Direction: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled My Views on University Ranking. You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.
(1) 目前高校排名相当盛行;
(2) 对于这种做法人们看法不一;
(3) 在我看来……

My View on University Ranking

Into the Unknown
The world has never seen population ageing before. Can it cope?

　　Until the early 1990s nobody much thought about whole populations getting older. The UN had the foresight to convene a "world assembly on ageing” back in 1982, but that came and went. By 1994 the World Bank had noticed that something big was happening. In a report entitled “Averting the Old Age Crisis”, it argued that pension arrangements in most countries were unsustainable.
　　For the next ten years a succession of books, mainly by Americans, sounded the alarm. They had titles like Young vs Old, Gray Dawn and The Coming Generational Storm, and their message was blunt: health-care systems were heading for the rocks, pensioners were taking young people to the cleaners, and soon there would be intergenerational warfare.
　　Since then the debate has become less emotional, not least because a lot more is known about the subject. Books, conferences and research papers have multiplied. International organisations such as the OECD and the EU issue regular reports. Population ageing is on every agenda, from G8 economic conferences to NATO summits. The World Economic Forum plans to consider the future of pensions and health care at its prestigious Davos conference early next year. The media, including this newspaper, are giving the subject extensive coverage.
　　Whether all that attention has translated into sufficient action is another question. Governments in rich countries now accept that their pension and health-care promises will soon become unaffordable, and many of them have embarked on reforms, but so far only timidly. That is not surprising: politicians with an eye on the next election will hardly rush to introduce unpopular measures that may not bear fruit for years, perhaps decades.
　　The outline of the changes needed is clear. To avoid fiscal (财政) meltdown, public pensions and health-care provision will have to be reined back severely and taxes may have to go up. By far the most effective method to restrain pension spending is to give people the opportunity to work longer, because it increases tax revenues and reduces spending on pensions at the same time. It may even keep them alive longer. John Rother, the AARP’s head of policy and strategy, points to studies showing that other things being equal, people who remain at work have lower death rates than their retired peers.
　　Younger people today mostly accept that they will have to work for longer and that their pensions will be less generous. Employers still need to be persuaded that older workers are worth holding on to. That may be because they have had plenty of younger ones to choose from, partly thanks to the post-war baby-boom and partly because over the past few decades many more women have entered the labour force, increasing employers’ choice. But the reservoir of women able and willing to take up paid work is running low, and the baby-boomers are going grey.
　　In many countries immigrants have been filling such gaps in the labour force as have already emerged (and remember that the real shortage is still around ten years off). Immigration in the developed world is the highest it has ever been, and it is making a useful difference. In still-fertile America it currently accounts for about 40% of total population growth, and in fast-ageing western Europe for about 90%.
　　On the face of it, it seems the perfect solution. Many developing countries have lots of young people in need of jobs; many rich countries need helping hands that will boost tax revenues and keep up economic growth. But over the next few decades labour forces in rich countries are set to shrink so much that inflows of immigrants would have to increase enormously to compensate: to at least twice their current size in western Europe’s most youthful countries, and three times in the older ones. Japan would need a large multiple of the few immigrants it has at present. Public opinion polls show that people in most rich countries already think that immigration is too high. Further big increases would be politically unfeasible.
　　To tackle the problem of ageing populations at its root, “old” countries would have to rejuvenate (使年轻) themselves by having more of their own children. A number of them have tried, some more successfully than others. But it is not a simple matter of offering financial incentives or providing more child care. Modern urban life in rich countries is not well adapted to large families. Women find it hard to combine family and career. They often compromise by having just one child.
　　And if fertility in ageing countries does not pick up? It will not be the end of the world, at least not for quite a while yet, but the world will slowly become a different place. Older societies may be less innovative and more strongly disinclined to take risks than younger ones. By 2025 at the latest, about half the voters in America and most of those in western European countries will be over 50—and older people turn out to vote in much greater number than younger ones. Academic studies have found no evidence so far that older voters have used their power at the ballot box to push for policies that specifically benefit them, though if in future there are many more of them they might start doing so.
　　Nor is there any sign of the intergenerational warfare predicted in the 1990s. After all, older people themselves mostly have families. In a recent study of parents and grown-up children in 11 European countries, Karsten Hank of Mannheim University found that 85% of them lived within 25km of each other and the majority of them were in touch at least once a week.
　　Even so, the shift in the centre of gravity to older age groups is bound to have a profound effect on societies, not just economically and politically but in all sorts of other ways too. Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of America’s CSIS, in a thoughtful book called The Graying of the Great Powers, argue that, among other things, the ageing of the developed countries will have a number of serious security implications.
　　For example, the shortage of young adults is likely to make countries more reluctant to commit the few they have to military service. In the decades to 2050, America will find itself playing an ever-increasing role in the developed world’s defence effort. Because America’s population will still be growing when that of most other developed countries is shrinking, America will be the only developed country that still matters geopolitically (地缘政治上).
Ask me in 2020
　　There is little that can be done to stop population ageing, so the world will have to live with it. But some of the consequences can be alleviated. Many experts now believe that given the right policies, the effects, though grave, need not be catastrophic. Most countries have recognized the need to do something and are beginning to act.
　　But even then there is no guarantee that their efforts will work. What is happening now is historically unprecedented. Ronald Lee, director of the Centre on the Economics and Demography of Ageing at the University of California, Berkeley, puts it briefly and clearly: “We don’t really know what population ageing will be like, because nobody has done it yet. ”

