W: For decades, white, Hispanic and black Americans have felt similarly optimistic about their chances of improving their lives and economic prospects. But a study out this week shows that, since about 2006, whites have become more pessimistic. At the same time, blacks and Hispanics have grown more optimistic. Joining me is Matt Barreto, a political science professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the opinion research group Latino Decisions. Professor Barreto, by so many measures, white families are doing better. You know, simply taken in the aggregate, the socioeconomic measurements are just better. Why so much pessimism? M: Well, I think it reflects what we call a ceiling effect, and that is that whites have been doing better for a very long time. You can go back to the post-World War II era, when whites really started moving into the suburbs and the upper middle class, and so they have occupied that top rung of doing better for a very long time. And now as they start to evaluate their position, I think a lot of white Americans are saying we don’t see ourselves growing anymore. We have been at this top rung and we’re not growing. And instead we see other groups are also growing. And that leads to a little bit more pessimism in their own reflection of their group, that perhaps they have already achieved the highest rung that they’re going to achieve. W: Conversely, black and brown Americans are more likely to be unemployed, less likely to have a college credential, by a lot of socioeconomic metrics, just doing worse. How do you explain the optimism? M: Easy. I was speaking when I was doing research to a guy named Dave Thomas, who is a business school professor at Harvard, and he used the phrase “irrational exuberance“ to explain what we were then picking up in the polls, because this poll finding is not new. It goes back several years. And in essence, part of it that what African-Americans are looking at and Latinos as well is aspirational. They’re looking at the future. We have gone, as Matt basically said, from being a country that was basically and totally dominated by whites to something very different now. And so for the first time you have African-Americans who are saying it’s possible to break through some of these ceilings that it was impossible to break through a generation ago. And when you’re talking about the future, the fact that unemployment for African-Americans has been roughly twice what it is for white Americans pretty much forever, mat doesn’t affect how you see the prospects for your child, because you say my child might be able to become a CEO of a corporation. My child may be able to become a big talk show host My child may be able to become president of the United States. That’s something you couldn’t say a generation ago, and that’s revolutionary. This is the end of Conversation Two. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Conversation Two. 6. How optimistic are Americans now? 7. How are white families doing now? 8. What is ceiling effect? 9. Why are Latinos more optimistic? 10. According to the man, what may happen to the black in the future? They are more optimistic than before. They are more pessimistic than before. The Hispanic and black are more optimistic and the white are more pessimistic. The white are more optimistic and the Hispanic and black are more pessimistic.

“Despite proving their grit in the two-month Ranger course, the two women are still unable to join infantry, armor and special forces units, but that could change after the Pentagon makes its recommendations.“ The modal auxiliary verb “could’’ in the sentence expresses______. low possibility in the past high possibility in the past low possibility in the future high possibility in the future

Among the four sentences below, the tag question in sentence______is used to seek confirmation of the asker’s opinion or belief. She’s French, isn ’t she? Do listen, will you? Let’s have a beer, shall we? Oh, I’m lazy, am I?

Our teacher recommended that we______as attentive as possible when we visit the chapel. are shall be be were

Advertising media like direct mail, radio, television and newspapers____to increase the sales of industrial products. have been used will be used is being used has been used

The______of AIDS his led to an expansion in research seeking a cure. innovation selection proliferation conviction

If you want to make money, buy cheap and sell______. high dear expensive costly

They needn’t have made so much______over a trifle like this. It was really much ado about nothing. gossip fuss argument rumor

