单选题 The medical world is gradually realizing that the quality of the environment in hospitals may play a significant role in the process of recovery from illness. As part of a nationwide effort in Britain to bring art out of the galleries and into public places, some of the country's most talented artists have been called in to transform older hospitals and to soften the hard edges of modern buildings. Of the 2,500 National Health Service hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have significant collections of contemporary art in corridors, waiting areas and treatment rooms. These recent initiatives owe a great deal to one artist, Peter Senior, who set up his studio at a Manchester hospital in northeastern England during the early 1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and that art should be enjoyed by a wider audience. A typical hospital waiting room might have as many as 500 visitors each week. What better place to hold regular exhibitions of art? Senior held the first exhibition of his own paintings in the out-patients waiting area of the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to be Britain's first hospital artist, Senior was so much in demand that he was soon joined by a team of six young art school graduates. The effect is striking. Now in the corridors and waiting rooms the visitor experiences a full view of fresh colors, playful images and restful courtyards. The quality of the environment may reduce the need for expensive drugs when a patient is recovering from an illness. A study has shown that patients who had a view onto a garden needed half the number of strong pain killers compared with patients who had no view at all or only a brick wall to look at.

单选题 中国致力于建设对创业创新者最具吸引力的国度，吸引力不仅来自巨大的市场需求，更来自完善的法制体系、规范的市场环境和包容的文化氛围。中国政府不断加大知识产权保护(IPR protection)力度，坚决打击知识产权侵权(IPR infringements)、假冒(fake and counterfeit)等违法行为。保护知识产权就是保护创 新的火种，保护公平竞争的市场秩序。从根本上讲，公平竞争、诚信经营有利于中外企业持续健康发展。

单选题 Language is, and should be, a living thing, constantly enriched with new words and forms of expression. But there is a vital distinction between good developments, which add to the language, enabling us to say things we could not say before, and bad developments, which subtract from the language by rendering it less precise. A vivacious, colorful use of words is not to be confused with mere slovenliness. The kind of slovenliness in which some professionals deliberately indulge is perhaps akin to the cult (迷信) of the unfinished work, which has eroded most of the arts in our time. And the true answer to it is the same that art is enhanced, not hindered, by discipline. You cannot carve satisfactorily in butter. The corruption of written English has been accompanied by an even sharper decline in the standard of spoken English. We speak very much less well than was common among educated Englishmen a generation or two ago. The modern theatre has played a baneful (有害的) part in dimming our appreciation of language. Instead of the immensely articulate dialogue of, for example, Shaw (who was also very insistent on good pronunciation), audiences are now subjected to streams of barely literate trivia, often designed, only too well, to exhibit 'lack of communication', and larded (夹杂) with the obscenities (下流的话) and grammatical errors of the intellectually impoverished. Emily Post once advised her readers: 'The theatre is the best possible place to hear correctly-enunciated speech.' Alas, no more. One young actress was recently reported to be taking lessons in how to speak badly, so that she should fit in better. But the BBC is the worst traitor. After years of very successfully helping to raise the general standard of spoken English, it suddenly went into reverse. As the head of the Pronunciation Unit coyly (含蓄地) put it, 'In the 1960s the BBC opened the field to a much wider range of speakers.' To hear a BBC disc jockey talking to the latest ape-like pop idol is a truly shocking experience of verbal squalor. And the prospect seems to be of even worse to come. School teachers are actively encouraged to ignore little Johnny's incoherent grammar, atrocious spelling and haphazard punctuation, because worrying about such things might inhibit his creative genius.

单选题 When researcher Josh Santarpia stands at the foot of a bed, taking measurements with a device that can detect tiny, invisible particles of saliva (唾液) that come out of someone's mouth and move through the air, he can tell whether the sick person is speaking or not just by looking at the read-out on his instrument. 'So clearly, the particles which that person is putting out are being breathed in by someone that is five feet away from them, at the foot of their bed,' says Santarpia, who studies biological aerosols (气溶胶) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. 'Do they contain vires? I don't know for sure.' He and his colleagues are doing their best to find out. Already, using another device that looks like a fancy dust collector, they've sucked up air samples from 11 isolation rooms that housed 13 people who tested positive for COVID-19 infection, all of whom had a variety of mild symptoms. In those air samples, researchers found the genetic fingerprint of the virus. 'It was more than half of the samples that we took. It was fairly everywhere,' says Santarpia, 'but the concentrations were really pretty low.' Finding the genetic material doesn't necessarily mean that there's living virus that could potentially make someone sick, he cautions. Some primary evidence indicates that this might be the case, but the team wants to do more work 'and try and be as certain as we possibly can whether or not certain samples had infectious virus in them or not.' They want to know that with a high degree of confidence because the question of whether or not the coronavirus (冠状病毒) can be transported by the air is extremely controversial right now—and it's a question that has real implications for what people should do to avoid getting infected. 'I personally think that transmission by breathing in virus in the air is happening,' says Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech. But she says so far, health experts have largely discounted the possibility of transmitting this coronavirus in this way.

