How does a whale keep itself warm?Millions of years ago, whales lived on land and walked on four legs. Today, whales still have small bones that are the remains of their hind legs, but these bones can only be seen on the inside of the whale. No one knows why whales left the land to live in the water. However, scientists can imagine that when the whales changed their environment, their bodies underwent a change—taking on a more fish-like appearance. This new form offered less resistance to the water, enabling the whales to swim faster. Despite their fish like form, whales are not fish. A whale will drown, just as a man will, if it stays under water too long. When a whale is under water, it closes its nostrils tightly and holds its breath. The air in its lungs becomes very hot and full of water vapor. When the whale rises to the surface and exhales, its hot breath produces a column of water vapor that rises high in the air. A man produces the same effect when he exhales warm air on a cold morning. Whales are classified as mammals because they bear their young, rather than laying eggs, and because the mother whales give the babies milk. Like other mammals, whales have warm blood. Their blood stays at the same temperature, even when they move from hot to cold water. They keep warm in cold water because they have a thick layer of fat just under their skins. This fat is called blubber, and it is thicker on whales that spend their lives in cold water. Almost all land mammals, except man, have hair on their bodies to keep them warm, but whales, which have very few hairs, are kept warm by their fat. By its thick layer of fat under its skin. By moving frequently in the water. By adjusting its blood temperature. By taking in hot air.

[*]Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please. On behalf of the Hospitality Department, first I welcome you to the City Zoo. Now I’d like to explain the program we’ve arranged for you here this afternoon. There’ll be three animal shows. The first show will begin at three o’clock in the marine arena. And you’ll certainly be attracted by the dolphins’ and the killer whales’ interesting—and sometimes silly-actions. After that comes the second show. This is feeding the monkeys and apes at four o’clock, in the Primate Center. Please don’t feed the animals with any sweets, biscuits, or fruit you may have brought with you, because these kinds of food can upset the animals’ normal diet. You can, of course, help the staff in feeding the apes and monkeys with specially-prepared food, and in playing with the monkeys, too. The last show will begin at 4: 30 in the giant bird cage. Dr. Smith will be with you as your guide, he’ll point out to you more than 300 species of birds from Central and South America. If you have any questions about these shows or other forthcoming events at the zoo, please ask the people at the information desk at the main entrance. They’ll be very happy to help you. I hope you’ll enjoy your visit. Thank you very much.

What are the two speakers talking about?W: What’ s the advantage of using nuclear power in the generation of electricity? M: In an advanced reactor, as much electricity can be made from one ton of enriched uranium fuel as from 75,000 tons of coal. W: Then you need only a few lorry loads of fuel at a nuclear power station instead of many trains of coal. M: Exactly! W: With coal you have a residue of ash. What about the used fuel from a nuclear-powered station? W: Well, being radioactive, it can’t be left lying around. M: So how do you dispose of it? M: It’ s loaded into thick steel flasks each weighing 45 tons. They’ re dispatched to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority for reprocessing. W: So there’ s little actual wastage? M: But that doesn’t eliminate cost. The reprocessing isn’ t done for nothing. W: But electricity from a nuclear-powered station is cheaper than from a coal-fired plant, isn’t it? M: Well, the cost of operation of nuclear stations is only half the cost of even the least expensive coal-fired stations. And later on the figures will show an even greater advantage for nuclear energy. W: But don’t nuclear stations cost more to build? M: Yes, they do. However, their cheaper running gains more than offsets the construction costs. W: And aren’ t the nuclear stations cleaner in operation? M: Yes, and they’ re better looking than conventional stations and can be built in places unsuitable for conventional plants. In most cases, they are safe. The benefits of nuclear weapons. The environmental pollution caused by nuclear-powered stations. The disadvantages of used fuel. The advantages of nuclear-powered stations.

The world’ s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss. If there were an examination topic, most students would tear it apart, offering a long list of complaints from local smog(烟雾)to global climate change, from the felling(砍伐)of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. 【T1】Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad. After all, the world’ s population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way as they did in 1900(or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty disgusting place, smelly, dirty, toxic and dangerous. But they don’ t. 【T2】The reasons why they don’ t, and why the environment has not been ruined, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today’ s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable. Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must; the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious. 【T3】What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century. The same is true for food. 【T4】Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop technology. The long term trend has been downwards. 【T5】It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign(良性的)trend begins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it: fish is the best example of this.

