What can we learn about Scythians fr...

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Decked in a magnificent fur mantle and gilded wooden headdress, a nomad—probably a fierce warrior—was buried more than 2200 years ago in the icy highlands of Mongolia. This week, a team of archaeologists, led by Hermann Parzinger, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, announced that they had found his partially mummified remains. The finding will reveal more about the culture and conditions that preserved the body. It is urgent work, observers say, because a warmer environment could destroy specimens like this.
In 2004, the 30-member team from Germany, Russia, and Mongolia surveyed more than a dozen stone-covered burial mounds in northwestern Mongolia. Last year, they returned to the 2600-meter-high plateau in the Altai region, a remote mountain range that borders Russia, China, and Mongolia, with electromagnetic sensors, temperature probes, and other instruments to look for ice layers that might indicate intact burials.
Parzinger has made spectacular finds before. In 2001, he pulled nearly 20 kilograms of artfully worked jewelry out of a similar grave mound in the Russian republic of Tuva. Archaeologists say the Altai plateaus are the burial grounds of the Pazyryk, members of a larger Scythian culture that occupied Central Asia as early as the 9th century B. C. and struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians.
Scythians used a distinctive type of embalming, says Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Oregon, Eugene. "They removed the innards and filled the body with sweet-smelling grasses." High-status individuals were dressed, surrounded by goods, and buried under earth and stone mounds, or kurgans.
Shortly after burial, water sometimes seeped through the stones and froze, forming ice lenses insulated by the stone mounds above and permafrost underneath. The body found this summer was surrounded by slain horses and dressed in felt boots. Fantastical animal tattoos were visible on the man’s skin. "Instead of archaeology, the material culture is so well preserved it’s almost a kind of ethnography," Parzinger says.
Parzinger’s success comes as the Altai’s permafrost is melting fast. "The warming up of the general climate is a danger for these kurgans," Parzinger says. As rising temperatures threaten to bring the mummies out of deep freeze, the Scythian royalty may face decay and disintegration for the first time in millennia.
Questions: What did Hermann Parzinger find What is the significance of this discovery

答案： A team of archaeologists led by Hermann Parzinger found the ...

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To all the world, nothing seems more completely American than the cowboy. Yet the truth is that the cowboy’s horse, clothes, and trade are all part of the rich heritage contributed by Mexico to her northern neighbor.
Even the word cowboy is a translation of the Mexican term vaquero. The word cowboy was unknown to the American settlers who first headed west to Texas in the 1820’s. These people thought of themselves as farmers. In fact, the only cattle most of them brought were a cow or two for milk and a yoke of oxen to draw their plows. It was their Mexican neighbors—the Tejanos whose herds had roamed the open ranges since the early 1700’s—who introduced them to cattle raising, taught them to use the lariat, the branding iron, and the horned saddle, and showed them how to break the wild mustangs and round up the free-ranging longhorns. So well did the new Texans take to Tejano ways that soon you spoke fighin’ words if you referred to them as anything as ordinary as mere "farmers." They had been changed into saddle-proud ranchers.
Later, as the cattle industry spread all over the West, its Mexican origins were largely forgotten. But even today the language of the rangeland clearly shows how great were the cowboy’s borrowings. Corral, pinto, palomino, mesquite, bronco, rodeo, mesa, canyon, arroyo, loco, plaza, fiesta, pronto—by the hundreds Mexican words slipped into English with only a change in accent. Borrowed "by ear," other words underwent weird alterations. From sabe came savvy, jàquima turned into hackamore, chaparajos was shortened to chaps, estampida was converted into stampede, vamos emerged as vamoose, and the juzgado gave birth to hoosegow. Even the famed ten-gallon hat got its name not from some Texan’s tall tale but from a Mexican song about a gaily decorated hat, or sombrero galoneado.
In countless other ways the people of the United States are indebted to the Mexicans who once lived in the old Southwest. There were only seventy-five thousand of them when Mexico ceded the region to the United States, and these were scattered from the Gulf Coast in the east to the shores of the Pacific in the west. They had lived in the borderlands since 1598, more than twenty years before the Pilgrims sailed for the New World. In the course of more than 250 years they had left their mark on the land. Many of the western states in the United States still bear the lovely lyrical names the Mexican settlers first wrote upon their maps. So do countless rivers and mountains, and thousands of cities and towns—from Corpus Christi in Texas to all the Sans and Santas along the Pacific shore.
Through trial and error, the rugged Mexicans had learned to survive and prosper in the dry, haft-desert land, When English-speaking people poured into the region, the Spanish-speaking people shared their knowledge with the new settlers, making things much easier for them. Settlers in other parts of the United States did not have this advantage.
In all the rest of the country, pioneers had to break their own trails. But those who headed west in gold rush days could follow the Santa Fe Trail from the Missouri to the Rockies. In the old settlements of New Mexico, the wagon trains could rest their oxen and replenish their supplies before moving on down the Old Spanish Trail on the Tucson-Yuma route.
In the 1850’s, army engineers were sent west to survey the railroad routes that would link East with West. The northern parties had to find their own way through vast stretches of little-explored territory, but in the Southwest the surveyors merely remapped the trails that had been packed hard over the years by Mexican mule trains. Two major railroads—the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe—and many main highways were built along the routes made by the early Spanish settlers when they first spread out into the new land.
Early migrants from the East thought of the Southwest as a great desert, a land that had to be passed through, but was hardly to be settled upon. However, they changed their minds when they saw the rich green fields along the Rio Grande, fields that had been irrigated since the early 1600’s. In time the newcomers were able to turn even desert into some of the most fertile farmland in all the nation.
Water laws gave the new settlers some trouble at first. They tried to use a system under which the landowners along the banks of a stream controlled its waters. This system worked well in the water-rich East, but in the dry lands of the Southwest it gave the lucky more water than they needed, while others on higher ground got none at all. In time all the western states had to switch over to the Mexican way—sharing water rights among all the owners whose land could be irrigated.
Western sheep farmers, too, owe a great debt to their forerunners. For the small flocks that the early Mexican settlers had brought to Santa Fe had multiplied into large herds by the time the United States took over the Southwest. New Mexico supplied sheep to ranges all over the country. With the sheep went pastores, who still form a large percentage of the herdsmen in North America. Until the recent introduction of sheep clipping machines, sheepshearing was to a large extent a Mexican skill for which sheep ranchers in the States would bid eagerly.
Mexicans have played an important part not only in cattle and sheep farming, but in mining as well. It was a Mexican who discovered the great Santa Rita copper deposit in New Mexico. Today, miners of Mexican descent still form a major part of the work force in most of the copper mines of the Southwest. In industry, farming, and countless other fields, the United States owes a great deal to her neighbor.
Questions: What is the purpose of this article, to demonstrate what Mexicans gave to the United States or how languages change and grow Why

答案： The purpose of the article is to demonstrate what Mexicans g...

