Due to advances in technologies many s...

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Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."The suggestion given to those puzzling readers is to protect ants from being killed under your foot.

答案： N[解析] 题干意为：给那些疑惑读者们的建议是保护蚂蚁，使其免遭被踩死。原文N段最后一句为It"s no surpris...

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Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.If the project had been planned and completed with the combination of government, authorities and communities, it would have been more likely to achieve Success.

答案： O[解析] 题干用虚拟语气表达，如果这个项目由政府、专家和社区共同计划和完成，它更有可能取得成功。原文O段大意，由于项目...

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Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."Genetic analysis shows ants constantly upgrade these fungi by developing new species and by exchanging species with neighbouring ant colonies.

答案： G[解析] 通过关键词neighbouring ant colonies定位于G段最后一句Even more impre...

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Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.Due to the unsuccessful results of a number of transport programs, African authorities reconsider to deal with the problems in remote areas.

答案： A[解析] 题干意为：因为大量交通项目不成功，非洲当局重新考虑来解决偏远地区的交通问题。原文A段第一句为The disa...

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Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.Not all of Mr Bezos" bets turned to be successful but Amazon continues to branch out into many own-brand products.

答案： N[解析] 此句意为：并不是贝佐斯先生的所有赌注都取得成功了，但是亚马逊却继续拓展了许多自主品牌。根据题干中的提示词br...

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Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.Even drone advocates worry that the sky is becoming accessible for all drones, especially illegal drone usage.

答案： K[解析] 此句意为：就连无人机的支持者也担心任何人都可以在天上飞无人机的状况，特别是一些无人机的非法使用。根据题干中的...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."When we refers to the clever animals, it occurs to us immediately are monkeys and apes.

答案： A[解析] 题干意为：当我们提到聪明的动物时，立刻会想到猴子和猿。根据关键词monkeys and apes定位于A段第...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".The hero in the Girlfriends feels life become unreliable again when her best friend told her that she is going to be married.

答案： C[解析] 此句意为：《女朋友》的女主角自听到她最好的朋友宣布了喜讯后感觉生活变得不可靠了。根据题干中的The hero...

填空题

Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.Frequent breakdown of buses and trucks hindered attempts to make the existing transport services more efficient.

答案： L[解析] 题干意为：公交和货车常出现故障有碍于提高现有交通服务的效率。原文L段第一句为The efforts to i...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."The ants cultivate a large number of different species of edible fungi which convert cellulose into a form which they can digest.

答案： F[解析] 根据关键词digest定位于F段第二、三句Ants can"t digest the cellulose i...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.The new FAA Modernization and Reform Act requires the federal government to safely speed up the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.

答案： L[解析] 此句意为：新的联邦航空管理局现代化改革法案要求联邦政府安全地加速使民用无人机融入世界上最繁忙的领空之列。根据...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".The common characteristic of Frances Ha, Tiny Furniture and Girls is the depiction of a young woman struggling to keep balance between career, love and friendship.

答案： E[解析] 此句意为：《弗兰西斯哈》、《渺小的家具》和《女孩子们》的共同特点就是对年轻女性如何协调事业、爱情和友情的刻画...

填空题

Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.It was to improve efficiency in attaining needed goods and services that was the purpose of newly raised concept.

答案： B[解析] 题干意为：提高效率以获得所需的物资和服务是新提出理念的目标。原文B段第二句为The objective wa...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."In one experiment, foraging teams were not able to use their sense of smell to find food.

答案： L[解析] 题干意为：在一次试验中，觅食队伍不能够用它们的嗅觉来找食物。根据关键词foraging team定位于L段。...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.Due to advances in technologies many small drones are relatively cheap and many people flying them as a hobby but some of them frequently violate the restrictions.

答案： J[解析] 此句意为：由于科技的进步，小型无人机的价格相对低，因此很多人把飞行无人机当作爱好。可是一些人常常违反规定。根...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".Virginia Woolf used to think there are many things that have being neglected between female friendships but this problem has been solved by so many narratives today.

答案： F[解析] 此句意为：弗吉尼亚·沃尔夫过去认为女性关系的很多方面都被忽视了，但是这个问题被今天的诸多叙述作品解决了。根据...

