阅读理解A great deal of attention is being paid today to the so-called digital divide--the division of the world into the info (information) rich and the info poor. And that divide does exist today. My wife and I lectured about this looming danger twenty years ago. What was less visible then, however, were the new, positive forces that work against the digital divide. There are reasons to be optimistic. 　　There are technological reasons to hope the digital divide will narrow. As the Internet becomes more and more commercialized, it is in the interest of business to universalize access--after all, the more people online, the more potential customers there are. More and more governments, afraid their countries will be left behind, want to spread Internet access. Within the next decade or two, one to two billion people on the planet will be netted together. As a result, I now believe the digital divide will narrow rather than widen in the years ahead. And that is very good news because the Internet may well be the most powerful tool for combating world poverty that we''ve ever had. 　　Of course, the use of the Internet isn'' t the only way to defeat poverty. And the Internet is not the only tool we have. But it has enormous potential. 　　To take advantage of this tool, some impoverished countries will have to get over their outdated anti-colonial prejudices with respect to foreign investment. Countries that still think foreign investment is an invasion of their sovereignty might well study the history of infrastructure (the basic structural foundations of a society) in the United States. When the United States built its industrial infrastructure, it didn''t have the capital to do so. And that is why America'' s Second Wave infrastructure―including roads, harbors, highways, ports and so on--were built with foreign investment. The English, the Germans, the Dutch and the French were investing in Britain'' s former colony. They financed them. Immigrant Americans built them. Guess who owns them now? The Americans. I believe the same thing would be true in places like Brazil or anywhere else for that matter. The more foreign capital you have　helping you build your Third Wave infrastructure, which today is an electronic infrastructure, the better off you'' re going to be. That doesn'' t mean lying down and becoming fooled, or letting foreign corporations run uncontrolled. But it does mean recognizing how important they can be in building the energy and telecom infrastructures needed to take full advantage of the Internet.

阅读理解Passage 1 As falling house prices and tightening credit squeeze Americas economy, some worry that the country may suffer a decade of stagnation, as Japan did after its bubble burst in the early 1990s

阅读理解Text 3 In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences, that it is not even questioned

阅读理解Passage 3 When people move from one city or country to another, the spread of diseases may result. People often bring in germs (病菌) that may not have been present there before. These new germs can spread quickly and cause previously unknown diseases. If a germ is completely new to a region, people who already live there have no natural protection against it. As a result, they become ill more easily and die more often. In turn, newcomers may catch diseases that were not present in their own country. If they go back, they may carry the diseases with them and spread the diseases there, too. Changes in the heating system of a building can also lead to disease. In the 1970s, there was a worldwide shortage of heating oil. As a result, hotels in the United Sate lowered the temperature in their heating systems in order to save fuel. This low temperature led to a deadly germ that grows in heating pipes. When the heated air was blown into the rooms of a hotel, it carried the germs. Many visitors became ill and several died.The spread of new diseases may result from the move of people who _____.

阅读理解Passage 1 Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage: In 2014, older Americans fell 29 million times, leading to 7 million injuries, according to a report published last week

阅读理解They decided to open a second store because they __________.

阅读理解According to the writer, the main problem with the development of human cloning technology is that___________. 

阅读理解Years ago, doctors often said that pain was a normal part of life

阅读理解All but the tiniest of roads have to have names so they can be recognized on a map, and so people can ask directions to them

阅读理解Directions: There are 3 passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A., B., C. and D.. You should decide on the best choice and write the answer on the Answer Sheet.Passage twoThe first flying vertebrates were true reptiles in which one of the fingers of the front limbs became very elongated, providing support for a flap of stretched skin that served as a wing. These were the pterosaurs, literally the “winged lizards.” The earliest pterosaurs arose near the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic Era, some 70 million years before the first known fossils of true birds occur, and they presumably dominated the skies until they were eventually displaced by birds. Like the dinosaurs, some the pterosaurs became gigantic; the largest fossil discovered is of an individual that had a wingspan of 50 feet or more, larger than manyairplanes. These flying reptiles had large tooth-filled jaws, but their bodies were small and probably without the necessary powerful muscles for sustained wing movement. They must have been expert gliders, not skillful fliers, relying on wind power for their locomotion.Birds, despite sharing common reptilian ancestors with pterosaurs, evolved quite separately and have been much more successful in their dominance of the air. They are an example of a common theme in evolution, the more or less parallel development of different types of body structure and function for the same reason—in this case, for flight. Although the fossil record, as always, is not complete enough to determine definitively the evolutionary lineage of the birds or in as much detail as one would like, it is better in this case than for many other animal groups. That is because of the unusual preservation in a limestone quarry in southern Germany of Archaeopteryx, a fossil that many have called the link between dinosaurs and birds. Indeed, had it not been for the superb preservation of these fossils, they might well have been classified as dinosaurs. They have the skull and teeth of a reptile as well as a bony tail, but in the line-grained limestone in which these fossils occur there are delicate impressions of feathers and fine details of bone structure that make it clear that Archaeopteryx was a bird. All birds living today, from the great condors of the Andes to the tiniest wrens, trace their origin back to the Mesozoic dinosaurs.

