Peak performances - moments when children （1) that's in them -

Cordia Harrington was tired of standing up all day and smelling like French fries at night. She owned and operated three McDonald's shops in Illinois, but as a divorced mother of three boys, she yearned for a business that would provide for her children and let her spend more time with them.

Her lucky moment came, strangely enough, after she was nominated in 1992 to be on the McDonald's bun committee. "The company picked me up in a corporate jet to see bakeries around the world," she recalls. "Every time I went to a meeting, I loved it. This was global!"

The experience opened her eyes to business possibilities. When McDonald's decided it wanted a new bun supplier, Harrington became determined to win the contract, even though she had no experience running a bakery.

Harrington studied the bakery business and made sure she was never off executives' radar. "If you have a dream, you can't wait for people to call you," she says. "So I'd visit a mill and send them photos of myself in a baker's hat and jacket, holding a sign that says 'I want to be your baker. '" After four years and 32 interviews, her persistence paid off.

Harrington sealed the deal with a handshake, sold her shops, and borrowed $ 13. 5 million. She was ready to build the fastest, most automated bakery in the world.

The Tennessee Bun Company opened ahead of schedule in 1997, in time for a slump in U. S. fast-food sales for McDonald's. Before Harrington knew it, she was down to her last $ 20,000, not enough to cover payroll. And her agreement with McDonald's required that she sell exclusively to the company. "I cried myself to sleep many nights," she recalls, "I really did think, I am going to go bankrupt. "

But Harrington worked out an agreement to supply Pepperidge Farm as well. "McDonald's could see a benefit if our production went up and prices went down, and no benefit if we went out of business," she says, "That deal saved us. "

Over the next eight years, Harrington branched out even more: She started her own trucking business, added a cold-storage company, and now has three bakeries producing fresh buns and frozen dough - all now known as the Bun Companies. Speed is still a priority: It takes 11 people at the main bakery to turn out 60,000 buns an hour for clients across 40 states, South America, and the Caribbean.

Grateful for the breaks she's had, Harrington is passionate about providing opportunities to all 230 employees. "Financial success is the most fun when you can give it away," she says.

The current economy is challenging. Some of her clients' sales have declined, but she's found new clients and improved efficiencies to help sustain the company's double-digit growth.

Cordia Harrington doesn't have to stand on her feet all day anymore. Two of her three sons now work for her. And she's remarried - her husband, Tom, is now her CFO.

"This is more than a job," says Harrington, "It's a mission. I'm always thinking. How can we best serve our employees? If we support them, they'll do their best to look after our clients. That's how it works here. "

According to the passage, which of the following was most significant in her early career?

A．Her travel and the visits to bakeries around the world.

B．Her nomination on the McDonald's bun committee.

C．A business contract with local bun suppliers.

D．The interviews and experience in running a bakery.

Cordia Harrington was tired of standing up all day and smelling like French fries at night. She owned and operated three McDonald's shops in Illinois, but as a divorced mother of three boys, she yearned for a business that would provide for her children and let her spend more time with them.

Her lucky moment came, strangely enough, after she was nominated in 1992 to be on the McDonald's bun committee. "The company picked me up in a corporate jet to see bakeries around the world," she recalls. "Every time I went to a meeting, I loved it. This was global!"

The experience opened her eyes to business possibilities. When McDonald's decided it wanted a new bun supplier, Harrington became determined to win the contract, even though she had no experience running a bakery.

Harrington studied the bakery business and made sure she was never off executives' radar. "If you have a dream, you can't wait for people to call you," she says. "So I'd visit a mill and send them photos of myself in a baker's hat and jacket, holding a sign that says 'I want to be your baker. '" After four years and 32 interviews, her persistence paid off.

Harrington sealed the deal with a handshake, sold her shops, and borrowed $ 13. 5 million. She was ready to build the fastest, most automated bakery in the world.

The Tennessee Bun Company opened ahead of schedule in 1997, in time for a slump in U. S. fast-food sales for McDonald's. Before Harrington knew it, she was down to her last $ 20,000, not enough to cover payroll. And her agreement with McDonald's required that she sell exclusively to the company. "I cried myself to sleep many nights," she recalls, "I really did think, I am going to go bankrupt. "

But Harrington worked out an agreement to supply Pepperidge Farm as well. "McDonald's could see a benefit if our production went up and prices went down, and no benefit if we went out of business," she says, "That deal saved us. "

Over the next eight years, Harrington branched out even more: She started her own trucking business, added a cold-storage company, and now has three bakeries producing fresh buns and frozen dough - all now known as the Bun Companies. Speed is still a priority: It takes 11 people at the main bakery to turn out 60,000 buns an hour for clients across 40 states, South America, and the Caribbean.

