阅读理解If there is any endeavor whose fruits should be freely available，that endeavor is surely publicly financed science

阅读理解Embracing failure is a clichof the business world

阅读理解The happiest people in the world may live in Scandinavia， a new study suggests

阅读理解Every group has a culture, however uncivilized it may seem to us. To the professional anthropologist, there is no intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist, there is no intrinsic hierarchy among languages. People once thought of the languages of backward groups as undeveloped. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of "backward" languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex. They differ from Western languages not in their sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflect the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this aspect, two things are to be noted. First, all languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. Second, the objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in "backward" languages, while different from the West, are often surprisingly numerous and complicated. A Western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of remoteness ("this" and "that"). But some languages of the American Indians distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or to the person addressed, or removed from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future.

阅读理解"What does the middleman do but add to the price of goods in the shops?" Such remarks are aimed at the intermediate operations between manufacturers and final customers. This practice usually attracts a lot of attention from the public and the press and the operation most talked about is what is often called wholesaling. The wholesaler buys goods in large quantities from the manufacturers and sells them in smaller parcels to retailers, and for this service his selling price to the retailer is raised several percent higher. But his job is made more difficult by retail demand not necessarily running level with manufacturers'' production. Because he adjusts or regulates the flow of goods by holding stock until required, he frees the manufacturer, to some extent, from the effect on production of changing demand and having to bear the whole risk. The manufacturer can then keep up a steady production flow, and the retailer has no need to hold heavy stocks, who can call on the wholesaler for supplies any time. This wholesale function is like that of a valve in a water pipe. The middleman also bears part of the risk that would otherwise fall on the manufacturer and also the retailer. The wholesaler provides a purely commercial service, for which he is too well rewarded. But the point that is missed by many people is that the wholesaler is not just someone adding to the cost of goods. It is true one could eliminate the wholesaler but one would still be left with his function: that of making sure that goods find their way to the people who want them.

阅读理解There is something intrinsically fascinating about the idea of evolution

阅读理解The fact that most Americans live in urban areas does not mean that they reside in the center of large cities. In fact, more Americans live in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas than in the cities themselves. The Bureau of the Census regards any area with more than 2,500 people as an urban area, and does not consider boundaries of cities and suburbs. According to the Bureau, the political boundaries are less significant than the social and economic relationships and the transportation and communication systems mat integrate a locale. The term used by the Bureau for an integrated metropolis is an MSA, which stands for Metropolitan Statistical Area. In general, an MSA is any area that contains a city and its surrounding suburbs and has a total population of 50,000 or more. At the present time, the Bureau reports more than 280 MSAs, which together account for 75 percent of the US population. In addition, the Bureau recognizes 18 megapolises, that is, continuous adjacent metropolitan areas. One of the most obvious megapolises includes a chain of hundreds of cities and suburbs across 10 states on the East Coast from Massachusetts to Virginia, including Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. In the Eastern Corridor, as it is called, a population of 45 million inhabitants is concentrated. Another megapolis that is growing rapidly is the California coast from San Francisco through Los Angeles to San Diego.

阅读理解Congress makes the laws in the United States. It has two parts, which are more or less equal in power. They are known as the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is larger than the Senate whose 100 members (two from each state) serve for six years. The 435 members of the House are elected every two years, and the number from each state is determined by the population of the state. For example, California, which has a large population, has 43 representatives, while the State of Nevada has only one. The House and Senate are divided into small groups which take care of special matters such as education or foreign affairs. The most important work of Congress is often done in these groups, which are called subcommittees. According to the Constitution of the United States, a senator must be at least 30 years old and he must have been a citizen of the United States for nine years at the time of his election. To be elected to the House a person must be 25 years old and must have been a United States citizen for seven years. At the present time, members of Congress include businessmen, farmers, teachers, and especially lawyers. In general, senators are better known than representatives because they are fewer in number and serve for a longer time. Many American presidents served in Congress before they became president.

阅读理解When you first drift off into slumber, your eyes will roll about a bit, your temperature will drop slightly, your muscles will relax, and your breathing will become quite regular. Your brain waves slow down a bit, with the alpha rhythm predominating for the first few minutes. This is the first stage of sleep. For the next 30 minutes or so, you will drift down through Stage 2 and Stage 3. The lower your stage of sleep, the slower your brain waves will be. About 40-60 minutes after you lose consciousness, you will reach the last stage. Your brain waves will show the delta rhythm. You may think that you stay at this deep stage all the rest of the night, but that turns out not to be the case. About 80 minutes after you fall into slumber, your activity cycle will increase slightly. The delta rhythm will disappear, to be replaced by the activity pattern of brain waves. Your eyes will begin to dart around under your closed eyelids. This period of Rapid Eye Movements lasts for 8-15 minutes and is called REM sleep. During both light and deep sleep, the muscles in your body are relaxed but capable of movement. As you slip into REM sleep, a very odd thing occurs — most of the voluntary muscles in your body become paralyzed. Although your brain shows very rapid bursts of neural activity during REM sleep, your body is incapable of moving. REM sleep is accompanied by extensive muscular inhibition.

