单选题American education is every bit as polarized, red and blue, as American politics. On the crimson, conservative end of the spectrum are those who adhere to the back-to-basics credo: Kids, practice those spelling words and times tables, sit still and listen to the teacher; school isn"t meant to be fun—hard work builds character. On the opposite, indigo extreme are the currently unfashionable "progressives", who believe that learning should be like breathing— natural and relaxed, that school should take its cues from a child"s interests. As in politics, good sense lies toward the center, but the pendulum keeps sweeping sharply from right to left and back again. And the kids end up whiplashed. Since the Reading Wars of the 1990s, the U.S. has largely gone red. Remember the Reading Wars? In the 1980s, educators embraced "whole language" as the key to teaching kids to love reading. Instead of using "See Dick and Jane Run" primers, grade-school teachers taught reading with authentic kid lit: storybooks by respected authors, like Eric Carle (Polar Bear, Polar Bear). They encouraged 5-and 6-year-olds to write with "inventive spelling". It was fun. Teachers felt creative. The founders of whole language never intended it to displace the teaching of phonics or proper spelling, but that"s what happened in many places. The result was a generation of kids who couldn"t spell, including a high percentage who had to be turned over to special Ed instructors to learn how to read. That eventually ushered in the current joyless back-to-phonics movement, with its endless hours of reading-skill drills. Welcome back, Dick and Jane. Now we"re into the Math Wars. With American kids foundering on state math exams and getting clobbered on international tests by their peers in Singapore and Belgium, parents and policymakers have been searching for a culprit. They"ve found it in the math equivalent of whole language—so-called fuzzy math, an object of parental contempt from coast to coast. Fuzzy math, properly called reform math, is the bastard child of teaching standards introduced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (N.C.T.M) in 1989. Like whole language, it was a sensible approach that got distorted into a parody of itself. The reform standards, for instance, called for teaching the uses of a calculator and estimation, but some educators took that as a license to stop drilling the multiplication tables, skip past long division and give lots of partial credit for wrong answers. "Some of the textbooks and materials were absolutely hideous," says R. James Milgram, a professor of mathematics at Stanford. Adding to the math morass was the fact that 49 states (all but Iowa) devised their own math standards, with up to 100 different goals for each grade level. Textbook publishers responded with textbooks that tried to incorporate every goal of every state. "There are some 700-page third-grade math books out there," says N.C.T.M."s current president Francis Fennell, professor of education at Maryland"s McDaniel College. Now the N.C.T.M. itself has come riding to the rescue. In a notably slim document, it has identified just three essential goals, or "focal points", for each grade from pre-K to eighth, none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance, the group recommends focusing on the quick recall of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of decimals and the ability to measure and compute the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes. "Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get conversations going at the state level about what really is important." In recent weeks, that"s begun to happen. Florida and Utah and half a dozen other states are talking about revising their math standards to match the pared-down approach. That pleases academic mathematicians like Milgram, who notes that this kind of instruction is what works in math-proficient nations like Singapore. So do we have a solution to the national math problem? We certainly have the correct formula. The question is, can we apply it? Already the N.C.T.M."s focal points are being called a back-to-basics movement, another swing of the ideological pendulum rather than a fresh look at what it would take to get more kids to calculus by 12th grade. If the script follows that of the Reading Wars, what comes next will be dreary times tables recitals in unison, dull new books that fail to inspire understanding, and drill, drill, drill, much like the unhappy scenes in many of today"s "Reading First" classrooms. And that would be just another kind of math fiasco—of the red variety. Kids will learn their times tables for sure, but they"ll also learn to hate math.

单选题Questions 15～18

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单选题If the claim made by Feinberg in Para. 2 should turn out to be tree, which of the following must also be true?

