单选题She didn't plan to become an actress. She wanted to be six feet tall. She wanted to be a veterinarian. She wanted to be happy and make others happy.

单选题Although he generally observed the adage "Look before you leap," in this instance he was______acting in an unconsidered fashion.

单选题In general, matters which lie entirely within state borders are the______concern of state governments.

单选题There are good reasons to be troubled by the violence that spreads throughout the media. Movies, television and video games are full of gunplay and bloodshed, and one might reasonably ask what's wrong with a society that presents videos of domestic violence as entertainment. Most researchers agree that the causes of real-world violence are complex. A 1993 study by the U. S. National Academy of Sciences listed "biological, individual, family, peer, school, and community factors" as all playing their parts. Viewing abnormally large amounts of violent television and video games may well contribute to violent behavior in certain individuals. The trouble comes when researchers downplay uncertainties in their studies or overstate the case for causality. Skeptics were dismayed several years ago when a group of societies including the American Medical Association tried to end the debate by issuing a joint statement: " At this time, well over 1,000 studies...point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. Freedom-of-speech advocates accused the societies of catering to politicians, and even disputed the number of studies (most were review articles and essays, they said) . When Jonathan Freedman, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, reviewed the literature, he found only 200 or so studies of television-watching and aggression. And when he weeded out "the most doubtful measures of aggression", only 28% supported a connection. The critical point here is causality. The alarmists say they have proved that violent media cause aggression. But the assumptions behind their observations need to be examined. When labeling games as violent or non-violent, should a hero eating a ghost really be counted as a violent event? And when experimenters record the time it takes game players to read "aggressive" or "non-aggressive" words from a list, can we be sure what they are actually measuring? The intent of the new Harvard Center on Media and Child Health to collect and standardize studies of media violence in order to compare their methodologies, assumptions and conclusions is an important step in the right direction. Another appropriate step would be to tone down the criticism until we know more. Several researchers write, speak and testify quite a lot on the threat posed by violence in the media. That is, of course, their privilege. But when doing so, they often come out with statements that the matter has now been settled, drawing criticism from colleagues. In response, the alarmists accuse critics and news reporters of being deceived by the entertainment industry. Such clashes help neither science nor society.

单选题When we credit the successful people with intelligence, physical strength or great luck, we are making excuses for ourselves because we fall ______ in all three.

单选题Satellite communications are so up-to-date that even when ______ in the middle of the Pacific, businessmen can contact their offices as if they were next door.

单选题Passage Two To be fair, this observation is also frequently made of Canada and Canadians, and should best be considered North American. There are, of course, exceptions. Small-minded officials, rude waiters, and ill-mannered taxi drivers are hardly unknown in the US. Yet it is an observation made so frequently that it deserves comment. For a long period of time and in many parts of the country, a traveler was a welcome break in an otherwise dull existence. Dullness and loneliness were common problems of the families who generally lived distant from one another. Strangers and travelers were welcome sources of diversion, and brought news of the outside worl. The harsh realities of the frontier also shaped this tradition of hospitality. Someone traveling alone, if hungry, injured, or ill, often had nowhere to turn except to the nearest cabin or settlement. It was not a matter of choice for the traveler or merely a charitable impulse on the part of the settlers. It reflected the harshness of daily life: if you didn't take in the stranger and take care of him, there was no one else who would. And someday, remember, you might be in the same situation. Today there are many charitable organizations which specialize in helping the weary traveler. Yet, the old tradition of hospitality to strangers is still very strong in the US, especially in the smaller cities and towns away from the busy tourist trails. "I was just traveling through, got talking with this American, and pretty soon he invited me home for dinner-amazing. " Such observations reported by visitors to the US are not uncommon, but are not always understood properly. The casual friendliness of many Americans should be interpreted neither as superficial nor as artificial, but as the result of a historically developed cultural tradition. As is true of any developed society, in America a complex set of cultural signals, assumptions, and conventions underlies all social interrelationships. And, of course, speaking a language does not necessarily mean that someone understands, social and cultural patterns. Visitors who fail to "translate" cultural meanings properly often draw wrong conclusions. For example, when an American uses the word "friend", the cultural implications of the word may be quite different from those it has in the visitor's language and culture. It takes more than a brief encounter on a bus to distinguish between courteous convention and individual interest. Yet, being friendly is a virtue that many Americans value highly and expect from both neighbors and strangers.

