单选题However important we may regard school life to be, there is no denying the fact that children spend more time at home than in the classroom. Therefore, the great influence of parents cannot be ignored or discounted by the teacher. They can become strong allies of the school personnel or they can consciously or unconsciously hinder and obstruct curricular objectives. Administrators have been aware of the need to keep parents informed of the newer method used in schools. Many principals have conducted workshops explaining such matters as the reading readiness program, manuscript writing, and developmental mathematics. Moreover, the classroom teacher, with the permission of the supervisors, can also play an important role in enlightening parents. The many interviews carried on during the year as well as new ways of reporting pupils’ progress, can significantly aid in achieving a harmonious interplay between school and home. To illustrate, suppose that a father has been drilling Junior in arithmetic processes night after night. In a friendly interview, the teacher can help the parent convert his natural paternal interest into productive channels. He might be persuaded to let Junior participate in discussing the family budget, buying the food, using a yardstick or measuring cup at home, setting the clock, calculating mileage on a trip, and engaging in scores of other activities that have a mathematical basis. If the father follows the advice, it is reasonable to assume that he will soon realize his son is making satisfactory progress in mathematics and, at the same time, enjoying the work. Too often, however, teachers' conferences with parents are devoted to petty accounts of children's offences, complaints about laziness and poor work habits, and suggestions for penalties and rewards at home. What is needed is a more creative approach in which the teacher, as a professional adviser, plants ideas in parents' minds for the best utilization of the many hours that the child spends out of the classroom. In this way, the school and the home join forces in stimulating the fullest development of youngsters' capacities.

单选题Nothing in books could be accepted ______ checked by a demonstration to the senses. A. if B. after C. when D. unless

单选题 It turns out that men's brains may literally be wired differently than those of women. Researchers say the differences could explain why the sexes seem more suited to certain types of tasks than their counterparts. For example, women seem to be hardwired for multitasking. Using imaging techniques, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found men tended to display neural activity in one hemisphere of the brain for certain activities, while in women the activity bounces across hemispheres. "These maps show us a stark difference and complementarity in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others." said Ragini Verma, a PhD in the department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Past studies have shown sex differences in the brain, but the neural wiring connecting regions across the whole brain that have been tied to such cognitive skills has never been fully shown in a large population, the researchers said. Researchers found that in the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain, females displayed greater connectivity between the left and right hemispheres. Males, on the other hand, displayed greater connectivity within each hemisphere. By contrast, the opposite prevailed in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that plays a major role in motor control, where males displayed greater inter-hemispheric connectivity and females displayed greater intra-hemispheric connectivity. These connections likely give men an efficient system for coordinated action, where the cerebellum and cortex participate in bridging between perceptual experiences in the back of the brain, and action, in the front of the brain, according to the authors. The female connections likely facilitate integration of the analytic and sequential processing modes of the left hemisphere with the spatial, intuitive information processing modes of the right side. The findings meshed with other University of Pennsylvania studies in which females outperformed males on attention, word and face memory, and social cognition tests. Males performed better on spatial processing and sensorimotor speed. Those differences were most pronounced in the 12 to 14 age range. "It's quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are," said Dr. Ruben Gur. He further pointed out detailed connectome maps of the brain will not only help us better understand the differences between how men and women think, but it will also give us more insight into the roots of neuropsychiatric disorders, which are often sex related.

单选题Why is lean production "lean"?

