It can’t be truer that when in Rome do as the Romans do. So it’s necessary for you to know what you can talk with the local people in France, Australia and Switzerland, and different customs of these countries.
In France
You’ll find that conversations often turn into heated debates. Give opinions only on subjects that you are knowledgeable about. There is rarely a moment of silence, except when the topic under discussion has been exhausted, and nothing new has been introduced.
Food, art, music and current events or history are welcome topics. French believe in freedom, and you can criticize anyone, but not Napoleon, who is a symbol of French spirit and never use the standard. U.S. conversation opener “What do you do”.
In Australia
Australians tend to be enthusiastic debaters. A wide range of topics may be open to discussion, including religion and politics. The best policy, however, is to wait for Australian companions to bring up these two subjects; be prepared to hear their arguments.
Sport is a common topic of conversation in Australia and Australians tend to use sporting comparisons. Australians like to criticize themselves, but they can’t stand criticism from others. Don’t talk big；instead Australians prefer to judge your competence and abilities through your actions. People who show off their education in conversation may be subject to teasing.
In Switzerland
The Swiss may seem cold. Once you get close to them, however, you’ll find that they are honest, responsible people, who will be loyal to your interests.
They are good listeners and will remember practically everything you say to them. Sometimes they will even go so far as to take notes while you speak. The Swiss are a very private people, so you should avoid asking personal questions. They can be rather serious, so it is advisable to avoid making jokes on them.
【小題1】Which of the following statements is TURE according to the passage?

Nuclear­powered aircraft carriers are considered one of the most important marine weapons in the 20th century. So far, only two countries in the world, the USA and France, have ever produced them. But these fearful fighting machines are about to enter Asia.
The US Navy said last month that one of its nine nuclear­powered aircraft carriers will be sent to Japan to replace the diesel(柴油)­powered carrier Kitty Hawk in 2008. In an agreement on October 30, the two countries also planned to level up their military (軍事的) cooperation and the USA called for Japan to take a larger role in alliance (聯(lián)盟)military moves.
It will be the first time that a nuclear­powered carrier is based in Japan. Bombed by US forces in World War Ⅱ at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan is the only world country to have been attacked by a nuclear weapon. Therefore, the citizens are highly sensitive to where nuclear­powered weapons are based.
“A radiation leak at Yokosuka would kill 100,000 people as far away as Tokyo, and could cause billions of dollars in damage，” said Masahiko Goto, leader of a protest group in Yokosuka. His group has collected more than 300,000 signatures of people across Japan opposed to the nuclear carrier.
The 44­year­old Kitty Hawk, the US Navy's oldest active ship, has been based in Yokosuka since 1998. It had returned to the US to be decommissioned(廢棄核武器) in 2008. The new carrier will travel faster, be capable of supporting longer operations and carry with it the Navy's most modern technology.
Experts pointed that this change is not only to strengthen the US­Japan military alliance but also to keep the military power of China and North Korea within limits. However, even Japanese experts don't believe that the two countries are threats to the region.
“There is no need for Japan to have a nuclear carrier as defense，” said Tetsuo Maeda, an international relations professor at Tokyo International University. He said that the change of ship indicates an increased military capability in the region, much more than what is needed.
【小題1】With such a powerful weapon to enter its country, Japanese citizens ________.

Death Valley is a land of beautiful yet dangerous extremes. Death Valley can be dangerously cold      during the winter months. Storms in the mountains can produce sudden flooding on the floor of the Valley.
The air temperature during the summer has been as high as fifty- seven degrees Celsius. The sun can heat the ground so that the temperature of the rocks and soil can be as high as seventy -four degrees Celsius.                                                                     
Death Valley contains evidence of several ancient volcanoes that caused huge explosions. Evidence of one of these explosions is called Ubehebe Crater. The explosion left a huge hole in the ground almost a kilometer and a half wide. In many areas of Death Valley it is easy to see where the ground has been pushed up violently by movement deep in the Earth. This movement has created unusual and beautiful rock formations. Some are red. Others are dark brown, gray, yellow or black.
The area was named by a woman in 1849. Thousands of people from other parts of the ountry traveled Lo the gold mining areas in California. They were in a hurry to get there before other people did. One group trying to reach California decided to take a path called the Old Spanish Trail. By December they had reached Death Valley. They did not have to survive the terrible heat of summer, hut there was still an extreme lack of water. There were few plants for their work animals to eat.
The people could not find a pass through the call mountains to the west of the Valley. Slowly, they began co suffer from a lack of food. To survive, they killed their work animals for food and began to walk out of the Valley. As they left, one woman looked back and said, “Good -bye, death valley.”  The name has never been changed.
Almost everyone who visits Death Valley visits a huge house called Scotty' s Castle. The building design is Spanish, with high thick walls to provide protection from the fierce heat.
The castle is named for Walter Scott , called Scotty by his friends. He was a gold miner. He told everyone that he built the house with money he made from his gold mine. Many people believed him. But it was not really the truth.
【小題1】The first two paragraphs discuss Death Valley' s               ．

