泰祺教育

Directions:

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)

Most worthwhile careers require some kind of specialized training. Ideally, therefore, the choice of an   1   should be made even before choice of a curriculum in high school. Actually,  2  , most people make several job choices during their working lives,   3   because of economic and industrial changes and   4   to improve their position. The “one perfect job” does not exist. Young people should   5   enter broad flexible training program that will  6   them for a field of work rather than for a single   7  .

Unfortunately many young people have to make career plans   8   benefit of help from a competent vocational counselor or psychologist. Knowing   9   about the occupational world, or themselves for that matter, they choose their lifework on a hit-or-miss   10  . Some drift from job to job. Others   11   to work in which they are unhappy and for which they are not fitted.

One common mistake is choosing an occupation for its real or imagined   12  . Too many high-school students—or their parents for them—choose the professional field,   13   both the relatively small proportion of workers in the professions and the extremely high educational and personal   14  . The imagined or real prestige of a profession or a “White-collar” job is no good reason for   15   it as life's work.   16  , these occupations are not always well paid. Since a large proportion of jobs are in mechanical and manual work, the   17   of young people should give serious   18   to these fields.

Before making an occupational choice, a person should have a general idea of what he wants   19   life and how hard he is willing to work to get it. Some people desire social prestige, others intellectual satisfaction. Some want security; others are willing to take   20  for financial gain. Each occupational choice has its demands as well as its rewards.

Part A

Directions: 

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

Over the past decade, marketers have increasingly turned to social-media networks like Facebook and Twitter to create buzz around their products. But what impact do tweets and other recommendations have on sales, and how can companies get a bigger return on their investments in these important channels?

To get a clearer view, we examined the purchase decisions of 20,000 European consumers, across 30 product areas and more than 100 brands, in 2013 and 2014. Respondents were asked how significantly social media influenced their decision journeys and about instances when they themselves recommended products.

We found that the impact of social media on buying decisions is greater than previously estimated and growing fast. Social recommendations induced an average of 26 percent of purchases across all product categories, according to our data. That’s substantially higher than the 10 to 15 percent others have estimated. For the 30 product categories we studied, roughly two-thirds of the impact was direct; that is, recommendations played a critical role at the point of purchase. The remaining third was indirect; social media has an effect at earlier decision-journey touch points—for example, when a recommendation created initial awareness of a product or interactions with friends or other influencers helped consumers to compare product attributes or to evaluate higher-value features. We found that in 2014, consumers made 10 percent more purchases on the back of social-media recommendations than they had in 2013.

Consumers, we found, access social media to very different degrees in different product categories. At the low end, only about 15 percent of our respondents reported using social media in choosing utility services. For other categories, such as travel, investment services, and over-the-counter drugs, 40 to 50 percent of consumers looked to social recommendations.

Product categories tend to have their own discrete groups of influencers. Our data showed that the overlap of recommenders between any two consumer categories was very small—a maximum of 15 percent for any two pairs of products we analyzed. Timing matters as well: a first-time purchaser, for example, is roughly 50 percent more likely to turn to social media than a repeat buyer.

While the role of digital influence is expanding, the analog world remains important. Among the more than 100 brands we studied, about half of the recommendations were made offline—in person or by phone.

Our research shows that a small number of active influencers accounted for a disproportionate share of total recommendations. These power users are even more significant for product categories such as shoes and clothing: 5 percent of the recommenders accounted for 45 percent of the social influence generated. 

Text 2

When Dick Lippert’s wife, Cynthia, decided to become a minister, the former telecommunications CEO realized he needed a weekend hobby. In April 2000, Lippert, who calls himself a “car fanatic” and an “adrenaline（腎上腺素）junkie,” took a few courses at a Skip Barber Racing School in Laguna Seca, Calif. (www.skipbarber.com), then began competing in its regional and then national Masters Series. One year, the 61-year-old placed second out of about 20. “When you're in the car, you’re not thinking about the flight on Monday, or a meeting at the office or that your child needs braces”, he says. “It’s a mental escape.”

On the professional racing circuit, the winner’s circle skews the young: NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon is 35, the Indy 500’s Dario Franchitti is 34. But when it comes to recreational high-speed driving, baby boomers dominate. At the Sports Car Club of America, 64.5 percent of members are over 45. “Racing is expensive, so it’s not until they’re successful and have time and money that they can fulfill what they’ve been thinking about since they were 7,” says Rick Roso, Skip Barber's public-relations director.

