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The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of four hundred and thirty-five.

答案： B
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The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
The Vice President plays a role as a kind chairman and the presiding officer in the Senate meetings.
答案： G
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Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
Endangered Minds suggests that television has something to do with the change of our brain.
答案： I
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The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
The seats of the committees are distributed between the two parties based on their respective membership in the Congress.
答案： H
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Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
In the era before birth of immunization, old people were respected because almost no one died of old age then.
答案： E
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
Nikola Tesla invented alternating current technology that enabled electricity to be transmitted over long distances.
答案： G
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of four hundred and thirty-five.
答案： B
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
In order to obtain information on the potential bills before implementation, the sub-committee holds hearings.
答案： J
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
Gear, though a great invention, is excluded from the list because it doesn’t have independent function.
答案： B
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position in that he has to prepare for reelection at the start of his new job.
答案： C
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
The political and economic unrest in the Middle East is principally attributed to off.
答案： H
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
If the President wants to take significant action in foreign relations, it is necessary to gain the Senate’s cooperation and support.
答案： F
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
The telephone network enables people communicate to anyone anywhere at any time.
答案： F
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
As the Senators are elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, they are accorded greater prestige than Representatives.
答案： E
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
Electricity is something existed all along that can’t be described as an invention.
答案： A
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
The plague that trilled nearly half of Europe broke out in 1347.
答案： E
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
The American two-house legislature reflects the American principle of balances and checks.
答案： A
填空题

Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
Before the clock was invented, there was not a universal reference of time.
答案： C
填空题

The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
According to the principle of state equality, each state is represented by two Senators in the Senate.
答案： D
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Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A. I’ve drawn up a list. And there’s one thing I know about this list: You won’t agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever. Which is fine: A top eight list is all about starting a good argument. But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine: I’m starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we’d never get out of prehistory. And I’m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don’t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B. This is a list of end products. That is, I’m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we’d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, damn, I’m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C. Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D. Unoriginal, I know, but still it’s true. Gutenberg’s press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity’s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, ff the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E. Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft of Europe—in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It’s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F. Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That’s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone’s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G. Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world’s first electric power station. Nikola Tesla’s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity.
6. The Automobile
H. Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I. Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J. My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap).
After the invention of printing press, people no longer had to live by oral tradition and memory.
答案： D
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The US Congress
A. The US congress is the legislative branch of the federal government. It is a bicameral (两院制的) law-malting body of more than 500 members. Its two chambers are respectively called the House of Representatives and the Senate. The American two-house legislature, a product of the compromise between big states and small ones, embodies the American principle of balances and checks. All bills must carry both houses before becoming laws.
B. The House of Representatives is the lower house of the bicameral Congress. The membership of the House is distributed among the states according to their different populations. Since 1910, the House has had a permanent membership of 435, with each Representative representing about half a million Americans. Under the principle that each state is guaranteed at least one representative, Nevada, a state with a small population, sends only one Representative to the House. California has more than 40 Representatives in the House because of its large population.
C. The election of Representatives is organized by the state legislature which divides the state into a number of districts known as Congressional districts. Each district, with a population of nearly half a million, elects one Representative to the House. A Representative’s term of office is set at two years, but there is no limit to the number of his terms. A new Representative can hardly feel easy about his position. Hardly has he begun his work in the Congress when he finds it’s time for him to seek re-election.
D. The Senate is the upper house of the US Congress. Representation in the Senate is based on the principle of state equality. The Senate is comprised of 100 Senators, two from each of the fifty states. Senators have been directly elected by voters of their respective states since 1913. Their term of office is six years. With one-third of the Senate seats up for election every two years. A Senator must be at least thirty years old and a citizen for nine years.
E. Generally speaking, Senators are accorded greater prestige than their colleagues in the lower house. Many Representatives aspire to win the election to the Senate. Senators derive their prestige from the following facts. They are less numerous, for there are fewer than one fourth as many Senators as Representatives, or Congressmen. Elected by the whole state instead of a single congressional district, most Senators represent more constituents (选民) than do House members. They are less worried by the problem of seeking re-electives. What’s more, the Senate has special powers which it does not share with the House. It has the power to approve or deny proposed treaties, nominations proposed by the President. In line with the tradition of "senatorial courtesy (礼貌)", the Senate always rejects a nominee who is objected to by a Senator of the state from which he comes.
F. It won’t do to neglect the importance of the Senate in foreign affairs. Without its cooperation and support, the President can hardly take any significant action in foreign relations. A Secretary of State on good terms with the Senators is always important for the President. Foreign countries must try to establish good relations with the US Senate if they intend to make a bargain with the United States.
G. The presiding (主持的) officer of the Senate is the Vice President who functions as a kind chairman when the Senate is in session (开会). The chief spokesman of the House is known as the Speaker who is the leader of the majority party in the House. The Speaker is the most influential figure in the House because he directs his party’s forces in legislative battles.
H. The Congress is a legislative body, but it relies on its various committees to do preparatory work. The Senate and the House have several dozen standing and special committees to deal with problems of different natures. The seats of the committees are divided between the two parties in proportion to their respective membership in the Congress. But the committee chairman is always a member of the majority party who has been in the Senate or the House without interruption for longer than anybody else on the committee. The custom is known as "seniority rule".
I. Most proposed laws in the Congress are known as bills. All bills introduced during a two-year congressional term are designated "HR" in the House and "S" in the Senate, with consecutive (连续的) numbers assigned in order in which they are introduced in each house. After this, the bills are referred to the relevant committees for further study.
J. To assess the bill at its true worth, the relevant committee usually organizes its sub-committee to conduct detailed study. There is no doubt that the sub-committee will study the literal sense of the bill. But it also holds meetings with the citizens who want to state their opinions about the bill. These meetings are commonly known as hearings. The purpose of the sub-committee in holding these hearings is to obtain information on the bill before it. The sub-committee may summon people to appear at the hearings and to testify. After finishing study of the bill, the sub-committee will report the result to the full committee. The committee chairman then has a choice between two things. He can send the bill to the house for further consideration. He can also postpone, or kill it by putting it aside and not reporting it. For this reason, a committee chairman is regarded as an important person in the Congress. It won’t do to neglect them.
Nominations proposed by the President may be disapproved by the Senate.
答案： E
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