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考題練習
題型與計分都照真實考試。多選題採學測的部分給分：答錯 k 個選項得 (n − 2k)/n，算出負值以零分計——所以亂猜的期望值是負的。
綜合測驗：The Quiet Hour
At 8 a.m. on Tuesdays, a supermarket in Manchester turns off its music, dims half its lights, and asks staff not to stack shelves. The scanners are set to their lowest volume. For sixty minutes the store is, by ordinary retail standards, almost 1.
The practice began as an accommodation for autistic shoppers, for whom a normal supermarket — fluorescent glare, overlapping announcements, the constant clatter of trolleys — can be genuinely painful. A parent who had given up shopping with her son wrote to the manager describing what a weekly trip cost the family. The manager, 2 of any policy from head office, simply tried it.
What surprised everyone was who else showed up. People recovering from concussion came. So did shift workers, migraine sufferers, and older customers who had quietly stopped going out. Within a year, the quiet hour had the highest customer-satisfaction score of any hour in the week, and other branches began to 3 it.
The lesson is one that designers call the curb-cut effect. Ramps cut into sidewalks were fought for by wheelchair users, but they are now used by anyone pushing a stroller or pulling a suitcase. A change made for a group at the margin turns out to serve a much 4 population than anyone predicted.
None of this makes the quiet hour easy to sell. It reduces impulse purchases, and music in stores exists precisely because it raises them. Managers who keep the practice tend to justify it in terms of loyalty rather than 5 takings — a harder argument to make to a spreadsheet, and one that only works if head office is willing to wait.
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閱讀測驗：Every Map Lies
Take an orange, peel it, and try to flatten the peel on a table. It tears. No amount of care will make a curved surface lie flat, and this small kitchen failure is the entire problem of cartography. Every map of the world is a compromise, and every compromise loses something.
The projection most of us grew up with was published by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was designed for sailors: on a Mercator map, a straight line is a line of constant compass bearing, so a captain could rule a course and follow it. That single property made it indispensable for four hundred years. The price is size. Because the projection stretches the map east–west near the poles, it must stretch north–south by the same amount to keep angles true. Greenland ends up looking as large as Africa. Africa is fourteen times larger.
In 1973 the historian Arno Peters presented an alternative and argued, loudly, that Mercator's distortions had shaped how Europeans saw the rest of the world. His projection preserves relative area: Africa appears as vast as it is. Geographers were unimpressed, partly because the projection was not new — it had been described by James Gall a century earlier — and partly because preserving area badly distorts shape. On a Gall–Peters map, continents look stretched, as though seen in a warped mirror.
The dispute is often reported as a fight about politics, but cartographers see something narrower. A projection cannot preserve area, shape, distance, and direction at once; this is not a technical limitation but a mathematical certainty, proved by Gauss in 1827. The only question is which property you need. A pilot, an ecologist counting habitat, and a teacher explaining colonial history need different maps, and no single one of them is the honest map.
What has changed is that we no longer have to choose once and for all. A digital globe can be rotated, and a phone can switch projections in the time it takes to zoom. The generation now in school may be the first for whom the world does not have a single default shape.
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What is the purpose of the orange peel example in the first paragraph?
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Why did the Mercator projection remain in use for so long?
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Why were geographers unimpressed by the Peters projection?
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What does the author suggest by saying "no single one of them is the honest map"?
閱讀測驗：The Return of the Night Train
For most of the 2000s, the night train looked like a museum piece. Budget airlines could move a passenger from Vienna to Brussels for less than the price of a bunk, and European operators closed sleeper routes one after another. Between 2001 and 2015 the number of overnight services in Western Europe fell by roughly two-thirds. The carriages were sold, scrapped, or left to rust in sidings.
Then, quietly, the direction reversed. Austria's national operator bought a batch of second-hand sleeper cars that Germany was discarding and rebuilt the network around them. Ten years later it runs the largest night-train fleet in Europe and, unusually for the sector, does not lose money on it.
