(1) The annual December commercials around buying and exchanging gifts don’t usually include an in-depth discussion of the tact and ritual of gift giving. Managing a season of giving, when giving is taken personally and seriously, requires a kind of mindfulness. Our grandmothers were right. It truly is “the thought that counts“. We need to think about the receiver’s role in our life. We need to think about what we are trying to say with our gift. We need to think about how the receiver will interpret it as much as we think about our own intent. Finding the “perfect gift“ is about taking the time to get into the other person’s shoes and thinking about what would be most meaningful and appreciated by this particular person at this particular time. (2) Here are some examples of “heartfelt“ giving: (3) Ellen and her husband bought their first house last year. She’s still talking about the best gift she says she ever received: a toolbox and tools of her own. Ellen’s best friend knew how frustrating it was for Ellen to use her husband’s heavy professional tools. So she gave Ellen a hammer, a screwdriver, pliers, and a wrench that fit her smaller hands. “I felt really taken care of by my friend,“ Ellen says. “I probably use my tools every week.“ (4) Jim has a dog he really loves. Jim is always short of both time and money this year. He is working full time and trying to finish up a college degree he started years ago but never finished. His sister gave him “a perfect gift“: a gift certificate to the local veterinarian and a promise to take Jim’s dog to any needed checkups this year. (5) Best friends Hanna and Emily are both cash poor but friendship rich. Friends for over 20 years, neither of them need or want any more “stuff“. What they both need from each other is time—time away from the demands of their families, time away from work worries, time to get the land of revitalization and recharge that comes from feeling loved and understood by a girlfriend. They talked it over. Each gave the other a set of “coupons“, redeemable each month, for things like a breakfast out, a trip to the movies, a walk in the woods, etc. Their mutual gift is a statement of their mutual commitment to not let their friendship go unattended because of other demands, however real and pressing. (6) Will, a movie buff, had been going out with his girlfriend Lisa for about a year when he was invited to share a Christmas week meal with Lisa’s family. Traditionally, several members of Lisa’s extended family exchanged gifts during this annual gathering. Lisa’s mother gave the situation a lot of thought. She didn’t want Will to feel awkward or left out, but at the same time knew that the gift she presented to him would carry meaning. She wanted to acknowledge that he was important in her daughter’s life, but she didn’t want to put pressure on a relationship that had promise but not a commitment. After conferring with her daughter about Will’s interests, she settled on some passes to the local video store. Just right. He knew she had taken the time to choose a gift especially for him, but the gift wasn’t so elaborate or expensive that it carried an obligation for more than a thank you. (7) I like to think of gifting as a verb, an act of caring between people who care about each other. Keeping that in mind is the best antidote I’ve found for the commercialism that overwhelms us all each December. Happy Holidays.

W1: How do you make your resume stand out with so much competition? We are talking this morning with Jason Lovelace. He’s been with us, urn, for the past several hours here. We appreciate you. He is the Area Vice President in Chicago with careerbuilder.com. We’ve been hooking you up here live on the air with people who need some help with their resumes. Now we have Jannell Floyd on with us. Jannell Floyd, thank you for being here. You go right ahead. He has, uh, looked at your resume. You go right ahead and ask him here live what your question is about your resume? W2: Good morning and thank you, my question is that I think 1 have done a pretty good job of selling my skills, outlining my experience, and I need to know what’s missing on my resume? M: OK, that’s a great question, Jannell. First of all, you know I did review your resume and congratulations on your upcoming degree: it looks like you are graduating in June of this year. So that’s, that’s a big feat in itself but I took a look at your resume and the good news about your resume is that you do have a lot of important key words and information that should be at the top for recruiters to see. The unfortunate piece about your resume is that you are not doing a great job of marketing yourself, and what I mean is I’ll just give a couple of cosmetic information. W2: Thank you so much! M: First of all, the top of your resume. You have your contact information and it really takes up the first five to ten percent of that first page. It’s basically wasted space.You wanna try to condense that and make it a little bit more appealing. W2: OK, I’ll try. M: The other thing is there is really no attention grabber, why you? Why would a company select you? The other thing that you do is you highlight some of your awards and recognition, but you could probably do a better job of really showcasing those, letting companies know who you are, the awards that you’ve had throughout your career and really again highlighting those different points. And then the final thing from a cosmetic standpoint is you’re all paragraphs in your resume, long and difficult to read, and to a recruiter, time is money, and when they are shifting through resumes, you’ve gotta grab their attention. You should put bullet points with different things that you’ve accomplished but don’t expect them to read through paragraph after paragraph at each individual job. 1 think a couple of those things will help you and it should rise your resume to the top. W1: OK, some good advice from Jason Lovelace there in Chicago, and Janncll, good luck to you, I hope you get the job that you want. Thanks for calling in. This is the end of Conversation One. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Conversation One. 1. Who is Jason Lovelace? 2. What does Jannell want to ask about her resume? 3. What is good about the woman’s resume? 4. How can the woman improve her contact information? 5. Why does the woman’s resume fail to grab recruiter’s attention? A TV host. The president of a website. A job seeker. A professor.

