单选题In a world where bad news has become everyday news, people are turning to an ancient technique to deal with stress: meditation. At meditation centers, prayer groups and yoga studios around the United States, more and more are finding peace of mind by being quiet. Some use meditation to help deal with life changes; others, to process the painful reality of political and social unrest around the world of the type that has been experienced more recently. Stress from the September 11 terrorist attacks is probably "about 70 percent" of the reason one Chicago man started meditating and practicing yoga with his new wife. He became so emotionally affected that he realized he needed help in managing his stress. The yoga classes he takes begin and end with meditation. This "quiet time" helps him feel a lot more relaxed and gives him more breath control. The fact is, though, that he is not alone. Across the country, many are turning to more meditative exercise as they seek both psychological and physiological relief. In addition to helping people work out their stress, these classes bring people together, in the same way that religious Services or other community activities have done in the past. Different schools of meditation teach particular techniques, but they share a common basis-focusing attention on something your mind can return to if you are distracted. This may be the rhythm of breathing, an object such as a candle flame, or a repetitive movement, as in walking or taiji. Regardless of the specific technique or mode that is followed, meditation has well-documented benefits. Medical research indicates that it causes a sharp decrease in metabolic activity, reduced muscle tension, slower breathing, and a shift from faster brainwaves to slower waves, it also reduces high blood pressure. Practitioners are convinced that meditation is good for health because it relaxes the body. For ages, meditation has been a core practice of many groups meeting in their communal or religious centers. However, let's not forget that this is the twenty-first century. So, for those people who are too shy or busy to go to the nearest meditation center, there are Internet sites that offer online guided meditation. One has a variety of meditations from various religious traditions. At another, Jesuit priests post meditations and readings from the Scriptures everyday, and at still another, Buddhist and Hindu practitioners include music and visuals to accompany their offerings. These websites 'allow anyone with a computer access to meditation at any time. The fact is that whether online, at yoga classes, or at local spiritual centers, more people are turning to the practice of meditation.

单选题The author seems to regard Babbage's work with______.

单选题A century ago, the immigrants from across the Atlantic included settlers and sojourners. Along with the many folks looking to make a permanent home in the United States came those who had no intention to stay, and who would make some money and then go home. Between 1908 and 1915, about 7 million people arrived while about 2 million departed. About a quarter of all Italian immigrants, for example, eventually returned to Italy for good. They even had an affectionate nickname, "uccelli di passaggio", birds of passage. Today, we are much more rigid about immigrants. We divide newcomers into two categories: legal or illegal, good or bad. We hail them as Americans in the making, or brand them as aliens to be kicked out. That framework has contributed mightily to our broken immigration system and the long political paralysis over how to fix it. We don"t need more categories, but we need to change the way we think about categories. We need to look beyond strict definitions of legal and illegal. To start, we can recognize the new birds of passage, those living and thriving in the gray areas. We might then begin to solve our immigration challenges. Crop pickers, violinists, construction workers, entrepreneurs, engineers, home health-care aides and physicists are among today"s birds of passage. They are energetic participants in a global economy driven by the flow of work, money and ideas. They prefer to come and go as opportunity calls them. They can manage to have a job in one place and a family in another. With or without permission, they straddle laws, jurisdictions and identities with ease. We need them to imagine the United States as a place where they can be productive for a while without committing themselves to staying forever. We need them to feel that home can be both here and there and that they can belong to two nations honorably. Accommodating this new world of people in motion will require new attitudes on both sides of the immigration battle. Looking beyond the culture war logic of right or wrong means opening up the middle ground and understanding that managing immigration today requires multiple paths and multiple outcomes, including some that are not easy to accomplish legally in the existing system.

