阅读理解Every profession or trade, every art and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to designate things or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in nomenclature. Such special dialects, or jargons, are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by the devotees of the particular science or art, they have the precision of a mathematical formula. Besides, they save time, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, they are rather on the outskirts of the English language than actually within its borders. Different occupations, however, differ widely in the character of heir special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts, and other vocations, like farming and fishery, that have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary, is very old, It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very fiber of our language. Hence, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sounds; and more generally understood, than most other technicalities. The special dialects of law, medicine, divinity, and philosophy have also, in their older strata, become pretty familiar to cultivated persons, and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet every vocation still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has been much increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are coined with the greatest freedom and abandoned with indifference when they have served their turn. Most of the new coinages are confined to special discussions, and seldom get into general literature or conversation. Yet no profession is nowadays, as ail professions once were, a close guild. The lawyer, the physician, the man of science, the divine, associates freely with his fellow-creatures, and does not meet them in a merely professional way. Furthermore, what is called" popular science" makes everybody acquainted with modern views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a remote or provincial laboratory is at once reported in the newspapers, and everybody is soon talking about it -- as in the case of the Roentgen rays and wireless telegraphy. Thus our common speech is always taking up new technical terms and making them commonplace.

阅读理解Detectives are rather cynical because

阅读理解What does a man usually do when he is buying clothes?

阅读理解What is the main idea of the passage?

阅读理解What is "one of the first lessons of growing up"?

阅读理解What is the author's attitude towards the topic?

阅读理解We learn from the passage that the new character model

阅读理解Alden sees headphones as

阅读理解The chief problem in coping with foreign motorists is not so much remembering that they are different from yourself, but that they are enormously variable. Cross a frontier without adjusting and you can be in deep trouble. One of the greatest gulfs separating the driving nations is the Atlantic Ocean. More precisely, it is the mental distance between the European and the American motorist, particularly the South American motorist. Compare, for example, an English driver at a set of traffic lights with a Brazilian. Very rarely will an Englishman try to anticipate the green light by moving off prematurely. You will find the occasional sharpie who watches for the amber to come up on the adjacent set of lights. However, he will not go until he receives the lawful signal. Brazilians view the thing quite differently. If, in fact, they see traffic lights at all, they regard them as a kind of roadside decoration. The natives of North America are much more disciplined. They demonstrate this in their addiction to driving in one lane and sticking to it—even if it means settling behind some great truck for many miles. To prevent other drivers from falling into reckless ways, American motorists try always to stay close behind the vehicle in front, which can make it impossible, when all the vehicles are moving at about 55 mph, to make a real lane change. European visitors are constantly falling into this trap. They return to the Old World still flapping their arms in frustration because while driving in the States in their car they kept failing to get off the highway when they wanted to and were swept along to the next city. However, one nation above all others lives scrupulously by its traffic regulations—the Swiss. In Switzerland, if you were simply to anticipate a traffic light, the chances are that the motorist behind you would take your number and report you to the police. What is more, the police would visit you; and you would be convicted. The Swiss take their rules of the road so seriously that a driver can be ordered to appear in court and charged for speeding on hearsay alone, and very likely found guilty. There are slight regional variations among the French, German and Italian speaking areas, but it is generally safe to assume that any car bearing a CH sticker will be driven with a high degree of discipline.

阅读理解Human beings have used tools for a very long time. In some parts of the world you can still find tools that people used more than two million years ago. They made these tools by hitting one stone against another. In this way they broke off pieces from one of the stones. These chips of stone were usually sharp on one side. People used them for cutting meat and skin from dead animals, and also for making other tools out of wood. Human beings needed to use tools because they did not have sharp teeth like other meat-eating animals, such as lions and tigers. Tools helped people to get food more easily. Working with tools also helped to develop human intelligence. The human brain grew bigger, and human beings began to invent more and more tools and machines. The stone chip was one of the first tools that people used, and perhaps it is the most important. Some scientists say that it was the key to the success of mankind. Since 1960 a new kind of tool has appeared. This is the silicon chip—a little chip of silicon crystal(硅晶体). It is smaller than a finger-nail, but it can store more than a million "bits" of information. It is an electronic brain. Every year these chips get cleverer, but their size gets smaller, and their cost gets less. They are used in watches, calculators and intelligent machines that we can use in many ways. In the future we will not need to work with tools in the old way. Machines will do everything for us. They will even talk and play games with us. People will have plenty of spare time. But what will they do with it? Human beings used stone chips for more than two million years, but human life changed very little in that time. We have used silicon chips for only a few years, but life is changing faster every day. What will life be like twenty years from now? What will the world be like two million years from now?

