1、2听力题略
3、根据以下内容回答题
Is College a Worthy Investment?
are we spending so much money on college? Andwhy are we so unhappy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe it's time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious (大不敬) : is all this investment in college education really worth it?
B. The answer. I fear, is no. For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus.
my entire adult life, a good education has been the most important thing for middle-class households. My parents spent more educating my sister and me than they spent on their house, and they're not the only ones.., and, of course, for an increasing number of families, most of the cost of their house is actually the cost of living in a good school district. Questioning the value of a college education seems a bit like questioning the value of happiness, or tim.
average price of all goods and services has risen about 50 percent. But the price of a college education has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that today's students are getting twice as good? Are new workers twice as smart? Have they become somehow massively more expensive to educate?
E aps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor, says, "I look at the data, and I see college costs rising faster than inflation up to the mid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3to 4 percent a year over inflation. What has happened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes. " Aid has increased, subsidized (补贴的) loans have become available, and "the universities have gotten the money. " Economist Bryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees: "It's a giant waste of resources that will continue as long as the subsidies continue. "
otional literature for colleges and student loans often speaks of debt as an "investment in yourself. " But an investment is supposed to generate income to pay off the loans. More than haft of all recent graduates are tmemployed or in jobs that do not require a degree, and the amount of student- loan debt carried by households has increased more than five times since 1999. These graduates were told that a diploma was all they needed to succeed, but it won't even get them out of the spare bedroom at Mom and Dad's. For many, the most visible result of their four years is the loan payments, which now average hundreds of dollars a month on loan balances in the tens of thousands.
's true about the money--sort of. College graduates now make 80 percent more than people who have only a high-school diploma, and though there are no precise estimates, the wage premium (高出的.部分) for an outstanding school seems to be even higher. But that's not true of every student. It's very easy to spend four years majoring in English literature and come out no more employable than you were before you went in. Conversely, chemical engineers straight out of school can easily make almost four times the wages of an entry-level high-sch0ol graduate.
H. James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has examined how the returns o education break down for individuals with different backgrounds and levels of ability. "Even with these high prices, you're still finding a high return for individuals who are bright and motivated," he says. On the other hand, "if you're not college ready, then the answer is no, it's not worth it. " Experts tend to agree that for the average student, college is still worth it today, but they also agree that the rapid increase in price is eating up more and more of the potential return. For borderline students, tuition ( 学费) rise can push those returns into negative territory.
I. Everyone seems to agree that the government, and parents, should be rethinking how we invest in higher education-and that employers need to rethink the increasing use of college degrees as crude screening tools for jobs that don't really require college skills, "Employers seeing a surplus of college graduates and looking to fill jobs are just adding that requirement," says Vedder. "In fact, a college degree becomes a job requirement for becoming a bar-tender. "
J. We have started to see some change on the fmance side. A law passed in 2007 allows many students to cap their loan payment at 10 percent of their income and forgives any balance after 25 years. Bnt of course, that doesn't control the cost of education; it just shifts it to taxpayers. It also encourages gradimtes to choose lower-paying careers, which reduces the financial return to education still further. "You're subsidizing people to become priests and poets and so forth," says Heckman. "You may think that's a good thing, or you may not. " Either way it will be expensive for the government.
K. What might be a lot cheaper is putting more kids to work. Caplan notes that work also btfilds valuable skills--probably more valuable for kids who don't naturally love sitting in a classroom. Heckman agrees wholeheartedly:" People are different, and those abilities can be shaped. That's what we've learned, and public policy should recognize that. "
L. Heckman would like to see more apprenticeship-style (学徒式) programs, where kid can learn in the workplace learn not just specific job skills, but the kind of "soft skills," like getting to work on time and getting along with a team, that are crucial for career success, "It's about having mentors (指导者) and having workplace-based education," he says. "Time and again I've seen examples of this kind of program working. "
M. Ah, but how do we get there from here? With better public policy, hopefully, but also by making better individual decisions. "Historically markets have been able to handle these things," says Vedder, "and I think eventually markets will handle this one. ff it doesn't improve soon, people are going to wake up and ask, 'Why am I going to college?'"
Caplan suggests that kids who don't love school go to work,
4、 根据以下内容，回答题。
Is the Internet Making Us Forgetful?
A. A tourist takes a picture of the Empire State Building on his iPhone, sit, then takes another one from a different angle. But what happened to that first image? The button on our cameras, phones, and computers is a function we use often without thinking, yet it remains a fantastic concept.
Most things in the world don't just disappear. Not our thrown away plastic water bottles. Not the keys to the apartment. Not our earliest childhood memories.
B. "It is possible that every memory you have ever experienced that made its way into your long-term memory is still buried somewhere in your head," Michael S. Malone writes in his new book The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory. It is both a blessing and a curse that we cannot voluntarily erase our memories. Like it or not, we are stuck with our experiences. It's just one of the many ways that human beings differ from digital cameras.
C. Yet, humans are relying more and more on digital cameras and less on our own minds. Malone tells the story of how, over time, humans have externalized (外化) their internal memories, departing themselves from the experiences they own. The book is a history in time order--from the development of paper, libraries, cameras, to microchips—about how we place increasing trust in technology.
D. Is it a good thing for electronic devices and the Internet to store our memories for us? When we allow that to happen, who do we become? Will our brains atrophy (萎缩) ff we chose not to exercise them? Malone, who is a Silicon Valley reporter, shows us the technological progress, but backs away from deeper philosophical questions. His love for breaking news--the very idea of breakthrough--isapparent, but he fails to address the more distressing implications.
