单选题A strange thing about humans is their capacity for blind rage. Rage is presumably an emotion resulting from survival instinct, but the surprising thing about it is that we do not deploy it against other animals. If we encounter a dangerous wild animal——a poisonous snake or a wildcat——we do not fly into a temper. If we are unarmed, we show fear and attempt to back away; if we are suitably armed, we attack, but in a rational manner not in a rage. We reserve rage for our own species. It is hard to see any survival value in attacking one's own, but if we take account of the long competition which must have existed between our own subspecies and others like Neanderthal man——indeed others still more remote from us than Neanderthal man——man rage becomes more comprehensible. In our everyday language and behavior there are many reminders of those early struggles. We are always using tile words "us and them". "Our" side is perpetually trying to do down the "other" side. In games we artificially create other subspecies we can attack. The opposition of "us" and "them" is the touchstone of the two-party system of "democratic" politics. Although there are no very serious consequences to many of this modem psychological representation of the "us and them" emotion, it is as well to remember that the original aim was not to beat the other subspecies in a game but to exterminate it. The readiness with which human beings allow themselves to be regimented has permitted large armies to be formed, which, taken together with the "us and them" blind rage, has led to destructive clashes within Our subspecies itself. The First World War is an example in which Europe divided itself into two imaginary subspecies. And there is a similar extermination battle now in Northern Ireland. The idea that there is a religious basis for this clash is illusory, for not even the pope has been able to control it. The clash is much more primitive than the Christian religion, much older in its emotional origin. The conflict in Ireland is unlikely to stop until a greater primitive fear is imposed from outside the community, or until tile combatants become exhausted.
单选题Cancer has always been with us, but not always in the same way. Its care and management have differed over time, of course, but so, too, have its identity, visibility, and meanings. Pick up the thread of history at its most distant end and you have cancer the crab—so named either because of the ramifying venous processes spreading out from a tumor or because its pain is like the pinch of a crab's claw. Premodern cancer is a lump, a swelling that sometimes breaks through the skin in ulcerations producing foul-smelling discharges. The ancient Egyptians knew about many tumors that had a bad outcome, and the Greeks made a distinction between benign tumors (oncos) and malignant ones (carcinos). In the second century A. D. , Galen reckoned that the cause was systemic, an excess of melancholy or black bile, one of the body’s four "humors,, brought on by bad diet and environmental circumstances. Ancient medical practitioners sometimes cut tumors out, but the prognosis was known to be grim. Describing tumors of the breast, an Egyptian papyrus from about 1600 B.C. concluded: "There is no treatment. " The experience of cancer has always been terrible, but, until modern times, its mark on the culture has been light. In the past, fear coagulated around other ways of dying, infectious and epidemic diseases (plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever): "apoplexies" (what we now call strokes and heart attacks); and, most notably in the nineteenth century, "consumption" (tuberculosis). The agonizing manner of cancer death was dreaded, but that fear was not centrally situated in the public mind—as it now is. This is one reason that the medical historian Roy Porter wrote that cancer is "the modern disease par excellence," and that Mukherjee calls it "the quintessential product of modernity. " At one time, it was thought that cancer was a "disease of civilization," belonging to much the same causal domain as "neurasthenia" and diabetes, the former a nervous weakness believed to be brought about by the stress of modern life and the latter a condition produced by bad diet and indolence. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some physicians attributed cancer—notably of the breast and the ovaries—to psychological and behavioral causes. William Buchan's wildly popular eighteenth-century text "Domestic Medicine" judged that cancers might be caused by "excessive fear, grief, religious melancholy. " In the nineteenth century, reference was repeatedly made to a "cancer personality," and, in some versions, specifically to sexual repression. As Susan Sontag observed, cancer was considered shameful, not to be mentioned, even obscene. Among the Romantics and the Victorians, suffering and dying from tuberculosis might be considered a badge of refinement; cancer death was nothing of the sort. "It seems unimaginable," Sontag wrote, "to aestheticize" cancer.
单选题The coalition parties have asked the government to consider using more funds to help support the ailing market.
单选题Tim has given up his own writing and radio interests to pick you up off the ground and ______ you to the stature which he truly thought you deserved.
单选题Because of recent political and economic Uupheavals/U in these countries, it seems likely that the trend will be toward decentralized, Western-style systems.
单选题After years of research, Charles Drew devised a procedure for Upreserving/U plasma.
单选题Our culture has caused most Americans to assume not only that our language is universal but that the gestures we use are understood by everyone. We do not realize that waving good-bye is the way to summon a person from the Philippines to one's side, or that in Italy and some Latin American countries, curling the finger to oneself is a sign of farewell. Those private citizens who sent packages, to our troops occupying Germany after World War II and marked them GIFT to escape duty payments did not bother to find out that "Gift" means poison in German. Moreover, we like to think of ourselves as friendly, yet we prefer to be at least 3 feet or an arm's length away from others. Latins and Middle Easterners like to come closer and touch, which makes Americans uncomfortable. Our linguistic (语言上的) and cultural blindness and the casualness with which we take notice of the developed tastes, gestures, customs and languages of other countries, are losing us friends, business and respect in the world. Even here in the United States, we make few concessions to the needs of foreign visitors. There are no information signs in four languages on our public buildings or monuments; we do not have multilingual (多语言的) guided tours. Very few restaurant menus have translations, and multilingual waiters, bank clerks and policemen are rare. Our transportation systems have maps in English only and often we ourselves have difficulty understanding them. When we go abroad, we tend to cluster in hotels and restaurants where English is spoken. The attitudes and information we pick up are conditioned by those natives—usually the richer—who speak English. Our business dealings, as well as the nation's diplomacy, are conducted through interpreters. For many years, America and Americans could get by with cultural blindness and linguistic ignorance. After all, America was the most powerful country of the free world, the distributor of needed funds and goods. But all that is past, American dollars no longer buy all good things, and we are slowly beginning to realize that our proper role in the world is changing. A 1979 Harris poll reported that 55 percent of Americans want this country to play a more significant role in world affairs; we want to have a hand in the important decisions of the next century, even though it may not always be the upper hand.
