Section A
In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
Passage One
Lake Trummen in southern Sweden used to be a polluted, weed-choked mess. Now, after a $ 14 million cleanup, bathers crowd its clear blue water in summer.
a city of 80,000 that sits on its shores, is vying to be the most environmentally pristine place in Sweden. The town"s car fleet is being converted to biogas, a clean fuel based on methane, and a new biofuel factory has created 320 jobs.
has cut its carbon dioxide emissions by a third over the past 15 years, and the town even channels leftover heat from the local crematorium into homes.
Swedish business and political leaders think places like
are on to something. A few decades ago the country led the world in developing mobile technology through companies such as Ericsson. Now, with telecom sales flattening, business and political leaders think green technology could spark a new export boom—crucial to Sweden, where exports account for more than half of gross domestic product. "There is huge demand around the world for this technology," says Anders
president of Volvo Technology Transfer, a subsidiary of truck and bus maker Volvo that has invested about $ 20 million in clean tech companies.
While Denmark has wind power giant Vestas and Germany has a host of big outfits such as Q-Cells that make solar cells and panels, Sweden"s clean tech sector is made up mostly of smaller companies. In
for instance, Ⅳ Produkt makes energy-efficient ventilation systems it exports to 15 countries, from Belgium to Ukraine. The company says the systems mean energy savings of 80%, paying for themselves in about two years.
Some 30% of IV"s $ 38.6 million in revenues came from exports last year, a number that is likely to hit 50% by 2012, says sales manager
Fredriksson. In a Bauhaus-like suburban research park outside Stockholm, a startup called TranSIC is designing computer chips for the power systems of hybrid vehicles. And deep in the pine forests of Boden near the Arctic Circle, Swebo Bioenergy makes systems to burn manure and wood chips for heat. The company, with close to $ 8 million in annual sales, says it is deluged with orders from the U. S. and Europe. "This is going like a steamroller," says export manager Mattias Lindgren.
Sweden boasts some 3,500 clean tech companies that together book roughly $ 14 billion in revenues. Exports, which make up about a quarter of their overall sales, have grown 75% over the last four years. To further boost the industry, the government is earmarking $ 590 million for environmental projects over the next two years, including $ 180 million to commercialize green tech. None other than King Carl XVI Gustav has become the green industry"s biggest promoter and fan: He heats his suburban Drottningholm Palace with wood pellets and drives himself to and from Stockholm in a dark blue Volvo C30 station wagon that runs on biofuel. Where possible, light bulbs in the royal residences are being replaced with the energy-saving variety. He also has a prototype car that runs on hydrogen.
The 62-year-old king, whose environmental activism goes back to his Boy Scout days, is also taking to the road to pitch Swedish green business. He recently broke ground on a plant that Swedish Biogas International is building in Flint, Mich. "Mother Earth is not feeling well," the king says, "and she"s reacting." Green projects such as the biogas plant are one way to help repair the damage.
The king also sees Swedish exports and the environment as natural partners. "We"re a small country, so we"re dependent on exports. And we"ve always lived in a clean environment, close to nature." He admits change isn"t easy but says, "We have to think in the long term, not short term as we have before, but still make this happen quickly. I try to change my own thinking. We have to make this happen and not just discuss it. I don"t like discussions."
And in an interview with Business Week, he gently chides one reporter for flying to Stockholm to talk instead of picking up the phone. (此文选自 Businessweek)
Passage Two
They helped fleeing Romans evade Attila the Hun and held a glittering city aloft for more than 1,500 years. But the wooden pilings rising out of the Grand Canal in Venice are so decayed that as we clung to them one afternoon it wasn"t at all clear whether they would be sturdy enough to prevent us from capsizing into its murky waters.
It was rush hour in Venice, so the canal"s usual tumult of crosscurrents and tides was churning with the wake of water taxis, ferries and delivery boats. Each volley of waves slapped against the side of the inflatable kayak we were using to cross Italy"s most storied waterway; the pilings were our best chance to avoid being immersed in it.
This probably wasn"t quite what my girlfriend had in mind when we first started thinking about a trip to Venice. After scouring guidebooks, we found that the logical thing seemed to be to move about the city like other tourists: by foot, water bus and the occasional overpriced gondola ride. But as novice canoers, we were intrigued by the thought of exploring the waterways ourselves. We spent hours researching where and how to rent a small craft in Venice but found that the combination of Italian bureaucracy and the mighty gondolier lobby has made it virtually impossible.
Our solution An inflatable kayak that"s portable enough to check as luggage yet sturdy enough to hold 500 pounds and withstand the rigors of Class Ⅱ rapids. Getting it there was easy because it weighs just 32 pounds and tucks into a suitcase-sized tote bag (along with a foot pump). And it was surprisingly affordable: our two-person kayak, by West Marine, retails for $ 699, but we found one brand-new on eBay for $ 163.44, about the price of a 45-minute gondola ride.
Paddling the canals offers a visceral way to appreciate Venice"s mythic waters. On a purely practical level, it"s a lot easier to get lost walking Venice, with its twisting passageways and thousands of alleys, than to maneuver through its 200 easily navigable canals. The water also offers easier access to some of the city"s overlooked neighborhoods, like the Jewish ghetto in Cannaregio.
