单选题Last year, one group of students in Taiwan did just that. They took chances-and ended up in jail. More than 20 students paid a cram school owner to help them cheat on Taiwan's entrance exam, according to police. The students received answers to test questions through cell phones and other electronic devices. Taiwan isn't the only place in Asia to see major cheating scandals. In both India and South Korea, college entrance exams have been stolen and sold to students. Academic cheating has risen dramatically over the last decade. Duke University conducted a survey of 50,000 university and 18,000 high school students in America. More than 70 percent of the students admitted cheating. Just 10 years earlier, only 56 percent said they had cheated. This trend extends far beyond the U. S., too. In Asia, where students face intense pressure to excel, the cheating problem is especially pronounced. In many Asian countries, a student's performance is measured mostly by exam scores. And admission to a top school depends on acing standardized tests. This test-driven culture makes cheating an easy way for students to get ahead in a super-competitive academic system. But the pressure to perform well on tests isn't the only thing turning students into cheaters. For one, new technology makes cheating easier than ever. Students now have more sophisticated options than just "cheat sheets" hidden in pencil boxes. Today's tech-smart students use text-messaging to discreetly send each other test answers. They post questions from standardized tests on internet bulletin boards. Students in Asia, for example, have posted questions from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). Deeper issues than technology and testing, however, may be leading to the rise in academic dishonesty. Both students and educators say that society offers too many negative role models. Businesspeople make millions and scientists eam intemational acclaim by cheating and lying. The case of Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk offers one powerful example. He faked the results of his stem cell research and became a national hero. From many sectors of society, the message to students is loud and clear: Cheating is an easy way to get ahead. Victoria Lin, a high school teacher in Taichung, says educators must begin to stress integrity as well as achievement in academics. That's what she tries to instill in her students. "I always tell my students, 'How much is your character worth? 100 points? 90 points?'" Jerry Chang, a student at Taiwan's Oriental Institute of Technology, also has words of advice for classmates he sees cheating. "When you cheat on exams, you only cheat yourself," he says, "because you won't know how much you've really learned./

单选题Farid's reaction to the sceptics' accusations is______.

单选题Every newborn baby is dealt a hand of cards which helps to determine how long he or she will be allowed to play the game of life. Good cards will help those who have them to have a long and healthy existence, while bad cards will bring to those who have them terrible diseases like high blood pressure and heart disease. Occasionally, cards are dealt out that doom their holders to an early death. In the past, people never knew exactly which cards they had been dealt. They could guess at the future only by looking at the kind of health problems experienced by their parents or grandparents. Genetic testing, which makes it possible to find dangerous genes, has changed all this. But, until recently, if you were tested positive for a bad gene you were not obliged to reveal this to anyone else except in a few extreme circumstances. This month, however, Britain became the first country in the world to allow life insurers to ask for test results. So far, approval has been given only for a test for a fatal brain disorder known as Huntington’s disease. But ten other tests (for seven diseases) are already in use and are awaiting similar approval. The independent body that gives approval, the Department of Health’s genetics and insurance committee, does not have to decide whether the use of genetic information in insurance is ethical. It must judge only whether the tests are reliable to insurers. In the case of Huntington’s disease the answer is clear-cut. People unlucky enough to have this gene will die early, and cost life insurers dearly. This is only the start. Clear-cut genetic answers, where a gene is simply and directly related to a person’s risk of death, are uncommon. More usually, a group of genes is associated with the risk of developing a common disease, dependent on the presence of other genetic or environmental factors. But, as tests improve, it will become possible to predict whether or not a particular individual is at risk. In the next few years researchers will discover more and more about the functions of individual genes and what health risks — or benefits — are associated with them.

单选题Young girls at high risk for depression appear to have a malfunctioning reward system in their brains, a new study suggests. The finding comes from research that (1) a high-risk group of 13 girls, aged 10 to 14, who were not depressed but had mothers who (2) recurrent depression and a low-risk group of 13 girls with no (3) or family history of depression. Both groups were given MRI brain (4) while completing a task that could (5) either reward or punishment. (6) with girls in the low-risk group, those in the high-risk group had (7) neural responses during both anticipation and receipt of the reward. (8) , the high-risk girls showed no (9) in an area of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex (背侧前扣带皮质), believed to play a role in (10) past experiences to assist learning. The high-risk girls did have greater activation of this brain area (11) receiving punishment, compared with the other girls. The researchers said that this suggests that high-risk girls have easier time (12) information about loss and punishment than information about reward and pleasure. "Considered together with reduced activation in the striatal (纹状体的) areas commonly observed (13) reward, it seems that the reward-processing system is critically (14) in daughters who are at elevated risk for depression, (15) they have not yet experienced a depressive (16) ," wrote Ian H. Gotlib, of Stanford University, and his colleagues. " (17) , longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether the anomalous activations (18) in this study during the processing of (19) and losses are associated with the (20) onset of depression," they concluded. The study was published in the April of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

