单选题WHY SHOULD anyone buy the latest volume in the ever-expanding Dictionary of National Biography? I do not mean that it is bad, as the reviewers will agree. But it will cost you 65 pounds. And have you got the rest of volumes? You need the basic 22 plus the largely decennial supplements to bring the total to 31. Of course, it will be answered, public and academic libraries will want the new volume. After all, it adds 1,068 lives of people who escaped the net of the original compilers. Yet in 10 year"s time a revised version of the whole caboodle, called the New Dictionary of National Biography, will be published. Its editor, Professor Colin Matthew, tells me that he will have room for about 50,000 lives, some 13,000 more than in the current DNB. This rather puts the 1,068 in Missing Persons in the shade. When Dr. Nicholls wrote to The Spectator in 1989 asking for name of people whom readers had looked up in the DNB and had been disappointed not to find, she says that she received some 100,000 suggestions.(Well, she had written to her quality newspapers" too.)As soon as her committee had whittled the numbers down, the professional problems of an editor began. Contributors didn"t file copy on time; some who did sent too much: 50,000 words instead of 500 is a record, according to Dr. Nicholls. There remains the dinner-party game of who"s in, who"s out. That is a game that the reviewers have played and will continue to play. Criminals were my initial worry. After all, the original edition of the DNB boasted: Malefactors whose crimes excite a permanent interest have received hardly less attention than benefactors. Mr. John Gross clearly had similar anxieties, for he complains that, while the murderer Christie is in, Crippen is out. One might say in reply that the injustice of the hanging of Evans instead of Christie was a force in the repeal of capital punishment in Britain, as Ludovie Kennedy(the author of Christies entry in Missing Persons)notes. But then Crippen was reputed as the first murderer to be caught by telegraphy(he had tried to escape by ship to America). It is surprising to find Max Miller excluded when really not very memorable names get in. There has been a conscious effort to put in artists and architects from the Middle Ages. About their lives not much is always known. Of Hugo of Bury St Edmunds, a 12th-century illuminator whose dates of birth and death are not recorded, his biographer comments: "Whether or not Hugo was a wall-painter, the records of his activities as carver and manuscript painter attest to his versatility". Then there had to be more women, too(12 percent, against the original DBN"s 3), such as Roy Strong"s subject, the Tudor painter Levina Teerlinc, of whom he remarks: "Her most characteristic feature is a head attached to a too small, spindly body. Her technique remained awkward, thin and often cursory". Doesn"t seem to qualify her as a memorable artist. Yet it may be better than the record of the original DNB, which included lives of people who never existed(such as Merlin)and even managed to give thanks to J. W. Clerke as a contributor, though, as a later edition admits in a shamefaced footnote, "except for the entry in the List of Contributors there is no trace of J. W. Clerke".

单选题Dry-cleaning machines that use liquid carbon dioxide as a solvent will go on sale in the US next year—thanks to chemists in North Carolina who have developed CO 2 -soluble detergents. Dry-cleaners will lose their characteristic smell, and the new process will cut the amount of toxic waste produced in cleaning clothes. Joseph DeSimone, a chemist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says liquid CO 2 is an ideal solvent because after cleaning, the CO 2 can be evaporated off, collected, liquefied and reused. The problem in developing the process, says DeSimone, has been that CO 2 by itself is not a good solvent. However, he points out that not much dissolves in water without the help of detergents, yet water is the most common solvent. What CO 2 needed, he thought, was the right detergent. Detergent molecules such as those in washing-up liquid have two chemically distinct ends; one has a liking for water, the other sticks to dirt. Normal detergents do not dissolve in liquid CO 2 , so DeSimone created three CO 2 -soluble detergents. One end of the detergents has a fluorocarbon group, which makes them soluble in CO 2 . The other end is soluble in water, oil or silicone, depending on the type of dirt being removed. The person doing the dry-cleaning has to decide which of the detergents is best for the job. DeSimone"s company, MiCell, will start selling liquid CO 2 dry-Cleaning machines next year. They operate at room temperature at a pressure "about ten times the pressure of a bicycle tyro" , according to a spokesman for MiCell. Most dry-cleaners currently use chlorinated hydrocarbons such as perchloroethylene. But the US Environmental Protection Agency(EPA)is clamping down on the toxic waste emission this produces. After cleaning with the new machines, the liquid CO 2 is evaporated and collected for reuse, leaving a residue of detergent and dirt. Brad Lienhart, president of MiCell, says that cutting waste and pollution is the company" s strongest selling point. " Dry-cleaner owners are saying " get this burden off my back" ," he says. He hopes to sell a hundred machines, in the first year of business. About 15000 conventional drycleaning machines are sold around the world every year. Buster Bell, who owns Bell Laundry and Dry Cleaning in South Carolina, says the MiCell-technology looks competitive, and he likes the reduced environmental impact. "You really don"t know what is coming from the EPA," he says.

