Advancing age means losing your hair, your waistline and your memory, right? Dana Denis is just 40 years old, but (1) _______ she’s worried about what she calls “my rolling mental blackouts.” “I try to remember something and I just blank out,” she says.
    You may (2) _______ about these lapses, calling them “senior moments” or blaming “early Alzheimer’s (老年痴呆症).”Is it an inescapable fact that the older you get, the (3) _______ you remember? Well, sort of. But as time goes by, we tend to blame age (4) _______ problems that are not necessarily age-related.
    “When a teenager can’t find her keys, she thinks it’s because she’s distracted or disorganized,” says Paul Gold.  “A 70-year-old blames her (5) _______.” In fact, the 70-year-old may have been (6) _______ things for decades.
    In healthy people, memory doesn’t worsen as (7) _______ as many of us think. “As we (8) _______, the memory mechanism isn’t (9) _______,” says psychologist Fergus Craik. “It’s just inefficient.”
    The brain’s processing (10) _______ slows down over the years, though no one knows exactly (11) _______. Recent research suggests that nerve cells lose efficiency and (12) _______ there’s less activity in the brain. But, cautions Barry Gordon, “It’s not clear that less activity is (13) _______. A beginning athlete is winded (气喘吁吁) more easily than a (14) _______ athlete. In the same way, (15) _______ the brain gets more skilled at a task, it expends less energy on it.”
    There are (16) _______ you can take to compensate for normal slippage in your memory gears, though it (17) _______ effort Margaret Sewell says: “We’re a quick-fix culture, but you have to (18) _______ to keep your brain (19) _______ shape. It’s like having a good body. You can’t go to the gym once a year (20) _______ expect to stay in top form.”

    Prior to the 20th century, many languages with small numbers of speakers survived for centuries. The increasingly interconnected modern world makes it much more difficult for small language communities to live in relative isolation, a key factor in language maintenance and preservation.
    It remains to be seen whether the world can maintain its linguistic and cultural diversity in the centuries ahead. Many powerful forces appear to work against it: population growth, which pushes migrant populations into the world’s last isolated locations; mass tourism; global telecommunications and mass media; and the spread of gigantic global corporations. All of these forces appear to signify a future in which the language of advertising, popular culture, and consumer products become similar. Already English and a few other major tongues have emerged as global languages of commerce and communication. For many of the world’s peoples, learning one of these languages is viewed as the key to education, economic opportunity, and a better way of life.
    Only about 3,000 languages now in use are expected to survive the coming century. Are most of the rest doomed in the century after that?
    Whether most of these languages survive will probably depend on how strongly cultural groups wish to keep their identity alive through a native language. To do so will require an emphasis on bilingualism (mastery of two languages). Bilingual speakers could use their own language in smaller spheres—at home, among friends, in community settings—and a global language  at work, in dealings with government, and in commercial spheres. In this way, many small languages could sustain their cultural and linguistic integrity alongside global languages, rather than yield to the homogenizing (同化的) forces of globalization.
    Ironically, the trend of technological innovation that has threatened minority languages could also help save them. For example, some experts predict that computer software translation tools will one day permit minority language speakers to browse the Internet using their native tongues. Linguists are currently using computer-aided learning tools to teach a variety of threatened languages.
    For many endangered languages, the line between revival and death is extremely thin. Language is remarkably resilient (有活力的)，however. It is not just a tool for communicating, but also a powerful way of separating different groups, or of demonstrating group identity. Many indigenous (原生的，土著的) communities have shown that it is possible to live in the modern world while reclaiming their unique identities through language.

    Everyone, it seems, has a health problem. After pouring billions into the National Health Service, British people moan about dirty hospitals, long waits and wasted money. In Germany the new chancellor, Angela Merkel, is under fire for suggesting changing the financing of its health system. Canada’s new Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, made a big fuss during the election about reducing the country’s lengthy medical queues. Across the rich world, affluence, ageing and advancing technology are driving up health spending faster than income.
    But nowhere has a bigger health problem than America. Soaring medical bills are squeezing wages, swelling the ranks of the uninsured and pushing huge firms and perhaps even the government towards bankruptcy. Ford’s announcement this week that it would cut up to 30,000 jobs by 2012 was as much a sign of its “legacy” health-care costs as of the ills of the car industry. Pushed by polls that show health care is one of his main domestic problems and by forecasts showing that the retiring baby-boomers (生育高峰期出生的人) will crush the government’s finances, George Bush is expected to unveil a reform plan in next week’s state-of-the-union address.
    America’s health system is unlike any other. The Unite States spends 16% of its GDP on health, around twice the rich-country average, equivalent to $6,280 for every American each year. Yet it is the only rich country that does not guarantee universal health coverage. Thanks to an accident of history, most Americans receive health insurance through their employer, with the government picking up the bill for the poor and the elderly.
    This curious hybrid (混合物) certainly has its strengths. Americans have more choice than anybody else, and their health-care system is much more innovative. Europeans’ bills could be much higher if American medicine were not doing much of their Research and Development (R&D) for them. But there are also huge weaknesses. The one most often cited—especially by foreigners—is the army of uninsured. Some 46 million Americans do not have cover. In many cases that is out of choice and if they fall seriously ill, hospitals have to treat them. But it is still deeply unequal. And there are also shocking inefficiencies: by some measures, 30% of American health spending is wasted.
    Then there is the question of state support. Many Americans disapprove of the “socialized medicine” of Canada and Europe. In fact, even if much of the administration is done privately, around 60% of America’s heath-care bill ends up being met by the government. Proportionately, the American state already spends as much on health as the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) average, and that share is set to grow as the baby-boomers run up their Medicare bills and ever more employers avoid providing health-care coverage. America is, in effect, heading towards a version’ of socialized medicine by default.

