单选题As more schools are set up today, learning is compulsory. It is an Ought, even worse, a Must, enforced by regular hours and rigid discipline. And the young sneer at the Oughts and resist the Musts with all their energy. The feeling often lasts through a lifetime. For too many of us, learning appears to be a surrender of our own will to external direction, a sort of enslavement. This is mistake. Learning is a natural pleasure, inborn and instinctive, one of the essential pleasures of the human race. Watch a small child, at an age too young to have had any mental habits implanted by training. Some delightful films made by the late Dr. Arnold Gesell of Yale University show little creatures who can barely talk investigating problems with all the zeal and excitement of explorers, making discoveries with the passion and absorption of dedicated scientists. At the end of each successful investigation, there comes over each tiny face an expression of pure heartfelt pleasure. But if the pleasure of learning is universal, why are there so many dull, incurious people in the world? It is because they were made dull, by bad teaching, by isolation, by surrender to routine, sometimes, too, by the pressure of hard work and poverty, or by the toxin of riches, with all their ephemeral and trivial delights. With luck, resolution and guidance, however, the human mind can survive not only poverty but even wealth. This pleasure is not confined to learning from textbooks, which are too often tedious. But it does include learning from books. Sometimes when I stand in a big library like the library of Congress, or Butler Library at Columbia, and gaze around me at the millions of books, I feel a sober, earnest delight hard to convey except a metaphor. These are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of hearing, and just as the touch of a button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart. But, far beyond books, learning means keeping the mind open and active to receive all kinds of experience. One of the best-informed men I ever knew was a cowboy who rarely read a newspaper and never a book, but who had ridden many thousands miles through one of the western states. He knew his state as thoroughly as a surgeon knows human body. He loved it. Not a mountain, not a canyon which had not much to tell him, not a change in the weather that could not interpret. And so, among the pleasures of learning, we should include travel, travel with an open mind, an alert eye and a visit to understand other people, other places, rather than looking in them a mirror image of oneself. If I were a young man today, I should have resolved to see — no, to learn — all the states before I was 35. Learning also means learning to practice, or at least to aspirate, an art. Every new art you learn appears like a new window on the universe; it is like acquiring a new sense. Because I was born and brought in Glasgow, Scotland, a hideous 19th-century industrial city, I did not understand the slightest thing about architecture until I was in my 20"s. Since then, I have learned a little about the art, and it has been a constant delight...As for reading books, this contains two different delights. One is the pleasure of apprehending the unexpected, such as when one meets a new author who has a new vision of the world. The other is of deepening one"s knowledge of a special field... Learning extends our lives (as Ptolemy said) into new dimensions. It is cumulative. Instead of diminishing in time, like health and strength, its returns go on increasing.

单选题Questions 14 and 15 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 30 seconds to answer the two questions. Now listen to the news.

单选题CCELD is distinctive for its______.

单选题The first official version of the Bible known as the Great Bible was revised in the A. 15th century. B. 16th century. C. 17th century. D. 18th century.

单选题 Questions 6 and 7 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the two questions. Now listen to the news.