[*]Chinese lawmakers are reviewing a plan that would raise the monthly individual income tax threshold to 2,000 yuan(US $270)from 1,600 yuan, a move designed to help medium to low-income earners. The draft amendment for raising the threshold by 25percent was yesterday submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’ s Congress for deliberation. The amendment is expected to become effective March 1, 2008. Raising the personal income tax threshold would free 70 percent of income earners from paying income tax, compared with 50 percent now. Minister of Finance Xie Xuren said, “ Raising the individual income tax threshold is within the country ’ s financial capacity and aims to relieve the economic burden on medium and low income earners. “ Xie said the move would mean a reduction of 30 billion yuan in government revenue. China doubled the threshold to 1,600 yuan in 2006. The planned amendment comes as China’ s consumer price index(CPI)in November rose to a high not seen in 11 years. China’ s CPI jumped to a high of 6. 9 percent in November mainly because of food price increases. Food prices, which have a 33 percent weighting on the CPI, soared 18.2 percent last month.

According to the speaker, what should the listeners do as soon as possible?Good morning. First I’d like to welcome all of you to this workshop on student housing. I’ 11 go through the information about types of housing a-vailable for the fall and later hand out application forms. Then, if you have any questions, feel free to ask me. There are three main types of housing here for you to choose from: the dorms, the family student apartments, and the international houses. As of now, there is some space available in each type, but they are filling up fast. You should get your application in as soon as possible. Let me explain some of the main features for each type of housing. We have men’ s dorms, women’ s dorms, and coed dorms. Most of the rooms are doubles, with two beds, two closets, and two desks. We also have a few triples and a few single suites, but I think the suites are already taken. On each floor of the dorms there is a large bathroom and shower are-a. There aren’ t cooking facilities in the dorms, but you can buy a meal ticket for the cafeteria. The family student apartments are grouped together near the north entrance to the school. Each apartment has a kitchen, a living dining area, and either one or two bedrooms. There is a fenced play area for children. The international houses are a group of apartments for any students. They are organized into language and culture themes, and some of them have rules about speaking only a certain language during mealtimes. It’s been a good way for students to learn about other cultures as well as practice languages. These houses are for all students, no matter how much of a particular language you speak. I think that Spanish House is full, but there are rooms available in all the other houses. Well, that’s the main information. I’ll pass out these applications now and answer your individual questions. Find a roommate. Hand in applications. Go to Spanish house. Buy a meal ticket for the cafeteria.

The United States leads all industrial nations in the proportion of its young men and women who receive higher education. Why is this? What motivates a middle-income family with two children to【C1】______ loans for up to $120, 000 so that their son and daughter can 【C2】______private universities for four years? Why would both parents in a low-income family take jobs to support their three children at a state university—each【C3】______an annual cost of $4,000? Why should a woman in her forties quit her job and use her savings to【C4】______ for the college education she did not receive when she was【C5】______? Americans place a high personal value【C6】______higher education. This is an attitude that goes【C7】______to the country’ s oldest political traditions. People in the United States have always believed that education is necessary for【C8】______ a democratic government. They believe that it prepares the individual【C9】______informed intelligent, political participation, including voting. Before World War II, a high school education seemed adequate for【C10】______most people’s needs, but the post-war period produced dozens of new questions for Americans. How should a- tomic【C11】______ be used? Should scientists be【C12】______ to experiment in splitting genes? Should money be spent on【C13】______astronauts into space—or should it be used for aid to another nation? Americans rarely express a direct vote on such complex matters, but the representatives they elect【C14】______decide such issues. In recent years,【C15】______ a result, many Americans have begun to regard a college education as necessary to becoming an informed American voter.

