In a materialistic and ______ society people's interest seems to be focused solely on monetary pursuit.
   A. adaptive         B. addictive        C. acquisitive       D. arrogant

Even if I won a million-dollar lottery, I would continue to live ______
   A. subtly           B. frugally         C. explicitly        D. cautiously

Doctors must inform ______ parents about the low odds of success in fertility treatments.
   A. protective        B. respective        C. prospective       D. perspective

Moshe Katzma, 24, denied any ______ with the beating given to the homeless man, who was found outside a National Headquarters office.
   A. involvement     B. admission       C. isolation         D. access

There are an estimated eight million people currently thought to be eligible to ______ income tax.
   A. reclaim          B. recover          C. restore           D. return

As the sky lightened even more, they began to ______ their surroundings more clearly.
   A. fall out          B. fall into         C. makeup         D. make out

China's______cultural heritage should be better protected through increased efforts to preserve endangered art.
   A. inalienable      B. intangible        C. intelligible       D. indivisible

The matter is ______ settled; we may look upon it as being settled.
   A. as long as       B. for good         C. for sure          D. as good as

An announcement of further cuts in government expenditure is______
   A. imminent        B. eminent         C. illiterate         D. emergent

The______in our soaps should come only from essential oils, which are steamed or pressed from plants.
   A. scents           B. scenarios        C. scenes           D. scales

A ______of this approach is that the variables are visually presented in a style that can be understood by generalists and specialists alike,
   A. value           B. merit           C. factor           D. worth

Desperation, hunger, thirst, and resentment all make it more likely that people will ______ a more powerful figure who promises them help and / or salvation.
   A. be prone to      B. give in to        C. live up to        D. put an end to

The sentence given to the criminal was much too ______;murder should carry the maximum penalty.
   A. negligent        B. solitary          C. lenient           D. tedious

Though it was less attractive, Ralph knew the metal box would be more______than the wooden box.
   A. terminal         B. durable         C. persistent        D. bearable

In China, although people in many regions earn much less than those in prosperous regions, they also pay much less for ______ commodities, such as housing.
   A. disposable       B. redundant        C. equivalent       D. interchangeable

This leads record companies to treat musicians as contracted artists who are not paid a fixed sum for their labor-time, but instead receive royalties in ______ to their success.
   A. addition         B. relation         C. percentage       D. proportion

Terrorists will go to any length to ______ their evil ends, and pay no attention to the basic living rights of other peace-loving people.
   A. reach           B. gain            C. achieve         D. succeed

Australia continued the fight to end Japan's annual whale hunts, warning that its plan to kill humpback whales in Antarctica could ______ outrage.
   A. spark           B. lead            C. result           D. involve

At the moment every culture in Britain has a similar philosophy as far as size______;if you want to look good and be desirable, you've got to be thin.
   A. shows          B. states           C. says            D. goes

Women who entered voluntary work during the inter-war years did so largely because it provided them with ______ from household routine.
   A. distortion       B. diversion        C. dissipate        D. discount

There are so many new books about dying that there are now special shelves set aside for them in bookshops, along with the health-diet and home-repair paperbacks. Some of them are so  21   with detailed information and step-by-step instructions for performing the function, that you'd think this was a new sort of  22  which all of us are now required to learn. The strongest impression the casual reader gets is that proper dying has become an extraordinary,  23  an exotic experience, something only the specially trained can do.
      24  , you could be led to believe that we are the only  25  capable of being aware of death, and that when the rest of nature is experiencing the life cycle and dying, one generation after  26  , it is a different kind of process, done automatically and trivially, or more "natural", as we say.
   An elm in our backyard  27  the blight (枯萎病) this summer and dropped stone dead, leafless, almost overnight. One weekend  28  was a normal-looking elm, maybe a little bare in spots but  29  alarming, and the next weekend it was gone, passed over, departed, taken. Taken is right, for the tree surgeon came by yesterday with his  30  of young helpers and their cherry picker, and took it down branch by branch and carted it off in the back of a red truck, everyone  31  .
   The dying  32  a field mouse, at the jaws of an amiable household cat, is a spectacle I have beheld many times. It  33  to make me wince. However, early in life I gave up throwing sticks  34  the cat to make him drop the mouse,  35  the dropped mouse regularly went ahead and died anyway.