单选题We live in southern California growing grapes, a first generation of vintners, our home adjacent to the vineyards and the winery. It"s a very pretty place, and in order to earn the money to realize our dream of making wine, we worked for many years in a business that demanded several household moves, an incredible amount of risk-taking and long absences from my husband. When it was time, we traded in our old life, cinched up our belts and began the creation of the winery. We make small amounts of premium wine, and our lives are dictated by the rhythm of nature and the demands of the living vines. The vines start sprouting tiny green tendrils in March and April, and the baby grapes begin to form in miniature, so perfect that they can be dipped in gold to form jewelry. The grapes swell and ripen in early fall, and when their sugar content is at the right level, they are harvested carefully by hand and crushed in small lots. The wine is fermented and tended until it is ready to be bottled. The vineyards shed their leaves; the vines are pruned and made ready for the dormant months and the next vintage. It sounds nice, doesn"t it? Living in the country, our days were spent in the ancient routine of the vineyard, knowing that the course of our lives as vintners was choreographed long ago and that if we practiced diligently, our wine would be good and we"d be successful. From the start we knew there was a price for the privilege of becoming a winemaking family, connected to the land and the caprices of nature. We work hard at something we love, we are slow to panic over the daily emergencies, and we are nimble at solving problems as they arise. Some hazards to completing a successful vintage are expected: rain just before harvesting can cause mold; electricity unexpectedly interrupted during the cold fermentation of white wine can damage it; a delayed payment from a major client when the money is needed. There are outside influences that disrupt production and take patience, good will and perseverance. For example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulates every facet of the wine business. A winery"s records are audited as often as two or three times a year and every label—newly written for each year"s vintage—must be approved. But the greatest threat to the winery, and one that almost made us lose heart, came out of a lawyer"s imagination. Our little winery was served notice that we were named in a lawsuit accusing us of endangering the public health by using lead foils on our bottles (it was the only material used until recently) "without warning consumers of a possible risk". There it was, our winery"s name listed with the industry"s giants. I must have asked a hundred times: "Who gets the money if the lawsuit is successful?" The answer was, and I never was able to assimilate it, the plaintiffs and their lawyers who filed the suit! Since the lawsuit was brought in behalf of consumers, it seemed to me that consumers must get something if it was proved that a lead foil was dangerous to them. We were told one of the two consumer claimants was an employee of the firm filing the suit! There are attorneys who focus their careers on lawsuits like this. It is an immense danger to the small businessman. Cash reserves can be used up in the blink of an eye when in the company of lawyers. As long as it"s possible for anyone to sue anybody for anything, we are all in danger. As long as the legal profession allows members to practice law dishonorably and lawyers are congratulated for winning big money in this way, we"ll all be plagued with a corruptible justice system.

单选题What are the names of the two Houses of Australian Parliament? A. Senate; House of Representatives. B. House of Lords; House of Commons. C. House of Lords; House of Representatives. D. Senate; House of Commons.

单选题{{B}}TEXT B{{/B}} At last her efforts bore fruit. Burton was appointed to Santos, in Brazil, where Isabel might also go. They made their farewell rounds and Isabel learnt Portuguese while she packed up. At Lisbon three, inch cockroaches seethed about the floor of their room. Isabel was caught off her guard, but Burton was brutal," I suppose you think you look very pretty, standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures." Isabel's reaction was typical. She reflected that of course he was right; if she had to live in a country full of such creatures, and worse, she had better pull herself together. She got down and started lashing out with a slipper. In two hours she had got a bag of ninety-seven. On arrival in Brazil she found that Portuguese fauna had been nothing. Now there were spiders, as big as crabs. In the matter of tropical diseases it seems to have ranked with darkest Africa; there were slaves, too, and in a society where men drank brandy for breakfast, no one condemned the habit of chaining mad slave to the roof-top as a sort of domestic pet, or clown. There was cholera too, and the less dramatic but agonizing local boils," so close you could not put a pin through them." The Emperor found the new Consul and his wife a great addition to the country, and once again Burton's wonderful conversation held his audience spellbound. But chic Brazilians looked askance at Isabel wading barefoot in the streams, bottling snakes, painting and doing up a ruined chapel, or accompanying Richard on expeditions to the virgin interior. There were gymnastics and cold baths, and Mass and market," helping Richard with Literature" (his writing was always in capitals to her) and the wearisome pages of Foreign Office reports she was always so loyal and dutiful in copying out for him. About now, a note of sadness creeps into Isabel's letters home. We sense an immense loneliness behind the courage with which she always faced life. Richard was going through a particularly trying phase. The explorer was dying hard, strangled in office tape. He would cut loose and disappear for weeks at a time, returning as bitter and restless as when he left. It was she who held everything together and kept up the facade, both with the Foreign Office, who were constantly making the most awkward enquiries, and the local society, who were equally curious. There were few diversions for her, Richard preferred discussing metaphysics and astronomy with the Capuchin monks to going to the local dances. She was learning now to be self-sufficient, to manage, unobtrusively, the practical side of their lives, and to rough it, both physically and emotionally. She had to combine the shadow-like devotion of the Oriental woman with a fighting spirit seldom found in women, and certainly not in most Victorian women.

