D.face external threats ?















17. In history hostility to Gypsies in Europe resulted in their persecution by all the following EXCEPT ____.?







A.the Egyptians B.the state?







C.the church D.the Nazis ?















18. According to the passage, the main difference between the Gypsies and the Jews lies in their concepts of ____.?







A.language B.culture C.identity D.custom ??















Text B?







I was just a boy when my father brought me to Harlem for the first time, almost 50 years ago. We stayed at the Hotel Theresa, a grand brick structure at 125th Street and Seventh Avenus. Once, in the hotel restaurant, my father pointed out Joe Louis. He even got Mr. Brown, the hotel manager, to introduce me to him, a bit paunchy but still the champ as far as I was concerned.?







Much has changed since then. Business and real estate are booming. Some say a new renaissance is under way. Others decry what they see as outside forces running roughshod over the old Harlem.?







New York meant Harlem to me, and as a young man I visited it whenever I could. But many of my old haunts are gone. The Theresa shut down in 1966. National chains that once ignored Harlem now anticipate yuppie money and want pieces of this prime Manhattan real estate. So here I am on a hot August afternoon, sitting in a Starbucks that two years ago opened a block away from the Theresa, snatching at memories between sips of high-priced coffee. I am about to open up a piece of the old Harlem-the New York Amsterdam News-when a tourist asking directions to Sylvia's, a prominent Harlem restaurant, penetrates my daydreaming. He's carrying a book: ?Touring Historic Harlem.??







History. I miss Mr. Michaux's bookstore, his House of Common Sense, which was across from the Theresa. He had a big billboard out front with brown and black faces painted on it that said in large letters:"World History Book Outlet on 2 000 000 000 Africans and Nonwhite Peoples."An ugly state office building has swallowed that space.?







I miss speaker like Carlos Cooks, who was always on the southwest corner of 125th and Seventh, urging listeners to support Africa. Harlem's powerful political electricity seems unplugged-although the streets are still energized, especially by West African immigrants.?







Hardworking southern newcomers formed the bulk of the community back in the 1920s and '30s, when Harlem renaissance artists, writers, and intellectuals gave it a glitter and renown that made it the capital of black America. From Harlem, W. E. B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Zora Hurston, and others helped power America's cultural influence around the world.?







By the 1970s and '80s drugs and crime had ravaged parts of the community. And the life expectancy for men in Harlem was less than that of men in Bangladesh. Harlem had become a symbol of the dangers of inner-city life.?







Now, you want to shout "Lookin' good!"at this place that has been neglected for so long. Crowds push into Harlem USA, a new shopping centre on 125th, where a Disney store shares space with HMV Records, the New York Sports Club, and a nine-screen Magic Johnson theatre complex. Nearb, a Rite Aid drugstore also opened. Maybe part of the reason Harlem seems to be undergoing a rebirth is that it is finally getting what most people take for granted.?







Harlem is also part of an "empowerment zone"-a federal designation aimed at fostering economic growth that will bring over half a billion in federal, state, and local dollars. Just the shells of once elegant old brownstones now can cost several hundred thousand dollars. Rents are skyrocketing. An improved economy, tougher law enforcement, and community efforts against drugs have contributed to a 60 percent drop in crime since 1993.?







19. At the beginning the author seems to indicate that Harlem ____.?







A.has remained unchanged all these years?







B.has undergonedrastic changes?







C.has become the capital of Black America?







D.has remained a symbol of dangers of inner-city life ?















20. When the author recalls Harlem in the old days, he has a feeling of ____.?







A.indifference B.discomfort C.delight D.nostalgia ?















21. Harlem was called the capital of Black America in the 1920s and '30s mainly because of its ____.?







A.art and culture B.immigrant population?







C.political enthusiasm D.distinctivearchitecture ?















22. From the passage we can infer that, generally speaking, the author ____.?







A.has strong reservations about the changes







B.has slight reservations about the changes?







C.welcomes the changes in Harlem







D.is completely opposed to the changes ??