The reasons for the revival are not what most reports assume. Climate concern is real, and a night train from Zurich to Amsterdam emits a small fraction of what the equivalent flight does. But surveys of passengers put something else first: the trip does not cost a working day. Boarding at ten at night and arriving at seven in the morning converts travel time into sleeping time, which is time nobody was going to use anyway. The train competes not with the two-hour flight but with the hotel night plus the airport morning.
That logic explains where night trains work and where they do not. The sweet spot is a journey of roughly nine to fourteen hours: shorter, and passengers arrive uncomfortably early; longer, and a second night is needed and the economics collapse. It also explains the awkward fact that sleeper travel is not especially cheap. A private compartment can cost more than a flight and a hotel combined, and the operators who have tried to compete on price have generally failed.
Whether the revival lasts will depend less on passengers than on track access charges, which are set by national governments and which currently treat a train carrying thirty sleeping passengers much like a freight train carrying containers. Change that, operators argue, and the map of European night travel would redraw itself within a decade.
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What happened to night trains in Western Europe between 2001 and 2015?
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According to passenger surveys, what matters most to night-train travelers?
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What does the author mean by "The train competes not with the two-hour flight but with the hotel night plus the airport morning"?
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What does the last paragraph suggest about the future of night trains?
綜合測驗：The Repair Café
On the second Saturday of every month, a community hall in Rotterdam fills with broken things. People arrive carrying toasters, lamps, bicycle wheels, and jackets with failed zippers. Volunteers with tools sit at long tables. Nothing is sold, and nothing is thrown away without first being 1.
The rule that makes a repair café different from a repair shop is that owners must stay and watch. They are not customers dropping something off; they are apprentices for an afternoon. A volunteer will open the toaster, point to the broken contact, and hand over the screwdriver. The 2 is not efficiency but transfer: the next time something fails, one more person has some idea where to look.
Roughly two-thirds of the items that arrive leave working. The rest are 3 beyond repair, usually for the same reason — the manufacturer glued the case shut, or the replacement part is no longer made, or a chip inside refuses to work with anything but its original charger. Volunteers keep records of these failures, and the records have turned out to be politically useful. 4 thousands of such reports, campaigners in Europe were able to show that unrepairable design was a pattern rather than an accident.
That evidence contributed to legislation. Manufacturers of certain appliances must now make spare parts available for years after a model is discontinued. The change is modest, and it was 5 hard: an industry built on replacement has little reason to welcome a movement built on repair.
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綜合測驗：Why Deadlines Move
Ask a group of students when they will finish a term paper, and their answers will cluster around a date they will almost all miss. Ask the same students when they finished their last three papers, and they can tell you 1 — usually a week later than they had planned. The information needed to make a better prediction is already in their heads. They just do not use it.
Psychologists call this the planning fallacy, and its most striking feature is how 2 it is to experience. Being reminded of past delays barely helps. Neither does being told about the fallacy itself. In one study, students who were explicitly asked to recall similar past assignments still produced estimates that were far too optimistic, though their memories of the delays were accurate.
The explanation seems to lie in what we attend to when we plan. Planning is naturally forward-looking and specific: we imagine the steps, and each step, 3, looks manageable. What we do not imagine is the ordinary interference — a broken laptop, a sick child, a request from a supervisor — because interference has no shape until it arrives.
One method does work, and it works by refusing to use imagination at all. Instead of asking how long this project will take, ask how long 4 projects took. Construction firms that adopted this approach cut their overruns substantially. It feels wrong to planners, because it ignores everything they know about the specific job in front of them, and that is exactly 5 it succeeds.
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The audience grew visibly ___ long before the second act came to an end.
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___ his complete lack of formal training, he became the leading authority in the field.
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It was ___ a convincing argument that even his longtime critics fell silent.
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The new evidence ___ the committee reconsider a decision it had announced only a week earlier.