You only have to open your eyes to see that the world is getting fatter. Health officials — some of whom call overweight and obesity a global pandemic — say that the increasing availability of processed foods is simply overwhelming humanity. Combine that with high-tech sedentary lifestyles and more disposable income and the table is set for packing on extra pounds. But just how bad is the problem? A new big-data study published in the Lancet, a medical journal, lays out the kind of vast and sweeping survey that would have been unimaginable in the days before affordable computing power. It’s basically a global headcount of overweight people. An international team of researchers led by Marie Ng, PhD, an assistant professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, collected data from 188 countries’ national health ministry surveys and other sources (1, 770 in all) from 1980 through 2013 and gleaned from people of different age, gender, heights and weights, worked some statistical hocus-pocus on the data and came up with some eye-popping trends. China is now second only to the US in obesity, with its numbers bulging in the past three decades to 46 million adults qualifying as obese and 300 million overweight. China has a way to go to catch up to the US, however. The survey found that the US accounts for 13 percent of the world’s obese, while the vast populations of China and India combined make up only 15 percent of the world’s total obese. The study used the BMI — the body mass or weight-to-height ratio — to assess overweight (25-30) and obesity (30 and above). The Hospital Authority of Hong Kong (China), as an example, calls a BMI of 18.5 to 22.9 normal, 23 to 24.9 overweight at risk, 25 to 29.9 moderately obese and over 30 severely obese. Worldwide, overweight and obesity combined rates rose by 27.5 percent for adults and 47.1 percent for children from 1980 to 2013. The total number of overweight and obese individuals increased from 857 million in 2008 to 2.1 billion in 2013. The study also found some interesting sex patterns. In developed countries, more men than women were overweight or obese; in developing countries, overweight or obese women outnumbered men. In China, 23 percent of boys under 20 fall into the category of overweight or obese, while only 14 percent of girls under 20 make it. Of men 20 and older, 28.3 percent are overweight; and among women 20 and older, 27.4 percent are in the group. By contrast, in the US, 28.8 percent of boys under 20 are overweight, but significantly, 12.4 percent are obese. Among US girls under 20, 29.7 percent are overweight, with 13.4 percent obesity. Among US men 20 or older, a whopping 70.9 percent are overweight or obese; and 61.9 percent of women 20 or older, with 33.9 percent of the total qualifying as obese. The Wall Street Journal reported that China’s armed forces are feeling the pinch, “with the People’s Liberation Army facing challenges as its soldiers have begun to have trouble fitting into traditionally-sized tanks“. Ng said the high percentages of overweight and obesity in China were “especially troubling. We need to be thinking now about how to turn this trend around“. The greatest gain in weight worldwide, the survey found, came between 1992 and 2002 and mainly among people aged 20 to 40, for some reason. The rate of weight gain in recent years has been slackening off in the last eight years, but, no countries have shown any significant decrease in obesity prevalence in the past 30 years. Much of the original data was what’s called “self-reported“, the kind of personal facts people might give over the phone, and as one might suspect, can be subject to exaggeration. As the paper puts it: “Self-reported weights for women in some countries tend to be under-reported and self-reported heights for men tend to be over-reported.“ In other words, women fudge their weight and men fudge their height. “These data are all heavily modeled, “ the Lancet editors explain, “so that the real data are inevitably somewhat obscured, but the truth is not.“

