SECTION 5: LISTENING TEST (30 minutes)

Directions: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only inf ormation from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the correspond ing spa ce in your ANS WER BOOKLET.

Questions 1-3 //tr.hjenglish.com/
      Twelve-year-old Claire Elliott owes her French penpal two letters. Her English homework is always skimpy and late, and her friends have given up e-mailing her because she never replies. Yet, according to her mother Megan, Claire is a voracious reader. She just hates writing. A copywriter herself, Megan Elliott had assumed that all her children would learn to write as they had learnt to read, with relative ease. But as soon as Claire started school her writing seemed to be a problem. "Claire could never work out how to hold the pencil. Eventually, she ended up with this very tense, odd grip," says Megan.

      "Every year at parents' evening I'd say, 'She still doesn't seem to be holding her pencil very well' and the teacher would say, 'No she doesn't, does, she'. We all left it, and now Claire is capable of writing, though in a rather stilted style. But she hates it. Which seems a terrible shame."

      Going by the latest national test results for 11-year-olds, Claire is not alone. Almost half of all boys and four out of 10 girls fail to reach the average standard in their writing SATs - far more than the 20% or so of pupils who fail in reading. Parents who help their children learn to read are often at a loss to know how to help them write. That is not surprising, says the psychologist Dr Rhone Stainthorp, because even the experts don't fully understand what works. They just know that with its combination of hugely different skills - structuring, spelling, physical co-ordination, use of grammar and syntax - writing is "probably the hardest thing we ask our children to learn".

      So how can parents help? For children to learn to write well they need rich stores of language, says Kate Jones, who edits the magazine Young Writer (www. young-writer. org), which each year receives 5,000 contributions. What characterizes the best pieces, she says, is that they use fresh words and sentence structures - and the children who have these are the ones whose parents talk to them a lot, and continue to read aloud to them long after they can read to themselves. //tr.hjenglish.com/

     If children see their parents enjoy writing letters or making up poems they will imitate them, says Jones. Families can write together - keep a holiday scrapbook, or correspond with the tooth fairy - and they can play writing games. //tr.hjenglish.com/

      "There's a game where everybody writes the first sentence of a story on their own piece of paper, then you fold the papers and pass them on to the person on your left, who writes an ending. Then you pass them on again and each of you writes a story tojoin up the beginning and end," says Jones.

     It won't go down well, though, with the many older children — aged eight-plus–who, like Claire Elliott, have already been put off by a struggle with writing. As children approach 11, says Stainthorp, writing's component skills need to be automatic. If, by then, children are still concentrating on joining up letters or spelling, they are not thinking sufficiently about what they are trying to say.

     At this stage parents can help by boosting those basic skills. That may mean a handwriting course. It may mean tuition from a spelling specialist, or buying a hand-held spell-checker for children aged nine-plus to use - not when learning to spell, but when writing. //tr.hjenglish.com/

     Rhodri Williams, 15, and his brother Martin, 13, have been writing stories since they were seven. Their mother Kate encouraged them by making up entertaining comic poems. "We make up a lot of jokes and puns round the dinner table and when they say 'I'm bored' I say 'Go write something down'. They may not do it then, but they do it later," she says. The more children write, the better they get at it, says Stainthorp. "The children who initially succeed at writing, because they don't find it too hard, tend to get better and better. They do more writing, so they get more practice.

      "The children who initially find it very difficult do less writing. So they don't get the practice and they get further and further adrift. One group spirals up and the other group spirals down, and it becomes difficult to close the gap."
      (Claire and Megan Elliott are pseudonyms)

1.   Why does the author mention the 12-year-old girl Claire Elliott at the beginning of the passage?
2.   What is Young Writer's editor Kate Jones' view about improving children's writing skill?
3.   What is the psychologist Dr. Rhona Stainthorp's point of view? What is his suggestion on children's writing problem?

