2015年英语四级考试每日一练(12月14日)
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单项选择题
1、
A．Passwords are widely used in computer security. All too often, they are also ineffective. A good password has to be both easy to remember and hard to guess, but in practice people seem to choose the former over the latter.Names of wives, husbands and children are popular. Some take simplicity to extremes: one of my friends used "z" for many years. And when hackers stole 32m passwords from a social-gaming website called RockYou, it emerged that 1.1% of the site's users--365,000 people--had chosen either for "123456" or for "12345".
B. That predictability lets security researchers create dictionaries which listcommon passwords, good news to those seeking to break in. But althoughresearchers know that passwords are insecure, working out just how insecurehas been difficult. Many studies have only small samples to work on--afew thousand passwords at most. Hacked websites such as RockYou haveprovided longer lists, but there are ethical ( 伦理的) problems with usinghacked information, and its availability is unpredictable.
C．However, a paper to be presented at a security conference held with thesupport of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a NewYork-based professional body, in May 2012, sheds some light. With the co-operation of Yahoo!, a large Internet company, Joseph Bonneau of CambridgeUniversity obtained the biggest sample to date---70m passwords that, thoughanonymised ( 隐去姓名 ) , came with useful demographic data about theirowners. Mr. Bonneau found some interesting variations. Older users hadbetter passwords than young ones. People whose preferred language wasKorean or German chose the most secure passwords; those who spokeIndonesian the least. Passwords designed to hide sensitive information suchas credit-card numbers were only slightly more secure than those protectingless important things, like access to games. "Nag screens" that told users theyhad chosen a weak password made virtually no difference. And users whoseaccounts had been hacked in the past did not make dramatically more securechoices than those who had never been hacked.
D．But it is the broader analysis of the sample that is of most interest to securityresearchers. For, despite their differences, the 70m users were still predictableenough that a generic password dictionary was effective against both theentire sample and any demographically organised slice of it. Mr. Bonneauis blunt: "An attacker who can manage ten guesses per account...willcompromise around 1% of accounts." And that, from the hacker's point ofview, is a worthwhile outcome.
E．One obvious answer would be for sites to limit the number of guesses thatcan be made before access is blocked, as cash machines do. Yet whereas thebiggest sites, such as Google and Microsoft, do take such measures, many donot. A sample of 150 big websites examined in 2010 by Mr. Bonneau and hiscolleague Soren Preibusch found that 126 made no attempt to limit guessing.
How this state of affairs arose is obscure. For some sites, laxity ( 松懈) maybe rational, since their passwords are not protecting anything particularlyvaluable, such as credit-card details. But password laxity imposes costs evenon sites with good security, since people often use the same password forseveral different places.
F．One suggestion is that lax password security is a cultural remnant ( ~, ) of the Internet's innocent youth--an academic research network has few reasons to worry about hackers. Another possibility is that because many sites begin as cash-strapped start-ups, for which implementing extra password security would take up valuable programming time, they skimp on it at the beginning and then never bother to change. But whatever the reason, those who are unwilling to wait for websites should get their acts together to consider the alternatives to traditional passwords.
G．One such is multi-word passwords called passphrases. Using several words instead of one means an attacker has to guess more letters, which creates more security--but only if the phrase chosen is not one likely to turn up, through familiar usage, in a dictionary of phrases. Which, of course, it often is. Mr. Bonneau and his colleague Ekaterina Shutova have analysed a real-world passphrase system employed by Amazon, an online retailer thatallowed its American users to employ passphrases between October 2009 and February 2012. They found that, although passphrases do offer better security than passwords, they are not as good as had been hoped. A phrase of four or five randomly (随机地 ) chosen words is fairly secure. But remembering several such phrases is no easier than remembering several randomly chosen passwords. Once again, the need for memorability is good news to attackers.
By scraping the Interact for lists of things like film titles, sporting phrases and slang, Mr. Bonneau and Dr. Shutova were able to construct a 20,656-word dictionary that broke into 1.13% oft he accounts in Amazon's database.
