单选题What the author wants to suggest may be best interpreted as

单选题Aristotle believed that the heavens were perfect. If they ever were, they are no longer. The skies above Earth are now littered with the debris (残骸) of dead satellites, bits of old rockets and the odd tool dropped by a spacewalking astronaut. Such is the extent of the detritus that the first accidental collision between two satellites has already taken place. It happened in February 2009, when a defunct (废弃的) Russian Cosmos smashed into a functioning American Iridium, destroying both and creating even more space junk. To stop this sort of thing happening again Vaios Lappas of the University of Surrey, in England, has designed a system that will remove satellites from orbit at the end of their useful lives--and as a bonus will scour part of the sky clean as it does so. Dr. Lappas's satellite-removal system employs a solar sail. As light from the sun hits the sail, it imparts a minuscule but continuous acceleration. When a satellite is first launched, the sail is angled in a way that causes this acceleration to keep the satellite in orbit. (Orbits gradually decay as a result of collisions with the small number of air molecules found even at altitudes normally classified as "outer space". ) Solar sails have yet to be used widely to propel spacecraft in this way--several earlier versions came unstuck when the sails failed to unfurl properly-but doing so is not a novel idea in principle The novelty Dr. Lappas envisages is to change the angle of the sail when the satellite has become defunct. Instead of keeping the derelict craft in orbit, it will, over the course of a couple of years, drag it into the atmosphere and thus to a fiery end. Not only that, but the sail will also act like a handkerchief, mopping up microscopic orbital detritus such as flecks of paint from previous launches. A fleck of paint may not sound dangerous, but if travelling at 27 000kph (17 000mph), as it would be in orbit, it could easily penetrate an astronaut's spacesuit. A prototype of Dr. Lappas's design, called CubeSail, will be launched late next year. It weighs just 3kg and, when folded up, measures 30cm (12 inches) by 10era by 10era. Once unfurled, however, the sail will have an area of 25 square metres. If this prototype, which is paid for by EADS, a European aerospace company, proves successful, solar sails might be added to many future satellites. That would enable them to be removed rapidly from orbit when they became useless and would restore to the skies some measure of Aristotelian perfection.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Clouds may have silver linings, but even the sunniest of us seldom glimpse them on foot. The marvelous Blur Building that hovers above the lake of Yverdon les Bains in Switzerland provides such an opportunity. It gives anyone who has ever wanted to step into the clouds they watch from the airplane window a chance to realize their dream. Visitors wear waterproof ponchos before setting off along a walkway above the lake that takes them into the foggy atmosphere of the cloud. The experience of physical forms blurring before your eyes as you enter the cloud is both disorientating and liberating. However firmly your feet are planted on the floor, it is hard to escape the sensation of floating. On the upper deck of this spaceship-shaped structure, the Angel Bar, a translucent counter lit in tones of aqueous blue, beckons with a dozen different kinds of mineral water. To enter this sublime building situated in the landscape of the Swiss Alps feels like walking into a poem—it is part of nature but removed from reality, Its architects, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio of New York, designed it as a pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 in the Three Lakes region of Switzerland, an hour's train ride from Geneva, which features a series of exhibits on the lakes. The Blur Building is easily the most successful. Indeed, you can skip the rest of the Expo—a Swiss kitsch version of Britain's Millennium Dome—and head straight for the cloud, which is there until the end of October. The architects asked themselves what was the ideal material for building on a lake and decided on water itself.' the element of the lake, the snow. the rivers and the mist above it. They wanted to play on and lay bare the notion of a world's fair pavilion by creating an ethereal ghost of one in which there is nothing to see. The result is a refuge from the surveillance cameras and high-definition images of our everyday world—a particular tease in Switzerland, where clarity and precision are so prized. (Anti- architecture or not, the Blur Building cost a cool $7.5 million.) Out-of-the-box thinking is a trademark of Diller+Scofidio. a husband-and-wife team of architecture professors who became the first architects to win a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1999. Although they have built very little, they are interested in the social experience of architecture, in challenging people's ideas about buildings. They treat architecture as an analytical art form that combines other disciplines, such as visual art and photography, dance and theatre. To realize its Utopian poetry, the Blur Building has to be technologically state-of-the-art. Water from the lake is pumped through 32.000 fog nozzles positioned throughout the skeleton-like stainless steel structure; so the building does not just look like a cloud on the outside, it feels like a cloud on the inside. And while the 300-foot-wide platform can accommodate up to 400 people, visitors vanish from each other in the mist at about five paces, so you really can wander lonely as a cloud. Wordsworth must be smiling.

