Part I Writing (30 minutes)

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the importance of building trust between businesses and consumers/teachers and students/employers and employees. You can cite examples to illustrate your views. 150-200 words.

参考范文：

Build Trust between Businesses and Consumers

The past few years have witnessed a mounting number of cases resulting from the conflict between businesses and consumers. Taking a look around, one can find examples too many to enumerate. All these cases result in the loss of trust between the two sides.

A number of factors can account for the problem, but the leading reason is the cheating behavior of either the business or the consumer. On the one hand, some stores may have sold substandard commodities to the customer, which caused the latter to lose trust in the former. On the other hand, some customers might be too picky, which ruined their image in the seller’s mind. Whatever the reason is, if the situation is allowed to continue, the consequence will be worrisome.

In view of the seriousness of the problem, effective measures must be taken before the situation deteriorates. First, it is imperative that laws and regulations be worked out and enforced to punish those who cheat in the market. Secondly, both businesses and consumers should enhance the awareness of mutual understanding and mutual respect. With these measures taken, we have every reason to believe that the problem will be remedied in the near future.

Part Ⅲ Reading Comprehension (40 minutes)

Section A

Directions: In this section, there is a passage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.

Did Sarah Josepha Hale write “Mary’s Little Lamb,” the eternal nursery rhyme (儿歌) about girl named Mary with a stubborn lamb? This is still disputed, but it’s clear that the woman 26 for writing it was one of America’s most fascinating 27 . In honor of the poem publication on May 24,1830, here’s more about the 28 author’s life.

Hale wasn’t just a writer, she was also a 29 social advocate, and she was particularly 30 with an ideal New England, which she associated with abundant Thanksgiving meals that she claimed had “a deep moral influence,” she began a nationwide 31 to have a national holiday declared that would bring families together while celebrating the 32 festivals. In 1863, after 17 years of advocacy including letters to five presidents, Hale got it. President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, issued a __33__ setting aside the last Thursday in November for the holiday.

The true authorship of “Mary’s Little Lamb” is disputed. According to New England Historical Society, Hale wrote only one part of the poem, but claimed authorship. Regardless of the author, it seems that the poem was __34__by a real event. When young Mary Sawyer was followed to school by a lamb in 1816, it caused some problems. A bystander named John Roulstone wrote a poem about the event, then, at some point, Hale herself seems to have helped write it. However, if a 1916 piece by her great-niece is to be trusted, Hale claimed for the __35__of her life that “Some other people pretended that someone else wrote the poem”.

A) campaign I) proclamation

B) career J) rectified

C) characters K) reputed

D) features L) rest

E) fierce M) supposed

F) inspired N) traditional

G) latter O) versatile

H) obsessed

答案：

26　K) reputed

27 Ｃ) characters

28 M) supposed

29 E) fierce

30 H) obsessed

31 A) campaign

32 N) traditional

33 I) proclamation

34 F) inspired

35 L) rest

Section B

Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Each paragraph is marked with a letter. Answer the question by marking the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2.

Peer Pressure Has a Positive Side

A. Parents of teenagers often view their children's friends with something like suspicion. They worry that the adolescent peer group has the power to push its members into behavior that is foolish and even dangerous. Such wariness is well founded: statistics show, for example, that a teenage driver with a same-age passenger in the car is at higher risk of a fatal crash than an adolescent driving alone or with an adult.

B. In a 2005 study, psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and his co-author, psychologist Margo Gardner, then at Temple, pided 306 people into three age groups: young adolescents, with a mean age of 14; older adolescents, with a mean age of 19; and adults, aged 24 and older. Subjects played a computerized driving game in which the player must avoid crashing into a wall that materializes, without warning, on the roadway. Steinberg and Gardner randomly assigned some participants to play alone or with two same-age peers looking on.

C. Older adolescents scored about 50 percent higher on an index of risky driving when their peers were in the room—and the driving of early adolescents was fully twice as reckless when other young teens were around. In contrast, adults behaved in similar ways regardless of whether they were on their own or observed by others. “The presence of peers makes adolescents and youth, but not adults, more likely to take risks,” Steinberg and Gardner concluded.

D. Yet in the years following the publication of this study, Steinberg began to believe that this interpretation did not capture the whole picture. As he and other researchers examined the question of why teens were more apt to take risks in the company of other teenagers, they came to suspect that a crowd's influence need not always be negative. Now some experts are proposing that we should take advantage of the teen brain's keen sensitivity to the presence of friends and leverage it to improve education.

E. In a 2011 study, Steinberg and his colleagues turned to functional MRI (磁共振) to investigate how the presence of peers affects the activity in the adolescent brain. They scanned the brains of 40 teens and adults who were playing a virtual driving game designed to test whether players would brake at a yellow light or speed on through the crossroad.

