单选题BQuestions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation./B
单选题Near the border between Florida and Georgia, lives a rare tree called a stinking cedar. Once common,
Torreya taxi folia
seems to have got stuck in this tiny pocket as the continent warmed after the last ice age. It cannot migrate northward because the surrounding soils are too poor. Attacked by fungi, just a few hundred stinking cedars remain there. Rising temperatures now threaten to kill them off entirely.
Spying a looming extinction, a group of people is engaged in a kind of ecological vigilantism. The self-styled "Torreya Guardians" collect thousands of seeds a year and plant them in likely places across the eastern United States. Stinking cedar turns out to thrive in North Carolina. The Torreya Guardians are now trying to plant it in colder states like Ohio and Michigan as well. By the time the trees are fully grown, they reason, temperatures might be ideal there. Some are dubious. The Torreya Guardians were at first seen as "eco-terrorists spreading an invasive species", remembers Connie Barlow, the group"s chief propagandist. She rejects that charge, pointing out that she is only moving the tree within America. She also thinks that drastic action of this kind will soon be widespread: "We are the radical edge of what is going to become a mainstream action."
Conservation is nearly always backward-looking. It aims to keep plants and animals not just where they are but where they were before humans meddled. The only real debate is over how far to turn back the clock. Scotland and Wales have been heavily grazed for centuries, giving them a bald beauty. Should they now he reforested, or "rewilded"? Should wolves be encouraged to reclaim their ancient territory in America"s Rocky Mountains? In a rapidly warming world, this attitude is becoming outdated. No part of the Earth can be returned to a natural state that prevailed before human interference, because humans are so rapidly changing the climate. Conservation is being overtaken by fast-moving reality. In future the question will no longer be how to preserve species in particular places but how to move them around to ensure their survival.
Global warming has already set off mass migrations. Having crossed the Baltic Sea, purple emperor butterflies are fluttering northward through Scandinavia in search of cooler temperatures. Trees and animals are climbing mountains. The most spectacular migrations have taken place in the oceans, says Elvira Poloczanska of Australia"s national science agency. Many sea creatures can move quickly, which is just as well: in the oceans it is generally necessary to travel farther than on land to find lower temperatures. Phytoplankton populations are moving by up to 400km a decade. Not all plants and animals can make it to new homes, though. Some will be hemmed in by farmland, cities or coasts. Animals that live in one mountain range might be unable to cross a hot plain to reach higher mountains. And many will find that the species they eat move at a different speed from their own: carnivorous mammals can migrate more quickly than rodents, which in turn migrate faster than trees. The creatures that already inhabit the poles and the highest mountains cannot move to cooler climes and might be done for.
It is not clear that climate change has yet driven any species to extinction. Frogs native to Central and South America have been wiped out by a fungus to which they may or may not have become more vulnerable as a result of changing temperatures. Yet the speed at which species habitats are shifting suggests they are already under great pressure—which will only increase in the next few decades. Chris Thomas, an evolutionary biologist at the University of York in England, has estimated that by 2050 between 18% and 35% of species could be on the path to extinction.
A few years ago Mr. Thomas helped transport hundreds of butterflies to Durham, at least 50km north of their usual range, and released them into the cooler air. The butterflies fared well. These days he thinks bigger. Why not move creatures farther, he suggests, to places where they have never lived? He suggests several candidates for "assisted colonization" to Britain. The Caucasian wingnut tree, which clings on in a few moist parts of Turkey and Iran, could probably be planted widely. De Prunner"s ringlet, an endangered butterfly native to southern Europe, feeds on grasses that are common in Britain. The Iberian lynx, an endangered cat, would find lots of rabbits to eat. Britain is a highly suitable ark for other countries" endangered species: thanks to the Gulf Stream, its climate is expected to remain broadly constant over the next few decades.
The notion of deliberately moving species a long way from home is starting to look a little less heretical. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which shapes biodiversity policy, recently revised its guidelines, apparently giving a slight nod to such relocations. It insists upon great caution. But "if you have too much risk assessment, nothing will happen, and these species will go extinct," says Mr. Thomas.
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单选题Drunken driving—sometimes called America"s socially accepted form of murder—has become a national epidemic. Every hour of every day about three Americans on average are killed by drunken drivers, adding up to an incredible 250,000 over the past decade.
