阅读理解Americans today dont place a very high value on intellect

阅读理解Passage 3 The scientific name is the Holocene Age, but climatologists like to call our current climatic phase the Long Summer

阅读理解According to paragraph 2, it seems true that the Atlantic Ocean______ 

阅读理解Certainly no creature in the sea is odder than the common sea cucumber. All living creatures, especially human beings, have their peculiarities, but everything about the little sea cucumber seems unusual. What else can be said about a bizarre animal that, among other eccentricities, eats mud, feeds almost continuously day and night but can live without eating for long periods, and can be poisonous but is considered supremely edible by gourmets?For some fifty million years, despite all its eccentricities, the sea cucumber has subsisted on its diet of mud. It is adaptable enough to live attached to rocks by its tube feet (棘皮动物的管足)，under rocks in shallow water, or on the surface of mud flats. Common in cool water on both Atlantic and Pacific shores, it has the ability to suck up mud or sand and digest whatever nutrients are present.Sea cucumbers come in a variety of colors, ranging from black to reddish-brown to sand-color and early white. One form even has vivid purple tentacles. Usually the creatures are cucumber-shaped—hence their name—and because they are typically rock inhabitants, this shape, combined with flexibility, enables them to squeeze into crevices where they are safe from predators and ocean currents.Although they have voracious appetites, eating day and night, sea cucumbers have the capacity to become motionless and live at a low metabolic rate—feeding sparingly or not at all for long periods, so that the marine organisms that provide their food have a chance to multiply. If it were not for this faculty, they would devour all the food available in short time and would probably starve themselves out of existence.But the most spectacular thing about the sea cucumber is the way it defends itself. Its major enemies are fish and crabs. When attacked, it squirts all its internal organs into the water. It also casts off attached structures such as tentacles. The sea cucumber will eviscerate and regenerate itself when it is attacked or even touched; it will do the same if the surrounding water temperature is too high or if the water becomes too polluted.

阅读理解Text 4 Extraordinary creative activity has been characterized as revolutionary, flying in the face of what is established andproducing not what is acceptable but what will become accepted

阅读理解What is the author’s attitude towards music?

阅读理解Nowadays you can’t buy anything without then being asked to provide a rating of a company’s performance on a five-star scale. I’ve been asked to rate my store 【C1】________ on the EFTPOS terminal before I can pay. Even the most【C2】________activities, such as calling Telstra or picking up a parcel from Australia Post, are followed by texts or emails with surveys asking, How did we do? Online purchases are【C3】________followed up by a customer satisfaction survey. Companies are so【C4】________for a hit of stars that if you delete the survey the company sends you another one. We’re【C5】________to rate our apps when we’ve barely had a chance to use them. One online course provider I use asks you what you think of the course after you’ve only completed【C6】________2 per cent of it. Economist Jason Murphy says that companies use customer satisfaction ratings because a【C7】________display of star feedback has become the nuclear power sources of the modern economy. However, you can’t help but【C8】________if these companies are basing their business on fabrications (捏造的东西). I 【C9】________that with online surveys 1 just click the【C10】________that’s closest to my mouse cursor (光标) to get the damn thing off my screen. Often the star rating I give has far more to do with the kind of day I’m having than the purchase 1 just made.A)announceB) commonplacC) confessD) desperateE) experienceF) fascinatedG) optionH)promptedI) roughlyJ) routinelyK) shiningL)ShoweringM) varietN) voyageO) wonder

阅读理解Passage 2 New technology links the world as never before

阅读理解 If you listen to American music, watch American television or magazines, you will probably agree that the most popular subject of these forms of entertainment is love. Romantic love always finds an audience in the United States. Falling in love, solving the problems of love, and achieving the happy ending—the big wedding are subjects of interest to the adult as well as the teenage public. Millions of Americans celebrates Valentine's Day with special cards and gifts that announces their love to their mates, their friends, their co-workers and their families. Popular songs tell us that 'all the world loves a lover'. A popular saying is 'Love conquers all'. Numerous columns in magazines and newspapers offer advice to the lovelorn, those with difficulties of the heart. To most Americans, romantic love is essential to a happy life. Not only do Americans believe in romantic love but they also believe that it is the best basis for marriage. Despite the high divorce rate in the United States, young men and women continue to marry on the basis of romantic love. Americans consider marriage to private arrangement between the two people involved. Young Americans feel free to choose their own marriage partners from any social, economic, or religious background. The man or woman may have strong ties with parents, brothers, or sisters, but when he or she falls in love, the strongest feelings are supposed to be for the loved one. When an American couple marries, they generally plan to live apart from both sets of parents and build their own independent family structure.

