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Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Text 1
Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it’s hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good."
That’s because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol."
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow’s research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though.
Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That’s because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital’s intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It’s impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans.
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain’s reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug’s hold.
Compulsive eaters are typical example of

A．pleasure turning into habits and finally addiction.
B．obese people with brain hyperactivity.
C．those who can’t control their mouth, lips and tongue.
D．those who might also be addicted to gambling.
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单项选择题


Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Text 1
Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it’s hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good."
That’s because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol."
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow’s research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though.
Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That’s because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital’s intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It’s impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans.
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain’s reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug’s hold.
According to Dr. Nora Volkow, the use, of drugs

A．is a very harmful behavior that evolution failed to get rid of.
B．makes it hard for people to drive safely under its influence.
C．has to do with people’s desire to achieve pleasant feelings.
D．is understandable behavior because it dates back long ago.
单项选择题


Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Text 1
Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it’s hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good."
That’s because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol."
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow’s research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though.
Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That’s because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital’s intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It’s impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans.
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain’s reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug’s hold.
According to the text, anyone may be addicted to drugs if they

A．are born with a predisposition to addiction.
B．use certain chemicals long and frequently enough.
C．have sufficient drugs or alcohol to use.
D．create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving.
单项选择题


Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Text 1
Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it’s hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good."
That’s because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol."
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow’s research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though.
Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That’s because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital’s intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It’s impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans.
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain’s reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug’s hold.
Compulsive eaters are typical example of

A．pleasure turning into habits and finally addiction.
B．obese people with brain hyperactivity.
C．those who can’t control their mouth, lips and tongue.
D．those who might also be addicted to gambling.
单项选择题

Text 3
Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But "a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earthworm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark comer of the barn. Only about 15% of "free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them.
This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that "the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud ,the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville", "The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once ), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world’ s funniest joke.
Why range so widely The authors’ beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization," or buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein (" No Logo")and Alissa Quart (" Branded"), come in for
special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions.
Anticipating criticism, perhaps ,Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race" :each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors’, Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. ( This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure. )
But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were.
Still, it would be a shame if the book’ s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War II critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.
The joke about" free-range" chicken is used in the text to

A．introduce the topic of anti-consumerism.
B．draw a comparison between chicken and earthworm.
C．stress the fact that chickens don’ t actually want much space.
D．point out that chickens, like human, should have a choice.
单项选择题

Text 4
With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional mediamanagers cause to be envious, The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual privateequity funds are growing—a $10 billion fund is likely this year—so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially ff private-equity investors club together,
Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards.
One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity’s buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates (联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private-equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year.
Private-equity’s interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry.
Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the farm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.
The best title for the text might be

A．Private-Equity and the Media Industry.
B．Private-Equity and Traditional Media Managers.
C．Private-Equity’s Role in Economic Development.
D．Private-Equity Has Much Profit to Make.
单项选择题


Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Text 1
Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it’s hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good."
That’s because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol."
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow’s research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though.
Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That’s because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital’s intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It’s impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans.
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain’s reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug’s hold.
Paulus could accurately predict the relapsers because

A．the part of their brain controlling cognitive skills is less active.
B．a four-week intensive rehabilitation program is not effective enough.
C．he has the devices sophisticated enough to scan any brain damage.
D．something innate to their brains prompt them to use drugs.
单项选择题

Text 3
Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But "a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earthworm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark comer of the barn. Only about 15% of "free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them.
This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that "the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud ,the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville", "The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once ), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world’ s funniest joke.
Why range so widely The authors’ beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization," or buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein (" No Logo")and Alissa Quart (" Branded"), come in for
special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions.
Anticipating criticism, perhaps ,Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race" :each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors’, Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. ( This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure. )
But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were.
Still, it would be a shame if the book’ s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War II critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.
Mr. Heath and Mr. Potter seem to believe that counterculture

