A paradox of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text convey the information harder to read. Dr. Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three “species“ of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge. Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% grayscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% grayscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read. Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as “What is the diet of the Pangerish?“ and “What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?“ The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time. The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom? It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier.

Migration and Business 1. Migration - Map—sharp lines divide up the world. - Real world—No 【T1】______between lands. 【T1】______ 2. Two changes of diasporas - They become much bigger. - Because of cheap flights and communications, people can 【T2】______【T2】______ with the places they come from. 3. Reasons: three 【T3】______【T3】______ - They speed the flow of information across borders. - They foster trust. - They help people 【T4】______each other. 【T4】______ 4. Migration and 【T5】______【T5】______ - A quarter of 【T6】______firms between 1995 and 2005 were 【T6】______ started by immigrants. - To exile itself has the effect. - 【T7】______of migrants saw the solution against 42% of non-migrants. 【T7】______ - Diaspora ties help 【T8】______to collaborate. 【T8】______ - Example: Indian American engineers worked on a fridge for 【T9】______. 【T9】______ 5. Hyperconnectivity, 【T10】______to today’s networked diasporas 【T10】______Migration and Business Today, we’ll talk about migration and business. In the flat world of maps, sharp lines show where one country ends and another begins. But the real world is more fluid. First, peoples do not have borders the way that parcels of land do. They migrate. Consider the difference between China and the Chinese people. One is an enormous country in Asia. The other is a nation that spans the planet. Second, thanks to cheap flights and communications, people can now stay in touch with the places they come from. A century ago, a migrant might board a ship, sail to America and never see his friends or family again. Today, he texts his mother while still waiting to clear customs. He can wire her money in minutes. He can follow news from his hometown on his laptop. He can fly home regularly to visit relatives or invest his earnings in a new business. This is because the diaspora networks have three lucrative virtues. First, they speed the flow of information across borders. Second, they foster trust. Third, and most important, diasporas create connections that help people with good ideas collaborate with each other, both within and across ethnicities. Then, there’s the relationship between migration and creativity. Immigrants are only an eighth of America’s population, but a quarter of the engineering and technology firms started there between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder, according to Duke University. The work by Northwestern University suggests that to exile itself makes people creative. They compared MBA students who had lived abroad with otherwise similar students who had not, using an experiment in which each was given a candle, a box of matches and a box of drawing pins. This candle problem requires people to imagine something being used for a purpose quite different from its usual one. Some 60% of the migrants saw the solution against 42% of non-migrants. Diaspora ties also help businesses to collaborate. What may be the world’s cheapest fridge was conceived from a marriage of ideas generated by Indians in India and Indians overseas. Three Indian-American engineers had an idea for a cooling engine and then worked on a cheap fridge for rural Indians too poor to fork out the $200 normally required, let alone the subsequent electric bills. Finally, the “new type of hyperconnectivity“ that enables such projects is fundamental to today’s networked diasporas. Migrants are now connected instantaneously, continuously, dynamically and intimately to their communities of origin. This is a fundamental and profound break from the past eras of migration. The break explains why diasporas, always marginalized in the flat-map world of national territories, find themselves in the thick of things as the world becomes networked. We’ve talked about the changes of diasporas, why diaspora networks are effective and how migrations can help business. Any questions?

Jack: I refuse to spend Sunday at your mother’s house! Jill: Oh you do, do you? We’ll see about that. In the dialogue above, Jill uses the tag question “do you?“ to______. express surprise show confrontation seek confirmation express confidence

Among the four sentences below, the preposition in sentence______carries the metaphorical meaning. The man’s father lives beyond the sea. Mary came out of the house. Such behavior is beneath him. The jet flew over the clouds.