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Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.
The first of these asserts that residents of early modem England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover." Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in America history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably.
Bailyn’s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730’s, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans.
Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of (what of 1: what is the situation with respect to 2: what importance can be assigned to) seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture.
Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.
Questions: What is the passage primarily concerned with

答案： The passage is mainly concerned with a reinterpretation of e...

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Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as broad as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co, the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels. When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight in 1903, they made the world a forever smaller place. I’ve been to Kitty Hawk, N.C., and seen where the brothers imagined the future, and then literally flew across its high frontier. It was an inspiration to be there, and to soak up the amazing perseverance and creativity of these two pioneers.
The Wright brothers had been fascinated by the idea of flight from an early age. In 1878 their father, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, gave them a flying toy made of cork and bamboo. It had a paper body and was powered by rubber bands. The young boys soon broke the fragile toy, but the memory of its faltering flight across their living room stayed with them. By the mid-1890s Wilbur was reading every book and paper he could find on the still earthbound science of human flight. And four years before they made history at Kitty Hawk, the brothers built their first, scaled-down flying machine—a pilotless "kite" with a 5-ft. wingspan, and made of wood, wire and cloth. Based on that experiment, Wilbur became convinced that he could build an aircraft that would be "capable of sustaining a man."
When published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliable, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft as it nosed up and down. They fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back to control its tendency to yaw from side to side. They devised a pulley system that warped the shape of the wings in midflight to turn the plane and to stop it from rolling laterally in air. Recognizing that a propeller isn’t like a ship’s screw, but becomes, in effect, a rotating wing, they used the data from their wind-tunnel experiments to design the first effective airplane props—a pair of 8-ft, propellers, carved out of laminated spruce, that turned in opposite directions to offset the twisting effect on the machine’s structure. And when they discovered that a lightweight gas-powered engine did not exist, they decided to design and build their own. It produced 12 horsepower and weighed only 152 lbs.
The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by these two American bicycle mechanics to create it. The unmanned gliders spawned by their first efforts flew erratically and were at the mercy of any strong gust of wind. But with help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today. And with guidance from this scientific study, they developed the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over 600 lbs.
On Dec. 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer lifted off shakily from Kitty Hawk and flew 120 ft. —little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting it to new heights of freedom and giving mankind access to places it had never before dreamed of reaching. Although the Wright brothers’ feat was to transform life in the 20th century, the next day only four newspapers in the U.S. carried news of their achievement—news that was widely dismissed as exaggerated.
The Wright brothers gave us a tool, but it was up to individuals and nations to put it to use, and use it we have. The airplane revolutionized both peace and war. It brought families together: once, when a child or other close relatives left the old country for America, family and friends mourned for someone they would never see again. Today, the grandchild of that immigrant can return again and again across a vast ocean in just half a turn of the clock. But the airplane also helped tear families apart, by making international warfare an effortless reality.
Now, on the eve of another century, who knows where the next Wright brothers will be found, in what grade of school they’re studying, or in what garage they’re inventing the next Flyer of the information age. Our mission is to make sure that wherever they are, they have the chance to run their own course, to persevere and follow their own inspiration. We have to understand that engineering breakthroughs are not just mechanical or scientific—they are liberating forces that can continually improve people’s lives. Who would have thought, as the 20th century opened, that one of its greatest contributions would come from two obscure, fresh-faced young Americans who pursued the utmost bounds of human thought and gave us all, for the first time, the power literally to sail beyond the sunset.
The 20th century has been the American Century in large part because of great inventors such as the Wright brothers. May we follow their flight paths and blaze our own in the 21st century.
Questions: What great difficulties did the Wright Brothers overcome while building an aircraft that would be "capable of sustaining a man"

答案： 1)The published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliabl...

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Joe Harberg became an energy-efficiency guru because he didn’t know the first thing about energy efficiency. In 2003 he was constructing a new home in Dallas and wanted to work with his builder to make the place as environmentally friendly as possible. But neither Harberg nor his designer had any training in how to turn an ordinary house green, and they found few resources to help them. "It was so frustrating," says Harberg, 46, a Dallas-based entrepreneur.
Relying principally on the Internet, Harberg—who previously had worked as a marketing expert and real estate developer—did manage to build an energy-efficient home. He boasts that his electricity bills are regularly 50% less than those of similar homes in his neighborhood, and the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity. Lots of people worry about global warming, not to mention the soaring costs of powering a home, but they don’t know what to do about it. Working with his brother-in-law Josh Stern, Harberg helped launch what would become Current Energy, in 2005, to provide the needed expertise. "We aspire to be the ones who put it all together for you," Harberg says.
Today Current Energy operates what is probably the first dedicated energy-efficiency retail store in the U. S., a hip space in Dallas’ tony Highland Park where shoppers can buy ultraefficient air conditioners, tankless water heaters and even electric votive candles. But while the store itself is green cool—reminiscent of the Apple retail shops that Harberg helped roll out in his previous career—the real value in Current Energy isn’t in its gadgets but in the services it offers. "It’s an art to figure out how to save money at home," Harberg says. "We do the work."
Homeowners who come to Current Energy can order an energy audit—a socket-to-faucet analysis of how to eliminate energy and water waste. After receiving the report, customers can follow as many of the recommendations as they wish, with Current Energy employees involved in the installation work—down to changing the lightbulbs. Joseph VanBlargan, a writer, secured an assessment for his Dallas home and estimates that the upgrades save him about 30% on his monthly energy bill. "I could have done it on my own, but there would have been bits and parts I would have missed," he says.
Joe Green’s Shopping List.
At its retail location and online, Current Energy sells a wide range of energy-efficiency gadgets.:
1) Digital PowerCost Monitor provides real-time data on your energy consumption, $185
2) Magic Globe, a solar-powered light, $50
3) Solio Solar Charger is a way to power all those electronic devices with the sun, $99
4) Solar Backpack lets you carry your laptop—and charge it for free, $140
5) Kill A watt Electricity Meter monitors the power use and cost of any appliance, $40
Greenies who live outside Dallas will soon be able to get an energy assessment from currentenergy, com and the company will work with licensed auditors in your town to carry out the improvements.
What Current Energy does isn’t as easy as it looks. Maximizing the efficiency in your home means more than just chucking your incandescent lightbulbs. You might improve your attic insulation to prevent the loss of heat in the winter, but go overboard, and you could end up choking on indoor air pollution. Just as a house is more than four walls and a door, energy efficiency should be holistic, with insulation, appliances, lighting and clean electricity all working together.
That’s a message the tireless Harberg—who could probably power Texas Stadium if you plugged him into the grid—spreads with zeal. He hosts a weekly radio call-in show and was recently on the TV show Good Morning Texas touting the benefits of an indoor air-quality monitor. "You’re saving people money and saving the earth at the same time," he says excitedly. As business plans go, that’s an awfully good one.
Questions: Who is Joe Harberg How did he start his energy-efficiency business