H. The researchers also suspected that even those who do not use famous phrases would still prefer patterns found in natural language over true randomness.
So they compared their collection of passphrases with two-word phrases extracted at random from the British National Corpus, and from the Google NGram Corpus. Sure enough, they found considerable overlap ( 重叠) between structures common in ordinary English and the phrases chosen by Amazon's users. Some 13% of the adjective-noun constructions which the researchers tried were on the money, as were 5% of adverb-verb mixes.
I．One way round that is to combine the ideas of a password and a passphrase into a so-called mnemonic ( 帮助记忆的 ) password. This is a string of apparent nonsense which is not actually too hard to remember. It can be formed, for example, by using the first letter of each word in a phrase, varying upper and lower case, and substituting some symbols for others-- "8"for"B" , for instance. Even mnemonic passwords, however, are not always safe. A study published in 2006 cracked 4% of the mnemonics in a sample using a dictionary based on song lyrics, film titles and the like.
J．The final result is that there is probably no right answer. All security is annoying, and there is a constant tension between people's desire to be safe and their desire for things to be simple. While that tension persists, the hacker will always get through.
Mr. Bonneau found that the passwords used by older users were more secure than the ones used by young users.
2、
Making Reading, Writing and Recession Work Together
A．With books tucked neatly on the shelves and a comfy purple-dragon rug in a back comernook, the library at San Diego's Willard B. Hage Elementary School is the perfect place forchildren to fall in love with reading. Since the start of the school year, however, the libraryhas been off limits to students, who get to go there only when (already overworkeD．teacherscan escort them and handle the record keeping. "With all of the cutbacks we've had in thelast few years, the district can't pay for someone to help check out books," explains PamWiesenberg, a third-grade teacher at the school. "As a result, the children suffer."
B．As the national economy continues to nose dive, a growing number of public schoolshave found themselves facing similar situations -- and making more and more painfulcutbacks. Advanced Placement programmes, extra help for English learners, art, musicand summer school could be on the chopping block in many places. Ditto (同上) for ef-forts to reduce class size.
C．The huge federal stimulus package should offer some relief to desperate districts; theHouse and Senate are haggling over versions that include at least $80 billion for edu-cation programs, a significant bump up from the Education Department's $59 billiondiscretionary ( 自由裁量的) budget for fiscal 2008. But there's a catch: a big chunk ofthe stimulus money that is designed to prevent massive teacher layoffs will be awardedonly to states that spend at least as much on education as they did in 2006 -- a tall ordergiven that a minimum of 42 states are facing significant budget gaps. At least 20 stateshave already cut their K-12 budgets. Moreover, even with the federal stimulus money,school districts will still get the bulk of their funding from state and local coffers, whichhaven't been this low in decades. As Randall Moody, manager of federal advocacy forthe National Education Association, says, "When you have 40 states with serious budgetissues and that's where schools get the bulk of their money, naturally there's going to bea problem."
D．Budget disasters are perhaps most acute in California. The state, the most populous in theUS, spends about $48 billion a year on K-12 education, or nearly half its general fund,which receives revenue from a variety of sources, including income and sales taxes. Thisyear, however, the double hits of endless layoffs and an imploding (剧减的) real estatemarket has mined the fund, with legislators projecting a $42 billion deficit by the mid-dle of next year. To help bridge this gap, Govemor Amold Schwarzenegger has proposedshorting schools $2.1 billion during the rest of this academic year and $3.1 billion thenext. He wants to save an additional $1.1 billion by reducing the number of school days,from 180 to 175. Though the extra time off might cheer students, California school super-intendent Jack O. Connell strenuously opposes the move. Best sound bite: "To close theachievement gap and prepare all students for success in the competitive global economy,we should be offering more time in class, not less."
E. Despite Congress's holding emergency weekend sessions to push through a stimulus plan,educators in many states lament the fact that schools won't see a penny of the extra moneyuntil at least July. According to O. Connell, some of California's poorest districts are run-ning out of cash for subsidised meal programmes. The Hayward district is planning layoffsthat would increase class size in primary grades from 20 students to 32. In Lake Elsinore,schools have turned off the lights in many rooms -- and placed duct tape over the switch-es -- to save money on electricity bills.
