They designed ______ than a matchbox.

The Supreme Court's decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important ______ for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.

The man went to prison, but the two boys ______ with a warning.

The path follows the river closely, occasionally ______ round a clump of trees.

The vocabulary and grammatical differences between British and American English are so trivial and few as hardly ______.

The Roman language served as the first model for answering the question. Even to someone with no knowledge of Latin, the similarities among Roman languages would have made it natural to suggest that they were derived from a common ancestor. On the assumption that the shared characteristic of these languages came from the common ancestor, it would have been possible to reconstruct many of the characteristics of the original common language. In much the same way it became clear that the branches of the Indo-European family could be studied and a hypothetical family tree constructed, reading back to a common ancestor. This is the tree approach. The basic process represented by the tree model is one of divergence: when languages become isolated from one another, they differ increasingly, and dialects gradually become different until they become separate languages. Divergence is by no means the only possible tendency in language evolution. Johannes Schmidt introduced a 'wave' model, in which linguistic changes were like waves, eventually leading to convergence; that is, growing similarity among languages that were initially quite different. Today, however, most linguists think primarily in terms of familytrees. It is necessary to construct some models of how language change might occur according to a process-based view. There are four main classes of models. The first is the process of initial colonization, by which an uninhabited territory becomes populated; its language naturally becomes that of the colonizers. Second are processes of divergence, such as the linguistic divergence arising from separation or isolation mentioned above in relation to early models of the Indo-European languages. The third group of models is based on processes of linguistic convergence. The wave model, formulated by Schmidt in the 1870's, is an example, but convergence methods have not generally found favor among linguists. Now, the slow and rather static operation of these processes is complicated by another factor: linguistic replacement. That factor provides the basis for a fourth class of models, in many areas of the world the languages initially spoken by the indigenous people have come to be replaced, fully or partially, by languages spoken by people coming from outside. Were it not for this large complicating factor, the world's linguistic history could be faithfully described by the initial distribution of Homo Sapiens, followed by the gradual workings of divergence and convergence. So linguistic replacement also has a key role to play in explaining the origins of the Indo-European languages.

晚婚晚育

He said economic growth is the basis for strengthening defense capability, which is ______ an important indicator of overall national strength.

I had no ______ about speaking the language when I was in Greece; it was driving on the other side of the road which bothers me.

Nearly a century ago, biologists found that if they separated an invertebrate animal embryo into two parts at an early stage of its life, it would survive and develop as two normal embryos. This led them to believe that the ceils in the early embryo are undetermined in the sense that each cell has the potential to develop in a variety of different ways. Late biologists found that the situation was not so simple. It matters in which plane the embryo is cut. If it is cut in a plane different from the one used by the early investigators, it will not form two whole embryos. A debate arose over what exactly was happening. Which embryo cells are determined, just when do they become irreversible committed to their fates and what are the 'morphogenetic determinants' that tell a cell what to become? But the debate could not be resolved because no one was able to ask the crucial questions in a form in which they could be pursued productively. Recent discoveries in molecular biology, however, have opened up prospects for a resolution of the determinants in early development. They have been able to show that, in a sense, ceil determination begins even before an egg is fertilized. Studying sea urchins, biologist Paul Gross found that an unfertilized egg contains substances that function as morphogenetic determinants. They are located in the cytoplasm of the egg cell, i. e. , in that part of the cell's protoplasm that lies outside of the nucleus. In the unfertilized egg, the substances ate inactive and are not distributed homogeneously. When the egg is fertilized, the substances become active and, presumable, govern the behavior of the genes they interact with. Since the substances are unevenly distributed in the egg, when the fertilized egg divides, the resulting cells are different from the start and so can be qualitatively different in their own gene activity. The substances that Gross studied are maternal messenger RNA's—products of certain of the maternal genes. He and other biologists studying a wide variety of organisms have found that these particular RNA's direct, in large part, the synthesis of histones a class of proteins that bind to round them to form a structure that resembles beads, or knots, on a string. The beads are DNA segments wrapped around the histone; the string is the intervening DNA. And it is the structure of these beaded DNA strings that guides the fate of the cells in which they are located. Choose the most appropriate from the four choices to complete the sentence or answer the question.

NMD

Although Heron is well known for the broad comedy in the movies she has directed previously, her new film is less inclined to ______: the gags are fewer and subtler.

Few of us take the pains to study our cherished convictions; indeed, we almost have a natural ______ doing so.

The official was arrested for inability to ______ all his fortune he has enjoyed.

Average Joe

与国际接轨

A ______ is a growth of feathers, fur or skin along the top of the heads of some animals, especially birds.

人类文明的摇篮

A middle-aged woman of tremendous ______ sat down beside the other patients in the waiting room.

Passage Four Self-reliance is a nineteenth-century term, popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay of that time, but it still comes easily to the tongues of many of those to whom we talked. Self-reliance of one sort or another is common to every one of the traditions we have discussed. What, if not self-reliant, were the Puritans, many of whom, like John Winthrop, left wealth and comfort to set out in small ships on a dangerous 'errand into the wilderness'? They felt called by God, but they had to rely on themselves. Thomas Jefferson chose in his draft of The Declaration of Independenceto strike a note of self-reliance-when he said that emigration and settlement here 'were effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain,' conveniently forgetting how recently the British had defended the colonists against the French and Indians, but expressing a genuinely American attitude. The note of self-reliance had a clearly collective context in the biblical and republican traditions. It was that as a people we had acted independently and self-reliantly. With utilitarian and expressive individualism, however, the collective note became muted. The focus of the self-made printer or the poet who sang of himself was more exclusively on the individual. Emerson in his 1841 essay 'Self-Reliance' even declared the individual and society to be in opposition. 'Society,' he said, 'is everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. ' Emerson was speaking to the world of the independent citizen and insisting that the conformity exacted by small-town America was too coercive. His friend Thoreau would push this teaching to an extreme in his classic experiment at Walden Pond. But in his essay, Emerson also expressed a more prosaic sense of self-reliance, one that has been the common coin of moral life for millions of Americans ever since. Emerson says we only deserve the property we work for. Conversely, our primary economic obligation is only to ourselves. 'Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?' he wrote. We found self-reliance common as a general orientation in many of those to whom we smoke. Therapist Margaret Oldham typically expressed it as 'taking responsibility for oneself.' But economic self-reliance is often seen as the bedrock on which the more general character trait rests. Asked why he worked so hard to support his wife and child after he first got married, corporate executive Brian Palmer said, 'I guess self-reliance is one of the characteristics I have pretty high up in my value system.' As a young husband and father, Brian felt 'confronted with the stark realities of being self-supporting or dropping out of the human race.' Some critics have seen the 'work ethic' in decline in the United States and a 'narcissistic' concern with the self emerging in its place. In our conversations, we have found that an emphasis on hard work and self-support can go hand in hand with an isolating preoccupation with the self, as Toequeville feared would be the case. Indeed, work continues to be critically important in the self-identity of Americans, closely linked to the demand for self-reliance. The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a 'work ethic' as the meaning of work and the ways it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another. Please answer the following questions based on the above passage: