单选题At dawn one m0ming in early May, Sean Cosgrove is stashing piles of maps, notes and photocopied documents in his gym bag before heading for West Milford High, a rural school in northernmost New Jersey. On his 30-minute commute, the young former investment banker tries to dream up new ways of lifting the monumentally forgettable Mexican War off the textbook page and into his students' imaginations. Can he invoke the storied memories of Robert E. Lee, who cut his first military exploits on the plains of Veracuz—or will he be met with thundering responses of "Who's Lee"? Should he raise James K. Polk out of the mystic chords of memory, and hope, for a nanosecond, that the kids will care about the first U. S. president who stepped aside because he'd accomplished everything he wanted? Let's think some more. Well, there's always the Alamo. And hey, isn't that the teachers' parking lot up ahead? It's never an easy task. These big kids, in big jeans and ball caps, come to his history classes believing that history is about as useful as Latin. Most are either unaware or unimpressed that the area's iron forges once produced artillery cannon for George Washington's army. Their sense of history orbits more narrowly around last month's adventures on "Shop Rite Strip", the students' nickname for downtown West Milford, once a factory town, now a Magnet for middle class vacationers. Cosgrove looks uncommonly glum as he thumbs through a stack of exams in the teachers' lounge. "I can't believe anyone in my class could think John Brown was the governor of Massachusetts," moans Cosgrove, 28, pointing to one student's test paper. He had to be sleeping for days on end. The same morning, students in his college bound class could name only one U. S. Supreme Court justice—Clarence Thomas. All his wit, energy and beyond the textbook research can't completely reverse the students' poor preparation in history, their lack of general knowledge, their numbness to the outside world. It's the bane of history teachers at every level. When University of Vermont professor James Loewen asked his senior social science majors who fought in the Vietnam War, 22 percent answered D.P.R. korea and R.O.Korea. Don't these kids even go to the movies?

单选题According to Mr. Burrows, the apprenticeship scheme

单选题As thick-skinned elected officials go, FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter is right up there with Bill Clinton. The chief of the Zurich-based group that oversees World Cup soccer hasn't been accused of groping any interns, but that's about all he hasn't been accused of. Vote buying, mismanagement, cronyism--and that's just for starters. Yet the 66-year-old Swiss shows no sign of abandoning his campaign for a second four-year term. Blatter, a geek of dispensing FIFA'S hundreds of million in annual revenue to inspire loyalty, even stands a good chance of reelection. At least he did. Since mid-March, he has seen a credible challenger emerge in Issa Hayatou, president of the African Football Confederation. Hayatou, a 55-year-old from Cameroon, leads a group of FIFA reformers that also includes FIFA Vice-President Lennart Johansson, a Swede who lost the presidential election to Blatter in 1998. These contenders' mission: to end what they call the culture of secrecy and lack of accountability that threatens FIFA with financial disaster. Representatives of the world's 204 national soccer associations meet in Seoul on May 29, and the rebels are given a chance of unseating Blatter. But even they concede that the FIFA honcho won't be easy to dislodge. Blatter's staying power seems incredible, given the array of misdeeds attributed to him and his circle. However, there are signs that FIFA'S troubles are bigger than Blatter is saying. The insurgents have already won one victory: They persuaded the rest of the executive board to order an audit of FIFA finances. But Blatter--who claims, through a spokesman, that the accusations are a smear campaign-should not be underestimated. At least publicly, sponsors and member associations remain remarkably siient with the controversy. For example, there is no outward sign of outrage from German sports equipment maker Adidas Salomon, which is spending much of its $ 625 million marketing budget on the World Cup. "We don't expect current developments within FIFA to have a negative impact on our expectations" for the World Cup, says Michael Riehl, Adidas head of global sports marketing. The conventional wisdom is that fans don't care about FIFA politics. Says Bernd Schiphorst, president of Hertha BSC Berlin, a top-ranked German team: "I've no fear that all these discussions are going to touch the event." Still, the Olympic bribery scandals and the doping affair in the Tour de France show that sleazy dealings can stain the most venerable athletic spectacle. "For the Good of the Game" is FIFA'S official motto. The next few months should show whether it rings true.

单选题Six years later, in an about-face, the FBI admits that federal agents fired tear gas canisters capable of causing a fire at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas in 1993. But the official said the firing came several hours before the structure burst into flames, killing 80 people including the Davidians' leader, David Koresh. "In looking into this, we've come across information that shows some canisters that can be deemed pyrotechnic in nature were fired--hours before the fire started," the official said. "Devices were fired at the bunker, not at the main structure where the Davidians were camped out." The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains it did not start what turned to be a series of fiery bursts of flames that ended a 51-day standoff between branch members and the federal government. "This doesn't change the bottom line that David Koresh started the fire and the government did not," the official said. "It simply Shows that devices that could probably be flammable were used in the early morning hours." The law enforcement official said the canisters were fired not at the main structure where the Davidian members were camped out but at the nearby underground bunker. They bounced off the bunker's concrete roof and landed in an open field well, the official said. The canisters were fired at around 6 a.m. , and the fire that destroyed the wooden compound started around noon, the official said. The official also added that other tear gas canisters used by agent that day were not flammable or potentially explosive. While Coulson denied the grenades played a role in starting the fire, his statement marked the first time that any U.S. government official has publicly contradicted the government's position that federal agents used nothing on the final day of the siege at Waco that could have sparked the fire that engulfed the compound. The cause of the fiery end is a major focus of an ongoing inquiry by the Texas Rangers into the Waco siege.

单选题More than 40 million Americans between the ages of 5 and 18 attend schools throughout the United States. About 2 million school-age children are taught at home. While home schooling offers an alternative to the school environment, it has become a controversial issue. Many public school advocates take a harsh attitude toward home schoolers, perceiving their actions as the ultimate Slap in the face of public education and a damaging move for the children. Yet, public school officials realize they stand little to gain by remaining hostile to the home-school population, the hard line seem to be softening a bit. Some public schools have moved closer to tolerance, and, even in some cases, are seeking cooperation with home schoolers." We are becoming relatively tolerant of home schoolers. Let's give the kids access to public school so they'll see it's not as terrible as they've been told, and they'll want to come back," says John Marshall, an education official. Perhaps, but don't count on it, say home-school advocates. Some home schoolers oppose that public school system because they have strong convictions that their approach to education—whether fueled by religious belief or the individual child's interests and natural place—is best. Other home schoolers contend "not 80 much that the schools teach heresy, but that schools teach whatever they teach inappropriately," says Van Gallon. "These parents are highly independent and strive to take responsibility for their own lives within a society that they define as bureaucratic and inefficient." But Howard Carol, spokesman for America's largest teachers union, argues that home schooling parents are trying to hide their children from the real world. "Maybe we are going to run into people with problems, people that have a drug problem, people that have an alcohol problem, and teenage pregnancy. We have many problems that happen in our society and many of the children are victims. But shielding the children from the real mix of what happens every day is denying them something that they are going to need later in life. "Mr. Carol also questioned the competence of parents as teachers though he admitted that some home schoolers do better academically. "We want to make sure that a student is not denied the full range of curriculum experiences and appropriate materials, especially now with the new technology that is being introduced and the costs involved there." "The success of home schooling has been documented in standardized test scores administered by public school officials," says Frank Bernet, the executive director of the National Association of College Admission Councilors. "I know why they are doing it, but I wonder why they can't work with school officials and teachers to make the school what they want it to be." The response from home schoolers: "We have tried that. Now it's time to strike out on our own./