    Psychologists are finding that hope plays a surprisingly vital role in giving people a measurable advantage in realms as (1) _________ as academic achievement, bearing up in tough jobs and coping with (2) _________ illness. And, by contrast, the loss of hope is turning out to be a stronger sign that a person may (3) _________ suicide than other factors long thought to be more likely risks.
    “Hope has proven a powerful predictor of (4) _________ in every study we’ve done so far,” said Dr. Charles R. Snyder, a psychologist who has devised a (5) _________ to assess how much hope a person has.
    For example, in research with 3,920 college students, Dr. Snyder and his (6) _________ found that the level of hope among freshmen at the beginning of their first semester was a more (7) _________ predictor of their college grades than were their S.A.T. scores or their grade point (8) _________ in high school, the two measures most commonly used to predict college performance. (9)“____________________________,” Dr. Snyder said. “When you compare students of equivalent intelligence and past academic achievements, what sets them apart is hope.”
    In devising a way to assess hope scientifically, Dr. Snyder (10) ____________________________. “That notion is not concrete enough, and it blurs two key components of hope,” Dr. Snyder said.(11)“____________________________.”

    Most young boys are trained to believe that men should be strong, tough, cool, and detached. Thus, they learn early to hide vulnerable emotions such as love, joy, and sadness because they believe that such feelings are feminine and imply weakness. Over time, some men become strangers to their own emotional lives. It seems that men with traditional views of masculinity are more likely to suppress outward emotions and to fear emotions, supposedly because such feelings may lead to a loss of composure (镇定). Keep in mind, however, that this view is challenged by some researchers. As with many gender gaps, differences in emotionality tend to be small, inconsistent, and dependent on the situation. For instance, Robertson and colleagues found that males who were more traditionally masculine were more emotionally expressive in a structured exercise than when they were simply asked to talk about their emotions.
    Males’ difficulty with “tender” emotions has serious consequences. First, suppressed emotions can contribute to stress-related disorders. And worse, men are less likely than women to seek help from health professionals. Second, men’s emotional inexpressiveness can cause problems in their relationships with partners and children. For example, men who endorse traditional masculine norms report lower relationship satisfaction, as do their female partners. Further, children whose fathers are warm, loving, and accepting toward them have higher self-esteem and lower rates of aggression and behavior problems. On a positive note, fathers are increasingly involving themselves with their children. And 30 percent of fathers report that they take equal or greater responsibility for their children than their working wives do.
    One emotion males are allowed to express is anger. Sometimes this anger translates into physical aggression or violence. Men commit nearly 90 percent of violent crimes in the United States and almost all sexual assaults.

　　In the early 20th century, few things were more appealing than the promise of scientific knowledge. In a world struggling with rapid industrialization, science and technology seemed to offer solutions to almost every problem. Newly created state colleges and universities devoted themselves almost entirely to scientific, technological, and engineering fields. Many Americans came to believe that scientific certainty could not only solve scientific problems, but also reform politics, government, and business. Two world wars and a Great Depression rocked the confidence of many people that scientific expertise alone could create a prosperous and ordered world. After World War Ⅱ, the academic world turned with new enthusiasm to humanistic studies, which seemed to many scholars the best way to ensure the survival of democracy. American scholars fanned out across much of the world—with support from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright program, etc.—to promote the teaching of literature and the arts in an effort to make the case for democratic freedoms.
　　In the America of our own time, the great educational challenge has become an effort to strengthen the teaching of what is now known as the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). There is considerable and justified concern that the United States is falling behind much of the rest of the developed world in these essential disciplines. India, China, Japan, and other regions seem to be seizing technological leadership.
　　At the same time, perhaps inevitably, the humanities—while still popular in elite colleges and universities—have experienced a significant decline. Humanistic disciplines are seriously underfunded, not just by the government and the foundations but by academic institutions themselves. Humanists are usually among the lowest-paid faculty members at most institutions and are often lightly regarded because they do not generate grant income and because they provide no obvious credentials (资质) for most nonacademic careers.
　　Undoubtedly American education should train more scientists and engineers. Much of the concern among politicians about the state of American universities today is focused on the absence of “real world” education—which means preparation for professional and scientific careers. But the idea that institutions or their students must decide between humanities and science is false. Our society could not survive without scientific and technological knowledge. But we would be equally impoverished (贫困的) without humanistic knowledge as well. Science and technology teach us what we can do. Humanistic thinking helps us understand what we should do.
　　It is almost impossible to imagine our society without thinking of the extraordinary achievements of scientists and engineers in building our complicated world. But try to imagine our world as well without the remarkable works that have defined our culture and values. We have always needed, and we still need, both.

