学历类 - 外语类

Only a man who hates himself and loves humanity could possibly become an actor, but to become an actor doing plays for live television is without doubt the most ghastly torture ever invented for the acting profession. So, at least, a well-known actor has stated and I am quite prepared to believe it.Consider for yourself. For one thing the unseen audience may number millions. If you forget your lines there is no hope whatsoever of being prompted and the only resource left to you is that of mouthing silently at the cameras in the vain hope that thousands of viewers will think that the fault is in their sets rather than that the actor is incompetent.There is a story told by a famous actor of his experiences in this field which gives me intense pleasure whenever I read it. The types of part he usually plays are generally somewhat stiff-upper-lip typically British parts. He was due to act in a live television show where the script was of indifferent quality, rehearsals had been sketchy and a great deal more attention had been paid to the trappings of the production than to its actual quality.He claims himself that acting live on television scares him stiff. However, on this occasion he was determined to give as good an impression as possible of the “stiff-upper-lip.” He was acting a part where the costume was fairly simple and his idea of making a “calm and collected” impression was to leave the main items (coat, briefcase and beret) in the little hut he had been assigned as a dressing room and stroll about the stage five minutes before the performance was due to start, apparently totally unprepared. This worked beautifully.Everyone naturally, from the producer to the humblest stage-hand, begged him to get ready. “Two minutes will be quite enough,” he stated calmly, puffing at an enormous cigar. Two minutes before the live show was due to start he strolled to the dressing room and tried to open the door. It was locked. He then describes himself as being changed into a gibbering nervous wreck, shouting and screaming for help. He finally went on the set with his coat on back to front and covered with wood-shavings from having had to break down the door. He forgot his lines and the cool Englishman with the iron nerve he was supposed to be playing turned into, as he describes it, a furtive little man with a dirty coat, a stammer and a nervous twitch. He has now decided that live television is not for him, a fact which will hardly surprise the reader.1.According to the author, what kind of person could become an actor on live television?2.The type of the part the actor usually plays is（ ）.3.The actor did not go to get his main items in advance in order to（ ）.4.In the end the Englishman the actor played on the stage must have looked（ ）.

The short, smiling man who introduce himself as the manager denied that we had paid more than other people, though he did admit that we had been put in a “special” room.

That's all right, it is better to （ ） the feeling than to let it build up.

Many social observers in China are concerned that children growing up in villages away from their mother and father lack of parental love and may have trouble becoming responsible adults as they enter their twenties.

The difference in tone and language must strike us, as soon as it is philosophy that speaks: that change should remind us that even if the function of religion and that of reason coincide. This function is performed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many, reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourishes by prayer. Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on which indeed we may come to reflect but which exists in us ideally only, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not conform to it; it does not urge or chide us, not call for any emotions on our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects which it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings some order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to the natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into them. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal .constitution which experience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience itself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate principle, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this struggling and changing force of religion seems to direct man toward something eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the soul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all that the soul depends upon. Religion, in its intent is a more conscious and direct pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society. Science, or art, for these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and piecemeal, hardly regarding the foal or caring for the ultimate justification of the instinctive aims. Religion also has an instinctive and blind side and bubbles up in all manner of chance practices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the heart or things, and from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the direction of the ultimate.

Nevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life of Reason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of each religion may prevail upon themselves, to express satisfaction with its results, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generous draughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the various religions at once and comparing their achievements with what reason requires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they have one and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offer imaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurable essentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directed effort. The Greed oracles, for instance, pretended to heal out natural ignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while the Christian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our natural death—the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing and conditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done for the real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocate sentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuing happiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a one-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. When these come. The real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxed vitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spirits untrained in natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauches the morality it comes to sanction and impedes the science it ought to fulfill.What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to rationality in its purpose, fall so short of it in results? The answer is easy; religion pursues rationality through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it is an imaginative substitute for science. When it gives precepts, insinuates ideals, or remolds aspiration, it is an imaginative substitute for wisdom—I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit of all food. The condition and the aims of lif

The new policy has （ ）a large amount of investment for industry and business in this city.