F. The brains of teenagers, but not adults, showed greater activity in two regions associated with rewards when they were being observed by same-age peers than when alone. In other words, rewards are more intense for teens when they are with peers, which motivates them to pursue higher-risk experiences that might bring a big payoff (such as the thrill of just making the light before it turns red). But Steinberg suspected this tendency could also have its advantages. In his latest experiment, published online in August, Steinberg and his colleagues used a computerized version of a card game called the Iowa Gambling Task to investigate how the presence of peers affects the way young people gather and apply information.

G. The results: Teens who played the Iowa Gambling Task under the eyes of fellow adolescents engaged in more exploratory behavior, learned faster from both positive and negative outcomes, and achieved better performance on the task than those who played in solitude. “What our study suggests is that teenagers learn more quickly and more effectively when their peers are present than when they're on their own,” Steinberg says. And this finding could have important implications for how we think about educating adolescents.

H. Matthew D. Lieberman, a social cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the 2013 book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, suspects that the human brain is especially adept at learning socially salient information. He points to a classic 2004 study in which psychologists at Dartmouth College and Harvard University used functional MRI to track brain activity in 17 young men as they listened to descriptions of people while concentrating on either socially relevant cues (for example, trying to form an impression of a person based on the description) or more socially neutral information (such as noting the order of details in the description). The descriptions were the same in each condition, but people could better remember these statements when given a social motivation.

I. The study also found that when subjects thought about and later recalled descriptions in terms of their informational content, regions associated with factual memory, such as the medial temporal lobe, became active. But thinking about or remembering descriptions in terms of their social meaning activated the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—part of the brain's social network—even as traditional memory regions registered low levels of activity. More recently, as he reported in a 2012 review, Lieberman has discovered that this region may be part of a distinct network involved in socially motivated learning and memory. Such findings, he says, suggest that “this network can be called on to process and store the kind of information taught in school—potentially giving students access to a range of untapped mental powers.”

J. If humans are generally geared to recall details about one another, this pattern is probably even more powerful among teenagers who are hyperattentive to social minutiae: who is in, who is out, who likes whom, who is mad at whom. Their penchant for social drama is not—or not only—a way of distracting themselves from their schoolwork or of driving adults crazy. It is actually a neurological(神经的) sensitivity, initiated by hormonal changes. Evolutionarily speaking, people in this age group are at a stage in which they can prepare to find a mate and start their own family while separating from parents and striking out on their own. To do this successfully, their brain prompts them to think and even obsess about others.

K. Yet our schools focus primarily on students as inpidual entities. What would happen if educators instead took advantage of the fact that teens are powerfully compelled to think in social terms? In Social, Lieberman lays out a number of ways to do so. History and English could be presented through the lens of the psychological drives of the people involved. One could therefore present Napoleon in terms of his desire to impress or Churchill in terms of his lonely melancholy. Less inherently interpersonal subjects, such as math, could acquire a social aspect through team problem solving and peer tutoring. Research shows that when we absorb information in order to teach it to someone else, we learn it more accurately and deeply, perhaps in part because we are engaging our social cognition.

L. And although anxious parents may not welcome the notion, educators could turn adolescent recklessness to academic ends. “Risk taking in an educational context is a vital skill that enables progress and creativity,” wrote Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, in a review published last year. Yet, she noted, many young people are especially risk averse at school—afraid that one low test score or mediocre grade could cost them a spot at a selective university. We should assure such students that risk, and even peer pressure, can be a good thing—as long as it happens in the classroom and not the car.

36. It is thought probable that the human brain is particularly good at picking-up socially important information.

37. It can be concluded from experiment that the presence of peers increases risk-taking by adolescents and youth.

38. Students should be told that risk-taking in classroom can be something positive.

39. The urgency of finding a mate and getting married accounts for adolescents’ greater attention to social interactions.

40. According to Steinberg, the presence of peers increases the speed and effectiveness of teenagers’ leaning.

41. Teenagers’ parents are often concerned about negative peer influence.

42. Activating the brain’s network involved in socially motivated learning and memory may allow students to tap their mental powers.

43. The presence of peer intensifies the feeling of rewards in teens’ brains.

44. When we absorb information for the purpose of imparting it to ethers, we do so with greater secretary and depth.

45. Some experts are suggesting that we turn peer influence to good use in education.

答案：

36-40 H C L J G　41-45 A I F K D

Section C

Direction: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statement. For each of them there are four choice and our marked A),B),C) and D).You should decide on the best choice and nark the corresponding letter on Answer sheet2 with a single line through the centre.