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} In the last ten years, the Internet has opened up incredible amounts of information to ordinary citizens. But using the Internet can he like walking into a library where the books are all lying on the floor in piles. While tools like Google allow some structured search, much of the data from such searches is outdated or of questionable value. Some web enthusiasts have taken up the task of organizing information through a democratic means that only the Internet allows: an encyclopedia of the people, by the people, and completely free to copy and distribute. This ‘people’s encyclopedia’ of the Web — a free site called Wikipedia — has provided a unique solution by inviting individuals to participate in the process of rationalizing and updating web content. At the heart of this movement are wikis, web sites that allow users to directly edit any web page with one click of the mouse. Wikipedia — the largest example of these collaborative efforts — is a functioning, user-contributed online encyclopedia that has become a popular and highly regarded reference in just three years of existence. The goal of Wikipedia was to create an encyclopedia that could he shared and copied freely while encouraging people to change and improve the content. Each and every article has an “Edit this page” button, allowing anyone, even anonymous passersby, to add or delete any content on the page. It seems like a recipe for disaster and chaos, but it has produced surprisingly credible content that has been evaluated and revised by the thousands of international visitors to the site. For many, it finally realizes the original concept of World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee — an online environment where people not only browse content, but freely and actively exchange information. The Wikipedia project was started by Jimmy Wales, head of Internet startup Bomis.com, after his original project for a volunteer, hut strictly controlled, free encyclopedia ran out of money and resources after two years. Editors with PhD degrees were at the helm of the project then, but it produced only a few hundred articles. Not wanting the content to languish, Wales placed the pages on a wiki website in January 2001 and invited any Internet visitors to edit or add to the collection. The site became a runaway success in the first year and gained a loyal following, generating over 20,000 articles and spawning over a dozen language translations. After two years, it had 100,000 articles, and in April 2004, it exceeded 250,000 articles in English and 600,000 articles in 50 other languages. Over 2,000 new articles are added each day across all the various languages. And according to website rankings at Alexa.com, it has become more popular than traditional online encyclopedias such as Britannica.com and is one of the top 600 most heavily visited websites on the internet.

单选题Plato asked "What is man?" and St Augustine asked "Who am I?" A new breed of criminals has a novel answer: "I am you!" Although impostors have existed for ages, the growing frequency and cost of identity theft is worrisome. Around 10m Americans are victims annually, and it is the leading consumer-fraud complaint over the past five years. The cost to businesses was almost ＄ 50 billion, and to consumers ＄ 5 billion, in 2002, the most recent year that America's Federal Trade Commission collected figures. After two recent, big privacy disasters, people and politicians are calling for action. In February, ChoicePoint, a large data-collection agency, began sending out letters warning 145,000 Americans that it had wrongly provided fraudsters with their personal details, including Social Security numbers. Around 750 people have already spotted fraudulent activity. And on February 25th, Bank of America revealed that it lost data tapes that contain personal information on over 1m government employees, including some Senators. Although accident and not illegality is suspected, all must take precautions against identity theft. Faced with such incidents, state and national lawmakers are calling for new regulations, including over companies that collect and sell personal information. As an industry, the firms—such as ChoicePoint, Acxiom, LexisNexis and Westlaw—are largely unregulated. They have also grown enormous. For example, ChoicePoint was founded in 1997 and has acquired nearly 60 firms to amass databases with 19 billion records on people. It is used by insurance firms, landlords and even police agencies. California is the only state with a law requiring companies to notify individuals when their personal information has been compromised—which made ChoicePoint reveal the fraud (albeit five months after it was noticed, and after its top two bosses exercised stock options). Legislation to make the requirement a federal law is under consideration. Moreover, lawmakers say they will propose that rules governing credit bureaus and medical companies are extended to data-collection firms. And alongside legislation, there is always litigation. Already, ChoicePoint has been sued for failing to safeguard individuals' data. Yet the legal remedies would still be far looser than in Europe, where identity theft is also a menace, though less frequent and costly. The European Data Protection Directive, implemented in 1998, gives people the right to access theft information, change inaccuracies, and deny permission for it to be shared. Moreover, it places the cost of mistakes on the companies that collect the data, not on individuals. When the law was put in force, American policymakers groaned that it was bad for business. But now they seem to be reconsidering it.