填空题

Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.Construction of footbridges, steps and handrails improved paths used for transport up and down hillsides.

答案： G[解析] 根据关键词footbridges和handrails定位于G段最后一句It made sense to im...

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Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."Cultural continuity merely exists in human beings while ants are simply depended on genes.

答案： C[解析] 题干意为：文化传承仅仅存在于人类之中，而蚂蚁只有靠基因。根据原文C段第一句However, in ants ...

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Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.In many eases FAA cannot find any data about those unregistered drones and their operators are hard to be identified.

答案： B[解析] 此句意为：在很多情况下，联邦航空管理局很难收集到这些没有注册的无人机的数据，并且很难找出它们的操控者。根据题...

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Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".If we take a close look at those minor works in the history of literature we can see many narratives of different genres about female friendships.

答案： M[解析] 此句意为：如果我们仔细地看文学史上的那些非主流的文学作品我们会发现许多有关女性之间友情的不同体裁的作品。根据...

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Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.Prior to the start of M1RTP the Makete district was almost inaccessible during the rainy season.

答案： C[解析] 题干意为：在项目开始前，Makete地区在雨季几乎无法通行。原文C段第一句为When the project...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."Ancient people have no opportunity to experience city life, which is a factor to encourage the development of intelligence.

答案： H[解析] 题干意为：古代人没有机会体验城市生活，而城市生活恰恰是孕育智力发展的一个因素。原文H段指出Whereas p...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also not free from air crashes.

答案： E[解析] 此句意为：那些有联邦航空管理局特许，并在它监视下飞行的民用无人机也难以避免空难。根据题干中的air cras...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".From the similar plot of Girlfriends , we can see that the female friendship is not a new problem and yet many new works on this issue have drawn large audience.

答案： L[解析] 此句意为：从《女朋友》中相似的情节我们可以看出女性之间友情已不是什么新鲜问题了，但是许多关注这一问题的作品还...

填空题

Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.The isolation of Makete for part of the year was no longer a problem once the roads had been improved.

答案： J[解析] 题干意为：一旦路况改善，Makete地区部分时候无法通行便不再是问题。原文J段第一句为The road im...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."Chemical signals used by ants are similar to the human beings" way of communication through listening and speaking.

答案： B[解析] 根据关键词chemical signals定位于B段，第二句为Such chemical communica...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.Producers of drones become impatient and worry that if the FAA do not act quickly foreign companies will steal the market.

答案： O[解析] 此句意为：无人机的制造商开始担心，如果联邦航空管理局还是动作那么慢，那么外国的公司会抢占无人机市场。根据题干...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".The depiction of a woman in relation to men only reveals a very small part of a woman"s actual life.

答案： O[解析] 此句意为：仅仅把女性置在与男性的关系中刻画女性只揭示了女性正式生活中的很小的一部分。根据题干中的depict...

填空题

Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.The survey concluded that one-fifth or 20% of the household transport requirement is outside the local area.

答案： D[解析] 题干意为：调查统计出，五分之一的家庭出行目的地是在本地区以外。根据数字关键词20%定位于D段，80% was...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."Some ants can find their way by making calculations based on distance and position.

答案： K[解析] 题干意为：一些蚂蚁通过判断距离和位置来找方向。原文K段指出they navigate by integrat...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.Some contractors see the potential to sell drones to private business and other government agencies and they projected a very profitable market of drones.

答案： M[解析] 此句意为：一些承包商看到了把无人机卖给私营经济和其他政府部门的巨大潜力，并设想了一个利益巨大的无人机市场。根...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".The Friendship explores the relationship between two women and their conflicting ideas about how to be a modern woman.

答案： K[解析] 此句意为：《友谊》探索了两位女性之间的关系，以及她们有关如何成为一名现代女性的相矛盾的意见。根据题干中的ho...

填空题

Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.Donkeys other than oxen were regarded as a tool means for those people living in northern part of the district.

答案： H[解析] 题干意为：住在北部地区的人们将驴当作一项交通工具，而不是牛。原文H段第三句为Oxen were not us...