单选题The injection that the girl had been given was beginning to work. Her head【C1】______heavy, and she was very sleepy. Once she opened her eyes and saw two nurses. They were placing her on another bed. Then she had the feeling of moving down a long hall. Once【C2】______a while, she thought that she heard people talking around her. The last time she opened her eyes, she saw a large round lamp above her. Then everything was dark, and she【C3】______into a deep sleep. The doctor was【C4】______to begin. First he opened the chest【C5】______around the heart. Meanwhile, another doctor connected the special machine to her. Next, the first doctor used an electric shock to stop the girl's heart. Working very carefully, he repaired the passage that was【C6】______. Then, using another electric shock, he【C7】______the heart again. He closed her chest, and the operation was【C8】______. No additional blood had been needed. The【C9】______operation lasted ninety minutes. The girl was taken to another room She would be watched until she was conscious. As she opened her eyes, the girl saw her mother's face. Her mother smiled. "It's all over, " she said. "The doctor promised to make you better and he has succeeded. In a few weeks you'll be【C10】______home. "

单选题Allelomimetic behavior may be defined as behavior in which two or more individual animals do the same thing, with some degree of mutual simulation and coordination. It can only involve in species with sense organs that are well enough developed so that continuous sensory contact can be maintained. It is found primarily in vertebrate, in those species that are diurnal, and usually in those that spend much of their lives in the air, in open water or on open plains. In birds, allelomimetic behavior is the rule rather than the exception, though it may occasionally be limited to particular seasons of the year as it is in the redwing blackbird. Its principal function is that of providing safety from predators, partly because the flock can rely on many pairs of eyes to watch for enemies, and partly because if one bird reacts to danger, the whole flock is warned. Among mammals, allelomimetic behavior is very rare in rodents, which almost never move in flocks or herds. Even when they are artificially crowded together, they do not conform in their movements. On the other hand, such behavior is a major system among large hoofed mammals such as sheep. In the pack-hunting carnivores, allelomimetic behavior has another function that of cooperative hunting for large prey animals such as moose. Wolves also defend their dens as a group against larger predators, such as bears. Finally, allelomimetic behavior is highly developed among most primate groups, where it has the principal function of providing warning against predators, though combined defensive behavior is also seen in troops of baboons.

单选题A TIME columnist bears witness to an operation to help triplets with cerebral palsy walk like other boys. Cindy Hickman nearly bled to death the day she gave birth — three months prematurely — to her triplet sons. Weighing less than 2 lbs. each, her babies were alive, but barely. They clung so tenuously to life that her doctors recommended she name them A, B and C. Then, after a year of heroic interventions —brain shunts, tracheotomies, skull remodeling — often requiring emergency helicopter rides to the hospital nearest their rural Tennessee home, the Hickmans learned that their triplets had cerebral palsy. Fifteen years ago there wasn"t much that could be done about cerebral palsy, a disorder caused by damage to the motor centers of the brain. But pediatric medicine has come a long way since then, both in intervention before birth, with better prenatal care and various techniques to postpone delivery, and surgical interventions after birth to correct physical deficiencies. So although the incidence of cerebral palsy seems to be increasing(because the odds of preemies surviving are so much better), so too are the number of success stories. This is one of them. Lane, Codie and Wyatt(as the Hickman boys are called)have spastic cerebral palsy, the most common form, accounting for nearly 80% of cases. "We first noticed that they weren"t walking when they should," Cindy recalls. "Instead they were only doing the combat crawl." Their brains seemed to be developing age appropriately, but their muscles were unnaturally stiff, making walking difficult if not impossible. Happily, spastic cerebral palsy is also the most treatable form of CP, largely thanks to a procedure known as selective dorsal rhizotomy, in which the nerve roots that are causing the problem are isolated and severed. Among the first to champion SDR in the U.S. in the late 1980s was Dr. T.S. Park, a Korean-born pediatric neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., who has preformed more than 800 of these operations and hopes to do an additional 1,000 before he retires. Peering through a microscope and guided by an electric probe, we were able to distinguish between the two groups of nerve roots leaving the spinal cord. The ventral roots send information to the muscle; the dorsal roots send information back to the spinal cord. The dorsal roots cause spasticity, and if just the right ones are severed, the symptoms can be greatly reduced. Nearly half a million Americans suffer from cerebral palsy. Not all are candidates for SDR, but Park estimates that as many as half may be. He gets the best results with children between ages 2 and 6 who were born prematurely and have stiffness only in their legs. He is known for performing the operation very high up in the spine, right where the nerve roots exit the spinal cord. It"s riskier that way, but the recovery is faster, and in Park"s skilled hands, the success rate is higher. Cindy and Jeremy Hickman will testify to that. Just a few weeks after the procedure, two of their sons are walking almost normally and the third is rapidly improving.