单选题Read the following text. Choose the best word or phrase marked A, B, C or D for each numbered blank. The American Family In the American family the husband and wife usually {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}important decision making. When the children are {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}enough, they take part as well. Foreigners are often surprised by the permissiveness of American parents. The old rule that "children should be seen and not heard" is rarely {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}, and children are often allowed to do {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}they wish without strict {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}of their parents. The father seldom expects his children to listen to him {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}question, and children are encouraged to be {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}at an early age. Some people believe that American parents carry this freedom {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}far. Others think that a strong father image would not {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}the American values of {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}and independence. Because Americans emphasize the importance of independence, young people are expected to {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}their parental families by the time they have {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}their late teens or early twenties. Indeed, not to do so is often regarded as a {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}, a kind of weak dependence. This pattern of independence often results in serious {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}for the aging parents of a small family. The average American is expected to live {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}the age of 70. The job-retirement age is {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}65. The children have left home, married, and {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}their own households. {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}20 percent of all people over 65 do not have enough retirement incomes. {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}the major problem of many elderly couples is not economic. They feel useless and lonely with neither an occupation nor a {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}family group.

单选题William Shakespeare described old age as "second childishness"—no teeth, no eyes, no taste. In the case of taste he may, musically speaking, have been more perceptive than he realised. A paper in Neurology by Giovanni Frisoni and his colleagues at the National Centre for Research and Care of Alzheimers"s Disease in Italy, shows that frontotemporal dementia can affect musical desires in ways that suggest a regression , if not to infancy, then at least to a patient"s teens. Frontotemporal dementia, a disease usually found with old people, is caused, as its name suggests, by damage to the front and sides of the brain. These regions are concerned with speech, and with such "higher" functions as abstract thinking and judgment. Two of such patients intrigued Dr Frisoni. One was a 68-year-old lawyer, the other a 73-year-old housewife. Both had undamaged memories, but displayed the sorts of defect associated with frontotemporal dementia—a diagnosis that was confirmed by brain scanning. About two years after he was first diagnosed, the lawyer, once a classical music lover who referred to pop music as "mere noise", started listening to the Italian pop band "883". As his command of language and his emotional attachments to friends and family deteriorated, he continued to listen to the band at full volume for many hours a day. The housewife had not even had the lawyer"s love of classical music, having never enjoyed music of any sort in the past. But about a year after her diagnosis she became very interested in the songs that her 11-year-old granddaughter was listening to. This kind of change in musical taste was not seen in any of the Alzheimer"s patients, and thus appears to be specific to those with frontotemporal dementia. And other studies have remarked on how frontotemporal-dementia patients sometimes gain new talents. Five sufferers who developed artistic abilities are known. And in another case, one woman with the disease suddenly started composing and singing country and western songs. Dr Frisoni speculates that the illness is causing people to develop a new attitude towards novel experiences, Previous studies of novelty-seeking behaviour suggest that it is managed by the brain"s fight frontal lobe. A predominance of the right over the left frontal lobe, caused by damage to the latter, might thus lead to a quest for new experience. Alternatively, the damage may have affected some specific nervous system that is needed to appreciate certain kinds of music. Whether that is a gain or a loss is a different matter. As Dr Frisoni puts it in his article, there is no accounting for taste.

单选题All the following about the Literary Digest and its forecast is true EXCEPT ______.

单选题Today is Friday, and the ______ is Sunday. [A] day after today [B] tomorrow after tomorrow [C] day after tomorrow