Sunny countries are often poor. A shame, then, that solar power is still quite expensive. Eight19, a British company by Cambridge University, has, however, invented a novel way to get round this. In return for a deposit of around $10 it is supplying poor Kenyan families with a solar cell able to generate 2.5 watts of electricity, a battery that can deliver a three amp（安培） current to store this electricity, and a lamp whose bulb is a light-emitting diode（二極管）. The firm thinks that this system, once the battery is fully charged, is enough to light two small rooms and to power a mobile-phone charger for seven hours. Then, next day, it can be put outside and charged back up again.
The trick is that, to be able to use the electricity, the system's keeper must buy a scratch card—for as little as a dollar—on which is printed a reference number. The keeper sends this reference, plus the serial number of the household solar unit, by SMS to Eight19. The company's server will respond automatically with an access code to the unit. 
Users may consider that they are paying an hourly rate for their electricity. In fact, they are paying off the cost of the unit. After buying around $80 worth of scratch cards—which Eight19 expects would take the average family around 18 months—the user will own it. He will then have the option of continuing to use it for nothing, or of trading it in for a bigger one, perhaps driven by a 10-watt solar cell. 
In that case, he would go then through the same process again, paying off the additional cost of the upgraded kit at a slightly higher rate. Users would therefore increase their electricity supply steadily and affordably.
According to Eight19's figures, this looks like a good deal for customers. The firm believes the average energy-starved Kenyan spends around $10 a month on oil—enough to fuel a couple of smoky lamps—plus $2 on charging his mobile phone in the market-place. Regular users of one of Eight19's basic solar units will spend around half that, before owning it completely. Meanwhile, as the cost of solar technology falls, it should get even cheaper.
【小題1】The underlined word “get round” in the first paragraph can be replaced by _______ .

閱讀下面的短文，并根據(jù)短文后的要求答題(請注意問題后的詞數(shù)要求)。
In 2009, the number of hungry people in the world reached one billion for the first time. It is difficult not to be shocked by the fact that more than one in seven people on the planet do not have enough to eat. By the end of this year, more than 35 million people will have died as a result of        . Hunger kills more people per year than AIDS and malaria(瘧疾 ) combined.
The UN calculates that almost two-thirds of the world's hungry people are in Asia. More than a quarter are in sub-Saharan Africa. Almost all of the rest are in Latin America, North Africa and the Caribbean. In the richest regions of the world there are only a small number of people who don't have enough to eat. There are many reasons for world hunger. They include wars, droughts, floods and the overuse of farming land. All of them affect food production. But the most important reason is, quite simple, poverty—which has increased recently due to the economic effects of the financial crisis of 2008.
Although many people point out that there would be less hunger if the global population were smaller, few people would argue that there is not enough food to go around. The basic problem seems to be not a lack of food, but its distribution. In the last 50 years, global food production has risen even more quickly than the global population and there are of course many areas of the world where people generally have more than enough food. Overweight is a far bigger problem than hunger there.
【小題1】What's the main topic of the passage? (no more than 3 words )
                                                                
【小題2】Where do most of the hungry people live? (no more than 3 words)
                                                               
【小題3】Fill in the blank in Para. 1 with proper words. (no more than 5 words )
                                                                
【小題4】What does the underlined word "they"(line 4, paragraph 2 ) probably refer to? (no more than 6 words)
                                                                
【小題5】What is the suggested way to reduce hunger in Paragraph 3? (no more than 8 words )
                                                                

Popular music in America is what every student likes.Students carry small radios with earphones and listen to music before class, after class, and at lunch.Students with cars buy large speakers and play the music loudly as they drive on the street.
Adult drivers listen to the car radio as they drive to work.They also listen to the news about sports, the weather, and the life of American people.Most of the radio programmes are music.
Pop or popular music singers make much money.They make a CD or tape which radio stations use in many places.Once the popular singer is heard all over the country, young people buy his or her tapes.Some of the money from these tapes goes to the singer.Wherever the singer goes , all the young people want to meet him or her.Now the singer has became a national star.
There are other kinds of music that are important to Americans.One is called folk music.It tells stories about the common life of Americans.Another is called western or country music.This was started by cowboys who would sing at night to the cows when they were watching.Today, any music about country life and the love between a country boy and his girl is called western or country music.
【小題1】________  kinds of music are mentioned in the passage?