单选题______ was called the "Poet Laureate of Black."A. James Arthur Baldwin B. Ralph EllisonC. Langston Hughes D. Toni Morrison

单选题This fishing village of 1,480 people is a bleak and lonely place. Set on the southwestern edge of Iceland, the volcanic landscape is whipped by the North Atlantic winds, which hush everything around them. A sculpture at the entrance to the village depicts a naked man facing a wall of seawater twice his height. There is no movie theater, and many residents never venture to the capital, a 50-min. drive away. But Sandgerdi might be the perfect place to raise girls who have mathematical talent. Government researchers two years ago tested almost every 15-year-old in Iceland for it and found that boys trailed far behind girls. That fact was unique among the 41 countries that participated in the standardized test for that age group designed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. But while Iceland's girls were alone in the world in their significant lead in math, their national advantage of 15 points was small compared with the one they had over boys in fishing villages like Sandgerdi, where it was closer to 30. The teachers of Sandgerdi's 254 students were only mildly surprised by the results. They say the gender gap is a story not of talent but motivation. Boys think of school as sufferings on the way to a future of finding riches at sea; for girls, it's their ticket out of town. Margret Ingporsdottir and Hanna Maria Heidarsdottir, both 15, students at Sandgerdi's gleaming school—which has a science laboratory, a computer room and a well-stocked library—have no doubt that they are headed for university. "I think I will be a pharmacist," says Heidarsdottir. The teens sat in principal Gudjon Kristjansson's office last week, waiting for a ride to the nearby town of Kevlavik, where they were competing in West Iceland's yearly math contest, one of many throughout Iceland in which girls excel. Meanwhile, by the harbor, Gisli Tor Hauksson, 14, already has big plans that don't require spending his afternoons toiling over geometry. "I'll be a fisherman," he says, just like most of his ancestors. His father recently returned home from 60 days at sea off the coast of Norway. "He came back with 1.1 million krona," about $18,000, says Hauksson. As for school, he says, "it destroys the brain." He intends to quit at 16, the earliest age at which he can do so legally. "A boy sees his older brother who has been at sea for only two years and has a better car and a bigger house than the headmaster," says Kristjansson. But the story of female achievement in Iceland doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. Educators have found that when girls leave their rural enclaves to attend universities in the nation's cities, their science advantage generally shrinks. While 61% of university students are women, they make up only one-third of Iceland's science students. By the time they enter the labor market, many are overtaken by men, who become doctors, engineers and computer technicians. Educators say they watch many bright girls suddenly flinch back in the face of real, head-to-head competition with boys. In a math class at a Reykjavík school, Asgeir Gurdmundsson, 17, says that 'although girls were consistently brighter than boys at school, "they just seem to leave the technical jobs to us." Says Solrun Gensdottir, the director of education at the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture: "We have to find a way to stop girls from dropping out of sciences." Teachers across the country have begun to experiment with ways to raise boys to the level of girls in elementary and secondary education. The high school in Kevlavik tried an experiment in 2002 and 2003, separating 16-to-20-year-olds by gender for two years. That time the boys slipped even further behind. "The boys said the girls were better anyway," says Kristjan Asmundsson, who taught the 25 boys. "They didn't even try./

