单选题 .  SECTION A  MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1)Ask an American schoolchild what he or she is learning in school these days and you might even get a reply, provided you ask it in Spanish. But don't bother, here's the answer: Americans nowadays are not learning any of the things that we learned in our day, like reading and writing. Apparently these are considered antique old subjects, invented by white males to oppress women and minorities.
    (2)What are they learning? In a Vermont college town I found the answer sitting in a toy store book rack, next to typical kids' books like "Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy Is Dysfunctional". It's a teacher's guide called "Happy To Be Me", subtitled "Building Self Esteem".
    (3)Self-esteem, as it turns out, is a big subject in American classrooms. Many American schools see building it as important as teaching reading and writing. They call it "whole language" teaching, borrowing terminology from the granola people to compete in the education marketplace.
    (4)No one ever spent a moment building my self-esteem when I was in school. In fact, from the day I first stepped inside a classroom my serf-esteem was one big demolition site. All that mattered was "the subject," be it geography, history, or mathematics. I was praised when I remembered that "near", "fit", "friendly", "pleasing", "like" and their opposites took the dative case in Latin. I was scolded when I forgot what a cosine was good for. Generally I lived my school years beneath a torrent of criticism so consistent I eventually ceased to hear it, as people who live near the sea eventually stop hearing the waves.
    (5)Schools have changed. Scolding is out, for one thing. More important, subjects have changed. Whereas I learned English, modem kids learn something called  "language skills." Whereas I learned writing, modem kids learn something called "communication". Communication, the book tells us, is seven per cent words, 23 per cent facial expression, 20 per cent tone of voice, and 50 per cent body language. So this column, with its carefully chosen words, would earn me at most a grade of seven per cent. That is, if the school even gave out something as oppressive and demanding as grades.
    (6)The result is that, in place of English classes, American children are getting a course in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Consider the new attitude toward journal writing: I remember one high school English class when we were required to keep a journal. The idea was to emulate those great writers who confided in diaries, searching their souls and perfecting their critical thinking on paper.
    (7)"Happy To Be Me" states that journals are a great way for students to get in touch with their feelings. Tell students they can write one sentence or a whole page. Reassure them that no one, not even you, will read what they write. After the unit, hopefully all students will be feeling good about themselves and will want to share some of their entries with the class.
    (8)There was a time when no self-respecting book for English teachers would use "great" or "hopefully" that way. Moreover, back then the purpose of English courses (an antique term for "Unit") was not to help students "feel good about themselves." Which is good, because all that scolding didn't make me feel particularly good about anything.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1)The American screen has long been a. smoky place, at least since 1942's Now, Voyager, in which Bette Davis and Paul Henreid showed how to make and seal a romantic deal over a pair of cigarettes that were smoldering as much as the stars. Today cigarettes are more common onscreen than at any other time since midcentury: 75% of all Hollywood films—including 36% of those rated G or PG—show tobacco use, according to a recent survey by the University of California, San Francisco.
    (2)Audiences, especially kids, are taking notice. Two recent studies, published in Lancet and Pediatrics, have found that among children as young as 10, those exposed to the most screen smoking are up to 2.7 times as likely as others to pick up the habit. Worse, it's the ones from nonsmoking homes who are hit the hardest, perhaps because they are spared the dirty ashtrays and moldy drapes that make real-world smoking a lot less appealing than the clean cinematic version.
    (3)Now the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH)—the folks behind the designated-driver campaign—are pushing to get the smokes off the screen. "Some movies show kids up to 14 incidents of smoking per hour," says Barry Bloom, HSPH's dean. "We're in the business of preventing disease, and cigarettes are the No. 1 preventable cause."
    (4)If there's one thing health experts know, it's that you don't influence behavior by telling people what to do. You do it by exposing them to enough cases of people behaving well that it creates a new norm. What made the designated-driver concept catch on in the 1980s was partly that Harvard and the ad agencies it worked with persuaded TV networks to slip the idea into their shows. There's a reason a designated-driver poster appeared in the bar on Cheers, and it's not because it made the jokes funnier.
