重要提示：
请勿将账号共享给其他人使用，违者账号将被封禁！
题目内容
（请给出正确答案）
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3. Question 27-33 Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, i-viii, in boxes 27 - 33 on your answer sheet. List of Headings i. Disputes over financial arrangements regarding senior managers ii. The impact on companies of being subjected to close examination iii. The possible need for fundamental change in every area of business iv. Many external bodies being held responsible for problems v. The falling number of board members with broad enough experience vi. A risk that not all directors take part in solving major problems vii. Boards not looking far enough ahead viii.A proposal to change the way the board operates 27 Paragraph A 28 Paragraph B 29 Paragraph C 30 Paragraph D 31 Paragraph E 32 Paragraph F 33 Paragraph G UK companies need more effective boards of directors A After a number of serious failures of governance (that is, how they are managed at the highest level), companies in Britain, as well as elsewhere, should consider radical changes to their directors’ roles.It is clear that the role of a board director today is not an easy one.Following the 2008 financial meltdown, which resulted in a deeper and more prolonged period of economic downturn than anyone expected, the search for explanations in the many post-mortems of the crisis has meant blame has been spread far and wide.Governments, regulators, central banks and auditors have all been in the frame. The role of bank directors and management and their widely publicised failures have been extensively picked over and examined in reports, inquiries and commentaries. B The knock-on effect of this scrutiny has been to make the governance of companies in general an issue of intense public debate and has significantly increased the pressures on, and the responsibilities of, directors. At the simplest and most practical level, the time involved in fulfilling the demands of a board directorship has increased significantly, calling into question the effectiveness of the classic model of corporate governance by part-time, independent non-executive directors. Where once a board schedule may have consisted of between eight and ten meetings a year, in many companies the number of events requiring board input and decisions has dramatically risen. Furthermore, the amount of reading and preparation required for each meeting is increasing. Agendas can become overloaded and this can mean the time for constructive debate must necessarily be restricted in favour of getting through the business. C Often, board business is devolved to committees in order to cope with the workload, which may be more efficient but can mean that the board as a whole is less involved in fully addressing some of the most important issues. It is not uncommon for the audit committee meeting to last longer than the main board meeting itself. Process may take the place of discussion and be at the expense of real collaboration, so that boxes are ticked rather than issues tackled. D A radical solution, which may work for some very large companies whose businesses are extensive and complex, is the professional board, whose members would work up to three or four days a week, supported by their own dedicated staff and advisers. There are obvious risks to this and it would be important to establish clear guidelines for such a board to ensure that it did not step on the toes of management by becoming too engaged in the day-to-day running of the company. Problems of recruitment, remuneration and independence could also arise and this structure would not be appropriate for all companies. However, more professional and better-informed boards would have been particularly appropriate for banks where the executives had access to information that part-time non-executive directors lacked, leaving the latter unable to comprehend or anticipate the 2008 crash. E One of the main criticisms of boards and their directors is that they do not focus sufficiently on longer-term matters of strategy, sustainability and governance, but instead concentrate too much on short-term financial metrics. Regulatory requirements and the structure of the market encourage this behaviour. The tyranny of quarterly reporting can distort board decision-making, as directors have to ’make the numbers’ every four months to meet the insatiable appetite of the market for more data. This serves to encourage the trading methodology of a certain kind of investor who moves in and out of a stock without engaging in constructive dialogue with the company about strategy or performance, and is simply seeking a short- term financial gain. This effect has been made worse by the changing profile of investors due to the globalisation of capital and the increasing use of automated trading systems. Corporate culture adapts and management teams are largely incentivized to meet financial goals. F Compensation for chief executives has become a combat zone where pitched battles between investors, management and board members are fought, often behind closed doors but increasingly frequently in the full glare of press attention. Many would argue that this is in the interest of transparency and good governance as shareholders use their muscle in the area of pay to pressure boards to remove underperforming chief executives. Their powers to vote down executive remuneration policies increased when binding votes came into force. The chair of the remuneration committee can be an exposed and lonely role, as Alison Carnwath, chair of Barclays Bank’s remuneration committee, found when she had to resign, having been roundly criticised for trying to defend the enormous bonus to be paid to the chief executive; the irony being that she was widely understood to have spoken out against it in the privacy of the committee. G The financial crisis stimulated a debate about the role and purpose of the company and a heightened awareness of corporate ethics. Trust in the corporation has been eroded and academics such as Michael Sandel, in his thoughtful and bestselling book What Money Can’t Buy, are questioning the morality of capitalism and the market economy. Boards of companies in all sectors will need to widen their perspective to encompass these issues and this may involve a realignment of corporate goals. We live in challenging times. Question 34-37 Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3？ In boxes 34 - 37 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer FALSE if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 34.Close scrutiny of the behaviour of boards has increased since the economic downturn. 35.Banks have been mismanaged to a greater extent than other businesses. 36.Board meetings normally continue for as long as necessary to debate matters in full. 37.Using a committee structure would ensure that board members are fully informed about significant issues. Question 38-40 Complete the sentences below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 38 - 40 on your answer sheet. 38.Before 2008, non-executive directors were at a disadvantage because of their lack of ________. 39.Boards tend to place too much emphasis on ________ considerations that are only of short-term relevance. 40.On certain matters, such as pay, the board may have to accept the views of ________.
更多“You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-...”相关的问题
第1题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. The Benefits of Being Bilingual A According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers.Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual. B Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. When we hear a word, we don’t hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear ‘can’, you will likely activate words like ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called ‘language co-activation’, comes from studying eye movements. A Russian-English bilingual asked to ‘pick up a marker’ from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn’t know Russian, because the Russian word for ‘stamp’, marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, ‘marker’. In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language. C Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase ‘tip-of-the-tongue states’, when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word’s font. When the colour and the word match (i.e., the word ‘red’ printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word don’t match (i.e., the word ‘red’ printed in blue). This occurs because the word itself (‘red’) and its font colour (blue) conflict. Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by colour (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy. D It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening background noise, they show highly similar brain stem responses. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the bilingual listeners’ neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sound’s fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception. E Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language. This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focusing on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know. F Research also indicates that bilingual experience may help to keep the cognitive mechanisms sharp by recruiting alternate brain networks to compensate for those that become damaged during aging. Older bilinguals enjoy improved memory relative to monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits. In a study of over 200 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease an average of five years later than monolingual patients. In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms. Surprisingly, the bilinguals’ brains had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, even though their outward behaviour and abilities were the same. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help it to go farther on the same amount of fuel. G Furthermore, the benefits associated with bilingual experience seem to start very early. In one study, researchers taught seven-month-old babies growing up in monolingual or bilingual homes that when they heard a tinkling sound, a puppet appeared on one side of a screen. Halfway through the study, the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In order to get a reward, the infants had to adjust the rule they’d learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully learn the new rule. This suggests that for very young children, as well as for older people, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer far beyond language. Question 27-31 Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 27-31 on your answer sheet. Test Findings Observing the 27______ of Russian-English bilingual people when asked to select certain objects Bilingual people engage both languages simultaneously: a mechanism known as 28________. A test called the 29_____, focusing on naming colours Bilingual people are more able to handle tasks involving a skill called 30_______. A test involving switching between tasks When changing strategies, bilingual people have superior 31_______. Question 32-36 Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 32 - 36 on your answer sheet, write YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 32. Attitudes towards bilingualism have changed in recent years. 33. Bilingual people are better than monolingual people at guessing correctly what words are before they are finished. 34. Bilingual people consistently name images faster than monolingual people. 35. Bilingual people’s brains process single sounds more efficiently than monolingual people in all situations. 36. Fewer bilingual people than monolingual people suffer from brain disease in old age. Question 37-40 Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 37-40 on your answer sheet. 37 an example of how bilingual and monolingual people's brains respond differently to a certain type of non-verbal auditory input 38 a demonstration of how a bilingual upbringing has benefits even before we learn to speak 39 a description of the process by which people identify words that they hear 40 reference to some negative consequences of being bilingual
第2题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Are You Being Served?
