citizens. The activities include book discounts, prize contests for book reports, opening of new libraries in rural areas and urban communities, etc. Write a composition of about 200 words on the following topic: The Benefits of Book Reading Today

two tempting choices: a good major or a prestigious university. What do you think of these two choices in the preparation of the national entrance examination for postgraduate? Write a composition of about 200 words on the following topic: School or Major?

or parody to the mainstream culture. Someone thinks that kuso is the corruption of culture, while others think that it is a successful business operation. What is your idea of kuso? Write a composition of about 200 words on the following topic; Kuso: a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

ts and short-story writers. All his life Hemingway was fascinated by war—in World War I he worked for the Red Cross on the Italian front, in the Spanish Civil War and World War II he served as a war reporter. His experiences and observations provided him with materials and background for many of his best works, in which he concerned himself with mans courage in facing strong physical forces. "Grace under pressure" was Hemingways definition of courage. In his view, life is painful and complex. The only way to survive is to face what comes with honor, dignity, strength, knowledge and endurance. Hemingways overall message, as established in The Old Man and the Sea ( 1952) , his nearly flawless short novel which gained him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954, is that although life is a lonely, losing battle, it is a struggle that a man can dominate in such a way that his loss has dignity and is itself a victory.

l framework. Instead, when the subject demands it, he manages deftly to flit back and forth among the decades. Less satisfying is his account of Californias cultural progress in the 19th and 20th centuries: does he really need to invoke so many long-forgotten writers to accompany such names as Jack London, Frank Norris, Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler? But that is a minor criticism for a book that will become a California classic. The regret is that Mr. Starr, doubtless pressed for space, leaves so little room—just a brief final chapter—for the implications of the past for Californias future. He poses the question that most Americans prefer to gloss over: is California governable? "For all its impressive growth, there remains a volatility in the politics and governance of California, which became perfectly clear to the rest of the nation in the fall of 2003 when the voters of California recalled one governor and elected another.

pathological language defects, our language mechanism automatically equips us to say anything we need to say. This does not mean that I can talk about all the technicalities of company law or of central heating with the glibness of a solicitor or a plumber. What it does mean is that if my job or my hobby entailed knowledge of these activities, my language would rise to the occasion. We thus have the general truth that any normal person has the language tools to handle anything he needs to handle. But there are odd little exceptions. Let us consider, for instance, forms of address to strangers. Quite often we need to draw a persons attention to something that has just dropped out of pocket or handbag, or to the fact that he is just going to walk into a plate glass door. Not merely does English lack anything corresponding to the French attention, but we do not have the equivalent of Msieur or Madame or even Mademoiselle.

on. I do not know just how many parts the poem is supposed to have, but to me there are something like fifty parts which offer no bridges the one to the other and which are quite distinct in time, place, action, persons, tone and nearly all the unities to which art is accustomed. This discreteness reaches also to the inside of the parts, where it is indicated by a frequent want of grammatical joints and marks of punctuation; as if it were the function of art to break down the usual singleness of the artistic image, and then to attack the integrity of the individual fragments. I presume that poetry has rarely gone further in this direction. It is a species of the same error which modern writers of fiction practice when they laboriously disconnect the stream of consciousness and present items which do not enter into wholes. Evidently they think with Hume that reality is facts and pluralism, not compounds and systems. But Mr. Eliot is more enterprising than they, because almost in so many words he assails the philosophical or cosmical principles under which we form. the usual images of reality, naming the whole phantasmagoria Waste Land almost as plainly as if he were naming cosmos Chaos. His intention is evidently to present a wilderness in which both he and the reader may be bewildered, in which one is never to see the wood for the trees.

of Technology has been a unique institution. Great institutions of higher education are grounded in and learn from the past; interact to some degree with the world of the present; and aspires to influence the future. MIT is no exception, but in large measure, the institutes uniqueness derives from the unusual extent of our engagement with the present and dedication to the future. We apply our talents to problems posed by contemporary society—by its institutions of industry, commerce, arts, healing, and politics. Yet our minds are even more firmly engaged in shaping the future. This somewhat singular approach to our mission has enabled us, over the years, to define new forms of research and scholarship, and to establish new paradigms for education. MIT students, faculty, and staff are deeply engaged in the process of learning in the classroom, in the laboratory, and from each other. There is an exhilarating sense of being at the cutting edge in all that we do. You will find MIT to be intense and demanding, yet the atmosphere here is highly collegial. You will be a very important part of one of the worlds great institutions of learning and exploration.

like yourself; I have an intense objection to having my house demolished by a bomb from an aeroplane and myself killed in a horribly painful way by mustard gas. I have visions of streets heaped with mangled corpses in which children wander crying for their parents, and babies gasp and strangle in the clutches of dead mothers. That is what war means nowadays. This is what is happening in Spain and in China whilst I speak to you; and it may happen to us tomorrow. And the worst of it is that it does not matter two straws to Nature, the mother of us all, how dreadfully we misbehave ourselves in this way, or in what hideous agonies we die. Nature can produce children enough to make good any extremity of slaughter of which we are capable. London may be destroyed; Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople may be laid in smoking ruins and the silence of death. No matter. Mother Nature will replace the dead. She is doing so every day.

hs, but parents over the world love our children. We respect our mothers, our sisters and daughters. Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity—a commitment shared by people of good will on every continent. Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. Yet the terrorists who helped rule that country now plot and plan in many countries, and they must be stopped. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women. In America, next week brings Thanksgiving. After the events of the last few months, well be holding our families even closer, and we will be especially thankful for all the blessings of American life. I hope Americans will join our family in working to insure that dignity and opportunity will be secured for all the women and children of Afghanistan.