Part Ι Reading Comprehension (60 points, 3 for each)

Directions: There are four passages in this part. Each of the passages is followed by five questions or unfinished statements. For each of the questions there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best one and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET.

Passage One

Within the last decade, music festivals have grown into a major moneymaker in a competitive industry that sees hundreds of such events each year in the U.S. There are the big ones with big-ticket prices, multiple stages, camping options and nearly endless lists of performers. And alongside their rise in popularity, hundreds of smaller festivals have flourished.

The origins of music festivals date back to ancient Greece, where such events often involved competitions in music, arts and sports. Modern music festivals in the U.S. grew out of the establishment of Woodstock. Though it was not the first event of its kind, the 1969 event holds a mythical place within American pop-cultural history. Festivals have since grown into mainstream businesses that reap profits and embrace corporate sponsorships, as more than 32 million people attend them each year, according to Billboard. Coachella, one the most popular festivals in the country, grossed $114.6 million in 2017, setting a major record by earning more than $100 million.

The mechanics that drove music festivals to becoming top earners have a lot to do with the effects of modernlife, says Chirinos, a professor of clinical music and global health at New York University. People are more likely now to spend money on experiences over material goods, he says, arguing that sharing a clip from a Billie Eilish or Cardi B performance with one’s Instagram followers is more satisfying than buying something expensive. A 2019 Deloitte survey of millennials—a group that makes up at least 45% of the 32 million people who attend music festivals—finds that most value experiences: 57% of them said they prefer travel and seeing the world over owning a home.

Music itself has changed, as well, making festivals a bigger attraction for listeners. As streaming becomes one of the most popular ways to listen to music, sales of tickets and products make up a large part of fans’ expenditures on music. Because listening to music has become practically free, the access is unprecedented—and makes live music much more special, according to Chirinos. “Audiences are keen to connect to the artist,” he says.

On the other hand, for artists, appearing at music festivals is an easier way to make money than depending on record sales or long tours. As record sales saw a sharp decline in the early- to mid- 2000s thanks to the growth of digital music, artists began depending on touring to earn money.

1. Big festivals have all the characteristics EXCEPT that ________.

[A] they are very expensive to attend

[B] they involve a large number of artists

[C] they pose threat to smaller festivals

[D] they offer attenders more choices

2. In the text, Woodstock (Para.2) most probably refers to ________.

[A] the company that sponsored the first music festival

[B] the place where the first festival was held in the U.S.

[C] the first most influential of the U.S. music festivals

[D] the music event which was organized by Coachella

3. Chirinos thinks that festivals become popular because ________.

[A] they can enrich the attenders’ spiritual life

[B] they are promoted on the Internet and TV

[C] they are attended mostly by young people

[D] they invite the most popular stars in America

4. We can infer from Paragraph 4 that ________.

[A] streaming music services threaten to replace festivals

[B] streaming music makes live music even more popular

[C] the ways in which tickets are sold need to be changed

[D] the music is preferred only by some young audiences

5. The text mainly discusses ________.

[A] the factors leading to the decline in record sales

[B] various ways in which music festivals are held

[C] the relationship between industry and music

[D] the reasons for the popularity of music festivals

Passage Two

Beginning in2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded a $575-million effort to hire and retain“effective” teachers at large, urban, public-school districts around the country. The initiative sought to “reward and retain effective teachers while dismissing ineffective ones,” writes Murphy research professor of education Susan Moore Johnson in her new book, Where Teachers Thrive: Organizing Schools for Success. Yet despite its funding,the seven-year program failed to significantly improve student achievement or increase graduation rates.

The philosophy backing that intervention assumes that improving K-12 education is a matter of dropping good teachers into schools. But this ignores the larger school context in which teachers are working—and a lot of what it means to be a good teacher, Johnson argues, depends on how well schools are organized. And in her view, what she calls the “egg-crate” model of schools, in which teachers work alone and have few formal opportunities to learn about what their colleagues are doing, is pervasive in U.S. schools, with deleterious effects for students and educators alike.

Johnson’s work as an education researcher began in the 1970s, after nearly a decade of teaching English at Brookline (Massachusetts) High School in an environment she describes as ideal, where teams of teachers wrote curricula together and conferred about how their classes were going. When she started her doctorate, she assumed other former teachers had had similar experiences. They hadn’t. “That was the beginning of this inquiry,” she says.“There was very little research and writing about the context of teachers’ work.”