A drunken driver is usually defined as one with a 0.10 blood alcohol content or roughly three beers, glasses of wine or shots of whisky drunk within two hours. Heavy drinking used to be an acceptable part of the American manly image and judges were not severe in most courts, but the deaths caused by drunken driving have recently caused so many well-publicized tragedies, especially involving young children, that public opinion is no longer so tolerant.
Twenty states have raised the legal drinking age to 21, changing a trend in the 1960s to reduce it to 18. After New Jersey lowered it to 18, the number of people killed by 18-20 year-old drivers more than doubled, so the state recently upped it back to 21.
Reformers, however, fear that raising the drinking age will have little effect unless accompanied by educational programs to help young people to develop "responsible attitudes" about drinking and teach them to resist peer pressure to drink.
Tough new laws have led to increased arrests and tests and, in many areas already, to a marked decline in fatalities. Some states are also punishing bars for serving customers too many drinks. A bar or pub in Massachusetts was fined for serving six or more brandies to a customer who was "obviously drunk" and later drove off the road, killing a nine-year-old boy.
As the fatalities continue to occur daily in every state, some Americans are even beginning to speak well of the 13 years of national prohibition of alcohol that began in 1919, what President Hoover called the "noble experiment". They forget that legal prohibition didn"t stop drinking, but encouraged political corruption and organized crime. As with the booming drug trade generally, there is no easy solution.
单选题Questions 1~5
There has been an ecological triumph in the province of Sweden where I"ve spent the past three weeks. The wolf and the lynx have both returned to the forests. The naturalists have been rejoicing. There"s been a TV documentary. Meanwhile the local farmers and hunters have disappeared into the forests with their rifles. Jan and Lennart, the sons of the farmer at the end of the lake, were particularly aggrieved that the lynx (that"s a wild cat to you townies) was killing "their" deer, and the urban bureaucrats who had decided to protect it only increased their rage. They vowed to track the animal down. "Did they kill it?" I asked one local man. "They didn"t say", he replied with a hint of a wink.
What does the word "rural" mean to you? Organic, perhaps. Wholesome.
Gemeinschaft
(or do I mean
Gesellschaft
?). Conservative. Marx"s "rural idiocy" maybe. To me the countryside is about paranoia. It breeds independence and idiosyncrasy and other nice things but also the sort of people who wander onto Capitol Hill in order to kill some senators or declare war on the FBI for being an essentially socialist organization. For people who live in and off the countryside, there always seems to be the idea that "they"—the bureaucrats, the government, the city folk—are out to get them.
What they despise almost as much as city folk themselves are the sort of things that city folk like about the countryside, footpaths, beauty spots, old buildings, rare flora and fauna, ancient sites of historical interest. To select from my experience of the past few weeks, the land that was once owned by my late grandparents contained a meadow that was famous across Sweden (well, it was once featured on the front page of the local newspaper) for its rare plants. A couple of weeks ago my cousin—an engineer and part-time farmer with a flock of four sheep and one ram—fenced the meadow off, set the sheep loose into it and within two days it duly looked like a bit of scrub in a corner of a derelict industrial estate. Incidentally, when your correspondent went to investigate this vandalism, the said ram pursued him across the field in a way that was later said to be hilarious to onlookers.
Another local man carries around a special bullet in case he should ever get on the trail of a wolf. The normal bullets used for hunting deer and elk have soft tips so that they spread out on contact and cause devastating fatal wounds. But this special wolf bullet has a hard tip so that it will pass right through the animal, leaving a relatively small (though almost certainly fatal) wound. The dying wolf will then probably walk tens of miles before it dies, thus preventing "them" from identifying the slayers of this absurdly protected predator. And this happens in a province which has a wolf as its official symbol.
There"s more. A neighboring lake has become home to what I was informed is an exceedingly rare kind of hawk. But the local people who have spotted it have kept its presence a closely guarded secret. If they told ornithologists about it, then the next thing that would happen is that they would probably want to come into the area and start to look at the bloody thing, and once these bureaucrats and scientists get their claws into an area, who knows where it will end?
Much of this is probably true of rural areas everywhere, but in Sweden it has been exacerbated by the Byzantine bureaucracy that was generated by 40 years of social democracy, a system that led both to some of the finest public services and to the situation in which the country"s greatest living artist, Ingmar Bergman, under suspicion of a minor tax transgression, was publicly arrested and interrogated in a manner that might have been thought excessive by Beria.