单选题Questions 6-10 It"s 10 p. m. You may not know where your child is. But the chip does. The chip will also know if your child has fallen and needs immediate help. Once paramedics arrive, the chip will also be able to tell the rescue workers which drugs little Johnny or Janic is allergic to. At the hospital, the chip will tell doctors his or her complete medical history. And of course, when you arrive to pick up your child, settling the hospital bill with your health insurance policy will be a simple matter of waving your own chip--the one embedded in your hand. To some, this may sound far-fetched. But the technology for such chips is no longer the stuff of science fiction. And it may soon offer many other benefits besides locating lost children or elderly Alzheimer patients. "Down the line, it could be used as credit cards and such," says Chris Hables Gray, a professor of cultural studies of science and technology at the University of Great Falls in Montana, "A lot of people won"t have to carry wallets anymore," he says, "what the implications are for this technology, in the long run, is profound. " Indeed, some are already wondering what this sort of technology may do to the sense of personal privacy and liberty. "Any technology of this kind is easily abusive of personal privacy. " says Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If a kid is trackable, do you want other people to be able to track your kid? It"s a double-edged sword. " Tiny Chips That Know Your Name The research of embedding microchips isn"t entirely new. Back in 1988, Brian Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University in London, implanted a chip into his arm as an experiment to see if Warwick"s computer could wirelessly track his whereabouts with the university"s building. But Applied Digital Solutions, Inc, in Palm Beach, Fla. is one of the latest to try and push the experiments beyond the realm of academic research and into the hands--and bodies--of ordinary humans. The company says it has recently applied to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin testing its VeriChip device in humans. About the size of a grain of rice, the microchip can be encoded with bits of information and implanted in humans under a layer of skin. When scanned by a nearby reader, the embedded chip yields the data--says an ID number that links to a computer database file containing more detailed information. Chipping Blocks Most embedded chip designs are so-called passive chip which yield information only when scanned by a nearby reader. But active chips--such as the proposed Digital Angel of the future--will need to beam out information all the time. And that means designers will have to develop some sort of power source that can provide a continuous source of energy, yet be small enough to be embedded with the chips. Another additional barrier, developing tiny GPS receiver chips that could be embedded yet still is sensitive enough to receive signals from thousands of miles out in space. In addition to technical hurdles, many suspect that all sorts of legal and privacy issues would have to be cleared as well.

单选题Questions 16-20 California is a land of variety and contrast. Almost every type of physical land feature, sort of arctic ice fields and tropical jungles can be found within its borders. Sharply contrasting types of land often lie very close to one another. People living in Bakersfield, for instance, can visit the Pacific Ocean and the coastal plain, the fertile San Joaquin Valley, the arid Mojave Desert, and the high Sierra Nevada, all within a radius of about 100 miles. In other areas it is possible to go snow skiing in the morning and surfing in the evening of the same day, without having to travel long distance. Contrast abounds in California. The highest point in the United States (outside Alaska) is in California, and so is the lowest point (including Alaska). Mount Whitney, 14,494 feet above sea level, is separated from Death Valley, 282 feet below sea level, by a distance of only 100 miles. The two areas have a difference in altitude of almost three miles. California has deep, clear mountain lakes like Lake Tahoe, the deepest in the country, but it also has shallow, salty desert lakes. It has Lake Tulainyo, 12,020 feet above sea level, and the lowest lake in the country, the Salton Sea, 236 feet below sea level Some of its lakes, like Owens Lake in Death Valley, are not lakes at all.. they are dried-up lake beds. In addition to mountains, lakes, valleys, deserts, and plateaus, California has its Pacific coastline, stretching longer than the coastlines of Oregon and Washington combined.

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单选题Questions 27-30

单选题The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx once widely spoken on the isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning, however, has helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe"s regional languages, spoken by more than a half million of the country"s three million people. The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster, implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the club-Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union. The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western Europe-only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living. Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue. And Wales now boasts a national airline. Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means "land of compatriots", is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation"s symbol since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere-on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell phone covers. "Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-class citizens," said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod, Wales"s annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the sounds of new Welsh bands. "There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence", Dyfan continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago. "We used to think. We can"t do anything, we"re only Welsh. Now I think that"s changing."

