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Today we know more about (). We’re better at preventing illness.
A.medicine
B.pollution
C.environment
D.population
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A.medicine
B.pollution
C.environment
D.population
People living in different countries made different kinds of words. Today there are about fifteen hundred different languages in the world. Each contains many thousands of words. A very large English dictionary, for example, contains four or five hundred thousand words. But we do not need all these. Only a few thousand words are used in everyday life.
The words you know are called your vocabulary. You should try to make your vocabulary bigger. Read as many books as you can. There are plenty of books written in easy English for you to read. You will enjoy them. When you meet a new word, find it in your dictionary. Your dictionary is your most useful book.
From this passage, we know that ______.
A.man never made sounds
B.man made animal sounds
C.man used to be like animals to make sounds
D.man learned from the animals to make sounds
This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil.
You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.
After all, what is the one modern form. of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.
People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.
Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda—to lure us to open our wallets to make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate"! commanded the ads for the arthritis drug, before we found out it could in crease the risk of heart attacks.
What we forget—what our economy depends on is forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.
By citing the example of poets Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the author intends to show that ______.
A.poetry is not as expressive of joy as painting or music
B.art grow out of both positive and negative feeling
C.poets today are less skeptical of happiness
D.artist have changed their focus of interest
How will scientists do this? People can' t go to the stars. The stars are far away. A person would take hundreds of years to the next star in a spaceship. So scientists are sending out radio signals. These signals travel in space at the speed of light. At that speed, radio signals will take 25 years to reach the next star. The signals ask "Is there anyone out here?". Living things in space must have machines to hear the signals. We will not get an answer to our signals for more than 50 years. However, scientists are already listening. Someone from space may be trying to send signals to us, too.
Scientists also have sent large telescopes into space. A telescope can make things look larger. The telescopes are going around the earth. They are looking for life on other worlds. In the next few years we may get an answer to the question, "Is there life in space.
People always thought about the question, ______.
A.How can scientists use machines to look for a star?
B.How far away are the stars?
C.How many years a person would take to go to the next star in a spaceship?
D.Is there life in space?
For many years, doctors have been studying the way the brain works. We all know that the brain has two sides, the left and the right. The right side controls the senses (seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling), and is the creative and imaginative side. The left side of the brain controls our logical thinking. It processes the information which comes in, and puts it into order, We call the left side the "educated" side of the brain and generally, in western societies, people have developed this side of the brain more than the fight side.
Scientists believe that our brain will work much more efficiently if both the right side and the left side are developed equally. In many schools today, teachers try to educate the children in such a way that both sides of the brain are used. This can be done with logical subjects including mathematics and science as well as with creative subjects such as art and literature. The result achieved by students who are educated in this way is usually better than the result of students who are educated in a more traditional way. Traditional teaching tends to exercise the left side of the brain without paying very much attention to the development of the right side.
great thinkers such as Bertand Russell the Philosopher, and Albert Einstein, the scientist, only in their work, but also in creative and imaginative activities. It was because of their many different interests in life that they were able to achieve the full development of both sides of their brain.
As long as Einstein and Russell lived, their brains functioned efficiently. It was their bodies, finally, which could not go on any longer.
The body improves ______.
A.with age
B.with use
C.with memory
D.with development
As an example of how this works ,when facial tissues were first put on the market in 1924 ,they were made in limited quantities and sold at 65 cents per box of 200. People liked these facial tissues immediately and began asking for them when they went into different stores. Because there was such a demand for the product, manufacturers began making tissues in larger and larger quantities. Because the manufacturers were making tissues in greater quantities, their production costs were lowered, so that the cost of tissues went down.In the meanwhile, the quality of facial tissues was constantly improving, because more manufacturers went into the business of making tissues and each manufacturer strove to make his product better than his competitors. Today, instead of costing 65 cents, a box of 200 facial tissues costs around one-third of that price, and they are both softer and stronger.
When people are free to compete--when they are free to make more things and make them better--everyone benefits.
According to the passage, we know the word "tissue" in Para. 2 Line 1 means "______".
A.cell
B.soft paper
C.organization
D.thin fibre
Here is a great argument in favor of foreign travel and learning foreign languages. It is only by traveling in, or living in a country and getting to know its inhabitants and their language that one can find out what a country and its people are really like. And how different the knowledge one gains this way frequently turns out to be from the second-hand information gathered from other sources! How often we find that the foreigners whom we thought to be such different people from ourselves are not very different after all!
Differences between peoples do, of course, exist and, one hopes, will always continue to do so. The world will be a dull place indeed when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike, and some people might say that we are rapidly approaching this state of affairs. With the much greater rapidity and ease of travel, there might seem to be some truth in this at least as far as Europe is concerned. However this may be, at least the greater ease of travel today has revealed to more people than ever before that the Englishman or Frenchman or German is not some different kind of animal from themselves.
Every country criticizes ways of life in other countries because they are______.
A.distorted
B.normal
C.similar to each other
D.different from its own
The experiments of Expressionism are, perhaps, the easiest to explain in words. The term itself may not be happily chosen, for we know that we are all expressing ourselves in everything we do or leave undone, but the word became a convenient label because of its easily remembered contrast to Impressionism, and as a label it is quite useful. In one of his letters, Van Gogh had explained how he set about painting the portrait of a friend who was very dear to him. The conventional likeness was only the first stage. Having painted a "correct" portrait, he proceeded to change the colors and the setting.
