考试日期：

2016年01月14日

Reading Passage 1  

Title

（待补充）

Question types:

T/F/NG          6

Table completion  8

文章大意

俄罗斯的芭蕾舞发展

参考答案

（待补充）

Reading Passage 2  

Title:

Aqua product:New Zealand’s AlgaeBiodiesel（旧）

Question types:

Information Containing  5

Summary             5

多选                 3

文章内容

Aqua product:New Zealand’s Algae Biodiesel
A    The world’s first wild algae biodiesel, produced in New Zealand by Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation, was successfully test driven in Wellington by the Minister for Energy and Climate Change Issues, David Parker. In front of a crowd of invited guests, media and members of the public, the Minister filled up a diesel-powered Land Rover with Aquaflow B5 blend bio-diesel and then drove the car around the forecourt of Parliament Buildings in Central Wellington. Green Party coleader, Jeanette Fitzsimons was also on board. Marlborough-based Aquaflow announced in May 2006 that it had produced the world’s first bio-diesel derived from wild microalgae sourced from local sewage ponds.
B    "We believe we are the first company in the world to test drive a car powered by wild algae-based biodiesel. This will come as a surprise to some international bio-diesel industry people who believe that this break-through is still years away, " explains Aquaflow spokesperson Barrie Leay. "A bunch of inventive Kiwis, and an Aussie, have developed this fuel in just over a year ", he comments. "This is a huge opportunity for New Zealand and a great credit to the team of people who saw the potential in this technology from day one."
C    Bio-diesel based on algae could eventually become a sustainable, low cost, cleaner burning fuel alternative for New Zealand, powering family cars, trucks, buses and boats. It can also be used for other purposes such as heating or distributed electricity generation. There is now a global demand for billions of litres of biodiesel per year. Algae are also readily available and produced in huge volumes in nutrient rich waste streams such as at the settling ponds of Effluent Management Systems (EMS). It is a renewable indigenous resource ideally suited to the production of fuel and other useful by-products. The breakthrough comes after technology start-up, Aquaflow, agreed to undertake a pilot with Marlborough District Council late last year to extract algae from the settling ponds of its EMS based in Blenheim. By removing the main contaminant to use as a fuel feedstock, Aquaflow is also helping clean up the council’s water discharge - a process known as bio-remediation. Dairy farmers, and many food processors too, can benefit in similar ways by applying the harvesting technology to their nutrientrich waste streams.
D    Blended with conventional mineral diesel, bio-diesel can run vehicles without the need for vehicle modifications. Fuel derived from algae can also help meet the Government B5 (5% blended)target, with the prospect of this increasing over time as bio-fuel production increases. "Our next step is to increase capacity to produce one million litres of bio-diesel from the Marlborough sewerage ponds over the next year, " says Leay. Aquaflow will launch a prospectus pre-Christmas as the company has already attracted considerable interest from potential investors. The test drive bio-diesel was used successfully in a static engine test at Massey University’s Wellington campus on Monday, December 11.
E Today Algae are used by humans in many ways; for example, as fertilizers, soil conditioners and livestock feed. Aquatic and microscopic species are cultured in clear tanks or ponds and are either harvested or used to treat effluents pumped through the ponds. Algaculture on a large scale is an important type of aquaculture in some places. Naturally growing seaweeds are an important source of food, especially in Asia. They provide many vitamins including: A, B, B2, B6, niacin and C, and are rich in iodine, potassium, iron, magnesium and calcium. In addition commercially cultivated microalgae, including both Algae and Cyan-bacteria, are marketed as nutritional supplements, such as Spirulina, Chlorella and the Vitamin-C supplement, Dunaliella, high in beta-carotene. Algae are national foods of many nations: China consumes more than 70 species, including fat choy, a cyano-bacterium considered a vegetable; Japan, over 20 species. The natural pigments produced by algae can be used as an alternative to chemical dyes and coloring agents.
F     Algae are the simplest plant organisms that convert sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air around us into stored energy through the well understood process of photosynthesis. Algae are rich in lipids and other combustible elements and Aquaflow is developing technology that will allow these elements to be extracted in a cost effective way. The proposed process is the subject of a provisional patent. Although algae are good at taking most of the nutrients out of sewage, too much algae can taint
the water and make it smell. So, councils have to find a way of cleaning up the excess algae in their sewerage outflows and then either dispose of it or find alternative uses for it. And that’s where Aquaflow comes in.
G    Unlike some bio-fuels which require crops to be specially grown and thereby compete for land use with food production, and use other scarce resources of fuel, chemicals and fertiliser, the source for algae-based biodiesel already exists extensively and the process produces a sustainable net energy gain by capturing free solar energy from the sun.