    (5)"The idea appeared in 160 prime-time episodes over four years," says Jay Winsten, HSPH's associate dean. "Drunk-driving fatalities fell 25% over the next three years."
    (6)Harvard long believed that getting cigarettes out of movies could have as powerful an effect, but it wouldn't be easy. Cigarette makers had a history of striking product-placement deals with Hollywood, and while the 1998 tobacco settlement prevents that, nothing stops directors from incorporating smoking into Scenes on their own.
    (7)In 1999 Harvard began holding one-on-one meetings with studio executives trying to change that, and last year the Motion Picture Association of America flung the door open, inviting Bloom to make a presentation in February to all the studios. Harvard's advice was direct: Get the butts entirely out, or at least make smoking unappealing.
    (8)A few films provide a glimpse of what a no-smoking—or low-smoking—Hollywood would be like. Producer Lindsay Doran, who once helped persuade director John Hughes to keep Ferris Bueller smoke-free in the 1980s hit, wanted to do the same for the leads of her 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction. When a writer convinced her that the character played by Emma Thompson had to smoke, Doran relented, but from the way Thompson hacks her way through the film and snuffs out her cigarettes in a palmful of spit, it's clear the glamour's gone. And remember all the smoking in The Devil Wears Prada? No? That's because the producers of that film kept it out entirely. "No one smoked in that movie," says Doran, "and no one noticed."
    (9)Such movies are hardly the rule, but the pressure is growing. Like smokers, studios may conclude that quitting the habit is not just a lot healthier but also a lot smarter.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor, was philosopher of Athens, Greece. It is said that in early life he practiced his father's art. In middle life he married Xanthippe, who is legendary as a shrew, although the stories have little basis in ascertainable fact. It is not certain who were Socrates's teachers in philosophy, but he seems to have been acquainted with the doctrines of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and the atomists. He was widely known for his intellectual powers even before he was 40, when, ac- cording to Plato's report of Socrates's speech in the Apology, the oracle at Delphi pronounced him the wisest man in Greece. In that speech Socrates maintained that he was puzzled by this acclaim until he discovered that, while others professed knowledge without realizing their ignorance, he at least was aware of his own ignorance.
    (2)Socrates became convinced that his calling was to search for wisdom about right conduct by which he might guide the intellectual and moral improvement of the Athenians. Neglecting his own affairs, he spent his time discussing virtue, justice, and piety wherever his fellow citizens congregated. Some felt that he also neglected public duty, for he never sought public office, although he was famous for his courage in the military campaigns in which he served. In his self-appointed task as gadfly—someone annoys other people by criticizing them—to the Athenians, Socrates made numerous enemies.
    (3)Aristophanes mimicked Socrates in his play The Clouds and attributed to him some of the faults of the Sophists—professional teachers of rhetoric. Although Socrates in fact baited the Sophists, his other critics seem to have held a view similar to that of Aristophanes. In 399 B.C. he was brought to trial for corrupting youth and for religious heresies. Obscure political issues surrounded the trial, but it seems that Socrates was tried also for being the friend and teacher of Alcibiades and Critias, both of whom had betrayed Athens. The trial and death of Socrates, who was given poison to drink, are described with great dramatic power in the Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo of Plato.
    (4)Socrates's contributions to philosophy were a new method of approaching knowledge, a conception of the soul as the seat both of normal waking consciousness and of moral character, and a sense of the universe as purposively mind-ordered. His method, called dialectic, consisted in examining statements by pursuing their implications, on the assumption that if a statement were true it could not lead to false consequences. The method may have been suggested by Zeno of Elea, but Socrates refmed it and applied it to ethical problems.
