试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-考博英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

青岛理工大学

Directions: Write a composition of about 250 words on the topic “Mistakes and Progress”. Write down your composition on the Answer Sheet.

The ascendancy of the Net economyAs we cross the threshold into the next century, human society is beginning its move from the industrial economy into the knowledge-based economy. The general trend is that the 21st century will be a new era of the knowledge-based economy. The most notable characteristics of this new era of the knowledge-based economy is information-driven economic growth and globalization (1).In more specific terms, the application of information to the economy is best exemplified in the networking of communication, or the so-called Net economy. This Net refers to the computer network of satellites, optic fibers, cables and telephone lines that connect the whole world. With the click of a mouse, information from the other end of the globe will be transported to your computer screen at the dizzying speed of seven-and-a-half times around the earth per second (2).Singapore has an early start in networking. If we deposit a sum of money at a particular POSB (邮政储蓄所) branch, we can withdraw our money from any other POSB branches in Singapore (3). This was an early step in networking. The networks of the future would have greater significance and implications.Generally, there are two aspects of the Net. One is the networking between businesses and their customers. The other is the networking between individual businesses, or the regional and even global networking between industrial production and scientific research. The examples of the POSB and Internet shopping belong to the first aspect.From a long-term perspective, Internet shopping is but a low-level aspect of the Net, and it is not likely to become the most important trend. After all, most merchandise are unsuitable for Internet shopping. Besides, if everyone shops on the Net, what will happen to our Orchard Road? Or New York’s Broadway? A friend said if he were to force his daughter to shop on the Net instead of letting her shop at Orchard Road, the daughter would rather kill herself.Therefore, the second aspect of the Net will be more important. Its significance goes beyond that of connecting businesses. There have been reports of simultaneous consultation of doctors from all over the world, surgery on the Net and cooperation in research and development made possible by the Internet (4). These are early examples of high-level networking.The president of Intel, producer of the Pentium micro-processors, feels that the new synergy between computers and Net technology will have multiple implications for industry of the future. The sheer power of electronic commerce (e-commerce) will change the face of trade dramatically. Sporting goods company Puma was on the verge of bankruptcy back in 1992. From 1993, Puma began to diffuse its production, logistics and marketing divisions to 80 Net enterprises worldwide, and the results were spectacular. Puma was transformed from a sickly feline into a magnificent beast. The reason for this transformation is that intra-and inter-business electronic links greatly increase the efficiency of production, planning, the collecting of information and data exchange (5). As the business is rapidly being rationalized, production figures go up while costs come down.

