单选题{{B}}Passage Five{{/B}} Architects are hopeless when it comes to deciding whether the public will view their designs as marvels or monstrosities, according to a study by Canadian psychologists. They say designers should go back to school to learn about ordinary people's tastes. Many buildings that appeal to architects get the thumbs down from the public. Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia decided to find out whether architects understand public preferences and simply disagree with them, or fail to understand the lay person's view. With his colleague Graham Brown, he asked 25 experienced architects to look at photos of 42 large buildings in the US, Canada, Europe and Hong Kong. The architects predicted how the public would rate the buildings on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represented "terrible” and 10"excellent". A further 27 people who were not architects also scored the buildings out of 10. In addition, eight architects gave their own personal ratings of the buildings. The three groups tended to agree among themselves on a building's merits. And architects correctly predicted that lay people would on average rate buildings higher than they did themselves. But for individual buildings, the architects' perceptions of what the lay people would think were often way off the mark. "Some architects are quite good at predicting lay preferences, but others are not only poor at it, they get it backwards,” says Gilford. For instance, architects gave the Stockley Park Building B-3 offices in London a moderate rating of 5.2. They thought the public would like it much better, predicting a rating of 6.3. But the public actually disliked the offices, and gave it 4.7. Gifford thinks that lay people respond to specific features of buildings, such as durability and originality, and hopes to pin down what they are. "Architects in architecture school need to be taught how lay people think about buildings," Gifford concludes. He doesn't think designers should pander to the lowest common denominator, but suggests they should aspire towards buildings that appeal to the public and architects alike, such as the Bank of China building in Hong Kong. Marco Goldschmeid of the Richard Rogers Partnership, designers of the Millennium Dome in London, thinks the study is flawed. "The authors have assumed, wrongly, that buildings can be meaningfully judged from photographs rather than actual visits," he says. Goldschmeid thinks it would be more significant and interesting to look at the divergence of public taste between generations.

单选题John is ______ to pollen.

单选题Flu shots are given every fall as a {{U}}precaution{{/U}} against an epidemic the following winter.

单选题Scientists are expected to carry out thoroughgoing studies to back up claim's made concerning new drugs.

单选题Can you Ucompress/U your speech into five minutes due to limited time for the meeting?

单选题One of the most {{U}}damaging{{/U}} plant parasites is the stem eelworm.

单选题Customers (are asked) to ensure that they (have given) correct change before (leaving) the shop as mistakes cannot be (afterwards) remedied.

单选题He was confronted with many difficulties, which, with the help of his friends, he successfully overcame.

单选题Man: When could you go over the test? Woman: Now's as good a time as any. Question: What does the woman mean?

单选题How many of today's ailments, or even illnesses, are purely psychological? And how far can these be alleviated by the use of drugs? For example a psychiatrist concerned mainly with the emotional problems of old people might improve their state of mind somewhat by the use of anti-depressants but he would not remove the root cause of their depression—the feeling of being useless, often unwanted and handicapped by failing physical powers. One of the most important controversies in medicine today is how far doctors, and particularly psychologists, should depend on the use of drugs for "curing" their patients. It is not merely that drugs may have been insufficiently tested and may reveal harmful side effects (as happened in the case of anti-sickness pills prescribed for expectant mothers) but the uneasiness of doctors who feel that they are treating the symptoms of a disease without removing the disease itself. On the other hand, some psychiatrists argue that in many cases (such as chronic depressive illness) it is impossible to get at the root of the illness while the patient is in a depressed state. Even prolonged psychiatric care may have no noticeable effect whereas some people can be lifted out of a depression by the use of drugs within a matter of weeks. These doctors feel not only that they have no right to withhold such treatment, but that the root cause of depression can be tackled better when the patient himself feels better. This controversy is concerned, however, with the serious psychological illnesses. It does not solve the problem of those whose headaches, indigestion, backache, etc. are due to "nerves". Commonly a busy family doctor will ascribe them to some physical cause and as a matter of routine prescribe a drug. Once again the symptoms are being cured rather than the disease itself. It may be true to say, as one doctor suggested recently, that over half of the cases that come to the ordinary doctor's attention are not purely physical ailments. If this is so, the situation is serious indeed.