TEXT C







The senior partner, Oliver Lambert, studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was married, and that was mandatory. The firm had never hired an unmarried lawyer, and it frowned heavily on divorce, as well as womanizing and drinking. Drug testing was in the contract. He had a degree in accounting, passed the CPA exam the first time he took it and wanted to be a tax lawyer, which of course was a requirement with a tax firm. He was white, and the firm had never hired a black. They managed this by being secretive and clubbish and never soliciting job applications. Other firms solicited, and hired blacks. This firm recruited, and remained lily white. Plus, the firm was in Memphis, and the top blacks wanted New York or Washington or Chicago. McDeere was a male, and there were no women in the firm. That mistake had been made in the mid-seventies when they recruited the number one grad from Harvard, who happened to be a she and a wizard at taxation. She lasted four turbulent years and was killed in a car wreck.?







He looked good, on paper. He was their top choice. In fact, for this year there were no other prospects. The list was very short. It was McDeere, or no one.?







The managing partner, Royce McKnight, studied a dossier labeled "Mitchell Y. McDeere-Harvard."An inch thick with small print and a few photographs; it had been prepared by some exCIA agents in a private intelligence outfit in Bethesda. They were clients of the firm and each year did the investigating for no fee. It was easy work, they said, checking out unsuspecting law students. They learned, for instance, that he preferred to leave the Northeast, that he was holding three job offers, two in New York and one in Chicago, and that the highest offer was $ 76 000 and the lowest was $ 68 000. He was in demand. He had been given the opportunity to cheat on a securities exam during his second year. He declined, and made the highest grade in the class. Two months ago he had been offered cocaine at a law school party. He said no and left when everyone began snorting. He drank an occasional beer, but drinking was expensive and he had no money. He owed close to $ 23 000 in student loans. He was hungry.?







Royce McKnight flipped through the dossier and smiled. McDeere was their man.?







Lamar Quin was thirty-two and not yet a partner. He had been brought along to look young and act young and project a youthful image for Bendini, Lambert & Locke, which in fact was a young firm, since most of the partners retired in their late forties or early fifties with money to burn. He would make partner in this firm. With a six-figure income guaranteed for the rest of his life, Lamar could enjoy the twelve-hundred-dollar tailored suits that hung so comfortably from his tall, athletic frame. He strolled nonchalantly across the thousand?dollar?a?day suite and poured another cup of decaf. He checked his watch. He glanced at the two partners sitting at the small conference table near the windows.?







Precisely at two-thirty someone knocked on the door. Lamar looked at the partners, who slid the resume and dossier into an open briefcase. All three reached for their jackets. Lamar buttoned his top button and opened the door.?















23. Which of the following is NOT the firm's recruitment requirement??







A.Marriage. B.Background. C.Relevant degree. D.Male. ?















24. The details of the private investigation show that the firm ____.?







A.was interested in his family background?







B.intended to check out his other job offers?







C.wanted to know something about his preference?







D.was interested in any personal detail of the man ?















25. According to the passage, the main reason Lama Quin was there at the interview was that ____.?







A.his image could help impress McDeere?







B.he would soon become a partner himself?







C.he was good at interviewing applicants?







D.his background was similar to McDeere's ?















26. We get the impression from the passage that in job recruitment the firm was NOT ____.?







A.selective B.secretive C.perfunctory D.racially biased ??















TEXT D







Harry Truman didn't think his successor had the right training to be president. "Poor Ike-it won't be a bit like the Army,"he said. "He'll sit there all day saying 'do this, do that,'and nothing will happen."Truman was wrong about Ike. Dwight Eisenhower had led a fractious alliance-you didn't tell Winston Churchill what to do-in a massive, chaotic war. He was used to politics. But Truman's insight could well be applied to another, even more venerated Washington figure: the CEO-turned cabinet secretary.?







A 20-year bull market has convinced us all that CEOs are geniuses, so watch with astonishment the troubles of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul O' Neill. Here are two highly regarded businessmen, obviously intelligent and well-informed, foundering in their jobs.?