单选题 What's your earliest childhood memory? Can you remember learning to walk? Or talk? The first time you heard thunder or watched a television program? Adults seldom{{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}events much earlier than the year or so before entering school,{{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}children younger than three or four{{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}retain any specific, personal experiences. A variety of explanations have been{{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}by psychologists for this "childhood amnesia". One argues that the hippo-campus, the region of the brain which is{{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}for forming memories, does not mature until about the age of two. But the most popular theory{{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}that, since adults don't think like children, they cannot{{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}childhood memories. Adults think in words, and their life memories are like stories or{{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}one event follows{{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}as in a novel or film. But when they search through their mental{{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}for early childhood memories to add to this verbal life story. they don't find any that fit the{{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}It's like trying to find a Chinese word in an English dictionary. Now psychologist Annette Simms of the New York State University offers a new{{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}for childhood amnesia. She argues that there simply aren't any early childhood memories to (13) . According to Dr. Simms, children need to learn to use someone else's spoken description of their personal{{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}in order to turn their own short-term, quickly forgotten {{U}}{{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}of them into long-term memories. In other{{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}, children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about{{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}—Mother talking about the afternoon {{U}}{{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}looking for seashells at the beach or Dad asking them about their day at Ocean Park. Without this{{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}reinforcement, says Dr. Simms, children cannot form{{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}memories of their personal experiences.{{B}}Notes:{{/B}} childhood amnesia 儿童失忆症。

单选题People don't want to buy information online. Why? Because they don't have to. No more than that because they're used to not paying for it. That's the conventional wisdom. Slate, Microsoft's online politics-and-culture magazine, is an oft-cited example of the failed attempts to charge a fee for access to content. So far, for most publishers, it hasn't worked. But nothing on the Web is a done deal. In September graphics-soft-ware powerhouse Adobe announced new applications that integrate commerce into downloading books and articles online, with Simon Schuster, Barnes and Noble, and Salon. corn among its high-profile partners. Some analysts put the market for digitized publishing at more than $100 billion. Of course, if the Internet can generate that kind of money—some might say almost any kind of money—people want in. And this couldn't come at a better time. Newspaper and magazine writers in particular are increasingly frustrated by their publishers, which post their writings online but frequently don't pay them extra. So here's the good news: Fathrain. com, the third biggest book-seller on the Net—after Amazon. com and Barnesandnoble. corn—is now doing just what the publishing industry that made it a success fears., it's offering a secure way to pay for downloadable manuscripts online. Fatbrain calls it offshoot eMatter. With it, the company's executives have the radical notion of ousting publishers from the book-selling business altogether by giving writers 50% of each and every sale (To reel in authors, eMatter is running a 100% royalty promotion until the end of the year. ) Suggested prices to consumers range from a minimum $ 2 to $ 20, depending on the size of the book to download. "This will change publishing forever!" Chris MaeAskill, co-founder and chief executive of Fatbrain, declares with the bravado of an interior decorator. "With eBay, anybody could sell antiques. Now anybody can be published. " There's been no shortage of authors wanting in. Within a few weeks, according to the company, some 2,000 writers signed on to publish their works. Some of this is technical stuff—Fatbrain got where it is by specializing in technical books—but there are some well-known writers like Catherine Lanigan, author of Romancing the Stone, who has put her out-of-print books and a new novella on the site. Another popular draw is Richard Bach, who agreed to post a 23-page short story to the site. Not everyone thinks downloadable documents are the biggest thing in publishing since Oprah's Book Club. "I think it will appeal to sellers more than buyers," says Michael May, a digitalcommerce analyst at Jupiter Communications, which released a report that cast doubt on the market's potential. "A lot of people are going to publish gibberish. The challenge is to ensure the quality of the work. " Blaine Mathieu, an analyst at Gartner Group's Dataquest, says, "Most people who want digital content want it immediately, I don't know if this model would satisfy their immediate need. Even authors may not find that Web distribution of their works is going to bring them a pot of gold. For one thing, it could undermine sales rather than enhance them. For another, anybody could e-mail downloaded copies of manuscripts around town or around the world over the Net without the writer's ever seeing a proverbial dime. " Softlock. com, Authentica and Fatbrain are trying to head this problem off by developing encryption padlocks that would allow only one hard drive to receive and print the manuscripts. For now, the problem persists.

单选题Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject—and studied the brain—say that they are. Research for my book Late—Talking Children drove home the point to me. Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathematician or scientist—and four—fifths had a close relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subjects—and to music. Black, white and Asian children in this group showed the same patterns. However, looking at the larger world around us, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering. If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians. It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled—popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music. Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a disproportionately large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modem. A long string of names comes to mind—Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, W. C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker…and so on. None of this presupposes any special innate ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.

