2021 年真题

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

完形填空

Directions

Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)

Text

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, $\underline{1}$ , to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviors have multiple components. $\underline{2}$ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll $\underline{3}$ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to $\underline{4}$ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are $\underline{5}$ . How about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is $\underline{6}$ . People complained that buses were late and infrequent. $\underline{7}$ , the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were $\underline{8}$ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit these targets. But they $\underline{9}$ hit cyclists. If the target was changed to safety, you would get more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to $\underline{10}$ you would have more $\underline{11}$ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another $\underline{12}$ : people became immensely inventive in hitting targets. Have you $\underline{13}$ that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a $\underline{14}$ is meant to take. A one-hour flight is now billed as a two-hour flight.

The $\underline{15}$ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion and you may well $\underline{16}$ others. Everything can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a $\underline{17}$ . Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting. But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria $\underline{18}$ critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not only to $\underline{19}$ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better $\underline{20}$ the objective.

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisitions have

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisitions have

Text 4

We’re fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed “thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly with students’ end-of-semester ratings. Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.

Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. Accuracy dropped dramatically, Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading cues, such as certain gestures or utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. She found similar interference when participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.

Other research shows we’re better at detecting deception and sexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. “It’s as if you’re driving a stick shift,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, “and if you start thinking about it too much, you can’t remember what you’re doing. But if you go on automatic pilot, you’re fine. Much of our social life is like that.”

Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences. College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts’ opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex - when they had a lot of information to process.

Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules, comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech). Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition (“gut feeling,” hunches," “my heart”). Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest. Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.

Nalini Ambady’s study deals with

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisitions have

Text 4

We’re fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed “thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly with students’ end-of-semester ratings. Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.

Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. Accuracy dropped dramatically, Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading cues, such as certain gestures or utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. She found similar interference when participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.

Other research shows we’re better at detecting deception and sexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. “It’s as if you’re driving a stick shift,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, “and if you start thinking about it too much, you can’t remember what you’re doing. But if you go on automatic pilot, you’re fine. Much of our social life is like that.”

Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences. College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts’ opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex - when they had a lot of information to process.

Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules, comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech). Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition (“gut feeling,” hunches," “my heart”). Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest. Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.

Nalini Ambady’s study deals with

In Ambady’s study, rating accuracy dropped when participants

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisitions have

Text 4

We’re fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed “thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly with students’ end-of-semester ratings. Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.

Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. Accuracy dropped dramatically, Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading cues, such as certain gestures or utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. She found similar interference when participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.

Other research shows we’re better at detecting deception and sexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. “It’s as if you’re driving a stick shift,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, “and if you start thinking about it too much, you can’t remember what you’re doing. But if you go on automatic pilot, you’re fine. Much of our social life is like that.”

Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences. College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts’ opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex - when they had a lot of information to process.

Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules, comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech). Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition (“gut feeling,” hunches," “my heart”). Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest. Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.

Nalini Ambady’s study deals with

In Ambady’s study, rating accuracy dropped when participants

Judith Hall mentions driving to show that

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisitions have

Text 4

We’re fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed “thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly with students’ end-of-semester ratings. Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.

Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. Accuracy dropped dramatically, Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading cues, such as certain gestures or utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. She found similar interference when participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.

Other research shows we’re better at detecting deception and sexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. “It’s as if you’re driving a stick shift,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, “and if you start thinking about it too much, you can’t remember what you’re doing. But if you go on automatic pilot, you’re fine. Much of our social life is like that.”

Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences. College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts’ opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex - when they had a lot of information to process.

Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules, comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech). Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition (“gut feeling,” hunches," “my heart”). Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest. Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.

Nalini Ambady’s study deals with

In Ambady’s study, rating accuracy dropped when participants

Judith Hall mentions driving to show that

When you are making complex decisions, it is advisable to

阅读理解

Part A

Directions

Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing , [B), or [D)]. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)

Text 1

“Reskiling” is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind. We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demand will change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain. Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds that on average 42 per cent of the core skill’l within job roles will change by 2022, at a pace that is three times faster than on average. That is a very short timeline, so we can only imagine what the changes will be like in the future.

The question of who should pay for reskiling is a thorny one. For individual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workers whose skills are no longer in demand and replace them with those whose skills are. That does not always happen. AT&T is often given as the gold standard of a company who decided to do a massive reskiling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy, ultimately retraining 18,000 employers., Prepandemic, other companies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to create their own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economy though, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts in Canada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and have given us a situation where we frequently hear of employers begging for workers, even at times and in regions where unemployment is high.

With the pandemic, unemployment is very high indeed. In February, at 3.5 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively, unemployment rates in Canada and the United States were at generational lows and worker shortages were everywhere. As of May, those rates had spiked up to 13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortages had disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical filed, to take an obvious example, the pandemic meant that there were still clear shortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel.

Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter and train him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it. But even if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, and doing so would be to the benefit of all concerned. That seems to be the case in Sweden: when forced to furlough 90 per cent of their cabin staff, Scandinavian Airlines decided to start up a short retraining program that reskilled the laid-off workers to support hospital staff. The effort was a collective one and involved other companies as well as a Swedish university.

Research by the World Economic Forum suggests

AT&T is cited to show

Efforts to resolve the skills mismatch in Canada

We can learn from Paragraph 3 that there was

Scandinavian Airlines decided to

Text 2

With the global population predicted to hit close to 10 billion by 2050, and forecasts that agricultural production in some regions will need to nearly double, the issue of food security is increasingly making headlines. In the UK, it has become a big talking point recently for a rather particular reason: Brexit.

Brexit is seen by some as an opportunity to reverse a recent trend towards the UK importing food. The country produces only about 60 per cent of the food it eats, down from almost three-quarters in the late 1980s. A move back to self-sufficiency, the argument goes, would boost the farming industry, political sovereignty and even the nation’s health. Sounds great - but how feasible is this vision?

According to a report on UK food production from the University of Leeds, UK, 85 per cent of the country’s total land area is associated with meat and dairy production. That supplies 80 per cent of what is consumed, so even covering the whole country in livestock farms wouldn’t allow us to cover all our meat and dairy needs.

There are many caveats to those figures, but they are still grave. To become much more self-sufficient, the UK would need to drastically reduce its consumption of animal foods, and probably also farm more intensively - meaning fewer green fields, and more factory-style production.

But switching to a mainly plant-based diet wouldn’t help. There is a good reason why the UK is dominated by animal husbandry: most of its terrain doesn’t have the right soil or climate to grow crops on a commercial basis. Just 25 per cent of the country’s land is suitable for crop-growing, most of which is already occupied by arable fields. Even if we converted all the suitable land to fields of fruit and veg - which would involve taking out all the ancient forests and removing thousands of people from their homes - we would achieve only a 30 per cent boost in crop production.

Just 23 per cent of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the UK are currently home-grown, so even with the most extreme measures we could meet only 30 per cent of our fresh produce needs. That is before we look for the space to grow the grains, sugars, seeds and oils that provide us with the vast bulk of our current calorie intake.

Some people argue that food self-sufficiency in the UK would

The report by the University of Leeds shows that in the UK

Crop-growing in the UK is restricted due to

It can be learned from the last paragraph that British people

The author’s attitude to food self-sufficiency in the UK is

Text 3

When Microsoft bought task management app Wunderlist and mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015. It picked up two newcomers that were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft’s own Office dominates the market for “productivity” software, but the startups represented a new wave of technology designed from the ground up for the smartphone world.

Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it had used their best features in its own products. Their teams of engineers stayed on, making them two of the many “acqui-hires” that the biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for tech-talent.

To Microsoft’s critics, the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise are examples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up any innovative companies that lie in their path. “They bought the seedlings and closed them down,” complained Paul Arnold, a partner at San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businesses that might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined to comment.

Like other startup investors, Mr. Arnold’s own business of ten depends on selling startups to larger tech companies, though he admits to mixed feelings about the result. “I think these things are good for me, if I put my selfish hat on, But are they good for the American economy? I don’t know.”

The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answer to that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US tech companies for information about their many small acquisitions over the past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, the request has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stage tech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.

Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tm, rifling through such small deals - many of them much less prominent than Wunderlist and Sunrise - might seem beside the point. Between them, the five companies(Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bn acquisitions over the past five years - a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than $130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.

However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buy their most threatening potential competitors before their businesses have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a “buy and kill” tactic to simply close them down.

What is true about Wunderlist and Sunrise after their acquisitions?

Microsoft’s critics believe that the big tech companies tend to

Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions might

The US Federal Trade Commission intends to

For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisitions have

Text 4

We’re fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed “thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly with students’ end-of-semester ratings. Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.

Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. Accuracy dropped dramatically, Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading cues, such as certain gestures or utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. She found similar interference when participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.

Other research shows we’re better at detecting deception and sexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. “It’s as if you’re driving a stick shift,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, “and if you start thinking about it too much, you can’t remember what you’re doing. But if you go on automatic pilot, you’re fine. Much of our social life is like that.”

Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences. College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts’ opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex - when they had a lot of information to process.

Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules, comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech). Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition (“gut feeling,” hunches," “my heart”). Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest. Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.

Nalini Ambady’s study deals with

In Ambady’s study, rating accuracy dropped when participants

Judith Hall mentions driving to show that

When you are making complex decisions, it is advisable to

What can we learn from the last paragraph?