- Do you have any idea what Jim does all Sunday? - He spends as much time idling about as He does____. his study studying to study on his study

Word came from my hometown_____an earthquake had taken place there,______200 persons their lives. where.. .to cost which.. .in order to cost that.. .costing that.. .cost

If only the committee______the regulations and put them into effect as soon as possible. approve will approve can approve would approve

Although some students graduate from high school, they are virtually illiterate_____writing a business letter. in the event of in the light of in case of in terms of

The motion picture is only a series of still photographs which are split and viewed in rapid______to create the illusion of movement and continuity. sequence succession transmission conveyance

Convinced of the importance of education, modern states “invest“ in institutions of learning to get back “interest“ in the form of a large group of______young men who are potential leaders. enlightened cultivated qualified nourished

It is said that the math teacher seems______towards bright students. partial beneficial preferable liable

He_____a well wished but unsuccessful campaign to ease East-West tensions calling for arms reduction and a summit of the nuclear powers. embarked on reckoned on caught on dwelt on

(1) John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me: not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions: the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back. (2) Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my face: for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair. (3) “That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since,“ said he, “and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!“ (4) Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it: my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult. (5) “What were you doing behind the curtain?“ he asked. (6) “I was reading.“ (7) “Show the book.“ (8) I returned to the window and fetched it thence. (9) “You have no business to take our books: you are a dependent, mama says: you have no money: your father left you none: you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense. Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine: all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows.“ (10) I did so, not at first aware what was his intention: but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however: the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax: other feelings succeeded. (11) “Wicked and cruel boy!“ I said. “You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver— you are like the Roman emperors!“ (12) I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud. (13) “What! What!“ he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? But first —“ (14) He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! Rat!“ and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I heard the words — (15) “Dear! Dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!“ (16) “Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!“ (17) Then Mrs. Reed subjoined — (18) “Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there.“ Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.

(1) Early in the film “A Beautiful Mind“, the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go(围棋), an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually was awarded a Nobel Prize. (2) In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. Today, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player. (3) The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid’s intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition. (4) Along with intuition, pattern recognition is a large part of the game. While computers are good at processing numbers, people are naturally good at matching patterns. Humans can recognize an acquaintance at a glance, even from the back. (5) Daniel Bump, a mathematics professor at Stanford, works on a program called GNU Go in his spare time. (6) “You can very quickly look at a chess game and see if there’s some major issue,“ he said. But to make a decision in Go, he said, players must learn to combine their pattern-matching abilities with the logic and knowledge they have accrued in years of playing. (7) One measure of the challenge the game poses is the performance of Go computer programs. The past five years have yielded incremental improvements but no breakthroughs, said David Fotland, a programmer and chip designer in San Jose, California, who created and sells The Many Faces of Go, one of the few commercial Go programs. (8) Part of the challenge has to do with processing speed. The typical chess program can evaluate about 300,000 positions in a second, and Deep Blue was able to evaluate some 200 million positions in a second. By midgame, most Go programs can evaluate only a couple of dozen positions each second, said Anders Kierulf, who wrote a program called SmartGo. (9) In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London. But the obstacles go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly: they have trouble evaluating them correctly. Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go increases as the difficulties it poses encourages programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence. (10) Reiss, an expert in neural networks, compared a human being’s ability to recognize a strong or weak position in Go with the ability to distinguish between an image of a chair and one of a bicycle. Both tasks, he said are hugely difficult for a computer. (11) For that reason, Fotland said, “Writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program.“

We know global warming is sure to come. / The temperature of the air on the surface of the Earth/ is projected to increase at a rate more rapidly / than any temperature change in the last 10,000 years. / Since species have adapted to climate change in the past, / why can’t they simply adapt to these changes? / For one thing, they don’t have enough time and resources/ to adapt to such rapid climate change, / and that’s why many are expected to extinct / if global warming continues at its currently projected rate.

