SECTION 5: LISTENING TEST (30 minutes)

Directions: Read the following passages and then answer IN COMPLETE SENTENCES the questions which follow each passage. Use only information from the passage you have just read and write your answer in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.

Questions 1～3
????? Hooligans are to be sent to jail from nine to five each day and allowed home each evening under plans being drawn up by Jack Straw, the home secretary. Offenders described by one of Straw's aides as “hooligans, vandals and thugs”will find themselves having to report for detention early each morning and stay in prison until the evening. Punishments, including a fulltime jail term in an ordinary prison wing, will be threatened for late attendance or failure to show up.

???? Advocates of the idea, which is likely to be in Labour's next election manifesto, say it is important that thugs should not be separated from their families for long periods. This often causes break-downs of relationships and higher likelihood of reoffending. Jailing criminals only in the daytime will save costs on staffing, meals and overhead. Straw is to ask his officials for a detailed study of how day custody works in Scandinavian countries.

????? Critics say day custody is bound to result in some detainees reoffending during the night-time. “Are we expected to pay for a load of yobbos to sit around all day eating and watching TV at our expense before going out for a night on the tiles?” one Tory said last night. Straw, however, is anxious to regain the initiative on law and order. He has told his staff that day custody should be part of a new battery of punishments available for those who habitually commit “anti social crimes”such as assault, car theft, vandalism and public order offences. Theft, car theft and criminal damage accounted for 60% of the 5.1m offences that were recorded in England and Wales last year.

????? Straw wants longer sentences and tailor-made punishments combined with a new sentencing regime under which repeat offenders are guaranteed a harsher penalty each time they reoffend. At present, only repeat burglars, rapists and drug dealers are covered by automatic minimum sentences. As a result, few of those who repeatedly commit lesser offences get locked up. Men over 21 and with between three and nine previous convictions stand only a one in five chance of jail when they reoffend. For many, that rate will go up to almost 100% if Straw gets his way.

?????? “Day custody is one of Jack's big ideas for taking these people out of circulation, ”an aide to the home secretary said yesterday. “They could be sent to an ordinary jail or a special secure unit. Breaches would meet a harsh response, and we don't rule out more prisons.”Straw will outline some of his ideas to probation officers and the Police Federation this week.

????? Other proposals include what the home secretary calls “custody plus ”: a prison sentence combined with community service after release; and “suspended sentence plus ”: community service with an automatic specifiedjail term if there are breaches.

1. What is the main point in Jack Straw's proposal about punishment of offenders? Explain the major reasons for this proposal.
2. What do you know about the opinion from the opponents of the proposal?
3. Explain the sentence in paragraph 4 “For many, that rate will go up to almost 100% if Straw gets his way. ”

Questions 4～6
????? Doctors are shackled by a “culture of blame and guilt”which prevents them? from admitting their mistakes to patients and overhauling the way they work to improve the safety of the patients they treat, according to this week's British Medical Journal. The BMJ, one of the? world's leading medical journals, devotes an entire issue to medical accidents in the wake of a report from the United States revealing that 100,000 Americans a year die from preventable errors in hospital more than deaths and injuries from motor and air crashes, suicides, falls, poisonings and drowning combined.

???? In a lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on the high toll of medical errors in hospitals, published recently, Sir Brian Jarman, professor of general practice at Imperial College school of medicine in London, said he thought the US death rate would at least be mirrored in Britain, suggesting that more than 33,000 die as a result of mistakes and accidents in UK hospitals.

????? Sir Brian, who is a member of the Bristol royal infirmary public inquiry into NHS failures behind the deaths of babies in open heart surgery, compared the health service unfavourably to the aviation industry. Airlines have improved safety by accepting that people make mistakes and encouraging pilots and other staff to recognise their own tiredness and fallibility. Doctors and expected never to make an error——and, if they do, the culture works against them admitting it.

????? A study in the BMj makes the same comparison between airline crew and medical staff working in operating theatres and intensive care units. It finds that while aviation workers are taught to deal with fatigue, doctors and nurses tend not to believe they might make mistakes
?tiredness.

????? “Much progress has been made to create a culture in aviation that deals effectively with error, whereas in medicine substantial pressures still exist to cover up mistakes... We found that susceptibility to error is not universally acknowledged by medical staff and many report that error is not handled appropriately in their hospital.”

????? The researchers, jBryan Sexton and colleagues from the University of Texas, suggest that poor teamwork can also contribute to mistakes. They point out that “surgeons are most supportive of steep hierarchies in which junior staff do not question senior staff.”

????? An editorial by Lucian Leape, a professor of health policy at Harvard University, and Donald Berwick, chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, say there are some practical measures that could be put in place immediately——such as the end of the handwritten medical notes in favour of computer records. But they also call for cultural change on both sides of the Atlantic.

