Taylor Swift, the seven-time Grammy winner, is known for her articulate lyrics, so there was nothing surprising about her writing a long column for The Wall Street Journal about the future of the music industry. Yet there’ s reason to doubt the optimism of what she had to say. “This moment in music is so exciting because the creative avenues an artist can explore are limitless,“ Swift wrote. “In this moment in music, stepping out of your comfort zone is rewarded, and sonic evolution is not only accepted ... it is celebrated. The only real risk is being too afraid to take a risk at all.“ That’s hard to reconcile with Nielsen’s mid-year U.S. music report, which showed a 15 percent year-on-year drop in album sales and a 13 percent decline in digital track sales. This could be the 2013 story all over again, in which streaming services cannibalize their growth from digital downloads, whose numbers dropped for the first time ever last year, except that even including streams, album sales are down 3.3 percent so far in 2014. Streaming has grown even more than it did last year, 42 percent compared to 32 percent, but has failed to make up for a general loss of interest in music. Consider this: in 2014 to date, Americans purchased 593.6 million digital tracks and heard 70.3 million video and audio streams for a sum total of 663.9 million. In the comparable period of 2013, the total came to 731.7 million. Swift, one of the few artists able to pull off stadium tours, believes it’ s all about quality. “People are still buying albums, but now they’re buying just a few of them,“ she wrote. “They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart.“ In 2000, album sales peaked at 785 million. Last year, they were down to 415.3 million. Swift is right, but for many of the artists whose albums pierce hearts like arrows, it’ s too late. Sales of vinyl albums have increased 40.4 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen, and the top-selling one was guitar hero Jack White’s Lazaretto. The top 10 also includes records by the aging or dead, such as the Beatles and Bob Marley & the Wailers. More modern entries are not exactly teen sensations, either: the Black Keys, Beck and the Arctic Monkeys. None of these artists is present on the digital sales charts, including or excluding streams. The top-selling album so far this year, by a huge margin, is the saccharine soundtrack to the Disney animated hit, “Frozen“. When, like me, you’re over 40 and you believe the music industry has been in decline since in 1993 (the year Nirvana released in Utero), it’s easy to criticize the music taste of “the kids these days,“ a term even the 23-year old Swift uses. My fellow dinosaurs will understand if they compare 1993’s top albums to Nielsen’s 2014 list. But these kids don’t just like to listen to different music than we do, they no longer find much worth hearing. The way the music industry works now may have something to do with that. In the old days, musicians showed their work to industry executives, the way most book authors still do to publishers (although that tradition, too, is eroding). The executives made mistakes and were credited with brilliant finds. Sometimes they followed the public taste, and sometimes they strove to shape it, taking big financial and career risks in the process. These days, according to Swift, it’s all about the social networks. “A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers,“ Swift wrote. “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.“ The social networks are fickle and self-consciously sarcastic (see the recent potato salad phenomenon). They are not about arrow-through-the-heart sincerity. That’s why YouTube made Psy a star, but it couldn’t have been the medium for Beatle mania. Justin Timberlake has 32.9 million Twitter followers, but he’ s no Jack White. In the music industry’s heyday, it produced a lot of schlock. But it got great music out to the masses, too. These days, it expects artists to do their own promotion and for those who less good at that than at making music, it may mean not getting heard. For fans it means less good music to stream and download. Well, there’ s always the warm and fuzzy world of vinyl nostalgia, I guess.

Which of the following is the feature shared by the English phonemes /m/ and /p/? Voiced. Voiceless. Bilabial. Dental.

The morpheme “-ceive“ in the word “conceive“ is a______. stem root allomorph suffix

_____advance seems to be following advance on almost a monthly basis. So rapid is the rate of progress that Rapid as the rate of progress is that So rapid is the rate of progress as Rapid as the rate of progress as

When you focus on “utterance function“ and “expected response“ by using examples like “Here you are“, “Thanks“, you are probably teaching language at the______. lexical level sentence level grammatical level discourse level

Which of the following tasks fails to encourage active language use? Reciting a text. Bargaining in a shop. Writing an application letter. Reading to get a message.

Which of the following statements about task design is incorrect? Activities must have clear and attainable objectives. Activities should be confined to the classroom context. Activities must be relevant to students’ life experiences. Activities should help develop students’ language ability.

When students are asked to go to the local museum, libraries, etc. to find out information about endangered animals and work out a plan for an exhibition, they are doing a(n)______. survey experiment project presentation

下面是对王老师课堂教学行为的听课记录。教读单词和课文：纠正学生的读音、拼写、句法等错误；讲解知识点：管理课堂纪律：安排学生活动：给学生布置作业：解答学生疑问：检查和评讲作业。请根据听课记录回答下列问题： (1)王老师的课堂角色有哪些? (2)王老师的角色定位存在什么问题?深层原因是什么? (3)英语教师应该如何定位自己的课堂角色?

Which of the following is true of English sound system? Aspiration is a distinctive feature. Voicing is a distinctive phonetic feature. Nasalization of vowels gives rise to another vowel. Length of vowels differentiates one vowel from the other.