The world's factory, it turns out, has a sizeable canteen attached, not to mention an office block and shopping mall. Last month's official revision of China's gross domestic product revealed an economy worth 16 trillion yuan (＄1.9 trillion) in 2004, 17% more than previously thought. Some ＄265 billion of the increase--93% of it--was ascribed to the services sector. As a result, services' share of the economy has jumped by nine percentage points, to 41%, compared with 46% for manufacturing and 13% for primary industries (mainly agriculture and mining).
Where has all this extra activity come from? The bulk of it is obvious to any traveller in China. As people grow wealthier, they want more restaurants and bars, clothes stores, car dealerships, bookshops, private hospitals, English language classes and beauty salons. In many of these businesses, however, turnover and profits have not previously been captured by a statistical system geared to measuring factory production. The small, often private, companies that dominate these areas have also often been at pains to escape notice--and therefore taxes.
Li Deshui, commissioner of China's National Bureau of Statistics, confirms that most of the newly unearthed GDP comes from three categories. The first is wholesale, retail and catering; the second, transport, storage, post and telecommunications. While postal and telecoms services are still state-controlled and thus readily measured, more than a million small tracking and removal companies are not. The third activity is real estate, booming particularly in the coastal cities and increasingly inland too, leading to an influx of private money--not least from overseas speculators. Property development has, in turn, boosted demand for architects, decorators, do-it-yourself stores and other building services.
There is more to China's services boom than dishing up stir-fries, shipping boxes and fitting out apartments. Recent years have seen a surge in media and technology services, including the internet; in financial services such as leasing; and in education and leisure. In a small way, for example, China is starting to rival India as an outsourcing hub: less for call-centres that require excellent English than for such tasks as preparing reports and patent filings. In October Microsoft took a stake in a Chinese software firm in Dalian, a city in north-east China with a thriving outsourcing industry preparing tax returns and software for companies from Japan and South Korea.
China's rapid economic growth is fuelling demand for accountants, lawyers, bankers and all manner of consultants, as Chinese companies expand and restructure. Specialists in marketing, advertising and public relations advise on the relatively new area of marketing products and developing brands. The new wealth has other consequences, too. China now has nearly a million security guards. It can offer its new rich everything from cosmetic surgeons to pet salons.
Meanwhile, a huge new market is opening up for private education--fuelled by the combination of a poor public system, the preoccupation of middle-class parents with giving their (often) only child the best chances, and demand from business. Chinese families spend more on education than on anything except housing --the market for courses, books and materials more than doubled from 2002 levels, to ＄90 billion in 2005. Richer households have also caused a tourism boom, which is still chiefly domestic, though more mainlanders are venturing overseas as visa restrictions are lifted. The World Travel & Tourism Council predicts that China's annual tourism market will more than triple to ＄300 billion within a decade.
China's services sector, on this basis, is well-developed and roughly as large as those of Japan and South Korea
A．the total mount of goods produced in the world.
B．China.
C．the United States.
第3题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Low Cost Lamps Light Rural India
Until throe months ago, life in this humble village without electricity would come to a halt after sunset. Inside his mud-and-clay home, Ganpat Jadhav's three children used to study in the dim, smoky glow of a kerosene lamp. When their monthly fuel quota of four litres dried up in just a fortnight, they had to strain their eyes using the light from a cooking fire. That all changed with the installation of low-cost, energy-efficient lamps that are powered entirely by the sun. The lights were installed by the Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), an Indian non-governmental organization focused on bringing light to rural India. Some 100,000 Indian villages do not yet have electricity. The GSBF lamps use LEDs--light emitting diodes--that are four times more efficient than a normal bulb. After a ＄55 installation cost, solar energy lights the lamp free of charge. LED lighting, like cell phones, is another example of a technology whose low cost could allow the rural poor to leap into the 21st century.
