Oxford English Language Center

Information for New Students

    CLASS TIME：8:30a. m. —10:00a. m.，10:30a. m. —12:00a. m.，1:30p. m. —3:00p. m..

    The Language Center is open Monday to Friday. Each class has one afternoon free per week. On the first day, go to the lecture hall to check your timetable.

    SELF—ACCESS：The language laboratory（Room 1110）is open Monday to Friday from 3:15p. m. to 5:00p. m. for all full-time students.

    You can learn how to use computers for language games or word-processing. There are tapes for students to borrow to practice their English. Go in and ask the teacher to show you. If you plan to take public examinations, there are dictation and listening comprehension tapes for you to practice with. There are cloze exercises on the computers. Ask your class teacher for a list of past exam essays. Students can borrow tapes to take home but they must be returned after two days.

    ATTENDANCE: All students are expected to attend classes as it is required. Students who do not attend classes will be reported to OSS. Eighty percent attendance is required for students to receive their certificates when they finish their courses. It is also required by OSS for an extension to your visa.

    BOOKS: If students are given course books, the books are their responsibility. If a book is lost, the student will be expected to pay for it. If students wish to buy books, there is a bookshop in the college specializing in English books（Room 3520.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    As the G20 Leaders Summit(峰会)kicked off on Sept 4, Hangzhou, the host city, took measures to promote its reputation for entrepreneurship(企业), as well as its many beauty sports, to those overseas people.

    Although many may have been surprised when Hangzhou was chosen to host the summit over bigger cities such as Beijing or Shanghai, economic statistics suggest that it's well deserving of the honor.

    When the national economy grew at 6.7 percent in the first half of this year, the lowest in more than two decades, Hangzhou steamed ahead with a huge 10.8 percent growth, becoming one of the only two cities in China, alongside Chongqing, with a double-digit growth rate.

Walking along the streets of Hangzhou, through centuries-old paths and along the Broadway—like Yan'an Avenue, a tourist can pick up whatever he or she wants with just a smartphone, via Alipay or WeChat Pay—no cash or credit cards needed.

    And starting this month, one can also rent public bikes simply by scanning the QR code(二维码)with a smartphone.

Meanwhile, a short video showing the beauty of Zhejiang Province and its capital, Hangzhou, was being aired on CNBC channels during prime time until Sept 12.

    The promotional video, created by CNBC's Catalyst Content Studio, highlighted some of Hangzhou's most charming attractions.

From eye-pleasing beauty spots like the Qiantang River and West Lake to the towering headquarters of leading Internet corporations, the promo(宣传片)showed how the city built its culture on a long history of commerce and developed into a vast modern center of technology, imports and exports.

    Many people believe that you lose the ability to learn new languages as you get older. Language experts, however, will tell you that you're never too old to learn a new language. As you get older, it can be more difficult to learn a new language, though.

    Children and adults learn new languages in different ways．For children, language is their life. They study for thousands of hours every year, because they need to learn languages to become part of their communities. Adults, on the other hand，are already part of a language community. Learning a new language means becoming part of another language community, and adults seldom get the chance to practice as much as young children do.

    Moreover, children learning a new language are expected to make mistakes. This gives them freedom when learning to be daring and confident. Adults, however, often feel pressured to be perfect when learning a new language. This can discourage many people and make it even harder to learn a new language.

    Research has shown that children who learn a new language when they are very young will not be likely to have a “foreign” accent when speaking a different language. Some scientists also believe that it can take up to 10,000 hours of study to master a new language. This can be difficult for adults to achieve, but young children can accumulate(积累) those hours over several years as they grow up.

    When young children learn a new language, they come to see multiple languages as a “normal” part of society. This mindset (思维模式) helps them learn a new language without feeling like they're doing something unusual or “too hard”.

    So if you want to learn a new language, go for it! It's never too late to learn a new language. If you're older, it may take more work, but it can be done. If you're a young child, though, now is the time to step out and learn a new language!