单选题Patients can recall what they hear while under general anesthetic even if they don"t wake up, concludes a new study. Several studies over the past three decades have reported that people can retain conscious or subconscious memories of thoughts that happened while they were being operated on. But failure by other researchers to confirm such findings has led skeptics to speculate that the patients who remembered these events might briefly have regained consciousness in the course of operations. Gitta Lubke, Peter Sebel and colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta measured the depth of anesthesia using bispectral analysis, a technique which measures changes in brainwave pattern in the frontal lobes moment by moment during surgery. "Before this study researchers only took an average measurement over the whole operation," says Lubke. Lubke studied 96 trauma patients undergoing emergency surgery. Many of whom were too seriously injured to tolerance full anesthesia. During surgery each patient wore headphones through which a series of 16 words was repeated for 3 minutes each. At the same time bisecteal analysis recorded the depth of anesthesia. After the operation Lubke tested the patients by showing them the first three letters of a word such as "limit", and asking them to complete. Patients who had had a word starting with these letters played during surgery — "limit", for example — chose that word an average of 11 per cent more often than patients who had been played a different word list. None of the patients had any conscious memory of hearing the word lists. Unconscious priming was strongest for words played when patients were most lightly anaesthetized. But it was statistically significant even when patients were fully anaesthetized when the word was played. This finding which will be published in the journal Anesthesiology could mean that operating theatre staff should be more discreet. "What they say during surgery may distress patient afterwards," says Philip Merikle, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

单选题Too much alcohol dulls your senses, but a study in Japan shows that moderate drinkers have a higher IQ than teetotalers. Researchers at the National Institute for Longevity Sciences in Aichi Prefecture, 250 kilometers west of Tokyo, tested the IQs of 2000 people between the ages of 40 and 79. They found that, on average, men who drank moderately—defined as less than 540 milliliters of sake or wine a day— had an IQ that was 3. 3 points higher that men who did not drink at all. Women drinkers scored 2. 5 points higher than female teetotalers. The type of alcohol didn" t influence the results. The volunteers tried a variety of tipples, which ranged from beer and whisky to wine and sake. The researchers are quick to point out that the results do not necessarily show that drinking will make you more intelligent. " It" s very difficult to show a cause-effect relationship," says senior researcher Hiroshi Shi-mokata. "We screened subjects for factors such as income and education, but there may be other factors such as lifestyle and nutritional intake. " Shimokata says that people who drink sake, or Japanese rice wine, tend to eat more raw fish. This could be a factor in enhanced intelligence, as fish often contain essential fatty acids that have been linked to brain development. Similarly, wine drinkers eat a lot of cheese, which is not something Japanese people normally consume or buy. Shimokata says the high fat content of cheese is thought to be good for the brain. If alcoholic drinks are directly influencing IQ, Shimokata believes chemicals such as polyphenols could be the critical factor. They are known to have antioxidant properties and other beneficial effects on ageing bodies, such as dilating constricted coronary arteries. The study is part of a wider research project to find out why brain function deteriorates with age.

单选题It was the kind of research that gave insight into how flu strains could mutate so quickly. (One theory behind the 1918 version's sudden demise after wreaking so much devastation was that it mutated to a nonlethal form. ) The same branch of research concluded in 2005 that the 1918 flu started in birds before passing to humans. Parsing this animal-human【C1】______could provide clues to【C2】______the next potential superflu, which already has a name: H5N1, also known as avian flu or bird flu. This potential killer also has a number: 59 percent. According to the World Health Organization, nearly three-fifths of the people who【C3】______H5N1 since 2003 died from the virus, which was first reported【C4】______humans in Hong Kong in 1997 before a more serious【C5】______occurred in Southeast Asia between 2003 and 2004. (It has since spread to Africa and Europe. ) Some researchers argue that those mortality numbers are exaggerated because WHO only【C6】______cases in which victims are sick enough to go to the hospital for treatment【C7】______compare that to the worldwide mortality rate of the 1918 pandemic; it may have killed roughly 50 million people, but that was only 10 percent of the number of people infected, according to a 2006 estimate. H5N1's saving grace — and the only reason we're not running around masked up in public right now — is that the strain doesn't jump from birds to humans, or from humans to humans, easily. There have been just over 600 cases (and 359 deaths) since 2003. But【C8】______its lethality, and the chance it could turn into something far more transmissible, one might expect H5N1 research to be exploding, with labs【C9】______the virus's molecular components to understand how it spreads between animals and【C10】______to humans, and hoping to discover a vaccine that could head off a pandemic.

