The main point of the first two paragr...

Passage 1

The climate of Earth is changing. Climatologists are confident that over the past century, the global average surface temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. This warming is thought to be at least partly the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests for agriculture. As the global population grows and national economies expand, the global average temperature is expected to continue increasing by an additional 1.0℃ to 3.5℃ by the year 2100.
Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing human- kind. Understanding the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems is essential if we are going to manage our environment to minimize the negative consequences of climate change and maximize the opportunities that it may offer. Because natural ecosystems are complex, nonlinear systems, it follows that their responses to climate change are likely to be complex. Climate change may affect natural ecosystems m a variety of ways. In the short term. climate change can alter the mix of plant species in land ecosystems such as grasslands. In the long term, climate change has the potential to dramatically alter the geo- graphic distribution of major vegetation types savannas, forests, and climate change can also potentially alter global ecosystem processes, including the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Moreover. changes in these ecosystem processes can affect and be affected by changes in the plant species of the ecosystem and vegetation type. All of the climate change-induced alterations of natural ecosystems affect the services, that these ecosystems provide to humans.
The global average surface temperature increase of half a degree Celsius observed over the past century has been in part due to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range. Decreases in the diurnal temperature range were first identified in the United States, where large-area trends showed that maximum temperatures have remained constant or increased only slightly, whereas minimum temperatures have increased at a faster rate. In this issue, Al-ward et al. report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperature increases.
Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a reason for the global warming

A．The burning of fuels such as coal or oil.
B．The clearing of forests.
C．The cultivation of farmland,
D．The negative consequences of human activities.

单项选择题

Passage 3

We all know that the normal human daily cycle of activity is of some 748 hours’ sleep alternating with some 16,417 hours’ wakefulness and that, broadly speaking, the sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness. Our present concern is with how easily and to what extent this cycle can be modified.
The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to working at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to a reversed routine of sleep and wakeful-ness, sleeping during the day and working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week: a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a. m. one week, 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. the next, and 4 p. m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner has he got used to one routine than he has to change to an- other, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.
The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.
This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile some- thing may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal day- time work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only adjust gradually back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. Therefore, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for Selection. So far, however, such a form of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.
Why is the question of "how easily people can get used to working at night" no mere academic one

A．Because few people like to reverse the cycle of sleep and wakefulness.
B．Because sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness.
C．Because people are required to work at night in some fields of industry.
D．Because shift work in industry requires people to change their sleeping habits.

单项选择题

Passage 4

The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth, is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth’s surface, the deep ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation’s Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP’s drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean’s surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983, During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger’s core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably lo0k like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger’s voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world’s past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change information that may be used to predict future climates.
The author refers to the ocean bottom as a "frontier" in the first sentence because it ______.

单项选择题

Passage 2

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about can’t be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of non-verbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber Where should be the valves placed Should it have a long or short piston Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed, to entail "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to en- counter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
In the passage, the author is primarily concerned with ______.

A．identifying the kinds of thinking that are used by technologists
B．stressing the importance of nonverbal thinking in engineering design
C．proposing a new role for nonscientific thinking in the development of technology
D．criticizing engineering schools for emphasizing science in engineering curricula

单项选择题

Passage 1

The climate of Earth is changing. Climatologists are confident that over the past century, the global average surface temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. This warming is thought to be at least partly the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests for agriculture. As the global population grows and national economies expand, the global average temperature is expected to continue increasing by an additional 1.0℃ to 3.5℃ by the year 2100.
Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing human- kind. Understanding the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems is essential if we are going to manage our environment to minimize the negative consequences of climate change and maximize the opportunities that it may offer. Because natural ecosystems are complex, nonlinear systems, it follows that their responses to climate change are likely to be complex. Climate change may affect natural ecosystems m a variety of ways. In the short term. climate change can alter the mix of plant species in land ecosystems such as grasslands. In the long term, climate change has the potential to dramatically alter the geo- graphic distribution of major vegetation types savannas, forests, and climate change can also potentially alter global ecosystem processes, including the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Moreover. changes in these ecosystem processes can affect and be affected by changes in the plant species of the ecosystem and vegetation type. All of the climate change-induced alterations of natural ecosystems affect the services, that these ecosystems provide to humans.
The global average surface temperature increase of half a degree Celsius observed over the past century has been in part due to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range. Decreases in the diurnal temperature range were first identified in the United States, where large-area trends showed that maximum temperatures have remained constant or increased only slightly, whereas minimum temperatures have increased at a faster rate. In this issue, Al-ward et al. report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperature increases.
The second paragraph is primarily concerned with ______.