单选题Just because more men pursue careers in science and engineering does not mean they are actually better at math than women are. The 1 is that men think they are much better at math than they really are. Women, 2 , tend to accurately estimate their arithmetic prowess, says Shane Bench of Washington State University in the U. S., leader of a study in Springer"s journal Sex Roles . There is a 3 gap between the number of men and women who choose to study and follow careers in the so-called STEM 4 of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the U. S. This is true 5 women outperform their male 6 on mathematical tests in elementary school. Bench"s study examined how people"s biases and 7 experiences about their mathematical abilities make them more or less 8 to consider pursuing math-related courses and careers. Gender gaps in STEM fields are not necessarily the result of women"s 9 their abilities, but rather may be due to men"s overestimating their abilities, 10 Bench. His team also found that women who had more positive past experiences 11 mathematics tended to rate their numerical abilities higher than they really were. This 12 the value of positively reinforcing a woman"s knack for mathematics 13 at a young age. "Despite 14 that realism and objectivity are always best in 15 the self and making decisions, positive illusions about math abilities may be 16 to women pursuing math courses and careers," says Bench. "Such positive illusions could 17 to protect women"s self-esteem 18 lower-than-desired performance, leading women to 19 to pursue courses in STEM fields and ultimately 20 their skills."

单选题Insurance companies provide a service to the community by protecting it against expected and unexpected disasters. Before an insurance company will agree to 1 anything, it collects accurate figures about the 2 . It knows, for example, that the risk of a man being killed in a plane accident is less than the risk he 3 in crossing a busy road. This 4 it to quote low figures for travel insurance. Sometimes the risk may be high, as in motorracing or mountaineering. Then the company 5 a much higher price. 6 too many climbers have accidents, the price rises still further. If the majority of climbers fall off mountains, the company will 7 to insure them. An ordinary householder may wish to protect his home against fire or his 8 against burglary. A shop keeper may wish to insure against 9 . In 10 cases, the company will check its statistics and quote a premium. If it is 11 , it may refuse to quote. If it insures a shop and then receives a suspicious 12 , it will 13 the claim as a means of protecting itself against false claims. It is not unknown for a businessman in debt to burn down his own premises so that he can claim much money from his insurance company. He can be sure that the fire will be investigated most carefully. Insurance companies also 14 insurance against shipwreck or disaster in the air. Planes and ships are very expensive, so a large 15 is charged, but a 16 is given to companies with an accident-free record. Every week insurance companies receive premium 17 from customers. These payments can form a very large total 18 millions of dollars. The company does not leave the money in the bank. It 19 in property, shares, farms and even antique paintings and stamps. Its aim is to obtain the best possible return on its investment. This is not so greedy as it may seem, since this is one way by which it can deep its premiums down and continue to make a profit 20 being of service to the community.

单选题According to the passage, which of the following is TRUE?