Some Chinese kids eat______as they actually need every day. twice as much protein twice protein as much twice twice protein as much protein as twice much

Jack is______intelligent than his sister, but he failed in the entrance exam. no less no more not less not so

Jason is a hard-working guy, and he even made a______for upper class support. application bid proposal suggestion

The price of the organic vegetables will vary according to how far it has to be transported and how expensive the fright______are. payment charges funds prices

“Mirrorworlds“ is only one of David Gelernter’s big ideas. Another is “lifestreams“—in essence, vast electronic diaries. “Every document you create and every document other people send to you is stored in your lifestream,“ he wrote in the mid-1990s together with Eric Freeman, who produced a doctoral thesis on the topic. Putting electronic documents in chronological order, they said, would make it easier for people to manage all their digital output and experiences. Lifestreams have not yet replaced the desktop on personal computers, as Mr. Gelernter had hoped. Indeed, a software start-up to implement the idea folded in 2004. But today something quite similar can be found all over the web in many different forms. Blogs are essentially electronic diaries. Personal newsfeeds are at the heart of Facebook and other social networks. A torrent of short text messages appears on Twitter. Certain individuals are going even further than Mr. Gelernter expected. Some are digitising their entire office, including pictures, bills and correspondence. Others record their whole life. Gordon Bell, a researcher at Microsoft, puts everything he has accumulated, written, photographed and presented in his “local cyberspace“. Yet others “log“ every aspect of their lives with wearable cameras. The latest trend is “life-tracking“. Practitioners keep meticulous digital records of things they do: how much coffee they drink, how much work they do each day, what books they are reading, and so on. Much of this is done manually by putting the data into a PC or, increasingly, a smartphone. But people are also using sensors, mainly to keep track of their vital signs, for instance to see how well they sleep or how fast they run. The first self-trackers were mostly ueber-geeks fascinated by numbers. But the more recent converts simply want to learn more about themselves, says Gary Wolf, a technology writer and co-founder of a blog called “The Quantified Self. They want to use technology to help them identify factors that make them depressed, and keep them from sleeping or affect their cognitive performance. One self-tracker learned, for instance, that eating a lot of butter allowed him to solve arithmetic problems faster. A market for self-tracking devices is already emerging. Fitbit and Greengoose, two start-ups, are selling wireless accelerometers that can track a user’s physical activity. Zeo, another start-up, has developed an alarm clock that comes with a headband to measure people’s brainwave activity at night and chart their sleep on the web. As people create more such self-tracking data, firms will start to mine them and offer services based on the result. Xobni, for example, analyses people’s inboxes (“xobni“ spelled backwards) to help them manage their e-mail and contacts. It lists them according to the intensity of the electronic relationship rather than in alphabetical order. Users are sometimes surprised by the results, says Jeff Bonforte, the firm’s boss: “They think it’s creepy when we list other people before their girlfriend or wife.“

A paradox of education is that presenting information in a way that looks easy to learn often has the opposite effect. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when people are forced to think hard about what they are shown they remember it better, so it is worth looking at ways this can be done. And a piece of research about to be published in Cognition, by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University, and his colleagues, suggests a simple one: make the text convey the information harder to read. Dr. Oppenheimer recruited 28 volunteers aged between 18 and 40 and asked them to learn, from written descriptions, about three “species“ of extraterrestrial alien, each of which had seven features. This task was meant to be similar to learning about animal species in a biology lesson. It used aliens in place of actual species to be certain that the participants could not draw on prior knowledge. Half of the volunteers were presented with the information in difficult-to-read fonts (12-point Comic Sans MS 75% grayscale and 12-point Bodoni MT 75% grayscale). The other half saw it in 16-point Arial pure-black font, which tests have shown is one of the easiest to read. Participants were given 90 seconds to memorise the information in the lists. They were then distracted with unrelated tasks for a quarter of an hour or so, before being asked questions about the aliens, such as “What is the diet of the Pangerish?“ and “What colour eyes does the Norgletti have?“ The upshot was that those reading the Arial font got the answers right 72.8% of the time, on average. Those forced to read the more difficult fonts answered correctly 86.5% of the time. The question was, would this result translate from the controlled circumstances of the laboratory to the unruly environment of the classroom? It did. When the researchers asked teachers to use the technique in high-school lessons on chemistry, physics, English and history, they got similar results. The lesson, then, is to make text books harder to read, not easier.

