单选题According to the author, what is the main problem with TV programs in America?

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单选题 The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished. Of course Belden's prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter's that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope. Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver's view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room." A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia's Fairmont Park. The San Francisco World's Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city's major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver. San Diego's model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city's Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles. A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco's many hills. The computer's ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model's importance, and its future is uncertain. New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama's bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.

单选题 I watched as Dr. Ian Stead, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation, began carefully removing the peat with a clay modelling tool. X-rays taken through the box while it was at the hospital revealed ribs, backbone, arm bones and a skull (apparently with fractures). However, the bones showed up only faintly because acid in the peat had removed minerals from them. Using the X-rays, Stead started on what he thought might be a leg. By his side was Professor Frank Oldfield, of Liverpool University, an expert on peat who could identify vegetation from stems only a fraction of an inch long. "Similar bodies found in bogs in Denmark show signs of a violent death," Stead said. "It is essential for us to be able to distinguish between the plant fibres in peat and clothing or a piece of rope which might have been used to hang him." As Stead continued his gentle probing, a brown leathery limb began to materialize amidst the peat; but not until most of it was exposed could he and Robert Connolly, a physical anthropologist at Liverpool University, decide that it was an arm. Beside it was a small piece of animal fur — perhaps the remains of clothing. Following the forearm down into the peat, Stead found a brown shiny object and then, close by, two more. Seen under a magnifying glass, he suddenly realized they were fingernails— "beautifully manicured and without a scratch on them," he said. "Most people at this time in the Iron Age were farmers; but with fingernails like that, this person can't have been. He might have been a priest or an aristocrat." Especially delicate work was required to reveal the head. On the third day, curly sideburns appeared and, shortly afterwards, a moustache. At first it seemed that the man had been balding but gradually he was seen to have close-cropped hair, about an inch or two long. "This information about his hairstyle is unique. We have no other information about what Britons looked like before the Roman invasion except for three small plaques showing Celts with drooping moustaches and shaven chins." The crucial clue showing how the man died had already been revealed, close to his neck, but it looked just like another innocent heather root. It was not recognized until two days later, when Margaret McCord, a senior conservation officer, found the same root at the back of his neck and, cleaning it carefully, saw its twisted texture. "He's been garr0tted." She declared. The root was a length of twisted sinew, the thickness of a strong string. A slip knot at the back shows how it was tightened round the neck. "A large discoloration on the left shoulder suggests a bruise and possibly a violent struggle," Stead said.

单选题According to the writer, eccentric people ______.

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单选题 Questions 6-10 It's 10 p. m. You may not know where your child is. But the chip does. The chip will also know if your child has fallen and needs immediate help. Once paramedics arrive, the chip will also be able to tell the rescue workers which drugs little Johnny or Janic is allergic to. At the hospital, the chip will tell doctors his or her complete medical history. And of course, when you arrive to pick up your child, settling the hospital bill with your health insurance policy will be a simple matter of waving your own chip--the one embedded in your hand. To some, this may sound far-fetched. But the technology for such chips is no longer the stuff of science fiction. And it may soon offer many other benefits besides locating lost children or elderly Alzheimer patients. "Down the line, it could be used as credit cards and such," says Chris Hables Gray, a professor of cultural studies of science and technology at the University of Great Falls in Montana, "A lot of people won't have to carry wallets anymore," he says, "what the implications are for this technology, in the long run, is profound. " Indeed, some are already wondering what this sort of technology may do to the sense of personal privacy and liberty. "Any technology of this kind is easily abusive of personal privacy. " says Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If a kid is trackable, do you want other people to be able to track your kid? It's a double-edged sword. " Tiny Chips That Know Your Name The research of embedding microchips isn't entirely new. Back in 1988, Brian Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University in London, implanted a chip into his arm as an experiment to see if Warwick's computer could wirelessly track his whereabouts with the university's building. But Applied Digital Solutions, Inc, in Palm Beach, Fla. is one of the latest to try and push the experiments beyond the realm of academic research and into the hands--and bodies--of ordinary humans. The company says it has recently applied to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin testing its VeriChip device in humans. About the size of a grain of rice, the microchip can be encoded with bits of information and implanted in humans under a layer of skin. When scanned by a nearby reader, the embedded chip yields the data--says an ID number that links to a computer database file containing more detailed information. Chipping Blocks Most embedded chip designs are so-called passive chip which yield information only when scanned by a nearby reader. But active chips--such as the proposed Digital Angel of the future--will need to beam out information all the time. And that means designers will have to develop some sort of power source that can provide a continuous source of energy, yet be small enough to be embedded with the chips. Another additional barrier, developing tiny GPS receiver chips that could be embedded yet still is sensitive enough to receive signals from thousands of miles out in space. In addition to technical hurdles, many suspect that all sorts of legal and privacy issues would have to be cleared as well.