单选题Five score years ago, a great American, ______ symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A. with his B. in whose C. by him D. of whom
单选题Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick Ⅱ in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What special about man"s brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattem "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain"s ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child"s babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child"s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.
单选题The ______ analysis by H.L. Mencken of the American character outraged some and delighted others.
单选题Most people who travel long distance complain of jetlag. Jetlag makes business travel ers less productive and more prone (21) making mistakes. It is actually caused by (22) of your "body clock" —a small cluster of brain cells that controls the timing of biological (23) . The body clock is designed for a (24) rhythm of daylight and darkness, so that it is thrown out of balance when it (25) daylight and darkness at the "wrong" times in a new time zone. The (26) of jetlag often persist for days (27) the internal body clock slowly adjusts to the new time zone. Now a new anti-jetlag system is (28) that is based on proven (29) pioneering scien tific research. Dr. Martin Mooreede had (30) a practical strategy to adjust the body clock much sooner to the new time zone (31) controlled exposure to bright light. The time zone shift is easy to accomplish and eliminates (32) of the discomfort of jetlag. A successful time zone shift depends on knowing the exact times to either (33) or avoid bright light. Exposure to light at the wrong time can actually make jetlag worse. The proper schedule (34) light exposure depends a great deal on (35) travel plans.
单选题 Coincident with concerns about the accelerating loss
of species and habitats has been a growing appreciation of the importance of
biological diversity, the number of species in a particular ecosystem, to the
health of the Earth and human beings. Much has been written about the diversity
of terrestrial organisms, particularly the exceptionally rich life associated
with tropical rain-forest habitats. Relatively little has been said, however,
about diversity of life in the sea even though coral reef systems are comparable
to rain forests in terms of richness of life. An alien
exploring the Earth would probably give priority to the planet's dominant, most
distinctive feature—the ocean. Humans have a bias toward land that sometimes
gets in the way of truly examining global issues. Seen from far away, it is easy
to realize that landmasses occupy one-third of the Earth's surface. Given that
two-thirds of the Earth's surface is water and that marine life lives at all
levels of the ocean, the total three- dimensional living space of the ocean is
perhaps 100 times greater than that of land and contains more than 90 percent of
all life on Earth even though the ocean has fewer distinct species.
The fact that half of the known species are thought to inhabit the
world's rain forests does not seem surprising, considering the huge numbers of
insects that comprise the bulk of species. One scientist found many different
species of ants in just one tree from a rain forest. While every species is
different from every other species, their genetic makeup constrains them to be
insects and to share similar characteristics with 750 000 species of insects. If
basic, broad categories such as phyla and classes are given more emphasis than
differentiating between species, then the greatest diversity of life is
unquestionably the sea. Nearly every major type of plant and animal has some
representation there. To appreciate fully the diversity of
abundance of life in the sea, it helps to think small. Every spoonful of ocean
water contains life on the order of 100 to 100 000 bacterial cells plus assorted
microscopic plants and animals, including larva's or organisms ranging from
sponges and corals to starfish and clams and much more.
单选题Few creations of big technology capture the imagination like giant dams. Perhaps it is humankind"s long suffering at the mercy of flood and drought that makes the ideal of forcing the waters to do our bidding so fascination. But to be fascinated is also, sometimes, to be blind Several giant dam projects threaten to do more harm than good.
The lesson from dams is that big is not always beautiful. It doesn"t help that building a big, powerful dam has become a symbol of achievement for nations and people striving to assert themselves. Egypt"s leadership in the Arab world was cemented by the Aswan High Dam. Turkey"s bid for First World status includes the giant Ataturk Dam.
But big dams tend not to work as intended. The Aswan Dam, for example stopped the Nile flooding but deprived Egypt of the fertile silt that floods left—all in return for a giant reservoir of disease which is now so full of silt that it barely generates electricity.
And yet, the myth of controlling the waters persists. This week, in the heart of civilized Europe, Slovaks and Hungarians stopped just short of sending in the troops in their contention over a dam on the Danube. The huge complex will probably have all the usual problems of big dams. But Slovakia is bidding for independence from the Czechs, and now needs a dam to prove itself.
Meanwhile, in India, the World Bank has given the go ahead to the even more wrong headed Narmada Dam. And the bank has done this even though its advisors say the dam will cause hardship for the powerless and environmental destruction. The benefits are for the powerful, but they are far from guaranteed.
Proper scientific study of the impacts of dams and of the cost and benefits of controlling water can help to resolve these conflicts. Hydroelectric power and flood control and irrigation are possible without building monster dams. But when you are dealing with myths, it is hard to be either proper, or scientific. It is time that the world learned the lessons of Aswan. You don"t need a dam to be saved.
单选题Envy and jealousy of other people and their lives become ______ once you start believing in yourself.
单选题From the passage we may well understand that the author ______.
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单选题It's a result more of ______ than anything else to win the top prize in a lottery.
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单选题The government should ______ with the irrational regulations restricting drinking hours.