A．the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems
B．how to minimize the negative consequences of climate change
C．how to maximize the opportunities that climate change may offer
D．the complex, nonlinear nature of natural ecosystems

单项选择题

Passage 3

We all know that the normal human daily cycle of activity is of some 748 hours’ sleep alternating with some 16,417 hours’ wakefulness and that, broadly speaking, the sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness. Our present concern is with how easily and to what extent this cycle can be modified.
The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to working at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to a reversed routine of sleep and wakeful-ness, sleeping during the day and working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week: a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a. m. one week, 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. the next, and 4 p. m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner has he got used to one routine than he has to change to an- other, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.
The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.
This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile some- thing may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal day- time work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only adjust gradually back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. Therefore, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for Selection. So far, however, such a form of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.
The main problem of the round-the*clock working system lies in ______.

A．the inconveniences brought about to the workers by the introduction of automation
B．the disturbance of the daily cycle of workers who have to change shifts too frequently
C．the fact that people working at night are often less effective
D．the fact that it is difficult to find a number of good night workers

单项选择题

Passage 2

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about can’t be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of non-verbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber Where should be the valves placed Should it have a long or short piston Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed, to entail "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to en- counter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
It can be inferred that the author thinks engineering curricula are ______.

A．strengthened when they include courses in design
B．strong because nonverbal thinking is still emphasized by most of the courses
C．strong despite the errors that graduates of such curricula have made in the development of automatic control, systems
D．strong despite the absence of nonscientific modes of thinking

单项选择题

Passage 4

The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth, is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth’s surface, the deep ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation’s Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP’s drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean’s surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983, During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger’s core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably lo0k like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger’s voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world’s past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change information that may be used to predict future climates.
The author mentions outer space in the first paragraph because ______.

A．the Earth’s climate millions of years ago was similar to conditions in outer space
B．it is similar to the ocean floor in being alien to the human environment
C．rock formations in outer space are similar to those found on the ocean floor
D．techniques used by scientists to explore outer space were similar to those used in ocean exploration

单项选择题

Passage 1

The climate of Earth is changing. Climatologists are confident that over the past century, the global average surface temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. This warming is thought to be at least partly the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests for agriculture. As the global population grows and national economies expand, the global average temperature is expected to continue increasing by an additional 1.0℃ to 3.5℃ by the year 2100.
Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing human- kind. Understanding the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems is essential if we are going to manage our environment to minimize the negative consequences of climate change and maximize the opportunities that it may offer. Because natural ecosystems are complex, nonlinear systems, it follows that their responses to climate change are likely to be complex. Climate change may affect natural ecosystems m a variety of ways. In the short term. climate change can alter the mix of plant species in land ecosystems such as grasslands. In the long term, climate change has the potential to dramatically alter the geo- graphic distribution of major vegetation types savannas, forests, and climate change can also potentially alter global ecosystem processes, including the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Moreover. changes in these ecosystem processes can affect and be affected by changes in the plant species of the ecosystem and vegetation type. All of the climate change-induced alterations of natural ecosystems affect the services, that these ecosystems provide to humans.
The global average surface temperature increase of half a degree Celsius observed over the past century has been in part due to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range. Decreases in the diurnal temperature range were first identified in the United States, where large-area trends showed that maximum temperatures have remained constant or increased only slightly, whereas minimum temperatures have increased at a faster rate. In this issue, Al-ward et al. report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperature increases.
According to the author, what may chiefly be responsible for the temperature in- creases observed over the past century.’

A．Increases of daily maximum temperatures.
B．Decreases of daily minimum temperatures.
C．Increases of diurnal temperature range.
D．Decreases in the diurnal temperature range.

单项选择题

Passage 4

The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth, is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth’s surface, the deep ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation’s Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP’s drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean’s surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983, During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger’s core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably lo0k like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger’s voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world’s past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change information that may be used to predict future climates.
Which of the following is: true of the Glomar Challenger

A．It is a type of submarine.
B．It is an ongoing project.
C．It has gone on over 100 voyages.
D．It made its first DSDP voyage in 1968.