Actually, we shouldn't be surprised. Rumsfeld and O' Neill are not doing badly despite having been successful CEOs but because of it. The record of senior businessmen in government is one of almost unrelieved disappointment. In fact, with the exception of Robert Rubin, it is difficult to think of a CEO who had a successful career in government.?







Why is this? Well, first the CEO has to recognize that he is no longer the CEO. He is at best an adviser to the CEO, the president. But even the president is not really the CEO. No one is. Power in a corporation is concentrated and vertically structured. Power in Washington is diffuse and horizontally spread out. The secretary might think he's in charge of his agency. But the chairman of the congressional committee funding that agency feels the same. In his famous study "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents,"Richard Neustadt explains how little power the president actually has and concludes that the only lasting presidential power is "the power to persuade."?







Take Rumseld's attempt to transform the cold-war military into one geared for the future. It's innovative but deeply threatening to almost everyone in Washington. The Defense secretary did not try to sell it to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress, the budget office of the White House. As a result, the idea is collapsing.?







Second, what power you have, you must use carefully. For example, O' Neill's position as Treasury secretary is one with little formal authority. Unlike Finance ministers around the world, Treasury does not control the budget. But it has symbolic power. The secretary is seen as the chief economic spokesman for the administration and, if he plays it right, the chief economic adviser for the president.?







O' Neill has been publiclycritical of the IMF's bailout packages for developing countries while at the same time approving such packages for Turkey, Argentina and Brazil. As a result, he has gotten the worst of both worlds. The bailouts continue, but their effect in holstering investor confidence is limited because the markets are rattled by his skepticism.?







Perhaps the government doesn't do bailouts well. But that leads to a third rule: you can't just quit. Jack Welch's famous law for re-engineering General Electric was to be first or second in any given product category, or else get out of that business. But if the government isn't doing a particular job at peak level, it doesn't always have the option of relieving itself of that function. The Pentagon probably wastes a lot of money. But it can't get out of the national-security business.?







The key to former Treasury secretary Rubin's success may have been that he fully understood that business and government are, in his words, "necessarily and properly very different."In a recent speech he explained, "Business functions around one predominate organizing principle, profitability ... Government, on the other hand, deals with a vast number of equally legitimate and often potentially competing objectives-for example, energy production versus environmental protection, or safety regulations versus productivity."?







Rubin's example shows that talented people can do well in government if they are willing to treat it as its own separate, serious endeavour. But having been bathed in a culture of adoration and flattery, it's difficult for a CEO to believe he needs to listen and learn, particularly from those despised and poorly paid specimens, politicians, bureaucrats and the media. And even if he knows it intellectually, he just can't live with it.?







27. For a CEO to be successful in government, he has to ____.?







A.regard the president as the CEO?







B.take absolute control of his department?







C.exercise more power than the congressional committee?







D.become acquainted with its power structure ?















28. In commenting on O' Neill's record as Treasury Secretary, the passage seems to indicate that ____.?







A.O' Neill has failed to use his power well?







B.O' Neill policies were well received?







C.O' Neill has been consistent in his policies?







D.O' Neill uncertain about the package he's approved ?















29. According to the passage, the differences between government and business lie in the following areas EXCEPT ____.?







A.nature of activity B.optin of withdrawal?







C.legitimacy of activity D.power distribution ?















30. The author seems to suggest that CEO-turned government officials ____.?







A.are able to fit into their new roles?







B.are unlikely to adapt to their new roles?







C.can respond to new situations intelligently?







D.may feel uncertain in their new posts ??















SECTION B SKIMMING AND SCANNING (10 min)?







In this section there are seven passages with ten multiple-choice questions. Skim or scan them as required and then mark your answers on COLORED ANSWER SHEET.??















TEXT E







First read the question. ?







31. The passage is mainly concerned with ____ in the U.S.A.?







A.traveling B.big cities C.cybercafes D .inventions ?







Now go through TEXT E quickly to answer question 31. ??