Passage One

Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

The Ebro Delta, in Spain, famous as a battleground during the Spanish Civil War, is now the setting for a different contest, one that is pitting rice farmers against two enemies: the rice-eating giant apple snail, and rising sea levels. What happens here will have a bearing on the future of European rice production and the overall health of southern European wetlands.

Located on the Mediterranean just two hours south of Barcelona, the Ebro Delta produces 120 million kilograms of rice a year, making it one of the continent’s most important rice-growing areas. As the sea creeps into these freshwater marshes, however, rising salinity (盐分) is hampering rice production. At the same time, this sea-water also kills off the greedy giant apple snail, an introduced pest that feeds on young rice plants. The most promising strategy has become to harness one foe against the other.

The battle is currently being waged on land, in greenhouses at the University of Barcelona. Scientists working under the banner “Project Neurice” are seeking varieties of rice that can withstand the increasing salinity without losing the absorbency that makes European rice ideal for traditional Spanish and Italian dishes.

“The project has two sides,” says Xavier Serrat, Neurice project manager and researcher at the University of Barcelona. “The short-term fight against the snail, and a mid- to long-term fight against climate change. But the snail has given the project greater urgency.”

Originally from South America, the snails were accidentally introduced into the Ebro Delta by Global Aquatic Tecnologies, a company that raised the snails for fresh-water aquariums (水族馆), but failed to prevent their escape. For now, the giant apple snail’s foothold in Europe is limited to the Ebro Delta. But the snail continues its march to new territory, says Serrat. “The question is not if it will reach other rice-growing areas of Europe, but when.”

Over the next year and a half investigators will test the various strains of saline-tolerant rice they’ve concocted. In 2018, farmers will plant the varieties with the most promise in the Ebro Delta and Europe’s other two main rice-growing regions—along the Po in Italy, and France’s Rhône. A season in the field will help determine which, if any, of the varieties are ready for commercialization.

As an EU-funded effort, the search for salt-tolerant varieties of rice is taking place in all three countries. Each team is crossbreeding a local European short-grain rice with a long-grain Asian variety that carries the salt-resistant gene. The scientists are breeding successive generations to arrive at varieties that incorporate salt tolerance but retain about 97 percent of the European rice genome (基因组).

46. Why does the author mention the Spanish Civil War at the beginning of the passage?（C）

A) It had great impact on the life of Spanish rice farmers.

B) It is of great significance in the records of Spanish history.

C) Rice farmers in the Ebro Delta are waging a battle of similar importance.

D) Rice farmers in the Ebro Delta are experiencing as hard a time as in the war.

47. What may be the more effective strategy for rice farmers to employ in fighting their enemies?（D）

A) Killing the weaker enemy first.

B) Eliminating the enemy one by one.

C) Killing two bird with one stone.

D) Using one evil to combat the other.

48. What do we learn about “Project Neurice”?（C）

A) Its goals will have to be realized at a cost.

B) It aims to increase the yield of Spanish rice.

C) Its immediate priority is to bring the pest under control.

D) It tries to kill the snails with the help of climate change.

49. What does Neurice project manager say about the giant apple snail?（B）

A) It can survive only on southern European wetlands.

B) It will invade other rice-growing regions of Europe.

C) It multiplies at a speed beyond human imagination.

D) It was introduced into the rice fields on purpose.

50. What is the ultimate goal of the EU-funded program?（A）

A) Cultivating ideal salt-resistant varieties.

B) Increasing the absorbency of the Spanish rice.

C) Introducing Spanish rice to the rest of Europe.

D) Popularizing the rice crossbreeding technology.

Part IV Translation （30 minutes）

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to translate a passage from Chinese into English. You should write your answer on Answer sheet 2.

过去，拥有一辆私家车对大部分中国人而言是件奢侈的事。如今，私家车在中国随处可见。汽车成了人们生活中不可或缺的一部分，他们不仅开车上下班，还经常驾车出游。有些城市的汽车增长速度过快，以至于交通拥堵和停车位不足的问题日益严峻，这些城市的市政府不得不出台新规，限制上路汽车的数量。由于空气污染日益严重，现在越来越多的人选择购买新能源汽车，中国政府也采取了一些措施，支持新能源汽车的发展。

译文：

Private cars used to be a luxury for most Chinese people, while today they can be seen everywhere in China as an indispensable part of life. Not only do people drive to and from work, but they often travel by car. In some cities, the growth of cars is so fast that the problems of traffic jams and lack of parking space become more severe. The municipal governments of these cities therefore have to introduce new rules to limit the number of cars on the road. Also, the increasingly serious air pollution has driven more people to choose new energy vehicles, so the Chinese government has taken some measures to support the development of new energy vehicles.