“Please put your phone down Daddy, we haven’t finished the story!” Hearing these heartfelt words from my four-year-old daughter was an uncomfortable wake-up call. How had I let the shiny electronic box in my hand take so much of my attention that it could even interrupt a short bedtime story with my precious children?
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that our mobile devices are in danger of taking over our entire lives. Time magazine found that 68% of users take their devices to bed with them, 20% check their phones every ten minutes and one third report feeling anxious when briefly separated from their beloved gadget. According to Osterman research, 79% of respondents take their work-related device on vacation and 33% admit to hiding from family and friends in order to check Facebook and Twitter. It’s hard to deny that these are worrying trends.
（写作内容）
1.用大约30字概括上文和图表的主要内容；
2.结合上述信息，用大约120字论述：
(1)科技的发展是否意味着人们生活更幸福。（选择“是”或“否”并论述你的观点）
(2)你认为在生活中应当如何处理人和科技的关系。
（写作要求）
1.写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句；
2.作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
3.不必写标题。
（评分标准）
内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。
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请认真阅读下列短文,并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。
注意:请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。每个空格只填一个单词。
Reputation of the corporate kind is a ''strategic asset(资产) '' that can be employed to gain ''competitive advantage'', a ''safety buffer(缓冲) '' that can be called upon to protect you against ''negative news''.
The Reputation Institute has offices in 30 countries. Plenty of other organizations offer firms advice on improving their reputations, such as Perception Partners in the United States or specialized divisions within many big consultancies. And a rapidly growing number of consultancies, like Reputation Defender, give people advice on managing their reputations online. For example, they offer tips on how to push positive items up the Google ranking and neutralize(抵消)negative ones.
It's easy to see why so many bosses are such eager consumers of this kind of advice. The market value of companies is increasingly determined by the things you cannot touch: their brands and their intellectual capital, for example, rather than their factories or fleets of trucks. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) can turn on a company in an instant and accuse it of racism or crimes against the environment. Customers can trash its products on Twitter. Corporate giants such as Toyota and BP have seen their reputations collapse in the blink of an eye.
Nevertheless, there're three objections to the reputation-management industry. The first is that it conflates(混合)many different things-from the quality of a company's products to its relationship with NGOs-into a single notion of ''reputation''. It also seems to be divided between public-relations specialists (who want to put the best possible information on the news) and corporate-social-responsibility types (who want the company to improve the world and be thanked for it).
The second objection is that the industry depends on a naive(天真的)view of the power of reputation: that companies with positive reputations will find it easier to attract customers and survive crises. It's not hard to think of counter-examples. Tobacco companies make vast profits despite their awful reputations. Everybody strongly criticizes Ryanair for its bad service and the Daily Mail for its mean-spirited journalism. But both firms are highly successful.
The biggest problem with the reputation industry, however, is that the way to deal with potential threats to your reputation is to work harder at managing your reputation. The opposite is more likely: the best strategy may be to think less about managing your reputation and concentrate more on producing the best products and services you can. Many successful companies, such as Amazon, Costco Southwest Airlines and Zappos, have been notable for their intense focus on their businesses, not for their fancy marketing. If you do your job well, customers will say nice things about you and your products.
What's in a name? | |
Values of managing reputation | ● Companies can get1. in competition through the use of strategies to manage reputation. ● Positive reputations tend to reduce the influence of negative news. |
Popularity of consultancies | ● Many organizations provide companies with advice on how to 2.up their reputations. ● Online reputation-management consultancies are on the sharp3.. |
Reasons for bosses being eager for advice about managing reputation | ● The market value of companies increasingly4. on untouchable things. ● Reputation is getting even5. to manage. |
6. to the reputation-management industry | ● It is a(n)7. of too many things, and it seems that opinions about it are8. between public-relations and corporate-social-responsibility specialists. ● The reputation-management industry naively 9. the success of a company to its positive reputation. ● The reputation industry wrongly thinks that the strategy to handle potential threats to a company is to 10. more on its reputation instead of its product quality and services. |
On his deathbed in 1638 John Harvard gave away half of his estate, about £800 and his library of some 400 books to a new college in present-day Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard's founders decided to name their new university after its first big benefactor.
About 370 years ago the first Harvard scholarship to help ''some poor scholars'' was set up thanks to £100 donated by Ann Radcliffe. The university continues to be the beneficiary of generous donors. Last year, John Paulson, an investor, donated $400m to Harvard's engineering school, its largest gift ever. Last year it raised more than $1 billion. Some of its graduates think this ought to be sufficient to cancel tuition fees.
Among them are Ralph Nader, a veteran political activist, and Ron Unz, author of a number of searing articles on American meritocracy(英才管理). Both are hoping to win election to the university's board of overseers, from which they want to make Harvard free for all students to attend, and also pressure its admissions office to make data on how it chooses which students to admit known to the public.