Questions 4-6 //tr.hjenglish.com/
      Genghis Khan massacred the population of whole cities as he built his Mongol empire. But in 1227, when his son avenged his death by ordering the slaying of the Central Asian Tangut people, he destroyed a whole culture, as the local Tangut language was never again spoken. The world now loses a language every two weeks, a rate unprecedented in history. Of course, not all meet such a Violent end. Two lively and accessible new books, Andrew Dalby's "Language in Danger' and "The Power of Babel" by John McWhorter, map the intricate combination of politics, genocide, geography and economics that more typically conspire in their demise — and ask whether we are losing a testament to human creativity that rivals great works of art.

      Linguists estimate that in 100 years fewer than half the world's 6,000 languages will still be in use. Will this mean a more peaceful, communicative world or an arid linguistic desert, subject to the tyranny of the monoglot yoke? In answering this question, Dalby and McWhorter take us on a fascinating and colorful spin through history, chronicling the rise of empires and crisscrossing the globe to take in the indigenous tribes of west Africa, Tasmania and the Amazon, tracking down itinerant healers in Bolivia, whale hunters off the coast of Germany, Russian immigrants in New Yorkwin short, anyone who can cast light on the unique ways people communicate. //tr.hjenglish.com/

      McWhorter likens linguistic change to Darwin's theory of evolution, arguing that languages, like animals and plants, inevitably split into subvarieties, alter in response to environmental pressures and evolve new forms and useless features. In prose that is bold and compelling, he warns against seeing grammar as a repository of culture, arguing that it is more often formed by chance and convenience and does not reflect its speakers world view any more than "a pattern of spilled milk reveals anything specific about the bottle it came from." His theory is slightly undermined by careless errors: a Latin sentence he has composed, on which his first chapter rests, has four mistakes in nine words. (Later, rather amazingly, he bungles the masculine and neuter forms of illa, the basic word for "that.")

      Rather than disassociating languages from the people who speak them, Dalby takes on the difficult but equally rewarding challenge of draw4ng out the distinct consciousness expressed by each tongue. As Babel becomes homogenized, surviving languages have fewer new words and ideas to draw on. Without Greek there would be no "wine-dark sea." We would not "bury the hatchet" if American Indians hadn't done it already.

      Despite these differences, both authors agree that with each language we learn, our ability to comprehend the world is given fresh, new scope. The word for "world' in Yupik, an Eskimo-Aleut language of Alaska, encompasses weather, outdoors, awareness and sense, as compared with its European equivalents, which tend to refer to "people, a crowd, inhabitants," as in the French du monde, a lot of people, or the classical Greek he oikoumene, meaning the settled zone. Whereas in English we may simply say "he is chopping trees," Tuyuca speakers in the Amazon rain forest must change their suffixes to specify whether this was told to them, they saw it themselves, they heard the sound or they're simply guessing. //tr.hjenglish.com/

      Why are these languages disappearing? Globalization is the modern equivalent of Genghis Khan, both authors argue. English is now competently spoken by about 1.8 billion people worldwide. Parents consider it the key to a more prosperous life. Fearing that without fluency in the languages of the cultures of "tall buildings" their children will be deprived of standardized education and the ability to reap the rewards of international trade, they allow their own tongues to die off with the elderly. Dalby and McWhorter rewrite the script on language change from nearly opposite but equally intelligent perspectives, agreeing on the most significant point: if our rich linguistic heritage is not preserved, even English speakers may find themselves uncomfortably lost for words.

4.   Introduce briefly Dalby and McWhorter's views about the death of languages and their differences.
5.   What can be concluded from the discussion about the word "world" and the expression "he is chopping trees" in different languages"?
6.   Explain the sentence "Globalization is the modern equivalent of Genghis Khan." from the last paragraph.

Questions 7-10 //tr.hjenglish.com/
      The greatest danger to our future is apathy. We cannot expect those living in poverty and ignorance to worry about saving the world. For those of us able to read this magazine, it is different. We can do something to preserve our planet.

      You may be overcome, however, by feelings of helplessness. You are just one person in a world of 6 billion. How can your actions make a difference? Best, you say, to leave it to decision makers. And so you do nothing.

