M: Hello Jessica. W: Hi Bob. M: Jessica, what’s wrong? You sound a bit miserable. W: Well Bob, I am. It’s raining again, and I’ve lost my wallet! M: Hmm. Well, I’ve got some news today that might put a smile on your face. It’s about a new study that tells us how we can make ourselves happier. W: Well, that sounds good and I’m feeling a lot happier already. Thank you, Bob! M: So Jessica, what are the things that make you feel happy? W: The finer things in life—good food, fine wine, things like that. And you Bob? M: For me, it’s got to be... everything! Nothing worries me and I always look for the positive things even in a bad situation. There’s been some good news from Holland—that’s where the World Happiness Database is, at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. W: It’s been collecting the results of studies about happiness from all over the world. M: Yes, and now all that information has been put together to produce some interesting results. W: But Bob, happiness is a state of mind—so different things make different people happy, depending on their mood or situation at the time. M: Yes, but this research has found some factors that we all share when we are searching for happiness. It also found what made people unhappy. W: So, maybe things like not having enough money or not going on holiday? M: Nothing like that, not materialistic values. Unhappy people are more aware of their life goals—things they want to achieve because they want to change their life for the better. Does that sound like you, Jessica? W: Not me, Bob. I lead such a busy life that I don’t always get time to think about the future! M: That’s good because the study found having an active life is most important for a happy and rewarding life. According to Professor Veenhoven, Director of the World Happiness Database, we can make ourselves happier because we see that happiness does change over time, and that these changes are not just a matter of better circumstances, but also better dealing with life. Elderly people tend to be wise and for that reason, happier. W: OK, our happiness changes over time. It’s older people who are the happiest because, as he says, they are wiser. They understand things more and have learnt to deal with the problems in life. M: That’s right. The study also says if you think you’re good looking, rather than if you actually are, makes you happier. So you might be really ugly but if you think you’re handsome then you’re happy. W: That’s interesting. M: Luckily for you, the study has also found that being sad for ten per cent of the time is actually good for you. Let’s face it—we can’t be happy all the time! W: That’s comforting to know. This is the end of Conversation One. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Conversation One. 1. Why is Jessica unhappy? 2. What makes Bob happy? 3. According to the research, what makes people unhappy? 4. According to Veenhoven, why are the elderly happier? 5. Being sad for how long is good for people? She has no money. She has lost her wallet. She has good food. She has no time for holiday.

Time-Saving Tech 1. The web - Turn the page - 【T1】______: hit the Space bar 【T1】______ - Scroll back up: hold down the 【T2】______and hit the Space bar 【T2】______ - Change the text size - Make it larger: hold down the Control key and 【T3】______【T3】______ - Make it smaller: hold down the Control key and 【T4】______【T4】______ 2. The cell phone - 【T5】______someone: hit the call button twice and dial 【T5】______ - Skip instructions while leaving a【T6】____: use a keyboard shortcut 【T6】______ 3. The camera - Avoid shutter lag - Tip: 【T7】______with a half-press and leave the finger down 【T7】______ - Cause: Time to calculate the 【T8】______【T8】______ 4. The slide - Shift the audience’s attention to the speaker - 【T9】______: hit the letter B key 【T9】______ - White it out: hit the 【T10】______【T10】______Time-Saving Tech I’ve noticed something interesting about society and culture. Everything risky requires a license, like, learning to drive, owning a gun, getting married. That’s true in everything risky, except technology. For some reason, there’s no standard syllabus, there’s no basic course. They just give you your computer. Nobody ever sits down and tells you, “This is how it works.“ So today I’m going to tell you six things that you thought everybody knows, but it turns out they don’t. First of all, on the web, if you want to scroll down, don’t pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar. That’s a terrible waste of time. Do that only if you’re paid by the hour. Instead, hit the Space bar. The Space bar scrolls down one page. Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again. It works in every browser, in every kind of computer. Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you should do is to hold down the Control key and hit Plus, Plus, Plus. You make the text larger with each tap. Works on every computer, every web browser, or Minus, Minus, to get smaller again. When it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you’ve dialed before, all you have to do is to hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, “Leave a message,“ and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions. It turns out there’s a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps. It’s extremely frustrating on any camera under $ 1,000. So, that’s because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down—no shutter lag! You get it every time. I’ve just turned your $50 camera into a $1,000 camera with that trick. And finally, it often happens that you’re giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you. So when that happens—this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program—all you do is to hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you’re ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you’re really on a roll, you can hit the W key for “whiteout,“ and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. So I know I went super-fast. If you missed anything, I’ll be happy to send you the list of these tips. In the meantime, congratulations! You all get your California Technology License. Have a great day!