A．has very strong subversive powers in modem society.
B．is originated by a magazine called" Mother Jones".
C．will possibly lead to further expansion of consumerism.
D．can eventually end up feeding monstrous social problems.
单项选择题

Text 2
Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI).
Today’ s games may look better, but the gameplay is"basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an" untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what’ s going to be the next thing that improves gameplay" asks John Laird, director of the A1 lab at the University of Michigan. Improved Al is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft’ s Xbox 360, are raising expectatious across the board, says Neff Young of Electronic Arts, the world’ s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour."
Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE ) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to Increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years," he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so ,AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The Al techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while Al researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, "both sides are learning, and are now much closer."
Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS) —a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what’s happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts.
If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as "Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills.
But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.
The last sentence" so now I expect high-resolution behavior" in the second paragraph most probably means

A．the gameplay should be improved in the future.
B．the behavior of game-designers should be refined.
C．the definition of characters in games should be more accurate.
D．the expectations of gameplayers will be raised across the board.
单项选择题


Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
Text 1
Addiction is such a harmful behavior, in fact, that evolution should have long ago weeded it out of the population: if it’s hard to drive safely under the influence, imagine trying to run from a saber-toothed tiger or catch a squirrel for lunch, And yet, says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA and a pioneer in the use of imaging to understand addiction, "the use of drugs has been recorded since the beginning of civilization. Humans in my view will always want to experiment with things to make them feel good."
That’s because drugs of abuse co-opt the very brain functions that allowed our distant ancestors to survive in a hostile world. Our minds are programmed to pay extra attention to what neurologists call salience—that is, special relevance. Threats, for example, are highly salient, .which is why we instinctively try to get away from them. But so are food and sex because they help the individual and the species survive. Drugs of abuse capitalize on this ready-made programming. When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in—salience in overdrive—to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving. "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol."
That can go for nonchemical addictions as well. Behaviors, from gambling to shopping to sex, may start out as habits but slide into addictions. Sometimes there might be a behavior-specific root of the problem. Volkow’s research group, for example, has shown that pathologically obese people who are compulsive eaters exhibit hyperactivity in the areas of the brain that process food stimuli—including the mouth, lips and tongue. For them, activating these regions is like opening the floodgates to the pleasure center. Almost anything deeply enjoyable can turn into an addiction, though.
Of course, not everyone becomes an addict. That’s because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking. Brain imaging is showing exactly how that happens. Paulus, for example, looked at drug addicts enrolled in a VA hospital’s intensive four-week rehabilitation program. Those who were more likely to relapse in the first year after completing the program were also less able to complete tasks involving cognitive skills and less able to adjust to new rules quickly. This suggested that those patients might also be less adept at using analytical areas of the brain while performing decision-making tasks. Sure enough, brain scans showed that there were reduced levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought can override impulsive behavior. It’s impossible to say if the drugs might have damaged these abilities in the relapsers—an effect rather than a cause of the chemical abuse--but the fact that the cognitive deficit existed in only some of the drug users suggests that there was something innate that was unique to them. To his surprise, Paulus found that 80% to 90% of the time, he could accurately predict who would relapse within a year simply by examining the scans.
Another area of focus for researchers involves the brain’s reward system, powered largely by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Investigators are looking specifically at the family of dopamine receptors that populate nerve cells and bind to the compound. The hope is that if you can reduce the effect of the brain chemical that carries the pleasurable signal, you can loosen the drug’s hold.
We can infer from the passage that we may cure addiction by

A．scanning Of brain as often as possible.
B．consciously practicing cognitive skills.
C．going through intensive rehabilitation programs.
D．making the neurotransmitter less sensitive.
单项选择题

Text 4
With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional mediamanagers cause to be envious, The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual privateequity funds are growing—a $10 billion fund is likely this year—so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially ff private-equity investors club together,
Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards.
One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity’s buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates (联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private-equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year.
Private-equity’s interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry.
Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the farm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.
Traditional media managers might be envious because