It is not unusual for people to speak two or three languages; they’re known as bilinguals or trilinguals. Speakers of more than three languages are known as polyglots. And when we refer to people who speak many languages, perhaps a dozen or more, we use the term hyper-polyglot.
The most famous hyper-polyglot was Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a 19^th century Italian cardinal, who was said to speak 72 languages. This claim sounds absurd. If you assume each language had 20,000 words, Mezzofanti would have to learn a word a minute, six hours a day, for eleven years—an impossible task. But Mezzofanti was tested by critics, and they were all impressed.
Did Mezzofanti have an extraordinary brain? Or are hyper-polyglots just ordinary people with ordinary brains who manage to do something extraordinary through hard work?
U.S. linguist Stephen Drashen believes that outstanding language learners just work harder at it and then they acquire unusually strong language ability. As an example, he mentions a Hungarian woman who worked as an interpreter during the 20^th century. When she was 86, she could speak 16 languages and was still working on learning new languages. She said she learned them mostly on her own, reading fiction or working through dictionaries or textbooks.
Some researchers argue to the contrary. They believe that there is such a thing as a talent for learning languages. In the 1930s, a German scientist examined parts of the preserved brain of a hyper-polyglot named Emil Krebs, who could speak 60 languages fluently. The scientist found that the area of Krebs’s brain called Broca’s area, which is associated with language, looked different from the Broca’s area in the brains of men who speak only one language. However, we still don’t know if Krebs was born with a brain ready to learn dozens of languages or if his brain adapted to the demands he put on it.
Although it is still not clear whether the ability to learn many languages is in born, there’s no doubt that just about all of us can acquire skills in a second, third, or even fourth language by putting our mind to it.
【小題1】What does the underlined sentence imply?

The popular song ‘Gangnam Style’ from South Korean recording artist PSY has just become the most watched video on YouTube ever, getting more than 808 million views on the popular media site.
The distinction was previously held by another pop heavyweight, Justin Bieber, whose song ‘Baby’ had a little more than 804 million views at press time. PSY made the announcement on his Twitter page earlier today.
Since its release, the song has defeated such other popular videos as Jennifer Lopez’s ‘On the Floor’ and Eminem's ‘Love the Way You Lie’. And in September, 'Gangnam Style' also became the most liked video on YouTube, now with nearly 5.4 million thumbs up.
At the time of the announcement, the Guinness Book of World Records released a statement saying: “In years past it was unthinkable that something would be viewed a hundred million times, and now Gangnam Style has achieved more than twice this figure in just three months on YouTube. PSY, your certificate is waiting here at our office, come pick it up any time!”
Despite its massive popularity, the video shows no signs of slowing down, and it even has a shot at becoming the first video to get more than one billion views.
If it maintains its current rate of around six million new views per day, ‘Gangnam Style’ would be in line to break that record by the end of the year.
The YouTube honors are just the latest in a long list that shows just how popular the song has become. Since it was released in July, the song has seen a meteoric rise through the music industry.
It has found its way to the tops of music charts in more than 30 countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and Canada, while providing material for thousands of parody（惡搞）videos.
It became part of the 2012 presidential elections with the now famous ‘Mitt Romney Style’ video and was even used by the North Korean government in propaganda films promoting their supreme leader.
Meanwhile, such influential figures as President Obama, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt have all made mention of the hit song.
【小題1】This passage mainly talks about a world famous________.
A. music chart                         B. video website
C. music video                         C. Korean pop singer
【小題2】Which of the following about “Gangnam Style” is NOT true according to the passage?

Most schools are named after famous people. Other schools are named after the streets on which they are located. Some school names are most unusual. How they were chosen is anyone’s guess.
There are schools with names that would make a person think twice before opening the door. The school named Lookout at least warns pupils in advance. You would need the most courage of all to enter the school in Oregon named Tenkiller!
Not all unusual school names are strange in a fearful way. Many of the names are pleasant. Who would not feel at home in the school named Welcome? What could go wrong in the school called Allgood? The Bright School, located in Montana, seems to promise that much learning will take place.
Other schools have names neither pleasant nor fearful. Their names are simply funny. There are schools with names such as Telephone, and Ducktown. For names to make us smile, what can match Bushyhead in the state of Georgia?
Do you think you can find the Nonesuch School? If you look carefully at the word, you will see that its name says there is no such school, but there is. The Nonesuch School is found in Kentucky. 
【小題1】One pleasant school name in the passage is _______.

I once had my Chinese MBA students brainstorming on “two-hour business plans”. I separated them into six groups and gave them an example: a restaurant chain. The more original their idea, the better, I said. Finally, five of the six groups presented plans for restaurant chains. The sixth proposed a catering（飲食）service. Though I admitted the time limit had been difficult, I expressed my disappointment.
My students were middle managers, financial analysts and financiers from state owned enterprises and global companies. They were not without talent or opinions, but they had been shaped by an educational system that rarely stressed or rewarded critical thinking or inventiveness. The scene I just described came in different forms during my two years’ teaching at the school. Papers were often copied from the Web and the Harvard Business Review. Case study debates were written up and just memorized. Students frequently said that copying is a superior business strategy, better than inventing and creating.
In China, every product you can imagine has been made and sold. But so few well developed marketing and management minds have been raised that it will be a long time before most people in the world can name a Chinese brand.
With this problem in mind, partnerships with institutions like Yale and MIT have been established. And then there’s the “thousand talent scheme”: this new government program is intended to improve technological modernization by attracting top foreign trained scientists to the mainland with big money. But there are worries about China’s research environment. It’s hardly known for producing independent thinking and openness, and even big salary offers may not be attractive enough to overcome this.
At last, for China, becoming a major world creator is not just about setting up partnerships with top Western universities. Nor is it about gathering a group of well-educated people and telling them to think creatively. It’s about establishing a rich learning environment for young minds. It’s not that simple.
【小題1】Why does the author feel disappointed at his students?