As many as 1.5 billion people--nearly 80 million in India alone--light their houses using kerosene as the primary lighting media. The fuel is dangerous, dirty, and--despite being subsidized--consumes nearly four percent of a typical rural Indian household's budget. A recent report by the Intermediate Technology Development Group suggests that indoor air pollution from such lighting media results in 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year. LED lamps, or more specifically white LEDS, are believed to produce nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb. "This technology can light an entire rural village with less energy than that used by a single conventional 100 watt light bulb," says Dave Irvins-Halliday, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada and the founder of Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW). Founded in 1997, LUTW has used LED technology to bring light to nearly 10000 homes in remote and disadvantaged comers of some 27 countries like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and the Philippines. The technology, which is not yet widely known in India, faces some scepticism here. "LED systems are revolutionising rural lighting, but this isn't a magic solution to the world's energy problems," says Ashok Jhunjhunwala, head of the electrical engineering department at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In a scenario in which nearly 60 percent of India's rural population uses 180 million tons of biomass per year for cooking via primitive wood stoves--which are smoky and provide only 10-15 percent efficiency in cooking--Jhunjhunwala emphasises the need for a clean energy source, not just for lighting but for other domestic purposes as well The Indian government in April launched an ambitious project to bring electricity to 112000 rural villages in the next decade. However, the remote locations of the village will make reaching this goal difficult. A.K. Lakhina, the chairman of India's Rural Electrification Corporation, says the Indian government recognizes the potential of LED lighting powered by solar technology, but expressed reservations about its high costs. "If only LEDs weren't imported but manufactured locally," he says, "and in bulk."
The lamps installed in nearly 300 homes by GSBF cost nearly half the price of other solar lighting systems. Jasjeet Singh Chaddha, the founder of the NGO, currently imports his LEDs from China. He wants to set up an LED manufacturing unit and a solar panel manufacturing unit in India. If manufactured locally, the cost of his LED lamp could plummet to ＄22, as they won't incur heavy import duties. "We need close to ＄5 million for this," he says. Mr. Chaddha says he has also asked the government to exempt
A．provide light for 100000 Indian villages.
B．are very expensive to install.
C．are powered by the sun.
第4题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Rise of the Robots
If you're into technology, you're living in wonderful times. Things are developing in leaps and bounds, especially gadgets. Let's look at the technology that's set to break through.
CELESTRON SICYSCOUT
Backyard star-gazing goes seriously hi-tech with the Celestron SkyScout, which was judged to be the Best of Innovations at the New York Consumer Electronics Show press preview event in November. It's nor difficult to see why. The SkyScout is a hand-held viewing device that's capable of finding and identifying more than 6000 celestial objects visible to the naked eye, thus transforming the night sky into your own personal planetarium. Using GPS technology and a substantial celestial database, the camcorder-sized SkyScout enables stargazers to point the device at any visible object in the sky, press a button and then listen to a commentary. For the truly celestially challenged, if you want to view a star or planet but haven't a clue which bit of the heavens to look in, don't despair, the SkyScout's “locate” feature will guide you to it using illuminated arrows in the viewfinder.
NOKIA N91
This amazing mobile jukebox is due out early in 2006. Nokia's N91 looks set to be in a class of its own as a multimedia mobile phone, It will play music, take photos, surf the web and download videos, store contact details and generally organise your life. The robust little phone, resplendent in its stainless steel case, is the first Nokia to be equipped with a hard drive (4Gb), which means that it can store up to 3000 songs. The N91, which has a hi-fi quality headset and remote control, supports a wide range of digital music formats, including MP3, Real, WAV and WMA, It uses wireless technology to allow users to find and buy music from the operator's music-store, You can also drag and drop music from your PC to the N91 and manage and share play-lists. If you can find the time. you can get on the blower, too.
SEIKO SPECTRUM E-PAPBR WATCH
The Seiko Spectrum is no ordinary wristwatch. At first glance, it's an attractive and futuristic bracelet-style. watch. Look closer, however, and you'll notice that its display is unlike any you've seen before. Rather than the usual LCD screen, the display is made of "e-paper"--from the electronic paper pioneers E Ink Corp--and shows a constantly changing mosaic pattern along with the time. Because e-paper is so flexible and thin, it allows the display to curve round the wrist along with the watch band--something conventional liquid-crystal displays cannot do, as they have to be flat. Seiko says the e-paper display not only produces far better contrast than an LCD screen, but requires no power to retain an image, so the batteries last longer. Seiko is releasing only 500 of the watches next month, priced at about ￡1,250--so you'd better lose no time.