A．Warner Music was acquired by private-equity firms at a very low price.
B．private-equity firms seem to be benefiting a lot from recent acquisitions.
C．more and more private-equity firms are entering the media industry.
D．even the biggest media firms could be acquired by private-equity firms.
单项选择题

Text 3
Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But "a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earthworm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark comer of the barn. Only about 15% of "free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them.
This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that "the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud ,the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville", "The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once ), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world’ s funniest joke.
Why range so widely The authors’ beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization," or buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein (" No Logo")and Alissa Quart (" Branded"), come in for
special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions.
Anticipating criticism, perhaps ,Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race" :each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors’, Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. ( This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure. )
But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were.
Still, it would be a shame if the book’ s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War II critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.
The word" eschew" (line 2,paragraph 3)is closest in meaning to

A．organize.
B．favor.
C．shun.
D．encourage.
单项选择题

Text 2
Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI).
Today’ s games may look better, but the gameplay is"basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an" untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what’ s going to be the next thing that improves gameplay" asks John Laird, director of the A1 lab at the University of Michigan. Improved Al is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft’ s Xbox 360, are raising expectatious across the board, says Neff Young of Electronic Arts, the world’ s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour."
Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE ) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to Increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years," he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so ,AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The Al techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while Al researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, "both sides are learning, and are now much closer."
Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS) —a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what’s happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts.
If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as "Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills.
But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.
The main purpose of the AIIDE conference is to

A．increase communication between the eastern and western spheres.
B．garantee the traffic of the gameplayers and the innovation of ideas.
C．cooperate to make more money from the computer game industry.
D．tap the commercial and academic use of A1 through further communication.
单项选择题

Text 4
With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional mediamanagers cause to be envious, The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual privateequity funds are growing—a $10 billion fund is likely this year—so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially ff private-equity investors club together,
Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards.
One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity’s buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates (联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private-equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year.
Private-equity’s interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry.
Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the farm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.
The word "volatile" (line 3, paragraph 2) most probably means

A．changeable.
B．stable.
C．versatile.
D．expensive.
单项选择题

Text 2
Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI).
Today’ s games may look better, but the gameplay is"basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an" untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what’ s going to be the next thing that improves gameplay" asks John Laird, director of the A1 lab at the University of Michigan. Improved Al is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft’ s Xbox 360, are raising expectatious across the board, says Neff Young of Electronic Arts, the world’ s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour."
Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE ) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to Increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years," he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so ,AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The Al techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while Al researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, "both sides are learning, and are now much closer."
Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS) —a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what’s happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts.
If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as "Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills.
But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.
The example of FPS is used in the passage to

A．show how software controls an enemy behavior in a shooter game.
B．show bow advanced technology can help improve the quality of games.
C．stress the importance of first principles in designing excellent games.
D．point out that the characters in a war game should shift dynamically.
单项选择题

Text 3
Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But "a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earthworm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark comer of the barn. Only about 15% of "free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them.
This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that "the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud ,the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville", "The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once ), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world’ s funniest joke.
Why range so widely The authors’ beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization," or buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein (" No Logo")and Alissa Quart (" Branded"), come in for
special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions.
Anticipating criticism, perhaps ,Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race" :each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors’, Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. ( This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure. )
But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were.
Still, it would be a shame if the book’ s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War II critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.
According to Mr. Heath and Mr. Potter, consumerism can be traced back to

A．the imposition of overbearing companies.
B．the very nature of arms race.
C．the ignorance of some stupid workers.
D．the desire to keep up with the Jones.
单项选择题

Text 4
With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional mediamanagers cause to be envious, The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual privateequity funds are growing—a $10 billion fund is likely this year—so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially ff private-equity investors club together,
Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards.
One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity’s buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates (联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private-equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year.
Private-equity’s interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry.
Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the farm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.
It can be inferred from the text that