Though the government encourages foreign investment,______ investors are reluctant to commit funds in the current climate situation in the country. potential affluent optimistic solid

There is no need______to teach children how to behave. however whatsoever forever whenever

The expression “As far as I know ...“ suggests that people usually observe the Maxim of______in their daily conversations. Quantity Quality Relevance Manner

For more advanced learners, group work may be more appropriate than pair work for tasks that are______. linguistically simple structurally controlled cognitively challenging thematically non-demanding

A teacher may encourage students to______when they come across new words in fast reading. take notes ask for help guess meaning from context look up the words in a dictionary

If someone says “I know the word“, he should not only understand its meaning but also be able to pronounce, spell, and______it. explain recognize memorize use

Which of the following tasks fails to develop students’ skill of recognizing discourse patterns? Analyzing the structure of difficult sentences. Checking the logic of the author’ s arguments. Getting the scrambled sentences into a paragraph. Marking out common openers to stories and jokes.

设计任务：请阅读下面学生信息和语言素材，设计一个20分钟的英语写前准备活动。教案没有固定格式，但须包含下列要点： teaching objectives teaching contents key and difficult points major steps and time allocation activities and justifications 教学时间：20分钟学生概况：某城镇普通中学高中二年级第一学期学生，班级人数40人。多数学生已经达到《普通高中英语课程标准(实验)》六级水平。学生课堂参与积极性一般。语言素材： A personal essay is a short piece of writing that tells about a personal experience or something about a person’ s life. Here is an example of a personal essay. [*] You can write about nearly any personal topic using a format like this. The student’s essay in the Reading also used this same plan.

Taylor Swift, the seven-time Grammy winner, is known for her articulate lyrics, so there was nothing surprising about her writing a long column for The Wall Street Journal about the future of the music industry. Yet there’ s reason to doubt the optimism of what she had to say. “This moment in music is so exciting because the creative avenues an artist can explore are limitless,“ Swift wrote. “In this moment in music, stepping out of your comfort zone is rewarded, and sonic evolution is not only accepted ... it is celebrated. The only real risk is being too afraid to take a risk at all.“ That’s hard to reconcile with Nielsen’s mid-year U.S. music report, which showed a 15 percent year-on-year drop in album sales and a 13 percent decline in digital track sales. This could be the 2013 story all over again, in which streaming services cannibalize their growth from digital downloads, whose numbers dropped for the first time ever last year, except that even including streams, album sales are down 3.3 percent so far in 2014. Streaming has grown even more than it did last year, 42 percent compared to 32 percent, but has failed to make up for a general loss of interest in music. Consider this: in 2014 to date, Americans purchased 593.6 million digital tracks and heard 70.3 million video and audio streams for a sum total of 663.9 million. In the comparable period of 2013, the total came to 731.7 million. Swift, one of the few artists able to pull off stadium tours, believes it’ s all about quality. “People are still buying albums, but now they’re buying just a few of them,“ she wrote. “They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart.“ In 2000, album sales peaked at 785 million. Last year, they were down to 415.3 million. Swift is right, but for many of the artists whose albums pierce hearts like arrows, it’ s too late. Sales of vinyl albums have increased 40.4 percent so far this year, according to Nielsen, and the top-selling one was guitar hero Jack White’s Lazaretto. The top 10 also includes records by the aging or dead, such as the Beatles and Bob Marley & the Wailers. More modern entries are not exactly teen sensations, either: the Black Keys, Beck and the Arctic Monkeys. None of these artists is present on the digital sales charts, including or excluding streams. The top-selling album so far this year, by a huge margin, is the saccharine soundtrack to the Disney animated hit, “Frozen“. When, like me, you’re over 40 and you believe the music industry has been in decline since in 1993 (the year Nirvana released in Utero), it’s easy to criticize the music taste of “the kids these days,“ a term even the 23-year old Swift uses. My fellow dinosaurs will understand if they compare 1993’s top albums to Nielsen’s 2014 list. But these kids don’t just like to listen to different music than we do, they no longer find much worth hearing. The way the music industry works now may have something to do with that. In the old days, musicians showed their work to industry executives, the way most book authors still do to publishers (although that tradition, too, is eroding). The executives made mistakes and were credited with brilliant finds. Sometimes they followed the public taste, and sometimes they strove to shape it, taking big financial and career risks in the process. These days, according to Swift, it’s all about the social networks. “A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers,“ Swift wrote. “In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.“ The social networks are fickle and self-consciously sarcastic (see the recent potato salad phenomenon). They are not about arrow-through-the-heart sincerity. That’s why YouTube made Psy a star, but it couldn’t have been the medium for Beatle mania. Justin Timberlake has 32.9 million Twitter followers, but he’ s no Jack White. In the music industry’s heyday, it produced a lot of schlock. But it got great music out to the masses, too. These days, it expects artists to do their own promotion and for those who less good at that than at making music, it may mean not getting heard. For fans it means less good music to stream and download. Well, there’ s always the warm and fuzzy world of vinyl nostalgia, I guess.

The man______the dark glasses fled away from the spot very rapidly. in at of by

Tom, see that your sister gets safely back,______? can you won’t we won’ t you should we

How does the writer perceive Swift’ s attitude towards the future of the music industry?

Why is music industry declining in the writer’ s view?

What does the underlined word “that“ in PARAGRAPH EIGHT refer to?

Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined word “heyday“ in the Last PARAGRAPH?

Why does the writer fell nostalgic about vinyl albums?