    When Thomas Keller, one of America’s foremost chefs, announced that on Sept. 1 he would abolish the practice of tipping at Per Se, his luxury restaurant in New York City, and replace it with a European-style service charge, I knew three groups would be opposed: customers, servers and restaurant owners. These three groups are all committed to tipping—as they quickly made clear on Web sites. To oppose tipping, it seems, is to be anticapitalist, and maybe even a little French.
    But Mr. Keller is right to move away from tipping—and it’s worth exploring why just about everyone else in the restaurant world is wrong to stick with the practice.
    Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. “Waiters know that they won’t get paid if they don’t do a good job” is how most advocates of the system would put it. To be sure, this is a tempting, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants.
    Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, has conducted dozens of studies of tipping and has concluded that consumers’ assessments of the quality of service correlate weakly to the amount they tip.
    Rather, customers are likely to tip more in response to servers touching them lightly and leaning forward next to the table to make conversation than to how often their water glass is refilled—in other words, customers tip more when they like the server, not when the service is good. Mr. Lynn’s studies also indicate that male customers increase their tips for female servers while female customers increase their tips for male servers.
    What’s more, consumers seem to forget that the tip increases as the bill increases. Thus, the tipping system is an open invitation to what restaurant professionals call “upselling”: every bottle of imported water, every espresso and every cocktail is extra money in the server’s pocket. Aggressive upselling for tips is often rewarded while low-key, quality service often goes unrecognized.
    In addition, the practice of tip pooling, which is the norm in fine-dining restaurants and is becoming more common in every kind of restaurant above the level of a greasy spoon, has ruined whatever effect voting with your tip might have had on an individual waiter. In an unreasonable outcome, you are pushing the good waiters in the restaurant by not tipping the bad one. Indeed, there appears to be little connection between tipping and good service.

    “I promise.” “I swear to you it’ll never happen again.” “I give you my word.” “Honestly. Believe me.” Sure, I trust. Why not? I teach English composition at a private college. With a certain excitement and intensity, I read my students’ essays, hoping to find the person behind the pen. As each semester progresses, plagiarism (剽窃) appears. Not only is my intelligence insulted as one assumes I won’t detect a polished piece of prose from an otherwise-average writer, but I feel a sadness that a student has resorted to buying a paper from a peer. Writers have styles like fingerprints and after several assignments, I can match a student’s work with his or her name even if it’s missing from the upper left-hand corner.
    Why is learning less important than a higher grade-point average (GPA)? When we’re threatened or sick, we make conditional promises. “If you let me pass math I will…” “Lord, if you get me over this before the big homecoming game I’ll…” Once the situation is behind us, so are the promises. Human nature? Perhaps, but we do use that cliché (陈词滥调) to get us out of uncomfortable bargains. Divine interference during distress is asked; gratitude is unpaid. After all, few fulfill the contract, so why should anyone be the exception. Why not?
    Six years ago, I took a student before the dean. He had turned in an essay with the vocabulary and sentence structure of PhD thesis. Up until that time, both his out-of-class and in-class work were borderline passing.
    I questioned the person regarding his essay and he swore it was his own work. I gave him the Identical assignment and told him to write it in class, and that I’d understand this copy would not have the time and attention an out-of-class paper is given, but he had already a finished piece so he understood what was asked. He sat one hour, then turned in part of a page of unskilled writing and faulty logic. I confronted him with both essays. “I promise…, I’m not lying. I swear to you that I wrote the essay. I’m just nervous today.”
    The head of the English department agreed with my finding, and the meeting with the dean had the boy’s parents present. After an hour of discussion, touching on eight of the boy’s previous essays and his grade-point average, which indicated he was already on academic probation (留校察看) the dean agreed that the student had plagiarized. His parents protested, “He’s only a child” and we instructors are wiser and should be compassionate. College people are not really children and most times would resent being labeled as such… except in this uncomfortable circumstance.

    Powering the great ongoing changes of our time is the rise of human creativity as the defining feature of economic life. Creativity has come to be valued, because new technologies, new industries and new wealth flow from it. And as a result, our lives and society have begun to echo with creative ideas. It is our commitment to creativity in its varied dimensions that forms the underlying spirit of our age.
    Creativity is essential to the way we live and work today, and in many senses always has been. The big advances in standard of living—not to mention the big competitive advantages in the marketplace—always have come from “better recipes, not just more cooking.” One might argue that’s not strictly true. One might point out, for instance, that during the long period from the early days on the Industrial Revolution to modern times, much of the growth in productivity and material wealth in the industrial nations  came  not just  from  creative  inventions  like  the  steam  engine,  but from the  widespread application of “cooking in quantity” business methods like massive division of labor, concentration of assets, vertical integration and economies of scale.  But those methods themselves were creative developments.

    Write an essay based on the following table, in which you should
    (1) describe the table and
    (2) state your opinions drawn from it.
    You should write at least l.50 words. (20 points)

Accidents in a Chinese City (2005)