单选题{{B}}TEXT D{{/B}} Given Shakespeare's popularity as an actor and a playwright and his conspicuous financial success, it was not surprising that jealous rivals began to snipe at his work. In later centuries, a common charge was that Shakespeare did not invent many of his plots but took his basic stories from well-known English history and old legends instead. It is quite true that these sources have been used by many English dramatists. But what Shakespeare did to the common facts is wholly remarkable: he invented new characters, transformed old ones, created a gallery of kings, maidens, courtiers, warriors and clowns of startling psychological depth. He rearranged familiar tales with an extraordinary gift for drama, comedy and fantasy. And over all this Work, so rich with soaring language and glistening poetry, he cast an unprecedented mood of grandeur and glory. Never had the theatre been showered with such lyricism and passion, such insight and profundity. But how could a man of so little education produce such masterful works? Did Shakespeare, in fact, write the plays? Through the centuries, some have suggested Francis Bacon was the "real" Shakespeare. But the mystery-author theorists conveniently ignore an indisputable fact: numerous contemporaries stated that William Shakespeare of Stratford and London was the author of all but a few plays in the present canon. Ben Jonson knew him well, as did theatre owners, and the actors who signed the validating foreword to the definitive First Folio (1623) edition of his work. That Shakespeare was not "educated" means only that he had not endured the dry curriculum of Oxford or Cambridge in those days. Shakespeare was, in fact, a wide reader with an inquisitive mind and a confidence in his own perceptions. John Deyden observed: "He was naturally learned" And Shakespeare certainly "read" tile nature of human behavionr-male and female, monarchs and jesters, peasants and buffoons. It was his imaginative range, his jewelled language, his skill as a storyteller-rather than his erudition-that made him the wonder of the world. In one revolutionary step, the dramatist from Avon broke away from the stereotyped morality plays that dominated the English stage. He preached no sermons; he offered no pious warnings; he treated good, evil, virtue and sin as would a psychologist, not a priest. His cool objectivity in rendering human passions has incurred the wrath of many a righteous soul, and even the great Samuel Johnson chastised Shakespeare for writing "without any moral purpose". It was precisely this aspect of Shakespeare, this relentless analytic stance, embroidered with poetry of luminous beauty , that ushered in what can, without exaggeration, be called the modern theatre. Shakespeare destroyed the reigning, stultifying over-simplifications of Elizabethan drama. He dared to show heroes with flaws and doubts and unheroic impulses; heroines whose chastity was at war with their carnality; petty and fearful kings; queens who were monsters, and princes who were charlatans; villains overwhelmed by guilt or even tempted by virtue-in short, a parade of characters caught, as men and women truly are, in the conflict of emotions and the paradoxes of human dilemmas.

单选题According to the passage, which is the principal energy source of home heat?

单选题Scotland Yard"s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief Superintendent Gerald Lambourne had a request from the British Museum"s Prehistoric Department to force his magnifying glass on a mystery somewhat "outside my usual beat." This was not a question of Whodunit, but Who Was It. The blunt instruments he pored over were the antlers of red deer, dated by radio-carbon examination as being up to 5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors who had last wielded them. The antlers were unearthed in July during the British Museum"s five-year-long excavation at Grime"s Graves, near Therford, Norfolk, a 93-acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned how to farm land in the period from 3,000 to 1,500 B.C. Flint was especially used for ax-heads to clear forests for agriculture, and the quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were kept busy with many orders. What excited Mr. G. de G. Sieveking, the museum"s deputy director of the excavations, was the dried mud still sticking to some of them. "Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip," he says. "The exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last identify as individuals as people who have left few relics, who could not read or write, but who may have had much more intelligence than had been supposed in the past." Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who four years ago had "assisted" the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4000-year-old Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he found minute marks indicating a human hand—that part of the hand just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear the wielding of a pick. After 25 years" specialization in the Yard"s fingerprints department, Chief Superintendent Lambourne knows all about ridge structures—technically known as the "tri-radiate section". It was his identification of that part of the hand that helped to incriminate some of the Great Train Robbers. In 1995 he discovered similar handprints on a bloodstained tee-maker on a golf-course where a woman had been brutally murdered. They eventually led to the killer, after 4,065 handprints had been taken. Chief Superintendent Lamboure had agreed to visit the Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that further hand-marked antlers will come to light. But he is cautious about the historic significance of his findings. "Finger prints and hand prints are unique to each individual but they can tell nothing about the age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them," he says. "Even the Finger prints of gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team." "As indication of intelligence I might determine in which way the miners held the antlers and how they wielded them." To Mr. Sieveking and his museum colleagues any such findings will add to their dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote ancestors.