F.Terry Grier, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, says his districtneeds a cash influx (流入) now. "There are schools in our district that don't even havenurses on certain days," says Grier, whose district includes Hage Elementary School andits shuttered stacks. "If a kid skins his elbow, a teacher has to take time out of her lesson todust him off, clean him up and put on a Band Aid."
G. California isn't the only state grappling with steep K-12 budget cuts. In Florida, officialsin overcrowded school districts are bracing themselves for likely staff cuts. Connecti-cut's board of education adopted a budget resolution in December that included an over-all 10% reduction -- a move that some fear means that pink slips for teachers are inevi-table. "The biggest line items in most school budgets are staff and benefits," says BobBrewer, an education consultant in East Hartford, Conn. "No district can absorb thosekinds of hits without trimming some of those big ticket items." Even oil and gas richstates are in a panic. In Alaska, for instance, sinking oil prices have some state legisla-tors scrambling to lock in education budgets for the next few years as the state preparesto dip into its savings to cover a shortfall of approximately $1.65 billion this year andup to $3 billion next year. In Montana, which earned big bucks last year from its naturalresources, education is funded primarily through property taxes, and many fear that theclosing of mines and aluminum plants could trigger a mass exodus and redistribute thetax base. "It doesn't look good," says Eric Feaver, who heads the MEA MFT, a union ofteachers and state employees. "People around here are starting to ask themselves whatwill happen if people leave."
H. Where will those families go? And whose school districts can afford to absorb their chil-dren? In California, school officials are expecting to receive upwards of $8 billion overtwo years from the federal stimulus. While this money would enable districts to addresssome of their most pressing needs, John Mockler, an education funding specialist in Sac-ramento, says, "It's not apanacea (万灵药). In the long term, Mockler says, states needto come up with new funding sources to support classroom instruction and let teachers dowhat they were hired to do -- teach. In the meantime, some school district administratorshave come up with creative solutions. Superintendent Jerry Vaughn of the Floydada Inde-pendent School District in Texas -- which has 900 or so students -- says he is working to-ward a partnership with a local wind power company that would pay for a laptop for everykid in grades 6 through 12. At the fast growing Forsyth County Schools District in Cum-ming, Ga., Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer, recently opted to usefree open source software instead of purchasing expensive software licenses from vendorslike Microsoft. Mitchell says the decision will save $1.1 million over three years. "We satback and recognized the money we needed simply wasn't going to materialize out of thinair," he says.
I. Back in San Diego, at Hage Elementary, teachers desperate for help in the school libraryare recruiting parent volunteers to staff the facility a few days each week. Juli Finney,president of the school's Parent Teacher Association, admits that while this solution isn'tideal, it is precisely the kind of effort she and other parents must make to ensure that statebudget cuts don't deny their children the chance to experience the thousands of books thatare now quite literally behind closed doors. "Technically, the PTA is supposed to put ic-ing on the cake and not provide the cake itself," she says. But when times are tough, somecake is better than no cake at all.
There might not be enough taxes for school budgets if a lot of people leave Montana.