单选题No one was absent from the meeting, ______?

单选题Although he suffered from discrimination, Martin Luther King is a man who believed in reconciliation and only rarely ______ a grudge during his Civil Rights movement.

单选题The third candidate is a______. She's new to politics and is just beginning her campaign.

单选题In eighteenth-century France and England, reformers rallied around egalitarian ideals, but few reformers advocated higher education for women. Although the public decried women"s lack of education, it did not encourage learning for its own sake for women. In spite of the general prejudice against learned women, there was one place where women could exhibit their erudition: the literary salon. Many writers have defined the woman"s role in the salon as that of an intelligent hostess, but the salon had more than a social function for women. It was an informal university, too, where women exchanged ideas with educated persons, read their own works and heard those of others, and received and gave criticism. In the 1750s, when salons were firmly established in France, some English women, who called themselves "Bluestocking," followed the example of the salonnieres ( French salon hostesses) and formed their own salons. Most Bluestockings did not wish to mirror the salonnieres; they simply desired to adapt a proven formula to their own purpose—the elevation of women"s status through moral and intellectual training. Differences in social orientation and background can account perhaps for differences in the nature of French and English salons. The French salon incorporated aristocratic attitudes that exalted courtly pleasure and emphasized artistic accomplishments. The English Bluestockings, originating from a more modest background, emphasized learning and work over pleasure. Accustomed to the regimented life of court circles, salonnieres tended toward formality in their salons. The English women, though somewhat puritanical, were more casual in their approach. At first, the Bluestockings did imitate the salonnieres by including men in their circles. However, as they gained cohesion, the Bluestockings came to regard themselves as a women"s group and to possess a sense of female solidarity lacking in the salonnieres, who remained isolated from one another by the primacy each held in her own salon. In an atmosphere of mutual support, the Bluestockings went beyond the salon experience. They traveled, studied, worked, wrote for publication, and by their activities challenged the stereotype of the passive woman. Although the salonnieres were aware of sexual inequality, the narrow boundaries of their world kept their intellectual pursuits within conventional limits. Many salonnieres, in fact, camouflaged their nontraditional activities behind the role of hostess and deferred to men in public Though the Bluestockings were trailblazers when compared with the salonnieres, they were not feminists. They were too traditional, too hemmed in by their generation to demand social and political rights. Nonetheless, in their desire for education, their willingness to go beyond the confines of the salon in pursuing their interests, and their championing of unity among women, the Bluestockings began the process of questioning women"s role in society.

单选题The Olympic Games______in 776 B. C. in Olympia, a small town in Greece.

单选题I was eight years old the first time I fainted. I was at friend"s house, and a bee stung me on the back of the neck. I had felt nothing but a slight pinch and the bug was soon wiped away and flushed down the toilet, but since I looked pale I was urged to call my mother. As I told her what had happened , I felt myself blacking out, sinking to the floor, vaguely aware that I was still gripping the receiver. Perhaps I was allergic to the bee sting—the only one I"ve ever gotten, although to this day I have a phobia about bees, wasps, and other insects. But the image of an eight-year-old in Keds crumpling to the ground while he describes his injury to his Mommy seems to return us to Freudian territory. Note the umbilical image of the phone cord. Call me fanciful. Still, I"m afraid these undertones are hardly dissipated by the second fainting incident I can recall, which practically reeks of the family romance. This took place one weekend morning while we were gathered in the kitchen to eat breakfast. My mother stood at the stove making French toast, which she had already served to the kids; my father, seated at the table, was cutting a bagel with a sharp bread knife. Contrary to every principle of kitchen safety, he was holding the bagel in his hand and cutting inward, and eventually he made a neat, shallow incision in his palm. The blood was profuse. Being a hematologist, my father didn"t panic: this was just business as usual. But my mother stopped flipping French toast and collapsed to the floor. I, inspired by the blood and my mother"s collapse and the powerful odors of syrup and sugar rising from my plate, slumped forward. My forehead went into the syrup. I heard a roar—it seemed to me that I was being clutched beneath the armpits and whirled around—and then my father shook me back into consciousness. He had already attended to my mother. Still think I"m fanciful? Then listen to this. Out of curiosity I asked my mother when her first fainting episode had occurred. She paused, thought it over, and came up with the following. At the age of thirteen, she went to visit her father in the hospital, who only the day before had had his appendix removed. Aside from her father, still conked out from the anesthesia, the other person in the room was a nurse, whowas busy changing the dressing on the patient"s incision, which hadn"t quite closed. For some reason, the nurse had to leave the room. At this point, she asked my mother to hold the soiled dressing in place until she returned. My mother complied. Standing over her dazed father, gingerly holding a used bandage over a hole in his lower abdomen, the thirteen-year-old grew lightheaded. I assumed the nurse returned before she hit the floor.