单选题Despots and tyrants may have changed the course of human evolution by using their power to force hundreds of women to bear their children, says new research. It shows that the switch from hunter-gathering to farming about 8,000 - 9,000 years ago was closely followed by the emergence of emperors and elites who took control of all wealth, including access to young women. Such men set up systems to impregnate hundreds, or even thousands, of women while making sure other men were too poor or oppressed to have families. It means such men may now have hundreds of millions of descendants, a high proportion of whom may carry the genetic traits that drove their ancestors to seek power and oppress their fellow humans. "In evolutionary terms this period of human existence created an enormous selective pressure, with the guys at the top who had the least desirable traits passing on their genes to huge numbers of offspring," said Laura Betzig, an evolutionary anthropologist. She has studied the emergence of the world"s first six great civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico and Peru. In each she found that emperors created systems to "harvest" hundreds of the prettiest young women and then systematically impregnate them. Betzig has studied the records left by the six civilisations to work out how many children were born to emperors. "In China they had it down to a science. Yangdi, the 6th-century Sui dynasty emperor, was credited by an official historian with 100,000 women in his palace at Yangzhou alone," she said. "They even had sex handbooks describing how to work out when a woman was fertile. Then they would be taken to the emperor to be impregnated. It was all organised by the state so the emperor could impregnate as many women as possible. And they had rules, like all the women had to be under 30 and all had to be attractive and symmetrical. This was the system in China for more than 2,000 years." Others relied on violence. One genetic study showed that Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol warlord, who was renowned for sleeping with the most beautiful women in every territory he conquered, now has about 16m male descendants. This compares with the 800 people descended from the average man of that era. Betzig also studied primitive societies. She found that the small bands of hunter-gatherers were the most egalitarian, with men and women able to have the number of children they wanted. "This freedom is probably because they were so mobile. If their group got taken over by a big guy who tried to control resources, the others could simply leave and find somewhere else," she said. This system broke down when the world"s first civilisations emerged about 8,000 years ago based on farming. All began on fertile river plains surrounded by mountains or deserts that made it difficult to leave. Such situations were perfect for the emergence of elites and emperors. In a paper published recently, Betzig has catalogued the same trend in each of the great early civilisations. Such systems arose in Britain as well, especially in the feudal era. "Lords then had sexual access to hundreds of dependent serfs ... with up to a fifth of the population "in service"," Betzig said. She is to publish a book, The Badge of Lost Innocence , exploring why that era has ended. "The European discovery of the Americas changed everything," she said. "Along with the emergence of democracy it offered millions of people the chance to emigrate or get rid of despotic regimes. The literature of that time shows people wanted to have families of their own and for the first time in thousands of years they had that chance. "

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单选题According to the passage, all of the following statements are true except ______.