单选题This weekend marks 25 years since the publication of the U.S. Department of Education's explosive report "A Nation at Risk. " Its powerful indictment of American education launched the largest education-reform movement in the nation's history, paving the way for strategies as different as charter schools and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. But even after a vast political and financial investment spanning two and a half decades, we're far from achieving the report's ambitious aims. We've learned a lot about school reform in 25 years, lessons that suggest that it is possible, eventually, to achieve "A Nation at Risk's" ambitious aims. We've learned that a lot of public schools require incentives to lift their sights for their students. The nation's long tradition of letting local school boards set standards isn't going to get us where we need to go educationally. If anything, NCLB's requirement of statewide standards needs to be taken to its logical conclusion—rigorous national standards. Make them voluntary. Give states and school systems different ways of measuring their progress against the standards by sanctioning a number of different national examination boards. And reward educators for meeting the new standards (NCLB only punishes schools for not meeting state standards, which encourages states to keep standards low because they don't want a lot of their schools labeled as failures). But improvement can't merely be imposed on schools from the outside. Schools are complex social enterprises; their success depends on thousands of daily personal interactions. They are, in the end, only asgood as the people in them and the culture in which those people work. So it's crucial to get everyone in a school community invested in a school's mission. Ownership is key. That comes from giving schools autonomy—in staffing, budgeting and instruction. From giving families a chance to choose their public schools. And from school leadership that promotes a strong sense of school identity and clear expectations of success. Reform has to come from the inside-out as well as the outside-in. There's a human side of school reform that we ignore at our peril. But if achieving "A Nation at Risk's" vision is becoming increasingly difficult, the alternative is really no alternative. The American economy hasn't collapsed in the absence of public-school reform because its success is driven mainly by the small segment of the workforce that is highly educated. But the plight of the middle class that the reform reports of the 1980s warned about has worsened as the wage gap between high-school graduates and the college-educated has widened, creating an increasingly two-tiered society—and an ever-greater need to arm every American with the high-quality education that "A Nation at Risk" envisioned.

单选题From this passage, we learn that the people ______.

单选题Plato asked "What is man?" and St Augustine asked "Who am I?" A new breed of criminals has a novel answer: "I am you!" Although impostors have existed for ages, the growing frequency and cost of identity theft is worrisome. Around 10m Americans are victims annually, and it is the leading consumer-fraud complaint over the past five years. The cost to businesses was almost $ 50 billion, and to consumers $ 5 billion, in 2002, the most recent year that America's Federal Trade Commission collected figures. After two recent, big privacy disasters, people and politicians are calling for action. In February, ChoicePoint, a large data-collection agency, began sending out letters warning 145,000 Americans that it had wrongly provided fraudsters with their personal details, including Social Security numbers. Around 750 people have already spotted fraudulent activity. And on February 25th, Bank of America revealed that it lost data tapes that contain personal information on over 1m government employees, including some Senators. Although accident and not illegality is suspected, all must take precautions against identity theft. Faced with such incidents, state and national lawmakers are calling for new regulations, including over companies that collect and sell personal information. As an industry, the firms--such as ChoicePoint, Acxiom, LexisNexis and Westlaw--are largely unregulated. They have also grown enormous. For example, ChoicePoint was founded in 1997 and has acquired nearly 60 firms to amass databases with 19 billion records on people. It is used by insurance firms, landlords and even police agencies. California is the only state with a law requiring companies to notify individuals when their personal information has been compromised--which made ChoicePoint reveal the fraud (albeit five months after it was noticed, and after its top two bosses exercised stock options ). Legislation to make the requirement a federal law is under consideration. Moreover, lawmakers say they will propose that rules governing credit bureaus and medical companies are extended to data-collection firms. And alongside legislation, there is always litigation. Already, ChoicePoint has been sued for failing to safeguard individuals' data. Yet the legal remedies would still be far looser than in Europe, where identity theft is also a menace, though less frequent and costly. The European Data Protection Directive, implemented in 1998, gives people the right to access their information, change inaccuracies, and deny permission for it to be shared. Moreover, it places the cost of mistakes on the companies that collect the data, not on individuals. When the law was put in force, American policymakers groaned that it was bad for business. But now they seem to be reconsidering it.