    We may think we're a culture that gets rid of our worn technology at the first sight of something shiny and new, but a new study shows that we keep using our old devices (装置)well after they go out of style. That's bad news for the environment—and our wallets—as these outdated devices consume much more energy than the newer ones that do the same things.

    To figure out how much power these devices are using, Callie Babbitt and her colleagues at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York tracked the environmental costs for each product throughout its life—from when its minerals are mined to when we stop using the device. This method provided a readout for how home energy use has evolved since the early 1990s.Devices were grouped by generation. Desktop computers, basic mobile phones, and box-set TVs defined 1992.Digital cameras arrived on the scene in 1997.And MP3 players, smart phones, and LCD TVs entered homes in 2002, before tablets and e-readers showed up in 2007.

    As we accumulated more devices, however, we didn't throw out our old ones.“The living-room television is replaced and gets planted in the kids' room, and suddenly one day, you have a TV in every room of the house,” said one researcher. The average number of electronic devices rose from four per household in 1992 to 13 in 2007.We're not just keeping these old devices—we continue to use them. According to the analysis of Babbitt's team, old desktop monitors and box TVs with cathode ray tubes are the worst devices with their energy consumption and contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (排放)more than doubling during the 1992 to 2007 window.

    So what's the solution (解决方案)?The team's data only went up to 2007,but the researchers also explored what would happen if consumers replaced old products with new electronics that serve more than one function, such as a tablet for word processing and TV viewing. They found that more on-demand entertainment viewing on tablets instead of TVs and desktop computers could cut energy consumption by 44%.

    Several Jobs That Will Be Automated By Artificial Intelligence(AI) And Robots

Translator

    Image recognition software and voice recognition software are bringing some major advances to language translation. Applications like Google's Word Lens can translate words from signs and documents in real time and there are a lot of translation apps that allow you to type in a word or phrase and will translate it for you.

    Some will even speak the phrase for you and raw word-to-word translation will be fully automated soon.

    Fast food workers

    Automated ordering booths have already made their way into a few McDonald's restaurants around the world, and cooking positions could be removed next. The booths probably can't handle customer service problems well, so televideo systems could bring in an office employee to deal with complaints.

    Field technician

    New advances in the Internet of Things could make this work obsolete.

    Low-cost sensors combined with high availability cellular／satellite communications and cloud technology are being started to automate and alarm these sites, and can be checked and maintained from a desktop or mobile device.

    Sales representative

    But, e-commerce is changing how we make purchasing decisions, especially those where there isn't much differentiation among the major competitors.

    If you're selling a high-differentiation product and／or a high-price, low-volume product you have some job security, but if you're selling a high-volume, low-differentiation product, you better start polishing your resume, said Doug Camplejohn, CEO of Fliptop. “These kind of product sales are all moving online.”

    The dream to travel the world has always been in the mind of many. The national geographic and Discovery Channel videos are just not enough. You can only feel the excitement of experiencing all those fascinating wildlife, countryside or adventure tourism documentaries by traveling the world. Here are the best destination countries based on safety, culture, ease of transportation, and accommodation for single travelers in 2018.

    Bali Island, Indonesia

    The cheapest of all countries to visit. Living in a comfortable room, having three meals a day and a few beers for only 25 dollars per day! Accommodation and goods are cheap everywhere, especially when you move further to the north.

    Italy

    Lined with olive trees, hilltop towns, and wonderful beaches, Italy is one of the most sought-after destinations; Not forgetting the wine and wine-cooked barbecues. All the cities of Italy are always full of tourists all year around.

    Vietnam

    Vietnam suburbs or the city of Hanoi is just where you need to be. Amazing landscapes, friendly locals, cheap food and affordable services, Cab services are a mere 10 dollars or less compared to cab services in the States which can get as high as 30 dollars for a couple of blocks away.

    France

    You don't talk of France without mentioning Eiffel tower. At night, it gives the most incredible view of France. Avoid the long lines to the tower and book your trip earlier For Catholics or historians, the Notre Dame and its surroundings will attract you with its ancient mummified (制成木乃伊的) cats, while Les Invalids military museum has all types of the world war weapons.