单选题 How Babbling to Babies Can Boost Their Brains A. The more parents talk to their children, the faster those children's vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. That might seem obvious, but it took until 1995 for science to show just how early in life the difference begins to matter. In that year Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas published the results of a decade-long study in which they had looked at how, and how much, 42 families in Kansas City conversed at home. Dr Hart and Dr Risley found a close correlation between the number of words a child's parents had spoken to him by the time he was three and his academic success at the age of nine. At three, children born into professional families had heard 30 millions more words than those from a poorer background. B. This observation has profound implications for policies about babies and their parents. It suggests that sending children to 'pre-school' (nurseries or kindergartens) at the age of four—a favoured step among policymakers—comes too late to compensate for educational shortcomings at home. Happily, understanding of how children's vocabularies develop is growing, as several presentations at this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science showed. C. One of the most striking revelations came from Anne Fernald of Stanford University, who has found that the disparity (差异) appears well before a child is three. Even at the tender age of 18 months, when most toddlers (刚学走路的小孩) speak only a dozen words, those from disadvantaged families are several months behind other, more favoured children. Indeed, Dr Fernald thinks the differentiation starts at birth. D. She measures how quickly toddlers process language by sitting them on their mothers' laps and showing them two images: a dog and a ball, say. A recorded voice tells the toddler to look at the ball while a camera records his reaction. This lets Dr Fernald note the moment the child's gaze begins shifting towards the correct image. At 18 months, toddlers from better-off backgrounds can identify the correct object in 750 milliseconds—200 milliseconds faster than those from poorer families. This, says Dr Fernald, is a huge difference. E. The problem seems to be cumulative. By the time children are two, there is a six-month gap in the language-processing skills and vocabulary of the two groups. It is easy to see how this might happen. Toddlers learn new words from their context, so the faster a child understands the words he already knows, the easier it is for him to attend to those he does not. F. It is also now clear from Dr Fernald's work that words spoken directly to a child, rather than those simply heard in the home, are what builds vocabulary. Putting children in front of the television does not have the same effect. Neither does letting them sit at the feet of academic parents while the grown-ups converse about Plato. G. The effects can be seen directly in the brain. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University told the meeting how linguistic disparities are reflected in the structure of the parts of the brain involved in processing language. Although she cannot yet prove that hearing speech causes the brain to grow, it would fit with existing theories of how experience shapes the brain. Babies are born with about 100 billion neurons, and connections between these form at an exponentially rising rate in the first years of life. It is the pattern of these connections which determines how well the brain works, and what it learns. By the time a child is three there will be about 1000 trillion connections in his brain, and that child's experiences continuously determine which are strengthened and which pruned. This process, gradual and more-or-less irreversible, shapes the trajectory (发展轨迹) of the child's life. H. Fortunately, taciturnity (沉默寡言) can be easily fixed. Telling parents is the first step: Many who volunteered themselves and their children for study did not know they could help their babies do well simply by speaking to them. I. There are tools that can help, as well. One such is a Language Environment Analysis (LENA) device. It is like a pedometer (计步器), but keeps track of words, not steps, by analysing the speech children hear. It was originally developed as a tool for research, but parents kept asking for the data it recorded and researchers thus realised it could also serve as a spur. Parents use it to monitor, and improve, their patterns of speech, much as a pedometer-wearing couch potato might try to reach 10000 steps a day, say. J. A recent study by Dana Suskind shows how promising this approach is. Dr Suskind is a paediatric surgeon in Chicago. She got interested in the field while monitoring children whom she had fitted with artificial cochleas (耳蜗), to treat deafness. K. Her new study shows that the use of a LENA device, combined with a one-off home visit to give parents advice, produces a 32% increase in the number of words a child hears per hour after six weeks. Dr Suskind's Thirty Million Words Initiative (named after Dr Hart's and Dr Risley's original finding) is now using LENA devices and weekly home visits to improve the linguistic diet of children in Chicago. Parents are taught to make the words they serve up more enriching. For example, instead of telling a child, 'Put your shoes on,' one might say instead, 'It is time to go out. What do we have to do?' L. Other groups are trying similar approaches. In Providence, Rhode Island, Angel Taveras, the mayor, has started a project that uses LENA devices to improve the vocabularies of children in pre-school. Meanwhile, in Chicago and several other places, nurses who visit mothers' homes to give them advice on health and nutrition also encourage them to chat to their children and read to them aloud. Such interventions are effective and not particularly expensive. M. In January Barack Obama urged Congress and state governments to make high-quality preschools available to every four-year-old. He is knocking on an open door. This financial year 30 states and the District of Columbia have increased spending on pre-schools. Nationally, this amounts to an increase of 6.9%. N. That is a good thing. Pre-school programmes are known to develop children's numeracy, social skills and (as the term 'pre-school' suggests) readiness for school. But they do not deal with the gap in much earlier development that Dr Fernald, Dr Noble, Dr Suskind and others have identified. And it is this gap, more than a year's pre-schooling at the age of four, which seems to determine a child's chances for the rest of his life.