单选题Can the Internet help patients jump the line at the doctor"s office? The Silicon Valley Employers Forum, a sophisticated group of technology companies, is launching a pilot program to test online "virtual visits" between doctors at three big local medical groups and about 8,000 employees and their families. The six employers taking part in the Silicon Valley initiative, including heavy hitters such as Oracle and Cisco Systems, hope that online visits will mean employees won"t have to skip work to tend to minor ailment or to follow up on chronic conditions. "With our long commutes and traffic, driving 40 miles to your doctor in your hometown can be a big chunk of time," says Cindy Conway, benefits director at Cadence Design Systems, one of the participating companies. Doctors aren"t clamoring to chat with patients online for free; they spend enough unpaid time on the phone. Only 1 in 5 has ever E-mailed a patient, and just 9 percent are interested in doing so, according to the research firm Cyber Dialogue. "We are not stupid," says Stirling Somers, executive director of the Silicon Valley Employers group. "Doctors getting paid is a critical piece in getting this to work." In the pilot program, physicians will get $ 20 per online consultation, about what they get for a simple office visit. Doctors also fear they"ll be swamped by rambling E-mails that tell everything but what"s needed to make a diagnosis. So the new program will use technology supplied by Healinx, an Alameda, Calif. -based start-up. Healinx"s "Smart Symptom Wizard" questions patients and turns answers into a succinct message. The company has online dialogues for 60 common conditions. The doctor can then diagnose the problem and outline a treatment plan, which could include E-mailing a prescription or a face to face visit. Can E-mail replace the doctor"s office? Many conditions, such as persistent cough, require a stethoscope to discover what"s wrong — and to avoid a malpractice suit. Even Larry Bonham, head of one of the doctor"s groups in the pilot, believes the virtual doctor"s visits offer a "very narrow" sliver of service between phone calls to an advice nurse and a visit to the clinic. The pilot program, set to end in nine months, also hopes to determine whether online visits will boost worker productivity enough to offset the cost of the service. So far, the Internet"s record in the health field has been underwhelming. The experiment is "a huge roll of the dice for Healinx," notes Michael Barrett, and analyst at Internet consulting from Forester Research. If the "Web visits" succeed, expect some HMOs(Health Maintenance Organizations)to pay for online visits. If doctors, employers, and patients aren"t satisfied, figure on one more E-health start-up to stand down.

单选题Students taking business courses are sometimes a little surprised to find that lectures on business ethics have been included in their syllabuses of study. They often do not realize that, later in their careers, they may be tempted to bend their principles to get what they want; perhaps also they are not fully aware that bribery in various forms is on the increase in many countries. In dealing with the topic of business ethics, some lecturers ask students how they would act in the following situation; suppose you were head of a major soft-drinks company and you want to break into a certain overseas market where the growth potential for your company is likely to be very great indeed. During negotiations with government officials of this country, the Minister of Trade makes it clear to you that if you offer him a substantial bribe, you will find it much easier to get an import license for your goods, and you are also likely to avoid" bureaucratic delays", as he puts it. Now, the question is: do you pay up or stand by your principles? It is easy to talk about having high moral standards but, in practice, what would one really do in such a situation? Some time ago the British car manufacturer, British Leyland, was accused of operating a "slush fund", and of questionable practices such as paying agents and purchasers with padded commission, offering additional discounts and making payments to numbered bank accounts in Switzerland. The company rejected these allegations and they were later withdrawn. Nevertheless, at this time, there were people in the motor industry in Britain who were prepared to say in private: "Look, we' re in a wheeling-dealing business. Every year we' re selling more than ￡1 000 million worth of cars abroad. If we spend a few million greasing the palms of some of the buyers, who's hurt? If we didn't do it, someone else would." It is difficult to resist the impression that bribery and other questionable payments are on the increase. Indeed, they seem to have become a fact of commercial life. To take just one example, the Chrisler Corporation, third largest of the U. S. motor manufacturers, disclosed that it made questionable payments of more than $ 2.5 million. By making this revelation, it joined more than 300 U. S. companies that had admitted to the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission that they had made dubious payments.

