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1、Part Writing (30 minutes)Directions:For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled Should Parents Send Their Kids to Art Classes? You should write at least 150 words following the outline given below.1. 现在有不少家长送孩子参加各种艺术班2. 对这种做法有人表示支持，也有人并不赞成3. 我认为采集者退散Should Parents Send
2、Their Kids to Art Classes?Part Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes) Bosses Say “Yes” to Home WorkRising costs of office space, time lost to stressful commuting, and a slow recognition that workers have lives beyond the officeall are strong arguments for letting staff work from
3、home.For the small business, there are additional benefits toostaff are more productive, and happier, enabling firms to keep their headcounts (员工数) and their recruitment costs to a minimum. It can also provide competitive advantage, especially when small businesses want to attract new staff but dont
4、 have the budget to offer huge salaries.While company managers have known about the benefits for a long time, many have done little about it, sceptical of whether they could trust their employees to work to full capacity without supervision, or concerned about the additional expenses teleworking pol
5、icies might incur as staff start charging their home phone bills to the business.Yet this is now changing. When communications provider Inter-Tel researched the use of remote working solutions among small-and-medium-sized UK businesses in April this year, it found that 28% more companies claimed to
6、have introduced flexible working practices than a year ago.The UK network of Business Links confirms that it too has seen a growing interest in remote working solutions from small businesses seeking its advice, and claims that as many as 60-70% of the businesses that come through its doors now offer
7、 some form of remote working support to their workforces.Technology advances, including the widespread availability of broadband, are making the introduction of remote working a piece of cake.“If systems are set up properly, staff can have access to all the resources they have in the office wherever
8、 they have an internet connection,” says Andy Poulton, e-business advisor at Business Link for Berkshire and Wiltshire. “There are some very exciting developments which have enabled this.”One is the availability of broadband everywhere, which now covers almost all of the country (BT claims that, by
9、July, 99.8% of its exchanges will be broadband enabled, with alternative plans in place for even the most remote exchanges). “This is the enabler,” Poulton says.Yet while broadband has come down in price too, those service providers targeting the business market warn against consumer services masque
10、rading (伪装) as business-friendly broadband.“Broadband is available for as little as 15 a month, but many businesses fail to appreciate the hidden costs of such a service,” says Neil Stephenson, sales and marketing director at Onyx Internet, an internet service provider based in the north-east of Eng
11、land. “Providers offering broadband for rock-bottom prices are notorious for poor service, with regular breakdowns and heavily congested (拥堵的) networks. It is always advisable for businesses to look beyond the price tag and look for a business-only provider that can offer more reliability, with good
12、 support.” Such services dont cost too muchquality services can be found for upwards of 30 a month.The benefits of broadband to the occasional home worker are that they can access email in real time, and take full advantage of services such as internet-based backup or even internet-based phone servi
13、ces.Internet-based telecoms, or VoIP (Voice over IP) to give it its technical title, is an interesting tool to any business supporting remote working. Not necessarily because of the promise of free or reduced price phone calls (which experts point out is misleading for the average business), but bec
14、ause of the sophisticated voice services that can be exploited by the remote workerfacilities such as voicemail and call forwarding, which provide a continuity of the company image for customers and business partners.By law, companies must “consider seriously” requests to work flexibly made by a par
15、ent with a child under the age of six, or a disabled child under 18. It was the need to accommodate employees with young children that motivated accountancy firm Wright Vigar to begin promoting teleworking recently. The company, which needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure (基础设施) to provide connect
16、ivity with a new, second office, decided to introduce support for remote working at the same time.Marketing director Jack OHern explains that the company has a relatively young workforce, many of whom are parents: “One of the triggers was when one of our tax managers returned from maternity leave. S
17、he was intending to work part time, but could only manage one day a week in the office due to childcare. By offering her the ability to work from home, we have doubled her capacitynow she works a day a week from home, and a day in the office. This is great for her, and for us as we retain someone hi
18、ghly qualified.”For Wright Vigar, which has now equipped all of its fee-earners to be able to work at maximum productivity when away from the offices (whether thats from home, or while on the road), this strategy is not just about saving on commute time or cutting them loose from the office, but ena
19、bling them to work more flexible hours that fit around their home life.OHern says: “Although most of our work is client-based and must fit around this, we cant see any reason why a parent cant be on hand to deal with something important at home, if they have the ability to complete a project later i
20、n the day.”Supporting this new way of working came with a price, though. Although the firm was updating its systems anyway, the company spent 10-15% more per user to equip them with a laptop rather than a PC, and about the same to upgrade to a server that would enable remote staff to connect to the
21、company networks and access all their usual resources.Although Wright Vigar hasnt yet quantified the business benefits, it claims that, in addition to being able to retain key staff with young families, it is able to save fee-earners a substantial amount of “dead” time in their working days.That sta