MERS — Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — was first reported on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012. Since then, there have been 1, 154 confirmed cases of MERS worldwide leading to 431 deaths. More than 85 percent of the reported cases have been on the Arabian Peninsula, primarily in Saudi Arabia, with all cases outside of the region linked by travel back to there. It’s gotten out again, and this time it’s threatening East Asia. As of now, more than 1, 300 people in South Korea have been placed under compulsory quarantine after a 68-year-old man took ill after returning from a business trip to four Middle Eastern countries in early May. Suffering from respiratory distress, he went to two out-patient clinics and two hospitals before being correctly diagnosed with MERS. In the process, health officials believe, he may have infected at least 22 other people, two of whom are now dead. According to the latest assessments, at least 30 people in South Korea have come down with MERS, with two dead. With memories of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak of 10 years ago that killed more than 750, people are wearing surgical masks on the streets and more than 200 schools have been closed. But quarantine doesn’t work if they’re not enforced. Health officials say one confirmed patient ignored medical advice and traveled to China. MERS, like its cousin SARS, is a coronavirus, so called because of the crown-like spikes on its surface. Coronaviruses are common and most people contract one at some point in their life, suffering mild to moderate respiratory tract distress, as in the common cold. Coronaviruses also infect animals, mostly one species at most or a group of closely related species, but not people and animals. SARS and MERS are the exceptions. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, SARS can also infect monkeys, Himalayan palm civets, cats, dogs and rodents. In addition to humans, MERS can infect camels and bats. “Although the majority of human cases of MERS have been attributed to human-to-human infections, camels are likely to be a major reservoir host for MERS and an animal source of MERS infection in humans. However, the exact role of camels in transmission of the virus and the exact route(s) of transmission are unknown, “ says the WHO website. The MERS virus doesn’t pass easily from person to person unless there is close contact, such as nursing a sick patient without adequate protection. Clusters of cases have appeared in health clinics where infection control practices were suspect. That’s why WHO has warned that because of the sheer number of hospitals and clinics that the first patient visited and was examined at, more cases can be expected. According to WHO, more than a third of patients diagnosed with MERS die. There is no vaccine or specific treatment, other than “supportive and based on the patient’s clinical condition“, that is, doing everything possible to help the patient battle the illness. In the South Korean case involving the 68-year-old man, he never told doctors he had been exposed to MERS. He had also been exposed to family members, visitors, medical staff and other patients in the same room and ward. Some patients were infected after being exposed to the man for a little as five minutes, WHO reports. So far, two of those people have died. And South Korea’s Ministry of Health has confirmed that two of the most recent cases are “third generation“, meaning from exposure to someone infected by the original patient. So the virus is apparently on the move. It was one of those confirmed cases that, on May 26, traveled “against medical advice“ to Guangdong, China (by bus), via Hong Kong (by airplane). “He was symptomatic at the time of travel, “ WHO reports. “On 29 May, China informed WHO that the patient, who was isolated at a Huizhou hospital, tested positive for the MERS coronavirus.“ According to a study published recently in the medical journal Lancet, coronaviruses have high rates of mutation and a tendency to cross into new host species and while this is of concern, especially in light of how deadly MERS and SARS can be, MERS transmission is not efficient enough to have “pandemic potentiat“, the study’s authors suggest. WHO said that “consistent application of adequate measures for infection prevention and control has halted other large clusters of cases associated with health care facilities, “ implying that it can be done again in this case. And they have not recommended any special screening at points of entry or travel restrictions. The first MERS case in the US was diagnosed in 2014 — it was a health worker who had travelled to Saudi Arabia, the CDC says.