Planning to answer your e-mail while on holiday in New York? That may not be easy. The Internet may have been invented in the United States, but America is one of the least likely places where a traveller might find an Internet cafe. "Every major city in the world has more cybercafes than New York,"says Joie Kelly, who runs CyberCafeGuide.com. The numbers seem to bear her out: according to various directories, London has more than 30, Paris 19, Istanbul 17, but New York has only 8. Other U.S. cities fare just as poorly: Los Angeles has about 11, Chicago has 4. "Here it's quite hard work to find a cafe. I was surprised,"says Michael Robson, a sportswriter from York, England, who was visibly relieved to be checking his e-mail at CyberCafe near New York's Times Square.?







Why the lack of places to plug in? Americans enjoy one of the highest rates of Internet access from work and home in the world, and they've never really taken to cafes. About 80 percent of CyberCafe's clients, for instance, are tourists from overseas. Greek tycoon Stelios HajiIoannou also thinks high prices drive away locals. Last November he oppened a branch of his Internet-cafe chain easyEverything in Times Square. With 800 terminals, it's the largest Net cafe in the world. While the typical American cafe charges $ 8 to $ 12 an hour, easyEverything charges $ 1 to 4. Marketing manager Stephaine Engelsen says half the cafe's customers are locals. "We get policemen, firemen, nurses who don't work at desks with computers, actors between auditions."easyEverything is now planning to open new locations in Harlem, and possibly SoHo. Unless there's some cultural shift afoot, however, New York will continue to lag behind metropolises from Mexico City to Moscow.??















TEXT F







First read the question. ?







32. In the passage below the author primarily attempts to ____.?







A.criticize yogis in the West B.define what yoag is?







C.teach yoga postures D.experiment with yoga ?







Now go through TEXT F quickly to answer question 32. ??















Most of the so-called yogis in the West seem to focus on figure correction, not true awareness. They make statements about yoga being for the body, mind and soul. But this is just semantics. Asanas (postures), which get such huge play in the West, are the smallest aspect of yoga. Either you practice yoga as a whole or you don't. If one is practicing just for health, better to take up walking. Need to cure a disease? See a doctor. Yoga is not about fancy asanas or breath control. Nor is it a therapy or a philosophy. Yoga is about inside awareness. It is the process of union of the self with the whole. Yoga is becoming the Buddha.?







Yogis are experimentalists. In the West, scientists research mainly externalphenomena. Yogis focus on the inside. They know that the external world is maya (illusionary) and everything inside is sathya (truth). In maya everything goes, but if you know yourself nothing goes. The West tends to practice only what we call cultural asanas that focus on the external. We don't practice asanas just to become fit. Indian yogis have discovered 8.4 million such postures. It is essential to train our bodies to find the most comfortable pose that we can sit in for hours. Beyond that there is no role for physical yoga.?







Basically yoga is made up of two parts: ?bahirang? (external yoga) and ?antarang? (internal yoga). The West practices only the former. It needs to enter into ?antarang? yoga. After that begins the trip to the unknown where the master makes the student gradually aware at every stage, where you know that you are not the body or the mind and not even the soul. That is when you get the first taste of ?moksha?, or enlightenment. It is the sense of the opening of the silence, the sense where you lose yourself and are happy doing it, where for the first time your ego has merged with the superconsciousness. You feel you no longer exist, for you have walked into the valley of death. And if you start walking more and more in this valley, you become freer.??















TEXT G







First read the question. ?







33. The reviewer's comments on Henry Kissinger's new book are basically ____.?







A.negative B.noncommittal C.unfounded D.positive ?







Now go through TEXT G quickly to answer question 33. ??







Whatever you think of Henry Kissinger, you have to admit: the man has staying power. With a new book-?Does America Need a Foreign Policy?? -on the shelves, Kissinger is once again helping to shape American thinking on foreign relations. This is the sixth decade in which that statement can be said to be true.?







Kissinger's new book is terrific. Plainly intended as an extended tutorial on policy for the new American Administration, it is full of good sense and studded with occasional insights that will have readers nodding their heads in silent agreement. A particularly good chapter on Asia rebukes anyone who unthinkingly assigns China the role once played by the Soviet Union as the natural antagonist of the U.S.?