3、听音频：
根据录音选择合适的答案( )
A．Use the woman's mobile phone．
B．Buy a mobile phone．
C．Borrow some change,
D．Use a pay phone．
4、Questionsare based on the following passage．
Never before has so much money been made by a single firm in such a short period of time．OnJanuary 27th Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, announced that it had made $18 billion in its latest financialquarter．Apple's telephone-number-sized profit stemmed largely from sales of its hugely popular iPhone, which accounted for over two-thirds of its $ 74．6 billion revenue．Chief executives rarely admit to being shocked by their companies' performance, but Mr．Cook said it was "hard to comprehend" the extent of the interest in Apple's products．He noted that, on average,34,000 iPhones were bought every hour of every day during the latest quarter．
Apple is the world's largest company by market capitalisation (总值) as well as its most profitable．Strikingly, it has risen to greatness using a rather old-Fashioned business model: sellinghighly desirable objects at fat gross margins, which hit almost 40% in the latest quarter．The tech
industry has bred numerous software-based finns, such as Google and Facebook, that don't have to worry about shifting goods around, yet they make much less than the Colossus of Cupertino．Amazon handles lots of physical goods, but loses money．
Another thing that sets Apple apart from the tech pack is its success in conquering China．Whilerivals have been frustrated there, Apple has just become the largest force in China's smartphone market measured by units shipped, according to Canalys, a market-research firm．Any failure in China could hurt Apple．The company's overall dependence on the iPhone is anotherrisk．But these are early days for the iPhone 6, Apple's latest device, whose bigger screen takes the firminto the "phablet" (平板手机) category of larger phones that are wildly popular with customers．Some
iFans also point out that Apple's share of the smartphone market is small compared with devices using Google's Android operating system．So it has plenty of room to grow．Mr．Cook said this week that its much-anticipated smartwatch will go on sale in April．Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a consulting ftrm, thinks Apple could sell 22m -24m in the first 12 months after
the launch, producing billions of dollars of new revenue．Sanford C．Bernstein, a research firm, reckons the watches will have a higher-than-average gross margin, which predicts good profits．Apple should be able to make more money from software and services, too．
A large part of Apple's fat profit comes from__________．
A．the sales of its smartwatch
B．the sales of its software
C．the sales of its service
D．the sales of its iPhone
5、听音频，
回答题
A．She will give her test report to the man on Sunday.
B．She wants to copy the test report with the man together.
C．She won't let the man copy her test report.
D．She thinks the man can copy her test report on Sundays.
6、听音频，
回答题
A．Finishing the lunch.
B．Having a meeting.
C．Arranging the room.
D．Making some coffee.
7、听录音,
回答题
A． She used to be in poor health.
B． She was popular among boys.
C． She was somewhat overweight.
D． She didn't do well at high school.
填空题
8、阅读下文，回答题
Everybody wants to get wealthy. In today’s（26）_____ world，making money or becoming wealthy symbolizes a person’s success and capability. Many people just make every effort，pay any price to（27）_____ greater wealth. with money，they can buy nice，large（28）_____ in nice neighborhoods；with money they can own stately（29）_____ cars. Wealth seems to bring all happiness in life.
But is wealth the only road to happiness? Not really. There are many things in the world which are beyond（30）_____ money， such as friendship，love，health and knowledge. Many people are so preoccupied with（31）_____ money that they have no time or would not take the time to form or maintain friendship. What happiness can they feel living as lonely，（32）_____ creatures with no true love or friends in the world，even if they（33）_____ tremendous wealth?
In my opinion，people can’t do anything without money，but money is not everything. What money will bring you depends on your personal（34）_____ and goal in life. If you are kind enough to help others. especially the poor，money is a good thing for you. with it，you can do much more for the benefit of people and your country，and it will（35）_____ your own happiness. If you want money just for your own needs，you’ll never be satisfied or happy. In a word， only if you are generous can money be the source of your happiness.
第(26)题__________
简答题
9、中国长城是中国古代为抵御敌人的侵袭而修筑的伟大工程。它位于中国北部，全长约8851．8公里。它始建于2000多年前的春秋时期(Spring and Autumn Period.，秦始皇统一中国之后联成万里长城。汉、明两代(the Hanand Ming Dynasties.又曾大规模修筑，因此它是世界上修建时间长的一项古代工程。长城是人类文明史上伟大的建筑工程之一，被列为世界八大奇迹之一和世界文化遗产(heritage)。
10、 剪纸(paper cutting)是中国为流行的传统民间艺术形式之一。中国剪纸有一千五百多年的历史，在明朝和清朝时期(the Ming and OingDynasties)特别流行。人们常用剪纸美化居家环境。特别是在春节和婚庆期间，剪纸被用来装饰门窗和房间，以增加喜庆的气氛。剪纸常用的颜色是红色，象征健康和兴旺。中国剪纸在世界各地很受欢迎，经常被用作馈赠外国友人的礼物。
1、
A．Passwords are widely used in computer security. All too often, they are also ineffective. A good password has to be both easy to remember and hard to guess, but in practice people seem to choose the former over the latter.Names of wives, husbands and children are popular. Some take simplicity to extremes: one of my friends used "z" for many years. And when hackers stole 32m passwords from a social-gaming website called RockYou, it emerged that 1.1% of the site's users--365,000 people--had chosen either for "123456" or for "12345".