At the turn of this century, Johnson says, economics research indicated that high-quality teachers are linked to better outcomes for their students, such as college attendance and higher earnings. “Rarely, if ever, has academic research had such an immediate and far-reaching impact on education policy,” she writes. After 2000, policymakers aimed to increase schools’ “human capital—the sum total of their teachers’ qualifications, skills, and professional habits.” That not only produced costly failed programs, but also militated against the kind of ground-level, context-dependent research Johnson conducted.

Johnson says people often imagine a trade-off between teachers and whether they like their jobs, on the one hand, and students, on the other. “The assumption is that it’s zero sum: what the teachers gain the students lose. But the research is pretty clear that when teachers report their workplace is a positive support for them, students do better.” She writes, “Only when our society acknowledges and funds the costs of a first-class education system will our schools and teachers succeed in providing it.”

6. The word “intervention” (Para.2) refers to ________.

[A] the failure of the seven-year program

[B] the Foundation’s effort to help schools

[C] the improved program for K-12 education

[D] the reform made on school management

7. Johnson’s “egg-crate” model ________.

[A] hasn’t been adopted by many American schools

[B] ignores the initiatives teachers take in their work

[C] explains why good teachers can be less effective

[D] is one resulting from the Foundation’s funding

8. Johnson began her education research when ________.

[A] she began the pursuit of her doctor’s degree

[B] she worked with friendly colleagues at a school

[C] she decided to share her teaching experiences

[D] she realized some schools were not well organized

9.The education policy based on economics research ________.

[A] has led to costly failure of education programs

[B] has given students more education opportunities

[C] has turned schools from money to human capital

[D] has enabled schools to hire more qualified teachers

10. Which of the following is true according to the author?

[A] How to organize teachers is more important than their qualifications.

[B] Less effective teachers are usually those who get less positive support.

[C] Both money and encouragement are needed for first-class education.

[D] Teachers should treat their students as friends rather than as enemies.

Passage Three

In our new social media age, the problem of cheating has become more complex. Human beings are, by nature, risk adverse. Taking too many risks means being killed in the wild. Taking too many risks inside a relationship is similar: it means destroying the chances of long-lasting happiness. But the availability of social connection via the internet reduces those risks dramatically. According to the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, 45 percent of men and 35 of percent of women have admitted to an “emotional affair.”

And online contact exacerbates real-life risks. If you’ re at work with someone to whom you’re attracted, eventually the work day ends. But if you’re on Facebook with that person, it’s not difficult to exchange messages after the workday, or to text, or to direct message. Probably for many, such activity doesn’t even feel wrong at the beginning—after all, a work “friend” isn’t a work lover. But blurring lines between work and extracurricular activity broadens the field for micro-cheating.

Furthermore, we’re a post-marriage society. Age of marriage has increased dramatically. Cohabitation has become a fact of life—as of 2012, two-thirds of married couples had lived together for at least two years before tying the knot. Marriage represents an investment of skin in the game: it means drawing hard lines. Living together provides no such guarantee. It is, consciously or not, an attempt to leave a door open. Combine that slightly-opened door with the availability of apps that allow you to keep in touch with ex-lovers, and you’re created a higher chance of micro-cheating.

All of which means that in an age of increased ease of micro-cheating, we’d require better self-policing to avoid the consequences. But instead, we’ve embraced little to no self-policing. In fact, those who self-police are called prissy and puritanical. When Mike Pence says he won’t dine with a woman without his wife, he’s characterized as a character from The Handmaid’s Tale. Our society despises standards so much that we’ve somehow conflated self-limitation with desire to limit the behavior of others.

That’s absurd. We all require limitations—and in a free society, we need to be the ones doing the limiting. That means unfriending high school partners on Facebook. It means setting up porn-blockers on computers. It means refusing to correspond with attractive colleagues outside the work environment. It means being better human beings.

Social media comes with great challenges. But if we rise to those challenges, we could become better human beings, not worse ones.

11. The use of the internet makes an emotional affair ________.

[A] more difficult

[B] more risky

[C] more likely

[D] more disastrous

12. Contacting a person both at and after work ________.

[A] is more likely to develop into a real relationship

[B] makes yourself more liable to micro-cheating

[C] leads to an end of an otherwise possible affair

[D] is considered to be a wrong act by both persons

13. The availability of internet contact ________.

[A] enriches the lives of married couples

[B] turns cohabitation into a trend

[C] makes people marry at an earlier age

[D] poses a serious threat to married life

14. In face of challenges posed by social media, the author proposes ________.

[A] practicing greater restraint on oneself

[B] imposing more stringent social rules

[C] strengthening the online supervision

[D] enhancing the authority of the police

15. It is implied that the author’s attitude to married life is ________.

[A] liberal

[B] sorrowful

[C] suspicious

[D] supportive

Passage Four

In the lobby of Deutsche Bank’s polished London headquarters stands a sculpture by British artist Tony Cragg.In the decade before the financial meltdown, some banks used their huge profits to make those institutions the world’s largest holders of contemporary art. Deutsche Bank’s collection consists of more than 50,000 pieces. UBS owns 35,000. Dutch bank ING houses 22,500, and JPMorgan Chase stores more than 30,000. By comparison, Paris’Louvre, the most famous museum in the world, has 35,000 works. Goldman Sachs reportedly paid $5 million for the Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu to create a mural for the lobby of its New York City headquarters.

