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

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

单选题Where any people have made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox ______ was for a time suspended.

单选题Many students agreed to come, but some students against because they said they don"t have time.

单选题Perhaps more than anything else, it was onerous taxes that led to the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381. A. multiple B. unjust C. burdensome D. infamous

单选题The purpose of formal agents is to ______.

单选题 Questions 91-95 are based on the following passage. It is amazing how many people still say, "I never dream", for it is now decades since it was established that everyone has over a thousand dreams a year, however few of these nocturnal productions are remembered on waking. Even the most confined "non-dreamers" will remember dreams if woken up systematically during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) periods. These are periods of light sleep during which the eyeballs move rapidly back and forth under the closed lids and the brain becomes highly activated, which happens three or four times every night of normal sleep. It is a very interesting question why some people remember dreams regularly—perhaps several a night on occasion—while others remember hardly any at all under normal conditions. In considering this, it is important to bear in mind that the dream tends to be an elusive phenomenon for all of us. We normally never recall a dream unless we awaken directly from it, and even then it has a tendency to fade quickly into oblivion. Given this general elusiveness of dreams, the basic factor that seems to determine whether a person remembers them or not is the same as that which determines all other memory, namely degree of interest. Dream researchers have made a broad classification of people into "recallers" —those who remember at least one dream a month—and "non-recallers", who remember fewer than this. Tests have shown that cool, analytical people with a very rational approach to their feelings tend to recall fewer dreams than those whose attitude to life is open and flexible. Engineers generally recall fewer dreams than artists. It is not surprising to discover that in western society, women normally recall more dreams than men, since women are traditionally allowed an instinctive, feeling approach to life. In modern urban-industrial culture, feeling and dreams tend to be treated as frivolities which must be firmly subordinated to the realities of life. We pay lip-service to the inner life of imagination as it expresses itself in the arts, but in practice relegate music, poetry, drama and painting to the level of spare-time activities, valued mainly for the extent to which they refresh us for a return to work. We discourage our children from paying much attention to anything that might detract from the serious business of studying for exams or making a living in the "real" world of industry and commerce.

单选题I regret to have not paid more attention to our English lessons at school.

单选题It's a sure thing that if she knows that there is a ______ sale in town, she will certainly rush to the scene. A. liguidation B. station C. realization D. modification

单选题I will never ______ the experiences of the four years at Howard University, though there were unhappy encounters.

单选题 While some international {{U}}couriers{{/U}} are showing signs of exhaustion, EMS (Express Mail Service), the generic name for the courier services of post offices, seems to be finding its {{U}}stride{{/U}}. Known as Datapost in Britain, as Chronopost in France, and as Al-Barid al-Mumtaz in Saudi Arabia, EMS is now second in the international courier business (jointly with TNT Skypack). Last year it delivered 5.6 million items, weighing less than 20 kilograms each, across borders. That and its annual growth rate of around 5 percent have worried DHL, the market leader, enough for it to counter-attack in the Courts. On October 26, a Dutch judge ruled against DHL on all three counts filed against the Dutch post office: that the three-initial name was too close to DHL's; that the orange lines in the EMS logo were too similar to DHL's dark red ones; and that the claim to the widest route system in the world was unfounded. DHL has threatened the Swiss post office with similar action, but it may reconsider after the Dutch ruling. EMS has some advantages over the private couriers. One is a dense ready-made network of offices, especially in Europe, the avowed target area of the private couriers. Another advantage is a long tradition of working with customs authorities. In a business where minutes count, it pays to have good friends at customs. That advantage particularly irritates the private couriers because there is no legal way to combat such unquantifiable coziness. The private courier services are also annoyed because in countries like Switzerland and Italy, where the post office is officially a monopoly, they pay it a fee. In Switzerland DHL says it pays more than SFr lm ($708,000) "to the competition" each year. In France the couriers have won a battle for exoneration. Although governments are under little pressure to keep prices artificially low, EMS is often cheaper than the private couriers, but not always. A recent test in Britain(on a domestic route)showed Datapost about halfway between the least and the most expensive, but gave it full marks for speed and service. Each national EMS is free to set its rates and follow its own rules on things like bulk discounts. The Universal Postal Union, based in Berne, determines how costs and revenues are split between sending and receiving countries, and standardizes procedures. More than 100 postal administrations have linked into the system — and more are coming, including Russia's. That makes the feisty EMS particularly happy since its rivals have not been allowed to serve anywhere in Russia.

单选题His bibliography runs to a prodigious 500 items, taking more than 500 pages. A. enormous B. gigantic C. fraudulent D. prevalent

单选题The feeling of {{U}}competition{{/U}} among the students in all the classrooms where the test was going on was noticeable to everyone.

单选题Life insurance, {{U}}before available only to young, healthy persons{{/U}}, can now be obtained for quite a large proportion of the elderly population, and, sorry, even for pet animals.

单选题For centuries animals have been used as surrogates for people in experiments to assess the effects of therapeutic and other agents that may be later used for humans. A. which may later be used fr humans B. that may be later used in humans C. which might later be used for humans D. that might later be used in humans

单选题His famous lectures, Talks to Teachers, are every briefly ______ in the text to give you some feel for his flair with concepts as well as the significance of his thinking. His major point was that the entire enterprise of education is determined by the actual classroom teacher. A. loaded B. roared C. quoted D. folded