单选题Author Leo once talked about his admiration for cooking expert Juli

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Is nothing sacred? Even the idle weekend pastime of skimming stones on a lake has been taken apart and reduced to a mathematical formula. Everyone knows a stone bounces best on water if it's round and flat, and spun towards the water as fast as possible. Some enthusiasts even travel to international stone-skimming competitions, like world champion Jerdone Coleman-McGhee, who made a stone bounce 38 times on Blanco River, Texas, in 1992. Intuitively,a flat stone works best because a relatively large part of its surface strikes the water, so there's more bounce. Inspired by his eight-year-old son, physicist Lyderic Bocquet of Lyon University in France wanted to find out more. So he tinkered with some simple equations describing a stone bouncing on water in terms of its radius(半径) ,speed and spin, and taking account of gravity and the water's drag. The equations showed that the faster a spinning stone is travelling, the more times it will bounce. So no surprise there. To bounce at least once without sinking, Bocquet found the stone needs to be travelling at a minimum speed of about 1 kilometre per hour. And the equations also backed his hunch(直觉) that spin is important because it keeps the stone fairly flat from one bounce to the next. The spin has a gyroscopic(陀螺的) effect, preventing the stone from tipping and falling sideways into the water. To match the world record of 38 bounces using a 10-centimetre-wide stone, Bocquet predicts it would have to be travelling at about 40 kilometres per hour and spinning at 14 revolutions a second. He adds that drilling lots of small pits in the stone would probably help, by reducing water drag in the same way that dim pies on a golf ball reduce air drag. "Although I suppose that would be cheating," says Bocquet. He and his team at Lyon hope to design a motorized "catapult" that can throw stones onto a lake with a precise speed and spin, to test if the predictions stand up. Bocquet adds that he's probably just rediscovering a piece of history. British engineer Barnes Wallis must have done the same sort of maths and experiments when he was designing his famous bouncing bombs for the Dambusters squadron(中队) during the Second World War.

单选题A: I'm really getting fed up with the salespersons who keep calling. B: ______

单选题A: You Americans are funny! It seems as if you were married to your cars. B: ______. I was reading that there are about millions of cars in our country now.

单选题Other guests at yesterday's opening, which was broadcast ______by the radio station, included the Governor and the Mayor.

单选题Her humorous remarks seemed ______, but were in fact carefully prepared beforehand.

单选题{{B}}Passage One{{/B}} For more than thirty years after astronauts first set foot on the Moon, scientists have been unable to unravel the mystery of where the Earth's only satellite came from. But now there is direct evidence that the Moon was born after a giant collision between the young Earth and another planet. Previous studies of rocks from the Earth and the Moon have been unable to distinguish between the two, suggesting that they formed from the same material. But this still left room for a number of theories explaining how—for example, that the Moon and Earth formed from the same material at the same time. It was even suggested that the early Earth spun so fast it formed a bulge that eventually broke off to form the Moon. Franck Poitrasson, and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have compared Moon rocks with rocks from Earth and discovered a surprising difference. They analysed the weight of the elements present in the rock using a highly accurate form of mass spectroscopy(光谱研究) that involves vaporising a sample by passing it through an argon (氩) flame. Although they appeared very similar in most respects, the Moon rocks had a higher ratio of iron-57 to iron-54 isotopes(同位素)than the Earth rocks. "The only way we could explain this difference is that the Moon and the Earth were partly vaporised during their formation," says Poitrasson. Only the popular "giant planetary impact" theory could generate the temperatures of more than 1700℃ needed to vaporise iron. In this scenario, a Mars-sized planet known as Theia crashed into Earth 50 million years after the birth of the Solar System. This catastrophic collision would have released 100 million times more energy than the impact believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs—enough to melt and vaporise a large portion of the Earth and completely destroy Theia. The debris from the collision would have been thrown into orbit around the Earth and eventually coalesced to form the Moon. When iron is vaporised, the lighter isotopes burn off first. And since the ejected debris that became the Moon would have been more thoroughly vaporised, it would have lost a greater proportion of its lighter iron isotopes than Earth did. This would explain the different ratios that Poitrasson has found.

单选题This old man lives more in the present than in the past and ______ sports in a big way.