The world will need to double food production within the next three decades in order to feed a rapidly and increasingly growing population, which is going to grow from 7 billion today to 9 billion. A United Nations report says reaching that goal will require major increases in high-efficiency livestock operations for both meat and dairy production. The report also says that intensive livestock operations can cause serious ecological risks. And that’s why environmental critics are calling instead for reductions in global livestock production, and urging people to consume less, not more, meat in their diets. Feeding today’ s population is a challenge for an already-stressed environment. The challenge is how to ensure food without increasing animal numbers and having an impact on lands and our resource bases. More than half of the agricultural land in the world is used to raise and feed livestock. Those farm animals are also responsible for 18 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere every year. Experts agree that the next few decades will present a puzzle, how to feed nine billion people without destroying the planet in the process. 1. Why is increase in livestock production necessary? 2. What does the word “challenge“ mean in the news item? Because livestock production is highly efficient. Because more people will become wealthier. Because it may help double food production. Because it has fewer ecological risks.

Bilingual(双语的)education in schools has long been a political hot potato—it was banned in California by a 1998 ballot measure, which the state Senate is now asking voters to repeal. But politics aside, there’s an increasing amount of scientific support for the benefits of knowing at least two languages. Now, a new study published by the Annals of Neurology finds that you don’t even need to learn that second(or third, or fourth)tongue at a very young age: Picking up a new language even a little later in life can have serious cognitive(认知的)benefits for the aging brain. Many recent studies have pointed out that bilingualism seems to be good exercise for the brain and later in life might even help delay the onset of dementia. But what if it’s a self-selecting crowd? What if the people who learned two languages are just smarter to begin with? To help rule that factor out, researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland studied 853 people who first took an intelligence test in 1947 when they were about 11 years old as part of a group called the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, and retested them again around 2008 to 2010, when they were in their early 70s. A total of 262 of the seventy-year-old reported having learned at least one language other than English enough to communicate in it. Of those, 195 said they learned it before age 18: 65 said they learned it thereafter. The researchers gave the participants a battery of cognitive tests, including tests of their verbal reasoning, their vocabulary and reading abilities, their verbal fluency and their ability to process information quickly. They found that bilingual speakers performed much better than expected from their baseline cognitive ability, particularly in reading and in general intelligence. And those who knew three or more languages performed even better. Learning a language seemed to make as much difference in people’ s later-in-life cognitive decline as a gene that’ s been tied to risk of Alzheimer’ s disease and smoking habits. These participants mostly learned their second languages after age 11. The results actually make a very compelling point—you don’t have to be a fluent speaker of a language to get the benefits, and you can start later in life, too.

中国的春节在农历(lunar calendar)一月一日，是新一年的开始。这是举家团圆的时刻。一般说来，在春节前几天，只要有可能的话，多数人无论身处何地都会回家。就像圣诞节一样，人们会买很多东西如食品、礼物、衣服和烟花爆竹给孩子们。在除夕之夜，多数农村家庭仍然保持着一些传统习俗，如在两扇门上都贴上门神(painting of door gods)和春联。

An economic meeting on opportunities in China is expected to bring scholars, business leaders and government officials to Beijing next week. More than 800 participants are expected to attend 3-day Fortune Global Meeting which opens on Monday. More than 250 foreign companies including 76 of the Global 500 will be represented. The meeting is held annually by the US’ Fortune Magazine. This will be the meeting’s 10th year and third in China. Shanghai hosted it in 1999 and Hong Kong in 2001. 5. What is the theme of the meeting? 6. How many foreign companies will be represented in the meeting? 7. When was the first meeting held? Business leadership. Global business community. Economic prospects in China. Business opportunities.

In nearly all civilizations, at nearly all times in history, men have dressed differently from women. But it has not always been a simple matter of men wearing trousers while women wear skirts. In Scotland and parts of the Far East, men as well as women wore skirts. In Turkey and China, and among Eskimos, both men and women wore trousers. But in ancient Greece men who wore trousers were thought to be little better than savages. We think of women as wearing brighter clothes than men. Yet in some historical periods, it was men who wore the more colorful and elaborate costumes. Some anthropologists believe that the clothing men wear is directly related to the position they hold in society. In many civilizations, kings and chiefs wore special clothing and headgear to show their authority. Rich, important men in the 18th century wore special clothing, often elaborately made and difficult to keep clean. Since poor men could not afford to wear this kind of clothing, it became a symbol of wealth. Even today, men wear clothing that symbolizes their positions in life more often than women do. Men sometimes wear jewelry marked with the insignia of organizations to which they belong. Soldiers, delivery men, and service station workers wear uniforms. Doctors and dentists usually wear white coats. Women wear clothes to make them appear more attractive. As the fashion in beauty for women changes, clothing for women has changed rapidly. Men and women think alike about some things. But they don’t always agree about clothing. Questions 19 to 21 are based on the passage you have just heard. 19. Which of the following statements does the article try to make you believe? 20. Why do women’ s clothes change? 21. Which of the following statements is true according to the passage? Men who belong to organizations must wear jewelry. Each new period brings some changes in clothing. Women do not like to look attractive in new clothes. Every woman wants to look attractive.