E. The biology of human memory is largely mysterious. It is one of the remaining brain functions whoselocation neuroscientists can't place, Memory nerve cells are distributed all over the brain, hidden in itsgray wTinkles like money behind couch cushions. "What a plunge," opens Virginia Woolfs oway, as Clarissa tosses open her French windows and is transported into her remembered past."Live in the moment" is a directive we often hear these days in yoga class, but our ability to weave inund out of the past is what makes life interesting and also difficult for humans.
F. The Neanderthal (穴居人的 ) brain was powerful, but lacking a high-capaciW memory, "forevertrapped in the/low," according to Malone. The stories, images, and phrases that we turn over in ore'minds while lying awake in bed were different for them. Neanderthals could receive the stimuli of theworld--colors, sounds, smells--but had limited ways to organize or access that information. Even theterm Homo sapienns (晚期智人) reveals how our brains work differently from our slated from the Latin, it means knowing man. Not only do we know, but we know that we self-consciousness, that ability not only to make memories but to recall them, is what defines us.
G. Short-term memories are created by the compound of certain proteins in a cell and long-term memoriesare created by released magnesium (镁). Each memory is then ed like handprints in concrete. This is what we know about the physical process of memory making. Why a person might rememberthe meal they ate before their parents announced a divorce, but not the announcement itself, remainsa scientific mystery.
appearance of language is linked to memory, and many early languages were simply devices that aid memory. They served as a method for sharing memories, an early form of fact-checking that also expands the lifetime of a memory. The Library of Alexandria is an example of a population's desire tocatalog a common memory and situate it safely outside their own short-lived bodies.
I. The ancient Rondos even had a discipline called Ars Memorativa, or the art of memory. They honored extraordinary acts of memorization, just as they honored extraordinary feats in battle, and Cicero excelled at this. Memorization was an art that could be polished using patterns, imaginary structures and landscapes. Without training, the human brain can hold only about seven items in short-term memory.
invention of computer memory changes everything. We now have "Moore's Law", the notion that memory chips will double in performance every 18 months. Memory plug base. continues to decrease in size while our memories accumulate daily. Because of growing access to the Internet, Malone argues that individualized memory matters less and less. Schoolchildren today take open-book tests or with acalculator. "What matters now is not one's ownership of knowledge, but one's skill at accessing it and analyzing it," he writes. However, something is lost. We have unlimited access to a wealth of information, yet little of it belongs to us.
K. Human beings have a notion of self, a subjective world particular to us, thanks to our high lycomplicated and individualized brains that Malone compares to "the roots and branches of a tree". We own our own hardware, and we all remember differently. The Internet offers us access to information, but it is really a part of the external world of colors and sounds that even Neanderthals could receive. A world in which all our memories are stored on electronic devices and all our answers can be foundby Googling is a world closer to the Neanderthars than to a high-tech, idealized future. I don't remember when I first learned the word deja vu but I do remember the shirt I wore on the firt day of9th grade. Memory is a tool, but it can also teach us about what we think is important. Human memory is a way for us to learn about ourselves.
Compared with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, human beings have the particular ure of being able to make memories and recall them.
5、 根据以下资料，回答题：
Quesaons 61 to 65 are based on thefollowingpassage.
In 2005，the medical examiner in Wichita，Kansas，noticed a cluster of deaths that were unusually similar in nature：in three years，sixteen men and women，between the ages of twenty-two and fifty-two，had died in their the hours before they lost consciousness，they had been sluggish and dopey,struggling to stay awake.A few had complained of chest pain.“I can’t catch my breath，”one kept saying.
All of them had taken painkillers prescribed by a family practice called the Schneider Medical Clinic.
The clinic was in Haysville.a s suburb of main industries in the area were aircraft and plastics，neither of which was doing well.A mile sout of the clinic，there was little except wheat chief doctor was Stephen Schneider,a fifty-one-year-old osteopath(整骨师)with sandy hair and treated the county commissioner and the chief of police，gave physicals to the boys at the Haysville high school，and did rounds at local nursing of his patients，Jeffrey Peters，told me that Schneider reminded him of the“kind of family doctor we had forty years l was growing up—a doctor who will sit down and listen to you and ioke around and make you feel comfortable.”
On September 13，2005，Schneider arrived at work to find the clinic cordoned(包围隔离)off with police called his wife，Linda Atterbury,a blond，peppy forty-seven-year-old nurse，who was at home with their two young daughters，and told her to come to ts from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration led Schneider into one of the clinic’s fourteen exam rooms and asked him why he had been prescribing so many opioid(类) responded that sixty per cent of his patients suffered from chronic pain，and few other physicians in the area would treat agents wrote.“He tries to believe his patients whenthey describe their health problems and he will believe them until they prove themselves wrong.”When asked how many of his patients had died,Schneider said that he didn’t know…
注意：此部分试题请在答题卡2上作答。
What’s the similar nature of the 16 people’s death?
were examined by the same medical examiner.
were treated by the same docton
all died in their sleep.
r ages are roughly the same.
9、You should write an essay entitled The Power ofUnite by commenting on the remark“A snowflake is olqe ofGod's mostfragile creations，but look what they can do when they stick together!”You can cite examples to illustrate yourpoint.
写作导航
1.诠释名言来表示团结的力量;
2.进一步阐述团结在人们生活中的重要性，并以中国共产党来举例说明;
3.得出结论，呼吁大家培养团结意识。
10、You shouM write a short essay entitled Free Admission to Museums?
写作导航
1.引出话题：博物馆对公众免费开放的利与弊;
2.具体阐述博物馆对公众免费开放的好处以及带来的一些问题;
3.提出自已的想法。