阅读理解 Crying is hardly an activity encouraged by society. Tears, whether they are of sorrow, anger, or joy, typically make Americans feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. The shedder of tears is likely to apologize, even when a devastating tragedy was the provocation. The observer of tears is likely to do everything possible to put an end to the emotional outpouring. But judging from recent studies of crying behavior, links between illness and crying and the chemical composition of tears, both those responses to tears are often inappropriate and may even be counterproductive. Humans are the only animals definitely known to shed emotiomal tears. Since evolution has given rise to few, if any, purposeless physiological responses, it is logical to assume that crying has one or more functions that enhance survival. Although some observers have suggested that crying is a way to elicit assistance from others (as a crying baby might from its mother), the shedding of tears is hardly necessary to get help. Vocal cries would have been quite enough, more likely than tears to gain attention. So, it appears, there must be something special about tears themselves. Indeed, the new studies suggest that emotional tears may play a direct role in alleviating stress. University of Minnesota researchers who are studying the chemical composition of tears have recently isolated two important chemicals from emotional tears. Both chemicals are found only in tears that are shed in response to emotion. Tears shed because of exposure to cut onion would contain no such substance. Researchers at several other institutions are investigating the usefulness of tears as a means of diagnosing human ills and monitoring drugs. At Tulane University's Tear Analysis Laboratory Dr. Peter Kastl and his colleagues report that they can use tears to detect drug abuse and exposure to medication, to determine whether a contact lens fits properly of why it may be uncomfortable, to study the causes of 'dry eye' syndrome and the effects of eye surgery, and perhaps even to measure exposure to environmental pollutants. At Columbia University Dt. Liasy Faris and colleagues are studying tears for clues to the diagnosis of diseases away from the eyes. Tears can be obtained painlessly without invading the body and only tiny amounts are needed to perform highly refined analyses.

阅读理解Which of the following operations maybe dangerous?

阅读理解If we were to search through every class of society in China for the one spiritual force that influences and dominates them all, we should find it to be ancestor worship

阅读理解Task 5 Directions: The following is are caption plan.After reading it，you are required to answer each of the five questions( No.66 to No.70)in no more than three words. The answers are required to be written after the corresponding numbers on the Answer Sheet.Who will take the tourists to the hotel after they arrive in Beijing?

阅读理解 As you try to imagine yourself cruising along in the self-driving car of the future, you may think first of the technical challenges. But the more difficult challenges may have to do with ethics. Recent advances in artificial intelligence are enabling the creation of systems capable of independently pursuing goals in complex, real-world settings—often among and around people. Serf-driving cars are merely the vanguard of an approaching fleet of equally autonomous devices. As these systems increasingly invade human domains, the need to control what they are permitted to do, and on whose behalf, will become more acute. Within the next few decades, our stores, streets and sidewalks will likely be crammed with robotic devices fetching and delivering goods of every variety. How do we ensure that they respect the unstated conventions that people unconsciously follow when navigating in crowds? A debate may erupt over whether we should share our turf with machines or banish them to separate facilities. Will it be 'Integrate Our Androids!' or 'Ban the Bots!' And far more serious issues are on the horizon. Should it be permissible for an autonomous military robot to select its own targets? The current consensus in the international community is that such weapons should be under 'meaningful human control' at all times, but even this seemingly sensible constraint is ethically muddled. The expanded use of such robots may reduce military and civilian casualties and avoid collateral damage. So how many people's lives should be put at risk waiting for a human to review a robot's time-critical kill decision? Even if we can codify our principles and beliefs algorithmically, that won't solve the problem. Simply programming intelligent systems to obey rules isn't sufficient, because sometimes the right thing to do is to break those rules. Blindly obeying a posted speed limit of 55 miles an hour may be quite dangerous, for instance, if traffic is averaging 75, and you wouldn't want your self-driving car to strike a pedestrian rather than cross a double-yellow centerline. People naturally abide by social conventions that may be difficult for machines to perceive, much less follow. Finding the right balance between our personal interests and the needs of others—or society in general-is a finely calibrated human instinct, driven by a sense of fairness, reciprocity and common interest. Today's engineers, racing to bring these remarkable devices to market, are ill-prepared to design social intelligence into a machine. Their real challenge is to create civilized robots for a human world.