单选题 It is only natural for leaders to try to make the most of their strengths. The theory of comparative advantage directs people, as well as countries and firms, to focus on what they are good at. Management experts have tended to {{U}}concur{{/U}}: one of the bestselling business books of recent years is called Now Discover Your Strengths. When business schools (and indeed business columnists) profile bosses, they often assume that more is better. But is this right? Three recent books express some doubts. In Fear Your Strengths, Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser argue, "what you are best at could be your biggest problem. " Forcefulness can become bullying; decisiveness can turn into pigheadedness; niceness can develop into indecision. In From Smart to Wise, Prasad Kaipa and Navi Radjou argue that the strengths that today's leaders are most likely to overuse are what Americans called "smarts"—the sort of skills managers pick up studying at business school or working in consultancies. In Tipping Sacred Cows, Jake Breeden goes further, arguing that many so-called management virtues are just as likely to be vices in disguise. These three books are all valuable exercises in iconoclasm—deliberate destruction of icons. But the trouble with iconoclasm when you apply it to the analysis of leadership is that you can go on forever. Many successful leaders are successful precisely because they push their strengths to the limit. Richard Branson has turned Virgin into a global brand by relentlessly exploiting his two biggest strengths: his ability to take on "big bad wolves"—firms that are overcharging and underserving the public-and his talent for infusing Virgin with a counter-cultural personality. Leadership skills are context-dependent. Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly a nightmare to work for. In 1981 her closest advisers were so angry with her that they produced a memo that criticized her for breaking "every rule of good man-management", including bullying her weaker comrades, criticizing her colleagues in front of officials and refusing to give praise or credit. It warned her that she was "likely to become another failed Tory prime minister sitting with Edward Heath". But her abrasive style was exactly what Britain needed in the 1980s. The word that is too often missing from leadership studies is "judgment". Everybody involved in the business is desperate to appear scientific: academics because they want to get research grants and consultants because they want to prove that they are selling something more than just instinct. But judgment is what matters most, and it is hard to measure. It takes judgment to resist getting carried away with one quality (such as decisiveness) or one measure of success (such as the share price). It takes judgment to know when to modulate your virtues and when to pull out all the stops. Unfortunately judgment is in rather shorter supply than leadership versatility indices.

