Directions: The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions (1) - (5), you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent text by choosing from the list A-G and filling them into the numbered boxes. Paragraphs E and G have been correctly placed.

    [A] No disciplines have seized on professionalism with as much enthusiasm as the humanities. You can, Mr Menand points out, become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four. But the regular time it takes to get a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. Not surprisingly, up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees.
    [B] His concern is mainly with the humanities: literature, languages, philosophy and so on. These are disciplines that are going out of style: 22% of American college graduates now major in business compared with only 2% in history and 4% in English. However, many leading American universities want their undergraduates to have a grounding in the basic canon of ideas that every educated person should possess. But most find it difficult to agree on what a “general education” should look like. At Harvard, Mr Menand notes, “the great books are read because they have been read”—they form a sort of social glue.
    [C] Equally unsurprisingly, only about half end up with professorships for which they entered graduate school. there are simply too few posts. This is partly because universities continue to produce ever more PhDs. But fewer students want to study humanities subjects’: English departments awarded more bachelor’s degrees in 1970-71 than they did 20 years later. Fewer students require fewer teachers. So, at the end of a decade of thesis-writing, many humanities students, leave the profession to do something for which they have not been trained.
    [D] One reason why it is hard to design and teach such courses is that they cut across the insistence by top American universities that liberal-arts education and professional education should be kept separate, taught in different schools. Many students experience both varieties. Although more than half of Harvard undergraduates end up in law, medicine or business, future doctors and lawyers must study a non-specialist liberal-arts degree before embarking on a professional qualification.
    [E] Besides professionalizing the professions by this separation, top American universities have professionalized the professor. The growth in public money for academic research has speeded the process: federal research grants rose fourfold between 1960 and 1990, but faculty teaching hours fell by half as research took its toll. Professionalism has turned the acquisition of a doctoral degree into a prerequisite for a successful academic career: as late as 1969 a third of American professors did not possess one. But the key idea behind professionalisation, argues Mr Menand, is that “the knowledge and skills needed for a particular specialization are transmissible but not transferable.” So disciplines acquire a monopoly not just over the production of knowledge, but also over the production of the producers of knowledge.
    [F] The key to reforming higher education, concludes Mr Menand, is to alter the way in which   “the producers of knowledge are produced.” Otherwise, academics will continue to think dangerously alike, increasingly detached from the societies which they study, investigate and criticize. “Academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic.” Yet quite how that happens, Mr Menand does not say.
    [G] The subtle and intelligent little book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American university should be read by every student thinking of applying to take a doctoral degree. They may then decide to go elsewhere. For something curious has been happening in American Universities, and Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard University, captured it skillfully.
 
 (G) → (1) (  ) → (2) (  ) → (E) → (3) (  ) → (4) (  ) → (5) (  )

This part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a letter. Suppose you are Zhang Ying. Write a letter to Xiao Wang, a schoolmate of yours who is going to visit you during the week-long holiday. You should write at least 100 words according to the suggestions given below in Chinese: 
(1) 表示欢迎
(2) 提出对度假安排的建议
(3) 提醒应注意的事项

A letter to a Schoolmate

　　I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died “full of years,” as the Bible would say; both yielded to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence (吊唁) calls on the two families on the same afternoon.
　　At the first home, the son of the deceased (已故的) woman said to me, “If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It’s my fault that she died.” At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, “If only I hadn’t insisted on my mother’s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It’s my fault that she’s dead.”
　　When things don’t turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Priests know that any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course-keeping Mother at home, postponing the operation—would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?
　　There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilt. The first is our pressing need to believe that the world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they really exist and where they exist only in our minds.
　　The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence (万能). A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happen in it. He wakes up in the morning and summons the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when he is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile notion that our wishes cause things to happen.

    Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics-the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close.
    As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robo-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micromechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy—far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone.
    But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves—goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,” says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can’t yet give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world.”
    Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries.
    What they found; in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented—and human perception far more complicated-than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t know quite how we do it.

    New technology links the world as never before. Our planet has shrunk. It’s now a “global village” where countries are only seconds away by fax or phone or satellite link. And, of course, our ability to benefit from this high-tech communications equipment is greatly enhanced by foreign language skills.
    Deeply involved with this new technology is a breed of modern businesspeople who have a growing respect for the economic value of doing business abroad. In modern markets, success overseas often helps support domestic business efforts.
    Overseas assignments are becoming increasingly important to advancement within executive ranks. The executive stationed in another country no longer need fear being “out of sight and out of mind.”He or she can be sure that the overseas effort is central to the company’s plan for success, and that promotions often follow or accompany an assignment abroad. If an employee can succeed in a difficult assignment overseas, superiors will have greater confidence in his or her ability to cope back in the United States where cross-cultural considerations and foreign language issues are becoming more and more prevalent (普遍的).
    Thanks to a variety of relatively inexpensive communications devices with business applications, even small businesses in the United States are able to get into international markets.
    English is still the international language of business. But there is an ever-growing need for people who can speak another language. A second language isn’t generally required to get a job in business, but having language skills gives a candidate the edge when other qualifications appear to be equal
    The employee posted abroad who speaks the country’s principal language has an opportunity to fast-forward certain negotiations, and cam have the cultural insight to know when it is better to move more slowly. The employee at the home office who can communicate well with foreign clients over the telephone or by fax machine is an obvious asset to the firm.