单选题Many people believe the glare from snow causes snow blindness. However, the U.S. Army has now 27 that glare from snow does not cause snow blindness in troops in a snow-covered country. Rather, a man's eyes frequently find nothing to focus on in a broad 28 of barren snow-covered terrain. So his gaze continually 29 and jumps back and forth over the entire landscape in search of something to look at. Finding nothing, the eyes never stop searching and the eyeballs become 30 and the eye muscles ache. Nature 31 this irritation by producing more fluid which covers the eyeball. The fluid covers the eyeball in 32 quantity until vision blurs, then is 33 , and the result is snow blindness. Experiments led the Army to a simple method of overcoming this problem. Scouts ahead of a main body of troops are trained to shake snow from evergreen bushes, creating a dotted line as they cross completely snow-covered landscape. Even the scouts themselves throw lightweight, dark colored objects 34 on which they too can focus. The men following can then see something. Their gaze is 35 . Their eyes focus on a bush and having found something to see, stop scouring the snow-blanketed landscape. By focusing their attention on one object at a time, the men can cross the snow without becoming hopelessly snow-blind or 36 . In this way the problem ofcrossing a solid white terrain is overcome. A．landscape B．lost C．blurred D．increasing E．surveyed F．away G．determined H．arrested I．defined J．shifts K．obscured L．expanse M．offsets N．ahead O．sore

单选题 With the start of BBC World Service Television, millions of viewers in Asia and America can now watch the Corporation's news coverage, as well as listen to it. And of course in Britain listeners and viewers can tune in to two BBC television channels, five BBC national radio services and dozens of local radio stations. They are brought sport, comedy, drama, music, news and current affairs, education, religion, parliamentary coverage, children's programs and films for an annual licence fee of 83 pounds per household. It is a remarkable record, stretching back over 70 years—yet the BBC's future is now in doubt. The Corporation will survive as a publicly-funded broadcasting organization, at least for the time being, but its role, its size and its programs are now the subject of a nation-wide debate in Britain. The debate was launched by the government, which invited anyone with an opinion of the BBC—including ordinary listeners and viewers—to say what was good or bad about the Corporation, and even whether they thought it was worth keeping. The reason for its inquiry is that the BBC's royal charter runs out in 1996 and it must decide whether to keep the organization as it is, or to make changes. Defenders of the Corporation—of whom there are many—are fond of quoting the American slogan 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' The BBC 'ain't broke', they say, by which they mean it is not broken (as distinct from the word 'broke', meaning having no money), so why bother to change it? Yet the BBC will have to change, because the broadcasting world around it is changing. The commercial TV channels—TV and Channel 4—were required by the Thatcher Government's Broadcasting Act to become more commercial, competing with each other for advertisers, and cutting costs and jobs. But it is the arrival of new satellite channels—funded partly by advertising and partly by viewers' subscriptions—which will bring about the biggest changes in the long term.

单选题 U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan appealed Friday for a new generation of extraordinary teachers, calling education the civil rights cause of our time. Duncan told about 100 prospective (未来的) teachers at the University of Virginia that veterans, retirees and professionals seeking a second career must pay attention to the call to teach. He said the need is especially acute for black men in the nation's classrooms. The Virginia address is the first of several Duncan will make in October to press for bright candidates to enter teaching. He'll host a virtual town meeting with teachers from around the nation on Oct. 20, then deliver a major address on teacher preparation two days later in New York City. Duncan stressed the importance of teaching as the U.S. competes with an increasingly educated global work force, saying strong education is needed to reduce dropout rates among African-American, Latino and low-income students. 'I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation,' Duncan said. 'If you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality and social injustice, the classroom is the place to start.' Duncan noted that the next four years alone could see one-third of the nation's teachers and administrators leave. The departure of veteran educators will create huge demand for new teachers—200,000 annually in good economic times, he said. Duncan stressed that the demand for teachers is greatest among 'high-poverty, high-needs' and rural schools, as well as in subjects such as math and science. 'It is especially troubling,' he added, 'that less than 2 percent of our nation's teachers are African-American males.' Duncan said the way to bring more young black men into the teaching profession is to make sure that they continue their studies and don't drop out at the high rates they do now. 'Our African male dropout rate is too high. If you're dropping out of high school you can't be a teacher,' he said. Duncan said the nation cannot rely alone on schools of education to produce the next generation of teachers. He called for expanding alternatives such as Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in schools in poor communities for at least two years.