单选题In the villages of the English countryside there are still people who remember the good old days when no one bothered to lock their doors. There simply wasn't any crime to worry about. Amazingly, these happy times appear still to be with us in the world's biggest community. A new study by Dan Farmer, a gifted programmer, using an automated investigative program of his own called SATAN, shows that the owners of well over half of all World Wide Web sites have set up homes without fitting locks to their doors. SATAN can try out a variety of well-known hacking tricks on an Internet site without actually breaking in. Farmer has made the program publicly available, amid much criticism. A person with evil intent could use it to hunt down sites that are easy to burgle. But Farmer is very concerned about the need to alert the public to poor security and, so far, events have proved him right SATAN has done more to alert people to the risks than cause new disorder. So is the Net becoming more secure? Far from it. In the early days, when you visited a Web site your browser simply looked at the content. Now the Web is full of tiny programs that automatically download when you look at a Web page, and run on your own machine. These programs could, if their authors wished, do all kinds of nasty things to your computer. At the same time, the Net is increasingly populated with spiders, worms, agents and other types of automated beasts designed to penetrate the sites and seek out and classify information. All these make wonderful tools for antisocial people who want to invade weak sites and cause damage. But let's look on the bright side. Given the lack of locks, the Internet is surely the world's biggest (almost) crime-free society. Maybe that is because hackers are fundamentally honest. Or that there currently isn't much to steal. Or because vandalism isn't much fun unless you have a peculiar dislike for someone. Whatever the reason, let's enjoy it while we can. But expect it all to change, and security to become the number one issue, when the most influential inhabitants of the Net are selling services they want to be paid for.

单选题What new research reveals about the adolescent brain — from why kids bully to how the teen years shape the rest of your life. They say you never escape high school. And for better or worse, science is lending some credibility to that old saw. Thanks to sophisticated imaging technology and a raft of longitudinal studies, we're learning that the teen years are a period of crucial brain development subject to a host of environmental and genetic factors. This emerging research sheds light not only on why teenagers act the way they do, but how the experiences of adolescence — from rejection to binge drinking — can affect who we become as adults, how we handle stress, and the way we bond with others. One of the most important discoveries in this area of study, says Dr. Frances Jensen, a neuroscientist at Harvard, is that our brains are not finished maturing by adolescence, as was previously thought. Adolescent brains "are only about 80 percent of the way to maturity", she said at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November. It takes until the mid-20s, and possibly later, for a brain to become fully developed. An excess of gray matter (the stuff that does the processing) at the beginning of adolescence makes us particularly brilliant at learning — the reason we're so good at picking up new languages starting in early childhood — but also particularly sensitive to the influences of our environment, both emotional and physical. Our brains' processing centers haven't been fully linked yet, particularly the parts responsible for helping to check our impulses and considering the long-term repercussions of our actions. "It's like a brain that's all revved up not knowing where it needs to go, " says Jensen. It's partially because of this developmental timeline that a teen can be so quick to conjure a stinging remark, or a biting insult, and so uninhibited in firing it off at the nearest unfortunate target — a former friend, perhaps, or a bewildered parent. The impulse to hurl an insult is there, just as it may be for an adult in a stressful situation, but the brain regions that an adult might rely on to stop himself from saying something cruel just haven't caught up. In a paper published last year in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Dr. Jay Giedd, a scientist at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health, wrote that, according to brain scans conducted over several years, gray-matter volume peaks around or just before the beginning of puberty, and then continuously declines. In contrast, white matter (the stuff that helps connect areas of the brain) increases right up to, and beyond, the end of puberty. These adolescent brain developments don't happen to all parts of the brain at the same time. "The order in which this maturation of connection goes, is from the back of the brain to the front of the brain, " says Jensen. And one of the last parts to mature is the frontal lobe, a large area responsible for modulating reward, planning, impulsiveness, attention, acceptable social behavior, and other roles that are known as executive functions. It's thanks in part to the frontal lobe that we are able to schedule our time with any sort of efficiency, plan in advance to arrange for a designated driver on a night out (or stop drinking before one is over the legal limit), and restrain ourselves from getting into fights any time we get involved in an argument. Unfortunately, it's just these sorts of behaviors that teenage brains are not fully endowed to deal with — and the consequences are potentially fatal when it comes to high-risk behavior like drinking and driving. This blast of teen-brain change is compounded by profound social and psychological shifts. Of particular importance is that adolescence is the time when we develop stronger social connections with our peers, and more independence from our parents. "Before the transition to adolescence, kids interact with one another, and the kinds of friendships that they have, are substantially different, " explains Dr. Mitch Prinstein, professor and director of clinical psychology, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "After adolescence they can really confide in friends, they turn to them as first sources of social support. Kids tell us all the time they are more likely to tell their friends about things going on in their lives, and stressors, than any adult. " This cuts both ways. Healthy relationships have a positive effect on how an adolescent navigates through a tumultuous period of life. But at the same time, this reliance on friends makes young people susceptible to the influence of peer pressure, even when it is indirect.