    (5)His doctrine of the soul led him to the belief that all virtues converge into one, which is the good, or knowledge of one's true self and purposes through the course of a lifetime. Knowledge in turn depends on the nature or essence of things as they really are, for the underlying forms of things are more real than their experienced exemplifications. This conception leads to a teleological view of the world that all the forms participate in and lead to the highest form, the form of the good. Plato later elaborated this doctrine as central to his own philosophy. Socrates's view is often described as holding virtue and knowledge to be identical, so that no man knowingly does wrong. Since virtue is identical with knowledge, it can be taught, but not as a professional specialty as the Sophists had pretended to teach it. However, Socrates himself gave no final answer to how virtue can be learned.
    PASSAGE FOUR
    (1)An American survey has shown that each year every employed person loses three to four working days from colds and allied complaints, and every school child loses five to six days of schooling. Colds waste more time than strikes. The conquest of the common cold is therefore a thoroughly worthwhile ambition.
    (2)In 1961, Sir Christopher Andrewes found that the great killing infections like syphilis or poliomyelitis are each caused by one specific micro-organism, or, at worst, a small group of closely related parasites. By contrast it has slowly become apparent that the common cold is not a disease but a large group of similar diseases, caused possibly, by anything between fifty and one hundred different organisms.
    (3)Much of Sir Christopher's book is taken up by an account of the struggle to identify, the germs which do cause colds. At first it was thought that bacteria were responsible because certain bacteria are commonly found in the noses and throats of cold victims. But Dr. W. Kruse of the Hygienic Institute of the University of Leipzig in 1914 provided the first evidence that a virus might be concerned by launching experimental infectious.
    (4)Since that time thousands of volunteers have subjected themselves to similar experimental infections, and for early twenty years most of such work has been done at Salisbury where the guinea pigs are rewarded by a ten-day holiday, all found that this "clumsy, expensive and unreliable" use of human volunteers was necessary because for a long time chimpanzees were the only other animals known to be susceptible to infection by common cold germs, and chimpanzees were far too expensive and unruly for routine use.
    (5)Growing cold viruses in the laboratory also proved difficult until one of the men involved demonstrated his possession of that most precious scientific faculty-serendipity.
    (6)Cold viruses were being grown with only moderate success in laboratory cultures of lung tissue from human embryos. The lung tissue cultures were kept alive by a salt solution containing added vitamins and a number of other ingredients. One day at Salisbury Dr. David Tyrrell found that this salt solution was faulty, and in order to keep his tissue cultures going he hastily borrowed a supply from another laboratory. When the imported solution was added to tissue cultures infected with cold viruses the lung tissue cells began to degenerate in a manner typical of tissues parasitized by active viral particles.
    (7)Dr. Tyrrell soon discovered that the borrowed fluid provided a more acid medium in his culture tubes than that produced by the native Salisbury brew. The nose provides a slightly acid environment, and Dr. Tyrrell realized that a degree of acidity was just what nose-inhabiting viruses needed in order to thrive outside the body. Thus a happy accident enabled a perspicacious scientist to modify the cold virus culture technique and thenceforward the whole exercise proved far easier and more profitable.
    (8)Much of common cold folklore is demolished. Draughts, chilling and wet feet do not bring colds on, says Sir Christopher, and clean, healthy living with lots of fresh air, plenty of exercise, good, plain food and a cold bath every morning may be good for the soul and the waistline, but does nothing to keep cold viruses at bay.
    (9)Colds are not very infectious—which will surprise most of us—so there is really no excuse for staying away from work when you have one. All the remedies so far invented have one thing in common—they are useless. In temperate countries, colds are commoner during the winter, but what the "winter factor" is which brings them on remains unknown. Most of us harbour cold viruses in our noses throughout the year, and many colds are probably not "caught" at all, but start because somehow the resident viruses become activated from time to time.
    (10)To write a book about colds at this stage, says Sir Christopher, is rather like writing a review of a play in the middle of the first act. Since he wrote those words, workers at Salisbury have announced the production of the first cold vaccine which will protect against infection by one particular cold virus. Unfortunately there are very many cold viruses and complete immunity from colds by vaccination would require the administration of a separate vaccine for every virus in the book.1.  In Paragraph Three "whole language" teaching is in quotation marks because ______PASSAGE ONE