阅读理解According to the last paragraph, what kind of criminals are the police unable to catch?

阅读理解Many of the home electric goods which are advertised as liberating the modern woman tend to have the opposite effect, because they simply change the nature of work instead of eliminating it. Machines have a certain novelty value, like toys for adults. It is certainly less tiring to put clothes in a washing machine, but the time saved does not really amount to much: the machine has to be watched, the clothes have to be carefully sorted out first, stains removed by hand, buttons pushed and water changed, clothes taken out, aired and ironed. It would be more liberating to pack it all off to a laundry and not necessarily more expensive, since no capital investment is required. Similarly, if you really want to save time you do not make cakes with an electric mixer, you buy one in a shop. If one compares the image of the woman in the women''s magazine with the goods advertised by those periodicals, one realizes how useful a projected image can be commercially. A careful balance has to be struck: if you show a labour-saving device, follow it up with a complicated recipe on the next page; on no account hint at the notion that a woman could get herself a job, but instead foster her sense of her own usefulness, emphasizing the creative aspect of her function as a housewife. So we get cake mixes where the cook simply adds an egg herself, to produce "that lovely home-baked flavour the family love", and knitting patterns that can be made by hand, or worse still, on knitting machines, which became tremendously fashionable when they were first introduced. Automatic cookers are advertised by pictures of pretty young mothers taking their children to the park, not by professional women presetting the dinner before leaving home for work.

阅读理解Nursing at Beth Israel Hospital produces the best patient care possible. If we are to solve the nursing shortage, hospital administration and doctors everywhere would do well to follow Beth Israel''s example. At Beth Israel each patient is assigned to a primary nurse who visits at length with the patient and constructs s full-scale health account that covers everything from his medical history to his emotional state. Then she writes a care plan centered on the patient''s illness but which also includes everything else that is necessary. The primary nurse stays with the patient through his hospitalization, keeping track with his progress and seeking further advice from his doctor. If a patient at Beth Israel is not responding to treatment, it is not uncommon for his nurse to propose another approach to his doctor. What the doctor at Beth Israel has in the primary nurse is a true colleague. Nursing at Beth Israel also involves a decentralized nursing administration; every floor, every unit is a self-contained organization. There are nurse-managers instead of head nurses; in addition to their medical duties they do all their own hiring and dismissing, employee advising, and they make salary recommendations. Each unit''s nurses decide among themselves who will work what shifts and when. Beth Israel''s nurse-chief ranks as an equal with other vice presidents of the hospital. She also is a member of the Medical Executive Committee, which in most hospitals includes only doctors.

阅读理解Navigation computers, now sold by most car makers, cost $ 2000 and up. No surprise, then, that they are most often found in luxury cars, like Lexus, BMW and Audi. But it is a developing technology-meaning prices should eventually drop-and the market does seem to be growing. Even at current prices, a navigation computer is impressive, It can guide you from point to point in most major cities with precise turn by-turn directions spoken by a clear human sounding voice, and written on a screen in front of the driver. The computer works with an antenna that takes signals from no fewer than three of the 24 Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. By measuring the time required for a signal to travel between the satellites and the antenna, the car''s location can be pinned down within 100 meters. The satellite signals, along with inputs on speed from a wheel speed sensor and direction from a meter, determine the car''s position even as it moves. This information is combined with a map database. Streets, land marks and points of interest are included. Most systems are basically identical. The differences come in hardware-the way the computer accepts the driver''s request for directions and the way it presents the driving instructions. On most systems, a driver enters a desired address, motorway junction or point of interest via a touch screen or disc. But the Lexus screen goes a step further: you can point to any spot on the map screen and get directions to it. BMW''s system offers set of cross hairs that can be moved across the map (you have several Choices of map scale) to pick a point you''d like to get to. Audi''s screen can be switched to TV reception. Even the voices that recite the directions can differ, with better systems like BMW''s and Lexus''s having a wider vocabulary. The instructions are available in French, German, Spanish, Dutch arid, Italian, as well as English. The driver can also choose parameters for determining the route: fastest, shortest or no freeways, for example.

