncertainB) the quantifiable C) an earthquake D) unhealthy food Passage Two Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage. Crippling health care bills, long emergencyroom waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily. Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician. A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries(老年医保受惠人). The startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors. How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combine this fact with annual government threats to indiscriminately cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income. Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cashonly practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care. Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U.S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results in emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors. How do we fix this problem? It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳地) managing their diseases and practicing evidencebased medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving student loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries. We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade. Who will be there to treat them? 57. The author’s chief concern about the current U.S. health care system is . A) the inadequate training of physiciansB) the declining number of doctors C) the shrinking primary care resourcesD) the everrising health care costs 58. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that . A) the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure B) seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors C) visiting doctors on a regular basis ensures good health D) the more doctors taking care of a patient, the better 59. Faced with the government threats to cut reimbursements indiscriminately, primary care physicians have to . A) increase their income by working overtimeB) improve their expertise and service C) make various deals with specialistsD) see more patients at the expense of quality 60. Why do many new medical graduates refuse to choose primary care as their career? A) They find the need for primary care declining. B) The current system works against primary care. C) Primary care physicians command less respect. D) They think working in emergency rooms tedious. 61. What suggestion does the author give in order to provide better health care? A) Bridge the salary gap between specialists and primary care physicians. B) Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases. C) Recruit more medical students by offering them loans. D) Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major. Part V Cloze (5 minutes) Directions: There are 20 blanks in the following passage. For each blank there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D) on the right side of the paper. You should choose the ONE that best fits into the passage. Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. McDonald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway are today named as the most littered brands in England as Keep Britain Tidy called on fastfood companies to do more to tackle customers who drop their wrappers and drinks cartons (盒子) in the streets. Phil Barton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, 62 its new Dirty Pig campaign, said it was the first time it had investigated which 63 made up ―littered England‖ and the same names appeared again and again. ―We 64 litterers for dropping this fast food litter 65 the first place but also believe the results have pertinent (相关 的) messages for the fast food 66 . Mc,Donald’s, Greggs, KFC and Subway need to do more to 67 littering by their customers.” He recognised efforts made by McDonald’s, 68 placing litter bins and increasing litter patrols, but its litter remained “all too prevalent”. All fast food chains should reduce 69 packaging, he added. Companies could also reduce prices 70 those who stayed to eat food on their premises, offer moneyoff vouchers (代金券) or other 71 for those who returned packaging and put more bins at 72 points in local streets, not just outside their premises. A 73 for McDonald’s said: “We do our best. Obviously we ask all our customers to dispose of litter responsibly.” Trials of more extensive, allday litter patrols were 74 in Manchester and Birmingham. KFC said it took its 75 on litter management “very seriously”, and would introduce a programme to reduce packaging 76 many products. Subway said that it worked hard to 77 the impact of litter on communities， 78 it was ―still down to the 79 customer to dispose of their litter responsibly‖. Greggs said it recognised the ―continuing challenge for us all‖, 80 having already taken measures to help 81 the issue. 62. A) elevating B) conveningC) launchingD) projecting 63. A) signals B) signsC) commercials D) brands 64. A) condemnB) refuteC) uncover D) disregard 65. A) around B) towardC) in D) off 66. A) industryB) careerC) professionD) vocation 67. A) exclude B) discourageC) suppressD) retreat 68. A) incorporating B) includingC) comprisingD) containing 69. A) unreliableB) unrelatedC) unimportant D) unnecessary 70. A) for B) aboutC) with D) to 71. A) accessoriesB) meritsC) incentivesD) dividends 72. A) curious B) mysteriousC) strangeD) strategic 73. A) narrator B) spokesmanC) mediatorD) broker 74. A) in seasonB) at riskC) off handD) under way 75. A) responsibility B) liabilityC) commission D) administration 76. A) around B) byC) on D) above 77. A) divert B) minimizeC) degradeD) suspend 78. A) if B) whetherC) so D) but 79. A) individualB) concreteC) unique D) respective 80. A) except B) withoutC) despiteD) via 81. A) deal B) tackleC) cope D) dispose