填空题

Ant Intelligence
A. When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world of the ant has come in for considerable scrutiny lately, and the idea that ants demonstrate sparks of cognition has certainly not been rejected by those involved in these investigations.
B. Ants store food, repel attackers and use chemical signals to contact one another in case of attack. Such chemical communication can be compared to the human use of visual and auditory channels (as in religious chants, advertising image sand jingles, political slogans and martial music) to arouse and propagate moods and attitudes. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote, Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies to war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
C. However, in ants there is no cultural transmission—everything must be encoded in the genes—whereas in humans the opposite is true. Only basic instincts are carried in the genes of a newborn baby, other skills being learned from others in the community as the child grows up.
D. It may seem that this cultural continuity gives us a huge advantage over ants. They have never mastered fire nor progressed. Their fungus farming and aphid herding crafts are sophisticated when compared to the agricultural skills of humans five thousand years ago but have been totally overtaken by modern human agribusiness.
E. Or have they The fanning methods of ants are at least sustainable. They do not ruin environments or use enormous amounts of energy. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the crop farming of ants may be more sophisticated and adaptable than was thought.
F. Ants were farmers fifty million years before humans were. Ants can"t digest the cellulose in leaves—but some fungi can. The ants therefore cultivate these fungi in their nests, bringing them leaves to feed on, and then aphids (small insects of a different species from ants) use them as a source of food. Farmer ants secrete antibiotics to control other fungi that might act as "weeds", and spread waste to fertilise the crop.
G. It was once thought that the fungus that ants cultivate was a single type that they had propagated, essentially unchanged from the distant past. Not so. Ulrich Mueller of Maryland and his colleagues genetically screened 862 different types of fungi taken from ants" nests. These turned out to be highly diverse: it seems that ants are continually domesticating new species. Even more impressively, DNA analysis of the fungi suggests that the ants improve or modify the fungi by regularly swapping and sharing strains with neighbouring ant colonies.
H. Whereas prehistoric man had no exposure to urban lifestyles—the forcing house of intelligence—the evidence suggests that ants have lived in urban settings for close on a hundred million years, developing and maintaining underground cities of specialised chambers and tunnels.
I. When we survey Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles, we are amazed at what has been accomplished by humans. Yet Hoelldoblerand Wilson"s magnificent work for ant lovers, The Ants , describes a super colony of the ant Formica yessensis on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido. This "megalopolis" was reported to be composed of 360 million workers and a million queens living in 4,500 interconnected nests across a territory of 2.7 square kilometres.
J. Such enduring and intricately meshed levels of technical achievement outstrip by far anything achieved by our distant ancestors. We hail as masterpieces the cave paintings in southern France and elsewhere, dating back some 20,000 years. Ant societies existed in something like their present form more than seventy million years ago. Beside this, prehistoric man looks technologically primitive. Is this then some kind of intelligence, albeit of a different kind
K. Research conducted at Oxford, Sussex and Zurich Universities has shown that when desert ants return from a foraging trip, they navigate by integrating bearings and distances, which they continuously update in their heads. They combine the evidence of visual landmarks with a mental library of local directions, all within a framework which is consulted and updated. So ants can learn, too.
L. And in a twelve-year programme of work, Ryabko and Reznikova have found evidence that ants can transmit very complex messages. Scouts who had located food in amaze returned to mobilise their foraging teams. They engaged in contact sessions, at the end of which the scout was removed in order to observe what her team might do. Often the foragers proceeded to the exact spot in the maze where the food had been. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the foraging team using odour clues.
M. Discussion now centres on whether the route through the maze is communicated as a "left-right" sequence of turns or as a "compass bearing and distance" message.
N. During the course of this exhaustive study, Reznikova has grown so attached to her laboratory ants that she feels she knows them as individuals—even without the paint spots used to mark them. It"s no surprise that Edward Wilson, in his essay, "In the company of ants", advises readers who ask what to do with the ants in their kitchen to: "Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives."Ants have sophisticated methods of farming, including herding livestock and growing crops, which are in many ways similar to those used in human agriculture.

答案： D[解析] 根据关键词human agriculture定位于D段最后一句Their fungus farming an...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.Due to many drones flying in the sky, there are more and more dangerous occurrences in recent years.