单选题"Weapons of math instruction. " That is what Beijing"s English-language mouthpiece, Global Times—not normally much given to such wit—calls a Sino-British plan to export Chinese maths instructors to the UK and to send British teachers to Shanghai to learn why China is so good at numbers. A scouting party of British teachers has been in Shanghai for the past week learning how to deploy those weapons in the gross domestic product wars. The logic is simple, not to mention simplistic; Shanghai tops the global league table in tests by the OECD, the Paris-based think-tank, of 15-year-olds" maths skills. Now the UK wants to get its hands on some of that Shanghai magic for its own maths-free masses so they can end up as rich as the Chinese. Elizabeth Truss, then UK education minister, this year visited the Chinese financial centre and waxed lyrical about the advantages of giving the UK a maths education system with more Chinese characteristics. But quite apart from the rather breathless quality of her accolade, the logic is faulty. If Chinese schools are so fabulous, why are a staggering 85 per cent of Chinese parents thinking about sending their children overseas to study, according to a recent HSBC report? And why are more and more mainland parents eager to expatriate their children in time to finish their final years of secondary school overseas when they could just as easily stay at home and win accolades from the OECD? The apparent obsession of Britain"s Conservative party with the performance of one Chinese city"s students on a single mathematics test is probably just a manifestation of a global angst about China taking over the world. But other countries don"t seem to be importing Chinese teachers wholesale to show the locals how it"s done. Of course, every education system can learn something from every other—not least about how not to do things. And there is much to be admired about Chinese students, their teachers and even their tiger parents. There"s plenty of academic debate about why exactly Shanghai tops the maths charts on the OECD"s programme for international student assessment tests. There are those who would have us believe it"s all genetic—though, as the mother of one ethnically Chinese child who flunked her last maths test and another who counts maths as her worst subject. I am not much swayed by that argument. Then there are those who say that it makes no sense to compare the test results of one of China"s richest, most advanced cities with entire countries where rich and poor school districts are combined. But that, too, is not all that persuasive since poor Chinese students in the hinterland have, if anything, even more incentive to do well in maths exams. Australia"s Grattan Institute argues, in a recent study, that it is all about pedagogical strategies , such as mentoring and giving teachers more time outside the classroom. Grattan says, for example, that each new Shanghai teacher has two in-school mentors, one for classroom management and one for content. But an admittedly unscientific straw poll of a handful of teachers in Shanghai schools found that this was true for them only in their first year. How much difference can that make? And then there"s the parenting: even Chinese cubs who don"t have a tiger mum usually have parents who spend a lot of time teaching them basic numeracy from infancy—when mums elsewhere are still mesmerising them with Baby Beethoven. And last we come to what is, for me, the most entertaining argument of all: that Mandarin is a better language to learn maths in, for—among other things—the excellent reason that Mandarin speakers say "10 + 1" and "10 +2" , saving the effort of learning to say "eleven" and "twelve". So by all means, let"s learn from each other. But the war on British innumeracy will not be won just with weapons of maths instruction from a Chinese education system that has lost the confidence of much of its own population, at least when it comes to the immediate pre-university years and above. Chinese parents are voting with their pocketbooks to remove their children from China"s schools. Maybe they know something we don"t.

单选题The output of light and heat (from) the sun requires that some 600 (million) tons of hydrogen (be) converted into helium (in) the sun every second.

单选题He concluded his speech with a remark that failure ______ the mother of success.

单选题If the fire alarm is counted, all residents are requested to ______ in the courtyard.

单选题If only the patient ______ a different treatment instead of using the antibiotics, he might still be alive now. A. had received B. received C. should receive D. were receiving

单选题The U. S government is made up of three portions ; executive, legislative and judicial.

单选题Where do comets come from? For years astronomers have postulated a comet storehouse beyond the orbit of Pluto.