B. That predictability lets security researchers create dictionaries which listcommon passwords, good news to those seeking to break in. But althoughresearchers know that passwords are insecure, working out just how insecurehas been difficult. Many studies have only small samples to work on--afew thousand passwords at most. Hacked websites such as RockYou haveprovided longer lists, but there are ethical ( 伦理的) problems with usinghacked information, and its availability is unpredictable.
C．However, a paper to be presented at a security conference held with thesupport of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a NewYork-based professional body, in May 2012, sheds some light. With the co-operation of Yahoo!, a large Internet company, Joseph Bonneau of CambridgeUniversity obtained the biggest sample to date---70m passwords that, thoughanonymised ( 隐去姓名 ) , came with useful demographic data about theirowners. Mr. Bonneau found some interesting variations. Older users hadbetter passwords than young ones. People whose preferred language wasKorean or German chose the most secure passwords; those who spokeIndonesian the least. Passwords designed to hide sensitive information suchas credit-card numbers were only slightly more secure than those protectingless important things, like access to games. "Nag screens" that told users theyhad chosen a weak password made virtually no difference. And users whoseaccounts had been hacked in the past did not make dramatically more securechoices than those who had never been hacked.
D．But it is the broader analysis of the sample that is of most interest to securityresearchers. For, despite their differences, the 70m users were still predictableenough that a generic password dictionary was effective against both theentire sample and any demographically organised slice of it. Mr. Bonneauis blunt: "An attacker who can manage ten guesses per account...willcompromise around 1% of accounts." And that, from the hacker's point ofview, is a worthwhile outcome.
E．One obvious answer would be for sites to limit the number of guesses thatcan be made before access is blocked, as cash machines do. Yet whereas thebiggest sites, such as Google and Microsoft, do take such measures, many donot. A sample of 150 big websites examined in 2010 by Mr. Bonneau and hiscolleague Soren Preibusch found that 126 made no attempt to limit guessing.
How this state of affairs arose is obscure. For some sites, laxity ( 松懈) maybe rational, since their passwords are not protecting anything particularlyvaluable, such as credit-card details. But password laxity imposes costs evenon sites with good security, since people often use the same password forseveral different places.
F．One suggestion is that lax password security is a cultural remnant ( ~, ) of the Internet's innocent youth--an academic research network has few reasons to worry about hackers. Another possibility is that because many sites begin as cash-strapped start-ups, for which implementing extra password security would take up valuable programming time, they skimp on it at the beginning and then never bother to change. But whatever the reason, those who are unwilling to wait for websites should get their acts together to consider the alternatives to traditional passwords.
G．One such is multi-word passwords called passphrases. Using several words instead of one means an attacker has to guess more letters, which creates more security--but only if the phrase chosen is not one likely to turn up, through familiar usage, in a dictionary of phrases. Which, of course, it often is. Mr. Bonneau and his colleague Ekaterina Shutova have analysed a real-world passphrase system employed by Amazon, an online retailer thatallowed its American users to employ passphrases between October 2009 and February 2012. They found that, although passphrases do offer better security than passwords, they are not as good as had been hoped. A phrase of four or five randomly (随机地 ) chosen words is fairly secure. But remembering several such phrases is no easier than remembering several randomly chosen passwords. Once again, the need for memorability is good news to attackers.
By scraping the Interact for lists of things like film titles, sporting phrases and slang, Mr. Bonneau and Dr. Shutova were able to construct a 20,656-word dictionary that broke into 1.13% oft he accounts in Amazon's database.
H. The researchers also suspected that even those who do not use famous phrases would still prefer patterns found in natural language over true randomness.