单选题Osteoporosis used to be called "the silent disease" because its victims didn" t know they had it until it was too late and they suffered a bone fracture. Today, doctors can identify osteoporosis early. Improved understanding of the disease has also led to new treatments and strategies for preventing the disease altogether. For post-menopausal women, the most common medical response to osteoporosis is hormone replacement therapy. Boosting estrogen levels strengthens the entire skeleton and reduces the risk of hip fracture. Unfortunately, it sometimes causes uterine bleeding and may increase the risk of breast cancer. To bypass such side effects, researchers have developed several alternative treatments. Synthetic estrogens called Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators(SERMs)emulate estrogen with slight modifications. Another drug, alendronate, reduces spine, hip and wrist fractures by 50 percent. Researchers have even developed a nasal spray called calcitonin. Each of these alternatives has trade-offs, however. Patients must talk with their doctors to decide which therapy is best for them. The ideal way to address osteoporosis is by adopting a healthy lifestyle. And the best time to do this is in childhood, when most bone mass is accumulated. Because bodies continue building bone until about age thirty, some experts believe that women in their twenties can still increase their bone strength by as much as 20 percent. Calcium, which is available in low-fat dairy foods and dark green vegetables, is essential for preventing osteoporosis. So is vitamin D, which aides calcium absorption. Vitamin D comes from sunlight, but dietary supplements may be helpful in northern climates and among those who don" t get outside. The final component is regular moderate exercise because bone responds to the needs that the body puts on it. These are the simple steps that can help make "the silent disease" truly silent.

单选题It was the kind of research that gave insight into how flu strains could mutate so quickly. (One theory behind the 1918 version's sudden demise after wreaking so much devastation was that it mutated to a nonlethal form. ) The same branch of research concluded in 2005 that the 1918 flu started in birds before passing to humans. Parsing this animal-human【C1】______could provide clues to【C2】______the next potential superflu, which already has a name: H5N1, also known as avian flu or bird flu. This potential killer also has a number: 59 percent. According to the World Health Organization, nearly three-fifths of the people who【C3】______H5N1 since 2003 died from the virus, which was first reported【C4】______humans in Hong Kong in 1997 before a more serious【C5】______occurred in Southeast Asia between 2003 and 2004. (It has since spread to Africa and Europe. ) Some researchers argue that those mortality numbers are exaggerated because WHO only【C6】______cases in which victims are sick enough to go to the hospital for treatment【C7】______. compare that to the worldwide mortality rate of the 1918 pandemic; it may have killed roughly 50 million people, but that was only 10 percent of the number of people infected, according to a 2006 estimate. H5N1's saving grace — and the only reason we're not running around masked up in public right now—is that the strain doesn't jump from birds to humans, or from humans to humans, easily. There have been just over 600 cases (and 359 deaths) since 2003. But【C8】______its lethality, and the chance it could turn into something far more transmissible, one might expect H5N1 research to be exploding, with labs【C9】______the virus's molecular components to understand how it spreads between animals and【C10】______to humans, and hoping to discover a vaccine that could head off a pandemic.

单选题Researchers at Yale University Medical School and the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn. , have taken a pretty good look at what happens in the brain of a drunken driver. And it isn't pretty. Using【C1】______scans, the scientists compared the neural activity that【C2】______on and off like lights on a police car as both sober【C3】______game. The maps of activity in different areas of the brain【C4】______in new detail the impact that drinking has on a complicated【C5】______task such as driving. "No one had seen that in a scanner【C6】______, " said Dr. Godfrey Pearlson, a Yale psychiatrist and director of the Olin Center. Pearlson and Vince Calhoun, a researcher at Yale and Olin, first conducted brain scans on【C7】______drivers as they played the driving simulation game and then as they watched others play the game. Those scans gave the researchers a baseline of【C8】______activity in the unimpaired driver. Subjects were then given a low dose or a high dose of booze—enough to get their blood alcohol content to either 0. 04 percent or 0. 10 percent. An inebriated driver often will speed because alcohol has affected the cerebellum, a primitive area of the brain involved in【C9】______function, the researchers found But drunken drivers【C10】______in and out of traffic because of errors in the front parietal cortex, which translates sensory information and helps in the decision-making process, Pearlson said. Drinking did not seem to change activity in five other areas of the brain associated with driving, such as vision centers, the researchers found. But to the surprise of no one, the more the subjects drank, the more trouble they had with their driving.