America's universities raised a record $40.3 billion last year, according to the Council for Aid to Education. Donations are not usually used to lower tuition fees, but they can be used to provide scholarships and financial aid to students who cannot afford to pay (70% of students at Harvard get some assistance with fees and living costs).
Some lawmakers are wondering whether threats to change the tax-free status of donations might be used to persuade colleges to bring down the cost of tuition, which has increased by 220% in real terms since 1980. Nexus Research and Policy Centre says colleges receive $80 billion in support from state and local governments every year, which ought to give politicians some leverage(影响) in return.
In January Tom Reed, a Republican congressman from New York, proposed a bill requiring donations of more than $1 billion to allocate 25% for financial aid. Two congressional committees, the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, have sent letters to the heads of the colleges with the biggest donations asking about spending, conflicts of interest and fee arrangements. The 56 largest private university donations have to explain how they use their tax-free investment earnings.
The colleges have their defenders. ''Most of these places are providing a fair amount of financial aid for students well beyond the poverty line, '' says Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Centre. Kevin Weinman, Amherst's chief financial officer, says his university's donation offers $90m to the college's budget, $30m more than tuition, room board and various fees combined. This school year, it will spend $50,000 per student funding financial aid, pay faculty and fund student activities. After Congress last examined the topic in 2007, more colleges began to award grants instead of loans. Financial aid has doubled over the past decade. Rhode Island also make voluntary payments in place of property taxes.
In addition to pointing out their generosity, most colleges also argue that forcing them to spend donation money on free tuition might even be illegal. Donors can restrict their tax-free gift to a legally-binding particular purpose, such as creating a chair, establishing a scholarship or building a new lab. Around 70% of donations are restricted funds.
If the wealthiest colleges have already spent so much on financial aid, what is the problem? Mr. Unz argues that endowment-fuelled spending on new buildings, sports facilities and the hiring of administrators has created an arms-race in higher education, pushing up prices at those universities that are not fortunate enough to have lots of generous benefactors. Harvard could cancel tuition payments without damaging its finances or touching the restricted portion of its endowment, he says. Furthermore, the abolition of both complicated financial-aid forms and terrifying sticker prices for tuition could, he argues, do much to encourage applicants from beyond the plutocracy(富豪阶级).
1.The underlined word in Paragraph 1 can be replaced by .
A.founder B.donor C.defender D.innovator
2.According to the passage, Ralph Nader and Ron Unz hope that they can .
A.help Harvard to enroll new students
B.learn about how Harvard spends its donations
C.make free education to all students at Harvard possible
D.negotiate with the Harvard's board of overseers about tuition fees
3.What can we infer from Kim Rueben's words in Paragraph 7?
A.The colleges are making full use of their donations.
B.Ordinary families cannot afford the increasing tuition fees.
C.More attention should be paid to students below the poverty line.
D.Property taxes on the colleges ought to be canceled permanently.
4.According to the last but one paragraph, most colleges hold the idea that .
A.donors should keep a check on where their money goes
B.the financial aid they receive every year is far from enough
C.they shouldn't be forced to spend donation money on free tuition
D.most donations should be used to improve colleges' infrastructure
5.According to the last paragraph, Mr Unz thinks .
A.the competition between universities is necessary
B.Harvard should offer help to those who lack money
C.financial-aid forms offered by universities should be simplified
D.arms-races in higher education may lead to higher tuition fees
6.What can be the best title for this passage?
A.Should Harvard's tuition fees be canceled?
B.How does Harvard make use of its donations?
C.What do Harvard and lawmakers disagree about?
D.Why does Harvard get more donations than other universities?
Of all the components of a good night's sleep, dreams seem to be least within our control. In dreams, a window opens into a world where logic is suspended and dead people speak. A century ago, Freud formulated his revolutionary theory that dreams were the disguised shadows of our unconscious desires and fears; by the late 1970s, neurologists had switched to thinking of them as just ''mental noise''-the random byproducts of the neural-repair work that goes on during sleep. Now researchers suspect that dreams are part of the mind's emotional thermostat(恒温器), regulating moods while the brain is ''off-line''. And one leading authority says that these intensely powerful mental events can be not only harnessed but actually brought under conscious control, to help us sleep and feel better, ''It's your dream'', says Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Chicago's Medical Center, ''If you don't like it, change it''.
Evidence from brain imaging supports this view. The brain is as active during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep-when most vivid dreams occur-as it is when fully awake, says Dr. Eric Nofzinger at the University of Pittsburgh. But not all parts of the brain are equally involved; the limbic system (the ''emotional brain'') is especially active, while the prefrontal cortex (the center of intellect and reasoning) is relatively quiet. ''We wake up from dreams happy or depressed, and those feelings can stay with us all day'', says Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William Dement.
