阅读理解Why do we make friends? Students of animal behavior have pointed out that social attraction has an obvious adaptive function: it helps a species both to protect and to reproduce itself

阅读理解Questions 1 to 10are based on the following passage

阅读理解Whom did Benjamin Franklin work for at the age of11?

阅读理解Text One Concern with money, and then more money, in order to buy the conveniences and luxuries of modern life, hasbrought great changes to the lives of most Frenchmen

阅读理解 Back in 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius realized that by burning coal we were adding carbon dioxide to the air, and that this would warm the Earth. But he mentioned the issue only in passing (顺便地), for his calculations suggested it would not become a problem for thousands of years. Others thought that the oceans would soak up any extra CO2, so there was nothing much to worry about. That this latter argument has persisted to this day in some quarters highlights our species' propensity (倾向) to underestimate the scale of our impact on the planet. Even the Earth's vast oceans cannot suck up CO2 as quickly as we can produce it, and we now know the stored CO2 is acidifying the oceans, a problem in itself. Now a handful of researchers are warning that energy sources we normally think of as innocuous could affect the planet's climate too. If we start to extract immense amounts of power from the wind, for instance, it will have an impact on how warmth and water move around the planet, and thus on temperatures and rainfall. Just to be clear, no one is suggesting we should stop building wind farms on the basis of this risk. Aside from the huge uncertainties about the climatic effects of extracting power from the wind, our present and near-term usage is far too tiny to make any difference. For the moment, any negative consequences on the climate are massively outweighed by the effects of pumping out even more CO2. That poses by far the greater environmental threat; weaning ourselves off fossil fuels should remain the priority. Even so, now it is the time to start thinking about the long-term effects of the alternative energy sources we are turning to. Those who have already started to look at these issues report weary, indifferent or even hostile reactions to their work. That's understandable, but disappointing. These effects may be inconsequential, in which case all that will have been wasted is some research time that may well yield interesting insights anyway. Or they may turn out to be sharply negative, in which case the more notice we have, the better. It would be unfortunate to put it mildly, to spend countless trillions replacing fossil-fuel energy infrastructure(基础建设) only to discover that its successor(替代物) is also more damaging than it need be. These climatic effects may even be beneficial. The first, tentative models suggest that extracting large amounts of energy from high-altitude jet streams would cool the planet, counteracting the effects of rising greenhouse gases. It might even be possible to build an energy infrastructure that gives us a degree of control over the weather: turning off wind turbines here, capturing more of the sun's energy there. We may also need to rethink our long-term research priorities. The sun is ultimately the only source of energy that doesn't end up altering the planet's energy balance. So the best bet might be invest heavily in improving solar technology and energy storage—rather than in efforts to harness, say, nuclear fusion. For the moment, all of this remains supposition(推测). But our species has a tendency to myopia. We have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by taking the long view for a change.

阅读理解The story began on a downtown Brooklyn street corner

阅读理解Katherine walked into a newspaper office, and demanded to see the editor

阅读理解Police are ________ trying to find out the exact cause of the accident

阅读理解 NASA has hired airplane manufacturer Lockheed Martin to build its next experimental plane, which is designed to fly faster than the speed of sound without producing the loud sonic booms that have plagued the transportation form. The plane is due to be delivered in 2021 and will cost just shy of $250 million. During a press conference hosted by the agency during which they announced the partnership, Lockheed Martin spokesperson Dave Richardson explained that the new plane will be neither a prototype for a new commercial airplane, nor a reincarnation of previous supersonic jets. 'This is a purpose-built experimental research craft,' he said. 'This aircraft was designed from a clean sheet.' NASA will use the plane to gather data about the impact of its low-boom design, which the agency hopes will address the single biggest challenge of supersonic flight. Flying faster than the speed of sound produces shock waves that result in a loud booming sound. 'The air does not know that the airplane is coming,' Peter Coen, a NASA project manager for supersonic technology, explained during the press conference. Because no one liked hearing that noise, the Federal Aviation Administration and similar international organizations banned supersonic travel over land. Now, NASA thinks technology can break the sound barrier without being quite so loud about it. The secret is in the shape of the plane. Sonic booms form because the plane's flight produces many shock waves of different strengths headed in different directions that absorb into each other to create two strong pulses of pressure. From the testing done so far, NASA thinks the new plane's design successfully dissipates and weakens those shock waves, keeping them from forming the strong pulses responsible for booms. The plane would still produce what they've dubbed 'sonic thumps,' but the hope is that those would be much easier to deal with. Once the new plane is built, NASA will run surveys on the ground to see how people respond to the sonic thumps. Then, the agency will bring that survey data to the Federal Aviation Administration and its international counterparts in order to revisit the rule about breaking the speed of sound over land. 'It's not about making a new airplane for airplanes' sake, although I love airplanes,' Richardson said. 'It's about the data that will be collected.' If the rule change does come through, that could kick off a new era of commercial supersonic travel.