HIGH-DEFINITION TV
HDTV, already available in the United States, Japan and Australia, will hit the UK in 2006. When you watch a programme filmed in the HD format, you'll see a much sharper, clearer and more vibrant image. This is due partly to the way a programme is filmed, but also to the high-definition TV set itself, which uses either 720 or 1080 visible rows of pixels (depending on which format the individual HDTV uses) to display images, compared to the 576 rows of pixels used in current sets.
ELECTROLUX TRILOBITB 2.0 ROBOT VACUUM CLEANER
Next time you're expecting visitors, don't bother to vacuum first--wait until they arrive, and then entertain them with this little gadget. The Electrolux Trilobite 2. 0 is a robotic vacuum cleaner that navigates its way around your floors using ultrasound, just like a bat. It pings out ultrasound vibrations at surfaces to create a map of the room, which it remembers for future cleaning assignments. The Trilobi
A．tell you information about the stars.
B．tell you where in the world you are.
C．find objects in the sky that are not normally visible.
第5题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
The Fame Machine
Fascination is universal for what Aaron Spelling, a prolific producer of American soap operas, once called "rich people having problems that money can't solve". The fascinated in star-struck Britain have no equal. The country has a profusion of titles devoted to chronicling even the smallest doings of celebrities. Britons buy almost half as many celebrity magazines as Americans do, despite having a population that is only one-fifth the size. Celebrity news often makes the front page of British tabloid newspapers, providing a formidable distribution channel for stories about celebrities. New figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation show that the ten best-selling celebrity publications and ten most popular tabloids have a combined circulation of 23 million.
Satisfying this voracious demand has turned what was once a shoddy, amateurish business into an entertainment industry in its own right. Its business model has two distinguishing features. First, celebrity has become the product--rather than just a device for marketing films or music. The "talent" (if that is the word) owes its standing chiefly to the celebrity machine and not to any particular gift. It therefore depends on the attentions of the press to make money. Second, celebrities, agents, photographers and picture desks have found that the most efficient way to create an endless supply of celebrity news is to work together. A business that used to be based on intrusion has discovered a preference for collaboration.
It is also expanding abroad. In the past few weeks, Northern & Shell has hunched an American edition of OK!, a celebrity magazine that already has Australian, Chinese and Middle Eastern editions. EMAP recently launched Closer in France and already publishes a South African edition of Heat, a bestseller in Britain. Celebrity hounds who cut their teeth in Britain's competitive market are in demand abroad. The National Enquirer, a hard-nosed American scandal sheet famed for pushing back the boundaries of taste--and of free speech--was re-launched earlier in the year by a team led by Paul Field, formerly of the Sun, and stuffed with alumni of British tabloids and magazines.
Celebrity magazines were not a British invention. Hello!, which is still widely read but which has been waning of late, originated in Spain, where Hola! provided a hint of glamour to women under Franco's drab reigh. Before that, magazines grew up around the film industry in America. Some reported what the studios wanted them to say; others, such as Confidential--which became the biggest-selling magazine in America in the 1950s--aimed to dish the dirt on the stars. In Britain, celebrity news has been used to sell newspapers for more than a century. The News of the World, which gleefully reported aristocratic scandals in the 19th century, first appeared in the same year as Dickens's "A Christmas Carol".
Modem Britain has given the gossip a new sophistication. Part of the secret has been to separate celebrity revenue streams, Julian Henry of Henry's House, an agency for celebrities, distinguishes between a celebrity's craft (such as singing, stripping or kicking footballs) and their celebrity rating, which has a trajectory of its own, and often has an inverse relationship to the talent a famous person has, or once had. This second stream can often be more valuable than the first, and Britain's celebrity industry has become adept at creating and selling it.
Take, Peter Andre and Katie Price, who are to marry later this month. The pop singer and the model better known as Jordan, met when their careers were flagging, on a reality TV show--that essential new cog in the celebrity machine. They have sold rights to the wedding, built around a Cinderella theme, as an exclusive to OK! for a small fortune (a price, the
A．as many celebrity magazines as Americans do.