W: Good morning, Mr. Pitt. Do sit down. M: Thank you. W: First of all, Mr. Pitt, I’ d like you to tell me a bit about what you’ ve been doing. M: Well, I took four subjects in school: French, German, Chemistry and, uh, Art. Chemistry wasn’t my cup of tea but Art has always been. W: Art? M: Well, I really wanted to study Art. It didn’ t turn out like that because a friend of my father’ s offered me a job. He’ s an accountant in London. A quite big firm, you know. W: I see. A firm of accountants. Interesting! In your application, you say that you only spent nine months with this firm of accountants. Why was that? M: It was nearly a year actually. Well, to be quite honest, I didn’t like it. I just couldn’t seem to get interested in the job although there were fairly good prospects. So I got a place at the Art College to do a three-year diploma course. W: I see. Now, Mr. Pitt, what about hobbies and interests? Uh, what do you do in your spare time? M: I like jazz, traditional and folk music. I don’t play, of course, but I go to quite a lot of concerts, and I go to the theatre occasionally and act a bit myself. I’m in the local dramatic society. I read quite a lot and I’ve done a bit of photography. Also, I’ve traveled a lot—hitchhiked all over Europe last year. That was ... W: Very interesting, Mr. Pitt. I think that’ s all I wanted to ask about your background. Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 12. What might be the relationship between the woman and the man? 13. Why didn’t Mr. Pitt study Art immediately after he left school? 14. Why did the man left the company nine months later? 15. Which is one of the things Mr. Pitt does in his spare time? Friends. Coworkers. Interviewer and interviewee. Doctor and patient.

Four American teenagers, all children of U.S. military personnel, have been arrested on charges of attempted murder after a woman was knocked off her motorbike, Japanese police said. The four suspects—two 15-year-old boys, a 17-year-old girl and an 18-year-old man—were controlled on Saturday, the Tokyo Police Department said. They are charged with causing a serious head injury to a 23-year-old restaurant employee. U.S. Forces in Japan was informed of the August incident in late October, a public information officer said. There was no clear explanation for the delay in handing the suspects to police, other than it involved rules between Washington and Tokyo covering U.S. Forces and their dependents in Japan. The U.S. military presence and its impact on Japanese residents have been a trouble over the years. 3. What do we know about the victim according to the news? 4. When were the suspects arrested according to the news? A 17-year-old girl. A 15-year-old boy. A 23-year-old woman. An 18-year-old man.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay based on the picture below. You should start your essay with a brief description of the picture and then express your views on Refuse to Be Phubbers.You should write at least 120 words but no more than 180 words. [*]

M: Hello. W: Hello, welcome to “Advice“ radio program. What’s your name? M: Jim. W: What’ s your problem? M: Er ... well I’m er... beginning to lose my hair. Er, I went to the doctor, but he just said there was nothing I could do about it. He said it was probably hereditary. My father was bald by the time he was thirty. W: And how old are you? M: Me? I’ m twenty-eight. W: And are you losing a lot of hair then? M: Well, it comes out a lot when I comb my hair and you can see a thin part on the top of my head. W: Does that really worry you, Jim? M: Well, I don’t like it. It’s old, you know, looks old. I don’t want to look like a middle-aged man at twenty-eight. And I wonder if there is some special shampoo I should use, and if you could tell me one that I should buy, something like that, you know, to stop it getting worse. W: Well, you know, Jim, to be honest with you there’ s not really a lot you can do about it. There is one piece of advice, though, Jim, and that’s don’t try to comb your hair over the bald or thin patch. Whatever you do, don’t comb it over because that usually looks ridiculous. And the other thing that usually looks ridiculous is a man with a wig, that is, the false hairpiece. Don’t let anyone persuade you to buy one of those false hairpiece things, because they usually look much worse than a bald man. 1 actually think bald men can look very attractive. My husband is bald and I think it really suits him. Questions 8 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard. 8. What’ s probably the reason for the man’ s baldness? 9. What does the woman suggest to the man? 10. Where do you think this conversation takes place? 11. What does the woman think of her husband’ s baldness? It’s hereditary. The shampoo he used caused it. He combs his hair too much. He is old enough to lose hair.