At Skip Barber, which has racing schools across the country, one of the most popular classes among boomers is the High Performance Driving course ($1,595 for one day, $2,895 for two), where students choose three cars from a fantasy menu of Porsches, BMWs and Corvettes. Feel like driving an autocross session? Then slip into a Porsche 911 for a solo race against the clock. Thinking about buying a BMW M3? Go out for a day and take it for a high-speed test drive. Skip Barber also lets boomers race in formula or sports cars, offering Masters (over 40) and Grand Masters (over 50) series. Type-A personalities might appreciate the Jim Russell Racing School (www.jimrussellusa.com), which offers both a kart (a small, open-wheel car) and a formula series.

While racing may be a mental escape, it’s hard on the wallet. Lippert says that participation in a full season runs him between $50,000 and $60,000—and that’s “with minimal crash damage.” Skip Barber’s average client earns more than $200,000 a year, with serious racers often earning more. “Those are the people who are entrepreneurs or high-level executives and are self-made in some fashion,” says Roso. “This is their boat, this is their airplane.”

For some, exclusivity is half the fun. Ferrari owners who participate in the Ferrari Driving Experience (experienceferrari.com) spend $8,200 for a weekend at Mont Tremblant, a Quebec resort town, rubbing shoulders with fellow magnates (average annual income of a Ferrari owner: more than $1 million) and speeding around a 15-corner circuit—with multiple elevation changes and blind corners—that meets Formula 1 standards. After a day of exertion, they can repair to the chateau-like Hotel Quintessence, enjoy Bordeaux out of the wine bar’s 5,000-bottle cellar and shift into low gear.

Text 3

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 80-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.

There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand ordinary of today——everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring——means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes.

For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the pass 100,000 years —— even the pass 100 years —— our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they “l(fā)ook at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension.” No doubt we will remember a 20^th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

Text 4

Supporters of cutting corporate taxes argue that those savings would free up more capital for investment, allowing companies to expand operations and hire more workers. That was the argument that candidate Donald Trump offered last year when he proposed “reducing taxes tremendously” for both small and big businesses.

“That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan,” Trump said in the first presidential debate in September 2016. But the evidence for that outcome is slim, according to the Institute for Policy Studies analysis. To test the claim that corporate tax cuts create jobs, the group looked at the payroll changes at 92 publicly held U.S. corporations that posted profits every year from 2008 through 2015 and paid less than 20% of these earnings in federal income tax.

The researchers relied on companies' public accounting statements to calculate the amount of taxes paid on company and news reports to assess changes in payrolls. What they found was that more than half of these lightly taxed companies actually shed jobs during the period when the overall economy boosted payrolls by 6%.

Where did the tax savings go? Many of the companies on the list used the free cash to buy back stock, helping to boost the price of their company's shares. The top 10 job-cutters each spent $45 billion in stock buybacks over the 2008-2015 period, a pace six times that of the S&P 500 corporate average, according to the researchers.

Congressional Republicans favor deep cuts in both corporate and individual tax rates, but there is less consensus on how to pay for the lost revenues without adding to the national debt. The difficulty in striking that balance has, for decades, thwarted multiple efforts at overhauling the complex U.S. tax code.

The latest effort to cut corporate taxes will rely on generating popular support for the idea, which is one reason proponents insist it would create jobs. But the historical evidence is slim, according to Cornell economist Karel Mertens and University College London economist Morten Ravn.

“In contrast to the personal income tax cut, there is no evidence that a cut in corporate taxes is associated with any significant impact on employment, despite the considerable and significant immediate increase in output.” they wrote.

Part B

Directions:

Read the following text and answer the questions by finding information from the left column that corresponds to each of the marked details given in the right column. There are two extra choices in the right column. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET.

This week the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce releases a blueprint for rethinking American education to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy. While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. Right now we're aiming too low. Competency in reading and math is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here's what they are:

Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, whether they know it or not, and they need to behave that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are "global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages"—not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history.

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy—the ones that won't get outsourced or automated— "put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, a lead author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. That's a problem for U.S. schools. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations—design and technology, mathematics and art—"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

Can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts? The skills commission will argue that it's possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools. But without waiting for such a revolution, enterprising administrators around the country have begun to update their schools, often with ideas and support from local businesses. Organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are pouring money and expertise into model programs to show the way.

A. the ability to think in a creative way is essential for the students in the new economy.

B. a revolution should be carried out to reform the education system.

C. enterprises should pour money and expertise to help reshape the national curriculum.

D. it is important for students to make friends with people from different cultures.

E. it is necessary for students to develop team spirit in school.

F. schools should put more emphasis on courses like foreign language and world history.

G. students must learn how to manage and interpret the overflowing information.