21. 
A. contained       B. embraced        C. packed          D. littered

22. 
A. ability          B. skill            C. quality          D. technology

23. 
A. and             B. even             C. yet              D. but

24. 
A. Furthermore     B. However        C. Even so         D. Since then

25. 
A. races           B. creatures        C. people          D. human

26. 
A. the other        B. another          C. the next         D. the following

27. 
A. caught          B. held            C. took            D. picked

28. 
A. that           B. which         C. it             D. this

29. 
A. something       B. anything         C. nothing          D. everything

30. 
A. crew            B. members        C. corps           D. fellows

31. 
A. sings           B. sang            C. sung            D. singing

32. 
A. to              B. in              C. for             D. of

33. 
A. was             B. was used         C. used             D. was about

34. 
A. into             B. on               C. at               D. off

35. 
A. but              B. because          C. while            D. in order that

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, or so the saying goes. Sometimes attributed to Frank Zappa, other times to Elvis Costello, this quote is usually intended to convey the futility of such an endeavor, if not the complete silliness of even attempting it. But Glenn Kurtz's graceful memoir, Practicing- A Musician's Return to Music, turns the expression on its head, giving it a different meaning by creating a lovely, unique book.
   Kurtz picked up the guitar as a kid in a music-loving family, attended the Long Island music school, and went on to play on Merv Griffin's TV show before graduating from Tufts University. Motivating the young Kurtz was the dream of reinventing classical guitar, as if by his great ambition alone he could push it from the margins of popular interest to center stage--something not even accomplished by the late Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia, perhaps the only artist of the form ever to reach anything resembling widespread celebrity.
   This book reads like a love story of sorts: Boy meets guitar. Boy loves guitar. Guitar breaks boy's heart or, more precisely, the ordinariness of a working musician's life does so. "I'd just imagined the artist's life naively, childishly, with too much longing, too much poetry and innocence and purity," Kurtz writes. "The guitar had been the instrument of my dreams. Now the dream was over."
   Boy leaves guitar. Were the story to end here, this book would be a tragedy, but after nearly a decade the boy returns to guitar, and although he has lost the enthusiasm he had in his youth, he finds his love of the guitar again in a way he never could have appreciated before.
   Although Kurtz is writing about a unique musical path, his journey speaks eloquently to the heart of anyone who has ever desperately yearned to achieve something and felt the sting of disappointment. "Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream--of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete--lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs, "he writes. "Is that time and effort, that talent and ambition, truly wasted?\

As with any work of art, the merit of Chapman Kelley's "Wildflower Works I" was in the eye of the beholder.
   Kelley, who normally works with paint and canvas, considered the twin oval gardens planted in 1984 at Daley Bicentennial Park his most important piece.
   The Chicago Park District considered it a patch of raggedy vegetation on public property that could be dug up and replanted at will like the flower boxes along Michigan Avenue. And that's what happened in June 2004, when the district decided to create a more orderly vista for pedestrians crossing from Millennium Park via the new Frank Gehry footbridge.
   If you're looking for evidence that the rubes who run the Park District don't know art when they see it, all you have to do is visit what's left of Kelley's masterpiece. The exuberant 1.5-acre tangle of leggy wildflowers is now confined to a tidy rectangle, restrained on all sides by a knee-high hedge and surrounded by a closely cropped lawn. White hydrangeas and pink shrub roses complete the look. We don't know who's responsible for the redesign, but we'll bet the carpet in his home doesn't go with the furniture.
   Still, you'd think the Park District was within its rights to plow under the prairie. Wrong. Kelley just won at lawsuit in which he argued that the garden was public are and therefore protected by the federal Visual Artists Rights Act. Under that law, the district should have given him 90 days' notice that it intended to mess with his artwork instead of rushing headlong into the demolition, a la Meigs Field. That way Kelley could have mounted a legal challenge, or at least removed the plants.
   Park District officials said they never considered the garden a work of art, even though it was installed by an established artist and not, say, Joe's Sod and Landscaping. We can understand their confusion. Just recently, we figured out that the caged greenery directly south of Pritzker Pavilion is supposed to be an architectural statement and not a Christmas tree lot.
   All that's left is for the district to compensate Kelley for his loss. Whatever price the parties settle on, let's hope the agreement also provides for the removal of the rest of "Wildflower Works I". If it wash't an eyesore before--and plenty of people thought it was...it sure is now.

