Directions: Write a letter of thanks by using the information given below.

以 Mary 的名义给Rose写一封感谢信，内容如下：

1. 感谢你的好朋友Rose在你生日聚会时送给你一个音乐盒（music box）作为生日礼物；

2. 你早就想买一个音乐盒来听音乐，可是价钱有点贵，一直没能买。Rose买这个音乐盒肯定花了她几个星期的积蓄。你很喜欢这个音乐盒；

3. 再次向她表达感谢，这是你收到的最好的生日礼物。

Directions: You are required to write a notice in English. You should base your writing on the following information given in Chinese below.

假如你是系学生会主席。请根据下面的提示写一篇100字以内的关于周末郊游的书面通知。

1.参加者：生物系全体一年级学生

2.活动内容：6月21日（星期六）去紫金山爬山；在山顶野餐；参观植物园。

3.集合时间和地点：早晨七点在学校大门口前集合；七点二十分开车。

4.注意事项：穿运动鞋；自带午餐和饮用水；准时集合。

5.参加者在本周四前直接到学生会报名。

Words for reference: 紫金山 Purple Mountain； 植物园 botanical garden

Directions: Write an invitation letter by using the information given below.

请你以 Mary 的名义给Jack写一封邀请信，主要内容如下：

1.邀请Jack参加你妈妈为你准备的5月10日星期六的生日聚会；

2.你的生日聚会的时间是：晚上6:00 — 9:00；地点是：你们家里。届时很多同学和朋友参加，大家能品尝你妈妈准备的美味佳肴;同学们可以唱歌、跳舞以及做游戏等。

3.请Jack务必在2008年5月3日以前回复是否能参加，可通过发电子邮件Mary@hotmail.com或打电话66285796等方式及时回复。真诚希望Jack能参加。

Directions: You are required to write a poster in English. You should base your writing on the following information given in Chinese below:

影讯

4月15日（星期五）晚上七点半，我校大礼堂放映英国电影《雾都孤儿》，英语原声，汉语字幕。票价2元，售票地点：礼堂售票处。

外国语学院4月13日

Words for reference: 雾都孤儿 Oliver Twist; 大礼堂 auditorium; 字幕 subtitle

Directions: You are required to write an announcement in English. You should base your writing on the following information given in Chinese below:

假如你是班长，请根据下面的细节，写一个100字以内的通告：

1.事由：英语讲座；

2.讲座的内容：怎样学好英语；

3.报告人：郑州大学王明教授；

4.时间：3月2日星期五下午3点至5点

5.地点：阶梯教室；

6.可以向他咨询有关英语学习的问题；

7.要求大家准时出席。

Words for reference: 英语讲座 English lecture; 阶梯教室 lecture hall

Doctors have known for a long time that extremely loud noises can cause hearing damage or loss. The noise can be the sound of a jet airplane or machines in factories or loud music or other common sounds found at home and at work. A person only needs to hear the noise for little more than one second to be affected.An American scientist had found that using aspirin could increase the temporary hearing loss or damage from loud noise. He did an experiment, using a number of male students at a university who all had normal hearing. He gave them different amounts of aspirin for different periods of time, and then he tested their hearing ability. He found that students who were given four grams of aspirin a day for two days suffered much greater temporary hearing loss than those who did not use aspirin. The hearing loss was about twice as great. The scientist said millions of persons in the United States use much larger amounts of aspirin than were used in the study. He said these persons face a serious danger of suffering hearing loss from loud noises.

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Columbia: These schools have a lot in common. Their admissions are incredibly competitive, they charge a high price and graduates have a big advantage in finding a good job. In fact, graduates from famous schools might not enjoy as much of an advantage in the job markets as many think, and that a big name on your diploma doesn’t always mean a big payoff. Let’s start with the cost: Tuition at the top schools can easily average $35,000 per year or more, while a lesser-known school might cost up to $ 20,000 areas so students have to add their living costs to their tuition bill. Once they graduate, however, students are often facing with thousands of dollars of debt that they need to repay. The reasoning goes that graduates from big-name schools can write their own ticket, but the statistics don’t bear this out. Graduates from a school which requires test scores high above the average can expect to make an extra 5％ more than others, but that doesn’t justify paying 40％ more for tuition. Graduating from a lesser-known school with the same academic qualifications can make you the same money over the long run. Long-range studies show experience and performance eventually matter much more than the name on your degree, especially when times get tough.