W: Two million high school seniors are gearing up this fall to apply to nearly 3,500 US colleges. So, which are the strongest academically that’re toughest to get into, and yah, of course top party schools. We all need to know that, right? Well, the Princeton Review ranks The Best 361 Colleges, The Smart Students Guide to Colleges. Robert Franck is the lead author. Rob, good morning, good to see you again. M: Well. Thanks for having me back. W: Look at the size of this thing. I mean this is a lot of information here. And... M: It’s a lot of information, you’re right. We’ve reached up to so many students—110,000 students to put the best 361 colleges this year. W: So this is a survey of just the students then with their feedback on their campuses? M: Exactly. We think we know a lot about schools at Princeton Review, but we went directly to whom we considered power experts. W: To the source? How does, how does this differ to US News and World Report rankings, and Newsweek along with Kaplan’s rankings? M: Yah, it is just that. It’s a qualitative survey of the students’ experience both academically, as well as outside the classroom. W: All right. So let’s take a look at some of the strongest schools academically talking first here. And usually of course we expect the Harvard, Princeton, Yale, which they’re up there as well, but this year, kind of a little bit of surprise is, Reed College in Portland, Oregon scores the highest marks. M: Yeah! No. 1. Ur... Best overall... W: Why is it? You surprised? M: Actually not surprised. I mean, ur, Reed college is a great school. It’s got great regional reputation, and growing national reputations, only 1,300 students, but a wonderful liberal arts, ur, liberal arts school. We went directly to students. They told us that their professors were great, both inside as well as outside the classroom. W: Tiny school! M: Tiny school. Yeah! But survey... W: About ten students per class? M: Yeah! Well. It’s averaged ten to one, student to faculty ratio. So certainly small and they pride themselves on that relationships with the professors. W: All right! Ivy Leagues did very well in other categories as well, like toughest schools to get into and top in that list. MIT was first, followed then by Yale, Princeton, ur, and Harvard, second, third, fourth respectively. So any surprises there with them? M: There are some unusual suspects on that list. We reach directly out to school administrators through our website Princetonreview.com , and finding out information on schools specifically, where they’re looking from the SAT, ACT, GPA coming into a high school, so that’s how we come up with our list. W: All right! This is the end of Conversation Two. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Conversation Two. 6. Who is Robert Franck? 7. What makes it different from the other rankings? 8. Which school ranks No. 1 academically? 9. What is the student-faculty ratio in Reed College? 10. How did they work out the toughest school list? A high school student. Chief editor of Princeton Review. Author of The Best 361 Colleges. A TV host.