答案： He is a Dallas-based entrepreneur, who used to be a marketin...

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Decked in a magnificent fur mantle and gilded wooden headdress, a nomad—probably a fierce warrior—was buried more than 2200 years ago in the icy highlands of Mongolia. This week, a team of archaeologists, led by Hermann Parzinger, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, announced that they had found his partially mummified remains. The finding will reveal more about the culture and conditions that preserved the body. It is urgent work, observers say, because a warmer environment could destroy specimens like this.
In 2004, the 30-member team from Germany, Russia, and Mongolia surveyed more than a dozen stone-covered burial mounds in northwestern Mongolia. Last year, they returned to the 2600-meter-high plateau in the Altai region, a remote mountain range that borders Russia, China, and Mongolia, with electromagnetic sensors, temperature probes, and other instruments to look for ice layers that might indicate intact burials.
Parzinger has made spectacular finds before. In 2001, he pulled nearly 20 kilograms of artfully worked jewelry out of a similar grave mound in the Russian republic of Tuva. Archaeologists say the Altai plateaus are the burial grounds of the Pazyryk, members of a larger Scythian culture that occupied Central Asia as early as the 9th century B. C. and struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians.
Scythians used a distinctive type of embalming, says Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Oregon, Eugene. "They removed the innards and filled the body with sweet-smelling grasses." High-status individuals were dressed, surrounded by goods, and buried under earth and stone mounds, or kurgans.
Shortly after burial, water sometimes seeped through the stones and froze, forming ice lenses insulated by the stone mounds above and permafrost underneath. The body found this summer was surrounded by slain horses and dressed in felt boots. Fantastical animal tattoos were visible on the man’s skin. "Instead of archaeology, the material culture is so well preserved it’s almost a kind of ethnography," Parzinger says.
Parzinger’s success comes as the Altai’s permafrost is melting fast. "The warming up of the general climate is a danger for these kurgans," Parzinger says. As rising temperatures threaten to bring the mummies out of deep freeze, the Scythian royalty may face decay and disintegration for the first time in millennia.
Questions: What can we learn about Scythians from Paragraph 3

答案： From Paragraph 3, we can know that Central Asia was under th...

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To all the world, nothing seems more completely American than the cowboy. Yet the truth is that the cowboy’s horse, clothes, and trade are all part of the rich heritage contributed by Mexico to her northern neighbor.
Even the word cowboy is a translation of the Mexican term vaquero. The word cowboy was unknown to the American settlers who first headed west to Texas in the 1820’s. These people thought of themselves as farmers. In fact, the only cattle most of them brought were a cow or two for milk and a yoke of oxen to draw their plows. It was their Mexican neighbors—the Tejanos whose herds had roamed the open ranges since the early 1700’s—who introduced them to cattle raising, taught them to use the lariat, the branding iron, and the horned saddle, and showed them how to break the wild mustangs and round up the free-ranging longhorns. So well did the new Texans take to Tejano ways that soon you spoke fighin’ words if you referred to them as anything as ordinary as mere "farmers." They had been changed into saddle-proud ranchers.
Later, as the cattle industry spread all over the West, its Mexican origins were largely forgotten. But even today the language of the rangeland clearly shows how great were the cowboy’s borrowings. Corral, pinto, palomino, mesquite, bronco, rodeo, mesa, canyon, arroyo, loco, plaza, fiesta, pronto—by the hundreds Mexican words slipped into English with only a change in accent. Borrowed "by ear," other words underwent weird alterations. From sabe came savvy, jàquima turned into hackamore, chaparajos was shortened to chaps, estampida was converted into stampede, vamos emerged as vamoose, and the juzgado gave birth to hoosegow. Even the famed ten-gallon hat got its name not from some Texan’s tall tale but from a Mexican song about a gaily decorated hat, or sombrero galoneado.
In countless other ways the people of the United States are indebted to the Mexicans who once lived in the old Southwest. There were only seventy-five thousand of them when Mexico ceded the region to the United States, and these were scattered from the Gulf Coast in the east to the shores of the Pacific in the west. They had lived in the borderlands since 1598, more than twenty years before the Pilgrims sailed for the New World. In the course of more than 250 years they had left their mark on the land. Many of the western states in the United States still bear the lovely lyrical names the Mexican settlers first wrote upon their maps. So do countless rivers and mountains, and thousands of cities and towns—from Corpus Christi in Texas to all the Sans and Santas along the Pacific shore.
Through trial and error, the rugged Mexicans had learned to survive and prosper in the dry, haft-desert land, When English-speaking people poured into the region, the Spanish-speaking people shared their knowledge with the new settlers, making things much easier for them. Settlers in other parts of the United States did not have this advantage.
In all the rest of the country, pioneers had to break their own trails. But those who headed west in gold rush days could follow the Santa Fe Trail from the Missouri to the Rockies. In the old settlements of New Mexico, the wagon trains could rest their oxen and replenish their supplies before moving on down the Old Spanish Trail on the Tucson-Yuma route.
In the 1850’s, army engineers were sent west to survey the railroad routes that would link East with West. The northern parties had to find their own way through vast stretches of little-explored territory, but in the Southwest the surveyors merely remapped the trails that had been packed hard over the years by Mexican mule trains. Two major railroads—the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe—and many main highways were built along the routes made by the early Spanish settlers when they first spread out into the new land.
Early migrants from the East thought of the Southwest as a great desert, a land that had to be passed through, but was hardly to be settled upon. However, they changed their minds when they saw the rich green fields along the Rio Grande, fields that had been irrigated since the early 1600’s. In time the newcomers were able to turn even desert into some of the most fertile farmland in all the nation.
Water laws gave the new settlers some trouble at first. They tried to use a system under which the landowners along the banks of a stream controlled its waters. This system worked well in the water-rich East, but in the dry lands of the Southwest it gave the lucky more water than they needed, while others on higher ground got none at all. In time all the western states had to switch over to the Mexican way—sharing water rights among all the owners whose land could be irrigated.
Western sheep farmers, too, owe a great debt to their forerunners. For the small flocks that the early Mexican settlers had brought to Santa Fe had multiplied into large herds by the time the United States took over the Southwest. New Mexico supplied sheep to ranges all over the country. With the sheep went pastores, who still form a large percentage of the herdsmen in North America. Until the recent introduction of sheep clipping machines, sheepshearing was to a large extent a Mexican skill for which sheep ranchers in the States would bid eagerly.
Mexicans have played an important part not only in cattle and sheep farming, but in mining as well. It was a Mexican who discovered the great Santa Rita copper deposit in New Mexico. Today, miners of Mexican descent still form a major part of the work force in most of the copper mines of the Southwest. In industry, farming, and countless other fields, the United States owes a great deal to her neighbor.
Questions: What does the fact that Easterners borrowed words such as corral, bronco, and canyon suggest