Of course, any attempt to explore Venice"s canals involves a confrontation with the reality of water itself. Lord Byron and Casanova may have swum the canals in centuries past, but today swimming is banned for public health reasons. The canals are a drainage basin for 1.4 million people in the area around Venice, and a sewer system for the 60,000 residents of the historic center and the 20 million tourists who visit it each year. Dr. Edward S. Van Vleet, a University of South Florida Marine biochemist, has been studying the canals since 1985, and says the combination of chemical pollution and household waste make for a particularly noxious mix.
The most surprising sensory revelation of traveling the canals is the sound or, more precisely, the glorious absence of noise. Because Venice has no cars or traffic noise, today"s city is true to its centuries-old nickname, La Serenissima, and that tranquility is amplified on the water. A five-minute paddle from the tourist bedlam of the Rialto are aquatic side streets where even at midday, the hush was interrupted only by droplets from our paddles.
And nearly everywhere you paddle are sumptuous ruins, signs of a sinking city. Peer behind the rusty wrought-iron gates of many homes that abut the canal and you might see partly submerged first-floor porches, foyers or sitting rooms that were abandoned long ago, as rising waters forced the residents to flee upstairs.
While many gondoliers seem none too pleased at the prospect of sharing their waterways with nonpaying travelers, most boaters were polite. Many pedestrians appeared bemused by the novelty of a kayak, snapping photographs, waving and shouting the occasional "Buona idea!"
Out on the bustling Grand Canal, however, the pace is too fast and the water too treacherous for such niceties. It took us three days of maneuvering the side canals to work up the courage to try to make it across the 60-yard width of the Grand Canal, a feat that at first glance appears as wise as crossing an Interstate on a tricycle.
As we paddled from the Rio Di S. Zan Degola onto the Grand Canal, we hugged the shoreline, then sprinted into a cove of half-rotted pilings, buffering ourselves from the waves. Vaporetti powered past us from both directions, water taxis darted by, and delivery boats loaded with appliances. After two false starts, we spotted a crease in traffic and made a dash for it. Water splayed from our paddles as we sprinted out into the open water, swiveling our heads left and right to make sure we weren"t about to be rammed by a turnip boat.
After a minute of heavy paddling, we had reached the middle of the canal, where water was calmer and the city"s sounds again seemed muted. Then we scurried across the other busy lanes. When we reached the bank, mercifully, there was a wine bar waiting to commemorate the achievement. (此文选自 The New York Times)
Passage Three
High in the mountains of southern France, the sleepy town of Aurillac has few obvious charms to attract the outsider. If the setting is scenic, its claims to fame are slender: a thriving umbrella industry and a reputation as the coldest place in the country. Understandably, the tourists stay away. Except, that is, for one hectic week each summer, when the community plays host to the International Festival of Street Theater, an extravaganza that now attracts 100,000 visitors keen to watch performers from as far away as Poland and Chile. The bars fill; the shops prosper. "It"s put Aurillac on the map," says festival director Jean-Marie Songy. "We"re a place that people visit as opposed to simply passing by."
And as countless festival organizers and chambers of commerce have realized, the longer visitors stay, the more they spend. As the summer season draws to a close, communities across the world—from outsize cities to modest villages—are counting the rewards of tapping into this booming cultural economy. This year Europe alone will stage some 400 arts festivals, ranging from the Reykjavik Jazz Festival to the Edinburgh International Festival of music, opera and theater, which last month celebrated its 60th anniversary.
All the world loves a party, it seems—especially one that pays its own way. "More and more places are recognizing the massive economic, cultural and social benefits of a festival," says Joanna Baker, the Edinburgh festival"s marketing director. To be sure, a successful arts festival represents a happy union of commercial self-interest and public entertainment. Though many of even the best-known festivals need public subsidies to survive, they still provide an opportunity to lift a community"s profile or pack its restaurants and hotels.
Festivalgoers face an increasingly eclectic array of subjects—and venues. Barcelona, for one, boasts 26 major arts festivals a year—only one more than Melbourne, Australia. Film buffs can now choose between showings in cities from Aarhus in Denmark to Zagreb, not to mention the Pan-African Festival of Film and Television in Burkina Faso.
Ambitious promoters are now looking across borders to push successful formulas. In recent years, the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Britain has established similar events in Segovia, Spain, and the Colombian city of Cartagena. Even newcomers to the market have little problem filling seats; Manchester reports packed houses and reckons it"s on target to attract 300,000 visitors within a few years.
To the optimists, those surging numbers suggest a welcome change in public tastes. The new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has spoken of the proliferating literary festivals—Britain now has more than 300, compared with just three back in 1983—as evidence of a new cultural "seriousness." Others believe the communal experience of festivalgoing provides a useful antidote to the solitary pastimes—many of them electronic—of 21 st-century life.