Artists routinely deride businesspeople as money-obsessed bores. Or worse. Every time Hollywood depicts an industry, it depicts a conspiracy of knaves. Think of “Wall Street“ (which damned finance), “The Constant Gardener“ (drug firms), “Super Size Me“ (fast food), “The Social Network“ (Facebook) or “The Player“ (Hollywood itself). Artistic critiques of business are sometimes precise and well-targeted, as in Lucy Prebble’s play “Enron“. But often they are not, as those who endured Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story“ can attest. Many businesspeople, for their part, assume that artists are a bunch of pretentious wastrels. Bosses may stick a few modernist daubs on their boardroom walls. They may go on corporate jollies to the opera. They may even write the odd cheque to support their wives’ bearded friends. But they seldom take the arts seriously as a source of inspiration. The bias starts at business school, where “hard“ things such as numbers and case studies rule. It is reinforced by everyday experience. Bosses constantly remind their underlings that if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. Quarterly results impress the stock market; little else does. Managers’ reading habits often reflect this no-nonsense attitude. Few read deeply about art. “The Art of the DeaV by Donald Trump does not count; nor does Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War“. Some popular business books rejoice in their barbarism: consider Wess Robert’s “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun“ (“The principles are timeless, “ says Ross Perot) or Rob Adams’s “A Good Hard Kick in the Ass: the Real Rules for Business“. But lately there are welcome signs of a thaw on the business side of the great cultural divide. Business presses are publishing a series of luvvie-hugging books such as “The Fine Art of Success“, by Jamie Anderson, Jorg Reckhenrich and Martin Kupp, and “Artistry Unleashed“ by Hilary Austen. Business schools such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto are trying to learn from the arts. New consultancies teach businesses how to profit from the arts. Ms. Austen, for example, runs one named after her book. All this unleashing naturally produces some nonsense. Madonna has already received too much attention without being hailed as a prophet of “organizational renewal“. Bosses have enough on their plates without being told that they need to unleash their inner Laurence Oliviers. But businesspeople nevertheless have a lot to learn by taking the arts more seriously. Mr. Anderson & co point out that many artists have also been superb entrepreneurs. Tintoretto upended a Venetian arts establishment that was completely controlled by Titian. He did this by identifying a new set of customers (people who were less grand than the grandees who supported Titian) and by changing the way that art was produced (working much faster than other artists and painting frescoes and furniture as well as portraits). Damien Hirst was even more audacious. He not only realised that nouveau-riche collectors would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from ￡70.5m ($126.5m) on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed. Studying the arts can help businesspeople communicate more eloquently. Most bosses spend a huge amount of time “messaging“ and “reaching out“, yet few are much good at it. Their prose is larded with cliches and garbled with gobbledegook. Half an hour with George Orwell’s “Why I Write“ would work wonders. Many of the world’s most successful businesses are triumphs of story-telling more than anything else. Marlboro and Jack Daniels have tapped into the myth of the frontier. Ben & Jerry’s, an ice-cream maker, wraps itself in the tie-dyed robes of the counter-culture. But business schools devote far more energy to teaching people how to produce and position their products rather than how to infuse them with meaning. Studying the arts can also help companies learn how to manage bright people. Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones of the London Business School point out that today’s most productive companies are dominated by what they call “clevers“, who are the devil to manage. They hate being told what to do by managers, whom they regard as dullards. They refuse to submit to performance reviews. In short, they are prima donnas. The arts world has centuries of experience in managing such difficult people. Publishers coax books out of tardy authors. Directors persuade actresses to lock lips with actors they hate. Their tips might be worth hearing.

PASSAGE TWO

PASSAGE FOUR

Below are two excerpts on an important concern of music industry: whether it is correct to share music without paying. Read them carefully and write an essay of no less than 300 words, in which you should: 1. summarize the opinions in both excerpts; 2. give your comment. Excerpt 1 Taylor Swift: “Music Is Art, and Art Should Be Paid for“ Taylor Swift, who describes herself as an “enthusiastic optimist, “ offered up a sunny outlook on the future of the music industry in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. The success of recorded music, in her opinion, comes down to finding the proper price point for music and for keeping music fans interested by surprising them. She wrote. “My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet...is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.“ At its core, the value of an album amounts to the quantity of the “heart and soul“ its creator put into it, Swift wrote. But in her opinion, despite the fact that piracy has drained the record industry’s assets, music is valuable and worth the price of admission. “Music is art, and art is important and rare, “ she wrote. “Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is. I hope they don’t underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.“ Elsewhere, Swift preaches that the music that people are buying are records that “hit them like an arrow through the heart or have made them feel strong or allowed them to feel like they aren’t alone in feeling so alone.“ She believes that fans look at music much like they look at relationships, with some amounting to “a passing fling“ while others are meant to be treasured. Although she described herself as an optimist early in the article, she did point out that she was aware of changing times. Fans now opt for selfies over autographs, and with the importance of social media, she’s seen trends changing around the entertainment industry. That social media relationship with fans is important — she credited her MySpace presence as an important part of her getting a record deal in 2005 — and she predicts more artists will get deals based on their interaction with fans. Excerpt 2 Why Music Should Be Free By Brett McCracken It’s been one of the biggest debates of the first decade of the 21st century: Is it OK to download music for free when you can buy it in other places? In my opinion, the future of music is going to be FREE. Yes, free. For all the worry, complaining, and lawsuits about copyright and “intellectual property“ infringement, there are increasing numbers of people who suggest that the benefits of an open-source mindset outweigh the negatives. Lawrence Lessig, copyright guru and Stanford law professor, is one such voice. In his book, Free Culture, Lessig argues that digital technology enables a new sort of democratic creativity in which many can “participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries.“ Giving things away for free, letting the audience share and remix and consume things as it sees fit, is an advantage to the collective strength of the culture economy. Another intellectual champion of “Free“ these days is Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. In his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Anderson describes the rise of “freeconomics“ and argues that “free“ is not a thing to be feared for those who want to make money; rather, it’s a thing to be embraced. Free, says Anderson, “is a word with an extraordinary ability to reset consumer psychology, create new markets, break old ones, and make almost any product more attractive.“ And it doesn’t mean profitless. It just means that “the route from product to revenue“ is more indirect. It means that Wal-Mart might lure you into its stores with a $12 below-cost DVD, with the completely reasonable hope that you will spend $100 on other stuff while you’re there. It’s called a loss-leader.