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write an essay on the topic College Students Joining the Army: A Win-Win Choice. You can illustrate your point: why college students' taking part in the army is a win-win choice and finally encourage them to be a serviceman. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words. Write your essay on Answer Sheet 1.

单选题He should ______ be allowed to get up until he has completely recovered from his illness. A. in case B. in any case C. in that case D. in no case

单选题Woman: Look, I don't want to bother you, but the stereo is really loud. Man: I didn't realize you could hear it. Question: What will the man probably do?

单选题The sanctions are designed to force Libya to ______ the two Lockerbie suspects and to co-operate in the investigation in a similar case.

单选题One of the industrial giants who changed American society was Henry Ford horn on a farm in Michigan in 1863, and he grew up to bring forth some of the most revolutionary improvements in automotive technology in the early 20th century. His outstanding mechanical ability led him to become interested in the new automobiles in the early 1900s. Though be did not invent the automobile, he improved upon everyone else's designs. He was a person who believed in inexpensive, efficient production, so he established standards for his plants and workers. He also standardized and produced many new auto parts for his Ford Motor Company cars. Then he studied the workers' problems and thousands of automobiles per year. In fact, his plants had produced 15 million Model TS by 1927. Ford's personality was not all thrift (节俭), efficiency and inventiveness, however. He was a man who was cold and who could not keep pace with the competition due to his own rigidity (严格). His company suffered because of his desire to maintain the existing state instead of meeting and beating the competition by changing his products. Finally, he saw that he must change or fail, therefore, he introduced a newtype engine and once again took over the automobile market. Ford left a legacy of millions of dollars, millions of jobs for American workers, and millions of satisfied customers.

单选题Almost everyone has experienced the joy of sports. Nevertheless, thoughtful observers will continue to reflect on the pros and cons of the modern drive to rationalize sports in a quest for the ultimate possible athletic performance.

单选题 Not only _____her how to do it but he offered to help her as well.

单选题Scientists have been struggling to find out the reason behind blushing （脸红）。Why would humans evolve（进化） a 21__________ that puts us at a social disadvantage by 22__________ us to reveal that we have c

单选题He is ______ a horse. A. stronger as B. as stronger than C. the strong as D. stronger than

单选题The two boys had so ______ in common that they soon became good friends.

单选题What does the word infamous mean?