A．private-equity pays more attention to fast growing industries.
B．newcomers deny the fact that technology is vital to media industry.
C．traditional media managers often deny the importance of technology.
D．the public stock market accentuates business with more cashflow.
单项选择题

Text 2
Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI).
Today’ s games may look better, but the gameplay is"basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an" untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what’ s going to be the next thing that improves gameplay" asks John Laird, director of the A1 lab at the University of Michigan. Improved Al is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft’ s Xbox 360, are raising expectatious across the board, says Neff Young of Electronic Arts, the world’ s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour."
Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE ) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to Increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years," he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so ,AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The Al techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while Al researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, "both sides are learning, and are now much closer."
Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS) —a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what’s happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts.
If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as "Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills.
But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.
What can be inferred from the passage

A．Commercial games can be easily adopted as research tools in colleges.
B．College students can also benefit by playing high-resolution games.
C．Further communication between the two circles may result in mutual benefit.
D．Wresting with real content and technology will provide more solutions.
单项选择题

Text 3
Halfway through" The Rebel Sell," the authors pause to make fun of" free-range" chicken. Paying over the odds to ensure that dinner was not in a previous life, confined to tiny cages is all well and good. But "a free-range chicken is about as plausible as a sun-loving earthworm": given a choice, chickens prefer to curl up in a nice dark comer of the barn. Only about 15% of "free-range" chickens actually use the space available to them.
This is just one case in which Joseph Heath, who teaches philosophy at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Potter, a journalist and researcher based in Montreal, find fault with well-meaning but, in their view, ultimately naive consumers who hope to distance themselves from consumerism by buying their shoes from Mother Jones magazine instead of Nike. Mr Heath and Mr Potter argue that "the counterculture," in all its attempts to be subversive, has done nothing more than create new segments of the market, and thus ends up feeding the very monster of consumerism and conformity it hopes to destroy. In the process, they cover Marx, Freud ,the experiments on obedience of Stanley Milgram, the films" Pleasantville", "The Matrix" and "American Beauty", 15th-century table manners, Norman Mailer, the Unabomber, real-estate prices in central Toronto (more than once ), the voluntary-simplicity movement and the world’ s funniest joke.
Why range so widely The authors’ beef is with a very small group: left-wing activists who eschew smaller, potentially useful campaigns in favor of grand statements about the hopelessness of consumer culture and the dangers of" selling out". Instead of encouraging useful activities, such as pushing for new legislation, would-be leftists are left to participate in unstructured, pointless demonstrations against" globalization," or buy fair-trade coffee and free-range chicken, which only substitutes snobbery for activism. Two authors of books that railed against brands, Naomi Klein (" No Logo")and Alissa Quart (" Branded"), come in for
special derision for diagnosing the problems of consumerism but refusing to offer practical solutions.
Anticipating criticism, perhaps ,Messrs Heath and Potter make sure to put forth a few of their own solutions, such as the 35-hour working week and school uniforms (to keep teenagers from competing with each other to wear ever-more-expensive clothes). Increasing consumption, they argue throughout, is not imposed upon stupid workers by overbearing companies, but arises as a result of a cultural" arms race" :each person buys more to keep his standard of living high relative to his neighbors’, Imposing some restrictions, such as a shorter working week, might not stop the arms race, but it would at least curb its most offensive excesses. ( This assumes one finds excess consumption offensive; even the authors do not seem entirely sure. )
But on the way to such modest suggestions, the authors want to criticise every aspect of the counterculture, from its disdain for homogenisation, franchises and brands to its political offshoots. As a result, the book wanders: chapters on uniforms and on the search for" cool" could have been cut. Moreover, the authors make the mistake of assuming that the consumers they sympathise with—the ones who buy brands and live in tract houses—know enough to separate themselves from their purchases, whereas the free-trade-coffee buyers swallow the brand messages whole, as it were.
Still, it would be a shame if the book’ s ramblings kept it from getting read. When it focuses on explaining how the counterculture grew out of post-World War II critiques of modem society, "The Rebel Sell" is a lively read, with enough humour to keep the more theoretical stretches of its argument interesting. At the very least, it puts its finger on a trend: there will be plenty of future critics of capitalism lining up for their free-range chicken.
The passage is obviously taken from a