Recycling The concept of green consumerism has gained momentum over the last decade. However, three essential keys are needed to power this movement. I. The first step: raise 【T1】______about 【T1】______ A. recycling process - a creative act to 【T2】______the life and usefulness of the used 【T2】______ materials to be recycled - e.g. 【T3】______, glass bottles, and newspapers 【T3】______ B. ways on how to 【T4】______rubbish 【T4】______ - sort out reusable materials - establish a 【T5】______of collecting the sorted materials 【T5】______ C. 【T6】______of the traditional waste disposal method 【T6】______ - expanding the rubbish dumps into 【T7】______or green belt 【T7】______ - the increase in consumer waste - burying rubbish in a vast deep pit lined with plastic - chemicals used to 【T8】______of the rubbish 【T8】______ - returning the site 【T9】______rubbish in the ground to 【T9】______ agricultural use II. The second step: the development of technology A. provide 【T10】______support for companies involved in 【T10】______ recycling -【T11】______ 【T11】______ - low-cost 【T12】______ 【T12】______ - grants to upgrade equipment and further research B. a breakthrough—the new technology to help remove ink from paper C. 【T13】______of paper-recycling 【T13】______ - the difficulty in removing print from paper -the amount of 【T14】______ 【T14】______ - caustic waste III. The third step: expand the 【T15】____for recycled materials 【T15】______Recycling Good morning’ everyone. Today, we’ll continue our discussion on environment protection. In this lecture we will focus on a hot issue—how to become a greener society. We hear it a lot in the news these days: “Recycle newspapers and save a tree.“ Protecting our delicate environment seems to be on the agenda of politicians, government leaders, and citizens in many parts of the world to show support for mother nature. However, I must point out that three essential keys needed to power this movement include a more informed public, the development of improved technology, and a greater demand for recycled materials. The first step is to raise public awareness about the recycling process , to explain the kinds of materials that can be recycled, to provide ways on how to properly dispose of them and inform the public of the harm of the traditional waste disposal method. So, what is the recycling process? Actually recycling is what we do with the objects we use in our daily lives. It is ultimately a creative act that involves thought and dedication to extend the life and usefulness of something once it has been used. Common objects that are often used only once are plastic containers , glass bottles, and newspapers, but most of them can be recycled somehow, and it is only our lifestyles and the ease of disposal that prevent us from recycling everything we dispose of. Then we will come to the ways on how to properly dispose of the rubbish. Take paper-recycling for example. Local governments should educate the public on how to properly sort reusable materials from those, like waxed paper, carbon paper, plastic laminated material such as fast food wrappers, that can’t be recycled very easily. Then, a system of collecting these sorted materials needs to be established. The public interest might be there, but soon may wane if there isn’t a system where they can take these materials to be recycled. Sometimes we become complacent when it comes to recycling, but when you speak in terms of actual facts and figures that everyone provide understand. People become more conscious of the problem. I remember reading one time that the energy saved from one recycled can provide enough power to operate a television for three hours. Give the public information they can grasp, and then you will increase your chances of gaining followers. What is the harm of the traditional waste disposal method? Digging big holes and chucking in tons and tons of rubbish on a daily basis is no solution. Who wants a rubbish heap on their doorstep? But the more the householders dispose of, the more we have to expand our municipal dumps, which often have to expand into agricultural land or green belt land. Waste disposal experts are certainly coming up with ingenious ways of dealing with the increase in consumer waste that this century has seen, but ultimately we have to tackle the problem at the root: each and everyone of us. As is known to all that a waste disposal facility is essentially a dump—just that, where end of the line rubbish is dumped and somehow treated, in order to speed its breaking down and dispersal, usually in the ground, or sometimes in other storage facilities. The common method is to bury rubbish, in a vast deep pit, which might be lined with plastic. When the pit reaches maximum capacity, some chemicals including lime are poured in to speed the process of breakdown , then it may be sealed, and covered. The modern means of operation is to then return the site to some kind of agricultural use. The rubbish is always going to be in the ground, and if this is our means of dealing with waste, we then must move on and find land in which to dig more pits. But, certainly, there’s never enough land to bury the rubbish. Second, technological progress has been made on many fronts, but governmental agencies need to step up their support for companies involved in recycling by providing tax incentives, low-cost loans, or even grants to upgrade equipment and to encourage further research. One breakthrough has been the development of a new manufacturing process that uses enzymes to help remove ink from paper in more energy efficient and environmentally safe methods. Recycling paper materials can be expensive in both monetary and environmental terms. The difficulty in removing print from paper, the amount of energy expended during the process, and caustic waste produced are costs that companies incur and then they are passed on to the consumer. The final key is to increase demand for the growing surplus of resources waiting to be recycled. This problem has appeared in various regions of the world where the technology to process the used materials lags far behind the amount being collected for recycling. There may be a great outpouring of support; yet the great stumbling block to implementing the second stage of this plan could be held up by the corporate sector’s inability to find commercial enterprises interested in using recycled goods especially when the cost exceeds those of virgin materials. OK, in today’s lecture we looked at the environmental issue basically concerning recycling. Recycling is a crucial link protecting our planet. The three keys mentioned above including a more informed public, the development of improved technology, and a greater demand for recycled materials are important ways to achieve this end.