In a job interview, the first question is often a ″breaking the ice″ type of question. Donˊt be surprised if the interviewer asks you something like: “How are you today?″ or ″What do you think of the weather lately?″ Answer the question without going into too much detail. Talking about qualifications is the most important part of any job interview. Your qualifications include your education and any special training you may have received in the past. Your qualifications also include your experience in any previous work. It is important to explain what experience you have in detail. Generally, employers want to know exactly what you did and how well you accomplished your tasks. This is not the time to be modest. Try to avoid some big mistakes in the job interview, such as leaving the mobile on and criticizing previous bosses. The worst thing is you yourself have no questions. Having no questions shows you are either not interested or not prepared. Remember that interviewers are more impressed with the questions you ask than the selling points you try to make.

Do you know American Toughman? That is amateur boxing competitions around the U.S. Compared to professional boxing matches, a Toughman fight could not be simpler. Passing a brief physical examination and paying $50 get you a pair of gloves. The fights take place in three two-minute rounds with the winner decided by points awarded by a judge.The prize money doesn’t compare with professional matches either. Some professional boxers make millions every time, while the most a Toughman competitor can hope for is $1,000 for winning a series of fights. Some fighters hope that a Toughman boxing match will lead to fame and fortune though. Mr. T, a famous tough guy actor, got his start in Toughman, but that kind of success is one-in-a-million.Another difference between Toughman and professional matches is that Toughman fighters usually have no idea what they’re doing. The $50 entrance fee doesn’t buy a minute of training. Experienced fighters are trained to protect themselves as well as attack their opponents, but Toughman fighters could barely keep their hands up. Art Dore, who founded the league 24 years ago, admits, “These guys can’t fight.” This kind of inexperience can be fatal; 12 people have been killed in Toughman matches, four in the past nine months alone.

A team of archaeologists (考古学家) has gone to New Mexico to look for proof of one of the greatest stories of the 20th century: the UFO crash at Roswell.William Foleman, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico, agreed to excavate (发掘) the site where the UFO supposedly crashed in 1947.What exactly happened on the site is unclear. In 1947, a young man discovered some debris (碎片) on the field. After investigating the crash, the US Army announced they had recovered a “fly disc”.Several hours later, an Air Force general announced that the crash was caused by a weather balloon again. The field was closed off for several days while the military cleaned up the site.Believers claim that the military found a crashed UFO, along with several dead bodies at the site. This story has inspired countless books, movies and TV shows, but no one has been able to find any evidence to support it.In 1997, the Air Force said the weather balloon story was made up and that the military was actually conducting a crash-test program with balloons.But Foleman isn’t so sure. While he says he’s “Still uncertain” about UFOs, he knows that “something happened in July 1947”.

Aron Ralston was trapped, his right arm under a 200 kg stone. He was deep in a canyon (峡谷) in Southern Utah. All he had with him was a day’s worth of food and water, and some ropes and climbing equipment.Aron was an outdoorsman, and knew how to take care of himself. He liked climbing 5,000-meter peaks, often by himself in the winter.For the next four days he tried to break or shift the rock as he waited for help. His knife had little effect on the hard stone. He made his food and water last nearly three days. Finally, on the fifth day, Aron realized he had no other choice: to free himself, he would have to cut off his own hand.He knew that the knife would cut skin and muscle, but not bone. So first Aron had to break his own arm by twisting it against the rock. He then tied a rope tightly around the upper arm to control the bleeding, and cut through his hand to free himself. The entire procedure took approximately an hour.Tired, hungry and bleeding heavily, Aron climbed out of the canyon and walked nearly 8 kilometers to find help.“Iˊm not sure how I handled it,” he later said. “I felt pain and I coped with it. I moved on.”