单选题Today, "the bold-faced names" is used to refer to

单选题Time spent in a bookshop can be most enjoyable, whether you are a book-lover or merely there to buy a book as a present. You may even have entered the shop just to find shelter from a sudden shower. But the desire to pick up a book with an attractive dust-jacket is irresistible. You soon become absorbed in some book or other, and usually it is only much later that you realize that you have spent far too much time there. This opportunity to escape the realities of everyday life is, I think, the main attraction of a bookshop. There are not many places where it is possible to do this. A music shop is very much like a bookshop. You can wander round such places to your heart"s content. If it is a good shop, no assistant will approach you with the inevitable greeting: "Can I help you, sir?" You needn"t buy anything you don"t want. In a bookshop an assistant should remain in the background until you have finished browsing. Then, and only then, are his services necessary. You have to be careful not to be attracted by the variety of books in a bookshop. It is very easy to enter the shop looking for a book on, say, ancient coins and to come out carrying a copy of the latest best-selling novel and perhaps a book about brass-rubbing -- something which had only vaguely interested you up till then. This volume on the subject, however, happened to be so well illustrated and the part of the text you read proved so interesting that you just had to buy it. This sort of thing can be very dangerous. Booksellers must be both long suffering and indulgent. There is a story which wei1 illustrates this. A medical student had to read a textbook which was far too expensive for him to buy. He couldn"t obtain it from the library and the only copy he could find was in his bookshop. Every afternoon, therefore, he would go along to the shop and read a little of the book at a time. One day, however, he was dismayed to find the book missing from its usual place and about to leave when he noticed the owner of the shop beckoning to him. Expecting to be reproached, he went toward him. To his surprise, the owner pointed to the book, which was tucked away in a corner. "I put it there in case anyone was tempted to buy it," he said, and left the delighted student to continue his reading.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Anyone who doubts that children are born with a healthy amount of ambition need spend only a few minutes with a baby eagerly learning to walk or a headstrong toddler starting to talk. No matter how many times the little ones stumble in their initial efforts, most keep on trying, determined to master their amazing new skill. It is only several years later, around the start of middle or junior high school, many psychologists and teachers agree, that a good number of kids seem to lose their natural drive to succeed and end up joining the ranks of underachievers. It’s not quite that simple. “Kids can be given the opportunities to become passionate about a subject or activity, but they can’t be forced, ” says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25-year study examining what motivated first grade students in three school districts. Even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don’t seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve. Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn’t suffer from an emotional or learning disability, or isn’t involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically some how isn’t cool. “Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term,” says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. “You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth and that their intelligence is malleable. ” Howard (a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, an organization that works with teachers and parents to help improve children’s academic performance) and other educators say it’s important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. “The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions, ” says Michael Nakkual, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before you can run.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} "I'm a total geek all around," says Angela BYron, a 27-year-old computer prlogrammer who has just graduated from Nova Scotia Community College. And yet, like many other students, she "never had the confidence" to approach any of the various open-source software communities on the internet--distributed teams of volunteers who collaborate to build software that is then made freely available. But thanks to Google, the world's most popular search engine and one of the biggest proponents of open-source software, Ms Byron spent the summer contributing code to Drupal, an open-source project that automates the management of websites. "It's awesome," she says. Ms Byron is one of 419 students (out of 8 744 who applied) who were accepted for Google's "summer of code". While it sounds like a hyper-nerdy summer camp, the students neither went to Google's campus in Mountain View, California, nor to wherever their mentors at the 41 participating open-source projects happened to be located. Instead, Google acted as a matchmaker and sponsor. Each of the participating open-source projects received ＄500 for every student it took on; and each student received ＄4 500 (＄ 500 right away, and ＄4 000 on completion of their work). Oh, and a T-shirt. All of this is the idea of Chris DiBona, Google's open-source boss, who was brainstorming with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, last year. They realised that a lot of programming talent goes to waste every summer because students take summer jobs flipping burgers to make money, and let their coding skills degrade. "We want to make it better for students in the summer," says Mr. DiBona, adding that it also helps the open- source community and thus, indirectly, Google, which uses lots of open source software behind the scenes. Plus, says Mr. DiBona, "it does become an opportunity for recruiting." Elliot Cohen, a student at Berkeley, spent his summer writing a "Bayesian network toolbox" for Python, an open-source programming language. "I'm a pretty big fan of Google," he says. He has an interview scheduled with Microsoft, but "Google is the only big company that I would work at," he says. And if that doesn't work out, he now knows people in the open-source community, "and it's a lot less intimidating."