Is Having a Home a Right?Even on these coldest nights of the year, Americans can’t claim a right to adequate housing— not yet. But the notion that having a home is a basic human right is one that is gaining some currency around the globe, as well as on the corners of some of the most frigid cities in the United States.Record-breaking cold spells this winter have brought fresh attention to the plight of the 840,000 Americans who sleep in streets or in makeshift shelters on any given night. Twenty-five cities are reporting an average 13 percent increase in requests for emergency shelter over 2002, according to a US Conference of Mayors survey.Arguing that housing is a basic human entitlement, some advocates for the homeless have sharply criticized the situation in the US. Despite the country’s enormous wealth, a growing number of its citizens are homeless—a state of affairs that some international groups view as unacceptable and unjust.An investigator for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in January cited the US for “a range of violations” in a “dire reality” of “human rights denial” in the area of housing.Homeless advocates have also cried foul. A January report from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty says US promises made in 1948, 1949, and 1996 to progressively house all its citizens “have been badly broken.” The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, meanwhile, is preparing to argue that a projected net loss of 8,000 public housing units over the next five years would, for as many as 10,000 squatters, constitute unfair “forced eviction” under international human rights law.“I think a lot of us are groping for ways to square local, state, and national law with human rights principles,” says Rene Heybach, director of the Chicago Coalition’s Law Project. “There’s a great yearning to find an international focus because our government hasn’t provided enough to keep our people safe.”But changes are a foot, argue some members of the Bush administration.“It may very well be,” says Philip Mangano, executive director of the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness and the government’s point person on homelessness, that remedying “this wrong of homelessness will lead us to establish the right to housing. That would be consistent with our history of righting wrongs in this country, like slavery, and then creating rights afterward.”Mr. Mangano disputes the claim that the Bush administration has failed to address what he acknowledges to be a problem exacerbated by simultaneous job losses and rising housing costs. He points to the current year’s $1.27 billion investment in a range of programs to reduce homelessness. The figure marks a $100 million increase over the prior year, he said, and represents “probably the most ever invested anywhere” to put the needy in homes.The United States is not alone in experiencing a rise in homelessness, Mangano points out. And although other countries, such as Scotland and France, have in recent years passed legislation toward housing all citizens, the US is in his view honoring the spirit of its international pledges by funding programs to stem the causes of homelessness.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland has been given the nod to lead a robotic lunar mission in 2008—a key step in President George W. Bush’s recently announced space vision strategy. The lunar reconnaissance orbiter would likely be geared to investigate the potential for water ice trapped at the Moon’s poles. This type of investigation may involve powerful radar to scan the always darkened craters, thought by some scientists to contain bountiful quantities of water ice.Water ice is believed to have been brought to the Moon by impacting comets. Both NASA’s Lunar Prospector and the Pentagon’s Clementine spacecraft offered tantalizing data interpreted by some experts as indicative of water ice deposits.A number of alterative, fast-track approaches are under review at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to build the lunar orbiter. A newly formed GSFC lunar study team held their first meeting Thursday to begin scoping out how best to move the project forward.President Bush has directed NASA to undertake lunar exploration activities to enable sustained human and robotic exploration of Mars and more distant destinations in the solar system. Starting no later than 2008, the Bush plan calls for initiating a series of robotic missions to the Moon to prepare for and support future human exploration activities. A follow-on robotic lunar lander is also slated for 2009. The White House space directive states that the first extended human expedition to the lunar surface could occur as early as 2015, but no later than the year 2020.In reestablishing and reenergizing NASA’s Moon program, the White House envisions lunar exploration activities to further science, and to develop and test new approaches, technologies, and systems, including use of lunar and other space resources, to support sustained human space exploration to Mars and other destinations.1. On the robotic lunar mission which is to be led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the lunar orbiter ____2. On the robotic lunar mission, ____ will be explored to search for water ice.3. According to the third paragraph of the passage, why a newly formed GSFC lunar study team held their first meeting on Thursday?4. Federal government of the U.S. states in its space directive that ____.5. One of the purposes of NASA’s Series lunar exploration missions is to ____.

A Chinese study found that antibiotics can help prevent stomach cancer in people who carry a common strain of bacteria known to cause ulcers. The study adds to the already strong evidence that Helicobacter pylori bacteria can cause stomach cancer, a disease especially prevalent in Asia but far less common in the United States. Still, experts said the findings do not solve the dilemma of whether and how to treat carriers of the bacteria.The study involved 1,630 men and women from Fujian Province in southern China. All were carriers of H. pylori; hundreds of them already had precancerous lesions (癌变) at the outset of the study. Patients were randomly assigned to receive two weeks of treatment with antibiotics and an anti-ulcer drug, or a dummy medicine, and were followed for 7 years and a half after that. Among the 988 patients without precancerous lesions at the outset, none on the treatment got stomach cancer, compared with six in the placebo group.The findings among those with precancerous lesions were not as clear-cut: Seven in the treatment group developed stomach cancer, versus 11 in the placebo group. The study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association. H. pylori is estimated to affect as many as 90 percent of people in some developing nations and up to 50 percent of people in some industrialized countries, according to the World Health Organization. Chronic H. pylori is thought to cause stomach cancer, and doctors have come to believe since the early 1980s that it is the No. 1 cause of ulcers.The findings suggest that doctors should consider routine screening for such lesions in H. pylori patients in high-incidence areas, and treating the infections in patients with no precancerous lesions, said the authors, led by Benjamin Chun-Yu Wong of the University of Hong Kong.Dr. Michael Brown, a gastroenterologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said routine H. pylori screening would not be cost-effective in the United States because the rates of infection and cancer are so low.1. According to the passage, experts in the Chinese study mentioned in the passage are still not ____.2. Among people who developed cancer in the study, proportion of patients in the treatment group to patients in the placebo group is ____.3. In the study, what medicine did the placebo group take during the two-week treatment?4. How many patients in the study already had precancerous lesions at the outset of the study?5. The findings of the study propose that ____.

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