单选题Good looks, the video-games industry is discovering, will get you only so far. The graphics on a modern game may far outstrip the pixellated blobs of the 1980s, but there is more to a good game than eye candy. Photo-realistic graphics make the lack of authenticity of other aspects of gameplay more apparent. It is not enough for game characters to look better--their behaviour must also be more sophisticated, say researchers working at the interface between gaming and artificial intelligence (AI). Today's games may look better, but the gameplay is" basically the same" as it was a few years ago, says Michael Mateas, the founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. AI, he suggests, offers an "untapped frontier" of new possibilities. "We are topping out on the graphics, so what's going to be the next thing that improves gameplay?" asks John Laird, director of the AI lab at the University of Michigan. Improved AI is a big part of the answer, he says. Those in the industry agree. The high-definition graphics possible on next-generation games consoles, such as Microsoft's Xbox 360, are raising expectations across the board, says Neil Young of Electronic Arts, the world's biggest games publisher. " You have to have high-resolution models, which requires high-resolution animation," he says," so now I expect high-resolution behaviour. " Representatives from industry and academia will converge in Marina del Rey, California, later this month for the second annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment(AIIDE) conference. The aim, says Dr Laird, who will chair the event, is to increase the traffic of people and ideas between the two spheres. "Games have been very important to AI through the years, "he notes. Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of computing in the 1940s,wrote a simple chess-playing program before there were any computers to run it on; he also proposed the Turing test, a question-and-answer game that is a yardstick for machine intelligence. Even so, AI research and video games existed in separate worlds until recently. The AI techniques used in games were very simplistic from an academic perspective, says Dr. Mateas, while AI researchers were, in turn, clueless about modern games. But, he says," both sides are learning, and are now much closer. " Consider, for example, the software that controls an enemy in a first-person shooter (FPS)--a game in which the player views the world along the barrel of a gun. The behaviour of enemies used to be pre-scripted: wait until the player is nearby, pop up from behind a box, fire weapon, and then roll and hide behind another box, for example. But some games now use far more advanced "planning systems" imported from academia. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behaviour, the AI monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," says Dr. Mateas. They can, for example, work out whether the player can see them or not, seek out cover when injured, and so on. " Rather than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can dynamically shift, depending on what's happening," says Fiona Sperry of Electronic Arts. If the industry is borrowing ideas from academia, the opposite is also true. Commercial games such as" Unreal Tournament", which can be easily modified or scripted, are being adopted as research tools in universities, says Dr. Laird. Such tools provide flexible environments for experiments, and also mean that students end up with transferable skills. But the greatest potential lies in combining research with game development, argues Dr. Mateas. "Only by wrestling with real content are the technical problems revealed, and only by wrestling with technology does it give you insight into what new kinds of content are possible, "he says.

单选题 Many parents complain that their teenage children are rebelling. They greet their children's teenage with needless dread. While teenagers may assault us with heavy-metal music, wear strange clothes, have strange hair styles, and spend all their time dating or meeting friends, such behavior scarcely adds up to full-scale revolt. Take a good look at the present rebellion. It seems that teenagers are all taking the same way of showing that they disagree with their parents. Instead of striking out boldly on their wings, most of them are clutching at one another's hands for reassurance. Their reason for thinking or acting in thus-and-such a way is that the crowd is doing it. It has become harder and harder for a teenager to stand up against the popularity wave and to go his or her own way. They have come out of their cocoon—into a larger cocoon. Teenage rebellion, according to psychologist Laurence Steinberg, coauthor of You and Your Adolescent, has been greatly overstated. Many other psychologists agree. The idea that teenagers inevitably rebel is a myth that has the potential for great family harm. This notion can damage communication during this critical time for parents to influence youngsters. Still adolescence is often a trying time of transition for child and parent. Teenagers need to establish themselves as individuals—in their own minds and in the eyes of others. This search isn't about rebellion: it's about becoming a person of one's own. " Teenagers ought to be growing away from their parents and learning to stand on their own two feet, " says Steinberg. Here is one way parents can help: don't stereotype. " Parents who expect teenage rebellion may actually stir it up, " says Kenneth I. Howard, a member of a research team that collected survey data on more than 20,000 teenagers over a 28-year period. Howard cautions parents not to resort to suppression at the first sight of adolescent independence, fearful that giving in even slightly now means drugs cannot be far behind. When parents overreact, teenagers assert themselves more, parents clamp down harder, and a full-scale blowup results. In fact, psychologists say that there is no inevitable pattern to teenage behavior, and no such creature as a typical teenager. Your teenager is now larger, stronger, older and smarter than before, with an additional supply of hormone raging through the bloodstream. But he or she is still the same human being you have lived with since birth. Given a chance, your son or daughter will continue to behave in ways you have established.

