According to the last paragraph, "pape...

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us.
As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma.
Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection.
In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s hardest problems is something new.
It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.
The author believes that people are doing great harm to their lives by ______.

A． eating too much
B． taking wrong exercises
C． polluting the environment
D． A, B and C

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us.
As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma.
Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection.
In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s hardest problems is something new.
It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.
Nowadays people are likely to feel that they ______.

A． are all right
B． are very tired
C． tend to be ill
D． are stressed

We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude.
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."
The main idea of this passage is ______.

A． examinations exert a pernicious influence on education
B． examinations are ineffective
C． examinations are profitable for institutions
D． examinations are a burden on students

单项选择题

The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modem science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable.
Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and an enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the Work. Once their labours are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes.
The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day, Present flying mutes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey.
The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigours of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the later keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world.
Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few yearn ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavour.
When did man begin to explore the Antarctic

A． About 100 years ago.
B． In this century.
C． At the beginning of the 19th century.
D． In 1798.

单项选择题

The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished.
Of course Belden’s prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter’s that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope.
Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver’s view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room."
A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park.
The San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city’s major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver.
San Diego’s model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city’s Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles.
A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco’s many hills. The computer’s ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model’s importance, and its future is uncertain.
New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama’s bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.
What is the passage mainly about

A． City development in America
B． Famous American designers
C． History of American architecture
D． City model making in America

单项选择题

Eight thousand years ago, forests covered more than 23 million square miles, or about 40 percent of Earth’s land surface. Today, almost half of those forests have fallen to the ax, the chain saw, the matchstick, or the bulldozer.
A map unveiled in March by the Washington-based World Resources Institute not only shows the locations of former forests, but also assesses the condition of today’s forests worldwide. Institute researchers developed the map with the help of the World Conservation Monitoring Center, the World Wildlife Fund, and 90 forest experts from a variety of universities, government organizations, and environmental groups.
Only one-fifth of the remaining forests are still "frontier forests", defined as a relatively undisturbed natural forests large enough to support all of their native species. Frontier forests offer a number of benefits: They generate and maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, prevent flooding and soil erosion, and stabilize climate.
Many large areas that have traditionally been classified as forest land don’t qualify as "frontier" because of human influences such as fire suppression and a patchwork of logging. "There’s surprisingly little intact forest left," says research associate Dirk Bryant, the principal author of the report that accompanies the new map.
In the report, Bryant, Daniel Nielsen, and Laura Tangley divide the world into four groups: 76 countries that have lost all of their frontier forest; 11 nations that are "on the edge"; 28 countries with "not much time"; and only eight—including Canada, Russia, and Brazil—that still have a "great opportunity" to keep most of their original forest. The United States is among the nations said to be mining out of time: In the lower 48 states, says Bryant, "only 1 percent of the forest that was once there as frontier forest qualifies today."
Logging poses the biggest single threat to remaining frontier forests. "Our results suggest that 70 percent of frontier forests under threat are threatened by logging," says Bryant. The practice of cutting timber also creates roads that cause erosion and open the forest to hunting, mining, firewood gathering, and land clearing for farms.
What can protect frontier forests The researchers recommend combining preservation with sustainable land use practices such as tourism and selective timber extraction. It’s possible to restore frontiers," says Bryant, "but the cost and time required to do so would suggest that the smart approach is to husband the remaining frontier forest before it’s gone.
What is the main idea of the passage

A． The present situation of frontier forest on Earth.
B． The history of ecology.
C． The forest map in the past.
D． Beautiful forests in different parts of the world.

单项选择题

American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English.
But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft.
Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper.
Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.
According to Mc Whorter, the decline of formal English ______.

A． is inevitable in radical education reforms
B． is but all too natural in language development
C． has caused the controversy over the counter-culture
D． brought about changes in public attitudes in the 1960s

单项选择题

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us.
As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma.
Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection.
In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s hardest problems is something new.
It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.
Today, dying young is ______.

