How many whales altogether does Japan plan to capture?You will hear 3 conversations or talks and you must answer the questions by choosing A, B, C or D. You will hear each recording only once. Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following talk on the anti-whaling movement. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13. Australia’s anti-whaling film clip accuses Japan of using its scientific whaling program as a cover for commercial hunting. The film has been posted on the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube and it aims to reach Japanese children. It features video of humpback whales frolicking in the sea and Australia’s Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull interviewing Australian children who oppose Japan’s whaling program. Japanese whale hunters plan to capture 50 humpback whales in the Antarctic in the coming months. The endangered mammals are migrating south along the Australian coast, attracting thousands of whale watchers. Japan also plans to kill 935 minke whales for what it calls scientific research. Tokyo argues that its whaling program helps in the understanding of whale stocks as well as the health of the fragile Antarctic environment. The International Whaling Commission, of which Japan is a member, banned commercial whaling more than 20 years ago, in an effort to allow stocks to rebuild. Japan, however, argued against the ban, saying whaling was a long tradition in the country and whale meat a key part of the Japanese diet. The whales that Japanese boats hunt each year are sold for consumption after scientists study them. Opponents of this annual hunt plan to take legal action to stop Japan from operating in Australia’s Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. The government in Canberra, however, thinks lawsuits will be futile, as the sanctuary is not recognized by other nations. Japan’s fisheries agency has challenged its critics to take their cases to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The Australian government hopes public pressure will be more effective in its anti-whaling fight. Environmental groups are adopting similar tactics. Greenpeace is using an animated film in Japan, which also features school children, to get its anti-whaling message across. 50. 935. 985. Thousands of.

What is ADD?Questions 14 to 16 are based on the following talk on ADD. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16. Our subject is attention deficit disorder, ADD, and the related form ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. These affect an estimated five to ten percent of children worldwide. Children who forget easily and never seem to finish tasks or pay attention might be found to have ADD. If, in addition, they seem overly active and unable to control their behavior, a doctor might say it is ADHD. Experts say the cause involves a chemical imbalance in the brain. It can affect not only school, but also personal relationships and the ability to keep a job later in life. Many of those affected also have learning disabilities or suffer from depression. Medicines can produce calmer, clearer thinking for periods of time. But the drugs can also have side effects like weight loss and sleep problems. And there is debate about the morality of medicating children. Susan Smalley is a psychiatry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She just led a study of ADHD in northern Finland. The study found that rates and signs of ADHD are about the same in children there as in the United States. The Finnish children are rarely treated with medicine, while medication is widely used in the United States. Yet the study found that the two populations have few differences with ADHD among older children and teenagers. Professor Smalley says medication is very effective in the short term. But she says the study raises important questions about the long-term effectiveness of current treatments. The study also found that only about half the Finnish children diagnosed with ADHD had deficits in short-term memory and self-control. These cognitive deficits are generally considered part of the definition of ADHD. The study also found more evidence that ADHD symptoms change with age. Hyperactivity and lack of self-control decrease. But about two-thirds of children continue to show high levels of inattention as teenagers. Overly active and unable to control their behavior. Forget easily and never seem to finish task. A chemical imbalance in the brain. Learning disabilities.

