When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But more and more studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.“ Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. “It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,“ said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.“ For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it. When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students. “For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,“ said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.“ In the real world, such tendencies can yield big advantages, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

For many years, smokers have been admonished to take the initiative and quit: chew nicotine gum, use a nicotine patch, take a prescription medication that can help, call a help line, just say no. But a new study finds that stopping is seldom an individual decision. Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit. The study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003, studying them as part of a large network of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends and friends of friends. It was a time when the percentage of adult smokers in the United States fell to 21 percent from 45 percent. As the investigators watched the smokers and their social networks, they saw what they said was a striking effect—smokers had formed little social clusters and, as the years went by, entire clusters of smokers were stopping en masse. So were clusters of clusters that were only loosely connected. Dr. Christakis described watching the vanishing clusters as like lying on your back in a field, looking up at stars that were burning out. “It’s not like one little star turning off at a time,“ he said. “Whole constellations are blinking off at once.“ As cluster after cluster of smokers disappeared, those that remained were pushed to the margins of society, isolated, with fewer friends, fewer social connections. “Smokers used to be the center of the party,“ Dr. Fowler said, “but now they’ve become wallflowers.“ “We’ve known smoking was bad for your physical health,“ he said. “But this shows it also is bad for your social health. Smokers are likely to drive friends away.“ “There is an essential public health message,“ said Richard Suzman, director of the office of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, which financed the study. “Obviously, people have to take responsibility for their behavior,“ Mr. Suzman said. But a social environment, he added, “can just overpower free will.“ With smoking, that can be a good thing, researchers noted. But there also is a sad side. As Dr. Steven Schroeder of the University of California, San Francisco, pointed out in an editorial accompanying the paper, “a risk of the marginalization of smoking is that it further isolates the group of people with the highest rate of smoking—persons with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, or both.“

A natural resource or resource is usually defined as anything obtained from the physical environment to meet human needs. Some resources are available for use directly from the environment. Examples include solar energy, fresh air, rainwater, fresh water in a river or stream, and naturally growing edible plants. Other resources, such as oil, iron, groundwater, fish, and game animals, are not directly available for our use. 【F1】Whether these and other materials in the environment are considered to be human resources depends on a combination of human ingenuity, economics, and cultural beliefs. 【F2】Human ingenuity enables us to develop scientific and technological methods for finding, extracting, and processing many of the earth’s natural substances and converting them to usable forms. Groundwater found deep below the earth’s surface was not a resource until we developed the technology for drilling a well and installing pumps and other equipment to bring it to the surface. Fish and game animals are not a resource unless we have some way of catching and (in most cases) cooking them. Petroleum was a mysterious fluid until humans learned how to locate it, extract it, and refine it into gasoline, home heating oil, road tar and other products. 【F3】Cars, television sets, tractors, and other manufactured objects’ are available only because humans developed methods for converting an array of once useless raw materials from the earth’s crust into useful forms. Economics also determines whether something is classified as a resource or a potential resource. Some known deposits of oil, coal, copper, and other potentially useful materials are located so far beneath the earth’s surface or in such low concentrations that they would cost more to find, extract, and process than they are worth. 【F4】In the future, however, their prices may rise due to their scarcity, or cheaper, more efficient mining and processing technologies may be developed, converting these potential resources to actual resources. Cultural beliefs’ can also determine whether something is considered a resource. For example, protein-rich grasshoppers and other insects are considered food resources in some parts of Africa, but are viewed with disgust as sources of food in the United States and in most MDCs. In some cultures, religious beliefs prohibit the use of pork or other types of food resources. 【F5】The perceived or actual degree of risk involved in using a resource such as nuclear power can also play a role in whether or how widely it is used.

You have just learned that your friend John had his ankles injured and was in hospital now. Write a letter to him and your letter should include the following details: 1)your concern about his injury 2) and your best wishes for his recovery Write your letter in no less than 100 words. Write it neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. Do not sign your own name at the end of the letter; use “ Li Ming“ instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

Write an essay of 160 — 200 words based on the following drawing. In your essay, you should 1) describe the drawing briefly, 2) explain its intended meaning, and then 3) give your comments. You should write neatly on the ANSWER SHEET. (20 points) [*]