So they compared their collection of passphrases with two-word phrases extracted at random from the British National Corpus, and from the Google NGram Corpus. Sure enough, they found considerable overlap ( 重叠) between structures common in ordinary English and the phrases chosen by Amazon's users. Some 13% of the adjective-noun constructions which the researchers tried were on the money, as were 5% of adverb-verb mixes.
I．One way round that is to combine the ideas of a password and a passphrase into a so-called mnemonic ( 帮助记忆的 ) password. This is a string of apparent nonsense which is not actually too hard to remember. It can be formed, for example, by using the first letter of each word in a phrase, varying upper and lower case, and substituting some symbols for others-- "8"for"B" , for instance. Even mnemonic passwords, however, are not always safe. A study published in 2006 cracked 4% of the mnemonics in a sample using a dictionary based on song lyrics, film titles and the like.
J．The final result is that there is probably no right answer. All security is annoying, and there is a constant tension between people's desire to be safe and their desire for things to be simple. While that tension persists, the hacker will always get through.
Mr. Bonneau found that the passwords used by older users were more secure than the ones used by young users.
2、
Making Reading, Writing and Recession Work Together
A．With books tucked neatly on the shelves and a comfy purple-dragon rug in a back comernook, the library at San Diego's Willard B. Hage Elementary School is the perfect place forchildren to fall in love with reading. Since the start of the school year, however, the libraryhas been off limits to students, who get to go there only when (already overworkeD．teacherscan escort them and handle the record keeping. "With all of the cutbacks we've had in thelast few years, the district can't pay for someone to help check out books," explains PamWiesenberg, a third-grade teacher at the school. "As a result, the children suffer."
B．As the national economy continues to nose dive, a growing number of public schoolshave found themselves facing similar situations -- and making more and more painfulcutbacks. Advanced Placement programmes, extra help for English learners, art, musicand summer school could be on the chopping block in many places. Ditto (同上) for ef-forts to reduce class size.
C．The huge federal stimulus package should offer some relief to desperate districts; theHouse and Senate are haggling over versions that include at least $80 billion for edu-cation programs, a significant bump up from the Education Department's $59 billiondiscretionary ( 自由裁量的) budget for fiscal 2008. But there's a catch: a big chunk ofthe stimulus money that is designed to prevent massive teacher layoffs will be awardedonly to states that spend at least as much on education as they did in 2006 -- a tall ordergiven that a minimum of 42 states are facing significant budget gaps. At least 20 stateshave already cut their K-12 budgets. Moreover, even with the federal stimulus money,school districts will still get the bulk of their funding from state and local coffers, whichhaven't been this low in decades. As Randall Moody, manager of federal advocacy forthe National Education Association, says, "When you have 40 states with serious budgetissues and that's where schools get the bulk of their money, naturally there's going to bea problem."
D．Budget disasters are perhaps most acute in California. The state, the most populous in theUS, spends about $48 billion a year on K-12 education, or nearly half its general fund,which receives revenue from a variety of sources, including income and sales taxes. Thisyear, however, the double hits of endless layoffs and an imploding (剧减的) real estatemarket has mined the fund, with legislators projecting a $42 billion deficit by the mid-dle of next year. To help bridge this gap, Govemor Amold Schwarzenegger has proposedshorting schools $2.1 billion during the rest of this academic year and $3.1 billion thenext. He wants to save an additional $1.1 billion by reducing the number of school days,from 180 to 175. Though the extra time off might cheer students, California school super-intendent Jack O. Connell strenuously opposes the move. Best sound bite: "To close theachievement gap and prepare all students for success in the competitive global economy,we should be offering more time in class, not less."
E. Despite Congress's holding emergency weekend sessions to push through a stimulus plan,educators in many states lament the fact that schools won't see a penny of the extra moneyuntil at least July. According to O. Connell, some of California's poorest districts are run-ning out of cash for subsidised meal programmes. The Hayward district is planning layoffsthat would increase class size in primary grades from 20 students to 32. In Lake Elsinore,schools have turned off the lights in many rooms -- and placed duct tape over the switch-es -- to save money on electricity bills.
