s that have erupted in places like Haiti, Bangladesh and Burkina
Faso. Practical solutions to these growing woes do exist, but we’ll
have to start thinking ahead and acting globally.
The crisis has its roots in four interlinked trends. The first is
the chronically low productivity of farmers in the poorest
countries, caused by their inability to pay for seeds, fertilizers
and irrigation. The second is the misguided policy in the U.S. and
Europe of subsidizing the diversion of food crops to produce
biofuels like corn-based ethanol. The third is climate change; take
the recent droughts in Australia and Europe, which cut the global
production of grain in 2005 and 2006. The fourth is the growing
global demand for food and feed grains brought on by swelling
populations and incomes. In short, rising demand has hit a limited
supply, with the poor taking the hardest blow.
So, what should be done? Here are three steps to ease the current
crisis and avert the potential for a global disaster. The first is
to scale-up the dramatic success of Malawi, a famine-prone country
in southern Africa, which three years ago established a special
fund to help its farmers get fertilizer and high-yield seeds.
Malawi’s harvest doubled after just one year. An international fund
based on the Malawi model would cost a mere $10 per person annually
in the rich world, or $10 billion in all. Such a fund could fight
hunger as effectively as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and
malaria is controlling those diseases.
Second, the U.S. and Europe should abandon their policies of
subsidizing the conversion of food into biofuels. The U.S.
government gives farmers a taxpayer-financed subsidy of 51 cents
per gal of ethanol to divert corn from the food and feed-grain
supply. There may be a case for biofuels produced on lands that do
not produce foods-tree crops (like palm oil), grasses and wood
products-but there’s no case for doling out subsidies to put the
world’s dinner into the gas tank. Third, we urgently need to
weatherproof the world’s crops as soon and as effectively as
possible. For a poor farmer, sometimes something as simple as a
farm pond-which collects rainwater to be used for emergency
irrigation in a dry spell- can make the difference between a
bountiful crop and a famine. The world has already committed to
establishing a Climate Adaptation Fund to help poor regions
climate-proof vital economic activities such as food production and
health care but has not yet upon the promise.
|
A: poor countries
|
41: Anti-hunger campaigns are
successful in
|
B: all the world
|
42: Production of biofuels are
subsidized in
|
C: the Climate Adaptation
Fund
|
43: Protest riots occurred
in
|
D: the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB
and Malaria
|
44: The efforts were not so successful
with
|
E: Bangladesh
|
45: Food shortage become more serious
in
|
F: Malawi
|
|
G: the US and Europe
|
Key Answer:
F
G
E
C
A
Sample 2 （小标题）
Directions:
Read the following text and answer questions by finding a
subtitle for each of the marked parts or paragraphs. There are two
extra items in the subtitles. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET
1.
A: Follow on lines
B: Whisper: Keep It to Yourself
C: Word of Experience: Stick to It
D: Code of Success: Freed and Targeted
E: Efficient Work to Promote Efficient Workers
F: Recipe: Simplicity Means Everything
G: Efficiency Comes from Orders
Every decade has its defining self-help business book. In the 1940s
it was
How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the 1990s
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. These days
we’re worried about something much simpler: Getting Things
Done
41__________________________________
That’s the title of productivity guru David Allen’ pithy 2001
treatise on working efficiently, which continues to resonate in
this decade’ overworked, overwhelmed, overteched workplace. Allen
hasn’t just sold 500,000 copies of his book. He has preached his
message of focus, discipline and creativity everywhere from Sony
and Novartis to the World Bank and the U.S. Air Force. He counsels
swamped chief executives on coping with information overload. He
ministers to some clients with an intensive, two-day, $6,000
private session in which he and his team organize their lives from
top to bottom. And he has won the devotions of acolytes who
document on their blogs how his
Getting Things Done (GTO)
program has changed their lives.
42.______________________________________
Allen admits that much of his basic recipe is common sense. Free
your mind, and productivity will follow. Break down projects and
goals into discrete, definable actions, and you won’t be bothered
by all those loose threads pulling at your attention. First make
decisions about what needs to get done, and then fashion a plan for
doing it. If you’ve catalogued everything you have to do and all
your long-term goals, Allen says, you’re less likely to wake up at
3 a.m. worrying about whether you’ve forgotten something: “Most
people haven’t realized how out of control their head is when they
get 300 e-mails a day and each of them has potential
meaning.”
43. _____________________________________________________
When e-mails, phones calls and to-to lists are truly under control,
Allen says, the real change begins. You will finally be able to use
your mind to dream up great ideas and enjoy your life rather than
just occupy it with all the things you’ve got to do. Allen himself,
despite running a $5.5 million consulting practice, traveling 200
days a year and juggling a business that’s growing 40% every years,
finds time to joyride in his Mini Cooper and sculpt bonsai plants.