B．more celebrity magazines per head of population than Americans.
C．a grand total of 23 million celebrity magazines each year.
第6题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Do You Look Your Age?
It can be hard to guess someone's exact age. A range of factors may leave marks on our appearance', how much sleep we've had--even the way we dress and our view of ourselves. The good news is that just as these factors can add years on to your appearance, it follows that they can also take years off, We don't always have control over some of those social factors that can make us look younger, but there are other steps we can take to try to stop the ravages of age.
SOCIAL FACTORS
Last month the University of Southern Denmark published a report, The Influence of Environmental Factors on Facial Ageing, which showed that how we live can affect how old we look. In it, 1828 twins were photographed and then ten female nurses aged between 25-46 years were asked to guess how old the "models" were. The results were intriguing. They showed that belonging to a high social class can make us look up to four years younger and many other lifestyle. factors were shown to affect the way we look, Having children was found to make men look a full year younger, though it had no effect on women, and having four or more children cancelled out the benefit.
Depression and sun exposure were the biggest factors in making you look old before your time. Depression added up to three and a half years to a woman's perceived age (and 2.4 years for men). Sun exposure piled on at least an extra year. Smoking put on six months for a woman and a year for a man. Meanwhile, having a high BMI (body mass index) was found to take a whole year off for both men and women. "If you are not depressed, not a smoker and not too skinny, you are basically doing well," says Professor Kaare Christensen (married, three children, non-smoker), one of the report's authors. Professor Christensen's report concluded that it was more dangerous for our health to look a year older, than to actually be a year older.
NUTRITION
This is possibly the biggest change we can make fairly easily. There are four main factors that prematurely age us: smoking, too much alcohol, lack of fresh fruit and vegetables and insufficient protein intake. You can immediately tell a smoker. It's not just the lines around the mouth and eyes, but smoking is dehydrating to the body. Every time you inhale on a cigarette you're taking toxins into the body which have to be diffused and detoxified by the liver and kidneys and they're dependent on plenty of fresh water To carry toxins away. Most smokers don't drink anywhere near enough water,
The really big, quick-fix, though, is eating more fresh fruit and vegetables. You can see if someone doesn't eat enough, or any, fresh fruit and veg in a minute. The skin lacks a freshness and translucency. This is because the skin is the last organ to benefit from the nutrients you eat--the likes of the brain, heart and lungs all get first share. If someone's diet is lacking in fruit and veg, the skin will become dehydrated, This is a sign that sufficient nutrients aren't being delivered, so from an anti-ageing point of view, it's important to have live, fresh food and raw food is vital. If you have to cook, steaming will retain at least some of the vitamins and minerals.
The other really important thing and one we tend to miss out on in our diet-obsessed culture, is adequate intake of essential fatty acids, from oily fish, nuts and seeds, EFAs are vital for prolonging life expectancy because every cell in the body has a phospholipid bilayer that protects it, but they also give the skin a dewy, "bouncy", youthful feel. One of the worst things you can de in terms of looking old is to go on a low-fat diet. Stress is another big one for adding years. We can help support the adrenal and thyroid glands, which take a hammering when we're stressed, by eating plenty of
A．Having more than four children.
B．Having a high BMI.
C．Spending a long time in the sun.
第7题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
Are You Experienced?
How we spend our money is changing. In the new 'experience economy' we pay to do things, not have things. Trevor Beattie, the advertising supremo, has earned millions by devising original and controversial publicity campaigns. His agency assembled the arresting FCUK logo for French Connection. However, he doesn't believe in amassing expensive emblems of success, instead lavishing his fortune on such ephemeral things as flights in a MiG jet, or flying his mum on Concorde. He says that buying a Porsche is the saddest thing in the history of money.
