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Text 1 Every newborn baby is dealt a hand of cards which helps to determine how long he or she will be allowed to play the game of life. Good cards will help those who have them to have a long and healthy existence, while bad cards will bring to those who have them terrible diseases like high blood pressure and heart disease. Occasionally, cards are dealt out that doom their holders to an early death. In the past, people never knew exactly which cards they had been dealt. They could guess at the future only by looking at the kind of health problems experienced by their parents or grandparents. Genetic testing, which makes it possible to find dangerous genes, has changed all this. But, until recently, if you were tested positive for a bad gene you were not obliged to reveal this to anyone else except in a few extreme circumstances. This month, however, Britain became the first country in the world to allow life insurers to ask for test results. So far, approval has been given only for a test for a fatal brain disorder known as Huntington’s disease. But ten other tests (for seven diseases) are already in use and are awaiting similar approval. The independent body that gives approval, the Department of Health’s genetics and insurance committee, does not have to decide whether the use of genetic information in insurance is ethical. It must judge only whether the tests are reliable to insurers. In the case of Huntington’s disease the answer is clear-cut. People unlucky enough to have this gene will die early, and cost life insurers dearly. This is only the start. Clear-cut genetic answers, where a gene is simply and directly related to a person’s risk of death, are uncommon. More usually, a group of genes is associated with the risk of developing a common disease, dependent on the presence of other genetic or environmental factors. But, as tests improve, it will become possible to predict whether or not a particular individual is at risk. In the next few years researchers will discover more and more about the functions of individual genes and what health risks — or benefits — are associated with them. The author’s purpose in writing the passage is
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Text 2 Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a child in school. For a long time, though, researchers couldn’t actually prove that teaching talent was important. But new research finally shows that teacher quality is a close cousin to student achievement: A great teacher can cram one-and-a-half grades’ worth of learning into a single year, while laggards are lucky to accomplish half that much. Yet, while we know now that better teachers are critical, flaws in the way that administrators select and retain them mean that schools don’t always hire the best. Failing to recognize the qualities that make teachers truly effective and to construct incentives to attract and retain more of these top performers has serious consequences. Higher salaries draw more weak as well as strong applicants into teaching — applicants the current hiring system can’t adequately screen. Unless administrators have incentives to hire the best teachers available, it’s pointless to give them a larger group to choose from. Study after study has shown that teachers with master’s degrees are no better than those without. Job experience does matter, but only for the first few years, according to research by Hoover Institution’s Eric A. Hanushek. A teacher with 15 years of experience is no more effective, on average, than a teacher with five years of experience, but which one do you think is paid more This toxic combination of rigid pay and steep rewards for seniority causes average quality to decline rather than increase as teacher groups get older. Top performers often leave the field early for industries that reward their excellence. Mediocre teachers, on the other hand, are soon overcompensated by seniority pay. And because they are paid more than their skills command elsewhere, these less-capable pedagogues settle in to provide many years-of ineffectual instruction. So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession To make American schools competitive, we must rethink seniority pay, the value of master’s degrees, and the notion that a teacher can teach everything equally well — especially math and science — without appropriate preparation in the subject. Our current education system is unlikely to accomplish this dramatic rethinking. Imagine, for a moment, that American cars had been free in recent decades, while Toyotas and Hondas sold at full price. We’d probably be driving Falcons and Corvairs today. Free public education suffers from a lack of competition in just this way. So while industries from aerospace to drugs have transformed themselves in order to compete, public schooling has stagnated. School choice could spark the kind of reformation this industry needs by motivating administrators to hire the best and adopt new strategies to keep top teachers in the classroom. The lesson that good teachers matter should be taught, not as a theory, but as a practice. By citing the example of the automobile industry, the author intends to argue that
Text 4 Here is a quick way to spoil a Brussels dinner party. Simply suggest that world governance is slipping away from the G20, G7, G8 or other bodies in which Europeans may hog up to half the seats. Then propose, with gloomy relish, that the future belongs to the G2: newly fashionable jargon for a putative body formed by China and America. The fear of irrelevance haunts Euro-types, for all their public boasting about Europe’s future might. The thought that the European Union might not greatly interest China is especially painful. After all, the 21st century was meant to be different. Indeed, to earlier leaders like France’s Jacques Chirac, a rising China was welcome as another challenge to American hegemony, ushering in a “multipolar world” in which the EU would play a big role. If that meant kow-towing to Chinese demands to shun Taiwan, snub the Dalai Lama or tone down criticism of human-rights abuses, so be it. Most EU countries focused on commercial diplomacy with China, to ensure that their leaders’ visits could end with flashing cameras and the signing of juicy contracts. Meanwhile, Europe’s trade deficit with China hit nearly∈170 billion ( $ 250 billion) last year. In five years, China