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单选题 Since the late 1960s, another image of "one world" has edged its way into contemporary consciousness--the globe in its physical finiteness. We share in "humanity", we are connected by the "world market", but we are condemned to one destiny because we are inhabitants of one planet. This is the message conveyed by the first photograph of the "one world", taken from outer space, which has irresistibly emerged as the icon of our age. The photo shows the planet suspended in the vastness of the universe and impresses on everybody the fact that the Earth is one body. Against the darkness of infinity, the circular Earth offers itself as an abode, a bounded place. The sensation of being on and inside it strikes the onlooker almost instantly. The unity of the world is now documented. It can be seen everywhere. It jumps out at you from book covers, T-shirt and commercials. In the age of TV, photographs are our eyewitness. For the first time in history, the planet is revealed in its solitude. From now on, "One world" means physical unity; it means "one Earth". The unity of mankind is no longer an Enlightenment fancy or a commercial act but a biophysical fact. However, this physical interconnectedness stands in relief against the background of proliferating dangers. From creeping desertification to impending climate disaster, alarm signals multiply. The biosphere is under attack and threatens to cave in. Local acts such as driving a car or clearing a forest add up, when multiplied, to global imbalances. They turn beneficial cycles into vicious ones that undermine the reliability of nature. In the face of incalculable debacles, concerned voices call for a global political coherence which would match the biophysical interconnections. "The Earth is one but the world is not. We all depend on one biosphere for sustaining our lives." After having intoned this leitmotiv, the Brundtland Reports spells out the fateful new meaning of unity. The Brundtland Report, the leading document on development policy in the late 1980s, takes unity for granted, but a unity which is now the result of a threat.

单选题 Over the last decade, demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like breast enlargement and nose jobs, has increased by more than 400 per cent. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal. "What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures. They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that." In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centers on what age people should be before going under the knife. New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Imber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea if waiting until one need a heroic transformation is silly," he says. "By then, you've wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand." Dr. Imber draws the line at operating on people who are under 18, however, "It seems that someone we don't consider old enough to order a drink shouldn't be considering plastic surgery." In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous. But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people. Dr. Davie, who claims to "cater for the average person", agrees. He says: "I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, ￡3,000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday." Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anaesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Yet, as one woman who recently paid ￡2,500 for liposuction to remove cellulite from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery veteran is a deceptively gentle one. "I had my legs done because they'd been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective that it whetted my appetite. Now I don't think there's any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it."

单选题Questions 1～5 According to the old Jewish stories, the world was in a sad state. The hand of man was lifted against his neighbor. People murdered and stole from each other. It was not safe for a girl to leave her home, lest she be kidnapped by the boys in the neighboring villages. Jehovah, the God of the Israelites, wanted to begin civilization again, hoping that a new generation would prove to be more obedient to his will. In those days there lived a man called Noah. He was descendant of Seth, a younger brother of Cain and Abel, who was born after the family tragedy had taken place. Noah was a good man who tried to be at peace with his conscience and with his fellowmen. If the human race had to began once more, Noah would make a very good ancestor. Jehovah therefore decided to kill all other people, but spare Noah. He came to Noah and told him to build a ship. The vessel was to be four hundred and fifty feet long and thirty feet wide and it was to have a depth of forty-three feet. So Noah and his faithful workmen cut down large cypress trees and laid the kneel and built the sides and covered them with pitch, that the hold might be dry. When the third deck had been finished, a roof was built. It was made of heavy timber, to withstand the violence of the rain that was to pour down upon this wicked earth. Then Noah and his household, his three sons and their wives, made ready for the voyage. They went into the fields and into the mountains and gathered all the animals they could find that they might have beasts for food and for sacrifices when they should return to dry land. A whole week they hunted successfully. And then the "Ark" (for so was the ship called) was full of the noises of the various creatures who did not like their cramped quarters. On the evening of the seventh day, Noah and his family went on board. Later that night, it began to rain. It rained for forty nights and forty days. At the end of this time, the whole world was covered with water, Noah and his fellow travelers in the Ark were the only living things to survive this terrible deluge. Finally, a new wind swept the clouds away. Once more the rays of the sun rested upon the turbulent waves as they had done when the world was first created. Noah opened a window on the Ark and peered out. His ship floated peacefully in the midst of an endless ocean, and no land was in sight. To see if there was dry land, Noah sent out a raven, but the bird came back. Next he sent a pigeon. Pigeons can fly longer than almost any other bird, but the poor thing could not find a single branch upon which to rest, and it also came back to Ark. He waited a week, and once more he set the pigeon free. It was gone all day, but in the evening it returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak. The waters were receding. Another week went by before Noah released the pigeon for the third time. It did not return and this was a good sign. So afterward the Ark landed on the top of Mount Ararat, in the country which is now called Armenia. The next day Noah went ashore. At once he took some stones and built an altar, and then killed a number of his animals to make a sacrifice for Jehovah. And behold, the sky was bright with the colors of a mighty rainbow. It was a sign from Jehovah to his faithful servant, promising never again would he destroy the entire earth.

