He was looking
impatient
at the visiting salesman, who showed no signs of getting ready to leave.
Soon comics were so
prevalent
as to attract the attention of serious critics.
阅读理解On the Internet, ads are a real problem
阅读理解The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess information on climate change and its impact. Its Third Assessment Report predicts global temperature rises by 2100 of between 1.4°C and 5.8°C. Although the issue of the changing climate is very complex and some changes are uncertain, temperature rises are expected to affect countries throughout the world and have a knock-on effect with sea-level rises.
Scientists have argued about whether temperature rises are due to human activities or due to natural changes in our environment. The IPCC announced in 2001 that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is likely to be attributable to human activities". This was a more forceful statement than in 1996 when the Second Assessment Report stated that there was a "discernible human influence on the climate" which was the first time they had concluded such a link. Many experts believe the faster the climate changes, the greater the risk will be.
Key points of the projections for climate change globally include that by the second half of the 21st century, wintertime rainfall in the northern mid to high latitudes and Antarctica will rise, that meanwhile Australia, Central America and southern Africa are likely to see decreases in autumn precipitation, that some land areas in the tropics will see more rainfall, and that there will generally be more hot days over land areas.
阅读理解From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition
阅读理解This is offered as a textbook illustration of the principle that voters are far shrewder than most politicians believe. This case study highlighting Washington''s inability to fool anyone is based on a recent survey of the attitudes of people on Medicare about their new prescription-drug benefit.
Last fall, when Congress added prescription-drug coverage to Medicare, the new law was hailed as a political masterpiece. Congressional Democrats, who overwhelmingly opposed the bill, thundered that they, too, were eager to provide a drug benefit under Medicare, but they championed alternative legislation that offered a larger drug subsidy and smaller incentives to health insurers to participate. Liberals such as Sen. Edward Kennedy were confident that the drug bill, with plenty of holes in its benefit formulas, would inevitably be expanded around the time it took effect.
Not many in Congress seemed troubled that the federal budget was deep in deficit, the nation was saddled with future expenditures for the Iraq war and virtually no health care expert believed that the legislation would fit into its projected $400-billion-over-10-years cost framework. The new law was a cynical bargain that had more to do with the 2004 election than a rational approach to the prescription-drug needs of the nation''s elderly.
The prescription-drug legislation seems a compromise between competing ideologies inserted into a fixed congressional budget. Put another way, it was sausage-stuffing in the guise of lawmaking. And, what no one anticipated was the reaction of the elderly, a group that votes in disproportionate numbers.
阅读理解The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American
by Jeff Smith
Our real American foods have come from our soil and have been used by many groups — those who already lived here and those who have come here to live. The Native Americans already had developed an interesting cuisine using the abundant foods that were so prevalent.
The influence that the English had upon our national eating habits is easy to see. They were a tough lot, those English, and they ate in a tough manner. They wiped their mouths on the tablecloth, if there happened to be one, and they ate until you would expect them to burst. European travelers to this country in those days were most often shocked by American eating habits, which included too much fat and too much salt and too much liquor. Not much has changed! And, the Revolutionists refused to use the fork since it marked them as Europeans. The fork was not absolutely common on the American dinner table until about the time of the Civil War, the 1860s. Those English were a tough lot.
Other immigrant groups added their own touches to the preparation of our New World food products. The groups that came still have a special sense of self-identity through their ancestral heritage, but they see themselves as Americans. This special self-identity through your ancestors who came from other lands was supposed to disappear in this country. The term melting pot was first used in reference to America in the late 1700s, so this belief that we would all become the same has been with us for a long time. Thank goodness it has never worked. The various immigrant groups continue to add flavor to the pot, all right, but you can pick out the individual flavors easily.
The largest ancestry group in America is the English. There are more people in America who claim to have come from English blood than there are in England. But is their food English? Thanks be to God, it is not! It is American. The second largest group is the Germans, then the Irish, the Afro-Americans, the French, the Italians, the Scottish, and the Polish. The Mexican and American Indian groups are all smaller than any of the above, though they were the original cooks in this country.
阅读理解Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that were aired during the show in 2004.
Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it''s something I believe in." The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George Miller of California, called the contract "a very questionable use of taxpayers'' money" that is "probably illegal".
The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America''s Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists," to encourage the producers to periodically address" NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey''s manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances.