Beattie is not alone in prizing memories above materialism. For a truly special birthday party, a Ferrari in a ribbon will no longer cut it. What the super-rich really want is their own private Rolling Stones concert (cost: ￡2 million) or a trip into space (￡100000, courtesy of Virgin Galactic). Even the rest of us don't particularly want stuff any more: we'd rather enjoy a day at the races, a massage, a ride in a hot-air balloon or a weekend cookery course run by a Michelin-starred chef. These are all symptomatic of the growing "experience economy", which has evolved out of a culture of mass affluence. With our basic needs satisfied -- the disposable income of Britons is double what it was in 1980 -- we are becoming increasingly choosy about how we spend our money. Rather than upgrading our car or television, we'll spend the cash in coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, sports clubs and theme parks. We'll splash out on European city breaks or walking the Inca trail. Experiences, in other words. The amount that British people spend on retail goods as a proportion of consumer spending has gone down in the past ten years. That money has migrated to restaurants, leisure and budget travel, as well as mobile phone calls.
Even that most acquisitional of pursuits, shopping, has had to wake up to the experience economy. Shopping malls such as Bluewater have acknowledged the arrival of the experience economy by restyling themselves as destinations for a family day out. You can browse, dine and take in a film; the shopping is optional. Companies such as Marks & Spencer recognise the trend, which is why they've started putting coffee shops and bookshops in their stores. The experience of shopping is just as important to us as what we end up taking home.
The "experience economy" was first predicted in a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review by James Gilmore, an American business consultant who advocates, among other things, sleep deprivation as an idea booster. The idea was later expanded into The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Written with B. Joseph Pine, the book posits that we are in the middle of a profound economic shift. Just as we moved from a goods to a service economy, now we are shifting from a service to an experience economy.
Accordingly, to stand out in the marketplace, companies need to offer not just goods and services but experiences. Companies are no longer mere suppliers but stagers of events designed to be experienced. The newest retail stores prove the point: the flagship 'Toys "R" Us' shop in Times Square in New York is no "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap" emporium. Visitors are immersed in the Toys "R" Us experience as soon as they encounter the Ferris wheel at the front door. Other attractions include two floors designed as a Barbie house, and an anima-tronic dinosaur. Shoppers are called guests.
The idea is to foster an emotional attachment between company and consumer, and hope that "guests" will want to acquire a memento that reminds them of the warm fuzzy feelings they had during the experience. The hippest companies of the moment -- Starbucks, Apple and, on a smaller scale, the drinks company Innocent -- are all admired within the business indust
A．think of a good way of advertising something.
B．fly in a military plane.
C．buy a nice, fast car.
第8题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Fun for the Masses
Americans worry that the distribution of income is increasingly unequal.
Examining leisure spending changes that picture.
A
Are you better off than you used to be? Even after six years of sustained economic growth, Americans worry about that question. Economists who plumb government income statistics agree that Americans'incomes, as measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, have risen more slowly in the past two decades than in earlier times, and that some workers' real incomes have actually fallen. They also agree that by almost any measure, income is distributed less equally than it used to be. Neither of those claims, however, sheds much light on whether living standards are rising or falling. This is because 'living standard' is a highly amorphous concept. Measuring how much people earn is relatively easy, at least compared with measuring how well they live.
B
A recent paper by Dora Costa, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks at the living-standards debate from an unusual direction. Rather than worrying about cash incomes, Ms Costa investigates Americans'recreational habits over the past century. She finds that people of all income levels have steadily increased the amount of time and money they devote to having fun. The distribution of dollar incomes may have become more skewed in recent years, but leisure is more evenly spread than ever.
C
Ms Costa bases her research on consumption surveys dating back as far as 1888. The industrial workers surveyed in that year spent, on average, three-quarters of their incomes on food, shelter and clothing. Less than 2% of the average family's income was spent on leisure but that average hid large disparities. The share of a family's budget that was spent on having fun rose sharply with its income: the lowest-income families in this working-class sample spent barely 1% of their budgets on recreation, while higher earners spent more than 3%. Only the latter group could afford such extravagances as theatre and concert performances, which were relatively much more expensive than they are today.