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单选题 Woodrow Wilson was referring to the liberal idea of the economic market when he said that the free enterprise system is the most efficient economic system. Maximum freedom means maximum productiveness; our "openness" is to be the measure of our stability. Fascination with this ideal has made Americans defy the "Old World" categories of settled possessiveness versus unsettling deprivation, a "status quo" defended or attacked. The United States, it was believed, had no status quo ante. Our only "station" was the turning of a stationary wheel, spinning faster and faster. We did not base our system on property but opportunity—which meant we based it not on stability but on mobility. The more things changed, that is, the more rapidly the wheel turned, the steadier we would be. The conventional picture of class politics is composed of the Haves, who want a stability to keep what they have, and the Have-Nots, who want a touch of instability and change in which to scramble for the things they have not. But Americans imagined a condition in which speculators, self-makers, runners are always using the new opportunities given by our land. These economic leaders (front-runners) would thus be mainly agents of change. The nonstarters were considered the ones who wanted stability, a strong referee to give them some position in the race, a regulative hand to calm manic speculation; an authority that can call things to a halt, begin things again from compensatorily staggered "starting lines." "Reform" in America has been sterile because it can imagine no change except through the extension of this metaphor of a race, wider inclusion of competitors, "a piece of the action," as it were, for the disenfranchised. There is no attempt to call off the race. Since our only stability is change, America seems not to honor the quiet work that achieves social interdependence and stability. There is, in our legends, no heroism of the office clerk, no stable industrial work force of the people who actually make the system work. There is no pride in being an employee (Wilson asked for a return to the time when everyone was an employer). There has been no boasting about our social workers--they are merely signs of the system's failure, of opportunity denied or not taken, of things to be eliminated. We have no pride in our growing interdependence, in the fact that our system can serve others, that we are able to help those in need; empty boasts from the past make us ashamed of our present achievements, make us try to forget or deny them, move away from them. There is no honor but in the Wonderland race we must all run, all trying to win, none winning in the end (for there is no end).

单选题 Directions: In this section, you will read several passages. Each passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to choose ONE best answer, (A), (B), (C) or (D), to each question. Answer all the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Questions 1-5 The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shakleton, Scott, and Amundsen caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modern science and inventions are revolutionizing the endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable and hardly comparable. Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the work. Once their labors are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes. The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light which make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter- continental air services by making these areas as light as day. Present flying routes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey. The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his parties were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigors of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sickness and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the latter keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world. Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few years ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavor.

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单选题 {{B}}Questions 11-14{{/B}}

单选题The author mentioned "a string of crimes" in paragraph 2 to show that ______.

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