单选题The word "catharsis" in Par

单选题Deflation is an economic theory relating changes in the price levels to changes in the quantity of money. In its developed (1) , it constitutes an analysis of the (2) underlying inflation and deflation. As (3) by the English philosopher John Locke in the 17th century, the Scottish (4) David Hume in the 18th century, and (5) , it was a weapon (6) the mercantilists, who were thought to equate wealth with money. If the (7) of money by a nation merely raised (8) , argued the quantity theorists, then a "favourable" balance of trade, (9) desired by mercantilists, would increase the supply of money but would not in-crease (10) . In the 19th century the quantity theory (11) to the ascendancy of free trade over protectionism. In the 19th and 20th centuries it played a part in the (12) of business cycles and in the theory of foreign (13) rates. The (14) theory came under attack during the 1930s, (15) monetary expansion seemed ineffective in combating deflation. Economists argued that the levels of investment and government spending were more important than the money supply in determining economic activity.The tide of opinion (16) again in the 1960s, when experience (17) post-World WarⅡ inflation and new empirical (18) of money and prices— (19) A Monetary History of the United States (1963) by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz—restored much of the quantity theory' s lost prestige. One implication of this theory is that the size of the stock of money must be considered when shaping governmental policies (20) to control prices and maintain full employment.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The idea of humanoid robots is not new, of course. They have been part of the imaginative landscape ever since Karl Capek, a Czech writer, first dreamed them up for his 1921 play "Rossum's Universal Robots" . (The word "robot" comes from the Czech word for drudgery, robota.) Since then, Hollywood has produced countless variations on the theme, from the sultry False Maria in Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis" to the wittering C-3PO in "Star Wars" and the ruthless assassin of "Terminator" . Humanoid robots have walked into our collective subconscious, colouring our views of the future. But now Japan's industrial giants are spending billions of yen to make such robots a reality. Their new humanoids represent impressive feats of engineering: when Honda introduced Asimo, a four-foot robot that had been in development for some 15 years, it walked so fluidly that its white, articulated exterior seemed to conceal a human. Honda continues to make the machine faster, friendlier and more agile. Last October, when Asimo was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh, it walked on to the stage and accepted its own plaque. At two and a half feet tall, Sony's QRIO is smaller and more toy-like than Asimo. It walks, understands a small number of voice commands, and can navigate on its own. If it falls over, it gets up and resumes where it left off. It can even connect wirelessly to the Internet and broadcast what its camera eyes can see. In 2003, Sony demonstrated an upgraded QRIO that could run. Honda responded last December with a version of Asimo that runs at twice the speed. In 2004, Toyota joined the fray with its own family of robots, called Partner, one of which is a four-foot humanoid that plays the trumpet. Its fingers work the instrument's valves, and it has mechanical lungs and artificial lips. Toyota hopes to offer a commercial version of the robot by 2010. This month, 50 Partner robots will act as guides at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Despite their sudden proliferation, however, humanoids are still a mechanical minority. Most of the world's robots are faceless, footless and mute. They are bolted to the floors of factories, stamping out car parts or welding pieces of metal, machines making more machines. According to the United Nations, business orders for industrial robots jumped 18% in the first half of 2004. They may soon be outnumbered by domestic robots, such as self-navigating vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and window washers, which are selling fast. But neither industrial nor domestic robots are humanoid.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} "Target apologizes for any discomfort," said a spokesman for the discount chain. "that may have been caused by the baseball caps and shorts carrying the insignia '88' ." He explained that it was not the company's intent to promote hate. Since when does 88 mean "hate"? It turns out that some neoNazis have discovered that the eighth letter of the alphabet is "h", and to them the number 88 is an oh-so- secret ceded symbol for "heil Hitler" . The Boston Herald recalled the days of dot-and-dash telegraphy, with its two-digit codes for common phrases, and observed that "on CB and ham radio, and at the bottom of an odd e-mail, you still run across '88'—'love and kisses', which no gallant will dare use anymore to pique the interest of the YLs ( young ladies) for fear they'll think he is a bug-eyed, swastika--tattooed nutcake" Fans of Chet Gould's "Dick Tracy" strip of the 1950's will remember a piano-playing cartoon character with the musical name "88 Keys", played by Mandy Patinkin in the 1990 movie version. It comes from the number of keys on a piano keyboard, and its symbol can be the opposite of hatred: "Some of those 88 keys are white, and some black," notes Larry Horn of Yale University, "all playing together in peaceful harmony-and each set pretty boring on its own. Makes you wonder." This latest superstition imposed on a number, and its panicky effect on merchants, is nothing new. It's a variant of 311, throe references to the 11th letter, k, for the Ku Klux Klan. (Manufacturers who may have inadvertently turned out baseball caps with that number on it will now turn white as a sheet.) Before that, 666 was a hot number for the nervous. In the New Testament's Revelation 13: 9-18, the Apostle John recalls a vision of a boast that was an opponent of Christ: "Count the number of the beast," goes the King James Version, "for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six." Extrapolating this into a name is an example of gematria, an ancient numbers game that assigns each letter of the alphabet a numerical value. Some scholars point out that the verse characterizes, but does not name, the beast-which aren't Satan. Numbers are not letters. Hate groups and concerned cabals do not own the numbers, which can be used to stand for anything. So wear 88 all you like, and if you have nightmares about 666, as soda jerks used to say I'm 86 on the mail.