单选题The planet's wild creatures face a new threat -- from yuppies, empty nesters, singletons and one parent families. Biologists studying the pressure on the planet's dwindling biodiversity today report on a new reason for alarm. Although the rate of growth in the human population is decreasing, the number of individual households is exploding. Even where populations have actually dwindled -- in some regions of New Zealand, for instance -- the number of individual households has increased, bemuse of divorce, career choice, smaller families and longer lifespans. Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University and colleagues from Stanford University in California re- port in Nature, in a paper published online in advance, that a greater number of individual house-holds, each containing on average fewer people, meant more pressure on natural resources. Towns and cities began to sprawl as new homes were built. Each household needed fuel to heat and light it; each household required its own plumbing, cooking and refrigeration. "In larger households, the efficiency of resource consumption will be a lot higher, because more people share things," Dr. Liu said. He and his colleagues looked at the population patterns of life in 141 countries, including 76 "hotspot" regions unusually rich in a variety of endemic wildlife. These hot spots included Australia, New Zealand, the US, Brazil, China, India, Kenya, and Italy. They found that between 1985 and 2000 in the "hotspot" parts of the globe, the annual 3.1% growth rate in the number of households was far higher than the population growth rate of 1.8%. "Had the average household' size remained at the 1985 level," the scientists report, "there would have been 155m fewer households in hotspot countries in 2000. Paradoxically, smaller households do not mean smaller homes. In Indian River county, Florida, the average area of a one-storey, single family house increased 33 % in the past three decades." Dr. Liu's work grew from the alarming discovery that the giant pandas living in China's Wolong reserve were more at risk now than they were when the reserve was first established. The local population had grown, but the total number of homes had increased more swiftly, to make greater inroads into the bamboo forests. Gretchen Daily of Stanford, one of the authors, said: "We all depend on open space and wild places, not just for peace of mind but for vital services such as crop pollination, water purification and climate stabilization. The alarming thing about this study is the finding that, if family groups continue to become smaller and smaller, we might continue losing biodiversity -- even if we get the aggregate human population size stabilised./

单选题According to the passage, which of the following description about the computer clubs is NOT TRUE?______

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} NASA launched the first space mission to Pluto yesterday as a powerful rocket hurled the New Horizons spacecraft on a nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to the edge of the solar system As it soared toward a 2007 meeting with Jupiter, whose powerful gravitational field will shoot it on its way to Pluto. mission managers said radio communications confirmed that the 1,054-pound craft was in good health. The $700 million mission began when a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket rose from a launching pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 2 p.m., almost an hour later than planned because of low clouds that obscured a clear view of the flight path by tracking cameras. Less than an hour later, all three stages of the booster rocket worked as planned, and the spacecraft separated from them and sprinted away toward deep space. The robot ship sped away at about 36,000 miles per hour, the fastest flight of any spacecraft sent from Earth. allowing it to pass the Moon in about nine hours. "This is a historic day," said Alan Stem of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo, the mission's principal scientist and team leader. Speaking at a news conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Dr. Stern said the timing assured that the New Horizons would arrive for its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015—the 50th anniversary of the first flyby of Mars by the Mariner 4. the mission that began the exploration of the planets. The New Horizons is powered by a small plutonium-fired electric generator. Its instruments include three cameras, for visible-light, infrared and ultraviolet images, and three spectrometers to study the composition and temperatures of Pluto's thin atmosphere and surface features. It also carries a University of Colorado dust counter, the first experiment to fly on a planetary mission that is entirely designed and operated by students. This is the only experiment that will not hibernate during the mission. Yesterday's liftoff also paid regard to Pluto's discoverer, the astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh. who in 1930 became the only American to find a planet in the solar system.(He died at 90. in 1997.) His widow, Patricia Tombaugh. 93. and other family members were present at the cape, and some of his remains were among the commemorative items aboard the spacecraft. "Some of Clyde's ashes are on their way to Pluto today," Dr. Stem said. The New Horizons is to reach Jupiter's gravitational field in 13 months. The trip to Pluto will take eight more years, most of which the craft will spend in electronic "hibernation" to save power and wear on the equipment needed for its seven experiments. In addition to the two-hour delay, the launching was postponed twice in two days—on Tuesday by strong winds at the cape and on Wednesday by a storm that caused a power; failure at the spacecraft's control center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel. Md. Mission planners had until Feb. 14 to launch the mission this year, but only until the end of this month to use the gravity boost from Jupiter, which will shorten the trip to Pluto by five years.