We all buy things on the （ ） of the moment; this is what the retail trade calls an “impulse buy”.

Producing elastic through chemical synthesis is a tedious process consuming three months.

Over the past few years, outcries from food activists have changed many Americans' eating habits: Criticism of widespread pesticide use led many consumers to organic foods, and early warnings prompted shoppers to shun irradiated and genetically altered food. （1） Major players have muscled laws through state legislatures. The statutes make it illegal to suggest that a particular food is unsafe without a “sound scientific basis” for the claim. These so-called banana bills are under discussion in several US states.Banana bill backers believe the laws will protect agricultural producers from losses like those following the Alar scare in 1989, when the TV magazine show 60 Minutes publicized a Natural Resources Defense Council report charging that the chemical, which enhances the appearance of apples, causes cancer.（2 ） Banana bill foes say the laws simply serve to repress those who speak out against risky food-produce with “acceptable” levels of pesticides, genetically altered tomatoes, milk from cows injected with the growth hormone rBST, which boosts milk production. （3 ） They call them an insult to free speech and an impediment to covering critical food safety issues, notes Nicols Fox in American Journalism Review (March 1995). Most critics question the laws' requirement that only charges based on “reasonable and reliable” evidence be allowed. （4） After all, it's unlikely that agribusinesses will accept even the best evidence if it threatens their bottom line. Fox notes that even though the Environmental Protection Agency affirmed that Alar posed unacceptable health risks, Washington State Farm Bureau spokesperson Peter Stemberg insists that EPA's science is “subject to second opinion.” —opinions that challenged accepted wisdom.Instead of attacking what they sneer as “junk science”, food producers should be listening to the public's food worries, says Sierra's Rauber, who cites a recent Young &

In the case of mobile phones, change is everything. Recent research indicates that the mobile phone is changing not only our culture, but our very bodies as well.

First, let’s talk about culture. The difference between the mobile phone and its parent, the fixed-line phone is, you get whoever answers it.This has several implications. The most common one, however, and perhaps the thing that has changed our culture forever, is the “meeting” influence. People no longer need to make firm plans about when and where to meet. Twenty years ago, a Friday night would need to be arranged in advance.You needed enough time to allow everyone to get from their place of work to the first meeting place. Now, however, a night out can be arranged on the run. It is no longer "see you there at 8", but "text me around 8 and we’ll see where we all are".Texting changes people as well. In their paper, “Insight into the Social and Psychological Effects of SMS Text Messaging”，two British researchers distinguished between two types of mobile phone users: the “talkers” and the lexters”一those who prefer voice to text message and those who prefer text to voice.They found that the mobile phone’s individuality and privacy gave texters the ability to express a whole new outer personality. Texters were likely to report that their family would be surprised if they were to read their texts. This suggests that texting allowed texters to present a self-image that differed from the one familiar to those who knew them well.Another scientist wrote of the changes that mobiles have brought to body language.There are two kinds that people use while speaking on the phone. There is the “speakeasy”： the head is held high, in a self-confident way, chatting away. And there is the “spacemaker”： these people focus on themselves and keep out other people.Who can blame them? Phone meetings get cancelled or reformed and camera-phones intrude on people’s privacy. So, it is understandable if your mobile makes you nervous. But perhaps you needn't worry so much. After all, it is good to talk.1.When people plan to meet nowadays, they （ ）.2.According to the two British researchers, the social and psychological effects are mostly likely to be seen on（ ） .3.We can infer from the passage that the texts sent by texters are（ ） .4.According to the passage, is afraid of being heard while talking on the mobile（ ）.5.An appropriate title for the passage might be（ ） .