“It’s strange that she should wear her evening dress for such an informal party.“ The modal auxiliary verb “should“ in the sentence______. indicates a tentative inference denotes a sense of obligation expresses a feeling or an opinion conveys hypothetical meaning

We agree to accept_____they thought was the best tourist guide. whatever whomever whichever whoever

It’s______of you to miss______chance. mistake...such good a mistaken... so good a mistaken.. .such good mistakes.. .a such good

Could you tell me______the population of our city is? how much how many how many people what

Fond of singing as she is, she is______a good singer by profession. everything but anything but nothing but something but

The application of this new system would______a huge increase in education spending. result confer entail accomplish

Jimmy couldn’t eat hard food for at least half a week as he had his wisdom tooth______today. plucked fragmented extracted picked

A. clatter B. known C. puzzle D. din E. attainable F. referred G. chatter H. reachable I. ensures J. partnering K. affect L. vital M. effect N. heights O. system Deep in the pristine Amazon jungle, Brazil’s newest skyscraper has a mission unlike any other: to save the world. The white and orange metal frame called Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, or ATTO, is a bold new tool in the push to understand climate change and the【C1】______ role of rainforests. At 325 meters, the ATTO is a meter higher than the Eiffel Tower and a good bit taller than London’s loftiest building, the Shard. But instead of the typical city【C2】______ of honking horns and engines, the loudest noise around the skinny structure is the【C3】______ of cicadas and tropical birds. Built in the Uatuma nature reserve, 350 kilometers from the city of Manaus and【C4】______ only after hours of rough roads and a boat ride, the ATTO is seriously remote — and for the climate scientists that’s the point. “Being far from towns and man’s influence【C5】______ we can collect relatively pure data,“ said Meinrat Andrae, director of the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry, which is【C6】______ with Brazilian research agency Inpa on the German-Brazilian funded project. The Amazon is seen as a big piece of the global warming【C7】______, since trees are a key weapon in safely capturing destructive carbon gasses. And at 3,000 kilometers wide, the Amazon is the greatest of all rainforests,【C8】______ to many as the lungs of the world. “Thanks to this tower we’ll be able to better understand the role of the Amazon, its【C9】______ on the local climate and also on the global climate,“ said Antonio Ocimar Manzi, one of the Brazilian scientists. Rising far above even the mightiest Amazonian trees, the tower is a good place to swap the suffocating jungle heat for fresh air, as long as you don’t mind【C10】______. Wearing a safety harness is compulsory as journalists are led 150 meters up.

(1) With flaking paint and rusty doors, many factories in the province of Biella in north-west Italy stand idle. Production of the woollen fabrics and clothing that made the region’s name has drifted away to cheaper countries. Supply from Asia crushed the local textile industry. Yet in Trivero, a town in the Alpine foothills, the looms of one mill are still busy. This is where, 100 years ago, Ermenegildo Zegna began his fashion house. The firm is now one of the world’s top makers of costly male kit. Whether Zegna stays on top depends on demand from Asia. (2) Zegna has not been left unscathed by globalization, an economic downturn and the capriciousness of fashion: sales fell by 8.4% to ￠797m ($1.1 billion) last year and net profits slumped to ￠ 17.3m from ￠62m in 2008. “Protecting cash became our primary objective, turnover and profits secondary,“ says Gildo Zegna, the chief executive and a grandson of the founder. (3) This year things look brighter: the firm hopes to achieve double-digit sales growth. Mr Zegna and his cousin Paolo, the company’s chairman, have been building on their fathers’ decision to expand beyond weaving cloth. A generation ago bespoke tailoring declined as men increasingly bought off-the-peg rather than being measured for suits in the small tailors’ shops that Zegna supplied. So in the 1960s the company moved into ready-to-wear suits. Later in the 1960s it added sportswear and accessories. In the 1980s Zegna began selling its own clothes and now it has 300 shops and 250 or so franchised stores. About 90% of sales come from abroad. On the way, the payroll has grown to over 7,000, although in Trivero it has fallen from some 1,400 in 1970 to 500 now. (4) Turning to the glitter of the male catwalk has helped Zegna survive when many of its peers perished. Off-the-peg its suits cost between ￠1,500 and ￠3,000, and made-to-measure ones an extra 20% or so. This attracts glitzy customers: George Clooney wears a Zegna suit in “The American“, a new film about an assassin hiding in Italy. (5) One of Zegna’s priorities will be to keep extending its distribution network, which has absorbed more than half of its average annual investment of around ￠50m over the past decade. Next year the firm will celebrate 20 years of selling in China, where its 91 shops now have sales exceeding those of the 14 it has in America: Italian sales rank third. (6) India is the next frontier. Zegna recently entered into a deal with part of India’s Reliance Group to distribute clothes through a network of shops which their joint venture will set up. The first opened in Hyderabad in October: it will be followed by at least another nine by 2015. (7) Success as a global luxury brand depends on various factors. Mr Zegna points to creativity—a team of around 50 young designers dreams up the styles—and to a meritocracy among employees. From sheep to shops, quality control is essential. (8) Each stage of production involves careful checks: at the wool mill, at the factory in Switzerland where suits have been made for decades, at other plants in Italy, including a knitwear factory at Verrone, and at a couple of locations elsewhere in Europe. Stockrooms at Verrone are tightly controlled for temperature, humidity and light. Before being dispatched, each of the 130,000 items that leave Verrone each year is checked for faults on brightly illuminated plastic mannequins. (9) Zegna also has a niche upmarket women’s brand called Agnona which acquired in 1999, but has no big plans to expand it. The firm will remain private, family-owned and devoted to menswear. Mr Zegna says the firm has enough money to expand, so there is no reason to go public. “We’re working towards generational change, but I’m 55, my cousin is 54 and I don’t see succession as an immediate issue,“ he says. With 11 members of the fourth generation now in their 20s and teens, Ermenegildo Zegna looks like remaining a family affair.

