In recent years, nonhuman animals have been at the center of an intense philosophical debate. In particular, many authors have criticized traditional morality, maintaining that the way in which we treat members of other species is ethically indefensible. We routinely use animals as means to our ends—in fact, we treat them in ways in which we would deem it profoundly immoral to treat human being. Though they are "moral patients", that is, beings whose treatment may be subject to moral evaluation—their status is infinitely inferior to ours. Are such double standards warranted? And, if so, on what grounds? While not being completely overlooked by philosophers, the first justification offered is powerful and widespread at the societal level, mainly due to its simplicity. To the question of what divides us from the other animals, the answer is: the fact that they are not human. On such a view, what makes the difference is the possession, or lack, of a genotype characteristics of the species Homo sapiens. Is this a good reply? No. Those appealing to species membership work within the framework of the human egalitarian paradigm. And it is just the line of reasoning that supports human equality that implies, by denying the moral relevance of race or sex membership, the rejection of the idea that species membership in itself can make a difference in moral status. If one claims that biological characteristic like race and sex cannot play a role in ethics, how can one attribute a role to another biological characteristics such as species membership? Moral views that, while rejecting racism and sexism, accept "speciesism"—the view that grants members of our own species special moral status—are internally inconsistent. Sheer speciesism is hardly plausible. But there are more sophisticated ways of defending our current double standards to which the theoretical defenders of the status quo tend to turn. For most philosophers, it is not species membership rather than the possession of rationality that plays a central role. We can set aside for the sake of argument the (questionable) assumption that rationality is a human prerogative in order to focus on the moral significance attached to rationality. Though many other defences of the doctrine of human superiority have been put forward, the appeal to species membership, the appeal to the possession of rationality, as a precondition of morals, and the appeal to this very same characteristic as a means to intersubjective agreement are certainly the most basic, around which all the others revolve. If none of them can justify maintaining nonhuman animals in their present inferior moral condition, it seems plausible to infer that our current attitude is deeply flawed.

Notation gave western music a means of written record, but at first only for a kind of music, chant, that was believed to have originated half a millennium and more in the past—to be effectively, ageless. Early medieval chants sprang from the whole time of eternal sameness, rhythm. Then measure came. And with it came the first identifiable and precisely datable works. Where chant was of a piece with other musical traditions in being self-sufficient melody, working within a modal system, belonging to no creator (but to God) and designed for worship, the new music of the twentieth century opened a distinctively western path. The measuring of time was the beginning not only of rhythmic notation— known, far beyond Europe, to the Indian theorist Sarngadeva in the first haft of the thirteenth century—but also of music involving coordination among singers carrying different melodies, of polyphony. This, too, was by no means confined to the wedge of land between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: the gamelan music of Bali, a tradition independent of Europe, is comparable with early western polyphony in its superposition of different time streams, fast and slow, while the music of many sub- Saharan African peoples often piles up dissimilar rhythmic layers in ways foreign to Europe outside certain special repertories(fourteenth-century song and some music since 1950). But, from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, polyphony in the west gradually moved away from the repetitive structures that were retained on Bali or in central Africa as Europeans discovered how harmony could result in continuous flow. The source, as of so much in western culture, was a misunderstanding of classical Greek knowledge, again acquired through Boethius. He had nothing to say about harmony in the sense of chords, but he conveyed a Geek satisfaction in the primacy of the octave and the fifth, which medieval musicians took as models of consonance (the euphonious combining notes). Just as essential were dissonant combinations, lacking euphony, for these would intensity the need of for consonance. A dissonance placed immediately before a final consonance would produce a firmly conclusive ending—a cadence, such as became an essential of western music. Extending back from the cadence, the forces of harmony, marshaled through relationships between each chord and the next, could amplify the last note. Thus time measured became time decisively having a goal, and music could emulate the progress in every human soul towards eternity. Music mirrored, too, how time generally was being told. Guido's staff notation came roughly when water clocks were reintroduced from Byzantium and Islam, enabling monks to know when a service was due from the level reached by water slowly filling a vessel. Thus reading, whether of a chant book or a water gauge, substituted for memory and intuition. Exact synchrony between music and time was lost a little when clockwork mechanisms appeared in the mid—thirteenth century, half a century later than the gear-driven music produced at Notre Dame in Paris. However, the perfection of hour-chiming with hour-chiming capabilities, in the astronomical clock made by Richard Wallingford for St. Albans Abbey (1327-1336), strikingly coincided with the perfection of rhythmic notation that spread from Paris and gave music its own machinery of time lengths. Choose the most appropriate from the four choices to answer the question or complete the sentence.