      Can we overcome apathy? Yes, but only if we have hope. One reason for hope lies in the extraordinary nature of human intellectual accomplishment. A hundred years ago, the idea of a 747, of a man on the moon, of the Internet remained in the realm of science fiction. Yet we have seen those things and much, much more. So, now that we have finally faced up to the terrible damage we have inflicted on our environment, our ingenuity is working overtime to find technological solutions. But technology alone is not enough. We mush engage with our hearts also. And it's happening around the world.

      Even companies once known only for profits and pollution are having a change of heart. Conoco, the energy company, worked with the Jane Goodall Institute (J.G.I.) in Congo to build a sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees. I formed this partnership when I realized that Conoco, during its exploration, used state-of-the-art practices designed to have the least possible impact on the environment. Many other companies are working on clean forms of energy, organic farming methods, less wasteful irrigation and so on.

      Another reason for hope is the resilience of nature — if it is given a helping hand. Fifteen years ago, the forests outside Gombe National Park in Tanzania had been virtually eliminated. More people lived there than the land could support. J.G.I. initiated the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education Project (TACARE), a program active in 33 villages around the park. Today people improve their lives through environmentally sustainable projects, such as tree nurseries and wood lots. We provide health care, family-planning and education programs, especially for women. As their education increases, their family size tends to drop.

      While pollution still plagues much of the world, progress is being made. This May in Sudbury, Ont., I saw new forests that were recolonizing hills destroyed by 100 years of nickel mining. The community raised the money and worked for months spreading lime and planting vegetation on the blackened rock. I released the first brook trout into a once poisoned creek there. //tr.hjenglish.com/

      Animal species on the brink of extinction can be given a second chance through protection and captive breeding — even if preserving a habitat conflicts with economic interests. A company in Taiwan planned to build a rapid-transit line right through the only major remaining breeding ground of the rare pheasant-tailed jacana. There was an outcry, but it was the only economically viable route. Environmentalists worked with the company to come up with a solution — moving the breeding ground. Water was diverted back into nearby wetlands that had been drained by farmers, and suitable vegetation was replanted. In 2000 five birds hatched in their new home, and when I visited there the next year, even more birds had moved to the site.

      I derive the most hope from the energy and hard work of young people. Roots & Shoots, J.G.I.'s program for youth from preschool through university, is now active in 70 countries. The name is symbolic: roots and shoots together can break up brick walls, just as citizens of Earth together can overcome our problems. The more than 4,000 groups of young people are cleaning creeks, restoring prairies and wetlands, planting trees, clearing trash, recycling — and making their voices heard.

      We have huge power, we of the affluent societies, we who are causing the most environmental damage. For we are the consumers. We do not have to buy products from companies with bad environmental policies. To help us, the Internet is linking small grassroots movements so that people who once felt they were on their own can contact others with the same concerns.

      I feel deep shame when I look into the eyes of my grandchildren and think how much damage has been done to Planet Earth since ! was their age. Each of us must work as hard as we can now to heal the hurts and save what is left. //tr.hjenglish.com/

7.   Why does the author mention 747, a man on the moon and the Internet in the passage?
8.   What does the author want to explain when she refers to the energy company Conoco (para. 4)?
9.   The author  states that one reason for hope is "the resilience of nature" (para. 5). What does it mean? What examples does the author give to support this statement?
10.  What is "Roots & Shoots"? Why does the author say that the name is "symbolic" (para. 8)?

SECTION 6: LISTENING TEST (30 minutes)

Directions:  Translate the f ollowing passage into English and write your version in the correspond ing sp ace in your ANS WER BOOKLET.

     有了房子，就想车子，老百姓想法和银行不谋而合。银行在巩固了自己的住房贷款之后，又将目光瞄上了汽车市场。昨天，建行上海分行推出了十大优惠举措， 欲在外资非金融机构染指汽车贷款之前，做大自己的汽车贷款。 //tr.hjenglish.com/

     此前，银行界人士纷纷预测，外资非金融机构进入汽贷市场后，很可能会在手续简便和贷款利率上做文章，以吸引购车族。因此，建行的十大举措也同样是 了简化手续和提供优惠利率，希望此举能使该行的汽车贷款占个人消费信贷的比重从原来的三成提升至五成以上。

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