Read carefully the following excerpt on ageing population argument in the USA, and then write your response in NO LESS THAN 200 words, in which you should: - summarize the main message of the excerpt, and then - comment on whether the aging phenomenon is beneficial or not. You should support yourself with information from the excerpt Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks. Population Aging in China: A Mixed Blessing China is rapidly getting older. Three decades ago, only 5 percent of the population was over 65: today, 123 million people, or 9 percent of the population, are over this age. A report released by a government think tank forecasts that China will become the world’s most aged society in 2030. Further, by 2050 China’s older population will likely swell to 330 million, or a quarter of its total population. While China is not swimming against the population aging tide, the speed and scope of the change has caught Beijing off guard. Pensions, health care, and social security systems are still underdeveloped. China’s pension fund, put in place in 1997, is unable to keep up with aging population, and the pension reserve level remains extremely low. This booming senior population, together with the changing household structure and growing wealth, has also created a new growth market: institution-based elderly care. Currently, less than 2 percent of the senior population uses institution-based care. Yet according to a 2011 survey, 11.3 percent of the older people living in urban areas are willing to receive care in institutions (compared to 12.5 percent in the rural areas). It is estimated that the number of seniors who are able to afford senior housing will reach 22 million by 2020. This would generate huge opportunities for investors.

The increase in international business and in foreign investment / has created a need for professional executives / with knowledge of foreign languages and skills in cross-cultural communication. / Americans, however, have not been well trained in either area / and have not enjoyed the same level of success / as have their foreign counterparts in international business. / In many international business negotiations abroad, / Americans are perceived as wealthy and impersonal. / If Americans want to play a more effective role, / they must make more efforts to improve cross-cultural understanding.

“The plane is taking off at 10:30.“ The verb phrase “is taking off“ in the sentence expresses______. future of present intention future of present cause future happening anticipated in the present future as a matter of course

Having no money but______to know, he simply said he would go without dinner. not to want anyone not wanting anyone wanted no one to want no one

Some children display an______curiosity about every new thing they encounter. incredible infectious incompatible inaccessible

In the present economic______, we can safely invest our money into the stock and bond market. air mood condition climate

The continuous intense heat______the already serious shortage of food. agonized agitated aggregated aggravated

All the staff members of the department made_____efforts to clean up the hall for the Christmas party. gigantic cohesive comprehensive conscientious

Young people are not______to stand and look at works of art: they want art they can participate in. conservative content confident generous