Officials in Tampa Florida, got a surprise recently when a local firm building the state’s first ethanol * -production factory put in a request for 400, 000 gallons a day of city water. The request by US Envirofuels would make the facility one of the city’s top ten water consumers overnight, and the company plans to double its size. Florida is suffering from a prolonged drought. Rivers and lakes are at record lows and residents wonder where the extra water will come from. They are not alone. A backlash against the federally financed biofuels boom is growing around the country, and “water could be the Achilles heel“ of ethanol, said a report by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The number of ethanol factories has almost tripled in the past eight years from 50 to about 140. A further 60 or so are under construction. In 2007, President George Bush signed legislation requiring a fivefold increase in biofuels production, to 36 billion gallons by 2022. This is controversial for several reasons. There are doubts about how green ethanol really is(some say the production process uses almost as much energy as it produces). Some argue that using farmland for ethanol pushes up food prices internationally(world wheat prices rose 25% recently, perhaps as a side-effect of America’s ethanol programme). But one of the least-known but biggest worries is ethanol’s extravagant use of water. A typical ethanol factory producing 50 m gallons of biofuels a year needs about 500 gallons of water a minute. Most of that goes into the boiling and cooling process, which is similar to making beer. Some water is lost through evaporation in the cooling tower and in waste discharge. All this is putting a heavy burden on aquifers in some corn-growing areas. Residents went to court in Missouri to halt a $ 165 m facility being built by Gulf stream Bioflex Energy LLC which was projected to draw 1. 3 m gallons of water every day from the Ozark aquifer. Projects are being challenged in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and in central Illinois, where eight ethanol facilities are situated over the Mahomet aquifer. Demand for corn is such that more land is also being ploughed up in drier regions of the Great Plains states to the west of the corn belt, where irrigation is required, increasing water demand further. The good news is that ethanol plants are becoming more efficient. They now use about half as much water per gallon of ethanol as they did a decade ago. New technology might be able to halve the amount of water again, says Mike Fatigati, vice president of Delta-T Corp, a Virginia company which has designed a system that does not discharge any waste water. But others are sceptical. “There are things you can close loop(i. e. recycle efficiently)and things you can’t, “ says Paul Greene, a senior director for biofuels with Siemens Water Technologies, designers of the water-purification technology used in ethanol factories. Perhaps ethanol just isn’t as bio-friendly as it looks. * ethanol = alcohol fuel

You will hear an interview with a geography teacher. As you listen, answer Questions 1 to 10 by circling TRUE or FALSE. You will hear the conversation only once. You now have 1 minute to read Questions 1 to 10. [*]You will hear an interview with a geography teacher. As you listen, answer Questions 1 to 10 by circling TRUE or FALSE. You will hear the interview only once. You now have 1 minute to read Questions 1 to 10. M: What made you become a geography teacher? W: I was born in Somerset and went to a fairly small grammar school. Geography was always my favourite subject and from fairly early on I wanted to teach it. I took geography, art and economics A levels and I was into art but was advised against taking it. So I got a place in Bristol and did a degree in geography. M: When did your working life start? W: I got a job in Marlwood School, an 11—18 comprehensive in Alveston village just north of Bristol. It was a brilliant school. I was there for three years between 1976 and 1979. I got very fed up with the cold winters—we used to get snowed in—so I decided to go abroad where it would be hot. I applied for a job in Kenya and within a week I’d got the job. It was at a school 65 kilometres north of Nairobi and was owned by Delmonte. It had been set up for employees of the plantations, but became so good and famous that it began to take large numbers of expatriates. Some were very wealthy; Doris Moi, President Moi’s daughter, went there. I taught pupils aged 3 to 25 in a round hut classroom. M: Why did you come back to England? W: I met my husband in Kenya and we came back to England together. I got a part-time job at Comberton Village College near Cambridge. I taught there for 12 years and progressed from a part-time geography teacher through to full-time teacher, to head of geography, to assistant head of humanities and eventually I took my deputy head job. This year I’m looking for a headship. M: What does your job involve? W: Forty percent of my time is spent teaching. Then there’s my deputy head role which is a vision- building one. I also manage all the resources of the school—the budget, and the teaching and learning resources. M: What’s the best part of the job? W: I still love teaching. It is a total vocation. If I tell a child off in my office it’s because I’m their teacher rather than because I’m the deputy head. I do feel that the senior management’s credibility is based on what they do in the classroom. M: And the worst part? W: The hardest part is balancing the roles. First there’s the teaching, which also involves marking and preparation. Then you need time to think strategically; you have to build in thinking and reflection time. Then you have to cope with the day-to-day issues; a child behaving badly, a child protection issue, a parent wanting to speak to you. M: What worries you about education today? W: I’m quite worried about geography competing with other subjects in the curriculum. These days geography teachers have to be aware of marketing as much as geography. Children do not have to study geography at key stage four (when they reach ages 10-11). I think that’s sad. Geography gives children an appreciation of their environment. The video of the volcano, the earthquake victims—geography gives an awareness of global citizenship. M: What advice would you give to a young geography teacher? W: I would advise them to read a lot and to look around them. It’s a constant search for knowledge. Children don’t only want to see a video any more they want satellite images and things on the Internet and 3D models. You have to make geography come to life for them, not only in the classroom but in their own environment.