单选题 Ordinarily, I'm hardly what you'd call a nosy neighbor—each to his own is my credo. Yet, without moving from my desk, I've learned what my neighbors paid for their houses, whether they*ye refinanced, how many bathrooms they have, and what their median income is. I know their birth dates, social security numbers, and driving records. And with a bit more digging I could unearth many of their legal and business dealing. Do you find this unsettling? You might. But consider this: None of this information is considered private. All of it, and much more, is available online to anyone with a computer and a modem. What does the online world know about you? Plenty—whether you're online or not. Using a pseudonym (handsome@service.com) won't help, either. That's because most of the information about you isn't coming from you, at least not directly. It's coming from myriad government records and business transactions, which are being digitized, linked, packaged, sold, and re-sold. All of this is legal, or at least it is not clearly illegal. In one sense, the availability of "public records" online is merely an electronic extension of how things have always worked. With a few dollars and a trip to the right city, county, or state agency, you can get copies of many publicly filed records, such as real estate transactions or birth certificates. But a funny thing happened on the way to city hall in the 1990s. Actually, it's a confluence of four factors: PCs are everywhere, the Internet is connecting millions of them, business and government records are now routinely stored on computers, and government agencies (especially at the state and local levels) are desperately seeking new sources of revenue. In short, the market-place for online information, and the ability or desire to deliver it, are gelling at roughly the same moment in time. Who wants this personal information? Private investigators performing background checks or searching for deadbeat parents want it. Lawyers want it to track down court records and personal assets. So do prospective employers and landlords, to give you an electronic once-over before rolling out the welcome mat. And before you feel too affronted, it's to find a missing branch in the family tree or to check out a child-care worker. Naturally, marketers want it as well—preferably in large quantities—to try to do what they always do. sell you stuff. They are using cyberspace to snap up e-mail lists and demographics databases to send solicitations to your onscreen in-box, as well as your postal mailbox. And as shopping by computer takes off, they'll want to know more about your online buying habits as well. One compromise in the works: commerce Net and the Electronic Frontier foundation are testing a system called eTrust that displays standard symbols informing you prior to buying anything online whether information about the transaction will be anonymous, customer-to-merchant only, or shared with other. To be sure, the online arena is not the only place where your personal information is being collected and passed along. Smart cards and codes are being used to learn more about you in places as diverse as your state government and your local supermarket. Often, they will share the knowledge they gather with others. But nothing is spreading the information, or fueling the demand for it, faster than online connections. The demand, coupled with a delivery vehicle of unprecedented efficiency and reach called the Internet, had spawned a booming market for services offering to help you find out more about other people (or them about you). Demand has also spawned a number of new privacy groups bent on curbing, or at least keeping close tabs on the inline information-for-sale industry. Many of these groups are themselves rooted online, and somewhat ironically, are populated by the same brand of free thinkers who routinely oppose any attempts to regulate cyberspace or censor the electronic exchange of information. But for many, the sale of personal information hits a little too close to home.

单选题Researchers have known that secondhand smoke can be just as dangerous for nonsmokers as smoking is for smokers, but now there"s fresh evidence quantifying just how hazardous the after-burn from cigarettes can be, and how quickly it affects your body. Scientists at the Oregon Department of Health documented for the first time an hourly buildup of a cancer- causing compound from cigarette smoke in the blood of nonsmokers working in bars and restaurants in the state. Reporting in the American Journal of Public Health, the researchers found that waitstaff and bartenders working a typical night shift gradually accumulated higher levels of NNK, a carcinogen in cigarette smoke, at the rate of 6% each hour they worked. NNK is known to be involved in inducing lung cancer in both lab rats and smokers. "We were somewhat surprised by the immediacy of the effect and the fact that we could measure the average hourly increase," says Michael Stark, the lead author of the study and a principal investigator at the Mulmomah County Health Department in Oregon. The authors are confident that the increases in NNK in the workers they tested most likely came from their exposure to smoke—the study included a control group of similar subjects in restaurants where no smoking was allowed. "There is experimental evidence from studies where you put nonsmokers in a room, blow smoke into the room and measure their artery function, that you see the platelets get sticky, which can cause clots and lead to a heart attack, and the ability of the arteries to dilate decreases very rapidly," says Dr. Matthew McKenna, director of the office on smoking and public health for the Centers for Disease Control. All of which could mean more time loitering outside buildings and in alleyways for smokers intent on grabbing a puff. Thirteen states now prohibit smoking in restaurants altogether (most of these include bars as well), and while 11 states still put no restrictions on lighting up, individual cities within those states—such as Austin in Texas, for example have passed legislation banning smoking in eating establishments and other public areas. It"s just getting harder to refute the scientific evidence; in a study done in Scotland several months after that nation instituted a ban on smoking in public places, researchers found that following the ban, bar patrons showed stronger lung capacity and reduced levels of inflammation (a red flag for a number of chronic diseases, including heart disease and asthma). "We made it pretty clear that the science on this is pretty irrefutable," says McKenna. And if smokers have fewer places to smoke, that message may finally get heard.

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单选题Why did the author mention Gandhi and Martin Luther King?

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