The link between dreams and emotions shows up among the patients in Cartwright's clinic. Most people seem to have more bad dreams early in the night, progressing toward happier ones before awakening, suggesting that they are working through negative feelings generated during the day. Because our conscious mind is occupied with daily life we don't always think about the emotional significance of the day's events-until, it appears, we begin to dream.
And this process need not be left to the unconscious. Cartwright believes one can exercise conscious control over recurring bad dreams. As soon as you awaken, identify what is upsetting about the dream. Visualize how you would like it to end instead; the next time occurs, try to wake up just enough to control its course. With much practice people can learn to, literally, do it in their sleep.
At the end of the day, there’s probably little reason to pay attention to our dreams at all unless they keep us from sleeping of ''we wake up in a panic'', Cartwright says. Terrorism, economic uncertainties and general feelings of insecurity have increased people’s anxiety. Those suffering from persistent nightmares should seek help from a therapist. For the rest of us, the brain has its ways of working through bad feelings. Sleep-or rather dream-on it and you'll feel better in the morning.
1.Researchers have come to believe that dreams__________.
A.reflect our innermost desires and fears B.are a random outcome of neural repairs
C.can be modified in their courses D.are vulnerable to emotional changes
2.By referring to the limbic system, the author intends to show __________.
A.its difference from the prefrontal cortex B.its function in our dreams
C.the mechanism of REM sleep D.the relation of dreams to emotions
3.The negative feelings generated during the day tend to __________.
A.emerge in dreams early at night B.develop into happy dreams
C.worsen in our unconscious mind D.persist till the time we fall asleep
4.Cartwright seems to suggest that __________.
A.dreams should be left to their natural progression
B.dreaming may not entirely belong to the unconscious
C.visualizing bad dreams helps bring them under control
D.waking up in time is essential to the ridding of bad dreams
A few days after dropping off her daughter at college, Andrea got a phone call. Her daughter was ill. Andrea drove there immediately, located a doctor in town, booked a room at the university hotel and put her daughter to bed to recover. The next morning, Andrea went to her daughter's classes, taking notes on her behalf. It was important that her daughter headed into the first semester of college without missing a beat: A future dental career required an extremely good undergraduate academic record of four years.
At the same time, another parent faced a different type of problem. Alexis had handpicked her daughter's new university specifically and aimed to give her daughter an ideal social experience at college. But when she got there, she didn't seem to hit her stride. Alexis blamed it on a working-class roommate who didn't ever want to go out to meet people-and told her daughter, in no uncertain terms, to change roommates.
Both Andrea and Alexis are examples of ''helicopter parents'', defined by their hovering and readiness with supplies, assistance and guidance. Their interventions were costly-requiring time, financial reserves, social understanding and knowledge of higher education-though they had different purposes.
Why does educational and professional success today seem to require financial and emotional parental support? In large part, it reflects the shifting relationship between families and the university in America in the past century. Slowly after WWI and rapidly after WWII, many public universities were in fact free, as the government offered universities the resources to help families battle economic depression and poverty. However, in the 1980s, the government shifted financial aid largely from grants to loans. Soon, universities entered a period of heavy and expensive administrative growth as they faced new and intensive pressures. Without the support of the state, families eventually came to absorb many of these costs.
Universities now rely, in part, on parents, particularly those with money, time, and connections to meet their basic needs. However, paying parents bring more than funds alone. They often help promote the university; conduct admissions interviews; interface with donating alumni; assist with their own students’ emotional, cognitive and physical needs and help place graduates(both related and not) in valuable internships and jobs.
But the new family-university partnership exacts a toll. Parents are pushed to extend major parenting responsibilities into doing heavy financial lifting for their children who are supposed to be building their own financial security. There is also some truth to the notion that the helicoptered children are slow to adapt to adulthood, make decisions about their careers, and manage friendships without calling on their parents for help.
1.What does the underlined sentence ''she didn't seem to hit her stride'' in Paragraph 2 mean?
A.Alexis' daughter's social competence wasn't promoted.
B.Alexis' daughter found she herself had financial difficulties.
C.Alexis' daughter disagreed with Alexis about her working-class roommate.
D.Alexis' daughter found university life was different from what she had expected.
2.What's the author' attitude towards ''helicopter parents''?
A.Critical. B.Cautious. C.Doubtful. D.Objective.
3.What's this passage mainly about?
A.Troubles faced by universities in America.
B.The partnership between colleges and '''helicopter parents''.
C.The troubled relationship between parents and their children.
D.The fierce competition among the career-minded generation.
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1.Which of the following is NOT the feature of the Amazon.com Rewards visa card?
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B.You can get rewarded with this card even if you buy something on other websites.
C.$30 will be instantly loaded into your Amazon.com account upon the approval of your credit card application.
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C.The most attractive part of this card is the 2X rewards in gas and restaurant purchases.
D.Your points will be redeemed at Amazon.com checkout automatically towards any eligible purchase.