Kissinger's book can also be read in another, and more illuminating, light. It is, in essence, an extendedmeditation on the end of a particular way of looking at the world: one where the principal actors in international relations are nation-states, pursuing their conception of their own national interest, and in which the basic rule of foreign policy is that one nation does not intervene in the internal affairs of another.?







Students of international relations call this the "Westphalian system,"after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended Europe's Thirty Years War, a time of indescribable carnage waged in the name of competing religions. The treaties that ended the war put domestic arrangements-like religion-off limits to other states. In the war's aftermath a rough-rand-ready commitment to a balance of power among neighbours took shape. Kissinger is a noted shcool of the balance of power. And he is suspicious of attempts to meddle in the internal business of others.?







Yet Kissinger is far too sophisticated to attempt to recreate a world that is lost."Today,"he writes,"te Westphalian order is in systematiccrisis."In particular, nation-states are no longer the sole drivers of the international system. In some cases, groups of states-like the European Union or Mercosur-have developed their own identities and agendas. Economic globalization has both blurred the boundaries between nations and given a substantial international role to those giant companies for whom such boundaries make little sense. In today's world, individuals can be as influential as nations; future historians may consider the support for public health of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be more noteworthy than last week's United Nations conference on AIDS. And a large number of institutions are premised on the assumption that intervention in the internal affairs of others is often desirable. Were that not the case, Slobodan Milosevic would not have been surrendered last week to the jurisdiction of the war crimes tribunal in the Hague.?







The consequences of these changes are profound. Kissinger is right to note that globalization has undermined the role of the nation-state less in the case of the U.S. (Why? Because it's more powerful than anyone else.) Elsewhere, the old ways of thinking about the "national interest"-that guiding light of the Westphalian system-have fewer adherents than they once did.??















TEXT H







First read the question. ?







34. In the passage the author expresses his concern about ____.?







A.the survival of small languages







B.globalization in the post-Cold War era?







C.present-day technological progress







D.ecological imblance ?







Now go through TEXT H quickly to answer question 34. ??







During the past century, due to a variety of factors, more than 1 000 of the world's languages have disappeared, and it is possible to foresee a time, perhaps 100 years from now, when about half of today's 6 000 languages will either be dead or dying.?







This startling rate of linguistic extinction is possible because 96 per cent of the world's languages are now spoken only by 4 per cent of the world's population.?







Globalization in the post-Cold War era has witnessed the coming of the information age, which has played an important role in promoting economic co-operation but which has, at the same time, helped facilitate the assimilation of smaller cultural systems into a larger, mostly English-speaking whole.?







Internet and other forms of mass media have succeeded in making English the worldwide standard.?







In 1998, the Seminar on Technological Progress & Development of the Present-day World was held in China. At the seminar, many participants expressed concern over the potential risks associated with excessive dependency on information technology. These critics claimed a move from "information monopoly" to "information hegemony" could possibly become just another way for the strong to dominate the weak, culturally as well as economically.?







In other words, life in a technology-and information-based global society may lead to a new social stratification, in which linguistic assimilation will lead to cultural assimilation and social injustice will abound.?







In the 20th century, human society's over-development caused the deterioration of the environment and ecological imbalance. The extinction of myriadbiologicalspecies aroused deep concern which led people to an understanding of the special importance of protecting rare animals and plants on the brink of extinction.?







Now we face the question, is the maintenance of cultural and linguisticdiversity as important as the preservation of pandas and Chinese white-flag dolphins??







Given the open society in which we live, or wish to live, this question becomes complicated. A balance must be struck between promoting international exchanges on the one hand, and taking measures to protect "small" languages on the other hand.?







Most widely used languages, such as the six working languages-including English and Chiese-used in the United Nations, have little to fear and need no special protection.?







But for other, more marginal languages some measures should be taken. Professionals should be trained to study and use them in order to keep them alive. Effective measures such as bilingual or multilingual education should also be implemented to protect them from extinction.?







To some, 6 000 may seem like an inexhaustible number of languages. To those same people, it may seem irrelevant if one or two of those languages cease to be used.?