But festival frenzy can be too much of a good thing. A report published last year for the Edinburgh International Festival warned that the rising tally of festivals would rapidly increase the competition for audiences. The workaday port of Rotterdam is now home to a year-round series of festivals in part to keep up with its classier neighbor, Amsterdam. In an age of cheap air travel, the opera lover with a free weekend can head for Riga as easily as Salzburg.
And there"s a finite supply of sponsors and public money, not to mention performers. Already there"s grumbling over rising fees for the biggest names.
Critics argue that the whole purpose of the festival is changing. "Festivals used to belong to the public," says Getz. "Now they are almost always created for strategic reasons." Inevitably, that brings the risk of losing distinctive appeal. "This "festivalization" is creating a kind of homogeneity problem that festivals were created to solve," said Janice Price, boss of Luminato, Toronto"s Festival of Arts and Creativity.
Still, the benefits are simply too good to pass up. Cultural festivals are emerging as the new must-have for postindustrial cities keen to recast their images. Redeveloping the rundown waterfront or calling in big-name architects is only the start. "Big, flashy iconic buildings are not enough," says Fran Thoms, head of Cultural Strategy at Manchester City Council in Britain. "You need to fill the space between the buildings—and that"s where festivals come in."
If all else fails, cities can follow the example of little Leavenworth, Washington, and completely recreate themselves as a festival center. When Leavenworth"s logging industry collapsed, the settlement was remodeled to resemble a Bavarian village capable of hosting a range of cultural events. Result: 2 and a half million visitors a year. And a reputation as a don"t-miss stop on the festival circuit. (此文选自 Newsweek)
Passage Four
Faith schools and academies should be stripped of their power to choose pupils, according to research that suggests that some secondary schools are flouting new rules designed to prevent middle-class pupils dominating the best comprehensives.
Researchers at the London School of Economics, who studied more than 3,000 secondary school admission forms for 2008, said that faith schools and other establishments that control admissions, including academies, should hand over the job of allocating places to an independent body to ensure greater fairness. Anne West, director of the education research group at the LSE and lead author of the study, said that this could be the local authority, which already controls admissions for community schools, or a religious body such as the diocesan authority.
The researchers found that some schools were operating a form of backdoor selection by asking for personal information about parents" marital status, occupation and educational background and even children"s hobbies. It also found that a significant minority of nonselective schools—5 percent—were selecting pupils on the basis of aptitude for a particular subject.
More than half a million 11-year-olds in England will discover this week whether they have got a place at their preferred secondary. Early indications suggest that nationally up to a sixth of children, more than 90,000 pupils, could be disappointed.
An overall decline in the number of applications means that the proportion of those failing to get their first choice is likely to fall slightly.
The Times has conducted a survey of 65 local authorities. The proportion of pupils not getting their first choice in the West London borough of Kensington and Chelsea was 40 per cent. Further west in Hillingdon the proportion was 29.5 per cent. In Hertfordshire the figure was 33 per cent, in Bournemouth 29 per cent and in Bristol 19 per cent.
In the grammar school areas of Kent and Buckinghamshire, the proportions were 21.5 and 46.05 per cent respectively.
Professor West said that despite the introduction of an admissions code in 2007 to outlaw backdoor selection several schools had breached the rules in letter and in spirit.
The study, which was funded by the education charity RISE and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, found that some schools were using supplementary information forms to ask parents open-ended questions, which would indicate a great deal about the parents" own educational and social background.
Several schools asked about children"s hobbies and one even asked children to complete a 100-word statement. Another invited parents to meet the headteacher or deputy "to discuss the application for admission", despite a ban on interviews.
A small number of grammar schools (15 percent) asked about parents" marital status through indirect questions, which is also against the rules.
The sheer complexity of admissions procedures discriminated against certain groups of parents, the report suggests. More than a fifth of voluntary aided schools have at least four admissions criteria relating to religion and some have as many as 11.
Closely tied to this, Professor West said, was the wide degree of discretion open to schools that controlled their own admissions. "Schools that are their own admission authority are in theory in a position to "cream skim". This means that they are able, if they so wish, to select pupils who will maximise their examination league table results," she said. "We do not know what is going on behind closed doors. We do not know what happens in voluntary aided schools and how it is decided whether or not a particular applicant is offered a place."
The study found that the proportion of secondary schools selecting pupils by aptitude had risen from 3 per cent to 5 per cent between 2001 and 2008.
Nonselective schools that specialise in specific subject areas may select up to 10 percent of their intake by aptitude. The LSE study found that some schools used prior attainment, for example in music examinations, as an indicator of aptitude. This, Professor West suggested, was tantamount to selecting by ability.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry, the Schools Minister, said that the LSE report supported the Government"s own tough approach to the admissions code. "Admissions authorities must ensure their arrangements are not unnecessarily complex so as to disadvantage certain families," she said.
Faith authorities were highly critical of the report. The Rev Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, said that the study was based on out-of-date information and denied that the procedures for deciding a child"s religious affiliation were complex or that schools had too much discretionary power.
"Church attendance is the only measure our schools use when allocating places on the basis of faith, and you cannot get a much simpler way of assessing whether someone has a faith commitment or not," she said. (此文选自Worldwide Religious News)Which of the following words best describes the author"s treatment of the topic (Passage Three)