阅读理解Passage 4 When Columbus reached the New World, corn was the most widely grown plant in the Americas

阅读理解 If you are anything like me, you left the theater after Sex and the City 2 and thought, there ought to be a law against a looks-based culture in which the only way for 40-year-old actresses to be compensated like 40-year-old actors is to have them look and dress like the teenage daughters of 40-year-old actors. Meet Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor who proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race. In a provocative new book, The Beauty Bias, Rhode lays out the case for an America in which appearance discrimination is no longer allowed. That means Hooters can't fire its servers for being too heavy, as allegedly happened last month to a waitress in Michigan who says she received nothing but excellent reviews but weighed 132 pounds. Rhode is at her most persuasive when arguing that in America, discrimination against unattractive women and short men is as pernicious and widespread as bias based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Rhode cites research to prove her point: 11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they'd rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. And all of this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry and soaring rates of elective cosmetic surgery. Rhode reminds us how Hillary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor were savaged by the media for their looks, and says it's no surprise that Sarah Palin paid her makeup artist more than any member of her staff in her run for the vice presidency. And the problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It's not just American men who like things this way. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. To put it another way, appearance bias is a massive societal problem with tangible economic costs that most of us—perhaps especially women—perpetuate each time we buy a diet pill or sneer at fat women. This doesn't mean we shouldn't work toward eradicating discrimination based on appearance. But it may mean recognizing that the law won't stop us fi'om discriminating against the overweight, the aging, and the imperfect, so long as it's the quality we all hate most in ourselves.

阅读理解Passage One If the new art is not accessible to everyone, which certainly seems to be the case, this implies that its impulses are not of a generically human kind

阅读理解Frank was a wonderful teacher

阅读理解Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage

阅读理解Money spent on advertising is money spent as well as any I know of. It serves directly to assist a rapid distribution of goods at reasonable prices, thereby establishing a firm home market and so making it possible to provide for export at competitive prices. By drawing attention to new ideas it helps enormously to raise standards of living. By helping to increase demand it ensures an increased need for labour, and is therefore an effective way to fight unemployment. It lowers the costs of many services: without advertisements your daily newspaper would cost four times as much, the price of your television licence would need to be doubled and travel by bus or tube would cost 20 percent more. 　　And perhaps most important of all, advertising provides a guarantee of reasonable value in the products and services you buy. Apart from the fact that twenty-seven Acts of Parliament govern the terms of advertising, no regular advertiser dare promote a product that fails to live up to the promise of his advertisements. He might fool some people for a little while through misleading advertising. He will not do so for long, for mercifully the public has the good sense not to buy the inferior article more than once. If you see an article consistently advertised, it is the surest proof I know that the article does what is claimed for it, and that it represents good value. 　　Advertising does more for the material benefit of the community than any other force I can think of. 　　There is one point I feel I ought to touch on. Recently I heard a well-known television personality declare that he was against advertising because it persuades rather than informs. He was drawing excessively fine distinctions. Of course advertising seeks to persuade. 　　If its message were confined merely to information―and that in itself would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtlety persuasive advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention. But perhaps that is what the well-known television personality wants.

阅读理解Now let us look at how we read. When we read a printed text, our eyes move across a page in short,jerky movement. We recognize words usually when our eyes are still when they fixate. Each timethey fixate, we see a group of words. This is known as the recognition span or the visual span. Thelength of time in which the eyes stop — the duration of the fixation — varies considerably fromperson to person. It also varies within any one person according to his purpose in reading and hisfamiliarity with the text. Furthermore, it can be affected by such factors as lighting and tiredness.Unfortunately, in the past, many reading improvement courses have concentrated too much on howour eyes move across the printed page. As a result of this misleading emphasis on the purely visualaspects of reading, numerous exercises have been devised to train the eyes to see more words at onefixation. For instance, in some exercises, words are flashed on to a screen for, say, a tenth or atwentieth of a second. One of the exercises has required students to fix their eyes on some centralpoint, taking in the words on either side. Such word patterns are often constructed in the shape ofrather steep pyramids so the reader takes in more and more words at each successive fixation. Allthese exercises are very clever, but it’s one thing to improve a person’s ability to see words and quiteanother thing to improve his ability to read a text efficiently. Reading requires the ability tounderstand the relationship between words. Consequently, for these reasons, many experts have nowbegun to question the usefulness of eye training, especially since any approach which trains a personto read isolated words and phrases would seem unlikely to help him in reading a continuous text.