(R)=Condoleezza Rice (I)=Interviewer (I): Finally tonight, the tie between educating our children and national security. It’s by now a familiar warning: Our public schools are not adequately educating our children. A new report put out by the Council on Foreign Relations frames the risk in a global context, impacting both our economic and military power—among its recommendations, expanding a core curriculum in school districts across the country beyond an emphasis on reading and math to include more science, technology, history, and foreign languages, offer students more choices and competition to public schools, and launch a national security readiness audit to raise awareness and hold schools accountable. The 30-member task force was headed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and I sat down with her in Washington this morning. Condoleezza Rice, welcome. (R): Thank you. (I): Secretary Rice, why frame this as a national security issue? And make it concrete. What’s the specific impact you see of poor education? (R): National security is broader than what you can do with your military forces, obviously. But, even there, when it comes to the very tangible assets that the United States needs to defend itself, the education of people who can be soldiers, too many people can’t qualify for military service. (I): Simply can’t qualify? (R): Simply can’t qualify, when it comes to the foreign service or to intelligence agencies or to the ability to have people who can think about the problems of cyber-warfare and cyber-security and critical infrastructure protection. Then, of course, there’s the matter of the competitiveness of our economy, People can fill the jobs and be the innovators of the future, so that the United States maintains its economic edge, and then finally the matter of our social cohesion. The United States, we’ve always been held together by the belief that it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters where you’re going. And that is—absolutely, without education, we cannot maintain that cohesion. (I): Speaking of that, I heard you talked about that this morning, the social cohesion part. We’re sitting here, your report comes out at a time where there’s a lot of sense that the game is a little rigged, that public life is unfair, and in education as well. (R): Absolutely. If people believe the game is rigged, if people no longer believe that you can start out anywhere and end up at the top successfully in America, that the American dream is part of the past, I think that erodes a sense of belief and confidence in our nation. It makes us inward-looking. It makes us envious of other people, all the kinds of things that we have avoided as a people. If that turns against us, then I think our national security will be affected. And today, the sad fact is that, for the children who have the fewest options, the educational system is not delivering. If I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem. (I): You feel you can do that? (R): Yes increasingly. And I think if you are a child in difficult circumstances, the neighborhood school may not be the answer any longer. This is the end of Part One of the interview. Questions 1 to 5 are based on what you have just heard. Question One What is the interview mainly about? Question Two What is recommended in the report? Question Three What is the job that people can’t qualify in the army? Question Four What can hold American people together? Question Five According to the woman, what can she tell when she looks at the zip code of a child? Education and national security. A new report by the Council on Foreign Relations. The impact of poor education. Social cohesion and American dream.