阅读理解1 In the past thirty years many social changes have taken place in Britain. The greatest of these have probably been in the economic lives of women. 2 The changes have been significant, but, because tradition and prejudice can still handicap women in their working careers and personal lives, major legislation to help promote equality of opportunity and pay was passed during the 1970s. 3 At the heart of women''s changed role in society has been the rise in the number of women at work, particularly married women. As technology and society permit highly effective and generally acceptable methods of family planning there has been a decline in family size. Women as a result are involved in child-rearing for a much shorter time and related to this, there has been a rapid increase in the number of women with young children who return to work when the children are old enough not to need constant care and attention. 4 Since 1951 the proportion of married women who work has grown from just over a fifth to a half. Compared with their counterparts elsewhere on the Continent, British women comprise a relatively high proportion of the work-force, about two-fifths, but on average they work fewer hours, about 31 a week. There is still a significant difference between women''s average earnings and men''s, but the equal pay legislation which came into force at the end of 1975 appears to have helped to narrow the gap between women''s and men''s basic rates. 5 As more and more women joined the work-force in the 1960s and early 1970s there was an increase in the collective incomes of women as a whole and a major change in the economic role of large numbers of housewives. Families have come to rely on married women''s earnings as an essential part of their income, rather than as "pocket money". At the same time social roles within the family are more likely to be shared, exchanged or altered.

阅读理解It is implied in the last paragraph that, in approaching socio-cultural content in a dictionary,social thought should be given to ______.

阅读理解What accounts for the great outburst of major inventions in early America-breakthroughs such as the telegraph, the steamboat and the weaving machine? Among the many shaping factors, I would single out the country''s excellent elementary schools; a labor force that welcomed the new technology; the practice of giving premiums to inventors; and above all the American genius for nonverbal," spatial" thinking about things technological. Why mention the elementary schools? Because thanks to these schools our early mechanics ,especially in the New England and Middle Atlantic states, were generally literate and at home in arithmetic and in some aspects of geometry and trigonometry. Acute foreign observers related American adaptiveness and inventiveness to this educational advantage. As a member of a British commission visiting here in 1853 reported," With a mind prepared by thorough school discipline, the American boy develops rapidly into the skilled workman." A further stimulus to invention came from the "premium" system, which preceded our patent system and for years ran parallel with it. This approach, originated abroad, offered inventors medals, cash prizes and other incentives. In the United States, multitudes of premiums for new devices were awarded at country fairs and at the industrial fairs in major cities. Americans flocked to these fairs to admire the new machines and thus to renew their faith in the beneficence of technological advance. Given this optimistic approach to technological innovation, the American worker took readily to that special kind of nonverbal thinking required in mechanical technology. As Eugene Ferguson has pointed out," A technologist thinks about objects that cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in his mind by a visual, nonverbal process. The designer and the inventor are able to assemble and manipulate in their minds devices that as yet do not exist." This nonverbal "spatial" thinking can be just as creative as painting and writing. Robert Fulton once wrote," The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc., like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as an exhibition of his thoughts, in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea." When all these shaping forces-- schools, open attitudes, the premium system, a genius for spatial thinking -- interacted with one another on the rich U. S. mainland, they produced that American characteristic, emulation. Today that word implies mere imitation. But in earlier times it meant a friendly but competitive striving for fame and excellence.

阅读理解TEXT B I was a second-year medical student at the university, and was on my second day of rounds at a nearby hospital. My university's philosophy was to get students seeing patients early in their education. Nice idea,but it overlooked one detail:second-year students know next to nothing about medicine. Assigned to my team that day was an attending - a senior faculty member who was there mostly to make patients feel they weren't in the hands of amateurs. Many attendings were researchers who didn't have much recent hospital experience. Mine was actually an arthritis specialist. Also along was a resident (the real boss, with a staggering mastery of medicine, at least to a rookie like myself). In addition there were two interns(住院实习医生). These guys were just as green as I was，but in a scarier way: they had recently graduated from the medical school, so they were technically MDs. I began the day at 6:30 am. An intern and I did a quick check of our eight patients; later, we were to present our findings to the resident and then to the attending. I had three patients and the intern had the other five - piece of cake. But when I arrived in the room of 71-year-old Mr. Adams，he was sitting up in bed, sweating heavily and panting (喘气). He'd just had a hip operation and looked terrible. I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope, but they sounded clear. Next I checked the log of his vital signs and saw that his respiration and heart rate had been climbing, but his temperature was steady. It didn't seem like heart failure, nor did it appear to be pneumonia. So I asked Mr. Adams what he thought was going on. "It's really hot in here, Doc," he replied. So I attributed his condition to the stuffy room and told him the rest of the team would return in a few hours. He smiled and feebly waved goodbye. At 8:40 am., during our team meeting, "Code Blue Room 307!" blared from the loudspeaker. I froze. That was Mr. Adams's room. When we arrived, he was motionless. The autopsy (尸体解剖) later found Mr. Adams had suffered a massive pulmonary embolism (肺部栓塞). A blood clot had formed in his leg, worked its way to his lungs, and cut his breathing capacity in half. His symptoms had been textbook: heavy perspiration and shortness of breath despite clear lungs. The only thing was: I hadn't read that chapter in the textbook yet. And I was too scared, insecure, and proud to ask a real doctor for help. This mistake has haunted me for nearly 30 years, but what's particularly frustrating is that the same medical education system persists. Who knows how many people have died or suffered harm at the hands of students as naive as I, and how many more will?