Grateful for the breaks she's had, Harrington is passionate about providing opportunities to all 230 employees. "Financial success is the most fun when you can give it away," she says.

The current economy is challenging. Some of her clients' sales have declined, but she's found new clients and improved efficiencies to help sustain the company's double-digit growth.

Cordia Harrington doesn't have to stand on her feet all day anymore. Two of her three sons now work for her. And she's remarried - her husband, Tom, is now her CFO.

"This is more than a job," says Harrington, "It's a mission. I'm always thinking. How can we best serve our employees? If we support them, they'll do their best to look after our clients. That's how it works here. "

According to the passage, which of the following was most significant in her early career?

A．Her travel and the visits to bakeries around the world.

B．Her nomination on the McDonald's bun committee.

C．A business contract with local bun suppliers.

D．The interviews and experience in running a bakery.

听力原文：W: Now, sir, can you tell me exactly what happened?

M: Yes. I was right here watching three children playing ball in front of the school. It's a dangerous place for children to be playing. I wonder where their parents are.

W: Yes, sir, go on.

M: Anyway, a white Volkswagen came up on the right-hand side of the street.

W: Did you say a white Volkswagen?

M: Uh-huh. There was a bus in front of it, but the bus turned left at the corner. And at the same time a truck came down the other side of the street. What make was it? Uh, let me think.

W: It's not important. Just go on.

W: Well, the Volkswagen stopped at the red traffic light and then went on. Well, just at that moment, one of the children kicked the ball into the street.

W: So a boy ran into the street.

M: Yes. He was right in front of the truck, too. The driver of the truck slammed on his brakes but he had to turn to the left. That's how he ran into the bus.

W: But which driver was to blame?

M: Why, neither driver! It was the child's fault, clear and simple, coming out between two parked cars. I don't understand how parents can let their children play in such dangerous places.

W: Thank you, sir. You are very helpful. If we have any other questions, we'll be in touch.

M: You're welcome, officer. But those parents should be put in jail.

(20)

A．A teacher.

B．A government official.

C．A policewoman.

D．A woman soldier.

By the 1870s the easygoing cordiality that greeted the first Chinese in America had been replaced by an ugly resentment that often boiled into violence. Racism and economic fear led many Westerners to believe that the Chinese, who were willing to work cheap, were stealing their jobs.

Legal persecution took the form. of taxes and statutes aimed at their livelihood, their customs and even their looks. Chinese families had to pay special taxes. Their children were barred from local public schools. A San Francisco ordinance, vetoed by the mayor at the last moment, would have required that the queues of Chinese jail inmates be cut off. Other harassments included laws making it illegal to carry baskets suspended from poles while walking on sidewalks, as Chinese laundrymen did, or to rent rooms with less than 500 cubic feet of space per person, as most Chinese had to do. The courts even prohibited Chinese from giving testimony in cases that involved whites.

By 1880 Chinese immigrants represented only 0. 002 percent of the population, yet the "Chinese Question" -- which boiled down to finding ways to keep them out -- had become a major national issue.

The Chinese responded to prejudice and persecution in two ways. First, they created an insulated society-within-a-society that needed little from the dominant culture. Second, they displayed a stoic willingness to persevere, and to take without complaint or resistance whatever America dished out.

The first Chinese immigrants to the US

A．were welcomed with hospitality.

B．far outnumbered other minorities.

C．arrived mostly in the 1870s.

D．were met with obvious hostility.

The Montreal Study Participants, who were recruited for the study through advertisements, had their brain activity monitored while listening to their favourite music. It was noted that the music stimulated the brain’s neurons to release a substance called 27______　in two of the parts of the brain which are associated with feeling 28______. Researchers also observed that the neurons in the area of the brain called the 29______ were particularly active just before the participants’ favourite moments in the music — the period known as the 30______. Activity in this part of the brain is associated with the expectation of ‘reward’ stimuli such as 31______ (请填写31题答案）.