One of the fundamental Swedish rights is entitled
allamansrdtt
, which permits anybody to walk, pick berries or mushrooms virtually anywhere. Some local businessmen have hired Polish workers to come up to Sweden and pick mushrooms but they haven"t been to our area more than once. When they emerged from this forest they found that the tyres in their bikes and cars were mysteriously flat. It"s somehow a typically Swedish paradox: you have the legal right to go where you like, hut don"t let that give you the idea that you can just go anywhere.
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{{B}}Questions
23-26{{/B}}
单选题It looks unlikely that medical science will abolish the process of ageing. But it no longer looks impossible.
"In the long run," as John Maynard Keynes observed, "we are all dead." True. But can the short run be
elongated
in a way that makes the long run longer? And if so, how, and at what cost? People have dreamt of immorality since ancient times. Now, with the growth of biological knowledge that has marked the past few decades, a few researchers believe it might be within reach.
To think about the question, it is important to understand why organisms — people included —age in the first place. People are like machines, they wear out. That much is obvious. However, a machine can always be repaired. A good mechanic with a stock of spare parts can keep it going indefinitely. Eventually, no part of the original may remain, but it still carries on, like Lincoln"s famous axe that had three new handles and two new blades.
The question, of course, is whether the machine is worth repairing. It is here that people and nature disagree. Or, to put it slightly differently, two bits of nature disagree with each other. From the individual"s point of view, survival is an imperative. A fear of death is a sensible evolved response and, since ageing is a sure way of dying, it is no surprise that people want to stop it in its tracks. Moreover, even the appearance of ageing can be harmful. It reduces the range of potential sexual partners who find you attractive and thus, again, curbs your reproduction.
The paradox is that the individual"s evolved desire not to age is opposed by another evolutionary force, the disposable soma. The soma is all of a body"s cells apart from the sex cells. The soma"s role is to get those sex cells, and thus the organism"s genes, into the next generation. If the soma is a chicken, then it really is just an egg"s way of making another egg. And if evolutionary logic requires the soma to age and die in order for this to happen, so be it. Which is a pity, for evolutionary logic does, indeed, seem to require that.
The argument is this. All organisms are going to die of something eventually. That something may be an accident, a fight, a disease or an encounter with a hungry predator. There is thus a premium on reproducing early rather than conserving resources for a future that may never come. The reason why repairs are not perfect is that they are costly and resources invested in them might be used for reproduction instead. Often, therefore, the body"s mechanics prefer lash-ups to complete rebuilds — or simply do not bother with the job at all. And if that is so, the place to start looking for longer life is in the repair shop.
单选题Questions 21-25
We can begin our discussion of "population as global issue" with what most persons mean when they discuss "the population problem": too many people on earth and a too rapid increase in the number added each year. The facts are not in dispute, it was quite right to employ the analogy that likened demographic growth to "a long, thin powder fuse that burns steadily and haltingly until it finally reaches the charge and explodes. "
To understand the current situation, which is characterized by rapid increases in population, it is necessary to understand the history of population trends. Rapid growth is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Looking back at the 8,000 years of demographic history, we find that populations have been virtually stable or growing very slightly for most of human history. For most Of our ancestors, life was hard, often nasty, and very short. There was high fertility in most places, but this was usually balanced by high mortality. For most of human history, it was seldom the case that one in ten persons would live past forty, while infancy and childhood were especially risky periods. Often, societies were in clear danger of extinction because death rates could exceed their birthrates. Thus, the population problem throughout most of history was how to prevent extinction of the human race.
This pattern is important to notice. Not only does it put the current problems of demographic growth into a historical perspective, but it suggests that the cause of rapid increase in population in recent years is not a sudden enthusiasm for more children, but an improvement in the conditions that traditionally have caused high mortality.
Demographic history can be divided into two major periods, a time of long, slow growth which extended from about 8,000 B. C. till approximately A. D. 1650. In the first period of some 9,600 years, the population increased from some 8 million to 500 million in 1650. Between 1650 and the present, the population has increased from 500 million to more than 4 billion. And it is estimated that by the year 2000 there will be 6.2 billion people throughout the world. One way to appreciate this dramatic difference in such abstract numbers is to reduce the time frame to something that is more manageable. Between 8,000 ]3. C and 1650, an average of only 50,000 persons was being added annually to the world"s population each year. At present, this number is added every six hours. The increase is about 80,000,000 persons annually.