单选题It can be learned that the types of entertainment of mid-nineteenth century

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The mid-sixties saw the start of a project that, along with other similar research, was to teach us a great deal about the chimpanzee mind. This was Project Washoe, conceived by Trixie and Allen Gardner. They purchased an infant chimpanzee and began to teach her the signs of ASL, the American Sign Language used by the deaf. Twenty years earlier another husband and wife team, Richard and Cathy Hayes, had tried, with an almost total lack of success, to teach a young chimp, Vikki, to talk. The Hayes*s undertaking taught us a lot about the chimpanzee mind, but Vikki, although she did well in IQ tests, and was clearly an intelligent youngster, could not learn human speech. The Gardners, however, achieved spectacular success with their pupil, Washoe. Not only did she learn signs easily, but she quickly began to string them together in meaningful ways. It was clear that each sign evoked, in her mind, a mental image of the object it represented. If, for example, she was asked, in sign language, to fetch an apple, she would go and locate an apple that was out of sight in another room. Other chimps entered the project, some starting their lives in deaf signing families before joining Washoe. And finally Washoe adopted an infant, Loulis. He came from a lab where no thought of teaching signs had ever penetrated. When he was with Washoe he was given no lessons in language acquisition—not by humans, anyway. Yet by the time he was eight years old he had made fifty-eight signs in their correct contexts. How did he learn them? Mostly, it seems, by imitating the behavior of Washoe and the other three signing chimps, Dar, Moja and Tam. Sometimes, though, he received tuition from Washoe herself. One day, for example, she began to swagger about bipedally, hair bristling, signing food! food! food! in great excitement. She had seen a human approaching with a bar of chocolate. Loulis, only eighteen months old, watched passively. Suddenly Washoe stopped her swaggering, went over to him, took his hand, and moulded the sign for food (fingers pointing towards mouth). Another time, in a similar context,, she made the sign for chewing gum—but with her hand on his body. On a third occasion Washoe picked up a small chair, took it over to Loulis, set it down in front of him, and very distinctly made the chair sign three times, watching him closely as she did so. The two food signs became incorporated into Loulis's vocabulary but the sign for chair did not. Obviously the priorities of a young chimp are similar to those of a human child! Chimpanzees who have been taught a language can combine signs creatively in order to describe objects for which they have no symbol. Washoe, for example, puzzled her caretakers by asking, repeatedly, for a rock berry. Eventually it transpired that she was referring to brazil nuts which she had encountered for the first time a while before. Another language-trained chimp described a cucumber as a green banana. They can even invent signs. Lucy, as she got older, had to be put on a leash for her outings. One day, eager to set off but having no sign for leash, she signaled her wishes by holding a crooked index finger to the ring on her collar. This sign became part of her vocabulary.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The topic of cloning has been a politically and ethically controversial one since its very beginning. While the moral and philosophical aspects of the issues are entirely up to the interpretation of the individual, the application of cloning technology can be studied objectively. Many in the scientific community advocate the use of cloning for the preservation and support of endangered species of animals, which aside from cloning, have no other practical hope for avoiding extinction. The goal of the use of cloning to avoid extinction is the reintroduction of new genes into the gene pool of species with few survivors, ensuring the maintenance and expansion of genetic diversity. Likely candidates for this technique are species known to have very few surviving members, such as the African Bongo Antelope, the Sumatran Tiger, and the Chinese Giant Panda. In the case of Giant Panda, some artificial techniques for creating offspring have already been performed, perhaps paving the way for cloning as the next step in the process. With the estimated population of only about 1000 Giant Pandas left in the world, the urgency of the situation has led to desperate measures. One panda was born through the technique of artificial insemination in the San Diego Zoo in the United States. "Hua Mei" was born in 1999 after her parents, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, had trouble conceiving naturally. The plan to increase the Giant Panda population through the use of cloning involves the use of a species related to the Giant Panda, the American Black Bear. Egg cells will be removed from female black bears and then fertilized with Panda cells such as those from Ling-Ling or Hsing-Hsing. The fertilized embryo will then re-implanted into the black bear, where it will grow and mature, until a new panda is delivered from the black bear host. Critics of cloning technology argue that the emphasis on cloning as a method by which to preserve species will draw funding away from other methods, such as habitat preservation and conservation. Proponents of cloning counter that many countries in which many endangered species exist are too poor to protect and maintain the species' habitats anyway, making cloning technology the only practical way to ensure that those species survive to future generations. The issue is still hotly debated, as both sides weigh the benefits that could be achieved against the risks and ethical concerns that constantly accompany any argument on the issue. (402 words){{B}}Notes:{{/B}} ethically 道德上。gene pool 基因库。insemination n.受精。fertilize 使受精。embryo 胚胎。proponent支持者，拥护者。weigh A against B权衡A和B的利弊。

单选题Justice in society must include both a fair trial to the accused and the election of an appropriate punishment for those proven guilty. Because justice is regarded as one form of equality, we find in its earlier expressions the idea of a punishment equal to the crime. Recorded in the Old Testament is the expression "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth". That is, the individual who has done wrong has committed an offense; society must get even, which can be done only by inflicting an equal injury upon him. This conception of retributive justice is reflected in many parts of the legal codes and procedures of modern times. It is illustrated when we demand the death penalty for a person who has committed murder. This philosophy of punishment was supported by the German idealist Hegel. He believed that society owed it to the criminal to administer a punishment equal to the crime he had committed. The criminal had by his own actions denied his true self and it is necessary to do something that will counteract the denial and restore the self that has been denied. To the murderer nothing less than giving up his own life will pay his debt. The execution of the death penalty is a right the state owes the criminal and it should not deny him his due. Modern jurists have tried to replace retributive justice with the notion of corrective justice. The aim of the latter is not to abandon the concept of equality but to find a more adequate way to express it. It tries to preserve the idea of equal opportunity for each individual to realize the best that is in him. The criminal is regarded as being socially ill and in need of treatment that will enable him to become a normal member of society. Before a treatment can be administered, the cause of his antisocial behavior must be found, what's more, provisions must be made to have this done. Only those criminals who are incurable should be permanently separated from the rest of society. This does not mean that criminals will escape punishment or be quickly returned to take up careers of crime. It means that justice is to heal the individual, not simply to get even with him. If severe punishment is the only adequate means for accomplishing this, it should be administered. However, the individual should be given every opportunity to assume a normal place in society. His conviction of crime must not deprive him of the opportunity to make his way in the society of which he is a part.