答案： This phenomenon suggests that in terms of language, the peop...

问答题

Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.
The first of these asserts that residents of early modem England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover." Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in America history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably.
Bailyn’s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730’s, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans.
Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of (what of 1: what is the situation with respect to 2: what importance can be assigned to) seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture.
Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.
Questions: What effects did the migrants as indentured servants exert on early American history

答案： In order to pursue their personal independence and freedom, ...

问答题

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body—a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolledsintosone. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them—usually at somebody else’s expense—but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sinksintossuicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan—men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record In newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least, because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
When you consider what he wrote: thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musical-dramatic masterpieces. When you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.
What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man
Questions: Why did those who argued against Wagner finally agree with him

答案： Because they were worn out by his long speech and wanted pea...

问答题

Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as broad as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co, the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels. When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight in 1903, they made the world a forever smaller place. I’ve been to Kitty Hawk, N.C., and seen where the brothers imagined the future, and then literally flew across its high frontier. It was an inspiration to be there, and to soak up the amazing perseverance and creativity of these two pioneers.
The Wright brothers had been fascinated by the idea of flight from an early age. In 1878 their father, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, gave them a flying toy made of cork and bamboo. It had a paper body and was powered by rubber bands. The young boys soon broke the fragile toy, but the memory of its faltering flight across their living room stayed with them. By the mid-1890s Wilbur was reading every book and paper he could find on the still earthbound science of human flight. And four years before they made history at Kitty Hawk, the brothers built their first, scaled-down flying machine—a pilotless "kite" with a 5-ft. wingspan, and made of wood, wire and cloth. Based on that experiment, Wilbur became convinced that he could build an aircraft that would be "capable of sustaining a man."
When published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliable, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft as it nosed up and down. They fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back to control its tendency to yaw from side to side. They devised a pulley system that warped the shape of the wings in midflight to turn the plane and to stop it from rolling laterally in air. Recognizing that a propeller isn’t like a ship’s screw, but becomes, in effect, a rotating wing, they used the data from their wind-tunnel experiments to design the first effective airplane props—a pair of 8-ft, propellers, carved out of laminated spruce, that turned in opposite directions to offset the twisting effect on the machine’s structure. And when they discovered that a lightweight gas-powered engine did not exist, they decided to design and build their own. It produced 12 horsepower and weighed only 152 lbs.
The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by these two American bicycle mechanics to create it. The unmanned gliders spawned by their first efforts flew erratically and were at the mercy of any strong gust of wind. But with help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today. And with guidance from this scientific study, they developed the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over 600 lbs.
On Dec. 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer lifted off shakily from Kitty Hawk and flew 120 ft. —little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting it to new heights of freedom and giving mankind access to places it had never before dreamed of reaching. Although the Wright brothers’ feat was to transform life in the 20th century, the next day only four newspapers in the U.S. carried news of their achievement—news that was widely dismissed as exaggerated.
The Wright brothers gave us a tool, but it was up to individuals and nations to put it to use, and use it we have. The airplane revolutionized both peace and war. It brought families together: once, when a child or other close relatives left the old country for America, family and friends mourned for someone they would never see again. Today, the grandchild of that immigrant can return again and again across a vast ocean in just half a turn of the clock. But the airplane also helped tear families apart, by making international warfare an effortless reality.
Now, on the eve of another century, who knows where the next Wright brothers will be found, in what grade of school they’re studying, or in what garage they’re inventing the next Flyer of the information age. Our mission is to make sure that wherever they are, they have the chance to run their own course, to persevere and follow their own inspiration. We have to understand that engineering breakthroughs are not just mechanical or scientific—they are liberating forces that can continually improve people’s lives. Who would have thought, as the 20th century opened, that one of its greatest contributions would come from two obscure, fresh-faced young Americans who pursued the utmost bounds of human thought and gave us all, for the first time, the power literally to sail beyond the sunset.
The 20th century has been the American Century in large part because of great inventors such as the Wright brothers. May we follow their flight paths and blaze our own in the 21st century.
Questions: What quality of the Wright Brothers impresses you most Illustrate it briefly with an example.

答案：考生可根据自己的理解回答，没有固定答案，如：
Perseverance (文章第三段the Wrigh...