阅读理解The statistics I’ve cited and the living examples are all too familiar to you. But what may not be so familiar will be the increasing number of women who are looking actively for advancement of for a new job in your offices. This woman may be equipped with professional skills and perhaps valuable experience. She will not be content to be Executive Assistant to Mr. Seldom Seen of the Assistant Vice President’s Girl Friday, who is the only one who comes in on Saturday.She is the symbol of what I call the Second Wave of Feminism. She is the modern woman who is determined to be.Her forerunner was the radical feminist who interpreted her trapped position as a female as oppression by the master class of men. Men, she believed, had created a domestic, servile role for women in order that men could have the career and the opportunity to participate in making the great decisions of society. Thus the radical feminist held that women through history had been oppressed and dehumanized, mainly because man chose to exploit his wife and the mother of his children. Sometimes it was deliberate exploitation and sometimes it was the innocence of never looking beneath the pretensions of life.The radical feminists found strength in banding together. Coming to recognize each other for the first time, they could explore their own identities, realize their own power, and view the male and his system as the common enemy. The first phases of feminism in the last five years often took on this militant, class-warfare tone. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and many others hammered home their ideas with a persistence that aroused and intrigued many of the brightest and most able women in the country. Consciousness-raising groups allowed women to explore both their identities and their dreams—and the two were often found in direct conflict.What is the stereotyped role of American women? Marriage. A son. Two daughters. Breakfast. Ironing. Lunch. Bowling, maybe a garden club of for the very daring, non-credit courses in ceramics. Perhaps an occasional cocktail party. Dinner. Football or baseball on TV. Each day the same. Never any growth in expectations — unless it is growth because the husband has succeeded. The inevitable question: “Is that all there is to life?” The rapid growth of many feminist organizations attests to the fact that these radical feminists had touched some vital nerves. The magazine “Ms.” was born in the year of the death of the magazine “Life.” But too often the consciousness-raising sessions became ends in themselves. Too often sexism reversed itself and man-hating was encouraged. Many had been with the male chauvinist.It is not difficult, therefore, to detect a trend toward moderation. Consciousness-raising increasingly is regarded as a means to independence and fulfillment, rather than a ceremony of fulfillment itself. Genuine independence can be realized through competence, through finding a career, through the use of education. Remember that for many decades the education of women was not supposed to be useful.

阅读理解Americans today don'' t place a very high value on intellect. Our heroes are athletes, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, not scholars. Even our schools are where we send our children to get a practical education―not to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Symptoms of pervasive anti- intellectualism in our schools aren''t difficult to find. "Schools have always been in a society where practical is more important than intellectual," says education writer Diane Ravitch. "Schools could be a counterbalance." Ravitch '' s latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, traces the roots of anti-intellectualism in our schools, concluding they are anything but a counterbalance to the American distaste for intellectual pursuits. But they could and should be. Encouraging kids to reject the life of the mind leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and control. Without the ability to think critically, to defend their ideas and understand the ideas of others, they cannot fully participate in our democracy. Continuing along this path, says writer Earl Shorris, "We will become a second-rate country. We will have a less civil society." "Intellect is resented as a form of power or privilege," writes historian and professor Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a Pulitzer-Prize winning book on the roots of anti- intellectualism in US politics, religion, and education. From the beginning of our history, says Hofstadter, our democratic and populist urges have driven us to reject anything that smells of elitism. Practicality, common sense, and native intelligence have been considered more noble qualities than anything you could learn from a book. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist philosophers thought schooling and rigorous book learning put unnatural restraints on children: "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for I0 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." Mark Twain'' s Huckleberry Finn exemplified American anti-intellectualism. Its hero avoids being civilized― going to school and learning to read―so he can preserve his innate goodness. Intellect, according to Hofstadter, is different from native intelligence, a quality we reluctantly admire. Intellect is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind. Intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, and adjust, while intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, and imagines. School remains a place where intellect is mistrusted. Hofstadter says our country'' s educational system is in the grips of people who "joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise."

阅读理解Passage Three: Questions are based on the following passage

阅读理解Passage Two In eighteenth-century France and England, reformers rallied around egalitarian ideals, but few reformers advocated higher education for women

阅读理解The market investigation is indispensable to sales promotion

阅读理解When a Scottish research team startled the world by revealing 3 months ago that it had cloned an adult sheep, President Clinton moved swiftly. Declaring that he was opposed to using this unusual animal husbandry technique to clone humans, he ordered that federal funds not be used for such an experiment although no one had proposed to do so--and asked an independent panel of experts chaired by Princeton President Harold Shapiro to report back to the White House in 90 days with recommendations for a national policy on human cloning. That group--the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC)--has been working feverishly to put its wisdom on paper, and at a meeting on 17 May, members agreed on a near-final draft of their recommendations. 　　NBAC will ask that Clinton''s 90-day ban on federal funds for human cloning be extended indefinitely, and possibly that it be made law. But NBAC members are planning to word the recommendation narrowly to avoid new restrictions on research that involves the cloning of human DNA or cells--routine in molecular biology. The panel has not yet reached agreement on a crucial question, however, whether to recommend legislation that would make it a crime for private funding to be used for human cloning. 　　In a draft preface to the recommendations, discussed at the 17 May meeting, Shapiro suggested that the panel had found a broad consensus that it would be"morally unacceptable to attempt to createa human child by adult nuclear cloning". Shapiro explained during the meeting that the moral doubt stems mainly from fears about the risk to the health of the child. The panel then informally accepted several general conclusions, although some details have not been settled. 　　NBAC plans to call for a continued ban on federal government funding for any attempt to clone body cell nuclei to create a child. Because current federal law already forbids the use of federal funds to create embryos ( the earliest stage of human offspring be for birth) for research or to be for knowingly endanger an embryo''s life, NBAC will remain silent on embryo research. 　　NBAC members also indicated that they will appeal to privately funded researchers and clinics not to try to clone humans by body cell nuclear transfer. But they were divided on whether to go further by calling for a federal law that would impose a complete ban on human cloning. Shapiro and most members favored an appeal for such legislation, but in a phone interview, he said this issue was still "up in the air."

阅读理解D Would You Marry the Same Person Again?

阅读理解I am one of the many city people who are always saying that given the choice we would prefer to live in the country away from the dirt and noise of a large city

阅读理解Questions 21 to 30 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Format 1 Passage One A U

阅读理解Passage One Sometime late last year, I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read