答案： C[解析] 此句意为：由于越来越多的无人机在天上飞，近几年出现了越来越多的危险事件。根据题干可以定位到C段中的Hazar...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".Emmeline in To the North feels her world is tom apart when her roommate tells her that she is going to be married.

答案： B[解析] 此句意为：《到北方去》中的艾美琳在听到她的室友要结婚的消息后感到她的世界都塌下来了。根据题干中的Emmeli...

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Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project
A. The disappointing results of many conventional road transport projects in Africa led some experts to rethink the strategy by which rural transport problems were to be tackled at the beginning of the 1980s. A request for help in improving the availability of transport within the remote Makete District of south-western Tanzania presented the opportunity to try a new approach.
B. The concept of "integrated rural transport" was adopted in the task of examining the transport needs of the rural households in the district. The objective was to reduce the time and effort needed to obtain access to essential goods and services through an improved rural transport system. The underlying assumption was that the time saved would be used instead for activities that would improve the social and economic development of the communities. The Makete Integrated Rural Transport Project (MIRTP) started in 1985 with financial support from the Swiss Development Corporation and was co-ordinated with the help of the Tanzanian government.
C. When the project began, Makete District was virtually totally isolated during the rainy season. The regional road was in such bad shape that access to the main towns was impossible for about three months of the year. Road traffic was extremely rare within the district, and alternative means of transport were restricted to donkeys in the north of the district. People relied primarily on the paths, which were slippery and dangerous during the rains.
D. Before solutions could be proposed, the problems had to be understood. Little was known about the transport demands of the rural households, so Phase I, between December 1985 and December 1987, focused on research. The socio-economic survey of more than 400 households in the district indicated that a household in Makete spent, on average, seven hours a day on transporting themselves and their goods, a figure which seemed extreme but which has also been obtained in surveys in other rural areas in Africa. Interesting facts regarding transport were found: 95% was on foot; 80% was within the locality; and 70% was related to the collection of water and firewood and travelling to grinding mills.
E. Having determined the main transport needs, possible solutions were identified which might reduce the time and burden. During Phase Ⅱ, from January to February 1991, a number of approaches were implemented in an effort to improve mobility and access to transport.
F. An improvement of the road network was considered necessary to ensure the import and export of goods to the district. These improvements were carried out using methods that were heavily dependent on labour. In addition to the improvement of roads, these methods provided training in the operation of a mechanical workshop and bus and truck services. However, the difference from the conventional approach was that this time consideration was given to local transport needs outside the road network.
G. Most goods were transported along the paths that provide short-cuts up and down the hillsides, but the paths were a real safety risk and made the journey on foot even more arduous. It made sense to improve the paths by building steps, handrails and footbridges.
H. It was uncommon to find means of transport that were more efficient than walking but less technologically advanced than motor vehicles. The use of bicycles was constrained by their high cost and the lack of available spare parts. Oxen were not used at all but donkeys were used by a few households in the northern part of the district. MIRTP focused on what would be most appropriate for the inhabitants of Makete in terms of what was available, how much they could afford and what they were willing to accept. After careful consideration, the project chose the promotion of donkeys—a donkey costs less than a bicycle—and the introduction of a locally manufacturable wheelbarrow.
I. At the end of Phase Ⅱ, it was clear that the selected approaches to Makete"s transport problems had had different degrees of success. Phase Ⅲ, from March 1991 to March 1993, focused on the refinement and institutional isation of these activities.
J. The road improvements and accompanying maintenance system had helped make the district centre accessible throughout the year. Essential goods from outside the district had become more readily available at the market, and prices did not fluctuate as much as they had done before.
K. Paths and secondary roads were improved only at the request of communities who were willing to participate in construction and maintenance. However, the improved paths impressed the inhabitants, and requests for assistance greatly increased soon after only a few improvements had been completed.
L. The efforts to improve the efficiency of the existing transport services were not very successful because most of the motorised vehicles in the district broke down and there were no resources to repair them. Even the introduction of low-cost means of transport was difficult because of the general poverty of the district. The locally manufactured wheelbarrows were still too expensive for all but a few of the households. Modifications to the original design by local carpenters cut production time and costs. Other local carpenters have been trained in the new design so that they can respond to requests. Nevertheless, a locally produced wooden wheelbarrow which costs around 5000 Tanzanian shillings (less than $20) in Makete, and is about one quarter the cost of a metal wheelbarrow, is still too expensive for most people.
M. Donkeys, which were imported to the district, have become more common and contribute, in particular, to the transportation of crops and goods to market. Those who have bought donkeys are mainly from richer households but, with an increased supply through local breeding, donkeys should become more affordable. Meanwhile, local initiatives are promoting the renting out of the existing donkeys.
N. It should be noted, however, that a donkey, which at 20,000 Tanzanian shillings costs less than a bicycle, is still an investment equal to an average household"s income over half a year. This clearly illustrates the need for supplementary measures if one wants to assist the rural poor.
O. It would have been easy to criticise the MIRTP for using in the early phases a "top-down" approach, in which decisions were made by experts and officials before being handed down to communities, but it was necessary to start the process from the level of the governmental authorities of the district. It would have been difficult to respond to the requests of villagers and other rural inhabitants without the support and understanding of district authorities.The improvement of secondary roads and paths was done merely at the request of local people who were willing to lend a hand.