阅读理解Scratchy throats, stuffy noses and body aches all spell misery, but being able to tell if the cause is a cold or flu may make a difference in how long the misery lasts. The American Lung Association (ALA) has issued new guidelines on combating colds and the flu, and one of the keys is being able to quickly tell the two apart, That'' s because the prescription drugs available for the flu need to be taken soon after the illness sets in. As for colds, the sooner a person starts taking over-the-counter remedy, the sooner relief will come. The common cold and the flu are both caused by viruses. More than 200 viruses can cause cold symptoms, while the flu is caused by three viruses--flu A, B and C. There is no cure for either illness, but the flu can be prevented by the flu vaccine, which is, for most people, the best way to fight the flu, according to the ALA. But if the flu does strike, quick action can help. Although the flu and common cold have many similarities, there am some obvious signs to look for. Cold symptoms such as stuffy nose, runny nose and scratchy throat typically develop gradually, and adults and teens(with a cold) often do not get a fever. On the other hand, fever is one of the characteristic features of the flu for all ages. And in general, flu symptoms including fever and chills, sore throat and body aches come on suddenly and are more severe than cold symptoms. The ALA notes that it may be particularly difficult to tell when infants and preschool age children have the flu. It advises parents to call the doctor if their small children have flu-like symptoms. Both cold and flu symptoms can be eased with over-the-counter medications as well. However, children and teens with a cold or flu should not take aspirin for pain relief because of the risk of Reye syndrome, a rare but serious condition of the liver and central nervous system. There is, of course, no vaccine for the common cold. But frequent hand washing and avoiding close contact with people who have colds can reduce the likelihood of catching one.

阅读理解One of the questions that is coming into focus as we face growing scarcity of resources of many kinds in the world is how to divide limited resources among countries. In the international development community, the conventional wisdom has been that, the 2 billion people living in poor countries could never expect to reach the standard of living that most of us in North America enjoy, simply because the world does not contain enough iron ore. protein, petroleum, and so on. At the same time, we in the United States have continued to pursue super affluence as though there were no limit, s on how much we could consume. We make up 6 percent of the world''s people; yet we consume one-third of the world''s resources. As long as the resources we consumed each year came primarily from within our own boundaries, this was largely an internal matter. But as our resources come more and more from the outside world, "outsiders" are going to have some stay over the rate at which and terms under which we consume. We will no longer be able to think in terms of "our" resources and "their" resources, but only of common resources. As Americans consuming such a disproportionate share of the world''s resources, we have to question whether or not we can continue our pursuit of super affluence in a world of scarcity. We are now reaching the point where we must carefully examine the presumed link between our level of well-being and the level of material goods consumed. If you have only one crust of bread, then an additional crust of bread doesn''t make that much different. In the eyes of most of the world today, Americans have their loaf of bread and are asking for still more. People elsewhere are beginning to ask why. This is the question we''re going to have to answer, whether we''re trying to persuade countries to step up their exports of oil to us or trying to convince them that we ought to be permitted to maintain our share of the world fish catch. The prospect of a scarcity of, and competition for, the world''s resources requires that we reexamine the way in which we relate to the rest of the world. It means we find ways of cutting back on resource consumption that is dependent on the resources and cooperation of other countries, We cannot expect people in these countries to concern themselves with our worsening energy and food shortages unless we demonstrate some concern for the hunger, illiteracy and disease that are diminishing life for them.