In the digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digital catalogue, a group of national libraries has begun saving what the online giant leaves behind. For although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest. Adam Farquhar, in charge of digital projects for the British Library, points out that the world has in some ways a better record of the beginning of the 20th century than of the beginning of the 21st. In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and the Internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web. They started to pay attention when several elections produced interesting material that never touched paper. In 2003 eleven national libraries and the Internet Archive launched a project to preserve “born-digital“ information: the kind that has never existed as anything but digitally. Called the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), it now includes 39 large institutional libraries. But the task is impossible. One reason is the sheer amount of data on the web. The groups have already collected several petabytes of data (a petabyte can hold roughly 10 trillion copies of this article). Another issue is ensuring that the data is stored in a format that makes it available in centuries to come. Ancient manuscripts are still readable. But much digital media from the past is readable only on a handful of fragile and antique machines, if at all. The IIPC has set a single format, making it more likely that future historians will be able to find a machine to read the data. But a single solution cannot capture all content. Web publishers increasingly serve up content-rich pages based on complex data sets. Audio and video programmes based on proprietary formats such as Windows Media Player are another challenge. What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210? The biggest problem, for now, is money. The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one. But there are a lot more digital ones. America’s Library of Congress enjoys a specific mandate, and budget, to save the web. The British Library is still seeking one. So national libraries have decided to split the task. Each has taken responsibility for the digital works in its national top-level domain (web-address suffixes such as “.uk“ or “.fr“). In countries with larger domains, such as Britain and America, curators cannot hope to save everything. They are concentrating on material of national interest, such as elections, news sites and citizen journalism or innovative uses of the web. The daily death of countless websites has brought a new sense of urgency—and forced libraries to adapt culturally as well. Past practice was to tag every new document as it arrived. Now precision must be sacrificed to scale and speed. The task started before standards, goals or budgets are set. And they may yet change. Just like many websites, libraries will be stuck in what is known as “permanent beta“.

PASSAGE ONE Why did the girl play basketball over and over again?

PASSAGE TWO

Before the 1850’s, the US had a number of small colleges, / most of them dating from colonial days. / They were small churche-connected institutions / whose primary concern was to shape the moral character of their students. / Between mid-century and the end of the 1800’s, / more than 9000 young Americans went to Germany for advanced study./ Some of them returned to become presidents of honorable colleges / and transformed them into modern universities. / The new universities greatly expanded in size and course offerings, / breaking completely out of the old, limited curriculum. /

M: Hello, Linda. W: Hello, Bob. M: Now Linda, I have a question for you. Do you think you are a winner? W: You mean someone who has a lot of success in everything? M: Well, not exactly. I’m just talking about competitions. Do you have a lot of success or luck in winning them? W: Competitions? No, not at all. I don’t think I’ve ever won a competition. M: Ah, bad luck. And Linda, can you guess the biggest cash prize in the USA? W: I don’t know. Maybe 100 million. M: No, that’s 590 million! W: 590 million! Who’s so lucky? M: An 84-year-old lady in Florida. W: She’s so lucky! I think I once, about 10 years ago, I won ￡10 on the British National Lottery. M: Wow, that’s also a big win! But Linda, have you heard about “compers“? W: “Compers“? No. What does it mean? M: That’s an informal name for someone who takes part in competitions on an almost professional basis. They spend a lot of time trying to win something. W: You mean winning prizes or free gifts? M: Yes. Some people put a lot of effort into winning something, even if it’s just a box of chocolates or a coffee mug. It’s just the excitement of winning. W: Just a box of chocolates? M: But sometimes there are big prizes to win—a new car, a speedboat or a holiday of a lifetime. The only problem is that these prizes are either not easy to win or there are millions of people trying to win them. W: I’ve certainly never won anything as fantastic as that. M: But one man called Martin Dove has. He is a retired lecturer and an expert “comper“. W: What has he won? M: He’s won a yacht, a racehorse and lots of smaller prizes too. Some people have called him the King of Comping. He’s even written books on the subject and offered advice to other compers. W: But comping has changed, Bob. There are lots of competitions to enter on the Internet now. Every webpage you look at seems to tempt us with a fantastic prize to be won. M: That’s true. But Martin Dove doesn’t think that is necessarily a good thing. Competitions online are easier to enter—you just have to click. Martin said he could enter about 40 competitions in just 20 minutes! But because it’s so easy, more people enter and so the chances of winning are less. Sometimes, a one in a million chance of winning. W: No wonder I’ve never won any prize. This is the end of Conversation One. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Conversation One. 1. What is the biggest cash prize in the USA? 2. What prize has Linda won? 3. What does a comper mean? 4. What has Martin Dove won? 5. According to Martin Dove, is it easy to win prizes now? 100 million. 590 million. 950 million. 840 million.