单选题 How Should Teachers Be Rewarded? A. We never forget our best teachers—those who inspired us with a deeper understanding, or an enduring passion, the ones we come back to visit years after graduating, the educators who opened doors and altered the course of our lives. B. It would be wonderful if we knew more about such talented teachers and how to multiply their number. How do they come by their craft? What qualities and capacities do they possess? Can these abilities be measured? Can they be taught? Perhaps above all: How should excellent teaching be rewarded so that the best teachers—the most competent, caring and compelling—remain in a profession known for low pay and low status? C. Such questions have become critical to the future of public education in the U.S. Even as politicians push to hold schools and their faculty members responsible as never before for student learning, the nation faces a shortage of teaching talent. About 3.2 million people teach in U.S. public schools, but, according to an estimate made by econoraist William Hussar at the National Center for Education Statistics, the nation will need to recruit an additional 2.8 million over the next eight years owing to baby-boomer retirement, growing student enrollment and staff turnover (人员调整)—which is especially rapid among new teachers. Finding and keeping high-quality teachers are key to America's competitiveness as a nation. Recent test results show that U.S. 10th-graders ranked just 17th in science among peers from 30 nations, while in math they placed in the bottom five. Research suggests that a good teacher is the single most important factor in boosting achievement, more important than class size, the dollars spent per student or the quality of textbooks and materials. D. Across the country, hundreds of school districts are experimenting with new ways to attract, reward and keep good teachers. Many of these efforts borrow ideas from business. They include signing bonuses for hard-to-fill jobs like teaching high school chemistry, housing allowances and what might be called combat pay for teachers who commit to working in the most distressed schools. But the idea gaining the most motivation—and controversy—is merit pay, which attempts to measure the quality of teachers' work and pay teachers accordingly. E. Traditionally, public-school salaries are based on years spent on the job and college credits earned, a system favored by unions because it treats all teachers equally. Of course, everyone knows that not all teachers are equal. Just witness how hard parents try to get their kids into the best classrooms. And yet there is no universally accepted way to measure competence, much less the great charm of a truly brilliant educator. In its absence, policymakers have focused on that current measure of all things educational: student test scores. In districts across the country, administrators are devising systems that track student scores back to the teachers who taught them in an attempt to assign credit and blame and, in some cases, target help to teachers who need it. Offering bonuses to teachers who raise student achievement, the theory goes, will improve the overall quality of instruction, retain those who get the job done and attract more highly qualified candidates to the profession—all while lifting those all-important test scores. F. Such efforts have been encouraged by the government, which in 2006 started a program that awards $99 million a year in grants to districts that link teacher compensation to raising student test scores. Merit pay has also become part of the debate in Congress over how to improve the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Last summer, the president signed merit pay at a meeting of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, so long as the measure of merit is 'developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not based on some test score.' Hillary Clinton says she does not support merit pay for individual teachers but does advocate performance-based pay on a schoolwide basis. G. It's hard to argue against the notion of rewarding the best teachers for doing a good job. But merit pay has a long history in the U.S., and new programs to pay teachers according to test scores have already had an opposite effect in Florida and Houston. What holds more promise is broader efforts to transform the profession by combining merit pay with more opportunities for professional training and support, thoughtful assessments of how teachers do their jobs and new career paths for top teachers. H. To the business-minded people who are increasingly running the nation's schools, there's an obvious solution to the problems of teacher quality and teacher turnover: offer better pay for better performance. The challenge is deciding who deserves the extra cash. Merit-pay movements in the 1920s, '50s and '80s turned to failure just because of that question, as the perception grew that bonuses were awarded to principals' pets. Charges of unfairness, along with unreliable funding and union opposition, sank such experiments. I. But in an era when states are testing all students annually, there's a new, less subjective window onto how well a teacher does her job. As early as 1982, University of Tennessee statistician Sanders seized on the idea of using student test data to assess teacher performance. Working with elementary-school test results in Tennessee, he devised a way to calculate an individual teacher's contribution to student progress. Essentially, his method is this: he takes three or more years of student test results, projects a trajectory (轨迹) for each student based on past performance and then looks at whether, at the end of the year, the students in a given teacher's class tended to stay on course, soar above expectations or fall short. Sanders uses statistical methods to adjust for flaws and gaps in the data. 'Under the best circumstances,' he claims, 'we can reliably identify the top 10% to 30% of teachers.' J. Sanders devised his method as a management tool for administrators, not necessarily as a basis for performance pay. But increasingly, that's what it is used for. Today he heads a group at the North Carolina-based software firm SAS, which performs value-added analysis for North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and districts in about 15 other states. Most use it to measure schoolwide performance, but some are beginning to use value-added calculations to determine bonuses for individual teachers.