单项选择题

Passage 3

We all know that the normal human daily cycle of activity is of some 748 hours’ sleep alternating with some 16,417 hours’ wakefulness and that, broadly speaking, the sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness. Our present concern is with how easily and to what extent this cycle can be modified.
The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to working at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to a reversed routine of sleep and wakeful-ness, sleeping during the day and working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week: a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a. m. one week, 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. the next, and 4 p. m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner has he got used to one routine than he has to change to an- other, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.
The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.
This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile some- thing may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal day- time work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only adjust gradually back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. Therefore, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for Selection. So far, however, such a form of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.
It is possible to find out if a person has adapted to the changes of routine by measuring his body temperature because ______.

A．body temperature changes when the cycle of sleep and wakefulness alternates
B．body temperature changes when he changes to night shift or back
C．the temperature reverses when the routine is changed
D．people have higher temperatures when they are working efficiently

单项选择题

Passage 2

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about can’t be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of non-verbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber Where should be the valves placed Should it have a long or short piston Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed, to entail "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to en- counter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
The main point of the first two paragraphs can best be illustrated as ______.

A．when a machine like a rotary engine malfunctions, it is the technologist who is best equipped to repair it
B．a telephone is a complex instrument designed by technologists using only nonverbal thought
C．the designer of a new refrigerator should consider the designs of other refrigerators before deciding on its form
D．the distinctive features of a suspension bridge reflect its designer’s conceptualization as wetl as the physical requirements of its site

单项选择题

Passage 4

The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth, is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth’s surface, the deep ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation’s Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP’s drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean’s surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983, During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger’s core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably lo0k like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger’s voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world’s past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change information that may be used to predict future climates.
The Deep Sea Drilling Project was significant because it was ______.

A．an attempt to find new sources of oil and gas
B．the first extensive exploration of the ocean bottom
C．composed of geologists from all over the world
D．funded entirely by the gas and oil industry

单项选择题

Passage 1

The climate of Earth is changing. Climatologists are confident that over the past century, the global average surface temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. This warming is thought to be at least partly the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests for agriculture. As the global population grows and national economies expand, the global average temperature is expected to continue increasing by an additional 1.0℃ to 3.5℃ by the year 2100.
Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing human- kind. Understanding the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems is essential if we are going to manage our environment to minimize the negative consequences of climate change and maximize the opportunities that it may offer. Because natural ecosystems are complex, nonlinear systems, it follows that their responses to climate change are likely to be complex. Climate change may affect natural ecosystems m a variety of ways. In the short term. climate change can alter the mix of plant species in land ecosystems such as grasslands. In the long term, climate change has the potential to dramatically alter the geo- graphic distribution of major vegetation types savannas, forests, and climate change can also potentially alter global ecosystem processes, including the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Moreover. changes in these ecosystem processes can affect and be affected by changes in the plant species of the ecosystem and vegetation type. All of the climate change-induced alterations of natural ecosystems affect the services, that these ecosystems provide to humans.
The global average surface temperature increase of half a degree Celsius observed over the past century has been in part due to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range. Decreases in the diurnal temperature range were first identified in the United States, where large-area trends showed that maximum temperatures have remained constant or increased only slightly, whereas minimum temperatures have increased at a faster rate. In this issue, Al-ward et al. report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperature increases.
In subsequent paragraphs, we may expect the writer of this passage to ______.

A．discuss the global impacts of temperature increases
B．present a point of view which supports the idea of the second paragraph
C．introduce Alward’s report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperature increases
D．further illustrate the causes of the global average surface temperature increases

单项选择题

Passage 4

The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth, is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3 600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth’s surface, the deep ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation’s Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP’s drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean’s surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rocks from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983, During this time, the vessel logged 600 000 kilometers and took almost 20 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger’s core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably lo0k like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger’s voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world’s past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change information that may be used to predict future climates.
Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as being a result of the Deep Sea Drilling Project

A．Geologists were able to determine the Earth’s appearance hundreds of millions of years ago.
B．Two geological theories became more widely accepted.
C．Information was revealed about the Earth’s past climatic changes.
D．Geologists observed forms of marine life never seen before.

单项选择题

Passage 2

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about can’t be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of non-verbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber Where should be the valves placed Should it have a long or short piston Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed, to entail "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to en- counter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
The example of the early models of high-speed railroad cars is used to ______.