You will hear an interview with Dr. Anthony Komaroff on immortality. As you listen, answer the questions or complete the notes in your test booklet for Questions 21 to 30 by writing no more than three words in the space provided on the right. You will hear the interview twice. You now have 1 minute to read Questions 21 to 30. [*]You will hear an interview with Dr. Anthony Komaroff on immortality. As you listen, answer the questions or complete the notes in your test booklet for Questions 21 to 30 by writing not more than three words in the space provided on the right You will hear the interview twice. You now have minute to read Questions 21 to 30. W: The quest for immortality has been a past and a current obsession. How will medical advances contribute to longer life spans? Is there a limit to how long we can live? M: In the 20th century, in the developed nations, our life span increased from about 50 years to about 80 years. In just 100 years, our species increased its life span by 60 percent. Right now changes in our lifestyle have more power to extend our life span than any medicines yet invented: sitting around waiting for a magical life-extending cure-all isn’t healthy. Still, there have been some remarkable advances in identifying genes that affect aging. Manipulating those genes extends the life spans of some simple animals by 500 percent. I think our grandchildren may see a world in which people live healthier and considerably longer. But I won’t be there to find out if I was right. W: Are the dangers of advancing medicine too far ever taken into consideration? What happens when there is no more sickness and people live so long that we overpopulate the planet? How far is too far? M: I agree with you that longer lives and larger populations could cause problems. This is particularly true in overpopulated parts of the world, where hundreds of millions of people live in hunger and squalor. While discovering how to extend the healthy human life span, we also need to make major advances in cheap energy and food production. Otherwise we risk making the problems of overpopulation and uneven distribution of resources even worse. W: How can we control harmful viruses when they seem to change more quickly than medical and research advances? M: It is getting tougher for humans to fight viruses. Viruses counter our moves against them. They multiply very rapidly, and occasionally a genetic mutation occurs that allows them to resist our antiviral drugs. However, scientists are working on entirely new strategies. For example, a recently discovered natural process called RNA interference has shown early promise in treating viral infections. Like viruses, bacteria are also becoming more difficult to treat. Ironically, one way of countering bacteria may be to harness a group of viruses known as bacteriophages. For millions of years, these viruses have been killing specific bacteria without harming humans. Scientists are examining whether bacteriophages, rather than antibiotics, might help treat some bacterial infections. W: What is the status on finding a cure for HIV/AIDS? M: It is now 25 years since HIV/AIDS was first recognized, and we do not have either an effective vaccine or a curative antiviral treatment. Yet treatment has improved dramatically: For many people，HIV/AIDS is now a chronic disease and not a death sentence. Why don’t we have a cure? One problem is that today’s treatments, while suppressing HIV’s ability to proliferate and damage organs，do not completely eliminate the virus from the body. W: Obesity seems to foster just about every other malady known to man. What’s down the road in the field of DNA research and drug therapy? M: Obesity surely does make us more vulnerable to many major diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. No matter what great advances science offers, a healthy diet and regular exercise will always contribute to the maintenance of a healthy weight. That said, over the past 15 years scientists have discovered a group of genes that powerfully influence hunger and the efficiency with which we bum calories. It really is true: some people are born with “thin” genes. As we figure out how certain genes make it easier to be thin, I am optimistic that within the next 20 years we will develop new drugs that help us achieve a healthy weight without serious side effects. W: How must medical training change to meet the future challenges of health care? M: To be a good doctor, you have to know a lot of facts. Medical training does a very good job of teaching those facts. But a good doctor also needs to have many other skills: to keep up with an ever-changing body of medical knowledge; to learn how to make decisions such as how to balance the benefits of a test or treatment against its risks; to sense a patient’s unexpressed fears or mi sunder standing s, and, above all, to care. It is a lot harder to teach these skills than to give medical students facts to memorize. At our medical school, and at many others, the curriculum is being changed to emphasize such skills. W: The delivery of health care varies widely in this country, and medical errors cause a lot of unnecessary injury. How, going forward, will doctors be trained in the uniform practice of medicine? M: Scientific medicine has given us outstanding technologies for diagnosing and treating disease, but doctors and hospitals do not always practice scientific medicine. Sometimes tests or treatments are ordered when their risks exceed their benefits. Other times, tests or treatments are not ordered when scientific studies say they should be. These departures are sometimes justified by a patient’s wishes or a doctor’s clinical judgment. Unfortunately, they occur more often because there are no systems in place to monitor practice and maintain quality. We need many more systems to encourage scientific medicine, while leaving room for justified exceptions to the rules.