单选题
Up-Minneapolis, MN—A father was
recently arrested by the police for spanking his child, starting a debate among
the American public about spanking. Is spanking, or other types of corporal
punishment, an acceptable form of discipline for children? Or is it a form of
child abuse? The case that everyone has talking is the arrest of
Dale Clover, a thirty-six-year-old father of three, at a shopping mall in St.
Louis, Missouri. He was arrested after an employee at the mall saw him spanking
his five-year-old son, Donny, and called the police. The father was arrested for
child abuse. Mr. Clover admits that he hit his son but says that it wasn't child
abuse. He says it was discipline. Across the country, parents
disagree on this issue: What is the difference between loving discipline and
child abuse? Some parents like Rhonda Moore see a clear difference between
spanking and child abuse. Rhonda Moore believes a little bit of pain is
necessary to teach a child what is right and wrong. "It's like burning your hand
when you touch a hot stove. Pain is nature's way of teaching us." Moore believes
that spanking is done out of love, but child abuse is done out of anger, when
the parent loses control. "When I spank my children, I always talk to them
before and afterward, and explain why they are being spanked. I explain what
they did wrong, and they remember not to do it again." Moore says that her
children respect her as a parent and understand that she is spanking them for
their own good. In contrast, Taylor Robinson, father of four,
feels that parents should never hit their children for any reason.
Robinson wants his children to learn right and wrong, but not because they
are afraid of being hit. "Spanking teaches children to fear their parents, not
respect them. When a parent spanks a child, what the child learns is that
problems should be solved with violence." Robinson believes that children learn
that it is acceptable for parents to hurt their children. "None of these are
lessons that I want to teach my children. I want my children to learn to talk
about their problems and solve them without violence, but spanking doesn't teach
that." Parents are split about corporal punishment, and doctors
also disagree about the issue. Dr. John Oparah thinks our child abuse laws
sometimes go too far; that is, they make it difficult for parents to discipline
their children. Oparah says that today many children do not respect their
parents. "Children need strong, loving discipline. Sometimes spanking is the
best way to get a child's attention, to make sure the child listens to the
parent." Most doctors, however, say that there are many harmful
effects of spanking. Dr. Beverly Lau is opposed to spanking. Lau argues that
spanking can lead to more violent behavior in children. She points to research
shows that children who are spanked are more violent when they grow up. "A child
may stop misbehaving for the moment, but over time, children who are spanked
actually misbehave more than children who are not spanked." Lau adds that
research shows that, if you want a peaceful family, parents should not spank
their children. The issue of spanking and corporal punishment
will continue to be debated among parents and in the courts. In the meantime, if
he is convicted of child abuse, Dale Clover could get up to five years in
prison.
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Most sore throats are caused by an
infection which treatment with antibiotics cannot cure. But with simple remedies
the patient normally gets better in 4 or 5 days. Sore throats are common. Most
of the time the soreness is worse in the morning and improves as the day
progresses. Like colds, the vast majority of sore throats are
caused by viral infections. This means most sore throats will NOT respond to
antibiotics. Many people have a mild sore throat at the beginning of every cold.
When the nose or sinuses become infected, drainage can run down the back of the
throat and irritate it, especially at night. Or, the throat itself can be
infected. With a sore throat, sometimes the tonsils or
surrounding parts of the throat are inflamed. Either way, removing the tonsils
to try to prevent future sore throats is not recommended for most
children. Tonsillitis, however, usually starts with a sore
throat which causes pain on swallowing. With children — and some adults — there
may be a fever and the patient is obviously not feeling well. It may be possible
to see white spots on the back of the throat. The neck may also swell, both of
which are the normal response to infection. Sometimes a sore throat may occur
with the common cold, and with influenza there may be dryness of the throat,
pain on coughing and loss of voice. TREATMENT:
Aspirin: To help relieve the pain on swallowing and (if there is one) the
fever. Use aspirin tablets dissolved in water so that the patient can gargle
before swallowing. Repeat the treatment every 4 hours. Drink:
Encourage the patient to drink plenty. Food: Food should not be
forced on a patient who does not want to eat. Steam: If there is
pain in the throat on coughing, breathing in steam may help. CHILDREN:
Young children, who may not be able to gargle, should be given aspirin
dissolved in water every 4 hours in the right dose for their age.