D
Since those days, leisure has steadily become less of a luxury. By 1991, the average household needed to devote only 38% of its income to the basic necessities, and was able to spend 6% on recreation. Moreover, Ms Costa finds that the share of the family budget spent on leisure now rises much less sharply with income than it used to. At the beginning of this century a family's recreational spending tended to rise by 20% for every 10% rise in income. By 1972-73, a 10% income gain led to roughly a 15% rise in recreational spending, and the increase fell to only 13% in 1991. What this implies is that Americans of all income levels are now able to spend much more of their money on having fun.
E
One obvious cause is that real income overall has risen. If Americans in general are richer, their consumption of entertainment goods is less likely to be affected by changes in their income. But Ms Costa reckons that rising incomes are responsible for, at most, half of the
第9题
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
√ OTES FOR WOMEN
The suffragette movement, which campaigned for votes for women in the early twentieth century, is most commonly associated with the Pankhurst family and militant acts of varying degrees of violence. The Museum of London has drawn on its archive collection to convey a fresh picture with its exhibition The Purple, White and Green: Suffragettes in London 1906-14.
The name is a reference to the colour scheme that the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) created to give the movement a uniform, nationwide image. By doing so, it became one of the first groups to project a corporate identity, and it is this advanced marketing strategy, along with the other organisational and commercial achievements of the WSPU, to which the exhibition is devoted.
Formed in 1903 by the political campaigner Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the WSPU began an educated campaign to put women's suffrage on the political agenda. New Zealand, Australia and parts of the United States had already enfranchised women, and growing numbers of their British counterparts wanted the same opportunity.
With their slogan 'Deeds not words', and the introduction of the colour scheme, the WSPU soon brought the movement the cohesion and focus it had previously lacked. Membership grew rapidly as women deserted the many other, less directed, groups and joined it. By 1906 the WSPU headquarters, called the Women's Press Shop, had been established in Chafing Cross Road and in spite of limited communications (no radio or television, and minimal use of the telephone) the message had spread around the country, with members and branch officers stretching to as far away as Scotland.
The newspapers produced by the WSPU, first Votes for Women and later The Suffragette, played a vital role in this communication. Both were sold throughout the country and proved an invaluable way of informing members of meetings, marches, fundraising events and the latest news and views on the movement.
Equally importantly for a rising political group, the newspaper returned a profit. This was partly because advertising space was bought in the paper by large department stores such as Selfridges. and jewellers such as Mappin & Webb. These two, together with other likeminded commercial enterprises sympathetic to the cause, had quickly identified a direct way to reach a huge market of women, many with money to spend.
The creation of the colour scheme provided another money-making opportunity which the WSPU was quick to exploit. The group began to sell playing cards, board games. Christmas and greeting cards, and countless other goods, all in the purple, white and green colours. In 1906 such merchandising of a corporate identity was a new marketing concept.
But the paper and merchandising activities alone did not provide sufficient funds for the WSPU to meetorganisational costs, so numerous other fundraising activities combined to fill the coffers of the 'war chest'. The most notable of these was the Woman's Exhibition. which took place in 1909 in a Knightsbridge ice-skating rink. and in 10 days raised the equivalent of' ￡250.000 today.
The Museum of London's exhibition is largely visual, with a huge number of items on show. Against a quiet background hum of street sounds, copies of The Suffragette, campaign banners and photographs are all on display, together with one of Mrs Pankhurst's shoes and a number of purple, white and green trinkets.
Photographs depict vivid scenes of a suffragette's life: WSPU members on a self-roclaimed 'monster' march, wearing their official uniforms of a white frock decorated with purple, white and green accessories: women selling The Suffragette at street corners, or chalking up pavements with details of a forthcoming meeting.
Windows disp
A．the role of the Pankhurst family in the suffrage movement
B．the violence of the movement's political campaign
C．the success of the movement's corporate image
D．the movement's co-operation with suffrage groups overseas
第10题
The high costs of running AHI s hotels are related to their______
A．management.
B．size.
C．staff.
D．policies.
客服
TOP
警告：系统检测到您的账号存在安全风险
为了保护您的账号安全，请在“上学吧”公众号进行验证，点击“官网服务”-“账号验证”后输入验证码“”完成验证，验证成功后方可继续查看答案！
