单选题Gordon Shaw the physicist, 66, and colleagues have discovered what's known as the "Mozart effect," the ability of a Mozart sonata, under the right circumstances, to improve the listener's mathematical and reasoning abilities. But the findings are controversial and have launched all kinds of crank notions about using music to make kids smarter. The hype, he warns, has gotten out of hand. But first, the essence: Is there something about the brain cells work to explain the effect? In 1978 the neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle devised a model of the neural structure of the brain's gray matter. Looking like a thick band of colorful bead work, it represents the firing patterns of groups of neurons. Building on Mounteastle, Shaw and his team constructed a model of their own. On a lark, Xiaodan Leng, who was Shaw's colleague at the time, used a synthesizer to translate these patterns into music. What came out of the speakers wasn't exactly toe-tapping, but it was music. Shaw and Leng inferred that music and brain-wave activity are built on the same sort of patterns. "Gordon is a contrarian in his thinking," says his longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning Stanford physicist Martin Peri. "That's important. In new areas of science, such as brain research, nobody knows how to do it." What do neuroscientists and psychologists think of Shaw's findings?' They haven't condemned it, but neither have they confirmed it. Maybe you have to take them with a grain of salt, but the experiments by Shaw and his colleagues are intriguing. In March a team led by Shaw announced that young children who had listened to the Mozart sonata and studied the piano over a period of months improved their scores by 27% on a test of ratios and proportions. The control group against which they were measured received compatible enrichment courses--minus the music. The Mozart-trained kids are now doing math three grade levels ahead of their peers, Shaw claims. Proof of all this, of course, is necessarily elusive because it can be difficult to do a double- blind experiment of educational techniques. In a double-blind trial of an arthritis drug, neither the study subjects nor the experts evaluating them know which ones got the test treatment and which a dummy pill. How do you keep the participants from knowing it's Mozart on the CD?

单选题When you leave a job with a traditional pension, don"t assume you"ve lost the chance to collect it. You"re entitled to whatever benefit you"ve earned—and you might even be entitled to take it now. "A lot of people forget they have it, or they think that by waiting until they"re 65, they"ll have a bigger benefit," says Wayne Bogosian, president of the PFE Group, which provides corporate pre-retirement education. Your former employers should send you a certificate that says how much your pension is worth. If it"s less than $5,000, or if the company offers a lump-sum payout, it will generally close your account and cash you out. It may not seem like much, but $5,000 invested over 20 years at eight percent interest is $23,000. If your pension is worth more than $5,000, or your company doesn"t offer the lump-sum option, find out how much money you"re eligible for at the plan"s normal retirement age, the earlier age at which you can collect the pension, the more severe penalty for collecting it early. You"ll probably still come out ahead by taking the money now and investing it. What if you left a job years ago, and you"re realizing you may have unwittingly left behind a pension? Get help from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. It has an online search tool that has helped locate $47 million in lost benefits for more than 12,000 workers. If you have a traditional pension, retiring early costs more than you might expect. Most people assume you take a proportional cut for leaving before your plan"s normal retirement age. For example, you might think that if you need to accrue 30 years of service and you leave three years early, you"d get a pension 90 percent of the full amount. But that"s not how it works. Instead, you take an actuarial reduction, determined by the employer but often around five percent a year, for each year you leave early. So retiring three years early could leave you with only 85 percent of the total amount. When you retire early with a defined-contribution plan, the problem is you start spending investments on which you could be earning interest. If you retire when you"re 55, for example, and start using the traditional pension then, by age 65 you"ll have only about half of what you would have had if you"d kept working until 65.

单选题{{B}}Passage 2{{/B}} Married people live "happily ever after" in fairy tales, but they do so less and less often in real life. I, like many of my friends, got married, divorced, and remarried. I suppose, to some people, I'm a failure. After all, I broke my first solemn promise to "love and cherish until death us do part." But I feel that I'm finally a success. I learned from the mistakes I made in my first marriage. This time around, the ways my husband and I share our free time, make decision, and deal with problems are very different. I learned, first of all, not to be a clinging vine (依赖男子的妇女). In my first marriage, I felt the every moment we spent apart was wasted. If Ray wanted to go out to a bar with his friends to watch a football game, I felt rejected and talked him into staying home. I wouldn't accept an offer to go to a movie or join an exercise class if it meant that Ray would be home alone. I realize now that we were often angry with each other just because we spent too much time together. In contrast, my second husband and I spend some of our free time apart and try to have interests of our own. I have started playing racquetball at a health club, and David sometimes takes off to go to the local auto races with his friends. When we are together, we aren't bored with each other, our separate interests make us more interesting people. I learned not only to be apart sometimes but also to work together when it's time to make decisions. When Ray and I were married, I left all the important decisions to him. He decided how we would spend money, whether we should sell the car or fix it, and where to take a vacation. I know now that I went along with this so that I wouldn't have to take the responsibility when things went wrong. I could always end an argument by saying, "It was your fault!" With my second marriage, I am trying to be a full partner. We ask each other's opinions on major decisions and try to compromise if we disagree. If we make the wrong choice, we're equally guilty. When we rented an apartment, for example, we both had to take the blame for not noticing the drafty windows and the "no pets" clause in our lease. Maybe the most important thing I've learned is to be a grown-up about facing problems. David and I have made a vow to face our troubles like adults. If we're mad at each f other or worried and upset, we say how we feel. Rather than hide behind our own misery, we talk about the problem until we discover how to fix it. Everybody argues or has to deal with the occasional crisis, but Ray and I always reacted like children to these stormy times. I would lock myself in the spare bedroom. Ray would stalk out of the house, slam the door, and race off in the car. Then I would cry and worry till he returned. I wish that my first marriage hadn't been the place where I learned how to make a relationship work, but at least I did learn. I feel better now about being an independent per- son, about making decisions, and about facing problems. My second marriage isn't perfect, but it doesn't have the deep flaws that made the first one fall apart.

单选题It was difficult to build a power station in the deep valley, but it______as we had hoped.

单选题A(n)______price is a moderate one, not too expensive.

单选题Organizational culture can be defined as a system of shared beliefs and values that develops within an organization and______behaviors of its members.

单选题Which of the following income may enjoy a reduced tax or exclusion?

单选题I asked my mother if I could go out, and she ______. A. descended B. contented C. consented D. ascended

单选题 {{B}}Questions 21—23 are based on the passage about ice phrases. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 21—23.{{/B}}

单选题A teacher cannot give ______ attention to each pupil if his class is large.

单选题Among picture books for 4-8 years olds, several outstanding works appeared that combined original stories with______illustrations.

单选题The country's deficit that year ______ to a record 169.8 billion dollars. A. soared B. soured C. sored D. sourced

单选题Always since the creation of celluloid, plastics have been found to have a multitude of industrial and commercial uses.A.Always B.plastics C.have D.multitude

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单选题There is much I enjoy about the changing seasons, but my favorite time is the ______ from fall to winter. [A] transmission [B] transformation [C] transition [D] transfer

单选题Giorgio, now fifteen, and Lucia, also in her teens, were reaching the ______ of their adolescence.

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