单选题The University in transformation, edited by Australian futurists Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley, presents some 20 highly varied outlooks on tomorrow"s universities by writers representing both Western and non-Western perspectives. Their essays raise a broad range of issues, questioning nearly every key assumption we have about higher education today. The most widely discussed alternative to the traditional campus is the Internet University — a voluntary community to scholars / teachers physically scattered throughout a country or around the world but all linked in cyberspace. A computerized university could have many advantages, such as easy scheduling, efficient delivery of lectures to thousands or even millions of students at once, and ready access for students everywhere to the resources of all the world"s great libraries. Yet the Internet University poses dangers, too. For example, a line of franchised courseware, produced by a few superstar teachers, marketed under the brand name of a famous institution, and heavily advertised, might eventually come to dominate the global education market, warns sociology professor Peter Manicas of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Besides enforcing a rigidly standardized curriculum, such a "college education in a box" could undersell the offerings of many traditional brick and mortar institutions, effectively driving then out of business and throwing thousands of career academics out of work, note Australian communications professors David Rooney and Greg Hearn. On the other hand, while global connectivity seems highly likely to play some significant role in future higher education, that does not mean greater uniformity in course content—or other dangers — will necessarily follow. Counter-movements are also at work. Many in academia, including scholars contributing to this volume, are questioning the fundamental mission of university education. What if, for instance, instead of receiving primarily technical training and building their individual careers, university students and professors could focus their learning and research efforts on existing problems in their local communities and the world? Feminist scholar Ivana Milojevic dares to dream what a university might become "if we believed that child-care workers and teachers in early childhood education should be one of the highest(rather than lowest)paid professionals?" Co-editor Jennifer Gidley shows how tomorrow"s university faculty, instead of giving lectures and conducting independent research, may take on three new roles. Some would act as brokers, assembling customized degree-credit programmes for individual students by mixing and matching the best course offerings available from institutions all around the world. A second group, mentors, would function much like today"s faculty advisers, but are likely to be working with many more students outside their own academic specialty. This would require them to constantly be learning from their students as well as instructing them. A third new role for faculty, and in Gidley"s view the most challenging and rewarding of all, would be as meaning-makers: charismatic sages and practitioners leading groups of students / colleagues in collaborative efforts to find spiritual as well as rational and technological solutions to specific real-world problems. Moreover, there seems little reason to suppose that any one form of university must necessarily drive out all other options. Students may be "enrolled" in courses offered at virtual campuses on the Internet, between — or even during — sessions at a real-world problem-focused institution. As co-editor Sohail Inayatullah points out in his introduction, no future is inevitable, and the very act of imagining and thinking through alternative possibilities can directly affect how thoughtfully, creatively and urgently even a dominant technology is adapted and applied. Even in academia, the future belongs to those who care enough to work their visions into practical, sustainable realities.

单选题If a mother pushes her small son in a swing, giving only a light force each time he returns, eventually he will be swinging quite high. The child can do this for himself by using his legs to increase the motion, but both the mother's push and the child's leg movements must occur at the proper moment, or the extent of the swing will not increase. In physics, increasing the swing is increasing the amplitude; the length of the rope on the swing determines its natural oscillation period. This ability of an object to move periodically or to vibrate when stimulated by a force operating in its natural period is called resonance. Resonance is observed many times without consciously thinking about it; for example, one may find an annoying vibration or shimmy in an automobile, caused by a loose engine mount vibrating with increasing amplitude because of an out-of-round tire. The bulge on the tire slaps the pavement with each revolution; at the natural resonance point of the engine mount, it will begin to vibrate. Such vibrations can result in considerable damage if allowed to persist. Another destructive example of resonance is the shattering of a crystal goblet by the production of a musical tone at the natural resonant point of goblet. The energy of the sound waves causes vibration in the glass-, as its amplitude increases, the motion in the glass exceeds the elasticity of the goblet, and it shatters. An instrument called a tachometer makes use of the principle of resonance. It consists of many tiny bars, loosely fastened together and arranged so that each bar can slide independently of the others. Movement of the bars causes changes in a dial. When placed next to a rotating motor or engine, the tachometer picks up slight vibrations which are transferred to the resonant bars. These bars begin to move, and the resulting dial may be read to find the revolutions per minute of the motor very quickly.