A few years ago, in their search for ways to sell more goods, advertising men hit on a new and controversial gimmick. It is a silent, invisible commercial that, the ad men claim, can be rushed past the consumer's conscious mind and planted in his subconscious- and without the consumer's knowledge.
   Developed by James Vicary, a research man who studies what makes people buy, this technique relies on the psychological principle of subliminal perception. Scientists tell us that many of the sights coming to or eyes are not consciously "seen". We select only a few for conscious "seeing" and ignore the rest. Actually the discarded impressions are recorded in the brain though they are below the threshold of consciousness.
   There's little doubt in Vicary's mind as to the subliminal ad's effectiveness. His proof can be summed up in just two words: sales increase.
   In an unidentified movie house not so long ago, unknown audiences saw a curious film program. At the same time, on the same screen on which the film hero was courting the heroine a subliminal projector was flashing its invisible commercials.
   "Get popcorn", ordered the commercial for a reported one three-thousandths of a second every five seconds. It announced "Coca-Cola" at the same speed and frequency to other audiences. At the end of a six weeks trial, popcorn sales had gone up 57 percent, Coke sales 18 percent.
   Experimental Films. Inc, says the technique is not new. It began research on subliminal perception in 1954. Experimental Films stresses that its equipment was designed for helping problematic students and treating the mentally ill. At NYU two doctors showed twenty women the projected image of an expressionless face. They told the subjects to watch the face for some change of expression. Then they flashed the word angry on the screen at subliminal speeds. Now the women thought the face looked unpleasant. When the word happy was flashed on the screen instead, the subjects thought the woman's facial expression looked much more pleasant.
   Subliminal techniques, its promoters believe, are good for more than selling popcorn. Perhaps the process can even be used to sell political candidates, by leaving a favorable impression of the candidate in the minds of the electorates subliminally.
   How convincing are these invisible commercials? Skeptical psychologists answer that they aren't anywhere near as effective as the ad men would like to think they are. Nothing has been proven yet scientifically, says a prominent research man.

Walking through my train yesterday, staggering from my seat to the buffet and back, I counted five people reading Harry Potter novels. Not children- these were real grown-ups reading children's books,
   Maybe that would have been understandable. If these people had jumped whole-heartedly into a second childhood it would have made more sense. But they were card-carrying grown-ups with laptops and spreadsheets returning from sales meetings and seminars. Yet they chose to read a children's book.
   I don't imagine you'll find this headcount exceptional. You can no longer get on the London Tube and not see a Harry Potter book. Nor is it just the film; these throwback readers were out there in droves long before the movie campaign opened.
   So who are these adult readers who have made J.K. Rowling the second-biggest female earner in Britain (after Madonna)? As I have tramped along streets knee-deep in Harry Potter paperbacks, I've mentally slotted them into three groups.
   First come the Never-Readers, whom Harry has enticed into opening a book. Is this a bad thing? Probably not. Writing has many advantages over film, but it can never compete with its magnetic punch. If these books can re-establish the novel as a thrilling experience for some people, then this can only be for the better. If it takes obsession-level hype to lure them into a bookshop. that's fine by me. But will they go on to read anything else? Again, we can only hope.
   The second group are the Occasional Readers. These people claim that tiredness, work and children allow them to read only a few books a year. Yet now--to be part of the crowd, to say they've read it- they put Harry Potter on their oh-so-select reading list. It's infuriating, and maddening. Yes, I'm a writer myself, currently writing difficult, unreadable, hopefully unsettling novels, but there are so many other good books out there, so much rewarding, enlightening, enlarging works of fiction for adults; and yet these sad cases are swept along by the hype, the faddism, into reading a children's book.
   The third group are the Regular Readers, for whom Harry is sandwiched between McEwan (英国当代作家) and Balzac, Roth (德国现代诗人) and Dickens. This is the real baffler--what on earth do they get out of reading it? Why bother? But if they call rattle through it in a week just to say they've been there- like going to Longleat (朗利特山庄，英国名胜)or the Eiffel Tower--the worst they're doing is encouraging others.