F.Terry Grier, superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, says his districtneeds a cash influx (流入) now. "There are schools in our district that don't even havenurses on certain days," says Grier, whose district includes Hage Elementary School andits shuttered stacks. "If a kid skins his elbow, a teacher has to take time out of her lesson todust him off, clean him up and put on a Band Aid."
G. California isn't the only state grappling with steep K-12 budget cuts. In Florida, officialsin overcrowded school districts are bracing themselves for likely staff cuts. Connecti-cut's board of education adopted a budget resolution in December that included an over-all 10% reduction -- a move that some fear means that pink slips for teachers are inevi-table. "The biggest line items in most school budgets are staff and benefits," says BobBrewer, an education consultant in East Hartford, Conn. "No district can absorb thosekinds of hits without trimming some of those big ticket items." Even oil and gas richstates are in a panic. In Alaska, for instance, sinking oil prices have some state legisla-tors scrambling to lock in education budgets for the next few years as the state preparesto dip into its savings to cover a shortfall of approximately $1.65 billion this year andup to $3 billion next year. In Montana, which earned big bucks last year from its naturalresources, education is funded primarily through property taxes, and many fear that theclosing of mines and aluminum plants could trigger a mass exodus and redistribute thetax base. "It doesn't look good," says Eric Feaver, who heads the MEA MFT, a union ofteachers and state employees. "People around here are starting to ask themselves whatwill happen if people leave."
H. Where will those families go? And whose school districts can afford to absorb their chil-dren? In California, school officials are expecting to receive upwards of $8 billion overtwo years from the federal stimulus. While this money would enable districts to addresssome of their most pressing needs, John Mockler, an education funding specialist in Sac-ramento, says, "It's not apanacea (万灵药). In the long term, Mockler says, states needto come up with new funding sources to support classroom instruction and let teachers dowhat they were hired to do -- teach. In the meantime, some school district administratorshave come up with creative solutions. Superintendent Jerry Vaughn of the Floydada Inde-pendent School District in Texas -- which has 900 or so students -- says he is working to-ward a partnership with a local wind power company that would pay for a laptop for everykid in grades 6 through 12. At the fast growing Forsyth County Schools District in Cum-ming, Ga., Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer, recently opted to usefree open source software instead of purchasing expensive software licenses from vendorslike Microsoft. Mitchell says the decision will save $1.1 million over three years. "We satback and recognized the money we needed simply wasn't going to materialize out of thinair," he says.
I. Back in San Diego, at Hage Elementary, teachers desperate for help in the school libraryare recruiting parent volunteers to staff the facility a few days each week. Juli Finney,president of the school's Parent Teacher Association, admits that while this solution isn'tideal, it is precisely the kind of effort she and other parents must make to ensure that statebudget cuts don't deny their children the chance to experience the thousands of books thatare now quite literally behind closed doors. "Technically, the PTA is supposed to put ic-ing on the cake and not provide the cake itself," she says. But when times are tough, somecake is better than no cake at all.
There might not be enough taxes for school budgets if a lot of people leave Montana.