A. occurs B. expectations C. jumped D. which E. comes F. work G. exercise H. free I. that J. fears K. circular L. discovering M. endurance N. uncovering O. fit Over the years, I’ve trained enough clients to know that, sooner or later, most of them will utter a phrase I’ve learned to anticipate: “I’ll get back to my workouts as soon as I can.“ The As-Soon-As excuse is something we all end up using at one time or another. Unfortunately, “as soon as“ often turns into “never,“ as we wait for the perfect time to【C1】______. Instead of waiting for the perfect time, why not start now? When it【C2】______ to exercise, you may have good reasons why you’re not doing it. You’re busy, confused about how to start or you even have【C3】______ that keep you from even trying. These reasons, however, often become excuses to avoid the more uncomfortable aspects of exercise. Some of us put off exercise for fear of【C4】______how out of shape we really are. What if you can’t walk very far or you can only lift small weights? Some of us would rather not exercise at all than to face how far we are from the【C5】______person we want to be. You tell yourself you’ll join a gym as soon as you’re in better shape but, to get in shape, you may need to join a gym,【C6】______ you can’t do until you’re in better shape. That kind of【C7】______thinking can keep you off exercise forever. Start where you are. As adults, we put pressure on ourselves to be good at everything, especially exercise. But just because you【C8】______ rope 20 years ago or ran a mile once doesn’t mean you can do the same things right now. If you haven’t exercised in a while, you’ll need time to build strength,【C9】______ and confidence. Taking your time will keep you injury【C10】______ and make you feel more successful.

(1) One of the many pleasures of watching “Mad Men“, a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy: they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work. (2) The ad-men in those days enjoyed simple pleasures. They puffed away at their desks. They drank throughout the day. They had affairs with their colleagues. They socialized not in order to bond, but in order to get drunk. (3) These days many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease. Acclaris, an American IT company, has a “chief fun officer“. TD Bank, the American arm of Canada’s Toronto Dominion, has a “Wow!“ department that dispatches costume-clad teams to “surprise and delight“ successful workers. Red Bull, a drinks firm, has installed a slide in its London office. (4) Fun at work is becoming a business in its own right. Madan Kataria, an Indian who styles himself the “guru of giggling“, sells “laughter yoga“ to corporate clients. Fun at Work, a British company, offers you “more hilarity than you can handle“, including replacing your receptionists with “Ab Fab“ look-alikes. Chiswick Park, an office development in London, brands itself with the slogan “enjoy-work“, and hosts lunchtime events such as sheep-shearing and geese-herding. (5) The cult of fun is deepening as well as widening. Google is the acknowledged champion: its offices are blessed with volleyball courts, bicycle paths, a yellow brick road, a model dinosaur, regular games of roller hockey and several professional masseuses. But now two other companies have challenged Google for the jester’s crown—Twitter, a microblogging service, and Zappos, an online shoe-shop. (6) Twitter’s website stresses how wacky the company is: workers wear cowboy hats and babble that: “Crazy things happen every day...it’s pretty ridiculous.“ The company has a team of people whose job is to make workers happy: for example, by providing them with cold towels on a hot day. Zappos boasts that creating “fun and a little weirdness“ is one of its core values. Tony Hsieh, the boss, shaves his head and spends 10% of his time studying what he calls the “science of happiness“. He once joked that Zappos was suing the Walt Disney Company for claiming that it was “the happiest place on earth“. The company engages in regular “random acts of kindness“: workers form a noisy conga line and single out one of their colleagues for praise. The praisee then has to wear a silly hat for a week. (7) This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to frontline workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are “fully engaged with their job“. Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that “fun“ will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition. (8) The most unpleasant thing about the fashion for fun is that it is mixed with a large dose of coercion. Companies such as Zappos don’t merely celebrate wackiness. They more or less require it. Compulsory fun is nearly always cringe-making. Twitter calls its office a “Twoffice“. Boston Pizza encourages workers to send “golden bananas“ to colleagues who are “having fun while being the best“. Behind the “fun“ facade there often lurks some crude management thinking: a desire to brand the company as better than its rivals, or a plan to boost productivity through team-building. Twitter even boasts that it has “worked hard to create an environment that spawns productivity and happiness“.