What is the most exciting moment when Steve Jobs introducing Macintosh to the large audience?

A.When Steve Jobs opens the bag.

B.When Macintosh speaks for itself.

C.When Steve Jobs shows up.

D.When the light is on.

Grandma, what a big and fickle metaphor you can be! For children, the name translates as "the magnificent one with presents in her suitcase who thinks I'm a genius if I put my shoes on the right feet, and who stuffs me with cookies the moment my parents' backs are turned."

In news reports, to call a woman "grandmotherly" is shorthand for "kindly, frail, harmless, keeper of the family antimacassars, and operationally past tense."

For anthropologists and ethnographers of yore, grandmothers were crones, an impediment to "real" research. The renowned ethnographer Charles William Merton Hart, who in the 1920's studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia, described the elder females there as "a terrible nuisance" and "physically quite revolting" and in whose company he was distressed to find himself on occasion, yet whose activities did not merit recording or analyzing with anything like the attention he paid to the men, the young women, even the children.

But for a growing number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists, grandmothers represent a key to understanding human prehistory, and the particulars of why we are as we are —slow to grow up and start breeding but remarkably fruitful once we get there, empathetic and generous as animals go, and family-focused to a degree hardly seen elsewhere in the primate order.

As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers: what they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families' welfare, and what they are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world.

At a recent international conference —the first devoted to grandmothers —researchers concluded with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates, such durability is nothing new.

If, over the span of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their Stalwart bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their considerable energies elsewhere.

Say, over the river and through the woods. It turns out that there is a reason children are perpetually yearning for the flourdusted, mythical figure called grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around sometimes improved a child's prospects to a far greater extent than did the presence of a father.

Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia that was collected from 1950 to 1974, when child mortality rates in the area were so high that even minor discrepancies in care could be all too readily tallied. The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers, weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half.

"The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn't matter," Dr. Mace said in a telephone interview. "If the grandmother dies, you notice it; if the father does, you don't."

Importantly, this beneficent granny effect derived only from maternal grandmothers —the mother of one's mother. The p

A．It makes people think of kindness, frailty, old fashion, etc.

B．The word has different associations for different people.

C．The word brings a sense of security to children.

D．The word means an impediment to real research.

Grandma, what a big and. fickle metaphor you can be! For children, the name translates as "the magnificent one with presents in her suitcase who thinks I'm a genius if I put my shoes on the right feet, and who stuffs me with cookies the moment my parents' backs are turned."

In news reports, to call a woman "grandmotherly" is shorthand for "kindly, frail, harmless, keeper of the family antimacassars, and operationally past tense."

For anthropologists and ethnographers of yore, grandmothers were crones, an impediment to "real" research. The renowned ethnographer Charles William Merton Hart, who in the 1920's studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia, described the elder females there as "a terrible nuisance" and "physically quite revolting" and in whose company he was distressed to find himself on occasion, yet whose activities did not merit recording or analyzing with anything like the attention he paid to the men, the young women, even the children.

But for a growing number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists, grandmothers represent a key to understanding human prehistory, and the particulars of why we are as we are slow to grow up and start breeding but remarkably fruitful once we get there, empathetic and generous as animals go, and family-focused to a degree hardly seen elsewhere in the primate order.

As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers': what they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families' welfare, and what they are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world.

At a recent international conference—the first devoted to grandmothers—researchers concluded with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates, such durability is nothing new.

If, over the span of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their stalwart bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their considerable energies elsewhere.

Say, over the river and through the woods. It turns out that there is h reason children are perpetually yearning for the flour-dusted, mythical figure called grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around sometimes improved a child's prospects to a far greater extent than did the presence of a father.

Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia that was collected from 1950 to 1974, when child mortality rates in the area were so high that even minor discrepancies in care could be all too readily tallied. The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers, weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half.

"The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn't matter," Dr. Mace said in a telephone interview. "If the grandmother dies, you notice it; if the father does, you don't."

Importantly, this beneficent granny effect derived only from maternal grandmothers— the mother of one's mother.

A．It makes people think of kindness, frailty, old fashion, etc.

B．The word has different associations for different people.

C．The word brings a sense of security to children.

D．The word means an impediment to real research.

(There are) moments in life (where) you miss someone so much (that) you just (want to) pick them up from dreams and hug them for real.

A．There are

B．where

C．that

D．want to