单选题Modem technology may not have improved the world all that much, but. it certainly has made life noisier. Un-muffled motorcycles, blaring car alarms, and roving boom boxes come first, second, and third on my list of most obnoxious noise offenders, but everyone could come up with his own version of aural hell--if he could just find a quiet spot to ponder the matter. Yet what technology has done, other technology is now starting to undo, using computer power to zap those ear-splitting noises into silence. Previously silence seekers had little recourse except to stay inside, close the windows, and plug their ears. Remedies like these are quaintly termed "passive" systems, because they place physical barriers against the unwanted sound. Now computer technology is producing a far more effective "active" system, which doesn't just contain, deflect, or mask the noise but annihilates it electronically. The system works by countering the offending noise with "anti-noise", a some what sinister sounding term that calls to mind antimatter, black holes, and other Popular Science mindbenders but that actually refers to something quite simple. Just as a wave on a pond is flattened when it merges with a trough that is its exact opposite (or mirror image), so can a sound wave by meeting its opposite. This general theory of sound cancellation has been around since the 1930s. In the fifties and sixties it made or a kind of magic trick among laboratory acousticians playing around with the first clunky mainframe computers. The advent of low-cost, high-power microprocessors has made active noise-cancellation systems a commercial possibility, and a handful of small electronics firms in the United States and abroad are bringing the first ones onto the silence market. Silence buffs might be hoping that the noise-canceling apparatus will take the shape of the 44 Magnum wielded by Dirty Harry, but in fact active sound control is not quite that active. The system might more properly he described as reactive in that it responds to sound waves already headed toward human ears. In the configuration that is usual for such systems microphones detect the noise signal and send it to the system's microprocessor, which almost instantly models it and creates its inverse for loudspeakers to fire at the original. Because the two sounds occupy' the same range of frequencies and tones, the inverse sounds exactly tike the noise it is meant to eliminate: the anti-noise canceling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is heard as Beethoven's Fifth. The only difference is that every positive pressure produced on the air by the orchestra is matched by a negative pressure produced by the computer, and thereby silencing the sound. The system is most effective as a kind of muffler, in which microphones, microprocessor, and loudspeaker are all in a unit encasing the device, that produces the sound, stifling it at its source. But it can work as a headset, too, negating the sound at the last moment before it disturbs one's peace of mind.

单选题Which of the following may NOT be the way to keep brains alert?

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The energy crisis, which is being felt around the world, has dramatized how the careless use of the earth's resources has brought the whole world to the brink of disaster. The over-development of motor transport, with its increase of more cars, more highways, more pollution, more suburbs, more commuting, has contributed to the near-destruction of our cities, the broke up of the family, and the pollution not only of local air but also of the earth's atmosphere. The disaster has arrived in the form of the energy crisis. Our present situation is unlike war, revolution or depression. It is also unlike the great natural disasters of the past. Worldwide resources exploitation and energy use have brought us to a state where long-range planning is essential. What we need is not a continuation of our present serious state, which endangers the future of our country, our children, and our earth, but a movement forward to a new norm in order to work rapidly and effectively on planetary problems. This country has been falling back under the continuing exposures of loss morality and the revelation that lawbreaking has reached into the highest places in the land. There is a strong demand for moral revival and for some devotion that is vast enough and yet personal enough to enlist the devotion of all. In the past it has been only in a way in defense of their own country and their own ideals that and people have been able to devote themselves wholeheartedly. This is the first time that we have been asked to defend ourselves and what we hold dear in cooperation with all the other inhabitants of this planet, who share with us the same endangered air and the same endangered oceans. There is a common need to reassess our present course, to change that course and to devise new methods through which the world can survive. This is a priceless opportunity. To grasp it we need a widespread understanding of nature in the crisis confronting us—and the world—a crisis that is no passing inconvenience, no byproduct of the ambitions of the oil-producing countries, no environmentalists' mere fears, no by-product of any present system of government. What we face is the outcome of the invention of the last four hundred years. What we need is a transformed life style. This new life style can flow directly from science and technology, but its acceptance depends on a sincere devotion to finding a higher quality of life for the world' s children and future generation.