(1) Yet this buoyancy is checked by equally potent anxieties. Germany’s best-selling book is “Deutschland schafft sich ab“ (“Germany does away with itself), a warning by a director of the Bundesbank, since forced out of his job, that too much child-bearing by the poor and by immigrants (especially Muslims), and too little by the educated classes, dooms the country to decline. The book’s popularity has shaken Germany. Xenophobic parties play little role in politics, but the resentments that feed their popularity elsewhere are just as potent. A third of Germans think the country is overrun by foreigners, according to a newly published poll: a majority favour “sharply restricting“ Muslim religious practice. Over a tenth would even welcome a Fuhrer who would govern with “a strong hand“—a sign that the embers of extremism still glow. (2) Conservative politicians, long fearful of being outflanked on the right, are pandering. Horst Seehofer, head of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), declared this month that Germany needs no further immigration from Turkey or the Arab world. Germany is “not an immigration country“, he insisted, contradicting a hard-won consensus among conservatives. Characteristically, Angela Merkel, the CDU chancellor, sought to placate anti-immigrant sentiment without stooping to populism. Multiculturalism has “absolutely failed“, she said on October 16th, implying that immigrants would be expected to integrate better into German society. But she balanced this by admitting that Islam “is part of Germany“. (3) Despite their economic strength, Germans fear the worst. They believe their country “has passed its zenith“, says Mrs. Kocher, the pollster. This pessimism shapes Germany’s dealings with the rest of the world. Unlike most countries, Germany is not driven by any great ambition, but rather by the fear that “things could fall apart if they don’t hold on to stability,“ suggests Mr. Kornblum. (4) This year’s euro crisis brought out both the apprehension and the arrogance. With Greece’s near default, the promise that the euro would be as stable as the Deutschmark suddenly looked like the lie Germans had always suspected it to be. As the crisis mounted Mrs. Merkel delayed giving German backing to the inevitable rescue for wobbly euro countries. A €750 billion ($920 billion) package was eventually agreed on after a hectic weekend of negotiation in May. To Germans, this looked like the start of the dreaded “transfer union“, a bottomless commitment to subsidise Greeks’ early retirement, fix an Italian budget tattered by tax evasion and clear up after Spain’s burst property bubble. “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And the Acropolis while you’re at it,“ demanded Bild, a popular tabloid. Mrs. Merkel played to the gallery by suggesting that persistent euro sinners should be thrown out of the group. (5) These un-European outbursts startled not just Greeks, who brandished swastikas in response, but Europeans generally. They had grown up believing that the Germans saw their own interests as inseparable from those of their fellow Europeans. Now they glimpsed a different, ugly German, smug about his economy and untroubled by his past. Some pundits argue that Germany’s brutality to Greece during the Second World War should have tempered its irritation with the Greeks. (6) The crisis has created a new pecking order, at least temporarily. Germany, with its high-competitiveness, low-debt economy, is on top. The rest are having to adjust, including France, traditionally a joint leader of the European project. This is unsettling. “You get an enormous sense of German self-righteousness, which is very difficult to take, especially when there are solid foundations for it,“ says Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. France, which has lagged behind Germany in making structural reforms, feels its influence waning. “France has to do its homework to be able to restore some level of influence in Europe,“ says Jean-Pierre Jouyet, a former French minister for Europe, now head of France’s financial regulatory authority.