问答题

Joe Harberg became an energy-efficiency guru because he didn’t know the first thing about energy efficiency. In 2003 he was constructing a new home in Dallas and wanted to work with his builder to make the place as environmentally friendly as possible. But neither Harberg nor his designer had any training in how to turn an ordinary house green, and they found few resources to help them. "It was so frustrating," says Harberg, 46, a Dallas-based entrepreneur.
Relying principally on the Internet, Harberg—who previously had worked as a marketing expert and real estate developer—did manage to build an energy-efficient home. He boasts that his electricity bills are regularly 50% less than those of similar homes in his neighborhood, and the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity. Lots of people worry about global warming, not to mention the soaring costs of powering a home, but they don’t know what to do about it. Working with his brother-in-law Josh Stern, Harberg helped launch what would become Current Energy, in 2005, to provide the needed expertise. "We aspire to be the ones who put it all together for you," Harberg says.
Today Current Energy operates what is probably the first dedicated energy-efficiency retail store in the U. S., a hip space in Dallas’ tony Highland Park where shoppers can buy ultraefficient air conditioners, tankless water heaters and even electric votive candles. But while the store itself is green cool—reminiscent of the Apple retail shops that Harberg helped roll out in his previous career—the real value in Current Energy isn’t in its gadgets but in the services it offers. "It’s an art to figure out how to save money at home," Harberg says. "We do the work."
Homeowners who come to Current Energy can order an energy audit—a socket-to-faucet analysis of how to eliminate energy and water waste. After receiving the report, customers can follow as many of the recommendations as they wish, with Current Energy employees involved in the installation work—down to changing the lightbulbs. Joseph VanBlargan, a writer, secured an assessment for his Dallas home and estimates that the upgrades save him about 30% on his monthly energy bill. "I could have done it on my own, but there would have been bits and parts I would have missed," he says.
Joe Green’s Shopping List.
At its retail location and online, Current Energy sells a wide range of energy-efficiency gadgets.:
1) Digital PowerCost Monitor provides real-time data on your energy consumption, $185
2) Magic Globe, a solar-powered light, $50
3) Solio Solar Charger is a way to power all those electronic devices with the sun, $99
4) Solar Backpack lets you carry your laptop—and charge it for free, $140
5) Kill A watt Electricity Meter monitors the power use and cost of any appliance, $40
Greenies who live outside Dallas will soon be able to get an energy assessment from currentenergy, com and the company will work with licensed auditors in your town to carry out the improvements.
What Current Energy does isn’t as easy as it looks. Maximizing the efficiency in your home means more than just chucking your incandescent lightbulbs. You might improve your attic insulation to prevent the loss of heat in the winter, but go overboard, and you could end up choking on indoor air pollution. Just as a house is more than four walls and a door, energy efficiency should be holistic, with insulation, appliances, lighting and clean electricity all working together.
That’s a message the tireless Harberg—who could probably power Texas Stadium if you plugged him into the grid—spreads with zeal. He hosts a weekly radio call-in show and was recently on the TV show Good Morning Texas touting the benefits of an indoor air-quality monitor. "You’re saving people money and saving the earth at the same time," he says excitedly. As business plans go, that’s an awfully good one.
Questions: What is Current Energy What is its major business

答案： Current Energy, launched by Joe Harberg to provide needed ex...

问答题

Decked in a magnificent fur mantle and gilded wooden headdress, a nomad—probably a fierce warrior—was buried more than 2200 years ago in the icy highlands of Mongolia. This week, a team of archaeologists, led by Hermann Parzinger, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, announced that they had found his partially mummified remains. The finding will reveal more about the culture and conditions that preserved the body. It is urgent work, observers say, because a warmer environment could destroy specimens like this.
In 2004, the 30-member team from Germany, Russia, and Mongolia surveyed more than a dozen stone-covered burial mounds in northwestern Mongolia. Last year, they returned to the 2600-meter-high plateau in the Altai region, a remote mountain range that borders Russia, China, and Mongolia, with electromagnetic sensors, temperature probes, and other instruments to look for ice layers that might indicate intact burials.
Parzinger has made spectacular finds before. In 2001, he pulled nearly 20 kilograms of artfully worked jewelry out of a similar grave mound in the Russian republic of Tuva. Archaeologists say the Altai plateaus are the burial grounds of the Pazyryk, members of a larger Scythian culture that occupied Central Asia as early as the 9th century B. C. and struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians.
Scythians used a distinctive type of embalming, says Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Oregon, Eugene. "They removed the innards and filled the body with sweet-smelling grasses." High-status individuals were dressed, surrounded by goods, and buried under earth and stone mounds, or kurgans.
Shortly after burial, water sometimes seeped through the stones and froze, forming ice lenses insulated by the stone mounds above and permafrost underneath. The body found this summer was surrounded by slain horses and dressed in felt boots. Fantastical animal tattoos were visible on the man’s skin. "Instead of archaeology, the material culture is so well preserved it’s almost a kind of ethnography," Parzinger says.
Parzinger’s success comes as the Altai’s permafrost is melting fast. "The warming up of the general climate is a danger for these kurgans," Parzinger says. As rising temperatures threaten to bring the mummies out of deep freeze, the Scythian royalty may face decay and disintegration for the first time in millennia.
Questions: Why could the dead bodies be kept intact

答案： First, they filled the body with sweet-smelling materials in...

问答题

Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.
The first of these asserts that residents of early modem England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover." Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in America history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably.
Bailyn’s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730’s, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans.
Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of (what of 1: what is the situation with respect to 2: what importance can be assigned to) seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture.
Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.
Questions: According to the passage, which point do Bailyn and the author agree on in terms of the culture of colonial New England

答案： Both of them agree on that high culture in New England never...

问答题

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body—a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolledsintosone. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them—usually at somebody else’s expense—but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sinksintossuicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan—men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record In newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least, because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
When you consider what he wrote: thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musical-dramatic masterpieces. When you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.
What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man
Questions: What does the sentence "it doesn’t matter in the least" mean (Para. 7)

答案： It means that the record of Richard Wagner’s misbehaviors in...