单选题William Shakespeare described old age as "second childishness" — sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste. In the case of taste he may, musically speaking, have been even more perceptive than he realized. A paper in Neurology by Giovanni Frisoni and his colleagues at the National Centre for Research and Care of Alzheimer's Disease in Brescia, Italy, shows that one form of senile 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 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. Frontotemporal damage therefore produces different symptoms from the loss of memory associated with Alzheimer's disease, a more familiar dementia that affects the hippocampus and amygdala in the middle of the brain. Frontotemporal dementia is also rarer than Alzheimer's. In the past five years the centre in Brescia has treated some 1,500 Alzheimer's patients; it has seen only 46 with frontotemporal dementia. Two of those patients interested 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 dememia patients sometimes gain new talents. Five sufferers who developed artistic abilities are known. And in another lapse of musical taste, 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 behavior suggest that it is managed by the brain's right 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 neural circuit 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, De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est. Or, in plainer words, there is no accounting for taste.

单选题Should anyone much care whether an American boy living overseas gets six vicious thwacks on his backside? So much has been argued, rejoined and rehashed about the case of Michael Fay, an 18-year-old convicted of vandalism and sentenced to a caning in Singapore, that an otherwise sorry little episode has shaded into a certified International Incident, complete with intercessions by the U. S. head of state. An affair has outraged American libertarians even as it has animated a general debate about morality East and West and the proper functioning of U.S. law and order. Which, to all appearances, is what Singapore wanted. The question of whether anyone should care about Michael Fay is idle. though Singapore officials profess shock at the attention his case had drawn, they know Americans care deeply about the many sides of this issue. Does a teenager convicted of spraying cars with easily removable paint deserve half a dozen powerful strokes? At what point does swift, sure punishment become torture? By what moral authority can America, with its high rates of lawlessness and license, preach of a safe society about human rights? The caning sentence has concentrated minds wondrously on an already lively domestic debate over what constitutes a due balance between individual and majority rights. Too bad Michael Fay has become a focus for this discussion. Not only does he seem destined to be pummeled and immobilized, but the use of Singapore as a standard for judging any other society, let alone the cacophonous U. S. , is fairly worthless. To begin with, Singapore is an offshore republic that tightly limits immigration. Imagine crime-ridden Los Angeles, to which Singapore is sometimes contrasted, with hardly any inflow of the hard-luck, often desperate fortune seekers who flock to big cities. Even without its government's disciplinary measures, Singapore more than plausibly would be much the same as it is now. An academic commonplace today is that the major factor determining social peace and prosperity is culture--a sense of common identity, tradition and values. Unlike Singapore, though, the U. S. today is a nation in search of a common culture, trying to be a universal society that assimilates the traditions of people from all over the world. Efforts to safeguard minority as well as individual rights have produced a gridlock in the justice system. Its troubles stem more from the decay of family life than from any government failures. Few societies can afford to look on complacently. As travel eases and cultures intermix, the American experience is becoming the world's. The circumstances of this affair--evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property--suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Here is a quick way to spoil a Brussels dinner party. Simply suggest that world governance is slipping away from the G20, G7, G8 or other bodies in which Europeans may hog up to half the seats. Then propose, with gloomy relish, that the future belongs to the G2: newly fashionable jargon for a putative body formed by China and America. The fear of irrelevance haunts Euro-types, for all their public boasting about Europe’s future might. The thought that the European Union might not greatly interest China is especially painful. After all, the 21st century was meant to be different. Indeed, to earlier leaders like France’s Jacques Chirac, a rising China was welcome as another challenge to American hegemony, ushering in a “multipolar world” in which the EU would play a big role. If that meant kow-towing to Chinese demands to shun Taiwan, snub the Dalai Lama or tone down criticism of human-rights abuses, so be it. Most EU countries focused on commercial diplomacy with China, to ensure that their leaders’ visits could end with flashing cameras and the signing of juicy contracts. Meanwhile, Europe’s trade deficit with China hit nearly∈170 billion ( $ 250 billion) last year. In five years, China wants 60% of car parts in new Chinese vehicles to be locally made. This is alarming news for Germany, the leading European exporter to China thanks to car parts, machine tools and other widgets. As ever, Europeans disagree over how to respond. Some are willing to challenge China politically — for example, Germany, Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands. But they are mostly free traders. That makes them hostile when other countries call for protection against alleged Chinese cheating. In contrast, a block of mostly southern and central Europeans, dubbed “accommodating mercantilists” by the ECFR (The European Council on Foreign Relations), are quick to call for anti-dumping measures: But that makes them anxious to keep broader relations sweet by bowing to China on political issues. The result is that European politicians often find themselves defending unconditional engagement with China. The usual claim is that this will slowly transform the country into a freer, more responsible stakeholder in the world. The secret, it is murmured, is to let Europe weave China into an entangling web of agreements and sectoral dialogues. In 2007 no fewer than 450 European delegations visited China. Big countries like France and Britain add their own bilateral dialogues, not trusting the EU to protect their interests or do the job properly. There are now six parallel EU and national “dialogues” with China on climate change, for example.