Between 1852, when【C1】______was first established that Mount Everest was the highest mountain on earth, and 1953, when Edmund Hillary, and Tenzing Norgay finally reached the peak’s summit, it was every mountaineer’s dream to become the first person standing on the world’s【C2】______point. And George Mallory was one of the most tenacious early contenders. Mallory was introduced【C3】______rock climbing while studying at Winchester College. 【C4】______completed his studies, he settled into a career【C5】______a teacher at Charterhouse School, and continued to pursue his passion【C6】______climbing in his spare time. Mallory’s【C7】______trip to Everest was a reconnaissance mission in 1921【C8】______ aimed to produce the first accurate maps of the region. Two【C9】______visits to the mountain followed. Then, on 8 June 1924, 【C10】______his third attempt to reach the summit, Mallory and his partner, Andrew Irvine, disappeared. Several expeditions subsequently attempted to find the pair, and Mallory’s【C11】______was finally discovered in May, 1999, at 8, 169 metres, 600 metres【C12】______the summit, 【C13】______with various items of equipment, including handwritten letters to his wife, a pocket knife, an oxygen bottle and his goggles, 【C14】______were later donated to the Royal Geographical Society【C15】______Mallory’s family. There is still considerable debate as to【C16】______Mallory reached Everest’s summit. The【C17】______that his goggles were found in his pocket has led some to suggest that he was on his way down the mountain【C18】______ he fell. Had he been ascending in daylight, he would have been wearing the goggles to【C19】______snow-blindness, and given what is known of the pair’s climbing schedule, if it were【C20】______when they fell, they must have been on their way back down.

Few writers are as revered as Jane Austen. According to a poll in March, Pride and Prejudice—a romance without a single kiss—is the book Britons love most. Austen adaptations abound: the BBC is filming a new version of Sense and Sensibility written by Andrew Davies, whose 1995 Pride and Prejudice was a global success, and ITV has just shown three of her other five novels. But Janeites, as the author’s most avid devotees style themselves, have few relics to worship. Most of her letters were burned on her death, and a single sketch by her sister, Cassandra, showing her purse-lipped and in her night-cap, is the only generally acknowledged image of her face. That picture, now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, depicts a woman so plain that it is often reworked for book covers. That is perhaps why there has been so much interest in a portrait by Ozias Humphrey, a minor society artist of the 18th century, which was auctioned in New York on April 19th by Christie’s. According to its owner, Henry Rice, a sixth-generation descendant of Miss Austen’s brother Edward, it shows Jane at about 14, and was commissioned by a great-uncle to help her marriage prospects. Not everyone is convinced that the picture is in fact of Miss Austen. The National Portrait Gallery has repeatedly declined to purchase it, citing supposed anachronisms in the subject’s costume and a tax stamp on the canvas. Its pre-auction valuation reflected this uncertainty: although $400, 000-800, 000 is far more than any of Mr. Humphrey’s works has achieved before now, a buyer who believed he was looking at Miss Austen would surely be prepared to pay more. The doubts expressed in London are one reason why the portrait was sold in New York. Another is that Americans are as keen on Miss Austen as Britons are. The BBC’s Pride and Prejudice was co-produced by A&E, an American cable channel, and another such channel, HBO, co-financed ITV’s adaptations. Versions of her books for the big screen have relied on American cash and not a few American actors. At the heart of each of the novels is a heroine—and a marriage. But unlike her heroines, Miss Austen remained single, and some wonder whether that sour-faced sketch by her sister tells us why. Becoming Jane, a recent Hollywood production, presents a different, highly speculative, explanation: a beautiful girl has her heart broken by a flighty Irishman and turns to writing for solace. Miss Austen herself rated her heroines’ other attributes more highly than their looks, on which she rarely spends more than a few unspecific words. The rest are devoted to what these women think and say, which is also what matters most about Jane Austen.