A．weaken the point that math is a necessary part of the study of design
B．support the idea that errors in modern engineering systems are likely to increase
C．illustrate the topic that courses in design are the most effective cost-reducing means
D．exemplify the thesis that inadequate attention to nonscientific design may result in poor design

单项选择题

Passage 3

We all know that the normal human daily cycle of activity is of some 748 hours’ sleep alternating with some 16,417 hours’ wakefulness and that, broadly speaking, the sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness. Our present concern is with how easily and to what extent this cycle can be modified.
The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to working at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to a reversed routine of sleep and wakeful-ness, sleeping during the day and working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week: a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a. m. one week, 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. the next, and 4 p. m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner has he got used to one routine than he has to change to an- other, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.
The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.
This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile some- thing may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal day- time work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only adjust gradually back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. Therefore, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for Selection. So far, however, such a form of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.
Which of the following statements is NOT true

A．Body temperature may serve as an indication of a worker’s performance.
B．The selection of a number of permanent night shift workers has proved to be the best solution to problems of the round-the-clock working system.
C．Taking body temperature at regular intervals can show how a person adapts to the changes of routine.
D．Disturbed sleep occurs less frequently among those on permanent night or day shifts.

单项选择题

Passage 1

The climate of Earth is changing. Climatologists are confident that over the past century, the global average surface temperature has increased by about half a degree Celsius. This warming is thought to be at least partly the result of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests for agriculture. As the global population grows and national economies expand, the global average temperature is expected to continue increasing by an additional 1.0℃ to 3.5℃ by the year 2100.
Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues facing human- kind. Understanding the potential impacts of climate change for natural ecosystems is essential if we are going to manage our environment to minimize the negative consequences of climate change and maximize the opportunities that it may offer. Because natural ecosystems are complex, nonlinear systems, it follows that their responses to climate change are likely to be complex. Climate change may affect natural ecosystems m a variety of ways. In the short term. climate change can alter the mix of plant species in land ecosystems such as grasslands. In the long term, climate change has the potential to dramatically alter the geo- graphic distribution of major vegetation types savannas, forests, and climate change can also potentially alter global ecosystem processes, including the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Moreover. changes in these ecosystem processes can affect and be affected by changes in the plant species of the ecosystem and vegetation type. All of the climate change-induced alterations of natural ecosystems affect the services, that these ecosystems provide to humans.
The global average surface temperature increase of half a degree Celsius observed over the past century has been in part due to differential changes in daily maximum and minimum temperatures, resulting in a narrowing of the diurnal temperature range. Decreases in the diurnal temperature range were first identified in the United States, where large-area trends showed that maximum temperatures have remained constant or increased only slightly, whereas minimum temperatures have increased at a faster rate. In this issue, Al-ward et al. report on the different sensitivities of rangeland plants to minimum temperature increases.
The word "diurnal" (Line 3, Para. 3) is closest in meaning to______.

A．day-and-night’s
B．everyday
C．two days’
D．yearly

单项选择题

Passage 2

Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, their dimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about can’t be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds of those who built them.
The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of non-verbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber Where should be the valves placed Should it have a long or short piston Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component of design remains primary.
Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock-in-trade of the artist, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed, to entail "hard thinking", nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal or mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic American Engineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric views of industrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students with the requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architectural schools.
If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the background required for practical problem-solving, are not provided, we can expect to en- counter silly but costly errors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high-speed railroad cars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan sucked snow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems are not merely trivial aberrations; they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumed to be primarily a problem in mathematics.
The author seems to be in agreement with which of the following

A．Mathematical thinking is essential to any design course.
B．Non-verbal thinking has its advantage over other perceptive processes.
C．Engineering design demands scientific thought.
D．Artists play a primitive role in engineering work.

单项选择题

Passage 3

We all know that the normal human daily cycle of activity is of some 748 hours’ sleep alternating with some 16,417 hours’ wakefulness and that, broadly speaking, the sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness. Our present concern is with how easily and to what extent this cycle can be modified.
The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to working at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to a reversed routine of sleep and wakeful-ness, sleeping during the day and working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week: a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a. m. one week, 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. the next, and 4 p. m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner has he got used to one routine than he has to change to an- other, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.
The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.
This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile some- thing may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal day- time work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only adjust gradually back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. Therefore, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for Selection. So far, however, such a form of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.
It is implied in the last paragraph that a low body temperature indicates that a person ______.

A．has just been awake from sleep
B．can not work night shifts
C．should go to sleep at once
D．is less productive

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