wants 60% of car parts in new Chinese vehicles to be locally made. This is alarming news for Germany, the leading European exporter to China thanks to car parts, machine tools and other widgets. As ever, Europeans disagree over how to respond. Some are willing to challenge China politically — for example, Germany, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands. But they are mostly free traders. That makes them hostile when other countries call for protection against alleged Chinese cheating. In contrast, a block of mostly southern and central Europeans, dubbed “accommodating mercantilists” by the ECFR (The European Council on Foreign Relations), are quick to call for anti-dumping measures: But that makes them anxious to keep broader relations sweet by bowing to China on political issues. The result is that European politicians often find themselves defending unconditional engagement with China. The usual claim is that this will slowly transform the country into a freer, more responsible stakeholder in the world. The secret, it is murmured, is to let Europe weave China into an entangling web of agreements and sectoral dialogues. In 2007 no fewer than 450 European delegations visited China. Big countries like France and Britain add their own bilateral dialogues, not trusting the EU to protect their interests or do the job properly. There are now six parallel EU and national “dialogues” with China on climate change, for example. To deal with the trade deficit with China, Europeans
Text 1 Every newborn baby is dealt a hand of cards which helps to determine how long he or she will be allowed to play the game of life. Good cards will help those who have them to have a long and healthy existence, while bad cards will bring to those who have them terrible diseases like high blood pressure and heart disease. Occasionally, cards are dealt out that doom their holders to an early death. In the past, people never knew exactly which cards they had been dealt. They could guess at the future only by looking at the kind of health problems experienced by their parents or grandparents. Genetic testing, which makes it possible to find dangerous genes, has changed all this. But, until recently, if you were tested positive for a bad gene you were not obliged to reveal this to anyone else except in a few extreme circumstances. This month, however, Britain became the first country in the world to allow life insurers to ask for test results. So far, approval has been given only for a test for a fatal brain disorder known as Huntington’s disease. But ten other tests (for seven diseases) are already in use and are awaiting similar approval. The independent body that gives approval, the Department of Health’s genetics and insurance committee, does not have to decide whether the use of genetic information in insurance is ethical. It must judge only whether the tests are reliable to insurers. In the case of Huntington’s disease the answer is clear-cut. People unlucky enough to have this gene will die early, and cost life insurers dearly. This is only the start. Clear-cut genetic answers, where a gene is simply and directly related to a person’s risk of death, are uncommon. More usually, a group of genes is associated with the risk of developing a common disease, dependent on the presence of other genetic or environmental factors. But, as tests improve, it will become possible to predict whether or not a particular individual is at risk. In the next few years researchers will discover more and more about the functions of individual genes and what health risks — or benefits — are associated with them. Which of the following statements is true according to the text
Text 4 Here is a quick way to spoil a Brussels dinner party. Simply suggest that world governance is slipping away from the G20, G7, G8 or other bodies in which Europeans may hog up to half the seats. Then propose, with gloomy relish, that the future belongs to the G2: newly fashionable jargon for a putative body formed by China and America. The fear of irrelevance haunts Euro-types, for all their public boasting about Europe’s future might. The thought that the European Union might not greatly interest China is especially painful. After all, the 21st century was meant to be different. Indeed, to earlier leaders like France’s Jacques Chirac, a rising China was welcome as another challenge to American hegemony, ushering in a “multipolar world” in which the EU would play a big role. If that meant kow-towing to Chinese demands to shun Taiwan, snub the Dalai Lama or tone down criticism of human-rights abuses, so be it. Most EU countries focused on commercial diplomacy with China, to ensure that their leaders’ visits could end with flashing cameras and the signing of juicy contracts. Meanwhile, Europe’s trade deficit with China hit nearly∈170 billion ( $ 250 billion) last year. In five years, China wants 60% of car parts in new Chinese vehicles to be locally made. This is alarming news for Germany, the leading European exporter to China thanks to car parts, machine tools and other widgets. As ever, Europeans disagree over how to respond. Some are willing to challenge China politically — for example, Germany, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands. But they are mostly free traders. That makes them hostile when other countries call for protection against alleged Chinese cheating. In contrast, a block of mostly southern and central Europeans, dubbed “accommodating mercantilists” by the ECFR (The European Council on Foreign Relations), are quick to call for anti-dumping measures: But that makes them anxious to keep broader relations sweet by bowing to China on political issues. The result is that European politicians often find themselves defending unconditional engagement with China. The usual claim is that this will slowly transform the country into a freer, more responsible stakeholder in the world. The secret, it is murmured, is to let Europe weave China into an entangling web of agreements and sectoral dialogues. In 2007 no fewer than 450 European delegations visited China. Big countries like France and Britain add their own bilateral dialogues, not trusting the EU to protect their interests or do the job properly. There are now six parallel EU and national “dialogues” with China on climate change, for example. European countries once welcomed China’s growing up because
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