Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff furthered her reputation as an authority on Native American culture with her study of the symbols, myths, and rituals of the Huichol people.

All the students of this university have free________to the Internet via a broadband connection.

One of the things we have to do to prevent a pandemic is to make sure people understand and know what they can do to minimize the commotion .

Mary must have received my mail; otherwise she would have replied before now.

It was now clear that no such weapons were manufactured and none been found .

The________value of a coin, i. e. the value of the metal in it, is usually less than the value of what it will buy.

The scientist contested the assumption of previous scientists that the fate of human beings could not be predicated

Isolated cases of disaffection — or harbingers of a mass cross-border movement that threatens Europe's economic stability? The question is pressing.

Now which are the animals really to be pitied in captivity? First, those clever beings whose lively urge for activity can find no outlet behind the bars of the cage. This is most conspicuous, even for the uninitiated, in the case of animals which, when living in a free state, are accustomed to roaming about widely. Owing to this frustrated desire, foxes and wolves housed, in many old-fashioned zoos, in cages which are far too small, are among the most pitiable of all caged animals. Though pinioned swans generally seem happy, under proper care, by hatching and rearing their young without any trouble, at migration time things become different: they repeatedly swim to the lee side of the pond, in order to have the whole extent of its surface at their disposal, trying to take off. Again and again the grand preparations end in a pathetic flutter of their half wings; a truly sorry picture! This, however, rarely awakens the pity of the zoo visitor, least of all when such an originally highly intelligent and mentally alert animal has deteriorated, in confinement, into a crazy idiot, a very caricature of its former self. Sentimental old ladies, the fanatical sponsors of the societies for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, have no compunction in keeping a grey parrot in a relatively small cage or even chained to a perch. Together with the large corvines, the parrots are probably the only birds which suffer from that state of mind, common to prisoners, namely, boredom.

As an English major student at one of the most famous universities in China, I strongly believe that business English is more practical than other fields .

Following a year of fast development, by the first quarter of this year, China has had about 1,100 e-commerce websites.

Annie Jump Cannon, ________discovered so many stars that she was called "the census taker of the sky".

阅读理解On the Internet, ads are a real problem

阅读理解From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition

阅读理解This is offered as a textbook illustration of the principle that voters are far shrewder than most politicians believe. This case study highlighting Washington''s inability to fool anyone is based on a recent survey of the attitudes of people on Medicare about their new prescription-drug benefit. Last fall, when Congress added prescription-drug coverage to Medicare, the new law was hailed as a political masterpiece. Congressional Democrats, who overwhelmingly opposed the bill, thundered that they, too, were eager to provide a drug benefit under Medicare, but they championed alternative legislation that offered a larger drug subsidy and smaller incentives to health insurers to participate. Liberals such as Sen. Edward Kennedy were confident that the drug bill, with plenty of holes in its benefit formulas, would inevitably be expanded around the time it took effect. Not many in Congress seemed troubled that the federal budget was deep in deficit, the nation was saddled with future expenditures for the Iraq war and virtually no health care expert believed that the legislation would fit into its projected $400-billion-over-10-years cost framework. The new law was a cynical bargain that had more to do with the 2004 election than a rational approach to the prescription-drug needs of the nation''s elderly. The prescription-drug legislation seems a compromise between competing ideologies inserted into a fixed congressional budget. Put another way, it was sausage-stuffing in the guise of lawmaking. And, what no one anticipated was the reaction of the elderly, a group that votes in disproportionate numbers.

阅读理解The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American by Jeff Smith Our real American foods have come from our soil and have been used by many groups — those who already lived here and those who have come here to live. The Native Americans already had developed an interesting cuisine using the abundant foods that were so prevalent. The influence that the English had upon our national eating habits is easy to see. They were a tough lot, those English, and they ate in a tough manner. They wiped their mouths on the tablecloth, if there happened to be one, and they ate until you would expect them to burst. European travelers to this country in those days were most often shocked by American eating habits, which included too much fat and too much salt and too much liquor. Not much has changed! And, the Revolutionists refused to use the fork since it marked them as Europeans. The fork was not absolutely common on the American dinner table until about the time of the Civil War, the 1860s. Those English were a tough lot. Other immigrant groups added their own touches to the preparation of our New World food products. The groups that came still have a special sense of self-identity through their ancestral heritage, but they see themselves as Americans. This special self-identity through your ancestors who came from other lands was supposed to disappear in this country. The term melting pot was first used in reference to America in the late 1700s, so this belief that we would all become the same has been with us for a long time. Thank goodness it has never worked. The various immigrant groups continue to add flavor to the pot, all right, but you can pick out the individual flavors easily. The largest ancestry group in America is the English. There are more people in America who claim to have come from English blood than there are in England. But is their food English? Thanks be to God, it is not! It is American. The second largest group is the Germans, then the Irish, the Afro-Americans, the French, the Italians, the Scottish, and the Polish. The Mexican and American Indian groups are all smaller than any of the above, though they were the original cooks in this country.

阅读理解Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same. The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that were aired during the show in 2004. Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it''s something I believe in." The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract "a very questionable use of taxpayers'' money" that is "probably illegal". The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America''s Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists," to encourage the producers to periodically address" NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey''s manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances.

阅读理解At the end of a recent feast at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans，I ordered a cup of hot tea and was presented with an elegant silver kettle filled with an intoxicatingly aromatic lemon brew

阅读理解The idea of test-tube babies may make you either delighted at the wonders of modern medicine or irritated while considering the moral, or legal, or technological implications of starting life in a laboratory. But if you''ve ever been pregnant yourself, one thing is certain: You wonder what it''s like to carry a test-tube baby. Are these pregnancies normal? Are the babies normal? The earliest answers come from Australia, where a group of medical experts at the Queen Victoria Medical Center in Melbourne have taken a look at the continent''s first nine successful invitro pregnancies. The Australians report that the pregnancies themselves seemed to have proceeded according to plan, but at birth some unusual trends did show up. Seven of the nine babies turned out to be girls. Six of the nine were delivered by Caesarean section. And one baby, a twin, was born with a serious heart defect and a few days later developed life-threatening problems. What does it all mean? Even the doctors don''t know for sure, because the numbers are so small. The proportion of girls to boys is high, but until there are many more test-tube babies no one will know whether that''s something that just happened to be like that or something special that happens when egg meets sperm in a test tube instead of a fallopian tube. The same thing is true of the single heart defect. It usually shows up in only 15 out of 60,000 births in that part of Australia, but the fact that it occurred in one out of nine test-tube babies does not necessarily mean that they are at special risk. One thing the doctors can explain is the high number of Caesareans. Most of the mothers were older, had long histories of fertility problems and in some cases had had surgery on the fallopian tubes, all of which made them likely candidates for Caesareans anyway. The Australian researchers report that they are quite encouraged. All the babies are now making normal progress, even the twin with the birth defects.

阅读理解Often conjuring images of dank, smelly, mosquito-infested wastelands, upon closer look, wetlands are actually biologically diverse and productive ecosystems