[A] Set a Good Example for Your Kids [B] Build You Kids’ Work Skills [C] Place Time Limits on Leisure Activities [D] Talk about the Future on a Regular Basis [E] Help Kids Develop Coping Strategies [F] Help Your Kids Figure Out Who They Are [G] Build Your Kids’ Sense of Responsibility How Can a Parent Help? Mothers and fathers can do a lot to ensure a safe landing in early adulthood for their kids. E-ven if a job’ s starting salary seems too small to satisfy an emerging adult’ s need for rapid content, the transition from school to work can be less of a setback if the start-up adult is ready for the move. Here are a few measures, drawn from my book Ready or Not, Here Life Comes, that parents can take to prevent what I call “work-life unreadiness“ : 【R1】______ You can start this process when they are 11 or 12. Periodically review their emerging strengths and weaknesses with them and work together on any shortcomings, like difficulty in communicating well or collaborating. Also, identify the kinds of interests they keep coming back to, as these offer clues to the careers that will fit them best. 【R2】______ Kids need a range of authentic role models—as opposed to members of their clique, pop stars and vaunted athletes. Have regular dinner-table discussions about people the family knows and how they got where they are. Discuss the joys and downsides of your own career and encourage your kids to form some ideas about their own future. When asked what they want to do, they should be discouraged from saying “I have no idea. “ They can change their minds 200 times, but having only a foggy view of the future is of little good. 【R3】______ Teachers are responsible for teaching kids how to learn; parents should be responsible for teaching them how to work. Assign responsibilities around the house and make sure homework deadlines are met. Encourage teenagers to take a part-time job. Kids need plenty of practice delaying gratification and deploying effective organizational skills, such as managing time and setting priorities. 【R4】______ Playing video games encourages immediate content. And hours of watching TV shows with canned laughter only teaches kids to process information in a passive way. At the same time, listening through earphones to the same monotonous beats for long stretches encourages kids to stay inside their bubble instead of pursuing other endeavors. All these activities can prevent the growth of important communication and thinking skills and make it difficult for kids to develop the kind of sustained concentration they will need for most jobs. 【R5】______ They should know how to deal with setbacks, stresses and feelings of inadequacy. They should also learn how to solve problems and resolve conflicts, ways to brainstorm and think critically. Discussions at home can help kids practice doing these things and help them apply these skills to everyday life situations. What about the son or daughter who is grown but seems to be struggling and wandering aimlessly through early adulthood? Parents still have a major role to play, but now it is more delicate. They have to be careful not to come across as disappointed in their child. They should exhibit strong interest and respect for whatever currently interests their fledging adult (as naive or ill con ceived as it may seem) while becoming a partner in exploring options for the future. Most of all, these new adults must feel that they are respected and supported by a family that appreciates them.

Often referred to as “the heart of a factoring organization“ , the credit department is responsible for granting credit to clients’ customers and for collecting the accounts receivable purchased by the factor. When factored clients submit customer orders for credit approval, the credit department analyzes the financial condition and credit worthiness of the customer, and then makes a decision to approve or decline the order. The department must then monitor the condition of approved customers and collect all due receivables. Careful credit checking and effective collection procedures in this department can greatly reduce the risks inherent in factoring. As the head of the credit department, the credit manager is responsible for seeing that the department operates effectively. He must develop the factor’ s credit policies in consultation with senior factoring associates, and he is in overall command of everything from credit and collections to bankruptcy and liquidations. If the factor is a commercial bank division, the credit manager is a bank’ s vice president, and credit policy must also be approved by top management of the bank. Assisting the credit manager may be several supervisors who have credit responsibilities of their own and who also oversee the analysis and approval of customer orders by the credit specialists. Credit supervisors typically spend about eighty percent of their time handling large customer orders. If a customer order exceeds a supervisor’ s credit authority, he is responsible for making recommendations to the credit manager. A supervisor also reviews a subordinate’ s credit decision if the subordinate is unsure of the extent of the credit risk or if a client questions a particular credit decision. In extremely large credit exposures, supervisors bear the responsibility for analyzing the credit position of the customers and deciding on credit limits. To do this, they must regularly obtain current data from various credit information sources. They must also have extensive contact with each customer to determine operational performance and progress. Frequently, supervisors are called upon to give advice on what should be done to improve a company’ s financial condition. Meeting all these responsibilities requires that each supervisor continuously observe and study the industries with which he is concerned, so that he is capable of anticipating market changes which may affect his accounts. A supervisor’s major challenge is to maintain a fine balance between the demands of clients that all their customer orders be approved and the questionable financial position of some of the customers. In reviewing any credit decision, a supervisor must be capable of weighing a variety of elements , including the possibility of losing the client, the customer’ s credit position, and the extent of any possible loss.