Education Out of School 1. The origin of “Youth Hostel“ - German schoolmaster started “Youth Hostel“ - The little schoolhouse changed into a 【T1】______【T1】______ 2. The current use of “Youth Hostel“ - Admission and price - Show their 【T2】______in a hostel organization 【T2】______ - Use the facilities for a 【T3】______price 【T3】______ - “Hostelling“: - The young learn from each other - “Hostelling“ becomes a form of 【T4】______【T4】______ - Hostels provide the young with chances to 【T5】______【T5】______ 3. 【T6】______Work 【T6】______ - Young people serve at a 【T7】______without pay 【T7】______ - They also see the 【T8】______, meet people, etc. 【T8】______ - They come to 【T9】______the communities 【T9】______ - Those who come to villages often 【T10】______【T10】______Education Out of School Morning, everyone. Today we are going to talk about education out of school. In 1907, a young German schoolmaster had an idea which changed this state of affairs. He decided to turn his little schoolhouse into a dormitory for the summer holidays. A few years later, the schoolhouse was far too small to hold the many young people who wanted to stay there. Consequently, a dormitory was set up in an old castle nearby. This was the first Youth Hostel. Today young students and workers of every country can meet in the hostels and get to know each other. When young people arrive at a hostel, they have only to show their card of membership in a hostel organization in their own country. This card will permit mem to use the facilities of hostels all over the world for a minimum price. Often at the evening meal, a group of boys and girls of different ages from various parts of the country or the world, will happen to meet at the same hostel. One can learn a lot of things about other places, just by meeting people who come from those places. Hence, a few weeks spent “hostelling“ can be just as useful a part of one’s education as classes in school. Since the end of World War II, hostels have been opened in Africa and Asia. In today’s world, where so much depends on understanding between nations, hostels are extremely important. They are more than convenient places for young travelers to spend the night, because they also give people the opportunity to meet and learn about each other. Many groups of young people volunteer to serve at a work camp , without pay, during their summer holidays. There they spend several weeks or months working eight hours a day. In their free time they see the country, meet the people, and have discussion about world problems and problems of the region where they are working. Such volunteer groups do not work only in the poor areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia, but also in the rich countries of Europe and America. Even the most fortunate countries have large numbers of people who have not been able to find decent jobs or housing. When the volunteer workers come to help the community centers, organizing clubs and games for the children and young people, the formerly hopeless and discouraged members of the community see that all is not lost. Because of the work of volunteers, many small communities are learning that they can and should solve their problems themselves. The fact that someone is interested enough to come to such villages and help them often works wonders. The people of the community become interested in helping themselves. They become less discouraged when they realize that they themselves can help make a better future. Even after the volunteers have gone, the villagers often keep in touch with their new friends.

M: Hello, Mary. W: Hello, Bob. How did you get up here to the computer room on the sixth floor? M: Well, by lift, of course. W: I thought so. Lifts have changed our life. M: Yes, this invention has had quite an effect on which floor people choose to live on. W: Well, I suppose before the days of lifts rich people lived on the ground floor and poorer people lived on the top floors and had to use the stairs. Now though it’s the other way round. M: Do you know when the first lift was invented? W: I have no idea. M: It was mathematician Archimedes who invented the first lift in 236 BC. In the Middle Ages there were examples of lifts being used for military purposes. Then they helped to move agricultural products around. They really became very useful in the Industrial Revolution. W: And there was a wide range of methods used to drive them, too—water and steam power, electricity and so on. Today, tall buildings couldn’t exist without them. M: But have you noticed why nobody says anything in a lift? Have you ever felt uneasy in a lift, Mary? W: Actually yes, I have. Just this morning I was standing next to the big boss and neither of us knew what to say to each other. M: Yes, it’s a strange one, isn’t it? It’s a very anxious experience the time you spend in a lift. I think everyone behaves very differently and awkwardly in a lift. If you have things around you, you take away that awkwardness. We all look at our phones sometimes or look down at the floor. Well, surely it’s better to look at advertisements on the walls. W: Yes, it is. I think there are so many different ways to improve a lift with light boxes, with moving images, with television screens, it becomes quite exciting for us, and hopefully a little bit more interesting for the people who use lifts every day. M: Yes, you’re right. By the way, have you heard of the elevator pitch? W: Yes, I have. It’s something we can do when we’re stuck in a lift with someone. M: Yes - people say that if you have an idea or product to sell you should be able to sell it - or pitch it - to someone quickly. So in other words, in the time it takes for an elevator - or lift - to reach the top of a building. W: It’s a good idea if the lift doesn’t break down! This is the end of Conversation Two. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Conversation Two. 6. How did lift change the floor people choose to live? 7. When was the first lift invented? 8. How did the woman feel when seeing her boss in the lift? 9. According to the woman, how can a lift be improved? 10. What is elevator pitch? Rich people prefer ground floor now. Poor people prefer ground floor now. Rich people move to the top floors. Poor people move to the top floors.

“I’ve never claimed to be the know-all and end-all of China and Chinese culture, and I never will.“ The modal auxiliary verb “will“ in the sentence indicates______ prediction insistence possibility intention

Among the four sentences below, sentence______is the most polite form. You want to see me? Did you want to see me? You want to see me, don’t you? Do you want to see me?

I’m one of the students______never late for school. that is who are who am who is

If one____, he will be very particular about others’ clothing and appearance. has been overcome by vanity overcomes vanity is overcome by vanity has overcome vanity

A survey was carried out on the death rate of new born babies in that region,______were surprising. as results which results the results of it the results of which

His honeymoon expense is rather high in______to his income. comparison proportion association calculation

The main idea of the introducing paragraph can be best described as ______

The word “unattended“(in the last sentence of Para. 5) means______.

The article is most probably written______.