The landscape of the Giant's Causeway, lurking below the gaunt sea wall where the land ends, must have struck wonder into the hearts of the ancient Irish, who subsequently felt inspired and created legends about its builder, the giant Finn McCool. The Causeway Coast has an unparalleled display of geological formations representing volcanic activity during the Early Tertiary Period some 50-60 million years ago. Its Tertiary lavas of the Antrim Plateau, covering some 3,800 sq km, represent the largest remaining lava plateau in Europe.
   The Causeway is a mass of basalt columns packed tightly together. The tops of the columns form stepping stones that lead from the cliff foot and disappear under the sea. Altogether there are 40,000 of these stone columns, mostly hexagonal, but some are quadrangular, pentagonal, heptagonal and octagonal. The tallest ate about 40 feet high, and the solidified lava in the cliffs is 90 feet thick in places.
   A fine circular walk will take you down to the Giant's Causeway, past amphitheatres of stone columns and formations with fanciful names like the Honeycomb, the Wishing Well, and the Giant's Granny, past a wooden staircase to Benbane Head, and back along the cliff-top. Further down the coast, the stunning Carrick-a-rede rope bridge spans a gaping chasm between the coast and a small island used by fishermen. The eighty-foot drop can be crossed via the swinging bridge- and is not for the faint-hearted!
   The Giant's Causeway and Causeway Coast site was inscribed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986. The site is of outstanding universal value and meets the criteria set in the World Heritage Convention. Namely, it is an outstanding example representing major stages of the earth's history including the record of life: significant on-going geological processes in landform developments, and significant geomorphic and physiographic features; moreover, it also contains superlative natural phenomena and areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance.
   Moyle District Council's Causeway Visitor Centre is open daily all year round and located on the cliff top 1 km from the site. The Centre is the ideal starting point for walks along the coastal and cliff-top paths, providing all excellent range of visitor services. A 12-minute audio-visual presentation, with commentary available in 5 European languages, enables visitors to further explore the origins of the Giant s Causeway through local folklore~ and scientific theory, and highlights the many other attractions of the Causeway Coast and Glens of Antrim area.

Honesty no longer seems to be the best policy with telling of lies becoming a common part of our daily lives. A new research by a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts has revealed that most people lie in everyday conversation when they are trying to appear likable and competent.
   (66)______"People tell a considerable number of lies in everyday conversation. It was a very surprising result. We didn't expect lying to be such a part of daily conversation," said Robert S. Feldman.
   The study also found that lies told by men and women differ in content, though not in quantity. (67)______ "Women were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good, while men lied most often to make themselves look better," Feldman noted.
   As part of the study, a group of 121 pairs of undergraduate students were recruited to participate. (68)______Participants were unaware that the session was being videotaped. At the end of the session, the students were then asked to watch the video of themselves and identify any inaccuracies in what they had said during the conversation. They were encouraged to identify all lies, no matter how big or small.
   Feldman said the students who participated in the study were surprised at their own results. "When they were watching themselves on videotape, people found themselves lying much more than they thought they had," Feldman said. The lies the students told varied considerably. (69)______Others were more extreme, such as falsely claiming to be the star of a rock band.
   "It's so easy to lie," Feldman said. "We teach our children to be honest, but we also tell them it's polite to pretend they like a birthday gift they' ve been given. (70)______."
   A. The results showed that men do not lie more than women or vice versa, but they lie in different ways.
   B.  Kids get a very mixed message regarding the practical aspects of lying, and it has an impact on how they behave as adults.
   C.  Some were relatively minor, such as agreeing with the person that they liked someone when they did not.
   D.  They were told that the purpose of the study was to examine how people interact when they meet someone new.
   E.  Anyway, the knowledge that we are all capable of lying makes it really hard to trust people when they tell you things.
   F.  The study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology, found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation and told an average of two to three lies.