问答题

Wilbur and Orville Wright were two brothers from the heartland of America with a vision as broad as the sky and a practicality as down-to-earth as the Wright Cycle Co, the bicycle business they founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892. But while there were countless bicycle shops in turn-of-the-century America, in only one were wings being built as well as wheels. When the Wright brothers finally realized their vision of powered human flight in 1903, they made the world a forever smaller place. I’ve been to Kitty Hawk, N.C., and seen where the brothers imagined the future, and then literally flew across its high frontier. It was an inspiration to be there, and to soak up the amazing perseverance and creativity of these two pioneers.
The Wright brothers had been fascinated by the idea of flight from an early age. In 1878 their father, a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, gave them a flying toy made of cork and bamboo. It had a paper body and was powered by rubber bands. The young boys soon broke the fragile toy, but the memory of its faltering flight across their living room stayed with them. By the mid-1890s Wilbur was reading every book and paper he could find on the still earthbound science of human flight. And four years before they made history at Kitty Hawk, the brothers built their first, scaled-down flying machine—a pilotless "kite" with a 5-ft. wingspan, and made of wood, wire and cloth. Based on that experiment, Wilbur became convinced that he could build an aircraft that would be "capable of sustaining a man."
When published aeronautical data turned out to be unreliable, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel to test airfoils and measure empirically how to lift a flying machine into the sky. They were the first to discover that a long, narrow wing shape was the ideal architecture of flight. They figured out how to move the vehicle freely, not just across land, but up and down on a cushion of air. They built a forward elevator to control the pitch of their craft as it nosed up and down. They fashioned a pair of twin rudders in back to control its tendency to yaw from side to side. They devised a pulley system that warped the shape of the wings in midflight to turn the plane and to stop it from rolling laterally in air. Recognizing that a propeller isn’t like a ship’s screw, but becomes, in effect, a rotating wing, they used the data from their wind-tunnel experiments to design the first effective airplane props—a pair of 8-ft, propellers, carved out of laminated spruce, that turned in opposite directions to offset the twisting effect on the machine’s structure. And when they discovered that a lightweight gas-powered engine did not exist, they decided to design and build their own. It produced 12 horsepower and weighed only 152 lbs.
The genius of Leonardo da Vinci imagined a flying machine, but it took the methodical application of science by these two American bicycle mechanics to create it. The unmanned gliders spawned by their first efforts flew erratically and were at the mercy of any strong gust of wind. But with help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today. And with guidance from this scientific study, they developed the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over 600 lbs.
On Dec. 17, 1903, with Orville at the controls, the Flyer lifted off shakily from Kitty Hawk and flew 120 ft. —little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting it to new heights of freedom and giving mankind access to places it had never before dreamed of reaching. Although the Wright brothers’ feat was to transform life in the 20th century, the next day only four newspapers in the U.S. carried news of their achievement—news that was widely dismissed as exaggerated.
The Wright brothers gave us a tool, but it was up to individuals and nations to put it to use, and use it we have. The airplane revolutionized both peace and war. It brought families together: once, when a child or other close relatives left the old country for America, family and friends mourned for someone they would never see again. Today, the grandchild of that immigrant can return again and again across a vast ocean in just half a turn of the clock. But the airplane also helped tear families apart, by making international warfare an effortless reality.
Now, on the eve of another century, who knows where the next Wright brothers will be found, in what grade of school they’re studying, or in what garage they’re inventing the next Flyer of the information age. Our mission is to make sure that wherever they are, they have the chance to run their own course, to persevere and follow their own inspiration. We have to understand that engineering breakthroughs are not just mechanical or scientific—they are liberating forces that can continually improve people’s lives. Who would have thought, as the 20th century opened, that one of its greatest contributions would come from two obscure, fresh-faced young Americans who pursued the utmost bounds of human thought and gave us all, for the first time, the power literally to sail beyond the sunset.
The 20th century has been the American Century in large part because of great inventors such as the Wright brothers. May we follow their flight paths and blaze our own in the 21st century.
Questions: What’s the purpose of this article What is the tone of the passage

答案： The purpose of the passage is to inform people about the pro...

问答题

Joe Harberg became an energy-efficiency guru because he didn’t know the first thing about energy efficiency. In 2003 he was constructing a new home in Dallas and wanted to work with his builder to make the place as environmentally friendly as possible. But neither Harberg nor his designer had any training in how to turn an ordinary house green, and they found few resources to help them. "It was so frustrating," says Harberg, 46, a Dallas-based entrepreneur.
Relying principally on the Internet, Harberg—who previously had worked as a marketing expert and real estate developer—did manage to build an energy-efficient home. He boasts that his electricity bills are regularly 50% less than those of similar homes in his neighborhood, and the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity. Lots of people worry about global warming, not to mention the soaring costs of powering a home, but they don’t know what to do about it. Working with his brother-in-law Josh Stern, Harberg helped launch what would become Current Energy, in 2005, to provide the needed expertise. "We aspire to be the ones who put it all together for you," Harberg says.
Today Current Energy operates what is probably the first dedicated energy-efficiency retail store in the U. S., a hip space in Dallas’ tony Highland Park where shoppers can buy ultraefficient air conditioners, tankless water heaters and even electric votive candles. But while the store itself is green cool—reminiscent of the Apple retail shops that Harberg helped roll out in his previous career—the real value in Current Energy isn’t in its gadgets but in the services it offers. "It’s an art to figure out how to save money at home," Harberg says. "We do the work."
Homeowners who come to Current Energy can order an energy audit—a socket-to-faucet analysis of how to eliminate energy and water waste. After receiving the report, customers can follow as many of the recommendations as they wish, with Current Energy employees involved in the installation work—down to changing the lightbulbs. Joseph VanBlargan, a writer, secured an assessment for his Dallas home and estimates that the upgrades save him about 30% on his monthly energy bill. "I could have done it on my own, but there would have been bits and parts I would have missed," he says.
Joe Green’s Shopping List.
At its retail location and online, Current Energy sells a wide range of energy-efficiency gadgets.:
1) Digital PowerCost Monitor provides real-time data on your energy consumption, $185
2) Magic Globe, a solar-powered light, $50
3) Solio Solar Charger is a way to power all those electronic devices with the sun, $99
4) Solar Backpack lets you carry your laptop—and charge it for free, $140
5) Kill A watt Electricity Meter monitors the power use and cost of any appliance, $40
Greenies who live outside Dallas will soon be able to get an energy assessment from currentenergy, com and the company will work with licensed auditors in your town to carry out the improvements.
What Current Energy does isn’t as easy as it looks. Maximizing the efficiency in your home means more than just chucking your incandescent lightbulbs. You might improve your attic insulation to prevent the loss of heat in the winter, but go overboard, and you could end up choking on indoor air pollution. Just as a house is more than four walls and a door, energy efficiency should be holistic, with insulation, appliances, lighting and clean electricity all working together.
That’s a message the tireless Harberg—who could probably power Texas Stadium if you plugged him into the grid—spreads with zeal. He hosts a weekly radio call-in show and was recently on the TV show Good Morning Texas touting the benefits of an indoor air-quality monitor. "You’re saving people money and saving the earth at the same time," he says excitedly. As business plans go, that’s an awfully good one.
Questions: Why does the passage say that "What Current Energy does isn’t as easy as it looks"

答案： Because achieving energy efficiency in home needs more effor...