阅读理解The economy may be troubled, but one area is thriving: social media

阅读理解When the first of the two Viking landers touched down on Mars on July 20, 1976, and began to send camera images back to earth, the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not suppress a certain nervous anticipation， like people holding a lottery ticket that theyhave a one-in-a-million chance of winning

阅读理解There is no real border between Israel and Palestine,says Muhammad Hamudi, an olive farmer and olive oil producer from Asira al-Shamaliya,near Nablus in the West Bank

阅读理解With cloud, mobility, big data and consumerization, companies are in even greater need of technology talent than they were in the late 1990s,and that talent is in even shorter supply

阅读理解The ocean bottom — a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth — is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth''s surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space. Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation''s Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP''s drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean''s surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rock from the ocean floor. The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger''s core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger''s voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth. The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world''s past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change — information that may be used to predict future climates.

阅读理解Social control refers to social processes, planned or unplanned, by which people are taught, persuaded, or forced to conform to norms. In every society, some punishments or negative sanctions are established for deviant behavior. Without deviant behavior there would not be need for social control and without social control there would not be a way of recognizing the boundary between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Social control may be either formal or informal. Informal mechanisms include expressions of disapproval by significant others and withholding of positive rewards for disapproved behavior. Most people internalize norms in the course of socialization. This is any group''s most powerful protection against deviance, in that the individual''s own conscience operates as an agent of social control. When informal sanctions fail, formal agents of social control may be called upon. In contemporary society, such formal agents and agencies include psychiatry and other mental health professions; mental hospitals; police and courts of law; prisons; and social welfare agencies. All these formal agents function to limit, correct, and control violation of norms. Conflict theorists would also point out that social control agents and systems tend, in any society, to serve the interests of powerful groups and to enforce the norms most beneficial to those who make the rules and who, therefore, define unacceptable behavior. Social control, whether formal or informal, has a dual function. First, it punishes the wrongdoer and reaffirms the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Second, and less recognized, it regu?lates the manner in which deviants are treated.

阅读理解Air France SA said Monday that its second-quarter net profit fell 35 percent to €57 million ($57.4 million), but sales were steady and operating profit surged. Earnings before interest and tax, a measure of operating income, gained 86 percent to €141 million as fuel costs fell and cargo traffic rose. Air France has been hurt less than rivals such as British Airways PLC and Lufthansa AG by the slowdown on North Atlantic routes following the war on Iraq in 2003 because it has fewer flights in that market. Net income fell as the airline paid deferred taxes that came due. Sales rose 0.9 percent to €3.2 billion. The carrier lost about €80 million in revenue because of a four-day strike by pilots in September. An accord was reached tying future pay increases to inflation. The carrier said that first-half fuel costs fell 15 percent to €680 million. Cargo traffic rose 11 percent in the second quarter, while passenger traffic rose 1.1 percent. The airline''s shares gained 87 cents, or 7.7 percent, to close at €12.11. Separately, Air France and Alitalia SpA agreed to buy 2 percent stakes in each other as Europe''s second- and sixth-largest airlines deepen their partnership.

阅读理解For more than 50 years, microbiologists in the U

阅读理解A total of 4.6 million digital televisions have been sold, and the sales of HDTV sets have quadrupled since last year. Consumers have bought HDTVs to play their DVDs and to have clearer pictures and wide screens. Only a small percentage of the people who have purchased HDTVs, however, have actually ^hooked their TVs up# to receive high-definition television digital signals. Perhaps television viewers are having trouble keeping up with the changes in technology. Even the manufacturers of HDTVs, like Mitsubishi, Thomson Multimedia, Sony, and Samsung seem to have a tough time learning how to make their sets work with the various digital TV formats because little standardization has been required or implemented in the industry. Some of the HDTVs weigh over 200 lbs., and a variety of retailers offer a delivery service to the buyer''s home to help install the heavy sets. This is known as a white-glove service and usually comes with an extra fee. After HDTV purchasers get their sets home and hook them up, they will still need to work to get the digital signals to their systems. Most of the industry''s cable providers do not yet offer high-definition programing, and only about 15% of commercial television stations have switched over to even the lowest improved digital pictures. Worse yet, viewers may need to install antenna before they can even get the digital signals to their new HDTV sets. Another frustration for home-theater seekers is that the current HDTV sets allow owners only to watch high-definition programs, not to record them.

阅读理解Today the long-awaited, much-heralded Apple Watch goes on sale

阅读理解Declining house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years