答案： K[解析] 题干意为：只有愿意帮忙的当地人民要求时，二级公路和道路才会得到改善。原文K段第一句为Paths and se...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.In the many cases reported over the last two years, there are many drones flying very close to airports or passenger planes which is very dangerous.

答案： D[解析] 此句意为：在过去两年报道的众多案例里，许多无人机飞得离飞机场和客机非常近，这种情况非常危险。根据题干中的fl...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".Despite the fact that both Susan and Frances are strong characters, they have one thing in common that is their relationship with their best friend and roommate.

答案： D[解析] 此句意为：尽管事实上苏珊和弗兰西斯都是强硬的人物，但是有一点二人相同，那就是她们是最好朋友兼室友的关系。根据...

填空题

Drone—Problem and Chances
A. In the first incident on May 29, the pilot of a commercial airliner descending toward LaGuardia Airport saw what appeared to be a black drone (无人驾驶飞机) with a 10 to 15-foot wingspan about 5,500 feet above Lower Manhattan, according to a previously undisclosed report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. In the second, two airliners separately approaching Los Angeles International Airport soared past what they described as a drone or remote-controlled aircraft the size of a trash can at an altitude of 6,300 feet, FAA records show.
B. The records do not name the airlines involved or say how close the aircraft came to the drones when they flew past. FAA officials said their inspectors could not track down the unregistered drones or determine who was flying them. "In many cases, radar data is not available and the operators cannot be identified," the agency said in a statement.
C. The close calls were the latest in a rash of dangerous encounters between civilian airplanes and drones flown in contravention of FAA rules intended to safeguard U.S. airspace. Hazardous occurrences are becoming more frequent as more drones—legal and illegal—take to the skies, according to a year-long investigation by The Washington Post.
D. In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights very close to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
E. Civilian drones flown with the FAA"s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.
F. The problem is worsening just as the federal government is preparing to lift barriers that could flood the country"s already congested skies with thousands of remotely controlled aircraft. Under a law passed two years ago, Congress ordered the FAA to issue rules legalizing drones for commercial purposes by September 2015—the first step in a new era of aviation that will eventually allow drones of all sizes to fly freely in the national airspace, sharing the same airports as regular planes.
G. Congress imposed dual orders on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can use their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperilled.
H. The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.
I. The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can. "I completely understand that there is significant potential, there"s significant benefit, there"s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely," Michael P. Huerta, the FAA"s administrator, said in an interview. "Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky," Huerta added. "But they"re not really worried a lot about whether it"s safe. It"s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them."
J. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being violated and ignored. On May 5, a quad-copter—a drone with four rotors—crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis"s Metropolitan Square building, the city"s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two Midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a man. In August, a small drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.
K. Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all. "We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage," Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. "If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years."
L. In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to "safely accelerate" the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.
M. At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm"s way. Defence contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.
N. Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis. The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.
O. Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. "We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology," Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry"s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.The FAA has a difficult time to reconcile the order imposed by the Congress because it must draft the rules quickly and at the same time it has to ensure the safety standards.