Answer Questions 71 to 80 by referring to the passages on the following pages. Answer each question by choosing A, B, or C and mark it on ANSWER SHEET 1. Note : When more than one answer is required, these may be given in any order. Some choices may be required more than once. A = Yahoo! B = eBay C = Amazon Which company(companies) [*] The Internet company, Yahoo! appears in the end to have rebuffed Microsoft, the software Goliath that wanted to buy it. It has done so, in part, by surrendering to Google, the younger Internet company that is its main rival. Yahoo! lives, but on the web’s equivalent of life support. Yahoo! ’s descent, first gradual then sudden, during this decade marks a surprising reversal of the fates of the only three big Internet firms to have survived since the web’s earliest days. Back in 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, truant PhD students at Stanford, started to publish a list, eventually named Yahoo!, of links to cool destinations on the nascent web. Around the same time, Jeff Bezos was writing his business plan for a website, soon to be called Amazon, for selling books online. The following year, Pierre Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American, put an auction site on the web that would become eBay. Even as hundreds of other dotcoms fell by the wayside at the turn of the century, these three made it through the great Internet crisis and have since prospered, to varying degrees and at different times. Their fates have reflected the evolution of the web as a whole, and now suggest its future direction. For many years eBay and Yahoo! made more money than Amazon, which, as a capital-intensive retailer, struggled longer with losses and then made profits at lower margins. And yet, says Pip Coburn of Coburn Ventures, an investment adviser, Yahoo! is now drifting and eBay is a washed-up quasi-monopoly, whereas Amazon finds itself at the Internet’s cutting edge. Yahoo! set out to be a new sort of media company. Its site became a tawdry strip mall, with big, flashing advertisements next to users’ e-mail inboxes. The firm slipped into a mindset of product silos, with the teams for the home-page, e-mail, finance and sports pages competing with each other and for advertisers, and confusing users. Yahoo! ’s bigger mistake was not to see how the web was changing. Google, also founded by two truant Stanford PhD students, became the leader of a new generation with a vision that web search, rather than Yahoo! ’s “portal“ approach, would guide surfers around the Internet. Yahoo]belatedly tried to keep up and bought sites such as flicker, com for photo-sharing and del. icio. us. com for bookmark-sharing, but it “put them in the curio cabinet“ without transforming the company, say’s Jerry Michalski, a technology consultant. EBay took a different route, recognising that its business—in effect, online yard sales—had potential network effects: in short, that sellers and buyers would flock to whichever site already did the most trading. The firm became a de facto monopoly, but with that came a culture that left many of its users disenchanted, and growth slowed. Some measures, such as the number of new listings of items for sale, are even in decline. Buyers and sellers increasingly rely on Google’s search model, or online social networks, to find things and one another. EBay’s new boss, John Donahoe, is not facing a crisis like Yahoo! ’s—but neither does he appear to have a big idea for the future. Amazon, by contrast, has found exactly that. It is the only one of the three that has been led continuously by the same man, its founder Jeff Bezos. Unlike his peers at the other two firms, Mr. Bezos has stuck to his original vision—while adding two new ideas as they presented themselves. His original plan was to become “Earth’s biggest river“ of merchandise, from books and toys to electronics and almost anything else that can be shipped. Then Mr. Bezos realised that the same online store-front and logistics system that worked for Amazon itself could also work for others. So he added an entirely new category of customers: third-party sellers, who account for 30% of all items sold through Amazon’s site today. Then, about four years ago, another, and potentially bigger, idea struck Mr. Bezos. Their infrastructure is rivalled in scale by only a few other firms in the world, including Google. So Mr. Bezos again added an entire category of customers: firms that wanted to rent computing capacity from Amazon over the Internet, rather than build their own data centres in a warehouse. It has signed up over 370, 000 customers. Almost by accident, Amazon has thus “backed into cloud computing“. If there is a leader in the cloud, it is Google. But Amazon is now right up there. Better yet, although Amazon overlaps with Google in the cloud, it does not rival it directly. Google mostly offers entire applications, such as word processing or spreadsheets, to consumers through their web browsers. Amazon offers services to programmers so they can build and run their own applications. So there they are. Jerry Yang is still boss of Yahoo!, although angry, restive shareholders may oust him at their annual meeting on August 1st, and his top lieutenants are leaving in droves. John Donahoe is looking hard for a purpose that will enable eBay to survive another decade. And Mr. Bezos is right where he wants to be.