　　Will there ever be another Einstein? This is the undercurrent of conversation at Einstein memorial meetings throughout the year. A new Einstein will emerge, scientists say. But it may take a long time. After all, more than 200 years separated Einstein from his nearest rival, Isaac Newton.
　　Many physicists say the next Einstein hasn’t been born yet, or is a baby now. That’s because the quest for a unified theory that would account for all the forces of nature has pushed current mathematics to its limits. New math must be created before the problem can be solved.
　　But researchers say there are many other factors working against another Einstein emerging anytime soon.
　　For one thing, physics is a much different field today. In Einstein’s day, there were only a few thousand physicists worldwide, and the theoreticians who could intellectually rival Einstein probably would fit into a streetcar with seats to spare.
　　Education is different, too. One crucial aspect of Einstein’s training that is overlooked is the years of philosophy he read as a teenager—Kant, Schopenhauer and Spinoza, among others. It taught him how to think independently and abstractly about space and time, and it wasn’t long before he became a philosopher himself.
　　“The independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan (工匠) or specialist and a real seeker after truth,” Einstein wrote in 1944.
　　And he was an accomplished musician. The interplay between music and math is well known. Einstein would furiously play his violin as a way to think through a knotty physics problem.
　　Today, universities have produced millions of physicists. There aren’t many jobs in science for them, so they go to Wall Street and Silicon Valley to apply their analytical skills to more practical—and rewarding—efforts.
　　“Maybe there is an Einstein out there today,” said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, “but it would be a lot harder for him to be heard.”
　　Especially considering what Einstein was proposing.
　　“The actual fabric of space and time curving? My God, what an idea!” Greene said at a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute. “It takes a certain type of person who will bang his head against the wall because you believe you’ll find the solution.”
　　Perhaps the best examples are the five scientific papers Einstein wrote in his “miracle year” of 1905. These “thought experiments” were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown. There were no footnotes or citations.
　　What might happen to such a submission today?
　　“We all get papers like those in the mail,” Greene said. “We put them in the junk file.”

　　America’s most popular newspaper website today announced that the era of free online journalism is drawing to a close. The New York Times has become the biggest publisher yet to (1) ________ plans for a paywall around its digital offering, (2) ________ the accepted practice that internet users will not pay for news.
　　Struggling (3) ________ an evaporation of advertising and a downward drift in street corner sales, The New York Times (4) ________ to introduce a “metered” model at the beginning of 2011. Readers will be required to pay when they have (5) ________ a set number of its online articles per month.
　　The decision puts the 159-year-old newspaper (6) ________ the charging side of an increasingly wide chasm (鸿沟) in the media industry. But others, including the Guardian, have said they will not (7) ________ internet readers, and certain papers, (8) ________ London’s Evening Standard, have gone further in abandoning readership revenue by making their print editions (9) ________.
　　The New York Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, (10) ________ that the move is a gamble: “This is a (11) ________, to a certain degree, in where we think the web is going.”
　　Boasting a print (12) ________ of 995,000 on weekdays and 1.4 million on Sundays, The New York Times is the third bestselling American newspaper, (13) ________ the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (14) ________ most US papers focus on a single city, The New York Times is among the few that can (15) ________ national scope—as well as 16 bureaus in the New York area, it has 11 offices around the US and (16) ________ 26 bureaus elsewhere in the world.
　　But (17) ________ many in the publishing industry, the paper is in the grip of a (18) ________ financial crisis. Its parent company, the New York Times Company, has 15 papers, but (19) ________ a loss of $70 million in the nine months to September and recently accepted a $250 million (20) ________ from a Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim, to strengthen its balance sheet.

There is no denying that you __________________________________ (越仔细越好) in dealing with this matter.