答案： G[解析] 此句意为：联邦航空管理局正为协调国会的命令而头痛。因为，一方面要尽快制定规章制度，另一方面还要确保安全标准。...

填空题

Female Relationships
A. Several new books and films explore the complex relationships between women. Lucy Scholes explains why an issue once sidelined has come into the mainstream.
B. Emmeline and Cecilia, the protagonists of Elizabeth Bowen"s 1932 novel To the North happily share a house in London until Emmeline"s world is torn apart—when Cecilia announces she"s engaged to be married. "Timber by timber, Oudenarde Road fell to bits," Emmeline thinks.
C. Forty years on and across the Atlantic, Susan, the hero of Claudia Weill"s 1978 film Girlfriends finds herself standing on the same shifting sands in New York when her best friend and roommate Anne makes a similar announcement. Even for those who haven"t seen this relatively obscure film, the plot will move anyone who watched Noah Baumbach"s Frances Ha (2012), which is also about a woman caught off balance when she"s deserted by her best friend.
D. Although both are very much strong individuals—the aspiring photographer Susan in Girlfriends , and the aspiring dancer Frances in Frances Ha —same to these women"s identities is their relationship with their best friend and roommate. "We"re the same person, with different hair," Frances says of her bosom buddy Sophie at the beginning of the film.
E. What Frances Ha and Lena Dunham"s film Tiny Furniture (2010) and her hit TV series Girls have in common are their truthful portrayals of what it"s like to be a young woman struggling to balance career, love life and friendships. Despite the success of the likes of Dunham and Baumbach"s works, there"s yet to be a neat female-to-female equivalent, perhaps precisely because of the complexity involved in female friendships. They can be as formative and significant as romantic relationships: as mutually dependent, as supportive, but also as traumatic and toxic when they go wrong.
F. As Virginia Woolf noted in her essay "A Room of One"s Own", capturing these intricacies has traditionally presented a problem: "All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted." Woolf would surely be pleased by the excess of complex female friendship-focused narratives that exist today.
G. The most recent addition to the ever-growing female friendship fiction is Emily Gould"s first novel, Friendship , the story of two 30-year-old best friends, Bev Tunney and Amy Schein, and their attempts to maintain their relationship as each of them is storm-tossed by life in New York. Despite their closeness, they soon find their differing life choices put a strain on their friendship; growing up, they learn, sometimes means growing apart.
H. Friendship is Gould"s first novel but she"s made a career out of writing on a variety of popular blogs, the first of which led to a job at the New York-based gossip site Gawker. The New York Times , re-visiting Gould on the eve of the publication of Friendship , pointed out, "a case could be made that Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure anticipated a wave of confessional writing that paved the way for Girls ".
I. These more realistic fictions might also be considered the fictional representatives of the fourth wave feminism advocated by the likes of Caitlin Moran, the British newspaper columnist, who, since the publication of her book How to Be a Woman , has become something of model for the cause, along with Dunham. "Do you believe that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs" the writer and actress asked in an interview last year, complaining about women who claim not to be feminists. "Do you believe that women should be allowed to leave the house Do you think that women and men both deserve equal rights Great, then you"re a feminist."
J. So does the current popularity of female friendship-focused culture simply follow the fairly rich, although often overlooked, tradition of female friendships in literature and film Or, does it specifically reflect this new wave of feminism Carol Dyhouse, in her study " Girl Trouble: Panic and Protest in the History of Young Women ", says this feminism, and Moran"s book in particular, is characterised by "common sense"; for example, about how we reconcile our career ambitions with having a family without, as Amy puts it in Friendship , "children and domesticity and making it seem like they are the goals of women"s lives, the only legitimate goals women"s lives can have"
K. In Friendship the relationship between the two central characters allows for the working through of conflicting ideas about how best to be a modern woman. How, for example, does a woman like Amy who feels so strongly about the bonds of motherhood, learn to respect and appreciate the choice Bev makes without looking down on her
L. The fact that Girlfriends , despite being nearly 40 years old, sets up a similar plot between its two central characters reminds us that these problems aren"t as new as we might think. The film was recently screened at the British Film Institute in London to packed audiences who wanted to see "the original Frances Ha/Girls". Similarly, Rona Jaffe"s novel of career girls in 1950s New York, The Best of Everything , was republished and found a newly appreciative audience. There is clearly a huge appetite for these stories right now: issues that were once sidelined have now become main stream.
M. Look between the cracks, and there"s a healthy tradition of female friendship narratives that crosses literary genres: from Edna O"Brien"s The Country Girls (1960); through Mary McCarthy"s The Group (1963); Shirley Conran"s Lace (1982); and most recently, British novelist Emma Jane Unsworth"s novel Animals (2014).
N. Although in many ways examples like Girlfriends and The Best of Everything are very much products of the period they were filmed or written in, there"s something refreshingly contemporary in their focus on female friendships. These examples, from Bowen through to Gould, show that female friendships play just as significant roles in women"s lives today as they always have, it"s just taken a while for them to be seen and taken seriously, and this new-found emphasis is filtering down through all genres of film, literature and TV.
O. And about time too, for as Woolf shrewdly summarised it, the depiction of a woman seen only in relation to men, "how small a part of a woman"s life is that".Many of Ms. Gould"s realistic brand of self-exposure works have made a big influence on confessional works which prepared the appearance of Girls .