22、ff can do this without needing a fixed telephone line provides even more efficiency savings. “With Wi-Fi (fast, wireless internet connections) popping up all over the place, even on trains, our fee-earners can be productive as they travel, and between meetings, instead of having to kill time at the
23、shops,” he adds.The company will also be able to avoid the expense of having to relocate staff to temporary offices for several weeks when it begins disruptive office renovations soon.Financial recruitment specialist Lynne Hargreaves knows exactly how much her firm has saved by adopting a teleworkin
24、g strategy, which has involved handing her companys data management over to a remote hosting company, Datanet, so it can be accessible by all the companys consultants over broadband internet connections.It has enabled the company to dispense with its business premises altogether, following the reali
25、sation that it just didnt need them any more. “The main motivation behind adopting home working was to increase my own productivity, as a single mum to an 11-year-old,” says Hargreaves. “But I soon realised that, as most of our business is done on the phone, email and at off-site meetings, we didnt
26、need our offices at all. Were now saving 16,000 a year on rent, plus the cost of utilities, not to mention what would have been spent on commuting.”1. What is the main topic of this passage?A) How business managers view hi-tech.B) Relations between employers and employees.C) How to cut down the cost
27、s of small businesses.D) Benefits of the practice of teleworking.2. From the research conducted by the communications provider Inter-Tel, we learn that _.A) more employees work to full capacity at homeB) employees show a growing interest in small businessesC) more businesses have adopted remote work
28、ing solutionsD) attitudes toward IT technology have changed3. What development has made flexible working practices possible according to Andy Poulton?A) Reduced cost of telecommunications.B) Improved reliability of internet service.C) Availability of the VoIP service.D) Access to broadband everywher
29、e.4. What is Neil Stephensons advice to firms contracting internet services?A) They look for reliable business-only providers.B) They contact providers located nearest to them.C) They carefully examine the contract.D) They contract the cheapest provider.5. Internet-based telecoms facilitates remote
30、working by _.A) offering sophisticated voice servicesB) giving access to emailing in real timeC) helping clients discuss business at homeD) providing calls completely free of charge6. The accountancy firm Wright Vigar promoted teleworking initially in order to _.A) present a positive image to prospe
31、ctive customersB) support its employees with children to take care ofC) attract young people with IT expertise to work for itD) reduce operational expenses of a second office7. According to marketing director Jack OHern, teleworking enabled the company to _.A) enhance its market imageB) reduce recru
32、itment costsC) keep highly qualified staffD) minimise its office space8. Wright Vigars practice of allowing for more flexible working hours not only benefits the company but helps improve employees _.9. With fast, wireless internet connections, employees can still be _ while traveling.10. Single mot
33、her Lynne Hargreaves decided to work at home mainly to _Part Reading Comprehension(Reading in Depth)(25 minutes)Section A Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.Many countries have made it illegal to chat into a hand-held mobile phone while driving. But the latest research further con
34、firms that the danger lies less in what a motorists hands do when he takes a call than in what the conversation does to his brain. Even using a “hands-free” device can divert a drivers attention to an alarming extent.Melina Kunar of the University of Warwick, and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical
35、 School ran a series of experiments in which two groups of volunteers had to pay attention and respond to a series of moving tasks on a computer screen that were reckoned equivalent in difficulty to driving. One group was left undistracted while the other had to engage in a conversation using a spea
36、kerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add 5.7 metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the g
37、roup using the hands-free kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking.To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word t
38、hat began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more complicated task showed even worse reaction timesan average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when people have to conside
39、r the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly.Punishing people for using hand-held gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the
40、 wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even come to enjoy not having to take calls.来源：考试大47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered dangerous because it seriously distracts _.48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle
41、 a series of moving tasks which were considered _.49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a hands-free call took _ to react than those who were not.50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if they are required to do _.
42、51. The author believes persuasion, rather than _, might be the only way to stop people from using mobile phones while driving.Section BPassage OneQuestions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over
43、-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nations schools singled out those in the smugly（自鸣得意的）green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The citys public high school, as well as a
44、number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratorys worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This in a city
45、that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists（活跃分子）and various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the stee
46、l-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus childrens health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another
47、as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this lat
48、est drama is a trial for how todays parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safewhether its possible to keep them safein what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.“Theres no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies childrens health. “That means your choices can mat