单选题It is common to think that other animals are ruled by instinct whereas humans lost their instincts and ruled by reason, and that this is why we are so much more flexibly intelligent than other animals. William James, in his book Principles of Psychology, took the opposite view. He argued that human behavior is more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because we have more instincts than they do, not fewer. We tend to be blind to the existence of these instincts, however, precisely because they work so well—because they process information so effortlessly and automatically. They structure our thought so powerfully, he argued, that it can be difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. As a result, we take normal behavior for granted. We do not realize that normal behavior needs to be explained at all. This instinct blindness makes the study of psychology difficult. To get past this problem, James suggested that we try to make the natural seem strange. It takes a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of an instinctive human act. In our view, William James was right about evolutionary psychology. Making the natural seem strange is unnatural—it requires the twisted outlook seen, for example, in Gary Larson cartoons. Yet it is a central part of the enterprise. Many psychologists avoid the study of natural competences, thinking that there is nothing there to be explained. As a result, social psychologists are disappointed unless they find a phenomenon that would surprise their grandmothers and cognitive psychologists spend more time studying how we solve problems we are bad at, like learning math or playing chess, than ones we are good at. But our natural competences—our abilities to see, to speak, to find someone beautiful, to reciprocate a favor, to fear disease, to fall in love, to initiate an attack, to experience moral outrage, to navigate a landscape, and myriad others—are possible only because there is a vast and heterogeneous array of complex computational machinery supporting and regulating these activities. This machinery works so well that we don"t even realize that it exists — we all suffer from instinct blindness. As a result, psychologists have neglected to study some of the most interesting machinery in the human mind.

单选题In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to carry out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experience. Prior knowledge and interest influence what we experience, what we think our experiences mean, and the subsequent actions we take. Opportunities for misinterpretation, error, and self-deception abound. Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as protoscience. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are full of potential. But it takes collective scrutiny and acceptance to transform a discovery claim into a mature discovery. This is the credibility process, through which the individual researcher's me, here, now becomes the community's anyone, anywhere, anytime. Objective knowledge is the goal, not the starting point. Once a discovery claim becomes public, the discoverer receives intellectual credit. But, unlike with mining claims, the community takes control of what happens next. Within the complex social structure of the scientific community, researchers make discoveries; editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication process; other scientists use the new finding to suit their own purposes; and finally, the public (including other scientists) receives the new discovery and possibly accompanying technology. As a discovery claim works it through the community, the interaction and confrontation between shared and competing beliefs about the science and the technology involved transforms an individual's discovery claim into the community's credible discovery. Two paradoxes exist throughout this credibility process. First, scientific work tends to focus on some aspect of prevailing Knowledge that is viewed as incomplete or incorrect. Little reward accompanies duplication and confirmation of what is already known and believed. The goal is new-search, not re-search. Not surprisingly, newly published discovery claims and credible discoveries that appear to be important and convincing will always be open to challenge and potential modification or refutation by future researchers. Second, novelty itself frequently provokes disbelief. Nobel Laureate and physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi once described discovery as "seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought". But thinking what nobody else has thought and telling others what they have missed may not change their views. Sometimes years are required for truly novel discovery claims to be accepted and appreciated. In the end, credibility "happens" to a discovery claim — a process that corresponds to what philosopher Annette Baier has described as the commons of the mind. "We reason together, challenge, revise, and complete each other's reasoning and each other's conceptions of reason. "

单选题Despite growing numbers of joggers, Canada Fitness Surveys across the country demonstrate that Canadians are less physically fit than their U.S. or Swedish counterparts. Many people【C1】______that they are active do not exercise often or vigorously enough for optimal benefits. Only about 25 per cent of Canadian adults paddle at the recommended level that increases the heart beat to a target level【C2】______there for at least 15 minutes thrice weekly. Men are more likely to be either "sedentary" or "very active", while women are more likely to be "moderately active". Common reasons【C3】______are no willpower, poor facilities, boredom, fatigue, no partner, sheer laziness or lack of time. Experts counter that better use of available time is the answer, with incentives and rewards to help sustain the exercise habit until the benefits become so【C4】______that activity is automatically scheduled into daily routines. A modest increase in daily activity【C5】______the sedentary could improve the overall health of our population more than increased activity in those already dedicated to exercise. Activity in older people helps them【C6】______agile, work and feel better. Many elderly people who remain active have a lower-heart rate than inactive youngsters.【C7】______. one famous marathoner(Clarence Demar), even after age 60, was in better shape than【C8】______. Currently, only 35 percent of the over 65" s take regular walks. Even a small gain in fitness among the elderly may permit them to replace a restricted lifestyle with【C9】______in which they can play golf, dance, cycle and garden. The overall【C10】______is clear: physical activity benefits body and mind, and should be encouraged for all, especially those who are now the least active.