(I): So, if you say there’s a crisis, then what do we do? Now, you go and you look at—you have offered a series of things, most of which have been much discussed, more emphasis on core curriculum, common standards across the U.S., more choices for students. What is new, beyond putting it into a national security rubric? (R): Well, putting it into a national security rubric shouldn’t be underestimated, because it’s very easy if it’s just about my child. And my child can get a good education because I can either put that child in private school or I can move to a community where the schools are good, then I don’t have to worry so much about that child in East Oakland or in South Central L.A., or in Anacostia, for that matter, who won’t get a good education. But when you say this is a national security problem, then it is a common problem for all of us. (I): One of the things that I don’t see emphasized is—at least explicitly—is money. Resources, you talked about, but money. And one wonders, where does that all fit in at a time like this, where we’re a little scrunched for it? But... (R): Yes. Well, the interesting thing is if you look at some of the aspects of the report, we have actually increased dramatically over the last several decades the amount of money that is going into the public school system. It’s quite dramatic, in fact. And yet some of the poorest-performing districts are the ones that have the highest per capita per child spending. And so I believe very strongly in adequately resourcing our educational system. I would never want to under-resource it. But we have to spend the money wisely. And you are not going to get Americans to think about additional funding, even for the K-12 system, when we have the kinds of results that we do in the school districts that spend the most money. It doesn’t make sense. And so one thing that we say is, let’s really look at problems of misallocation. (I): Let me ask you, finally, you’ve spent time here in Washington. We’re in the political season. If you could wave your magic wand—and I must say you don’t hear a lot of talk about education so far in the campaign. If you could wave a magic wand—what would you want to hear? What would you want to have done? (R): It is the case that we are so undereducating our children that large numbers of them cannot, maybe 75 percent, be capable of serving in our military. What are we doing? And what are you going to do about it? I would like to hear the common core endorsed and the governors continuing to work on it. But whatever the specifics are, I want to know that those who would lead us know that this may indeed be our greatest national security challenge. (I): Condoleezza Rice, thanks very much. (R): Thank you. This is the end of Part Two of the interview. Questions 6 to 10 are based on what you have just heard. Question Six What will be different when education is put into a national security rubric? Question Seven According to the interviewer, what is not clearly emphasized in the report? Question Eight Which is true about some of the poorest-performing schools? Question Nine According to the woman, how should money be spent on education’? Question Ten How many children are incapable of serving in the army? More emphasis will be laid on core curriculum. More choices will be offered to students. It will become a common problem for people throughout the U.S. All the above.

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christmas Brother’s School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister. When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the color of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure deceased by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side. Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