单选题Questions 6 and 7 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions. Now listen to the news.

单选题Britain has the following papers except ______.

单选题Since ancient times, people have dreamed of leaving their home planet and exploring other worlds. In the later half of the 20th century, that dream became reality. The space age began with the launch of the first artificial satellites in 1963. A human first went into space in 1963. Since then, astronauts and cosmonauts have ventured into space for ever greater lengths of time, even living aboard orbiting space stations for months on end. Two dozen people have circled the moon or walked on its surface. At the same time, robotic explorers have journeyed where humans could not go, visiting all but one of the solar system's major worlds. Unpiloted spacecraft have also visited a host of minor bodies such as moons, comets, and asteroids. These explorations have sparked the advance of new technologies, from rockets to communications equipment to computers. Spacecraft studies have yielded a bounty of scientific discoveries about the solar system, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the universe. And they have given humanity a new perspective on the earth and its neighbors in space. The first challenge of space exploration was developing rockets powerful enough and reliable enough to boost a satellite into orbit. These boosters needed more than brute force, however; they also needed guidance systems to steer them on the proper flight paths to reach their desired orbits. The next challenge was building the satellites themselves. The satellites needed electronic components that were lightweight, yet durable enough to withstand the acceleration and vibration of launch. Creating these components required the world's aerospace engineering facilities to adopt new standards of reliability in manufacturing and testing. On Earth, engineers also had to build tracking stations to maintain radio communications with these artificial "moons" as they circled the planet. Beginning in the early 1920s, humans launched probes to explore other planets. The distances traveled by these robotic space travelers required travel times measured in months or years. These spacecraft had to be especially reliable to continue functioning for a decade or more. They also had to withstand such hazards as the radiation belts surrounding Jupiter, particles orbiting in the rings of Saturn, and greater extremes in temperature than are faced by spacecraft in the closeness of Earth. Despite their great scientific returns, these missions often came with high price tags. Today the world' s space agencies, such as the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA. and the European Space Agency (ESA), strive to conduct robotic missions more cheaply and efficiently. It was inevitable that humans would follow their unpiloted creations into space. Piloted space flight introduced a whole new set of difficulties, many Of them concerned with keeping people alive in the hostile environment of space. In addition to the vacuum of space, which requires any piloted spacecraft to carry its own atmosphere, there are other deadly hazards: solar and cosmic radiation, micrometorites (small bits of rock and dus0 that might puncture a spacecraft hull or an astronaut' s pressure suit, and extremes of temperature ranging from frigid darkness to broiling sunlight. It was not enough simply to keep people alive in space — astronauts needed to have a means of accomplishing useful work while they were there. It was necessary to develop tools and techniques for space navigation, and for conducting scientific observations and experiments. Astronauts would have to be protected when they ventured outside the safety of their pressurized spacecraft to work in the vacuum. Missions and hardware would have to be carefully designed to help insure the Safety of space crews in any foreseeable emergency, from liftoff to landing. The challenges of conducting piloted space flights were great enough for missions that orbited Earth. They became even more daunting for the Apollo missions, which sent astronauts to the moon. The achievement of sending astronauts to the lunar surface and back represents a summit of human space flight. After the Apollo program, the emphasis in piloted missions shifted to long-duration spaceflight, as pioneered aboard Soviet and U.S. space stations. The development of reusable spacecraft became another goal, giving rise to the U.S. space shuffle fleet. Today efforts focus on keeping people healthy during space missions lasting a year or more — the duration needed to reach nearby planets — and in lowering the cost of sending satellites into orbit.

单选题What is the author's main concern?

单选题In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question. Questions 6 and 7 are based on the following news.

单选题In all his novels, Theodore Dreiser set himself to project the ______ American values. For example, in Sister Carrie, there is not one character whose status is not determined economically.

单选题Henry James was most famous for ______.