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15- 27 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
Questions 15 -19
Reading Passage 2 contains 7 paragraphs A -G.
Which paragraphs stale the following information?
Write the appropriate letters A - G in boxes 15-19 on your answer sheet.
You may use any letter more than once
15 It is unnecessary to modify vehicles driven by bio-diesel.
16 Some algae are considered edible plants.
17 Algae could be part of a sustainable and recycled source.
18 Algae bio-diesel is superior to other bio-fuels in lot a ways.
19 overgrown algea also can be a potential threat to environment

Questions 20- 24
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 20-24 on your answer sheet.
Bio-diesel based on algae could become a substitute for 20_____ in New Zealand. It could be used to 21______ vehicles such as cars and boats. As a result, billions of litres of bio-diesel are required world wide each year. Algae can be obtained from 22______ with nutrient materials. With the technology breakthrough, algae are extracted and the 23_____ is removed from the settling ponds. Dairy farmers, and many food processors can adopt such 24______ technology.
Question 25 -27
Choose words from the passage to answer the questions 25-27. Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.
25 What environmental standard would bio-diesel vehicles are to meet?
26 What is to do as the immediate plan for coming years for Aquaflow?
27 Through what kind of process do algae obtain and store energy?

参考答案

答案：

15 D

16 E

17 C

18 G

19 F

20 fuel

21 power

22 water streams

23 contaminate

24 harvesting

25 photosynthesis

26 Government B5

27 producing/production capacity

Reading Passage 3  

Title:

We have Star performers!（旧）

Question types:

Information Containing    4

YES/NO/NO GIVEN     4

Summary               5

文章大意

We  have  Star  performers!

A     The difference between companies is people. With capital and technology in plentiful supply, the critical resource for companies in the knowledge era will be human talent. Companies full of achievers will, by definition, outperform organizations of plodders. Ergo, compete ferociously for the best people. Poach and pamper stars; ruthlessly weed out second-raters. This in essence has been the recruitment strategy of the ambitious company of the past decade. The ‘talent mindset’ was given definitive form in two reports by the consultancy McKinsey famously entitled The War for Talent. Although the intensity of the warfare subsequently subsided along with the air in the internet bubble, it has been warming up again as the economy tightens: labor shortages, for example, are the reason the government has laid out the welcome mat for immigrants from the new Europe.

B     Yet while the diagnosis - people are important - is evident to the point of platitude, the apparently logical prescription - hire the best - like so much in management is not only not obvious: it is in fact profoundly wrong. The first suspicions dawned with the crash to earth of the dotcom meteors, which showed that dumb is dumb whatever the IQ of those who perpetrate it. The point was illuminated in brilliant relief by Enron, whose leaders, as a New Yorker article called ‘The Talent Myth’ entertainingly related, were so convinced of their own cleverness that they never twigged that collective intelligence is not the sum of a lot of individual intelligences. In fact in a profound sense the two are opposites. Enron believed in stars, noted author Malcolm Gladwell, because they didn’t believe in systems. But companies don’t just create: ‘they execute and compete and co-ordinate the efforts of many people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star’. The truth is that you can’t win the talent wars by hiring stars - only lose it. New light on why this should be so is thrown by an analysis of star behavior in this month’s Harvard Business Review. In a study of the careers of 1, 000 star-stock analysts in the 1990s, the researchers found that when a company recruited a star performer, three things happened.

C     First, stardom doesn’t easily transfer from one organisation to another. In many cases, performance dropped sharply when high performers switched employers and in some instances never recovered. More of success than commonly supposed is due to the working environment - systems, processes, leadership, accumulated embedded learning that are absent in and can’t be transported to the new firm. Moreover, precisely because of their past stellar performance, stars were unwilling to learn new tricks and antagonized those (on whom they now unwittingly depended) who could teach them. So they moved, upping their salary as they did - 36 per cent moved on within three years, fast even for Wall Street. Second, group performance suffered as a result of tensions and resentment by rivals within the team. One respondent likened hiring a star to an organ transplant. The new organ can damage others by hogging the blood supply, other organs can start aching or threaten to stop working or the body can reject the transplant altogether, he said. ‘You should think about it very carefully before you do a transplant to a healthy body.’ Third, investors punished the offender by selling its stock. This is ironic, since the motive for importing stars was often a suffering share price in the first place. Shareholders evidently believe that the company is overpaying, the hire is cashing in on a glorious past rather than preparing for a glowing present, and a spending spree is in the offing.

