Come on—Everybody's doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good- -drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club , Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word.

  Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of example of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers.

  The idea seems promising, and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many public-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. "Dare to be different, please don't smoke!" pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers—teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure.

  But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it's presented here is that it doesn't work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed.

  There's no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of re-search shows that positive health habits—as well as negative ones—spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form. of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior. we see every day.

  Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It's like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that's the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.

Write an essay of 160—200 words based on the following drawing. In your essay, you should

1) describe the drawing briefly.

2) explain its intended meaning, and

3) give you comments.

You should write neatly on ANSWER SHEET 2. (20 points)

Some internationals students are coming to your university. Write them an email in the name of the Students' Union to

1) extend your welcome, and

2) provide some suggestions for their campus life here.

You should write about 100 words on ANSWER SHEET 2. Do not sign your name at the end of the letter. Use "Li Ming" instead. Do not write the address. (10 points)

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Part C

Directions: Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese. (10 points)

Since the days of Aristotle, a search for universal principles has characterized the scientific enterprise, in some ways, this quest for commonalities defines science. Newton's laws of motion and Darwinian evolution each bind a host of different phenomena into a single explicatory frame. work.

  (46)In physics, one approach takes this impulse for unification to its extreme, and seeks a theory of everything—a single generative equation for all we see.It is becoming less clear, however, that such a theory would be a simplification, given the dimensions and universes that it might entail, nonetheless, unification of sorts remains a major goal.

  This tendency in the natural sciences has long been evident in the social sciences too. (47)Here, Darwinism seems to offer justification, for if all humans share common origins, it seems reasonable to suppose that cultural diversity could also be traced to more constrained beginnings.Just as the bewildering variety of human courtship rituals might all be considered forms of sexual selection, perhaps the world's languages, music, social and religious customs and even history are governed by universal features. (48)To filter out what is unique from what is shared might enable us to understand how complex cultural behavior. arose and what guides it in evolutionary or cognitive terms.

  That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland and his colleagues consider the evolution of grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in language.

The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that humans are born with an innate language—acquisition capacity that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly.

  (49)The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality, identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many language which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints.

  Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000 languages. (50)Chomsky's grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it, whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations.Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lire age-specific and not governed by universals.

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