问答题

Decked in a magnificent fur mantle and gilded wooden headdress, a nomad—probably a fierce warrior—was buried more than 2200 years ago in the icy highlands of Mongolia. This week, a team of archaeologists, led by Hermann Parzinger, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, announced that they had found his partially mummified remains. The finding will reveal more about the culture and conditions that preserved the body. It is urgent work, observers say, because a warmer environment could destroy specimens like this.
In 2004, the 30-member team from Germany, Russia, and Mongolia surveyed more than a dozen stone-covered burial mounds in northwestern Mongolia. Last year, they returned to the 2600-meter-high plateau in the Altai region, a remote mountain range that borders Russia, China, and Mongolia, with electromagnetic sensors, temperature probes, and other instruments to look for ice layers that might indicate intact burials.
Parzinger has made spectacular finds before. In 2001, he pulled nearly 20 kilograms of artfully worked jewelry out of a similar grave mound in the Russian republic of Tuva. Archaeologists say the Altai plateaus are the burial grounds of the Pazyryk, members of a larger Scythian culture that occupied Central Asia as early as the 9th century B. C. and struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians.
Scythians used a distinctive type of embalming, says Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Oregon, Eugene. "They removed the innards and filled the body with sweet-smelling grasses." High-status individuals were dressed, surrounded by goods, and buried under earth and stone mounds, or kurgans.
Shortly after burial, water sometimes seeped through the stones and froze, forming ice lenses insulated by the stone mounds above and permafrost underneath. The body found this summer was surrounded by slain horses and dressed in felt boots. Fantastical animal tattoos were visible on the man’s skin. "Instead of archaeology, the material culture is so well preserved it’s almost a kind of ethnography," Parzinger says.
Parzinger’s success comes as the Altai’s permafrost is melting fast. "The warming up of the general climate is a danger for these kurgans," Parzinger says. As rising temperatures threaten to bring the mummies out of deep freeze, the Scythian royalty may face decay and disintegration for the first time in millennia.
Questions: Why does Parzinger say the material is a kind of ethnography instead of archaeology

答案： Because the body was so perfectly preserved that it can prov...

问答题

Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.
The first of these asserts that residents of early modem England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover." Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in America history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably.
Bailyn’s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730’s, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans.
Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of (what of 1: what is the situation with respect to 2: what importance can be assigned to) seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture.
Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.
Questions: On the whole, what is the author’s evaluation of Bailyn’s fourth proposition

答案： The author thinks the fourth preposition is partially correc...

问答题

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body—a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolledsintosone. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them—usually at somebody else’s expense—but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sinksintossuicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan—men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record In newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least, because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
When you consider what he wrote: thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musical-dramatic masterpieces. When you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.
What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man
Questions: How to comprehend "...a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy." (Para.8)

答案： Considering his marvelous works and magnificent contribution...

问答题

Joe Harberg became an energy-efficiency guru because he didn’t know the first thing about energy efficiency. In 2003 he was constructing a new home in Dallas and wanted to work with his builder to make the place as environmentally friendly as possible. But neither Harberg nor his designer had any training in how to turn an ordinary house green, and they found few resources to help them. "It was so frustrating," says Harberg, 46, a Dallas-based entrepreneur.
Relying principally on the Internet, Harberg—who previously had worked as a marketing expert and real estate developer—did manage to build an energy-efficient home. He boasts that his electricity bills are regularly 50% less than those of similar homes in his neighborhood, and the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity. Lots of people worry about global warming, not to mention the soaring costs of powering a home, but they don’t know what to do about it. Working with his brother-in-law Josh Stern, Harberg helped launch what would become Current Energy, in 2005, to provide the needed expertise. "We aspire to be the ones who put it all together for you," Harberg says.
Today Current Energy operates what is probably the first dedicated energy-efficiency retail store in the U. S., a hip space in Dallas’ tony Highland Park where shoppers can buy ultraefficient air conditioners, tankless water heaters and even electric votive candles. But while the store itself is green cool—reminiscent of the Apple retail shops that Harberg helped roll out in his previous career—the real value in Current Energy isn’t in its gadgets but in the services it offers. "It’s an art to figure out how to save money at home," Harberg says. "We do the work."
Homeowners who come to Current Energy can order an energy audit—a socket-to-faucet analysis of how to eliminate energy and water waste. After receiving the report, customers can follow as many of the recommendations as they wish, with Current Energy employees involved in the installation work—down to changing the lightbulbs. Joseph VanBlargan, a writer, secured an assessment for his Dallas home and estimates that the upgrades save him about 30% on his monthly energy bill. "I could have done it on my own, but there would have been bits and parts I would have missed," he says.
Joe Green’s Shopping List.
At its retail location and online, Current Energy sells a wide range of energy-efficiency gadgets.:
1) Digital PowerCost Monitor provides real-time data on your energy consumption, $185
2) Magic Globe, a solar-powered light, $50
3) Solio Solar Charger is a way to power all those electronic devices with the sun, $99
4) Solar Backpack lets you carry your laptop—and charge it for free, $140
5) Kill A watt Electricity Meter monitors the power use and cost of any appliance, $40
Greenies who live outside Dallas will soon be able to get an energy assessment from currentenergy, com and the company will work with licensed auditors in your town to carry out the improvements.
What Current Energy does isn’t as easy as it looks. Maximizing the efficiency in your home means more than just chucking your incandescent lightbulbs. You might improve your attic insulation to prevent the loss of heat in the winter, but go overboard, and you could end up choking on indoor air pollution. Just as a house is more than four walls and a door, energy efficiency should be holistic, with insulation, appliances, lighting and clean electricity all working together.
That’s a message the tireless Harberg—who could probably power Texas Stadium if you plugged him into the grid—spreads with zeal. He hosts a weekly radio call-in show and was recently on the TV show Good Morning Texas touting the benefits of an indoor air-quality monitor. "You’re saving people money and saving the earth at the same time," he says excitedly. As business plans go, that’s an awfully good one.
Questions: Paraphrase the sentence "That’s a massage the tireless Harberg spreads with zeal".

答案： Harberg conveys the information to the public with great ent...