Few banks collect art to make money. An auction of art from collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers in London on Sept. 29, for example, raised $2.6 million. Not bad, but it won’t make a dent in the $613 billion in liabilities the bank had run up when it folded. Art confers respectability and respect, and banks need those more than ever. From the mighty Medici banking dynasty in Renaissance Florence to the giants of the 19th century, like John Pierpont Morgan, art has been used to project status and power.

You could argue that the banks have done a better job of acquiring art than they have of acquiring financial assets. The people responsible for managing these corporate collections have professionalized. Whereas it was once the wife of the CEO or some personal friend managing the CEO’s interest in art, now banks have art departments and on-staff curators.

At Deutsch Bank, Hicks and his team manage collections in more than 900 buildings in 45 countries. Their department is a cottage industry in itself; they produce a bimonthly magazine, offer tours to employees and clients and, most crucially, patrol the globe for fresh and provocative new works. They periodically present their purchasing ideas to a committee of bankers, which has the final say on acquisitions.

That bankers, despite their fall from grace, still hold such a powerful place in the art world concerns some purists. The reason? When art becomes institutionalized, the line between prestige and corporate whitewash can become smudged. Jeffri points out that 30 years ago, when Big Tobacco was first coming under intense scrutiny over its lethal products, Philip Morris bulked up its art collection and began sponsoring exhibits under the slogan “It takes art to make a company great.”

In 2006 several prominent British artists and critics knocked UBS and the Tate Modern after the bank exhibited corporate art at the publicly funded museum. Art that is displayed in museums becomes immediately more valuable.Conversely, Royal Bank of Scotland came under fire last year for not sharing its collection despite receiving a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. Critics contended that the art was now publicly owned and therefore should be available for viewing.

On the whole, Jeffri and others say, banks are still a positive force in the contemporary-art world. “We are in a recession, but banks continue to sponsor and support the arts,” he says. “That’s crucial if we don’t want a 10-year gap in our culture.”

16. We learn from the first paragraph that ________.

[A] banks have collected art works to make huge profits

[B] the recent recession launched banks into art collection

[C] all the famous bank headquarters are artistically decorated

[D] banks have long been interested in art collection

17. Banks purchase art works to ________.

[A] bail them out of the recession

[B] make additional profits

[C] boost their images

[D] allow for possible collapse

18. Formerly, who would likely take care of corporate art collection?

[A] The art department.

[B] A professionalized manager.

[C] The bankers’ committee.

[D] A person closely related to CEO.

19. Some purists are not happy that ________.

[A] banks are a powerful force in the art world

[B] banks disgrace art with their huge profits

[C] banks’ purchase of arts is not subject to rigorous scrutiny

[D] banks collect only contemporary art works

20. On the whole, Jeffri’s attitude to corporate art collection is ________.

[A] critical

[B] favorable

[C] cautious

[D]apprehensive

Part ΙΙ Put the following into Chinese. (15 points)

There are two ways to drink Chinese tea: big blows of tea give people a casual feeling and gongfu tea (功夫茶)makes people experience the tea ceremony. Gongfu tea is a skill of making tea with traditional cultural features rather than a kind of tea or the name of tea, which was viewed as the elixir of immortality in ancient China. People call it gongfu tea for the reason that its brewing process requires strict attention to the teapot, tea leaves, water quality, and even how to make the tea, how to pour and how to drink tea. Oolong tea (烏龍茶) is mainly used in serving gongfu tea because it can meet the requirements of the color, aroma and taste of the tea.

Part Ⅲ Essay Writing (25 points)

Write a composition of about 200 words on the following topic:

The Importance of Learning Our Traditional Culture

You are to write in three parts.

In the first part, state specifically what your opinion is.

In the second part, support your opinion with appropriate details.

In the last part, bring what you have written to a natural conclusion or a summary.

Marks will be awarded for content, organization, grammar and appropriateness. Failure to follow the instructions may result in a loss of marks.