答案： H[解析] 此句意为：古德小姐的诸自我剖析的现实主义作品对忏悔作品产生了很大影响，而后者为《女孩子们》的出现做了准备。根...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.During the design of the original Kindle, Mr Bezos wanted the device to be simple and easy for users and it turned out to be something like a portable bookshop.

答案： M[解析] 此句意为：在设计最初的“kindle”时，贝佐斯希望使用它的人用起来简单容易。最终它变成了一个便携式书店。根...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.Mr Bezos said that they are willing to invest and prepared to be misunderstood for a very long time.

答案： G[解析] 此句意为：贝佐斯先生说他们愿意去投资，而且准备好了长期被人误解。根据题干中的willing to inves...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.The passion for invention has never deserted Mr Bezos, and this also promoted him to leave his old job and set up Amazon.

答案： J[解析] 此句意为：对于发明创造的热情一直没有变，这也促使了他放弃了旧工作，从而创立了亚马逊。根据题干中的passio...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.It is very hard to be the leader in the changing world but such challenges of reaching for distant horizons has motivated Amazon"s boss.

答案： O[解析] 此句意为：在这个风云变幻的世界里保持领先的地位是非常困难的，但是探寻未知世界的挑战一直激励着亚马逊的老板。根...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.The reason that makes Jeff Bezos successful is that he always takes long-term views as priority.

答案： A[解析] 此句意为：杰夫·贝佐斯成功的原因是他永远把长远目光放在第一位。根据题干中的take long-term vi...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.Mr Bezos often makes his investors angry by giving up short-term profits because he thinks bets on new technologies can bring larger profits in the future.

答案： C[解析] 此句意为：贝佐斯先生常常因为放弃短期利益而惹怒了他的投资商。原因是他认为在新科技上投资可以在未来带来更多的利...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.Though Mr Bezos keep his next big bet as a secret, there are many rumours and people predict that he will launch a smart phone very soon.

答案： L[解析] 此句意为：尽管贝佐斯先生对他下一个大赌注只字不提，但是有传言称他不久就会发行一部智能手机。根据题干中的lau...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.There is a huge clock which can tell the time for the next 10,000 years in a remote mountain and Jeff Bezos describes this great deed of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".

答案： B[解析] 此句意为：在偏远的深山里有一个可以预测未来一万年的巨钟，贝佐斯称这一工程上的壮举为“长远考虑问题的象征”。根...