Beauty has always been regarded as something praiseworthy. Almost everyone thinks attractive people are happier and healthier, have better marriages and have more respectable occupations. Personal consultants give them better advice for finding jobs. Even judges are softer on attractive defendants. But in the executive circle, beauty can become a liability. While attractiveness is a positive factor, for a man on his way up the executive ladder, it is harmful to a woman. Handsome male executives were perceived as having more integrity than plainer men; effort and ability, were thought to account for their success. Attractive female executives were considered to have less integrity than unattractive ones; their success was attributed not to ability but to factors such as luck. All unattractive women executives were thought to have more integrity and to be more capable than the attractive female executives. Interestingly, though, the rise of the unattractive overnight successes was attributed more to personal relationships and less to ability than was that of attractive overnight successes. Why are attractive women not thought to be able? An attractive woman is perceived to be more feminine and an attractive man more masculine than the less attractive ones. Thus, an attractive women has an advantage in traditionally female jobs, but an attractive women in a traditionally masculine position appears to lack the "masculine" qualities required. This is true even in politics." When the only clue is how he or she looks, people treat men and women differently." says Anne Bowman, who recently published a study on the effects of attractiveness on political candidates. She asked 125 undergraduate students to rank two groups of photographs, one of men and one of women, in order of attractiveness. The students were told the photographs were of candidates for political offices. They were asked to rank them again, in the order they would vote them. The results showed that attractive males utterly defeated unattractive men, but the women who had been ranked most attractive invariably received the fewest votes.

What makes Americans spend nearly half their food dollars on meals away from home? The answer lies in the way Americans live today. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, canned and other convenience foods freed the family cook from full-time duty at the kitchen range. Then, in the 1940s, work in the wartime defense plants took more women out of the home than ever before, setting the pattern of the working wife and mother. Today about half of the country's married women are employed outside the home. But, unless family members pitch in with food preparation, women are not fully liberated from that chore. Instead, many have become, in a sense, prisoners of the completely cooked convenience meals. It is easier to pick up a bucket of fried chicken on the way home from work or take the family out for pizzas or burgers than to start opening cans or heating up frozen dinners after a long, hard day. Also, the rising divorce rate means that there are more single working parents with children to feed. And many young adults and elderly people, as well as unmarried and divorced mature people, have been alone rather than as part of a family unit and don't want to bother cooking for one. Fast food is appealing because it is fast, it does not require any dressing up, it offers a "fun" break in the daily routine, and the expense of money seems small. It can be eaten in the car — sometimes picked up at a drive-in window without even getting out — or on the run. Even if it is brought home to eat, there will never be any dirty dishes to wash because of the handy disposable wrappings. Children, especially, love fast food because it is finger food, no struggling with knives and forks, no annoying instructions from adults about table manner.

Nearly a century ago, biologists found that if they separated an invertebrate animal embryo into two parts at an early stage of its life, it would survive and develop as two normal embryos. This led them to believe that the ceils in the early embryo are undetermined in the sense that each cell has the potential to develop in a variety of different ways. Late biologists found that the situation was not so simple. It matters in which plane the embryo is cut. If it is cut in a plane different from the one used by the early investigators, it will not form two whole embryos. A debate arose over what exactly was happening. Which embryo cells are determined, just when do they become irreversible committed to their fates and what are the "morphogenetic determinants" that tell a cell what to become? But the debate could not be resolved because no one was able to ask the crucial questions in a form in which they could be pursued productively. Recent discoveries in molecular biology, however, have opened up prospects for a resolution of the determinants in early development. They have been able to show that, in a sense, ceil determination begins even before an egg is fertilized. Studying sea urchins, biologist Paul Gross found that an unfertilized egg contains substances that function as morphogenetic determinants. They are located in the cytoplasm of the egg cell, i. e. , in that part of the cell's protoplasm that lies outside of the nucleus. In the unfertilized egg, the substances ate inactive and are not distributed homogeneously. When the egg is fertilized, the substances become active and, presumable, govern the behavior of the genes they interact with. Since the substances are unevenly distributed in the egg, when the fertilized egg divides, the resulting cells are different from the start and so can be qualitatively different in their own gene activity. The substances that Gross studied are maternal messenger RNA's—products of certain of the maternal genes. He and other biologists studying a wide variety of organisms have found that these particular RNA's direct, in large part, the synthesis of histones a class of proteins that bind to round them to form a structure that resembles beads, or knots, on a string. The beads are DNA segments wrapped around the histone; the string is the intervening DNA. And it is the structure of these beaded DNA strings that guides the fate of the cells in which they are located. Choose the most appropriate from the four choices to complete the sentence or answer the question.