单选题The history of English is conventionally, if perhaps too neatly, divided into three periods usually called Old (or Anglo-Saxon)English, Middle English, and Modern English. The earliest period begins with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A. D, though no records of their language survive from before the seventh century, and it continues until the end of the seventh century or a hit later. By that time, Latin, Old Norse(the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the Anglo-Nor-man French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had begun to have a substantial impact on the vocabulary, and the well-developed inflectional (词尾变化的) system that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to break down. The period of Middle English extends roughly from the twelfth century through the fifteenth. The influence of French(and Latin, often by way of French)upon the vocabulary continued throughout the period, the loss of some inflections and the reduction of others accelerated, and many changes took place within the grammatical systems of the language. A bypical prose passage, specially one from the later part of the period, will not have such a foreign look to us as the prose of Old English, but it will not be mistaken for contemporary writing either. The period of Modern English extends from the sixteenth century to our own day. The early part of this period saw the completion of a revolution in vowel distribution that had begun in late Middle English and that effectively brought the language to something resembling its present pattern. Other important early developments include the stabilizing effect on spelling of the printing press and the beginning of the direct influence of Latin, and to a lesser extent, Greek on the vocabulary. Later, as English came into contact with other cultures around the world and distinctive dialects of English developed in the many areas which Britain had colonized, numerous other languages made small but interesting contributions to our word-stock.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Jill Ker Conway, president of Smith, echoes the prevailing view of contemporary technology when she says that " anyone in today's world who doesn't understand data processing is not educated. "But she insists that the increasing emphasis on these matters leave certain gaps. Says she: "The very strongly utilitarian emphasis in education, which is an effect of man-made satellites and the cold war, has really removed from this culture something that was very profound in its 18th and 19th century roots, which was a sense that literacy and learning were ends in themselves for a democratic republic. " In contrast to Plato's claim for the social value of education, a quite different idea of intellectual purposes was advocated by the Renaissance humanists. Overjoyed with their rediscovery of the classical learning that was thought to have disappeared during the Dark Ages, they argued that the imparting of knowledge needs no justification--religious, social, economic, or political. Its purpose, to the extent that it has one, is to pass on from generation to generation the corpus of knowledge that constitutes civilization. "What could man acquire, by virtuous striving, that is more valuable than knowledge?" asked Erasmus, perhaps the greatest scholar of the early 16th century. That idea has acquired a tradition of its own. "The educational process has no end beyond itself," said John Dewey. "It is its own end " ' But what exactly is the corpus of knowledge to be passed on? In simpler times, it was all included in the medieval universities' Quadrivium ( arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music ) and Trivium( grammar, rhetoric ,logic). As recently as the last century ,when less than 5% of Americans went to college at all, students in New England establishments were compelled mainly to memorizeand recite various Latin texts, and crusty professors angrily opposed the introduction of any new scientific discoveries or modern European languages. "They felt," said regretfully Charles Francis Adams, Jr. ,the Union Pacific Railroad president who devoted his later years to writing history," that a classical education was the important distinction between a man who had been to college and a man who had not been to college, and that anything that diminished the importance of this distinction was essentially revolutionary and tended to anarchy. "

单选题There is one kind of pain for which nobody has yet found a cure--the pain that comes from the ending of a relationship. The relationship could be a marriage or a deep friendship. Such a relationship may come to a sudden end; or it may simply fade away slowly as people and circumstances change. You may be the one to "break it off', with a short note or a brief phone call. Or you may be on the receiving end. However it ended and whoever decided to end it, the pain is equally hard to bear and it requires the same time for grief. Although there is no cure for grief, we can not help looking for one, to ease the pain and to make us forget our tears. We keep ourselves busy with work, or we try to plunge ourselves into our hobbies. Perhaps we start to drink more than we should to "drown our sorrows", or we follow the conventional advice and join a club or society. But these things cannot cure it. Moreover, we are always in a hurry to get rid of our grief. We feel that we should try to convince ourselves, as we bite on the pillow, that we are much too old to be crying. Some people bury their grief deep inside themselves. Others seek relief by pouring their hearts out to their friends, or to anyone else who can offer a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. It is not easy to explain why we adopt these attitudes to emotional pain. Part of the answer must lie in the nature of grief itself. The important thing to admit about grief, then, is that it will take its time. By trying to convince ourselves that it ought to be over sooner, we create an additional tension which can only make things worse. How much time is needed will vary from person to person, but psychiatrists have a rule of thumb: grief will last as long as the original relationship lasted. The sad thing is that, when the breakdown occurs, we can only stumble forward over the stones beneath our feet. It is dark ahead, and we will fall painfully many times before we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

单选题 Questions 17～20 are based on the following conversation about a new snack food. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17～20.

单选题The author's attitude towards Larry Myers' work is ______.