According to certain beer commercials, the contemporary version of success 【B1】______ in moving up to a premium brand that costs a dime or so more per bottle. Credit-card companies would have you 【B2】______ success inheres in owning their particular piece of plastic. 【B3】______ the flag of success, modern-style, liberal arts colleges are withering 【B4】______ business schools are burgeoning, and yet even business schools are having an increasingly hard time 【B5】______ faculty members, because teaching isn’t 【B6】______ “successful“ enough. Amid a broad consensus 【B7】______ there is a glut of lawyers and an epidemic of strangling litigation, record numbers of young people continue to flock to law school 【B8】______ , for the individual practitioner, a law degree is still considered a safe ticket. Many, by external 【B9】______ , will be “successes“. Yet there is a deadening and dangerous flaw in their philosophy: It has little room, little sympathy and less respect for the noble failure, for the person who 【B10】______ past the limits, who 【B11】______ gloriously high and falls unashamedly 【B12】______ That sort of ambition doesn’t have much place in a world 【B13】______ success is proved by worldly reward 【B14】______ by accomplishment itself. That sort of ambition is increasingly thought of as the domain of irredeemable eccentrics, 【B15】______ people who haven’t quite caught on—and there is great social pressure not to be one of them. The irony is that today’s success-chasers seem obsessed with the idea of not settling. Yet in doggedly 【B16】______ the rather brittle species of success now in fashion, they are 【B17】______ themselves to a chokingly narrow swath of turf along the entire 【B18】______ of human possibilities. Does it ever 【B19】______ to them that, frequently, success is what people settle for 【B20】______ they can’t think of something noble enough to be worth failing at?

There are always good reasons for people to care about the welfare of animals. Ever since the Enlightenment, their treatment has been seen as a measure of mankind’s humanity. It is no coincidence that William Wilberforce and Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, two leaders of the movement to abolish the slave trade, helped found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the 1820s. An increasing number of people go further: mankind has a duty not to cause pain to animals that have the capacity to suffer. Both views have led people gradually to extend treatment once reserved for mankind to other species. But when everyday lives are measured against such principles, they are fraught with contradictions. Those who would never dream of caging their cats and dogs guzzle bacon and eggs from ghastly factory farms. The abattoir and the cattle truck are secret places safely hidden from the meat-eater’s gaze and the child’s story book. Plenty of people who denounce the fur-trade (much of which is from farmed animals) quite happily wear leather (also from farmed animals). Perhaps the inconsistency is understandable. After hundreds of years of thinking about it, people cannot agree on a system of rights for each other, so the ground is bound to get shakier still when animals are included. The trouble is that confusion and contradiction open the way to the extremist. And because scientific research is remote from most people’s lives, it is particularly vulnerable to their campaigns. In fact, science should be the last target, wherever you draw the boundaries of animal welfare. For one thing, there is rarely an alternative to using animals in research. If there were, scientists would grasp it, because animal research is expensive and encircled by regulations. Animal research is also for a higher purpose than a full belly or an elegant outfit. The world needs new medicines and surgical procedures just as it needs the unknowable fruits of pure research. And science is, by and large, kind to its animals. The couple of million (mainly rats and mice) that die in Britain’s laboratories are much better looked-after and far more humanely killed than the billion or so (mainly chickens) on Britain’s farms. In fact, if Darley Oaks makes up its loss of guinea pigs with turkeys or dairy cows, you can be quite sure animal welfare in Britain has just taken a step backwards.

Marketers like to work on the demand side—take what’s in demand, make it cheaper, run a lot of ads, make a profit. If you can increase demand for what you have already made, a lot of problems will take care of themselves. It’s the promise made by the typical marketing organization: Give us money, and we’ll increase demand. There’s an overlooked alternative. If you can offer a scarce and coveted good or service that others can’t, you win. What is both scarce and in demand? Things that are difficult: difficult to conceive, to convey, and to make. Sometimes difficult even, at first, to sell—maybe an unpopular idea or a product that’s ahead of its time. In fact, just about the only thing that is not available in unlimited supply in an ever more efficient, connected world is the product of difficult work. It’s no longer particularly difficult to run a complex factory. There are people across the globe able to do it more cheaply than you. Commoditization doesn’t apply only to making and selling cheap goods. Almost everything they teach in business school is easy to do. It’s easy to do the options pricing model. Providing audit services isn’t difficult. Neither is running a high-traffic website. Amazon will do it for you for pennies on the dollar. With a lack of difficulty comes more choice, more variation, and, yes, lower prices. And so consumers of every stripe are jaded. This puts huge pressure on organizations, because the race to the bottom demands that they either do all this easy work faster or do it cheaper than they did it yesterday. And there’s not a lot of room to do either one. The only refuge from the race to the bottom? Difficult work. Your only alternative is to create something scarce, something valuable, something that people will pay more for. What’s difficult? Creating beauty is difficult, whether it’s the tangible beauty of a brilliant innovation or the intangible essence of exceptional leadership. Beauty exists in an elegant and novel approach to a problem. Maybe it’s captured in a simple device that works intuitively, reliably, and efficiently or in an effective solution—a “beautiful“ solution—to an organizational dysfunction. And it exists in the act of connecting with and leading people. Leading changes is difficult. It’s difficult to find, hire, and retain people who are eager and able to change the status quo. It’s difficult to stick with a project that everyone seems to dislike. It’s difficult to motivate a team of people who have been lied to or had their spirits dashed. People who can do difficult work will always be in demand. And yet our default is to do the easy work, busywork, and work that only requires activity, not real effort or guts. That’s true of individuals, and also true of companies. That’s because we regard our role as cranking out average stuff for average people, pushing down price, and, at best, marginally improving value. That used to be the way to grow an organization. No longer. The world will belong to those who can create something scarce, not something cheap. The race to the top has just begun.