By sending a man into space, China is hoping to join the United States and Russia in one of the clubs in the world.Following a recent successful, though unmanned, test launch, China announced that it would attempt to send two men into space later this year on a Shenzhou V rocket. While the names of China’s first astronauts have yet to be announced, at least 14 fighter pilots have been chosen to train for the mission, and some have been sent to Russia.While China has been developing rockets since the 1950s, it has recently made great progress in rocket technology and regularly launches commercial satellites for US and British companies.China’s launch would come over 40 years after the first manned space flight. But manned space flight is still a risky effort, and the Chinese rocket will be launched while memories of the recent Space disaster are still fresh.However, China’s space ambitions seem to extend beyond putting people into space, with officials hinting that China may be the second country to ever put a man on the moon.“The short-term goal is to send Chinese people into space,” said Huang Chunping, Chief commander of rocketry for the Shenzhou project. “The grand vision for the future is to explore space. Both are inspiring to the Chinese people.”

The atmosphere is a blanket of gases around the Earth. For thousands of years these gases have kept the planet’s temperature at about 15oC. But now, because of pollution, there are more and more hot gases put into the atmosphere. This means the Earth is getting hotter. A greenhouse becomes hot for the same reason. It’s a glass that lets the sun’s heat pass through, then stop some of it from leaving. That’s why scientists call the problem of the Earth’s rising temperature “the Greenhouse Effect”.Scientists agree that the Greenhouse Effect will add between 1.5oC-4oC to the Earth’s temperature by 2030. This will change the weather everywhere.Then there is the problem of food. When the climate changes there will be less food in the world. At the moment areas like the Midwest of America and central Russia grow a lot of wheat. In the future that may change when the USA and Russia become too dry for farming. Other countries will become wetter, but that won’t help. The soil won’t possible to grow the same amount of food as before.We can’t stop the Greenhouse Effect. However, we can slow it down if we use less fossil fuel, protect rain-forest, use more natural energy from the sun, the sea and wind.

Internet use appears to cause a decline in psychological well-being, according to a recent research. This result really attracts a lot of attention from the public.The two-year study showed that even people who spent just a few hours a week on the Internet experienced more depression and loneliness than those who logged on less frequently. And it wasnˊt that people who were already feeling bad spent more time on the Internet, but that using the Net actually appeared to cause the bad feelings. People felt exhausted if they had been online for more than ten hours.Researchers are puzzled over the results, which were completely contrary to their expectations. They expected that the Net would prove socially healthier than television, since the Net allows users to choose their information and to communicate with others.But the fact that Internet use reduces time available for family and friends may account for the drｏp in well-being according to the study. Faceless, bodiless ″virtual″ communication may be less psychologically satisfying than actual conversation, and the relationships formed through it may be shallower. Another possibility is that exposure to the wider world via the Net makes users less satisfied with their lives.

James is a middle-aged New York builder. He’s lonely. Just like everyone else, James needs human contact from time to time, and he’s found a way: at cuddle (拥抱) parties.New York can be a terrible place: it has a high murder rate and some seriously disturbed people living in it. But James says he’s comfortable at a New York apartment with twenty strange people. The floor of the “cuddle zone” is soon covered with complete strangers snuggling (依偎) and cuddling, but that’s as far as it goes.Cuddle parties are the latest trend for lonely, isolated city folks who want to meet people and become safely intimate. The safety comes from rules before you come, bring clean clothes, ask permission before you cuddle, and keep your clothes on. “We have ‘cuddle lifeguards’ to make sure everyone sticks to the rules,” says Mihalko. The lifeguards make sure nobody gets out of line, and everyone goes home feeling better than when they arrived.Once the cuddle party is in full swing, people are soon crawling on top of one another, stretching out like dogs ready for a nap. Mihalko admits that the whole idea “might seem a little odd” at first. But research has shown that being touched by other people helps reduce stress and can help sick people heal faster.