Van Gogh was right in saying that the method he had chosen could be compared to that of the cartoonist. Cartoon had always been "expressionist", for the cartoonist plays with the likeness of his victim, and distorts it to express just what he feels about his fellow man. As long as these distortions of nature sailed under the flag of humor nobody seemed to find them difficult to understand. Humorous art was a field in which everything was permitted, because people did not approach it with prejudices. Yet there is nothing inconsistent about it. It is true that our feelings about things do color the way in which we see them and, even more, the forms which we remember. Everyone must have experienced how different the same place may look when we are happy and when we are sad.
What upset the public about the Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty. For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty were only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical masters, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the bare facts of our existence, and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly.
Expressionism is a(n)
A.artistic style. expressing the artist's inner experiences objectively.
B.marked trend characteristic of insisting on harmony and beauty.
C.new movement based on expressive style.
D.fundamental revolution in arts.
The old always assume that they know best for the simple 【C8】______ that they have been 【C9】______ a bit longer. They don't like to feel that their values are being questioned or threatened. And this is precisely what the 【C10】______ are doing. They are questioning the 【C11】______ of their elders and disturbing their complacency. They take leave to 【C12】______ that the older generation has created the best of all possible worlds. What they reject more than 【C13】______ is conformity. Office hours, for instance, are nothing more than enforced slavery. Wouldn't people work best if they were given complete freedom and 【C14】______ ? And what 【C15】______ the clothing? Who said that all the men in the world should 【C16】______ drab grey suits? If we turn our 【C17】______ to more serious matters, who said that human differences can best be solved through conventional politics or by violent means? Why have the older generation so often used 【C18】______ to solve their problems? Why are they are so unhappy and guilt-ridden in their personal lives, so obsessed with mean ambitions and the desire to amass more and more 【C19】______ possessions? Can anything be right with the rat-race? Haven't the old lost 【C20】______ with all that is important in life?
【C1】______
The reigning notion today is that the laws of economics are not, after all, suspended in cyberspace like the laws of gravity in outer space. Content needs to be paid for on the Web just as in any other medium. And it probably has to be paid for the same way most other things are paid for. by the people who use it. We tried charging the customers at Slate. It didn't work. Future experiments may be more successful. But meanwhile, let's look again at this notion that in every medium except the Internet, people pay for the content they consume. It's not really true.
TV is the most obvious case. A few weeks ago a producer from "Nightline" contacted Slate while researching a possible show on the crisis of content on the Internet. He wanted to know how on earth we could ever be a going business if we gave away our content for free. I asked how many people pay to watch "Nightline". Answer none. People pay for their cable or satellite transmission, and they pay for content on HBO, but "Nightline" and other broadcast programs thrive without a penny directly from viewers. There are plenty of differences, of course, and the ability of Web sites to support themselves on advertising is unproven. But "Nightline" itself disproves the notion that giving away content is suicidal.
Now, look at magazines. The money that magazine subscribers pay often doesn't even cover the cost of persuading them to subscribe. A glossy monthly will happily send out $20 of junk mail—sometimes far more to find one subscriber who will pay $12 or $15 for a yearly subscription. Why? Partly in the hope that she or he will renew again and again until these costs are covered. But for many magazines including profitable ones—the average subscriber never pays back the cost of finding, signing and keeping him or her. The magazines need these subscribers in order to sell advertising.
Most leading print magazines would happily send you their product for free, if they had any way of knowing (and proving to advertisers) that you read it. Advertisers figure, reasonably, that folks who pay for a magazine are more likely to read it, and maybe see their ad, than those who don't. So magazines make you pay, even if it costs them more than they get from you.
This madcap logic doesn't apply on the Internet, where advertisers pay only for ads that have definitely appeared in front of someone's "eyeballs". They can even know exactly how many people have clicked on their ads. So far advertisers have been insufficiently grateful for this advantage. But whether they come around or not, there will never be a need on the Internet to make you pay just to prove that you're willing. So maybe the Internet's first great cliché had it exactly backward: Information has been free all along. It's the Internet that wants to enslave it.
The predominant idea of today is that
A.information should be free in cyberspace.
B.content on the Web should be paid for.
C.the laws of economics are not applicable to cyberspace.
D.the laws of economics are as outdated as the laws of gravity.
The differences between American English and British English are not very great. Written English is more or less the same in both Britain and America, though there are some spelling differences. For example, centre, licence, colour and travelled are spelt as center, license, color and traveled in American English. In America "cock, rubber, iii, holiday, lorry, post... "are called "rooster, eraser, sick, vacation, truck, mail..." But people from the two countries can still understand each other easily.
There are only a very small number of differences in grammar between American English and British English. The most important differences are in spoken English. For example, Americans pronounce "tomato" differently from English people.
You may wonder "Which is correct?" The answer is that it does not matter. You should speak either American English or British English. But do not try to speak both at the same time.
When was English only spoken in England?
A.About the 6th century.
B.Before the 17th century.
C.Before the 14th century.
D.Before the 15th century.
How did language originate and develop?
Which theory about the origins of language sounds more reasionable to you? Why?
How can people today know about the original form. of language?