66. 

67. 

68. 

69. 

70. 

Customer experience is the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company. (71)______Indirect contact most often involves unplanned encounters with representations of a company's products, services, or brands and takes the form of word-of-mouth recommendations or criticisms, advertising, news reports, reviews, and so forth. Such all encounter could occur when Google's whimsical holiday loges pop up on the site's home page at the inception of a search, or it could be the distinctive "potato, potato" sound of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle's exhaust system. (72)______
   The secret to a good experience isn't the multiplicity of features on offer. Microsoft Windows, which is rich in features, may provide what a corporate IT director considers a positive experience. (73)______A customer's experience with an Apple device such as the iPod begins well before the purchaser turns it on perhaps because of the dancing silhouettes in the TV advertisements. Furthermore, the origami-like (and recyclable) packaging enfolds the iPod as though it were a Faberge egg made for a czar. A small sticker, "Designed in California, Made in China," communicates the message that Apple is firmly in charge but also interested in keeping costs down. Even Windows users appreciate the device's intuitive,  Mac-like feel and find that downloading tracks from iTunes is easier than buying a CD on Amazon. (74)______
   A successful brand shapes customers' experiences by embedding the fundamental value proposition in all the product's features. For BMW, "the Ultimate Driving Machine" is much more than a slogan; it informs the company's manufacturing and design choices. (75) ______ BMW would not consider developing such a feature unless it amplified rather than diminished the driving experience.
   A. Every Apple product is designed with the, overarching purpose of making the time one spends with Apple an enjoyable experience.
   B. It might just be an e-mail from one customer to another.
   C. Direct contact generally occurs in the course of purchase, use, and service and is usually initiated by the customer.
   D. People's expectations are set high in part by their previous experiences with a company's offerings
   E. In 2000. Mercedes-Benz introduced a system that automatically controls the distance between a Mercedes and the car in front.
   F. However, many home users prefer Apple's Macintosh operating system, which offers fewer features and configuration options.

71. 

72. 

73. 

74. 

75. 

One of the most difficult situations that a researcher can encounter is to see or suspect that a colleague has violated the ethical standards of the research community. It is easy to find excuses to do nothing, but someone who has witnessed misconduct has an unmistakable obligation to act. At the most immediate level, misconduct can seriously obstruct or damage one's own research or the research of colleagues. 1) More broadly, even a single case of misconduct can malign scientists and their institutions, which in turn can result in the imposition of counterproductive regulations, and shake public confidence in the integrity of science.
   To be sure, raising a concern about unethical conduct is rarely an easy thing to do. In some cases, anonymity is possible--but not always. Reprisals by the accused person and by skeptical colleagues have occurred in the past and have had serious consequences. 2) Any allegation of misconduct is a very important charge that needs to be taken seriously. If mishandled, an allegation can gravely damage the person charged, the one who makes the charge, the institutions involved, and science in general.
   Someone who is confronting a problem involving research ethics usually has more options than are immediately apparent. In most cases the best thing to do is to discuss the situation with a trusted friend or advisor. 3) In universities, faculty advisors, department chairs, and other senior faculty call be invaluable sources of advice in deciding whether to go forward with a complaint.
   An important consideration is deciding when to put a complaint in writing. Once in writing, universities are obligated to deal with a complaint in a mole formal manner than if it is made verbally. 4) Putting a complaint in writing can have serious consequences for the career of a scientist and should be undertaken only after thorough consideration.
   The National Science Foundation and Public Health Service require all research institutions that receive public funds to have procedures in place to deal with allegations of unethical practice. 5) These procedures take into account fairness for the accused, protection for the accuser, coordination with funding agencies, and requirements for confidentiality_ and disclosure.
   In addition, many universities and other research institutions have designated an ombudsman, ethics Officer, or other official who is available to discuss situations involving research ethics. Such discussions are carried out in the strictest confidence whenever possible. Some institutions provide multiple entry points, so that complainants can go to a person with whom they feel comfortable.

76. 

77. 

78. 

79. 

80. 

Topic
   When do you think is the best time for a college candidate to decide on his major: before going to college or while enrolled in college? Provide your reasons and supporting details.