You can tell the age of a tree by counting its rings. But these records of tree’ s life really say a lot more. Scientists are using tree rings to learn what’s been happening on the sun’s surface for the last ten thousand years. Each ring represents a year of growth. As a tree grows, it adds a layer to its trunk taking up chemical elements from the air. By looking up the elements in the rings from the given year, scientists can tell what elements were in the air that year. Dr. Stevenson is analyzing one element—carbon-14 in rings from both living and dead trees. Some of the rings go back almost ten thousand years to the end of the Ice Age. When Stevenson followed the carbon-14 trail back in time, he found carbon-14 levels change with the intensity of solar burning. You see the sun has cycles. Sometimes it burns fiercely and other times it is relatively calm. During the sun’ s violent periods, it throws off charged particles in fast moving strings called solar winds. The particles interfere with the formation of carbon-14 on earth. When there’s more solar wind activity, less carbon-14 is produced. Ten thousand years of tree rings show that the carbon-14 level rises and falls about every 420 years. The scientists concluded that the solar wind activity must follow the same cycle. Questions 16 to 18 are based on the passage you have just heard. 16. What is the purpose of the scientists in studying tree rings? 17. What affects the amount of carbon-14 on earth? 18. What do we learn from the passage about the solar wind activity? To examine the chemical elements in the Ice Age. To learn what’ s been happening on the sun’ s surface To analyze the composition of different trees. To find out the origin of carbon-14 on Earth.

All the people can teach you something, whether they have enjoyed success or have experienced failure. Role models can enable you to both learn from experience you haven’t had yet, or may never have. A role model is anyone who has anything to teach you on your journey to success. And you’ll find them everywhere, from the person sitting next to you at work to someone in your family. Modeling is a way of saying that we respect and admire the abilities of certain people, qualities that we want to make ours. You should try to learn something about that person’ s gifts, talents and characteristics that allowed them to be successful in the first place, try to incorporate these characteristics into your own behavior. So you shouldn ’t be interested in people who have been successful because they’ve been lucky, but those who have become successful be cause of their own achievements. Role models don’t have to be famous people. In fact, it’s probably better if they’re not. You can look at role models who are at the same stage in life that you are, so that you can better measure yourself against what they are doing. Questions 22 to 25 are based on the passage you have just heard. 22. Who can be role models? 23. What kind of role do role models play? 24. What does the speaker say about the modeling process? 25. How can we measure ourselves? Successful people. Famous people. Older people. Anyone.

Buried beneath a sand dune, in the beach town of Beidaihe, 【C1】______one of China’ s newest art galleries. An offshoot of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, 300 km away, the UCCA Dune is【C2】______any other cutting-edge art museum in China. Most are high-profile architectural statements, erected in the【C3】______of bustling cities. The Dune is subtle and secluded, its galleries unfolding against the backdrop of the sands. Interdependence with the landscape and the local community is at the heart of the Dune’ s purpose. It aims to be sustainable ecologically【C4】______financially, and to help【C5】______the environment rather than destroying it. “Our work was not just to design a physical structure,“ says Li Hu of OPEN Architecture, one of the overseers of the project, but to “【C6】______an entirely new type of institution.“ Mr. Li wanted to create a gallery that was not “juxtaposed“ to its environment but “merged into it“. 【C7】______placing the museum on top of the dunes as was originally planned, he decided to bury the building beneath them to preserve the coastal【C8】______. The structure is heated by geothermal energy; its walls and windows and the wooden tables in its cafe were handmade from local materials, a tribute to the craftsmanship of the Hebei region. Because the museum is【C9】______naturally by skylights, visitors’ experiences of the artwork will【C10】______with the seasons and time of day. A) protect B) unlike C) Instead of D) vary E) lit F) dream up G) nestles H) ecology I) middle J) as well as K) locate L) center M) build N) rather than O) decorated