Oh, and he had earned his black belt in karate.
44.__________________________________________
Few companies have embraced Allen’s philosophy as thoroughly as
General Mills, the Minnesota-based maker of Cheerios and Lucky
Charms. Allen began at the company with a couple of private
coaching sessions for top executives, who raved about his guidance.
Allen and his staff now hold six to eight two-day training sessions
a year. The company has already put more than 2,000 employees
through GTD training and plans to expand it company-wide. “Fads
come and go,” says Kevin Wilde, General Mills’ CEO, “but this
continuous to work.”
45.___________________________________________________________
The most fevered followers of Allen’s organizational methodology
gather online. Websites like gtdindex, marvelz, corn parse. Allen’s
every utterance. The 43 Folders blog ran an eight-part pod-cast
interview with him. GTD enthusiasts like Frank Meeuwsen, on
whatsthenextaction. Com gather best practice techniques for
implementing the book’s ideas. More than 60 software tools have
been built specifically to supplement Allen’s system.
Key Answer:
E
D
G
C
A
Sample 3 （判断正误）
Directions:
Read the following text and answer questions by deciding each of
the statements after the text is True or False. Choose T if the
statement is true or F if the statement is not true. Mark your
answer on ANSWER SHEET 1
A Tree Project Helps the Genes of Champions Live On
As an eagle wheels overhead against a crystalline blue sky, Martin
Flanagan walks toward a grove of towering cottonwood trees beside
the Yellowstone River, which is the color of chocolate milk due to
the spring rain.
As Mr. Flanagan leaves the glaring sun of the prairie and enters
the shady grove, his eyes search for specific tree. As he reaches a
narrow-leaf cottonwood, a towering giant, he cranes his neck to
look at the top, “This is the one I plan to nominate for state
champion,” he says, petting the bark with his hand. “It’s a beauty,
isn’t?”
When Europeans first came to North America, one of the largest
primeval forests in the world covered much of the continent.
Experts say a squirrel could have traveled from the Atlantic coast
to the Mississippi River without touching the ground. But only
about 3 percent of America’s native old-growth forest remains, and
many of the trees they hold are those that were not big enough to
attract a logger’s eye. The result is a generation of trees that
barely resemble the native forests that once covered the
country.
That makes some scientists suspect that the surviving forests have
lost much of their genetic quality, the molecular muscle that made
them dominate the landscape. When the loggers swept through, these
scientists say, only poor specimens were left to reproduce. Other
researchers wonder whether environmental factors or just plain luck
may explain a good part of the supertrees’ success.
To answer those questions, the mightiest trees of their types, or
genetically identical offspring, must be preserved for study, and
that is what is being done by a handful of enthusiasts, including
Mr. Flanagan and David Milarch, a nurseryman Copemish, Michigan.
They are searching out the largest tree of each species and taking
cuttings of new growth to make copies of genetic clones of the
giants. With tissue culture and grafting, they have reproduced 52
of the 827 living giants and are planting the offspring in what
they call “living libraries.” More than 20,000 offspring have been
planted.
The work is part of the Champion Tree Project, which began in 1996
with financial help from the National Tree Trust, a nonprofit group
in Washington.
“Those big trees are the last links to the boreal forests,” Mr.
Milarch, presidents of the champion Tree Project, said.
State and federal agencies and private organizations have been
keeping track of the largest trees in each state for some time. The
largest effort is the National Register of Big Trees, run by
American Forests, a 125-year-old nonprofit group based in
Washington. But the Champion Tree Project takes things a step
further by making it possible for the largest trees to live
on.
Eventually the Champion Tree Project hopes to reproduce enough
genetically superior trees for a nationwide reforestation project.
The offspring of the native trees, should they prove genetically
superior, could be especially valuable in urban settings, where the
average tree lives just 7 to 10 years. But things like soil
conditions, moisture and other environmental factors can also
affect the success of the trees.
41. Water in the Yellowstone River turned dark brown because of the
spring rain.
42. The cottonwood tree Mr. Flanagan found was an extremely tall
tree with broad leaves.
43. In the days when Europeans first came to America, it had one of
the largest primeval forests in the world.
44. Some scientists have the suspicion that the surviving forests
have lost much of their genetic quality because they were the
offspring of poor specimens.
45. The offspring of the supertrees have proved to be genetically
superior to those of the average trees.
Key Answer:
T
F
T
T
F
