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

湖南师范大学

Co-ordinated economies are well equipped to handle co-ordination problems, such as promoting public health. By contrast, America’s and Britain’s virus-containment strategies can seem disjointed and occasionally chaotic.

We learned a lot in 2020. We learned what was important. We played board games and did jigsaw puzzles and really talked and listened to our children. All of those are undoubtedly good things, and we nod in solemn agreement when our neighbors enumerate those little blessings. But do any of them capture the microtexture of what our lives were like this year?

Marketplace or peer-to-peer (P2P) lending matches borrowers on low-cost online platforms. By skirting banks, P2P lending allows borrower and lender alike to achieve better rates of interest. Essentially, P2P lending is a way of capitalizing on the network effect of social media and the volumes of data generated therein to allow cheaper access to capital.According to Liberum, P2P lending in the U.K. will grow at 98 percent year-on-year in 2015, with ￡3.5 billion presently lent out. Worldwide in 2015, it’s estimated that $77 billion will be lent via P2P platforms—$60 billion China, $12 billion U.S.A. and $5 billion U.K. Morgan Stanley’s Huw Steenis says, “While marketplace lending is still about 1 percent of unsecured consumer and SME lending in the U.S., we think it can reach approximately 10 percent by 2020. We forecast the global market to grow to $150-$490 billion by 2020.” As Liberum Cormac Leech says, “We are witnessing the biggest changes to the banking sector for 400 years.”P2P lending offers huge opportunities, mainly at the expense of banks, whose biggest margins are traditionally in unsecured lending. Herein is the layer of fat P2P platforms are guzzling, picking off the banks’ best customers. P2P platforms have also proved superior at harvesting and managing big data, and have lower cost bases than banks.A significant development is that institutional money is now alighting. The largest quoted institutional P2P lender, P2P Global Investment PLC, floated in London last year. It has raised nearly 500m and aims to double that this year. As a reward for lofting “transformational” amounts of cash on to various platforms, P2P Global has been accumulating warrants and options on their equity, notably Ratesetter, Zopa, Direct Money and Lending Works.In a twist to this development, Neil Woodford, Britain’s most famous fund manager, recently upped his stake in P2P Global. Last August Woodford sold out of HSBC, fearing “fine inflation”. This seems a ringing endorsement of this disruptive but nascent sector.Perhaps most significantly, in May this year, Zopa, the P2P platform, announced its debut in secured (most P2P lending is unsecured) lending by collaborating with Uber. Uber drivers in U.K. will be able to borrow via Zopa to buy their cars, with loans secured against the cars themselves.Of course, the sector presents risks. The credit dry up when interest rates rise. A P2P platform may go bust. But some investors, refugees from the banking sector perhaps, will simply like the idea of being on the right side of regulatory and technological upheaval. And when the banks finally understand, how will they react? Who knows? So far, none of them have.1. Liberum’s data quoted in Paragraph 2 indicates that ______.2. What can we learn about P2P Global Investment PLC?3. The cooperation between Zopa and Uber has ______.4. What is the author’s attitude towards the future of P2P lending?5. What’s the purpose of the author in writing this passage?

Let children learn to judge their own work. A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time. If corrected too much, he will stop talking. He notices a thousand times a day the difference between the language he uses and the language those around him use. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like what other people say. In the same way, when children learn to do all the other things they learn to do without being taught—to work, run, climb, whistle, or ride a bicycle. They compare those performances with those of more skilled people, and slowly make the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a chance to find out his own mistakes for himself, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought that he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the teacher. Let him do it himself. Let him work out, with the help of other children if he wants it, what this word says, what answer is to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or not.If it is a matter of right answers, as it may be in mathematics or science, give him the answer book. Let him correct his own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on such routine work? Our job should be to help the child when he tells us that he can’t find a way to get the right answer. Let’s end this nonsense of grades, exams and marks. Let us throw them all out, and let the children learn what all educated persons must some day learn, that is, how to measure their own understanding and how to know what they know or do not know.Let them get on with this job in the way that seems most sensible to them, with our help as school teachers if they ask for it. The idea that there is a body of knowledge to be learnt at school and used for the rest of one’s life is nonsense in a world as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anxious parents and teachers say, “But suppose they fail to learn something essential, something they will need to get in the world?” Don’t worry! If it is essential, they will go out into the world and learn it.1. What does the author think is the best way for children to learn things?2. What does the author think teachers should NOT do?3. The passage suggests that learning to speak and learning to ride a bicycle are ______.4. Exams, grades and marks should be abolished because children’s progress should only be estimated by ______.5. The author fears that children will grow up into children who are _______.

The internet mirrors society, reflecting our strengths and weaknesses. A healthy society and a healthy internet share the same vital forces: individuals taking action, making things, solving problems, and ultimately building our own environment. We need both technology and social commitment to create spaces where healthy democracies will flourish.As citizens, we have a right and a responsibility to participate in democracy for it to work. Today we see technology—specifically the internet—enabling rich new ways to participate in democracy. The internet lets citizens swiftly tune in to world events, discuss the implications, organize campaigns, project their voices, and force change. Through the internet, democratically elected leaders can more easily hear diverse voices. By making political activities more transparent, the internet helps citizens hold politicians more accountable. It has created a sea of change for democratic political discourse, offering a global soapbox like none other.We also see the internet magnifying the polarization of our societies and the rise of vitriol, hate speech and misinformation. This amplification is made possible by the internet and centralized social media platforms, which combine to create mass echo chambers. However, the core issues live within the nature of our societies themselves. So today the internet reflects richness, divisiveness and areas where hope and opportunities to improve one's own life are not as widely available as we would like.The ease with which “fake news” can be disseminated online presented an opportunity to capitalize on existing social discontent by distributing misinformation for financial gain. We saw this happen in the latest US election cycle when egregiously fabricated stories published solely for profit circulated widely in social media Pizzagate. The Pope endorses a presidential candidate. Florida imposes Sharia law. Though these stories were clearly false, each was published online, consumed, shared and viewed by millions of people. And yet we need to ask: How different are these articles from standard “clickbait” that sensationalizes the truth in order to drive traffic?The stakes are high when bad actors misappropriate the internet and position fake news to drown out facts for personal gain. Misinformation spread online has the power to influence people’s understanding of real world events. Millions of internet users have no way to quickly assess whether claims are true or false. All of this adds up to loss of trust in core institutions as a source of good information and trustworthy community. But the loss is further compounded. Democracy relies on the free flow of good information and human connection, and when people believe they can’t trust anyone, democracy is weakened.Technology alone will not solve the problem, but technology combined with human intent, economic investment, and development policies can make immense positive changes. The world today is in a disruptive state, and it’s clear that the connection of technology to social impact is deeply needed so that communities of goodwill can grow, trust in the internet and information will rebound and democracy will thrive. We have to apply ourselves to this challenge. Otherwise, we will have wasted a rare and precious opportunity.1. What can be inferred from the new approaches provided by the internet to take part in democracy?2. What does the word “vitriol” (Line 1, Para. 3) mean?3. By citing the examples of Pizzagate, the Pope and Florida, the author intends to show that ______.4. When someone spread misinformation online to cover up the truth for their own profit, it has negative effects on ______.5. What is the author’s attitude towards the power of the internet?

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