What can be cited to show Mr. Eliasson’ s understanding of total-immersion art?Questions 17 to 20 are based on an introduction to modern artist Olafur Eliasson and his works. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20. When asked to describe his work, Olaftir Eliasson replies “My art is about you.” This might sound strange, coming from an artist who is famous for creating a giant artificial sun at Tate Modem, who has just built a pavilion that looks like a spinning top in London Hyde Park and is showing pieces ranging from a rainbow to a frozen hydroelectric car in his new retrospective at San Francisco’s Museum of Modem Art. But for Mr. Eliasson, the viewer’s interaction with his art is an essential part of it. For the past 15 years, the artist has been quietly creating what might be called total-immersion art. “I make art that creates an experience, not a representation，” he says. For instance, he has dyed rivers green in cities from Stockholm to Tokyo in order to stimulate people to look afresh at their urban surroundings. As he walks up the ramp of the new pavilion, he speaks with messianic fervour about his mission to engage people through art: “I want to create art that allows people to be singular and plural, to have an individual experience ... and at the same time engage with other people and the landscape around them.” The pavilion is designed in a way that defies representation: It doesn’t photograph well and can’t be described in a sound-bite. The only way to understand it is by experiencing it. Mr. Eliasson believes that art today has an unprecedented opportunity to effect social change. “When I was a student, people became artists to step away from the world, now it is a way to engage with it.” Seeing indifference and homogeneity in public life, he wonders: “Why do people no longer have faith in basic social interaction? How does the individual fit within the collective?” Mr. Eliasson constantly poses such questions in his work. His interests in aesthetics and ethics converge in his new design for a hydroelectric car for BMW no show in San Francisco. The vehicle is a reflection on the relationship between the car industry and global warming. When asked how he squares his work for companies such as BMW with his antipathy to corporate values, he admits ambivalence. Nonetheless, he says, “I live in this world, not a parallel universe, and I have to engage it.“ He funnels the money he makes from such projects into his charitable foundation which finances orphanages in Ethiopia. Mr. Eliasson’s Scandinavian roots are often cited as an inspiration for his green politics and his use of natural elements. But he rejects this, insisting that he is not obsessed with cliches about the purity of the Nordic environment. “I am not a nature lover, I am a people lover. That is why I am an artist: I use art to engage people.” Tate Modern in London. The dyed rivers. The use of sustainable material. The viewer’ s response.

