59. Chen Lirong just retired from a state enterprise, living with his husband, who is retired too. They want to arrange their life without work in a better way and enjoy the life with a healthy body and high spirits. So she particularly pays more attention to their health.

58. Han Lei is an18--year--old girl, studying in a High School. She is a sports enthusiast and is good at tennis and jumping. Besides, she has a particular interest in those sports celebrities.

57. Han Yiwei is a successful CEO of a big International Company in Guangzhou. He usually flies to other countries for business, so he would like to equip himself with the most advanced communication appliances and know the news concerning the development in the communication area.

56. Liu Ming works as a chairman of a local Ping Pong club in Fo Shan. He shows great concern for sports news especially the news about Ping Pong. He has never missed a single Ping Pong match of China Ping Pong Team.

54. The studies show that _________.

A. an American treats his or her mother badly

B. ideas of treating the aged are different

C. personalities of Chinese and American are different

D. conflicts of Americans and Chinese are different

53. Compared with Americans, Chinese are _________.

A. likely to find the truth in life　　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 B. reluctant to admit their own failure

C. reluctant to have a general idea of things

D. likely to know advantages and disadvantages of things

52. The underlined word “contentious” in Paragraph 2 probably means _________.

A. conservative　　　 　　　 B. aggressive　 　　　 C. objective　　 　　　　　　　 D. optimistic

51. In Paragraph 1, the author sets examples in order to _________.

A. expose the contradiction between Chinese and Americans

B. show the differences between Chinese culture and American culture

C. find the reason for the differences

D. generalize the main idea of the passage

50. Which of the following statements is NOT true?

　 A. The results of economic decisions can not always be predicted.

　 B. Minimum wage can not always protect employees.

　 C. Economic theory can predict the results of economic decisions if other factors are not changing.

　 D. Economic decisions should not be based on economic theory.

C

Americans wear black for mourning while Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters while Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities (极性)　 with the West, as though each stands at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University of California, Berkeley, a psychologist has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and American cultures - polarities that go to the heart of how we reason and discover truth.

His findings go far toward explaining why American cultures seem to be contentious and Chinese cultures so passive, when compared to each other. More importantly, the research opens the way for the peoples of the East and the West to learn from each other in fundamental ways. The Chinese could learn much from Western methods for determining scientific truth, said Kaiping Peng, a former Beijing scholar, who is now a UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously from the Chinese tolerance for accepting contradictions in social and personal life, he said.

“Americans have a terrible need to find out who is right in an argument,” said Peng. “The problem is that at the interpersonal level you really don’t need to find the truth, or maybe there isn’t any.” Chinese people, said Peng, are far more content to think that both sides have flaws and virtues, because they have a holistic (整体的) awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming of the individual than Americans do, he added.

In studies of interpersonal argument, for example, when subjects were asked to deal with contradictory information stemming from conflict between a mother and a daughter or a student and a school, Peng found that Americans were “non-compromising, blaming one side - usually the mother - for the causes of the problems, demanding changes from one side to attain a solution and offering no compromise” in dealing with the conflict. Compared to this angry, blaming American stance, the Chinese were paragons (模范) of compromise, finding fault on both sides and looking for solutions that moved both sides to the middle.