PASSAGE ONE

You only have to open your eyes to see that the world is getting fatter. Health officials — some of whom call overweight and obesity a global pandemic — say that the increasing availability of processed foods is simply overwhelming humanity. Combine that with high-tech sedentary lifestyles and more disposable income and the table is set for packing on extra pounds. But just how bad is the problem? A new big-data study published in the Lancet, a medical journal, lays out the kind of vast and sweeping survey that would have been unimaginable in the days before affordable computing power. It’s basically a global headcount of overweight people. An international team of researchers led by Marie Ng, PhD, an assistant professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, collected data from 188 countries’ national health ministry surveys and other sources (1, 770 in all) from 1980 through 2013 and gleaned from people of different age, gender, heights and weights, worked some statistical hocus-pocus on the data and came up with some eye-popping trends. China is now second only to the US in obesity, with its numbers bulging in the past three decades to 46 million adults qualifying as obese and 300 million overweight. China has a way to go to catch up to the US, however. The survey found that the US accounts for 13 percent of the world’s obese, while the vast populations of China and India combined make up only 15 percent of the world’s total obese. The study used the BMI — the body mass or weight-to-height ratio — to assess overweight (25-30) and obesity (30 and above). The Hospital Authority of Hong Kong (China), as an example, calls a BMI of 18.5 to 22.9 normal, 23 to 24.9 overweight at risk, 25 to 29.9 moderately obese and over 30 severely obese. Worldwide, overweight and obesity combined rates rose by 27.5 percent for adults and 47.1 percent for children from 1980 to 2013. The total number of overweight and obese individuals increased from 857 million in 2008 to 2.1 billion in 2013. The study also found some interesting sex patterns. In developed countries, more men than women were overweight or obese; in developing countries, overweight or obese women outnumbered men. In China, 23 percent of boys under 20 fall into the category of overweight or obese, while only 14 percent of girls under 20 make it. Of men 20 and older, 28.3 percent are overweight; and among women 20 and older, 27.4 percent are in the group. By contrast, in the US, 28.8 percent of boys under 20 are overweight, but significantly, 12.4 percent are obese. Among US girls under 20, 29.7 percent are overweight, with 13.4 percent obesity. Among US men 20 or older, a whopping 70.9 percent are overweight or obese; and 61.9 percent of women 20 or older, with 33.9 percent of the total qualifying as obese. The Wall Street Journal reported that China’s armed forces are feeling the pinch, “with the People’s Liberation Army facing challenges as its soldiers have begun to have trouble fitting into traditionally-sized tanks“. Ng said the high percentages of overweight and obesity in China were “especially troubling. We need to be thinking now about how to turn this trend around“. The greatest gain in weight worldwide, the survey found, came between 1992 and 2002 and mainly among people aged 20 to 40, for some reason. The rate of weight gain in recent years has been slackening off in the last eight years, but, no countries have shown any significant decrease in obesity prevalence in the past 30 years. Much of the original data was what’s called “self-reported“, the kind of personal facts people might give over the phone, and as one might suspect, can be subject to exaggeration. As the paper puts it: “Self-reported weights for women in some countries tend to be under-reported and self-reported heights for men tend to be over-reported.“ In other words, women fudge their weight and men fudge their height. “These data are all heavily modeled, “ the Lancet editors explain, “so that the real data are inevitably somewhat obscured, but the truth is not.“

PASSAGE THREE

Educational attainment in rural America reached a historic height in 2000, with nearly one in six rural adults 【S1】______ holding a 4-year college degree, and more than three in four complete high school. 【S2】______ As the demand of workers with higher educational 【S3】______ qualifications rises, many rural policymakers have come to view local educational levels as a critical determinant of job and income growth in their communities. But policymakers are facing with two key questions. 【S4】______ First, does a better educated population lead to greater economic growth? According to a recent study, rural counties with higher educational levels saw rapid 【S5】______ earnings and income growth over the past two decades than counties with lower educational levels. However, economic returns to education for rural areas continue to lag that for 【S6】______ urban areas. Second, are there ways to improve local educational attainment, particularly through improvements in elementary and high schools, it can enhance the 【S7】______ economic well-being of rural residents and communities? In fact, preliminary research demonstrates a connection between better schools and positive outcomes in terms of earnings and income growth for rural workers and rural communities. Ultimately, the strength of the tie between education and economic outcomes is influenced in part by the extent which small rural counties lose young adults through 【S8】______ outmigration. The loss of potential workers from rural areas, as young adults leave college and work opportunities 【S9】______ in urban areas, has concerned rural observers for many decades. This rural “brain drain“ not only deprives rural employers of an education workforce, but also depletes 【S10】______ local resources because communities that have invested in these workers’ education reap little return on that investment.

我多少次想把这一段经历记录下来，但不是为这段经历感到愧悔，便是为觉察到自己要隐瞒这段经历中的某些事情而感到羞耻，终于搁笔。自己常常是自己的对立面。阳光穿窗而人，斜晖在东墙上涂满灿烂的金黄。停留在山水轴上的蛾子蓦地飞起来，无声地在屋里旋转。太阳即将走完自己的路，但她明日还会升起，依旧沿着那条亘古不变的途径周而复始；蛾子却也许等不到明天便会死亡，变成一撮尘埃。世上万千生物活过又死去，有的自觉，有的不自觉，但都追求着可笑的长生或永恒。而实际上，所有的生物都获得了永恒，哪怕它只在世上存在过一秒钟。那一秒钟里便有永恒。我并不想去追求虚无缥缈的永恒。永恒，已经存在于我的生命中了!

Health officials say that the following factors make overweight and obesity a global pandemic EXCEPT______.

In Hong Kong (China), if a man’s weight-to-height ratio is 24, he is______.

According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?