问答题

Decked in a magnificent fur mantle and gilded wooden headdress, a nomad—probably a fierce warrior—was buried more than 2200 years ago in the icy highlands of Mongolia. This week, a team of archaeologists, led by Hermann Parzinger, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, announced that they had found his partially mummified remains. The finding will reveal more about the culture and conditions that preserved the body. It is urgent work, observers say, because a warmer environment could destroy specimens like this.
In 2004, the 30-member team from Germany, Russia, and Mongolia surveyed more than a dozen stone-covered burial mounds in northwestern Mongolia. Last year, they returned to the 2600-meter-high plateau in the Altai region, a remote mountain range that borders Russia, China, and Mongolia, with electromagnetic sensors, temperature probes, and other instruments to look for ice layers that might indicate intact burials.
Parzinger has made spectacular finds before. In 2001, he pulled nearly 20 kilograms of artfully worked jewelry out of a similar grave mound in the Russian republic of Tuva. Archaeologists say the Altai plateaus are the burial grounds of the Pazyryk, members of a larger Scythian culture that occupied Central Asia as early as the 9th century B. C. and struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians.
Scythians used a distinctive type of embalming, says Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Oregon, Eugene. "They removed the innards and filled the body with sweet-smelling grasses." High-status individuals were dressed, surrounded by goods, and buried under earth and stone mounds, or kurgans.
Shortly after burial, water sometimes seeped through the stones and froze, forming ice lenses insulated by the stone mounds above and permafrost underneath. The body found this summer was surrounded by slain horses and dressed in felt boots. Fantastical animal tattoos were visible on the man’s skin. "Instead of archaeology, the material culture is so well preserved it’s almost a kind of ethnography," Parzinger says.
Parzinger’s success comes as the Altai’s permafrost is melting fast. "The warming up of the general climate is a danger for these kurgans," Parzinger says. As rising temperatures threaten to bring the mummies out of deep freeze, the Scythian royalty may face decay and disintegration for the first time in millennia.
Questions: What would be the best title for the passage

答案： Mummies Melting/A New Mummy Found/The Mummies and Culture

问答题

Bernard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions.
The first of these asserts that residents of early modem England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover." Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English—they would rather have stayed home—by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in America history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably.
Bailyn’s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousands of migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730’s, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans.
Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a half-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial periphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture. It is true, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of (what of 1: what is the situation with respect to 2: what importance can be assigned to) seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture.
Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely anti-aristocratic.
Questions: According to the author, what does Bailyn fail to achieve in his work

答案： Bailyn failed to relate the experience of the migrants to th...

问答题

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body—a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolledsintosone. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them—usually at somebody else’s expense—but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sinksintossuicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan—men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record In newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least, because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
When you consider what he wrote: thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musical-dramatic masterpieces. When you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.
What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man
Questions: Please use at least three words or phrases to describe Richard Wagner.

答案： Arrogant/conceit; talkative; talented; ambivalent; knowledge...

问答题

Joe Harberg became an energy-efficiency guru because he didn’t know the first thing about energy efficiency. In 2003 he was constructing a new home in Dallas and wanted to work with his builder to make the place as environmentally friendly as possible. But neither Harberg nor his designer had any training in how to turn an ordinary house green, and they found few resources to help them. "It was so frustrating," says Harberg, 46, a Dallas-based entrepreneur.
Relying principally on the Internet, Harberg—who previously had worked as a marketing expert and real estate developer—did manage to build an energy-efficient home. He boasts that his electricity bills are regularly 50% less than those of similar homes in his neighborhood, and the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity. Lots of people worry about global warming, not to mention the soaring costs of powering a home, but they don’t know what to do about it. Working with his brother-in-law Josh Stern, Harberg helped launch what would become Current Energy, in 2005, to provide the needed expertise. "We aspire to be the ones who put it all together for you," Harberg says.
Today Current Energy operates what is probably the first dedicated energy-efficiency retail store in the U. S., a hip space in Dallas’ tony Highland Park where shoppers can buy ultraefficient air conditioners, tankless water heaters and even electric votive candles. But while the store itself is green cool—reminiscent of the Apple retail shops that Harberg helped roll out in his previous career—the real value in Current Energy isn’t in its gadgets but in the services it offers. "It’s an art to figure out how to save money at home," Harberg says. "We do the work."
Homeowners who come to Current Energy can order an energy audit—a socket-to-faucet analysis of how to eliminate energy and water waste. After receiving the report, customers can follow as many of the recommendations as they wish, with Current Energy employees involved in the installation work—down to changing the lightbulbs. Joseph VanBlargan, a writer, secured an assessment for his Dallas home and estimates that the upgrades save him about 30% on his monthly energy bill. "I could have done it on my own, but there would have been bits and parts I would have missed," he says.
Joe Green’s Shopping List.
At its retail location and online, Current Energy sells a wide range of energy-efficiency gadgets.:
1) Digital PowerCost Monitor provides real-time data on your energy consumption, $185
2) Magic Globe, a solar-powered light, $50
3) Solio Solar Charger is a way to power all those electronic devices with the sun, $99
4) Solar Backpack lets you carry your laptop—and charge it for free, $140
5) Kill A watt Electricity Meter monitors the power use and cost of any appliance, $40
Greenies who live outside Dallas will soon be able to get an energy assessment from currentenergy, com and the company will work with licensed auditors in your town to carry out the improvements.
What Current Energy does isn’t as easy as it looks. Maximizing the efficiency in your home means more than just chucking your incandescent lightbulbs. You might improve your attic insulation to prevent the loss of heat in the winter, but go overboard, and you could end up choking on indoor air pollution. Just as a house is more than four walls and a door, energy efficiency should be holistic, with insulation, appliances, lighting and clean electricity all working together.
That’s a message the tireless Harberg—who could probably power Texas Stadium if you plugged him into the grid—spreads with zeal. He hosts a weekly radio call-in show and was recently on the TV show Good Morning Texas touting the benefits of an indoor air-quality monitor. "You’re saving people money and saving the earth at the same time," he says excitedly. As business plans go, that’s an awfully good one.
Questions: What is the value of Current Energy

答案： Current Energy not only provides people with ultra efficient...

问答题

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body—a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was not only the most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolledsintosone. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might last for hours, in which he proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with him, for the sake of peace.
It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them—usually at somebody else’s expense—but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sinksintossuicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head. He could be grief-stricken over the death of a pet dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder.
He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan—men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record In newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least, because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
When you consider what he wrote: thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musical-dramatic masterpieces. When you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.
What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives He had one mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been conceived by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a man
Questions: What is the author’s aim to write this article

答案： The author wrote this article aiming to extol the great tale...

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