单选题Television piracy gets less attention than film or music piracy, but it is no less widespread. One of the big (1) that had stood in its way--the large file sizes required to transmit video--is shrinking (2) computers get faster and bandwidth costs (3) . More and more people are buying televisions that can connect (4) the internet. TV piracy (5) for two reasons. It can bring shows to foreign (6) faster, and it is free. The first (7) matters for only a very few shows, most of them American dramas. And media firms have reduced this advantage further by releasing TV shows almost (8) in different countries. The second advantage is not as big as it appears either (9) music and film, nearly all television is free at the margin: (10) a household has paid its subscription, it costs (11) to watch another show. The real threat (12) by piracy is not that it threatens television's current business model but that it makes building a new one more difficult. (13) of the limitations of advertising-supported online video, Euro- pean media firms are currently testing micropayments for shows. The wide (14) of free illegal alternatives may well damage these efforts. (15) the parallel is not with music or films but with newspapers and maga- zines. These days print piracy is a(n) (16) issue, since most general news articles are (17) free. If news- papers and magazines begin 18 people to read their output, the pirates are likely to turn (19) , and at a rapid rate. (20) it may be with television.

单选题For college students and their parents, the steady high tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What's behind these huge tuition bills: Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate? Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Afford-ability and Productivity. During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent. The data, based on United States Department of Education filings from more than 2,782 colleges, come from 1987 to 2007. Neither the report nor outside experts on college affordability went so far as to argue that the increase in support staff was directly responsible for spiraling tuition. Most experts say that the largest driver of tuition increases has been the decline in state financing for higher eduction. Still, the data findings raise concerns about administrative bloat (膨胀). "On a case-by-case basis, many of these hiring decisions might be good ones, but over all, it's not a sustainable trend," said Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. The growth in support staff included some jobs that did not exist 20 years ago, like environmental sustainability officers and a broad array of information technology workers. The support staff category includes many different jobs, like residential-life staff, admissions and recruitment officers, fund-raisers, loan counselors and all the back-office staff positions responsible for complying with the new regulations. "A lot of it is definitely trying to keep up with the Joneses," said Daniel Bennett, a labor economist, "Universities and colleges are catering more to students, trying to make college a lifestyle, not just people getting an education. There's more social programs, more athletics, more trainers, more sustainable environmental programs." In the 20-year period, the report found, the greatest number of jobs added, more than 630,000, were instructors—but three-quarters of those were part-time. Converted to full-time equivalents, those resulted in a total of 939,000 teaching jobs, up from 641,000 in 1987. "Colleges have altered the composition of their work force by steadily increasing the number of managerial positions and support or service staff, while at the same time disproportionately increasing the number of part-time staff that provides instruction," the report said, "meanwhile, employee productivity relative to enrollment and degrees awarded has been relatively flat in the midst of rising compensation./

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C, and D on ANSWER SHEET 1. The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is becoming mature. A man reaches the mature{{U}} (1) {{/U}}of his reasoning powers and mental faculties{{U}} (2) {{/U}}before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen. And then, too, in the case of woman, it is the only reason of a sort--very mean in its{{U}} (3) {{/U}}. That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing{{U}} (4) {{/U}}but what is quite close to them,{{U}} (5) {{/U}}fast to the present moment, taking appearance for{{U}} (6) {{/U}}, and preferring{{U}} (7) {{/U}}to matters of the first importance. For it is {{U}}(8) {{/U}}his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only,{{U}} (9) {{/U}}the brute, but looks about him and considers the past anti the future; and this is the origin of{{U}} (10) {{/U}}, as well as that of care and anxiety which so many people{{U}} (11) {{/U}}. Both the advantages and the disadvantages, which this{{U}} (12) {{/U}}, are{{U}} (13) {{/U}}in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted,{{U}} (14) {{/U}}, while she has an immediate understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of {{U}}(15) {{/U}}is narrow and does not reach to what is{{U}} (16) {{/U}}; so that things which are absent, or past, or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is the reason why women are inclined to be{{U}} (17) {{/U}}and sometimes carry their desire to a{{U}} (18) {{/U}}that borders upon madness. In their hearts, women think it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it--if possible during their husband's life,{{U}} (19) {{/U}}, at any rate, after his death. The very fact that their husband hands them{{U}} (20) {{/U}}his earnings for purposes of housekeeping strengthens them in this belief.