22. What has the woman been doing in the past seven years?
Conversation 2
W: Morning! So early of you!
M: Hi, I am working on a research task of Prof. Stevenson?ˉs class.
W: I missed the class yesterday. Anything interesting?
M: Well, yes, very interesting. His class was about corporate culture and took the Swedish
furniture retailer IKEA as an example.
W: Oh, really? M: Right, with IKEA?ˉs mission statement ?°A better life for the majority of people?±. Have you
been in an IKEA store before?
W: Of course. Yeah. Actually my love of its products and working atmosphere pushed me to
work part-time in one of its stores last semester.
M: Oh. It is a pity you missed yesterday?ˉs class.
W: And maybe I will choose IKEA as the start of my career after graduation.
M: That?ˉs great you set a goal so early. And this part might be useful for you.
W: Hmm, about its recruitment principles.
M: See, although getting highly-skilled people is important for IKEA, they will not choose someone with a conflict of value systems with the company. ?°Anyone expecting a flash car
or status symbols has no future with us?± is what they say. And only those who wholly understand and buy into the company?ˉs philosophy can get promoted.
W: Interesting. Thanks for the information!
M: Pleasure!
Questions 23 to 25 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
23. How does the woman feel when she knew the class was about IKEA?
24. What does the woman think of IKEA?ˉs products?
25. What is IKEA?ˉs philosophy according to the man?
Section B
Passage One Ni Dan, 20, and two of his classmates were sitting at the front of a long queue outside Gate No. 6 of the Shanghai Expo Park. They had been there for six hours and it was just 4 a.m.
Sunday. ?°We chose to visit Expo today for three reasons: it?ˉs Expo?ˉs 100th day, it?ˉs the
two-year anniversary of the Beijing Olympic Games, plus it?ˉs the eighth day of the eighth month,?± Ni said. Eight is considered by many Chinese an auspicious number that brings fortune. Coming early is a crucial link to get the limited reservation tickets for the China Pavilion and shorten the hours of waiting outside other pavilions. But a front position on the
queue is not enough, ?°dashing as fast as you can is a must to secure a ticket?±, according to
instructions posted online by experienced visitors. Tickets to the China Pavilion, given out
free to visitors who came early, are used to curb waiting hours. With the ticketing system, it usually takes about an hour to enter the China Pavilion. While other popular pavilions often
require three to five hours. At its peak, visitors had to wait for eight hours to get into the Saudi
Arabia Pavilion. As of 9:36 a.m., more than 127,000 visitors have entered the 5.28-square-km Expo Park.
Questions 26 to 28 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. Which of the following is not the reason why Ni Dan chose the date for a visit to the
Shanghai Expo?
27. How to get into the Chinese Pavilion for visitors?
28. Since when have there already been 127,000 visitors into the Expo Park?
Passage Two
Life as we know it would simply not exist without plants. Biodiversity -- the web of all
life on Earth -- depends fundamentally on plants and fungi. Plants are used by every human
being on the planet, every single day. Just think of what you ate for breakfast this morning, the cup of coffee at your desk, the clothes you?ˉre wearing. Plants provide the human race with
food, fuel, medicine, clothing and shelter, whether we live in the countryside or a modern city,
in Europe or sub-Saharan Africa. Plants provide invaluable services, they provide us with the very air we breathe, clean water and fertile soil and they help regulate the climate. Plants also provide habitats and food for mammals, birds and invertebrates around the globe. But we are
living in an age of acute plant blindness. Somehow, while we make great strides in technology,
many of us have forgotten the fundamental importance of the very things on which our lives
ultimately depend. Plant diversity is being destroyed at a greater rate than ever before and much of this is due to habitat loss through changes in land use. We believe that economic development must go hand in hand with care for the environment. At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and other botanic gardens around the world, our plant scientists and horticulturists are working towards effective, science-based conservation solutions to ensure
that we leave a healthy and hopeful world to the next generation.
Questions 29 to 31 are based on the passage you have just heard.
29. What does biodiversity depend mainly on, according to the passage?
30. What does the phrase ?°plant blindness?± refer to?
31. In order to leave a healthy and hopeful world to the next generation, what do we have to do?
Passage Three
Why aren?ˉt there more women physicists, and in senior positions? One factor may be
unconscious biases that could keep women physicists from advancing?aand may even prevent
women from going into physics in the first place.
Amy Bug, a physicist at Swarthmore College, examined the bias question. Her research team trained four actors?atwo men, two women?ato give a 10-minute physics lecture. Real
physics classes watched the lecturers. Then the 126 students were surveyed.
When it came to questions of physics ability?awhether the lecturer had a good grasp of
the material, and knew how to use the equipment?amale lecturers got higher ratings by both
male and female students.
But when asked how well the lecturer relates to the students, each gender preferred their
own. And while female students gave a slight preference to female lecturers, male students
overwhelmingly rated the male lecturers as being superior. The research appears in the journal
Physics World. Bug says the results may be evidence of inherent biases that could hold women back?aalong with economic inequalities, such as lower wages and smaller start-up grants. Which reduce career acceleration and thus the amount of force available to crack the
glass ceiling?
Questions 32 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard. 32. According to the passage, what?ˉs the factor that woman physicists are fewer than men
physicists?
33. How many students were surveyed in the lectures? 34. Which of the following sentences is wrong when asked how well the lecturer relates to
the students. 35. Which of the following is the other field also mentioned in the passage, in which women suffer a lot from gender discrimination?
Section C In 1995, Ryan Schreiber was a 19-year-old Minneapolis record-store clerk who wanted to publish a rock-music fanzine but lacked access to a photocopier. Instead, he started a
website, called it Pitchfork and began posting his thoughts on bands like Sonic Youth, Fugazi
and the Pixies ?a groups whose songs rarely appeared on the radio or MTV. It was the first
golden age of ?°indie?± artists, back when the word was shorthand for music released
on
independent record labels, signifying the artistic freedom and cachet that came from operating
on the fringes.
By 2000, Schreiber had moved the site to Chicago, acquired some freelance writers and
codified the Pitchfork review into a signature formula ?a a long, rambling personal opinion of an album, accompanied by a rating on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0. But the site?ˉs readership was
still, to use his word, ?°negligible.?± That changed in October of that year, when Pitchfork
posted a fawning, grandiloquent 10.0 review of Radiohead?ˉs experimental rock album Kid A. Critic Brent DiCrescenzo?ˉs paean included lines like ?°butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky?± and became an Internet sensation ?a for
all the wrong reasons.
Then an odd thing happened: people made fun of the prose, but they kept reading Pitchfork. Schreiber and his writers knew what they were talking about; Kid A., which later
debuted at No. 1 on Billboard, really was a 10.0 album. Pitchfork?ˉs reviews of artists previously considered unknown or underground, began to act as stepping-stones to mainstream coverage. In the year of 2000, Modest Mouse moved from independent label Up
Records to Sony-owned Epic; by 2005, they had performed on Saturday Night Live, been nominated for two Grammys. Their songs are now used in car commercials.