Read the following text(s) and write an essay to 1) summarize the main points of the text(s), 2) make clear your own viewpoints, and 3) justify your stand. In your essay, make full use of the information provided in the text(s). If you use more than three consecutive words from the text (s) , use quotation marks (“ “). You should write 160 -200 words on the ANSWER SHEET. Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics—the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves—goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,“ says Dave La-very, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can’t yet give a robot enough ’common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world. “ What researchers found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brains roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented—and human perception far more complicated— than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’ t know quite how we do it.

However important we may regard school life to be, there is no denying the fact that children spend more time at home than in the classroom. Therefore, the great influence of parents cannot be ignored or discounted by the teacher. They can become strong allies of the school personnel or they can consciously or unconsciously hinder and obstruct curricular objectives. Administrators have been aware of the need to keep parents informed of the newer method used in schools. Many principals have conducted workshops explaining such matters as the reading readiness program, manuscript writing, and developmental mathematics. Moreover, the classroom teacher, with the permission of the supervisors, can also play an important role in enlightening parents. The many interviews carried on during the year as well as new ways of reporting pupils’ progress, can significantly aid in achieving a harmonious interplay between school and home. To illustrate, suppose that a father has been drilling Junior in arithmetic processes night after night. In a friendly interview, the teacher can help the parent convert his natural paternal interest into productive channels. He might be persuaded to let Junior participate in discussing the family budget, buying the food, using a yardstick or measuring cup at home, setting the clock, calculating mileage on a trip, and engaging in scores of other activities that have a mathematical basis. If the father follows the advice, it is reasonable to assume that he will soon realize his son is making satisfactory progress in mathematics and, at the same time, enjoying the work. Too often, however, teachers’ conferences with parents are devoted to petty accounts of children ’ s offences, complaints about laziness and poor work habits, and suggestions for penalties and rewards at home. What is needed is a more creative approach in which the teacher, as a professional adviser, plants ideas in parents’ minds for the best utilization of the many hours that the child spends out of the classroom. In this way, the school and the home join forces in stimulating the fullest development of youngsters’ capacities.

Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft chairman without a single earned university degree, is by his success raising new doubts about the worth of the business world’ s favorite academic title: the MBA(Master of Business Administration). The MBA, a 20th century product, always has borne the mark of lowly commerce and greed on the tree-lined campuses ruled by purer disciplines such as philosophy and literature. But even with the recession apparently cutting into the hiring of business school graduates, about 79,000 people were expected to receive MBAs in 1993. This is nearly 16 times the number of business graduates in 1960, a testimony to the widespread assumption that the MBA is vital for young men and women who want to run companies some day. “ If you are going into the corporate world it is still a disadvantage not to have one, “ said Donald Morrison, professor of marketing and management science. “But in the last five years or so, when someone asks, ’ Should I attempt to get an MBA?’ The answer a lot more is: ’ It depends. ’ “ The success of Bill Gates and other non-MBAs, such as the late Sam Walton of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. , has helped inspire self-conscious debates on business school campuses over the worth of a business degree and whether management skills can be taught. The Harvard Business Review printed a lively, fictional exchange of letters to dramatize complaints about business degree holders. The article called MBA hires “extremely disappointing“ and said “ MB As want to move up too fast, they don’ t understand politics and people, and they aren’ t able to function as part of a team until their third year. But by then, they’ re out looking for other jobs. “ The problem, most participants in the debate acknowledge, is that the MBA has acquired an image of future riches and power far beyond its actual importance and usefulness. Enrollment in business schools exploded in the 1970s and 1980s and created the assumption that no one who pursued a business career could do without one. The growth was fueled by a drive against the anti-business values of the 1960s and by the women’ s movement. Business people who have hired or worked with MB As say those with the degrees often know how to analyze systems but are not so skillful at motivating people. “ They don’ t get a lot of grounding in the people side of the business“, said James Shaffer, vice-president and principal of the Towers Perrin Management Consulting Firm.

What do we learn about the blood temperature of a whale?

In what way do whales distinguish themselves from other land mammals?