Section I Use of English
Directions:
Read the following text.Choose the best word(s) for each numberedblank and mark A,B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
Section Reading Comprehension
Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts.Answer the questions below each textby choosing A, B, C, or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.(40 points)
Reskilling is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually arequirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-beworkers do not get left behind.
.
We know we are moving into a period where the jobs in demandwill change rapidly, as will the requirements of the jobs that remain.Research by the WEF detailed in the Harvard Business Review, finds
that on average 42 per cent of the core skills " within job roles willchange by 2022. That is a very short timeline, so we can onlyimagine what the changes will be further in the future.
The question of who should pay for reskilling is a thorny one Forindividual companies, the temptation is always to let go of workerswhose skills are no longer demand and replace them with thosewhose skills are.That does not always happen.AT&T is often given asthe gold standard of a company who decided to do a massivereskilling program rather than go with a fire-and-hire strategy.ultimatelyretraining 18,000employees. Prepandemic,othercompanies including Amazon and Disney had also pledged to createtheir own plans. When the skills mismatch is in the broader economythough, the focus usually turns to government to handle. Efforts inCanada and elsewhere have been arguably languid at best, and havegiven us a situation where we frequently hear of employers beggingfor workers even at times and In regions
where unemployment is high.
With the pandemic, unemployment is very
high indeed. In February,
at 3.5 per cent and 5.5 per cent respectively,unemployment rates inCanada and the United States were at generational lows and workershortages were everywhere.As of May, those rates had spiked up to
13.3 per cent and 13.7 per cent, and although many worker shortageshad disappeared, not all had done so. In the medical field, to take anobvious example,the pandemic meant that there were still clearshortages of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel
Of course, it is not like you can take an unemployed waiter andtrain him to be a doctor in a few weeks, no matter who pays for it.Buteven if you cannot close that gap, maybe you can close others, anddoing so would be to the benefit of all concerned That seems to bethe case in Sweden, where the pandemic
kick-started a retraining
program where business as well as government had a role.
Reskiling in this way would be challenging in a North Americancontext. You can easily imagine a chorus of"you cant do that,"because teachers or nurses or whoever have special skills, and usingany support staff who has been quickly trained is bound to end indisaster. Maybe. Or maybe it is something that can work 'ell inSweden,with its history of co-operation between business,labourand government, but not in North America
where our history is very
大专自考怎么报名different. Then again, maybe it is akin to wa
rtime, when extraordinary
things take place, but it is business as usual
after the fact.And yet, as
山东教师资格证报名时间2021年in war the pandemic is teaching us that many things, including rapidreskilling, can be done if there is a will to do them. In any case,
Swedens work force is now more skilled, in more things,and moreflexible than it was before.
Of course, reskilling programs, whether for pandemic needs or thepostpandemic world,are expensive and at a time when everyonesbudgets are lean this may not be the time to implement them.Thenagain,extending income support programs to get us through thenext months is expensive, too, to say nothing of the cost of having aswath of long-term unemployed in the
POST-COVID years Given that,perhaps we should think hard about whether the pandemic canjump-start us to a place where reskilling becomes much more than abuzzword.
B.PreDaacancies for the unemplovo teau.e1
考研多少分才能过C. Retrain their cabin staff for better services
四六级成绩查询历年成绩D.finance their staff' s college education
Text 2
When Microsoft bought task managen
nent app Wunderlist and
mobile calendar Sunrise in 2015, it pickec
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up two newcomers that
were attracting considerable buzz in Silicon Valley. Microsoft' s ownOffice dominates the market for"productivity"software, but thestart-ups represented a new wave of technology designed from theground up for the smartphone world.
Both apps, however, were later scrapped, after Microsoft said it hadused their best features in its own products
Their teams of engineers
stayed on, making them two of the many
" acqui-hires"that the
biggest companies have used to feed their insatiable hunger for techtalent.
To Microsoft’ s critics,the fates of Wunderlist and Sunrise areexamples of a remorseless drive by Big Tech to chew up anyinnovative companies that lie in their path. " They bought theseedlings and closed them down,"complained Paul Arnold, a partnerat San Francisco-based Switch Ventures, putting paid to businessesthat might one day turn into competitors. Microsoft declined tccomment.
Like other start-up investors,Mr Arnold ' s own business oftendepends on selling start-ups to larger tech companies,though headmits to mixed feelings about the result:
"I think these things are
good for me, if I put my selfish hat on. But are they good for theAmerican economy? I don' t know.”
The US Federal Trade Commission says it wants to find the answerto that question. This week, it asked the five most valuable US techcompanies for information about their many small
acquisitions ovelthe past decade. Although only a research project at this stage, therequest has raised the prospect of regulators wading into early-stagetech markets that until now have been beyond their reach.
Given their combined market value of more than $5.5tn,riflingthrough such small deals —many of them much less prominent thanwunderlist and Sunrise —might seem beside the point. Betweenthem,the five companies (Apple，Microsoft,Google，Amazon andFacebook) have spent an average of only $3.4bn a year on sub-$1bnacquisitions over the past five years a drop in the ocean compared with their massive financial reserves, and the more than$130bn of venture capital that was invested in the US last year.
However, critics say that the big companies use such deals to buytheir most threatening potential competitcrs before their businesses
have a chance to gain momentum, in some cases as part of a"buyand kill" tactic to simply close them down
31. What is true about Wuderlist and sunrise after their acquisitionsA.Their market values declined.
B. Their tech features improved
C. Their engineers were retained
D. Their products were
re-priced.
32. Microsoft's critics believe that the big tech companies tend toA. ignore public opinions
D.eliminate their potential competitors.
33. Paul Arnold is concerned that small acquisitions miahtA. harm the national economy
B. worsen market competition
C. discourage start-up investors
D.weaken big tech companies.
34. The US Federal Trade Commission intend toA. examine small acquisitions
B. limit Big Tech'’ s expansion
C. supervise start-ups’operations
35. For the five biggest tech companies, their small acquisition haveA. brought little financial pressure
B. raised few management challenges
C.set an example for future deals
D. generated considerable profits
Text 4
we're fairly good at judging people based on first impressions,thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to afive-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneousbut intrusive. In one study of the ability she dubbed"thin slicing,"the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch
silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor's overall effectiveness. Their ratings correlated strongly withstudents’ end-of-semester ratings.Another set of participants had tccount backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips,occupying their con
ratings were just as
accurate, demonstri
e social processing.
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Critically, another
ninute writing down
reasons for their Jjudgment,betore giving the rating. Accuracydropped dramatically. Ambady suspected that deliberation focusedthem on vivid but misleading cues,such as certain gestures orutterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signalsform a holistic impression. She found similar interference whenparticipants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judgedwhether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.
Other research shows we' re better at detecting deception andsexual orientation from thin slices when we rely on intuition insteadof reflection.“It' s as if you' re driving a stick shift," says Judith Hall,a psychologist at Northeastern University,
"and if you start thinking
about it too much, you can' t remember what you’ re doing. But if yougo on automatic pilot, you' re fine. Much of our social life is like that."Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferencesCollege students' ratings of strawberry jams and college coursesaligned better with experts' opinions when the students weren'tasked to analyze their rationale. And people
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