3、听音频：
根据录音选择合适的答案( )
A．Use the woman's mobile phone．
B．Buy a mobile phone．
C．Borrow some change,
D．Use a pay phone．
4、Questionsare based on the following passage．
Never before has so much money been made by a single firm in such a short period of time．OnJanuary 27th Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, announced that it had made $18 billion in its latest financialquarter．Apple's telephone-number-sized profit stemmed largely from sales of its hugely popular iPhone, which accounted for over two-thirds of its $ 74．6 billion revenue．Chief executives rarely admit to being shocked by their companies' performance, but Mr．Cook said it was "hard to comprehend" the extent of the interest in Apple's products．He noted that, on average,34,000 iPhones were bought every hour of every day during the latest quarter．
Apple is the world's largest company by market capitalisation (总值) as well as its most profitable．Strikingly, it has risen to greatness using a rather old-Fashioned business model: sellinghighly desirable objects at fat gross margins, which hit almost 40% in the latest quarter．The tech
industry has bred numerous software-based finns, such as Google and Facebook, that don't have to worry about shifting goods around, yet they make much less than the Colossus of Cupertino．Amazon handles lots of physical goods, but loses money．
Another thing that sets Apple apart from the tech pack is its success in conquering China．Whilerivals have been frustrated there, Apple has just become the largest force in China's smartphone market measured by units shipped, according to Canalys, a market-research firm．Any failure in China could hurt Apple．The company's overall dependence on the iPhone is anotherrisk．But these are early days for the iPhone 6, Apple's latest device, whose bigger screen takes the firminto the "phablet" (平板手机) category of larger phones that are wildly popular with customers．Some
iFans also point out that Apple's share of the smartphone market is small compared with devices using Google's Android operating system．So it has plenty of room to grow．Mr．Cook said this week that its much-anticipated smartwatch will go on sale in April．Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, a consulting ftrm, thinks Apple could sell 22m -24m in the first 12 months after
the launch, producing billions of dollars of new revenue．Sanford C．Bernstein, a research firm, reckons the watches will have a higher-than-average gross margin, which predicts good profits．Apple should be able to make more money from software and services, too．
A large part of Apple's fat profit comes from__________．
A．the sales of its smartwatch
B．the sales of its software
C．the sales of its service
D．the sales of its iPhone
5、听音频，
回答题
A．She will give her test report to the man on Sunday.
B．She wants to copy the test report with the man together.
C．She won't let the man copy her test report.
D．She thinks the man can copy her test report on Sundays.
6、听音频，
回答题
A．Finishing the lunch.
B．Having a meeting.
C．Arranging the room.
D．Making some coffee.
7、听录音,
回答题
A． She used to be in poor health.
B． She was popular among boys.
C． She was somewhat overweight.
D． She didn't do well at high school.
填空题
8、阅读下文，回答题
Everybody wants to get wealthy. In today’s（26）_____ world，making money or becoming wealthy symbolizes a person’s success and capability. Many people just make every effort，pay any price to（27）_____ greater wealth. with money，they can buy nice，large（28）_____ in nice neighborhoods；with money they can own stately（29）_____ cars. Wealth seems to bring all happiness in life.
But is wealth the only road to happiness? Not really. There are many things in the world which are beyond（30）_____ money， such as friendship，love，health and knowledge. Many people are so preoccupied with（31）_____ money that they have no time or would not take the time to form or maintain friendship. What happiness can they feel living as lonely，（32）_____ creatures with no true love or friends in the world，even if they（33）_____ tremendous wealth?
In my opinion，people can’t do anything without money，but money is not everything. What money will bring you depends on your personal（34）_____ and goal in life. If you are kind enough to help others. especially the poor，money is a good thing for you. with it，you can do much more for the benefit of people and your country，and it will（35）_____ your own happiness. If you want money just for your own needs，you’ll never be satisfied or happy. In a word， only if you are generous can money be the source of your happiness.
第(26)题__________
简答题
9、中国长城是中国古代为抵御敌人的侵袭而修筑的伟大工程。它位于中国北部，全长约8851．8公里。它始建于2000多年前的春秋时期(Spring and Autumn Period.，秦始皇统一中国之后联成万里长城。汉、明两代(the Hanand Ming Dynasties.又曾大规模修筑，因此它是世界上修建时间长的一项古代工程。长城是人类文明史上伟大的建筑工程之一，被列为世界八大奇迹之一和世界文化遗产(heritage)。
10、 剪纸(paper cutting)是中国为流行的传统民间艺术形式之一。中国剪纸有一千五百多年的历史，在明朝和清朝时期(the Ming and OingDynasties)特别流行。人们常用剪纸美化居家环境。特别是在春节和婚庆期间，剪纸被用来装饰门窗和房间，以增加喜庆的气氛。剪纸常用的颜色是红色，象征健康和兴旺。中国剪纸在世界各地很受欢迎，经常被用作馈赠外国友人的礼物。
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