American ethnocentricity, while manifest in general attitudes toward others is, of course, tempered somewhat by the very heterogeneity of the population that we have been examining. Thus, while there are the broad standard-expressed in the ways most Americans set goals for their children, organize their political lives, and think about their society in contrast to others-living in our racial and ethnic mosaic makes us more inclined to think in terms of layers or circles of familiarity. A black from Chicago feels and thinks very American in Iago or Nairobi as does an Italian from Brooklyn when visiting relatives in Calabria or Sicily. But when they get home, they will generally reveal to feeling "black" in contrast to " white" and Italian in comparison to other Americans in their own communities. Ethnocentrism is found in political as well as in ethnic contexts. Much of the discussion of patriotism and loyalty is couched in language that reflects rather narrow culture-bound thinking. At various periods in our history this phenomenon has been particularly marked—we remind ourselves of the nativistic movements of the pre-Civil War period, of the anti-foreign organizations during the time of greatest immigration, and the McCarthyism of the early 1950s. During the McCarthy era there was a widespread attempt to impose the notion that anyone who had ever joined a Marxist study group, supported the Loyalist in the Spanish Civil War, or belonged to any one of a number of liberal organizations was "un-American." It is clear that not only those "over the sea" are viewed (and view others) ethnocentrically. These distinctions between "they" and "we" exist within societies as well. In modem industrial societies most individuals belong to a wide array of social groups that differentiate them from others—familial, religious, occupational, recreational, and so on. Individuals are frequently caught in a web of conflicting allegiances. This situation is often surmounted by a hierarchical ranking of groups as referents for behavior. In most societies, including our own, the family is the primary reference group. As we have seen in the U. S. , ethnic or racial identity and religious groups are often judged on the basis of how closely they conform to the standards of the group passing judgment. Thus, several studies have shown that in American society many whites holding Christian beliefs, who constitute both the statistical majority and the dominant group, rank minorities along a continuum of social acceptability. They rate members of minority groups in descending order in terms of how closely the latter approximate their image of "real Americans." Early studies of "social distance" indicated that most ranked groups in the following manner- Protestants from Europe at the top, then, Irish Catholics, Iberians, Italians, Jews, Spanish-Americans. American-born Chinese and Japanese, blacks, and foreign-born Asians. A 1966 study suggested the following rank order: English, French, Swedes, Italians, Scots, Germans, Spaniards, Jews, Chinese, Russians, and blacks. While, over the years, most Americans generally have considered those of English or Canadian ancestry to be acceptable citizens, good neighbors, social equals, and desirable marriage partners, relatively few feel the same way about those who rank low in scales of social distance. There is an interesting correlate to this finding. Investigators have found that minority-group members themselves tend to accept the dominant group's ranking system—with one exception, each tends to put his or her own group at the top of the scale. Ranking in one characteristic of ethnocentric thinking- generalizing is another. The more another group differs from one's own, the more one is likely to generalize about its social characteristics and to hold oversimplified attitudes towards its members. When asked to describe our close friends, we are able to cite their idiosyncratic traits, we may distinguish among subtle differences of physiognomy, demeanor, intelligence, and interests. It becomes increasingly diffcult to make the same careful evaluation of casual neighbors; it is almost impossible when we think of people we do not know at first- hand. Understandably, the general tendency is to assign strangers to available group categories that seem to be appropriate. Such labeling is evident in generalized images of "lazy" Indians, " furtive " Japanese, " passionate " Latins, and " penny-pinching" Scots. Ranking others according to one's own standards and categorizing them into generalized stereotypes together serve to widen the gap between "they" and "we." Freud has written that "in the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel toward strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self- love—of narcissism," in sociological terms, a function of ethnocentric thinking is the enhancement of group cohesion. There is a close relationship between a high degree of ethnocentrism on the part of one group and an increase of antipathy toward others. This relationship tends to hold for ethnocentrism of both dominant and minority groups. Choose the most appropriate from the four choices to complete the sentence.

语法与词汇If you dont ________ the children properly, Mr

语法与词汇These two areas are similar _____ they both have a high rainfall during this season

语法与词汇A sudden movement caught the ponys attention and he instantly became_____ and alert

语法与词汇Mr. Smith became very ________ when it was suggested that he had made a mistake.

语法与词汇The noise was so faint that you had to _____ your ears to hear it

语法与词汇These surveys indicate that many crimes go _____ by the police, mainly because not all victims report them

语法与词汇The broad aim of the meeting was that experts working in the same technical area should meet to exchange ________

语法与词汇When making modern cameras, people began to _____ plastics for metal

语法与词汇The landscape will have a(n) ________ change after a rainstorm in the desert

语法与词汇All the memories of his childhood had _____ from his mind by the time he was 65

语法与词汇________ means 战略， 策略 in Chinese

语法与词汇The man ________ that his car was the fastest in the world and nobody could compete with him in the race

语法与词汇It‟s no good ________ remember the grammatical rules

语法与词汇_____ before, his first performance for the amateur dramatic group was a SUCCESS