A．reader’s digest,
B．book review.
C．critical magazine.
D．text book.
单项选择题

Text 4
With a series of well-timed deals, private-equity firms are giving traditional mediamanagers cause to be envious, The Warner Music transaction, in which Edgar Bronfman junior and three private-equity firms paid Time Warner $ 2.6 billion for the unit in 2003, is already judged a financial triumph for the buyers. Their success is likely to draw still more private-equity into the industry. And the investments are likely to get bigger: individual privateequity funds are growing—a $10 billion fund is likely this year—so even the biggest media firms could come within range, especially ff private-equity investors club together,
Some private-equity firms have long put money in media assets, but mostly reliable, relatively obscure businesses with stable cash flows. Now, some of them are placing big strategic bets on the more volatile bits, such as music and movies. And they are currently far more confident than the media old guard that the advertising cycle is about to turn sharply upwards.
One reason why private-equity is making its presence felt in media is that it has a lot of money to invest. Other industries are feeling its weight too. But private-equity’s buying spree (狂购乱买) reveals a lot about the media business in particular. Media conglomerates (联合公司) lack the confidence to make big acquisitions, after the last wave of deals went wrong. Executives at Time Warner, for instance, which disastrously merged with AOL in 2000, wanted to buy MGM, a movie studio, but the board (it is said) were too nervous. Instead, private-equity firms combined with Sony, a consumer-electronics giant, to buy MGM late last year.
Private-equity’s interest also reflects the fact that revenue growth in media businesses such as broadcast TV and radio is now hard to come by. The average annual growth rate for 12 categories of established American media businesses in 1998-2003, excluding the internet, was just 3.4% , says Veronis Suhler Stevenson, an investment bank. Private-equity puts a higher value on low-growth, high cashflow assets than the public stockmarket, says Jonathan Nelson, founder of Providence Equity Partners, a media-focused private-equity firm. What private-equity men now bring to the media business, they like to think, is financial discipline plus an enthusiastic attitude towards new technology. Old-style media managers, claim the newcomers, are still in denial about how technology is transforming their industry.
Traditional media managers grudgingly agree that, so far, private-equity investors are doing very nicely indeed from their entertainment deals. The buyers of Warner Music have already got back most of their $ 2.6 billion from the farm by cutting costs, issuing debt and making special payouts to shareholders. This year, its investors are expected to launch an initial public offering, which could bring them hundreds of millions more.
The case of the executives at Time Warner was cited to show that

A．it was a big disaster for them to have merged with AOL in 2000.
B．the board of Time Warner was not qualified to lead the company.
C．MGM would give its buyer a sharper competitive edge.
D．leading media companies were "once bitten, twice shy".
单项选择题

Text 2
Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better—their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence(AI).
Today’ s games may look better, but the gameplay is"basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an" untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what’ s going to be the next thing that improves gameplay" asks John Laird, director of the A1 lab at the University of Michigan. Improved Al is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft’ s Xbox 360, are raising expectatious across the board, says Neff Young of Electronic Arts, the world’ s biggest games publisher. "You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour."
Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE ) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to Increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years," he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s, wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so ,AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The Al techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while Al researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says, "both sides are learning, and are now much closer."
Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS) —a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced" planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. "Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what’s happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts.
If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as "Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills.
But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.
According to the passage, good video-games used to be judged in terms of

A．how sophisticated the behaviors of the characters are.
B．how good-looking the characters seem to be.
C．how sophisticated the artificial intelligence is.
D．how much authenticity is displayed in the characters.
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