阅读理解At the end of a recent feast at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans,I ordered a cup of hot tea and was presented with an elegant silver kettle filled with an intoxicatingly aromatic lemon brew
阅读理解The idea of test-tube babies may make you either delighted at the wonders of modern medicine or irritated while considering the moral, or legal, or technological implications of starting life in a laboratory. But if you''ve ever been pregnant yourself, one thing is certain: You wonder what it''s like to carry a test-tube baby. Are these pregnancies normal? Are the babies normal?
The earliest answers come from Australia, where a group of medical experts at the Queen Victoria Medical Center in Melbourne have taken a look at the continent''s first nine successful invitro pregnancies. The Australians report that the pregnancies themselves seemed to have proceeded according to plan, but at birth some unusual trends did show up. Seven of the nine babies turned out to be girls. Six of the nine were delivered by Caesarean section. And one baby, a twin, was born with a serious heart defect and a few days later developed life-threatening problems.
What does it all mean? Even the doctors don''t know for sure, because the numbers are so small. The proportion of girls to boys is high, but until there are many more test-tube babies no one will know whether that''s something that just happened to be like that or something special that happens when egg meets sperm in a test tube instead of a fallopian tube. The same thing is true of the single heart defect. It usually shows up in only 15 out of 60,000 births in that part of Australia, but the fact that it occurred in one out of nine test-tube babies does not necessarily mean that they are at special risk. One thing the doctors can explain is the high number of Caesareans. Most of the mothers were older, had long histories of fertility problems and in some cases had had surgery on the fallopian tubes, all of which made them likely candidates for Caesareans anyway.
The Australian researchers report that they are quite encouraged. All the babies are now making normal progress, even the twin with the birth defects.
阅读理解Often conjuring images of dank, smelly, mosquito-infested wastelands, upon closer look, wetlands are actually biologically diverse and productive ecosystems
阅读理解If there is any endeavor whose fruits should be freely available,that endeavor is surely publicly financed science
单选题Where any people have made a temporary approach to such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox ______ was for a time suspended.
单选题Many students agreed to come, but some
students against because they said they don"t
have time.
单选题Perhaps more than anything else, it was onerous taxes that led to the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381. A. multiple B. unjust C. burdensome D. infamous
单选题The purpose of formal agents is to ______.
单选题
Questions 91-95 are based on
the following passage. It is amazing how many people
still say, "I never dream", for it is now decades since it was established that
everyone has over a thousand dreams a year, however few of these nocturnal
productions are remembered on waking. Even the most confined "non-dreamers" will
remember dreams if woken up systematically during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM)
periods. These are periods of light sleep during which the eyeballs move rapidly
back and forth under the closed lids and the brain becomes highly activated,
which happens three or four times every night of normal sleep.
It is a very interesting question why some people remember dreams
regularly—perhaps several a night on occasion—while others remember hardly any
at all under normal conditions. In considering this, it is important to bear in
mind that the dream tends to be an elusive phenomenon for all of us. We normally
never recall a dream unless we awaken directly from it, and even then it has a
tendency to fade quickly into oblivion. Given this general
elusiveness of dreams, the basic factor that seems to determine whether a person
remembers them or not is the same as that which determines all other memory,
namely degree of interest. Dream researchers have made a broad classification of
people into "recallers" —those who remember at least one dream a month—and
"non-recallers", who remember fewer than this. Tests have shown that cool,
analytical people with a very rational approach to their feelings tend to recall
fewer dreams than those whose attitude to life is open and flexible. Engineers
generally recall fewer dreams than artists. It is not surprising to discover
that in western society, women normally recall more dreams than men, since women
are traditionally allowed an instinctive, feeling approach to life.
In modern urban-industrial culture, feeling and dreams tend to be treated
as frivolities which must be firmly subordinated to the realities of life. We
pay lip-service to the inner life of imagination as it expresses itself in the
arts, but in practice relegate music, poetry, drama and painting to the level of
spare-time activities, valued mainly for the extent to which they refresh us for
a return to work. We discourage our children from paying much attention to
anything that might detract from the serious business of studying for exams or
making a living in the "real" world of industry and
commerce.
单选题I regret
to have not paid
more attention to our English lessons at school.
单选题It's a sure thing that if she knows that there is a ______ sale in town, she will certainly rush to the scene. A. liguidation B. station C. realization D. modification
单选题I will never ______ the experiences of the four years at Howard University, though there were unhappy encounters.