PASSAGE TWO

Read carefully the following excerpt on youth crime 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 young criminals are born 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. Juvenile delinquency: nature or nurture? Being a juvenile in any one’s life is part of the stage of development. The behavior patterns of juveniles are influenced in part by what goes on in the environment in which they live. Every stage of development has transitions. Family members, friends, and peers all influence these times of transition for the juvenile. It is sometimes accompanied by a desire for material things, fashion, peer pressure, cash and more. At times, the demands of wants and needs are intensified by a society that consists of high mobility, social change, and is materialistic. Also, social changes can create anxiety and disillusionment for adolescents and thus they commit delinquent acts. Obviously, human beings tend to develop in different stages until they become adults. One of these stages is the adolescent stage. When humans are in the adolescent stage, they are considered juveniles. When a juvenile does something wrong, contrary to the laws or norms of the society, such as acts of vandalism, theft, drug related activity, arson or other anti-social behavior, he/she is then considered a juvenile delinquent. On the other hand, some scientists believe some are born to be criminals. Some teenagers may suffer from psychopathy—a disorder suffered by many (but not all) violent criminals—is characterized by an inability to “empathise“. The researchers, based at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, said the differences in psychopaths’ brains mark them out even from other violent criminals with anti-social personality disorders (ASPD), and from healthy non-offenders. Psychopaths have physically different brains from “normal“ people—and may be bora to kill. The new finding may mean that there is simply no point treating psychopaths with current “behavioural“ treatments.

Reading literature doesn’t just improve your power of imagination. / It also expands your capacity for creative reasoning. / A study has shown that reading literature makes you more open-minded. / It releases you from the pressures of real world decision-making, / and lets you enter the mindset of those characters / who are often very different from yourself. / You may not be as imaginative as a famous writer, / but reading helps you see the world through his/her eyes. / The simple act of opening a book and diving into its world / opens the brain up to new ways of thinking.

“Hotel workers suspect that the fire was ignited by a cigarette and that a guest may have thrown the cigarette into a bush from the pool deck.’The modal auxiliary verb phrase “may have thrown“ in the sentence expresses______. high possibility in the past low possibility in the present high possibility in the present low possibility in the past

______the sense of someone watching him, Joey would take a shower right now in this beautiful river. Despite Except But for Except for

In China, the South generally receives more sunshine than______the North. does it does does it it does in

Some companies have introduced flexible working time with less emphasis on pressure______. than more on efficiency and more on efficiency and more efficiency than efficiency

(1) They do not throw lavish parties. Their editors are not immortalized in films. But the magazines put out by Britain’s supermarkets have a growing presence where it counts: in handbags and on coffee tables. In 2005 the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ top ten magazines contained two supermarket publications, with a combined distribution of 3.8m. Now there are five, reaching 7.7m people. (2) Publications such as Tesco Magazine and Your M&S are either sent to loyalty-card holders or picked up in stores, where they often enjoy prime placement next to the cash tills. They contain a mixture of heartwarming stories, recipes and product information. Rather than simply touting shampoo or artichokes, they explain how readers might use them. “We begin with what the customer wants to know and then feed in what the brand wants to say,“ explains Keith Grainger, chief executive of Redwood, a customer-publishing firm which produces a magazine for Marks & Spencer, among others. (3) Most supermarket magazines are put together by such outside agencies. They consult with stores about which products to feature. The agencies may collect a fee for their work or sell advertising, although few of the publications carry enough ads to cover their production costs. Supermarkets view them not as moneymakers but as a form of marketing. Magazines not only help to sell more products, they say: they also increase loyalty to the brand. (4) It may be tempting to believe that most people throw these freebies away. But the large National Readership Survey finds that Tesco Magazine reaches 6.4m Britons, suggesting each copy is read by three people. And with such huge circulations, the magazines have lots of affluent readers. Asda’s publication is read by 7.3% of all people belonging to social class A — handily beating upscale titles such as Country Living and Vogue. (5) By suggesting there is still value in dead trees, supermarket publications encourage their paid-for equivalents. But they also provide growing competition for advertising and readers. Their content has gradually converged with that of women’s magazines. Both are heavy on consumer advice, of the “wear this top with that skirt“ type. Thanks to data from loyalty cards, some supermarket rags know much more about their customers than do rival magazines. As they go online, they will be able to target readers with ruthless precision. (6) Britain’s four big supermarkets—Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco—are vital outlets for all kinds of media. Many magazine and book publishers depend on them. They already account for almost a quarter of all spending on music, more than double the share of Apple’s iTunes. Their magazines extend their dominance. Media retailers are on their way to becoming media conglomerates.

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

PASSAGE THREE