Haiti’s Tourism A) Like many of its Caribbean neighbors, Haiti once drew many tourists. But decades of political instability, repression and poverty, as well as natural disasters, led to the decay of the tourism infrastructure, and almost no visitors come now. Officials would like to change that. The arts town of Jacmel is one place they think could be a start. B) A couple of untidy aid workers were sucking down Sunday morning beers at the Hotel Florida here when the minister of tourism rolled up to the roadside, followed by the interior minister with body guards and then the star of the show, New York fashion designer Donna Karan of DKNY. The notables were in Jacmel, the funky (含有黑人韵味的爵士) art and carnival capital of Haiti, to plot the transformation of the earthquake-rattled port from a faded flower of the Caribbean to a resort destination for celebrities. C) “We ’re trying to rebrand Haiti, and so we ’re bringing Donna here to help us with our vision,“ Tourism Minister Stephanie Balrmir Villedrouin said in an interview. “We’re trying to raise the bar a little bit,“ Said Karma, as she swept through the abandoned Hotel Jacmeliernne—its seaside swimming pool green with grass, its overgrown gardens littered with broken glass—Oh, We can definitely work with this!“ D) As hard as it may be for young Haitians to believe, their country was once a tourist destination. Even during the bad old days of the Duvaiier dictatorships (独裁), tourists came. Or at least a few: see Graham Greene’s 1966 novel The Comedians, set incidentally at a hotel and based on a real-life mansion (大厦), the Hotel Oloffson in the capital; the hotel is still in operation but is now run by Richard Morse, front man for the rock band RAM and the new government’ s special political envoy (大使) to the Americas. Today, nobody visits Haiti for fun, except Haitians returning from the abroad. The arrivals at the Port-au-Prince airport are filled with Baptist missionaries, UN officials and American nurses—not a real tourist in sight. E) Yet across the Caribbean, revenue from tourism represents about 16 percent of gross domestic product, and many island nations, such as the Bahamas, Barbados and Antigua, generate at least a third of their GDP from visitors. For most of the Caribbean, tourists’ dollars, euros and pesos (比索) are the No. 1 source of foreign investment. F) Haiti let its tourism infrastructure degrade over three decades of political instability, hurricanes, earth quakes and deadly disease. But the poorest country in the Western hemisphere has a lot to offer the adventuresome visitor, according to international planners and Haitian officials. The Creole French cuisine (美食) here is some of the best in the Caribbean; its artisans are of world renown, its blend of African and Spanish music unique. All this, and rock music, too. G) The still-evolving plans for Haiti forecast Jacmel as a stand-alone destination, meaning tourists would not land in the disordered, dangerous, poor capital, Port-au-Prince, but arrive directly here via air or boat. H) With development aid from banks and donor nations, the government of former carnival singer and current President Michel Martelly is planning to extend the airport runway at Jacmel so it can accomodate small jets that would shuttle from Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Puerto Rico; and Guadaloupe. The deserted port is also scheduled for restoration to allow big cruise ships to dock. I) In the late 1800s, Jacmel was an important Caribbean crossroads in Haiti—then called the “Pearl of the Antilles“—and its downtown still harbors the Creole architecture of iron balconies and shuttered ware houses for coffee and orange peel. The town reminds many visitors of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and it hosts one of the best carnivals in the Caribbean, as well as a music festival and a film festival, now struggling to gain promotion again after the 2010 earthquake, seeing potential in ruin. J) Donna Karan knows Jacmel well; she shot her fall catalog at the Hotel Florida. The New Yorker gamely jumped into the bed of a small track for a tour of town. It stopped at the Manoir Alexandre, once the most prominent building in the city and now a rain that is slowly being restored by Leon Paul, a Haitian American orthopedic surgeon from New York. K) “We want to restore the mansion to its former glory, but as you can see, that is a big job, “Paul said as he walked Karan through the property, with its peeling wallpaper, holes in the roof, missing stair sand tilting balcony. L) He said Jacmel, his home town, will rise from the ruins, and he promised that someday soon, Haitian said visitors will be sitting in his restored mansion, listening to a band, drinking rum and celebrating. As Karan crawled through the ruins, she saw not despair, but hope: “Wow! Look at this. These are my colors. The rust, yellow and blue. Take a picture. This is perfect!“

The medical world is gradually realizing that the quality of the environment in hospitals may play a significant role in the process of recovery from illness. As part of a nationwide effort in Britain to bring art out of the galleries and into public places, some of the country’s most talented artists have been called in to transform older hospitals and to soften the hard edges of modern buildings. Of the 2, 500 National Health Service hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have significant collections of contemporary art in corridors, waiting areas and treatment rooms. These recent initiatives owe a great deal to one artist, Peter Senior, who set up his studio at a Manchester hospital in northeastern England during the early 1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and that art should be enjoyed by a wider audience. A typical hospital waiting room might have as many as 500 visitors each week. What better place to hold regular exhibitions of art? Senior held the first exhibition of his own paintings in the out-patients waiting area of the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to be Britain’s first hospital artist, Senior was so much in demand that he was soon joined by a team of six young art school graduates. The effect is striking. Now in the corridors and waiting rooms the visitor experiences a full view of fresh colors, playful images and restful courtyards. The quality of the environment may reduce the need for expensive drugs when a patient is recovering from an illness. A study has shown that patients who had a view onto a garden needed half the number of strong pain killers compared with patients who had no view at all or only a brick wall to look at.