阅读理解Masterpieces are dumb

阅读理解Which of the following could be banned worldwide by 2040?

阅读理解Emerging from the 1980 census is the picture of a nation developing more and more regional competition, as population growth in the Northeast and Midwest reaches a near standstill. 　　This development―and its strong implications for US politics and economy in years ahead―has enthroned the South as America''s most densely populate region for the first time in the history of the nation''s head counting. 　　Altogether, the US population rose in the 1970s by 23.2 million people―numerically the third-largest growth ever recorded in a single decade. Even so, that gain adds up to only 11.4 percent, lowest in American annual records except for the Depression years. 　　Americans have been migrating south and west in larger numbers since World War Ⅱ , and the pattern still prevails. 　　Three sun-belt states―Florida, Texas and California―together had nearly 10 million more people in 1980 than a decade earlier. Among large cities, San Diego moved from 14th to 8th and San Antonio from 15th to 10th―with Cleveland and Washington D. C. , dropping out of the top 10. 　　Not all that shift can be attributed to the movement out of the snow belt, census officials say. Nonstop waves of immigrants played a role, too―and so did bigger crops of babies as yesterday''s "baby boom" generation reached its child-bearing years. 　　Moreover, demographers see the continuing shift south and west as joined by a related but newer phenomenon: More and more, Americans apparently are looking not just for places with more jobs but with fewer people, too. Some instances: 　　Regionally, the Rocky Mountain states reproved the most rapid growth rate―37.1 percent since 1970 in a vast area with only 5 percent of the US population. 　　Among states, Nevada and Arizona grew fastest of all: 63.5 and 53.1 percent respectively. Except for Florida and Texas, the top 10 in rate of growth is composed of Western state with 7.5 million people―about 9 per square mile. 　　The flight from overcrowdedness affects the migration from snow belt to more-bearable climates. Nowhere do 1980 census statistics dramatize more the American search for spacious living than in the Far West. There, California added 3.7 million to its population in the 1970s, more than any other state. 　　In that decade ,however, large numbers also migrated from California, mostly to other parts of the West. Often they chose―and still are choosing―somewhat colder climates such as Oregon, Idaho and Alaska in order to escape smog, crime and other plagues of urbanization in the Golden State. 　　As a result, California''s growth rate dropped during the 1970s, to 18.5 percent―little more than two thirds the 1960s'' growth figure and considerably below that of other Western states.

阅读理解Technically, any substance other than food that alters our bodily or mental functioning is a drug

阅读理解 Liver disease is the 12th-leading cause of death in the U.S., chiefly because once it's determined that a patient needs a new liver it's very difficult to get one. Even in case where a suitable donor match is found, there's guarantee a transplant will be successful. But researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken a huge step toward building functioning livers in the lab, successfully transplanting culture-grown livers into rats. The livers aren't grown from scratch, but rather within the infrastructure of a donor liver. The liver cells in the donor organ are washed out with a detergent that gently strips away the liver cells, leaving behind a biological scaffold of proteins and extracellular architecture that is very hard to duplicate synthetically. With all of that complicated infrastructure already in place, the researchers then seeded the scaffold (支架) with liver cells isolated from healthy livers, as well as some special endothelial cells to line the bold vessels. Once repopulated with healthy cells, these livers lived in culture for 10 days. The team also transplanted some two-day-old recellularized livers back into rats, where they continued to thrive for eight hours while connected into the rats' vascular systems. However, the current method isn't perfect and cannot seem to repopulate the blood vessels quite densely enough and the transplanted livers can't keep functioning for more than about 24 hours (hence the eight-hour maximum for the rat transplant). But the initial successes are promising, and the team thinks they can overcome the blood vessel problem and get fully functioning livers into rats within two years. It still might be a decade before the tech hits the clinic, but if nothing goes horribly wrong—and especially if stem-cell research establishes a reliable way to create health liver cells from the very patients who need transplants—lab-generated livers that are perfect matches for their recipients could become a reality.