A． a common phenomenon
B． the case with many people
C． usually caused by trauma
D． never reported

单项选择题

Eight thousand years ago, forests covered more than 23 million square miles, or about 40 percent of Earth’s land surface. Today, almost half of those forests have fallen to the ax, the chain saw, the matchstick, or the bulldozer.
A map unveiled in March by the Washington-based World Resources Institute not only shows the locations of former forests, but also assesses the condition of today’s forests worldwide. Institute researchers developed the map with the help of the World Conservation Monitoring Center, the World Wildlife Fund, and 90 forest experts from a variety of universities, government organizations, and environmental groups.
Only one-fifth of the remaining forests are still "frontier forests", defined as a relatively undisturbed natural forests large enough to support all of their native species. Frontier forests offer a number of benefits: They generate and maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, prevent flooding and soil erosion, and stabilize climate.
Many large areas that have traditionally been classified as forest land don’t qualify as "frontier" because of human influences such as fire suppression and a patchwork of logging. "There’s surprisingly little intact forest left," says research associate Dirk Bryant, the principal author of the report that accompanies the new map.
In the report, Bryant, Daniel Nielsen, and Laura Tangley divide the world into four groups: 76 countries that have lost all of their frontier forest; 11 nations that are "on the edge"; 28 countries with "not much time"; and only eight—including Canada, Russia, and Brazil—that still have a "great opportunity" to keep most of their original forest. The United States is among the nations said to be mining out of time: In the lower 48 states, says Bryant, "only 1 percent of the forest that was once there as frontier forest qualifies today."
Logging poses the biggest single threat to remaining frontier forests. "Our results suggest that 70 percent of frontier forests under threat are threatened by logging," says Bryant. The practice of cutting timber also creates roads that cause erosion and open the forest to hunting, mining, firewood gathering, and land clearing for farms.
What can protect frontier forests The researchers recommend combining preservation with sustainable land use practices such as tourism and selective timber extraction. It’s possible to restore frontiers," says Bryant, "but the cost and time required to do so would suggest that the smart approach is to husband the remaining frontier forest before it’s gone.
The word "unveiled" as used in Para. 2 is closest in meaning to ______.

A． evaluated
B． decorated
C． designed
D． made public

单项选择题

The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished.
Of course Belden’s prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter’s that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope.
Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver’s view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room."
A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park.
The San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city’s major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver.
San Diego’s model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city’s Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles.
A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco’s many hills. The computer’s ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model’s importance, and its future is uncertain.
New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama’s bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.
The word "distilled" as used in Para. 1 is closest in meaning to ______.

A． removed
B． represented
C． refined
D． purified

单项选择题

We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude.
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."
The author’s attitude toward examinations is ______.

A． detesting
B． approval
C． critical
D． indifferent

单项选择题

The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modem science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable.
Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and an enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the Work. Once their labours are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes.
The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day, Present flying mutes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey.
The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigours of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the later keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world.
Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few yearn ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavour.
What must the explorers be, even though they have modem equipment and techniques

A． Brave and tough.
B． Stubborn and arrogant.
C． Well-liked and humorous.
D． Stout and smart.

单项选择题

American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English.
But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft.
Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper.
Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.
The word "talking" (Para. 3) denotes ______.

A． modesty
B． personality
C． liveliness
D． informality

单项选择题

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us.
As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma.
Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection.
In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s hardest problems is something new.
It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.
One hundred years ago, people were ______.

A． not as healthy as today
B． as strong as today
C． not as poor as today
D． as hard as today

单项选择题

Eight thousand years ago, forests covered more than 23 million square miles, or about 40 percent of Earth’s land surface. Today, almost half of those forests have fallen to the ax, the chain saw, the matchstick, or the bulldozer.
A map unveiled in March by the Washington-based World Resources Institute not only shows the locations of former forests, but also assesses the condition of today’s forests worldwide. Institute researchers developed the map with the help of the World Conservation Monitoring Center, the World Wildlife Fund, and 90 forest experts from a variety of universities, government organizations, and environmental groups.
Only one-fifth of the remaining forests are still "frontier forests", defined as a relatively undisturbed natural forests large enough to support all of their native species. Frontier forests offer a number of benefits: They generate and maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, prevent flooding and soil erosion, and stabilize climate.
Many large areas that have traditionally been classified as forest land don’t qualify as "frontier" because of human influences such as fire suppression and a patchwork of logging. "There’s surprisingly little intact forest left," says research associate Dirk Bryant, the principal author of the report that accompanies the new map.
In the report, Bryant, Daniel Nielsen, and Laura Tangley divide the world into four groups: 76 countries that have lost all of their frontier forest; 11 nations that are "on the edge"; 28 countries with "not much time"; and only eight—including Canada, Russia, and Brazil—that still have a "great opportunity" to keep most of their original forest. The United States is among the nations said to be mining out of time: In the lower 48 states, says Bryant, "only 1 percent of the forest that was once there as frontier forest qualifies today."
Logging poses the biggest single threat to remaining frontier forests. "Our results suggest that 70 percent of frontier forests under threat are threatened by logging," says Bryant. The practice of cutting timber also creates roads that cause erosion and open the forest to hunting, mining, firewood gathering, and land clearing for farms.
What can protect frontier forests The researchers recommend combining preservation with sustainable land use practices such as tourism and selective timber extraction. It’s possible to restore frontiers," says Bryant, "but the cost and time required to do so would suggest that the smart approach is to husband the remaining frontier forest before it’s gone.
All the following organization are involved in the development of the map except ______.