At one year: A single junior aspirin. At five years: Half
an adult aspirin. At eight years: One whole adult
aspirin. WHEN TO SEE THE DOCTOR. If the sore
throat is still getting worse after 2 days. If the patient complains of earache.
If the patient's fever increases. If the patient or parent is very
worried.
单选题Psychological testing is a measurement of some aspect of human behavior by procedures consisting of carefully prescribed content, methods of administration, and interpretation. Test content may be addressed to almost any aspect of intellectual or emotional functioning, including personality traits, attitudes, intelligence, or emotional concerns. Tests usually are administered by a qualified clinical, school, or industrial psychologist, according to professional and ethical principles. Interpretation is based on a comparison of the individual's responses with those previously obtained to establish appropriate standards for test scores. The usefulness of psychological tests depends on their accuracy in predicting behavior. By providing information about the probability of a person's responses or performance, tests aid in making a variety of decisions. The primary impetus for the development of the major tests used today was the need for practical guidelines for solving social problems. The first useful intelligence test was prepared in 1905 by the French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1873-1961). The two developed a 30-item scale to ensure that no child could be denied instruction in the Paris school system without formal examination. In 1916 the American psychologist Lewis Terman produced the first Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon scale to provide comparison standards for Americans from age three to adulthood. The test was further revised in 1937 and 1960, and today the Stanford-Binet remains one of the most widely used intelligence tests. The need to classify soldiers during World War I resulted in the development of two group intelligence tests—Army Alpha and Army Beta. To help detect soldiers who might break down in combat, the American psychologist Robert Woodworth (1869—1962) designed the Personal Data Sheet, a forerunner of the modern personality inventory. During the 1930s controversies over the nature of intelligence led to the development of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, which not only provided an index of general mental ability but also revealed patterns of intellectual strengths and weaknesses. The Wechsler tests now extend from the preschool through the adult age range and are at least as prominent as the Stanford-Binet. As interest in the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis grew in the 1930s, two important projective techniques introduced systematic ways to study unconscious motivation: the Rorschach test—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884—1922)— using a series of inkblots on cards, and a story-telling procedure called the Thematic Apperception Test—developed by the American psychologists Henry A. Murray (1893— 1988) and C. D. Morgan. Both of these tests are frequently included in contemporary personality assessment. During World War II the need for improved methods of personnel selection led to the expansion of large-scale programs involving multiple methods of personality assessment. Following the war, training programs in clinical psychology were systematically supported by U.S. government funding, to ensure availability of mental-health services to returning war veterans. As part of these services, psychological testing flourished, reaching an estimated several million Americans each year. Since the late 1960s increased awareness and criticism from both the public and professional sectors have led to greater efforts to establish legal controls and more explicit safeguards against misuse of testing materials.
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{{B}}Questions
15-18{{/B}}
单选题 Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the
immediate interests of the ordinary man in the street. He is not intrigued or
impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds—something
that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this
knowledge may have an impact on him when it is embodied in new technology, until
then, he can afford to ignore it. A good bit of new knowledge, on the other
hand, is directly related to his immediate concerns, his job, his politics, his
family life, even his sexual behavior. A poignant is the
dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive
radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of
childrearing. At the turn of the century in the United States,
for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in
the importance of heredity in determining behavior. Mothers who had never heard
of Darwin or Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the world views
of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person,
these world views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary
people that "bad children are a result of bad stock", that "crime is
hereditary", etc. In the early decades of the century, these
attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that
environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important,
created a new image of the child. The work of Watson and Pavlov began to creep
into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behaviorism, refusing to feed
infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning early to
avoid prolonged dependency. A study by Martha Wolfenstein has
compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of INFANT CARE,
a handbook issued by the United Stats Children's Bureau between 1914 and 1951.
She found distinct shifts in the preferred methods for dealing with weaning and
thumb-sucking. It is clear from this study that by the late thirties still
another image of the child had gained ascendancy. Freudian concepts swept in
like a wave and revolutionized childrearing practices. Suddenly, mothers began
to hear about "the rights of infants" and the need for "oral gratification".
Permissiveness became the order of the day.
单选题Questions 15-18
单选题Whoisthemanpossiblytalkingto?A.Adoctor.B.Ateacher.C.Hismother.
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19—22{{/B}}