W: Even as smoking declines in the U.S. and other countries, a new study reveals that the use of tobacco in developing countries is booming. The report looked at tobacco users in 14 developing nations and included data from the U.S. and the U.K. for comparison. It found that about half the men across the low- and middle-income nations use tobacco. The number was much smaller for women, 11 percent. But the survey found that women are starting at younger ages than in the past. Russia had the highest rates—60 percent of men and 22 percent of women used tobacco in some form. The World Health Organization says that if current trends continue, the global death toll from tobacco will reach eight million a year by 2030. And we’re joined now by Gary Giovino, the leading researcher on the new study. Welcome to you. Let me just ask you first, what was the most important thing that came from this study for you? M: Well, the magnitude of tobacco use in the different countries, the fact that we saw some different patterns, that smoking, for example, is very high among men and women in Russia, especially young men and women. In Russia, Turkey and Ukraine, it was very high. W: One thing that jumped out at me was the low number of people who quit smoking once they have started, especially as compared to in the U.S., for example. What does that tell you? Why is that happening? M: Well, I think we have some cultures, particularly, for example, in India, where quitting isn’t emphasized. Only 10 percent of people in India who have ever smoked daily have quit. That compares to about 45 percent in the United States and the United Kingdom, where tobacco control efforts, where efforts to educate people about tobacco use and encourage quitting and prevent initiation, have been going on for a long time. So, I hope that India, the government will look at that and try to improve their efforts to promote quitting among people who have become addicted and daily smokers. W: What can we do? What do we know that does work? M: Things that work are protecting non-smokers, of course, offering people to help with quitting, hardhitting mass media campaigns, and enforcing advertising bans or restrictions. In many countries, they can actually ban advertising. And they do. In our country, we can only restrict it. And then also raising taxes—when the price goes up, consumption goes down. But then, in many countries, they use some of the money that they get from raising taxes to fund media campaigns, for example, and other tobacco-control strategies. W: Gary Giovino, thanks so much for joining us. M: My pleasure. Thank you. This is the end of Conversation Two. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Conversation Two. 6. Which country does the study focus on? 7. How many people smoke in Russia? 8. What will happen if the trend of smoking continues? 9. Why do more people quit smoking in the United States? 10. What can be done to control smoking? The United States. The United Kingdom. 14 developing countries. 40 developing countries.

Evidence came up specific sounds are recognized by babies as young as six months old. what that which whose

No one would have time to read or listen to an account of everything____ going on in the world. it is as is there is what is

As the temperature dropped abruptly, the campers were______all over with cold. spinning shivering shaking staggering

The English language contains a (an) ______of words which are comparatively seldom used in ordinary conversation. altitude latitude multitude attitude

During the big fire in the school, Manfred______ into groups and asked each group to carry buckets of water to throw on to the flame. dispersed organized scattered ordered

What information is used in the experiment?

The word “upshot“ (The upshot was that...) in the last paragraph but one means______.