单选题Extraordinary creative activity has been characterized as revolutionary, flying in the face of what is established and producing not what is acceptable but what will become accepted. According to this formulation, highly creative activity transcends the limits of an existing form and establishes a new principle of organization. However, the idea that extraordinary creativity transcends established limits is misleading when it is applied to the arts, even though it may be valid for the science; Differences between highly creative art and highly creative science arise in part from a difference in their goal. For the sciences, a new theory is the goal and end result of the creative act. Innovative science produces new propositions in terms of which diverse phenomena can be related to one another in more coherent ways. Such phenomena as a brilliant diamond or a nesting bird are relegated to the role of date, serving as the means for formulating or testing a new theory. The goal of highly creative art is different: the phenomenon itself becomes the direct product of the creative act. Shakespeare's Hamlet is not a tract about the behavior of indecisive princes or the uses of political power, nor is Picasso's painting Guernica primarily a prepositional statement about the Spanish Civil War or the evils of fascism. What 'highly creative activity produces is not a new generalization that 'transcends established limits, but rather an aesthetic particular. Aesthetic particulars produced by the highly creative artist extend or exploit, rather than transcend that form. This is not to deny that a highly creative artist sometimes establishes a new principle of organization in the history of an artistic field; the composer Monteverdi, who created music of the highest aesthetic value, comes to mind. More generally, however, whether or not a composition establishes a new principle in the history of music has no bearing on its aesthetic worth. Because they embody a new principle of organization, some musical works, such as the operas of the Florentine Camerata, are of signal historical importance, but few listeners or musicologists would include these among the great works of music. On the other hand, Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro(费加罗的婚礼) is surely among the masterpiece of music even though its modest innovations are confined to extending existing means. It has been said of Beethoven that he toppled the rules and freed music from the stifling confines of convention. But a close study of his composition reveals that Beethoven overturned no fundamental rules. Rather, he was an incomparable strategist who exploited limits of the rules, forms, and conventions that he inherited from predecessors such as Haydn and Mozart, Handel and Bach—in strikingly original ways.

单选题That __  me of the day is spent in the countryside. 

单选题Quite a lot of people watch TV only to ______ time. A. waste B. spend C. kill D. pass

单选题此题为音频题

单选题There are so many bad things about women drivers, I don't know where to start. I guess I will get the bail rolling by talking about one of my biggest pet peeves. Why do women have to wait until they are in the car and barreling down the highway at sixty miles an hour before they decide it is time to put on their makeup? Is there a law that I don't know about that says women have to do their makeup in the car because the bathroom isn't good enough for them? I don't know if anyone has ever informed women, but the mirror in the car is not a makeup mirror. The mirror is used for looking at other cars and pedestrians. So please do us all a favor and do your makeup before you leave the house. The next order of business for the men should be to find out whose brilliant idea it was for women to have a phone in the car. This has disaster written all over it. Everyone knows that women can't even walk and chew gum at the same time, so how in the hell are they going to drive and talk on the phone? Why is it that every time you are sitting at a red light the woman in front of you thinks this is a good time to make a phone call? "HELLO LADY. THE LIGHT IS GREEN, GET OFF THE PHONE AND GO!" I really think we need to outlaw women using their cell phones while they drive. Another accident waiting to happen is when you get two women in the same car together. How many times have you seen two women just yakking away and the driver isn't paying attention to where she is going? There is either one of two things that happens when two women get in the car together. One. The women are talking and the driver doesn't see the stop sign in front of her, so she runs it. Two: The two women are talking and at the last minute the driver realizes there is her turn, so she stops really quick in front of you and you almost rear-end her. So women please pay more attention to your driving and, for the love of God, use your turn signals--they aren't there for decoration. I know all women out there are yelling at me and saying, "Women are better drivers than guys." If women were better drivers than men, why do guys drive on dates? Why don't women ever tell the guy, I will come pick you up? Why are almost all truck drivers guys? Why is it when a woman is going to move and she rents a U-Haul van, she always Calls a guy to drive it for her? When was the last time you watched a woman win the Indy 500 or Daytona 500? All of these questions .just go to prove why guys are the kings of the road.

单选题It is useless ______ about this point now.

单选题She got to know the young man very well ______ she had worked for so long. A) to whom B) in whom C) whom D) with whom