?????? “Achieving the culture we need——one of learning, trust, curiosity, systems thinking and executive responsibility——will be immensely difficulty. Harder still, we must now accomplish this cultural change under the spotlight of a newly aroused public that, given our track record, is understandably doubtful that healthcare can, on its own, do what needs to be done.”

4. What can be concluded from the comparison between the aviation industry and the health service?
5. What is meant by the phrase “culture of blame and guilt (Para. 1)”? What is the significance of changing such a culture?
6. What can be learnt from Lucian Leape and Donald Berwick's comment in the last paragraph??????????????

Questions 7～10
????? Roast Starbucks! For the trendy coffee retailer, a public-relations nightmare was brewing last week, courtesy of the caffeinated mix of labor activists, consumer groups and environmentalists that brought us Seattle s World Trade Organization protests. Campuses were mobilized, press kits mailed, and protests planned in 29 cities. An open letter to Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz was signed by the likes of Friends of the Earth, the Cincinnati Zapatista Coalition and San Francisco s Harvey Milk Democratic Club. “The farmers who make you rich earn poverty wages,”the letter said, “Sweatshops occur not only in the factory but also in the field.”

????? But just in time to avoid being tarred as the Nike of corner cafes, Starbucks, America's largest gourmet-coffee company, caved last Friday, agreeing to launch a line of Fair Trade-Certified beans. The politically correct coffee is grown on small farm cooperatives rather than large plantations. It sells for a minimum of 2.77 pre kg——which goes directly to the farmers rather than the middlemen, who often pay growers less than $1.10 per kg. The increase means that the farmers, who hand-pluck their beans and carry them down the mountain in 45-kgsacks, can afford to send their children to school. “Fair Trade gets the benefit back to the family farmer, ”says Starbucks vice president Dave Olsen, emerging from negotiations with activists. “It is consistent with our values.”

????? It also reflects the growing muscle of the corporate-accountability movement. From dolphin-free tuna, to old-growth-free lumber, to child-labor-free carpets and sweatshop-free sneakers, environmental and social concerns are invading the marketplace as never before. Coffee, the independently certified for the U.S. market based on criteria of economic justice. “Our vision is nothing less than restructuring the inequities between North and South, ”says Paul Rice, head of TransFair USA, the certifying group.

????? Funded by the Ford Foundation, TransFair USA is the newest member of a decade-old nonprofit network in 41 countries that monitors coffee-growing practices and controls the Fair Trade-Certified label. The movement, which began in Europe, includes 300 democratically run cooperatives in Latin America, Asia and Africa that represent 550,000 of the world's 4 million coffee growers. TransFair USA plans to certify other imported foodstuffs, including chocolate, tea and bananas, as is done in Europe.

????? Starbucks, the first big U.S. retailer to sign on, will promote its new coffee beans later this year with in store posters and brochures and keep the product on the shelves in 2,000 outlets for at least a year. Will the effort percolate through the whole -18 billion U.S. coffee industry? Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based human-rights group that organized the aborted protest, is calling on companies on companies such as Folgers and Maxwell House to follow suit. Warns Medea Benjamin, a Global Exchange official, “Coffee without the Fair Trade seal is very likely sweatshop coffee.”

7. Explain briefly Fair Trade discussed in the passage and the practice of the Fair Trade Certified label.
8. What is the “corporate accountability movement”(Para. 3) according to the passage?
9. Introduce briefly the nature and function of the certifying group TransFair USA.
10. What is the attitude of Starbucks, the biggest American coffee company, towards the issue of Fair Trade?

SECTION 6: TRANSLATION TEST (30 minutes)
Directions: Translate the following passage into English and write your version in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.

??? 知識和技術(shù)創(chuàng)新是人類經(jīng)濟、社會發(fā)展的重要動力源泉。中國將致力于建設(shè)國家創(chuàng)新體系，通過營造良好的環(huán)境，推進知識創(chuàng)新、技術(shù)創(chuàng)新和體制創(chuàng)新，這是中國實現(xiàn)跨世紀發(fā)展的必由之路。

??? 中國政府支持科學(xué)家為了國家需求和科學(xué)發(fā)展開展基礎(chǔ)研究，尊重科學(xué)家獨特的敏感和創(chuàng)造精神，鼓勵他們進行“好奇心驅(qū)動的研究”。在未來50 年甚至更長的時期里，中國 的發(fā)展將在很大程度上依賴于今天基礎(chǔ)研究和高技術(shù)研究的創(chuàng)新成就，依賴于這些研究所必然孕育的優(yōu)秀人才。

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