Even plants can run a fever, especially when they’re under attack by insects or disease. But unlike humans, plants can have their temperature taken from 3,000 feet away-straight up. A decade ago, adapting the infrared（红外线）scanning technology developed for military purposes and other satellites, physicist Stephen Paley came up with a quick way to take the temperature of crops to determine which ones are under stress.
    The goal was to let farmers precisely target pesticide（杀虫剂）spraying rather than rain poison on a whole field, which invariably includes plants that don’t have pest（害虫）problems.
    Even better, Paley’s Remote Scanning Services Company could detect crop problems before they became visible to the eye. Mounted on a plane flown at 3,000 feet at night, an infrared scanner measured the heat emitted by crops. The data were transformed into a color-coded map showing where plants were running “fevers”. Farmers could then spot-spray, using 50 to 70 percent less pesticide than they otherwise would.
    The bad news is that Paley’s company closed down in 1984, after only three years. Farmers resisted the new technology and long-term backers were hard to find. But with the renewed concern about pesticides on produce, and refinements in infrared scanning, Paley hopes to get back into operation. Agriculture experts have no doubt the technology works.
    “This technique can be used on 75 percent of agricultural land in the United States,” says George Oerther of Texas A&M. Ray Jackson, who recently retired from the Department of Agriculture, thinks remote infrared crop scanning could be adopted by the end of the decade. But only if Paley finds the financial backing which he failed to obtain 10 years ago.

Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay based on the picture below. You should start your essay with a brief description of the picture and then discuss whether technology is indispensable in education. You should give sound arguments to support your views and write at least 150words but no more than 200 words.

For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on happiness by referring to the saying “Happiness is not the absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them.” You can cite examples to illustrate your point and then explain how you can develop your ability to deal with problems and be happy. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words.

　　Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the 21st century, but- regardless of whether it is or isn't - we won't do much about it. We will argue over it and may even, as a nation, make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But the more dramatic and meaningful these commitments seem, the less likely they are to be observed.
　　A1 Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. But the real truth is that we don't know enough to relieve global warming, and - without major technological breakthroughs - we can't do much about it.
　　From 2003 to 2050, the world’s population is projected to grow from 6.4 billon to 9.1 billion, a 42% increase. If energy use per person and technology remain te same, total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions (mainly, CO2)will be 42% higher in 2050.But that's too low, because societies that grow richer use more energy. We need economic growth unless we condemn the world's poor to their present.
　　Poverty and freeze everyone else's living standards. With modest growth, energy use and greenhouse emissions more then double by 2050.
　　No government will adopt rigid restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might cut back global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something "Consider the Kyoto Protocol (京都议定书).It allowed countries that joined to punish those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced CO2 emissions(up about 25% since 1990),and many signatories (签字国) didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets.
　　The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential disaster, the only solution is new technology. Only an aggressive research and development program might find ways of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels or dealing with it.
　　The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral problem when it's really an engineering one. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.