One day a group of people walked into a cave and painted handprints all over the walls. Ten thousand years later, archaeologists have no idea why. 【R1】______ But this is the kind of challenge now facing a group of scientists, historians and futurists who are trying to send a message to the people of the distant future. In what has been called the first ever attempt at “reverse archaeology“ , they are designing a sign that will last at least 10, 000 years. The message: Don’t dig here, we buried nuclear waste. The repository in question, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP, was constructed in the 1970s and 80s in a disused salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. In 1999, it became the first underground repository in the world licensed to house waste from the production of nuclear weapons. Once it reaches full capacity in 2033, it will be monitored by the US Department of Energy for 1000 years before being abandoned. Computer models predict that within 1000 years the mine will collapse in on itself, sealing the chemical sludge, toxic waste and contaminated lab equipment inside. 【R2】______ This is a major challenge. In 10, 000 years our descendants may have no recollection of our culture, languages or technologies. They may be more technologically advanced than we can imagine , or civilisation as we know it may have long since crashed and burned. Clearly the survival of the WIPP message depends on more than paper or digital records. Maps and technical details will be stored in libraries around the world, but the warning signs on the site itself will need to be big, obvious and permanent. They will need to survive over thousands of years without eroding, being looted or being destroyed by vandals. 【R3】______ But making sure the message remains legible is only half the battle. It will also need to be understood, and, equally critically, believed. This is where things get tricky. Chances are the people of the future will no longer use language in the same way that we do. Even if they do use the spoken and written word to communicate, there is no guarantee their language will bear any relation to ours. In the early 1990s, Nelson gathered two teams of historians, anthropologists and semioticians—experts in signs—and challenged them to come up with the perfect warning sign. 【R4】______ Anthropologists say there is no universal symbol that will convey danger to any human past, present or future. Interpretations of colours vary between cultures, and while depictions of animals like spiders and snakes may inspire fear, they don’t tell you what you should be frightened of. 【R5】______ So if the symbols no longer mean anything to our descendants, will the two faces be enough to get the message across? “Both are relevant, I suppose, “ says Robert Aunger, “although we argue that disgust is a response to threat only of infectious disease: radioactivity is not contagious. Fear is more relevant than disgust. “ Barring extreme genetic modification, chances are faces will look much the same in 10, 000 years. A. All things going well it should stay that way for the 250, 000 years it will take for most of the waste to become safe. However, according to legislation drawn up in 1985 by the US Department of Energy, a repository must be safeguarded for at least 10, 000 years, and that means it must be marked. B. All we know is that nuclear waste is dangerous now and is likely to stay that way for a very long time, and that means we have to try. C. To be fair to the artists in question, they probably didn’t set out to create something that would make sense in 400 generations’ time. Even if thoughts of the future had crossed their minds, how could they possibly have imagined what would have become of the human race? Since that day, mankind has invented the wheel, developed hundreds of languages and got through several major civilisations, not to mention remodelled the planet and its climate. D. Facial expressions, though, are universally understood. “Fear is the most basic of emotions, and so would survive any cultural evolution, “ says Robert Aunger, a biological anthropologist. With this in mind, the WIPP designers came up with two symbols: a human face showing fear and another showing revulsion and disgust. There will also be a description of the site in seven languages, plus the word “Danger“ and today’s symbols for biohazards and radioactivity. E. The biggest challenge was choosing an image. Symbols do exist to illustrate radiation and biohazards, but symbols have a habit of changing their meanings over time. The swastika, for example, was first used by European tribes in 4000BC and was a Hindu holy symbol long before the Nazis got hold of it. F. The plan is literally to set the warnings in stone, by carving them onto 8-metre-tall monoliths. A study of ancient rock carvings commissioned by WIPP in 2000 found that deep carvings on basalt survived well, as, surprisingly, did those on sandstone. The team is now testing other rock types against freeze/thaw cracking and wind abrasion, as well as working on cheaper artificial alternatives.

You have read an article in a magazine which states, “ Some people criticize the main Olympic stadium Bird Nest in Beijing, saying it is not compatible with its surroundings; others believe it will become another landmark in Beijing, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. “ What do you think’! Write an article to the same magazine to clarify your own points of view towards this issue. You should use your own ideas, knowledge or experience to generate support for your argument and include an example. You should write no less than 250 words. Write your answer on ANSWER SHEET 2.

What organization(s) hope public pressure will be more effective than lawsuits?

Why did the International Whaling Commission ban commercial whaling?