A． the World Conservation Monitoring Centre
B． the United Nations Development Program
C． the World Wildlife Fund
D． the World Resources Institute

单项选择题

The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished.
Of course Belden’s prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter’s that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope.
Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver’s view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room."
A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park.
The San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city’s major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver.
San Diego’s model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city’s Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles.
A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco’s many hills. The computer’s ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model’s importance, and its future is uncertain.
New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama’s bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.
It can be inferred from the passage that models ______.

A． are only used for exhibition
B． can not be treated as work of art
C． always serve as a means of making money for architects
D． have helped architects and builders in various ways

单项选择题

The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modem science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable.
Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and an enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the Work. Once their labours are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes.
The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day, Present flying mutes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey.
The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigours of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the later keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world.
Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few yearn ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavour.
How large is the Antarctic Continent

A． As large as Asia.
B． As large as Europe.
C． As large as South America.
D． As large as Africa.

单项选择题

American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English.
But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft.
Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper.
Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.
To which of the following statements would Mc Whorter most likely agree

A． Logical thinking is not necessarily related to the way we talk.
B． Black English can be more expressive than standard English.
C． Non-standard varieties of human language are just as entertaining.
D． Of all the varieties, standard English can best convey complex ideas.

单项选择题

We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude.
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."
Under the current education system, the fate of students is decided by ______.

A． education
B． institutions
C． examinations
D． students themselves

单项选择题

Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us.
As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma.
Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection.
In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s hardest problems is something new.
It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.
Today, most people in America can live as long as ______.

A． 45
B． 75
C． 80
D． 90

单项选择题

The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modem science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable.
Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and an enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the Work. Once their labours are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes.
The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day, Present flying mutes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey.
The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigours of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the later keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world.
Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few yearn ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavour.
What is planned for the continent

A． Building dams along the coasts.
B． Setting up several summer resorts along the coasts.
C． Mapping the coast and the whole territory.
D． Setting up permanent bases on the coasts.

单项选择题

American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English.
But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft.
Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper.
Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.
The description of Russians’ love of memorizing poetry shows the author’s ______.

A． interest in their language
B． appreciation of their efforts
C． admiration for their memory
D． contempt for their old-fashionedness

单项选择题

Eight thousand years ago, forests covered more than 23 million square miles, or about 40 percent of Earth’s land surface. Today, almost half of those forests have fallen to the ax, the chain saw, the matchstick, or the bulldozer.
A map unveiled in March by the Washington-based World Resources Institute not only shows the locations of former forests, but also assesses the condition of today’s forests worldwide. Institute researchers developed the map with the help of the World Conservation Monitoring Center, the World Wildlife Fund, and 90 forest experts from a variety of universities, government organizations, and environmental groups.
Only one-fifth of the remaining forests are still "frontier forests", defined as a relatively undisturbed natural forests large enough to support all of their native species. Frontier forests offer a number of benefits: They generate and maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, prevent flooding and soil erosion, and stabilize climate.
Many large areas that have traditionally been classified as forest land don’t qualify as "frontier" because of human influences such as fire suppression and a patchwork of logging. "There’s surprisingly little intact forest left," says research associate Dirk Bryant, the principal author of the report that accompanies the new map.
In the report, Bryant, Daniel Nielsen, and Laura Tangley divide the world into four groups: 76 countries that have lost all of their frontier forest; 11 nations that are "on the edge"; 28 countries with "not much time"; and only eight—including Canada, Russia, and Brazil—that still have a "great opportunity" to keep most of their original forest. The United States is among the nations said to be mining out of time: In the lower 48 states, says Bryant, "only 1 percent of the forest that was once there as frontier forest qualifies today."
Logging poses the biggest single threat to remaining frontier forests. "Our results suggest that 70 percent of frontier forests under threat are threatened by logging," says Bryant. The practice of cutting timber also creates roads that cause erosion and open the forest to hunting, mining, firewood gathering, and land clearing for farms.
What can protect frontier forests The researchers recommend combining preservation with sustainable land use practices such as tourism and selective timber extraction. It’s possible to restore frontiers," says Bryant, "but the cost and time required to do so would suggest that the smart approach is to husband the remaining frontier forest before it’s gone.
It can be inferred from the passage that the world is divided into four groups in order to ______.