D     The result of mass star hirings as well as individual ones seem to confirm such doubts. Look at County NatWest and Barclays de Zoete Wedd, both of which hired teams of stars with loud fanfare to do great things in investment banking in the 1990s. Both failed dismally. Everyone accepts the cliche that people make the organisation - but much more does the organisation make the people. When researchers studied the performance of fund managers in the 1990s, they discovered that just 30 per cent of variation in fund performance was due to the individual, compared to 70 per cent to the company-specific setting.

E     That will be no surprise to those familiar with systems thinking. W. Edwards Deming used to say that there was no point in beating up on people when 90 per cent of performance variation was down to the system within which they worked. Consistent improvement, he said, is a matter not of raising the level of individual intelligence, but of the learning of the organisation as a whole. The star system is glamorous - for the few. But it rarely benefits the company that thinks it is working it. And the knock-on consequences indirectly affect everyone else too. As one internet response to Gladwell’s New

Yorker article put it: after Enron, ‘the rest of corporate America is stuck with overpaid, arrogant, underachieving, and relatively useless talent. ’

F     Football is another illustration of the stars VS systems strategic choice. As with investment banks and stockbrokers, it seems obvious that success should ultimately be down to money. Great players are scarce and expensive. So the club that can afford more of them than anyone else will win. But the performance of Arsenal and Manchester United on one hand and Chelsea and Real Madrid on the other proves that it’s not as easy as that. While Chelsea and Real have the funds to be compulsive star collectors - as with Juan Sebastian Veron - they are less successful than Arsenal and United which, like

Liverpool before them, have put much more emphasis on developing a setting within which stars-in-the-making can flourish. Significantly, Thierry Henry, Patrick Veira and Robert Pires are much bigger stars than when Arsenal bought them, their value (in all senses) enhanced by the Arsenal system. At Chelsea, by contrast, the only context is the stars themselves - managers with different outlooks come and go every couple of seasons. There is no settled system for the stars to blend into. The Chelsea context has not only not added value, it has subtracted it. The side is less than the sum of its exorbitantly expensive parts. Even Real Madrid’s galactics, the most extravagantly gifted on the planet, are being outperformed by less talented but better-integrated Spanish sides. In football, too, stars are trumped by systems.

G     So if not by hiring stars, how do you compete in the war for talent? You grow your own. This worked for investment analysts, where some companies were not only better at creating stars but also at retaining them. Because they had a much more sophisticated view of the interdependent relationship between star and system, they kept them longer without resorting to the exorbitant salaries that were so destructive to rivals.

Questions 28-31

The reading Passage has seven paragraphs A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter A-G, in boxes 28-31 on your answer sheet.

28 One example from non-commerce/business settings that better system wins bigger stars

29 One failed company that believes stars rather than system

30 One suggestion that author made to acquire employees then to win the competition nowadays

31 One metaphor to human medical anatomy that illustrates the problems of hiring stars.

Questions 32-35

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 32-35 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the information

NO if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

32 McKinsey who wrote The War for Talent had not expected the huge influence made by this book.

33 Economic condition becomes one of the factors which decide whether or not a country would prefer to hire foreign

employees.

34 The collapse of Enron is caused totally by a unfortunate incident instead of company’s management mistake.

35 Football clubs that focus making stars in the setting are better than simply collecting stars.

Questions 36-40

Summary

Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than two words from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet.

An investigation carried out on 1000 36__ participants of a survey by Harvard Business Review found a company hire a 37__ has negative effects. For instance, they behave considerably worse in a new team than in the 38__ that they used to be. They move faster than wall street and increase their 39 Secondly, they faced rejections or refuse from those 40__ within the team. Lastly, the one who made mistakes had been punished by selling his/her stock share.

参考答案

答案：

28 F

29 B

30 G

31 C

32 No Given

33 YES

34 NO

35 YES

36 analysts/star-stock analysts

37 performance star/ star/ star performer

38 working environment/ settings

39 salary

40 rivals

文章分析

标题讽刺，典型的驳论文。先介绍了公司中引入“明星职员”这一现象，以及它的利弊，利大于弊。接着从足球赛场球队运营的角度，分析了明星球员的利弊，并提出解决方案——应当通过培养球队氛围提升球员。

整场考试分析

本次阅读考试，判断题依然是重点，比重高达到了10/40。此外，Summary题型出场率也很高，比重同为10/40；其次的是Information Containing ，比重为9/40，剩余为多选题和填空。

纵观整场，题型数目较少，但都是偏难的题型。本次考试中没有涉及到LOH、matching和单选，各位考生在平时学习中也不能忽视对这些主要题型的练习。