阅读理解 If you are reading this article, antibiotics have probably saved your life—and not once but several times. A rotten tooth, a knee operation, a brush with pneumonia; any number of minor infections that never turned nasty. You may not remember taking the pills, so unremarkable have these one-time wonder drugs become. Modern medicine relies on antibiotics—not just to cure diseases, but to augment the success of surgery, childbirth and cancer treatments. Yet now health authorities are warning, in uncharacteristically apocalyptic terms, that the era of antibiotics is about to end. In some ways, bacteria are continually evolving to resist the drugs. But in the past we've always developed new ones that killed them again. Not this time. Infections that once succumbed to everyday antibiotics now require last-resort drugs with unpleasant side effects. Others have become so difficult to treat that they kill some 25,000 Europeans yearly. And some bacteria now resist every known antibiotic. Regular readers will know why: New Scientist has reported warnings about this for years. We have misused antibiotics appallingly, handing them out to humans like medicinal candy and feeding them to livestock by the tonne, mostly not for health reasons but to make meat cheaper. Now antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be found all over the world—not just in medical facilities, but everywhere from muddy puddles in India to the snows of Antarctica(南极洲). How did we reach this point without viable successors to today's increasingly ineffectual drugs? The answer lies not in evolution but economics. Over the past 20 years, nearly every major pharmaceutical company has abandoned antibiotics. Companies must make money, and there isn't much in short-term drugs that should be used sparingly. So researchers have discovered promising candidates, but can't reach into the deep pockets needed to develop them. This can be fixed. As we report this week, regulatory agencies, worried medical bodies and Big Phar-ma are finally hatching ways to remedy this market failure. Delinking profits from the volume of drug sold (by adjusting patent rights, say, or offering prizes for innovation) has worked for other drugs, and should work for antibiotics—although there may be a worryingly long wait before they reach the market. One day, though, these will fall to resistance too. Ultimately, we need, evolution-proof cures for bacterial infection: treatments that stop bacteria from causing disease, but don't otherwise inconvenience the little blighters. When resisting drugs confers no selective advantage, drugs will stop breeding resistance. Researchers have a couple of candidates for such treatment. But they fear regulators will drag their feet over such radical approaches. That, too, can be fixed. We must not neglect development of the sustainable medicine we need, the way we have neglected simple antibiotic R D. If we do, one day another top doctor will be telling us that the drugs no longer work—and there really will be no help on the way.

阅读理解Passage 1 In the corporate world, a perennial time-scarcity problemafflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years

阅读理解 Like most people, I was brought up to look upon life as a process of getting. It was not until in my late thirties that I made this important discovery: giving away makes life so much more exciting. You need not worry if you lack money. This is how I experimented with giving away. If an idea for improving the window display of a neighborhood store flashes to me, I step in and make the suggestion to the storekeeper. One discovery I made about giving away is that it is almost impossible to give away anything in this world without getting something back, though the return often comes in an unexpected form. One Sunday morning the local post office delivered an important special delivery letter to my home, though it was addressed to me at my office. I wrote the postmaster a note of appreciation. More than a year later I needed a post office box for a new business I was starting. I was told at the window that there were no boxes left, and that my name would have to go on a long waiting list. As I was about to leave, thepostmaster appeared in the doorway. He had overheard our conversation. 'Wasn't it you that wrote us that letter a year ago about delivering a special delivery to your home?' I said yes. 'Well, you certainly are going to have a box in this post office if we have to make one for you. You don't know what a letter like that means to us. We usually get nothing but complaints. '

阅读理解Which of the following would be the best title for this passage?