填空题

Jeff Bezos
Taking the long view
A. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.
B. Inside a remote mountain in Texas, a huge clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this "10,000-year clock", Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as "an icon for long-term thinking".
C. That description applies just as much to Mr Bezos himself. The founder and chief executive of Amazon has often ruffled investors" feathers by sacrificing short-term profits to make big bets on new technologies that, he insists, will produce richer returns for the company"s shareholders in future.
D. Some of these gambles have paid off handsomely. They have also enhanced Mr Bezos"s reputation as a technological seer (先知). "In the last few years there has been a re-acceleration of the rate of change in technology," he says. His impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry"s leading visionary.
E. Mr Bezos"s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon"s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories.
F. Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer.
G. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. "A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent," Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon"s annual meeting last year. "And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time."
The view from the garage
H. Amazon"s culture has been deeply influenced by Mr Bezos"s own experiences. A computer-science graduate from Princeton, he returned to his alma mater last year to give a speech to students that provided some fascinating insights into his psychology as an entrepreneur.
I. He explained that he had been a "garage inventor" from a young age. His creations included a solar cooker made out of an umbrella and tin foil, which did not work very well, and an automatic gate-closer made out of cement-filled tyres.
J. That passion for invention has not deserted Mr Bezos, who last year filed a patent (专业)for a system of tiny airbags that can be incorporated into smartphones, to prevent them from being damaged if dropped. Even so, in the 1990s he hesitated to leave a good job in the world of finance to set up Amazon after a colleague he respected advised him against it. But Mr Bezos applied what he calls a "regret minimisation framework", imagining whether, as an 80-year-old looking back, he would regret the decision not to strike out on his own. He concluded that he would, and with encouragement from his wife he took the plunge as an entrepreneur. They moved from New York to Seattle and he founded the company, in time-honoured fashion for American technology start-ups, in his garage.
K. This may explain why Mr Bezos is so keen to ensure that Amazon preserves its own appetite for risk-taking. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers" desire to conform and play it safe. "You get social cohesion at the expense of truth," he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. "It"s like exercising muscles," he adds. "Either you use them or you lose them."
L. Mr Bezos doesn"t tell where he might place more big bets in future, but there have been persistent rumours that Amazon might launch a smartphone, possibly as soon as this year. With Amazon"s video-streaming and music services, Mr Bezos clearly has Netflix and Apple in his sights. And in recent weeks there has been speculation that Amazon is toying with the idea of opening a bricks-and-mortar shop to promote sales of the Kindle, by letting customers try it in person. The success of Apple"s hugely profitable chain or" retail stores shows that even in the era of e-commerce, there are some things people prefer to buy the old-fashioned way.
Keeping it simple
M. During the design of the original Kindle, for example, Mr Bezos insisted that the e-reader had to work without needing to be plugged into a PC. That meant giving it wireless connectivity. But he also wanted it to work everywhere, not just in Wi-Fi hotspots, and without the need for a monthly contract. This prompted the Kindle team to devise a new business model, striking deals with mobile-phone operators to allow Kindle users to download e-books without having to pay network fees. The ability to download books anywhere does not simply make life easier for users; it also encourages them to buy more books. The Kindle is an e-reader, but it is also a portable bookshop.
N. Not all of his bets succeed. Who remembers Amazon Auctions, for example, or Amapedia, Amazon"s attempt to build a Wikipedia-like user-generated product directory Even more numerous are the bets that Mr Bezos has placed on new initiatives that have yet to prove their worth. Amazon has branched out into own-brand products, has set up specialist e-commerce sites and is dabbling in movie making and television production.
O. Staying on top in the fast-changing world of technology is hard, too. Mr Bezos is bound to be the target of more criticism as his company"s huge investments in new areas continue to put a dent in its bottom line. His next move could be into smart phones or a video-streaming service that competes with Netflix, but it is just as likely to be something entirely unexpected. By being unusually patient, he hopes to create businesses that rivals will find harder to assail. As the investments in both Blue Origin and the 10,000-year clock show, it is the challenge of reaching for distant horizons that really makes Amazon"s boss tick.Some of Mr Bezos" big bets have made huge profits and these also enhanced his reputation as a great predictor in technologies.

答案： D[解析] 此句意为：贝佐斯先生的一些大的赌注产生了巨大的经济回报，这也为他赢得了伟大的科技预言家的美名。根据题干中的e...

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