A． design a new map
B． show different approaches to the protection of forest
C． reveal locations of frontier forest in the world
D． put countries in different ranks

单项选择题

We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude.
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."
According to the author, the most important aspect of a good education system is ______.

A． to encourage students to read widely
B． to train students to think on their own
C． to teach students how to tackle exams
D． to master his fate

单项选择题

The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished.
Of course Belden’s prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter’s that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope.
Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver’s view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room."
A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park.
The San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city’s major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver.
San Diego’s model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city’s Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles.
A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco’s many hills. The computer’s ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model’s importance, and its future is uncertain.
New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama’s bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.
It can be most safely concluded form the passage that ______.

A． the computer will diminish the models importance
B． model making will become very profitable
C． advanced technology will greatly benefit model making
D． model makers will lose their ability to imitate due to the use of computers

单项选择题

American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English.
But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft.
Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper.
Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.
According to the last paragraph, "paper plates" is to "china" as ______.

A． "temporary" is to "permanent"
B． "radical" is to "conservative"
C． "functional" is to "artistic"
D． "humble" is to "noble"

单项选择题

The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modem science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable.
Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and an enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the Work. Once their labours are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes.
The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day, Present flying mutes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey.
The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigours of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the later keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world.
Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few yearn ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavour.
What kind of metals and minerals can we find in the Antarctic

A． Magnesite, coal and oil.
B． Copper, coal and uranium.
C． Silver, natural gas and uranium.
D． Aluminum, copper and natural gas.

单项选择题

We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person’s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person’s true ability and aptitude.
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don’t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."
Why does the author mention Court

A． To give an example.
B． For comparison.
C． It shows that teachers’ evolutions depend on the results of examinations.
D． It shows the results of court is more effective.

单项选择题

Eight thousand years ago, forests covered more than 23 million square miles, or about 40 percent of Earth’s land surface. Today, almost half of those forests have fallen to the ax, the chain saw, the matchstick, or the bulldozer.
A map unveiled in March by the Washington-based World Resources Institute not only shows the locations of former forests, but also assesses the condition of today’s forests worldwide. Institute researchers developed the map with the help of the World Conservation Monitoring Center, the World Wildlife Fund, and 90 forest experts from a variety of universities, government organizations, and environmental groups.
Only one-fifth of the remaining forests are still "frontier forests", defined as a relatively undisturbed natural forests large enough to support all of their native species. Frontier forests offer a number of benefits: They generate and maintain biodiversity, protect watersheds, prevent flooding and soil erosion, and stabilize climate.
Many large areas that have traditionally been classified as forest land don’t qualify as "frontier" because of human influences such as fire suppression and a patchwork of logging. "There’s surprisingly little intact forest left," says research associate Dirk Bryant, the principal author of the report that accompanies the new map.
In the report, Bryant, Daniel Nielsen, and Laura Tangley divide the world into four groups: 76 countries that have lost all of their frontier forest; 11 nations that are "on the edge"; 28 countries with "not much time"; and only eight—including Canada, Russia, and Brazil—that still have a "great opportunity" to keep most of their original forest. The United States is among the nations said to be mining out of time: In the lower 48 states, says Bryant, "only 1 percent of the forest that was once there as frontier forest qualifies today."
Logging poses the biggest single threat to remaining frontier forests. "Our results suggest that 70 percent of frontier forests under threat are threatened by logging," says Bryant. The practice of cutting timber also creates roads that cause erosion and open the forest to hunting, mining, firewood gathering, and land clearing for farms.
What can protect frontier forests The researchers recommend combining preservation with sustainable land use practices such as tourism and selective timber extraction. It’s possible to restore frontiers," says Bryant, "but the cost and time required to do so would suggest that the smart approach is to husband the remaining frontier forest before it’s gone.
Which of the following is the best way to restore frontier forests according to Bryant

A． To make people self-conscious of the environment.
B． To curb tourism.
C． To protect them now.
D． To use them for farmlands.

单项选择题

The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished.
Of course Belden’s prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter’s that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope.
Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver’s view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room."
A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park.
The San Francisco World’s Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city’s major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver.
San Diego’s model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city’s Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles.
A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco’s many hills. The computer’s ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model’s importance, and its future is uncertain.
New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama’s bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.
The sculptor Jeremy Lebensohn compares the model to ______.

A． the miniature
B． a Lilliputian world
C． propaganda
D． power

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