Back when we were kids, the hours spent with friends were too numerous to count. There were marathon telephone conversations, all-night studying and giggling sessions. Even after boyfriends, entered the picture, our best friends remained irreplaceable. And time was the means by which we nurtured those friendships. Now as adult women we never seem to have enough time for anything. Husbands, kids, careers and avocations—all require attention; too often, making time for our friends comes last on the list of priorities. And yet, ironically, we need our friends as much as ever in adulthood. A friendship network is absolutely crucial for our well-being as adults. We have to do the hard work of building and sustaining the network. Here are some important ways for accomplishing this. Let go of your less central friendships. Many of our friendships were never meant to last a lifetime. It’s natural that some friendships have time limits. Furthermore, now everyone has a busy social calendar, so pull back from some people that you don’t really want to draw close to and give the most promising friendship a fair chance to grow. 【C1】Be willing to “drop everything“ when you’re truly needed. You may get a call from a friend who is really depressed over a certain problem when you are just sitting down to enjoy a romantic dinner with your husband. This is just one of those instances when a friend’s needs mattered more. 【C2】Take advantage of the mails. Nearly all of us have pals living far away—friends we miss very much. Given the limited time available for visits and the high price of phone calls, writing is a fine way to keep in touch—and makes both sender and receiver feel good. 【C3】Risk expressing negative feelings. When time together is tough to come by, it’s natural to want the mood during that time to be upbeat. And many people fear that others will think less of you if you express the negative feelings like anger and hurt. 【C4】Don’t make your friends’ problems your own. Sharing your friend’s grief is the way you show deep friendship. Never underestimate the value of loyalty. Loyalty has always been rated as one of the most desired qualities in friends. True loyalty can be a fairly subtle thing. Some people feel it means that, no matter what, your friend will always take you side. But real loyalty is being accepting the person, not necessarily of certain actions your friend might take. 【C5】Give the gift of time as often as time allows. Time is what we don’t have nearly enough of—and yet, armed with a little ingenuity, we can make it to give it to our friends. The last but not the least thing to keep a friendship alive is to say to your friends “I miss you and love you.“ Saying that at the end of a phone conversation, or a visit, or writing it on a birthday card, can sustain your friendship for the times you aren’t together. [A] The trick is remembering that a little is better than none and that you can do two things at once. For instance, if you both go for a weekly aerobics, go on the same day. If you both want to go on vacation, schedule the same destination. [B] Careful listening, clear writing, close reading, plain speaking, and accurate description will be invaluable. In tomorrow’s fast-paced business environment there will be precious little time to correct any misunderstandings. Communications breakdown may well become a fatal corporate disease. [C] But taking on your friend’s pain doesn’t make that pain go away. There’s a big difference between empathy or recognizing a friend’s pain, and over identification, which makes the sufferer feel even weaker—“I must be in worse pain than I even thought, because the person I’m confiding in is suffering so much!“ Remember troubled people just need their friends to stay grounded in their own feelings. [D] Remember honesty is the key to keeping a friendship real. Sharing your pain will actually deepen a friendship. [E] Besides, letters, cards and postcards have the virtue of being tangible—friends can keep them and reread them for years to come. [F] Sometimes, because of our unbreakable commitments or other circumstances, we simply can’t give a needy friend the time we’d like. If you can’t be there at that given moment, say something like, “I wish I could be with you—I can hear that you’re in pain. May I call you tomorrow?“ Be sure your friend knows she’s cared about. [*]

From the first two paragraphs, we learn that

Older adults tend to be forgetful because of

The studies mentioned in paragraph 3 show that

What can we infer from the last paragraph?

The text intends to tell us that