The woman, 69 years old and still active as a professor at Harvard University, told a research team that she had begun to find it hard to recall the names of ever faculty members. Not long ago she had forgotten her classroom number when asking for a slide projector to be sent up. She had one anxious question for the research team, assembled to study the normal course of mental aging: “Am I losing my ability to remember, and perhaps even to think clearly?”That question is the principal focus of a new wave of scientific inquiry on the decline in mental ability with age. The findings are challenging some basic assumptions, like the belief that such decline is a natural part of the aging process, irrespective of general health.From 20 to 30 percent of people in their 80s who volunteer for cognitive testing perform as well as volunteers in their 30s and 40s, who are presumably in their mental prime. The intellectual and creative productivity in later life of certain artists and intellectuals may represent not so much an exception as an ideal, some experts now say.Dr KW Schaie, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, is the director of a major study of normal mental decline in the elderly. For over 35 years, his study has been following more than 5000 men and women who have been tested regularly. Dr Schaie’s investigations seek to fill a gap in gerontological research, which, according to Dr Jack Rowe, president of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a leading expert in the field, has focused on disease and disability, and neglected the prospects of maintaining high functioning in old age. Dr Rowe heads a research network on successful aging sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. In an interview he pointed out that gerontologists have focused on ‘"the 6 to 15 percent of the elderly who are frail and then lumped everyone else together as normal. But there is a huge variation from person to person among older people: the older a group gets, the less like each other people in it become.”Dr Schaie’s most recent findings were reported this month in The American Psychologist. Although the study’s results show abilities begin to decline gradually in the middle to late 60s and accelerate in the late 70s. The rate of decline differs for various mental faculties and differs in men and women. The sharpest declines are seen in basic mathematics. By their late 80s, both men and women were only about half as adept in basic math as they had been in their 50s. For men, the least decline shown is in spatial orientation, for example, in reading a map correctly. By the late 80s, it had dropped by only about one-eighth on average.For women, the most enduring mental skill is inductive reasoning, assessing the information in a timetable, for instance. As women reached their late 80s, it had dropped just over one-eighth from its height in middle age. One of the drastic declines for women proved to be in verbal comprehension, while that ability dropped relatively little into the 70s, it plummeted by about one-quarter during the 80s. For men, the decline was slight in those years.Another study, this one by Dr Richard Mons, a psychologist at Mount Sinai Medical School who is the acting director of a research consortium on normal memory loss and aging sponsored by the Charles
A. Dana Foundation, has found that different kinds of memory differ in their vulnerability to aging. “Crystallized” memory, ie, vocabulary or other knowledge accumulated over the years holds up very well into old age. “Fluid” memory, on the other hand, the ability to add new information to memory or to recall something that happened recently is more prone to decline, beginning in the 60s. He found little decline in very short-term memory, like remembering a telephone number just looked up.A pair of Harvard psychologists, Douglas Powell and Kean Whitla, have designed a computerized test of mental skills like long-term and short-term memory, attention, reasoning and calculation; they reported the test in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Sc

I wish that John would write more（ ） . I can never read his notes and letters.

The heat in summer is no less（ ） here in this mountain region.

He is afraid to go swimming in the ocean. He refuses to enter the water even the sea isperfectly calm and there are no waves.

Three days ago I received an e-mail from the conference organizers apologizing the last-minute changes in the schedule; they sounded genuinely embarrassed at the disorder in their planning.

It is hoped that the severe prison sentences will serve as a(n)（ ） to other would-be offenders.

Thanks to some help from professors at the university in Canberra，the Australian authorities are letting me to bring my biological samples into the country without the usual three-week quarantine.

Perhaps all criminals should be required to carry cards which read: Fragile: Handle with Care. It will never do, these days, to go around referring to criminals as violent thugs. You must refer to them politely as “social misfits”. The professional killer who wouldn’t think twice about using his club or knife to batter some harmless old lady to death in order to rob her of her meager life-savings must never be given a dose of his own medicine. He is in need of “hospital treatment”. According to his misguided defenders, society is to blame. A wicked society breeds evil - or so the argument goes. When you listen to this kind of talk, it makes you wonder why aren’t all criminals. We have done away with the absurdly harsh laws of the nineteenth century and this is only right. But surely enough is enough. The most senseless piece of criminal legislation in Britain and a number of other countries has been the suspension of capital punishment.The violent criminal has become a kind of hero-figure in our time. He is glorified on the screen; he is pursued by the press and paid vast sums of money for his “memoirs”. Newspapers which specialize in crime reporting enjoy enormous circulations and the publishers of trashy cops and robbers stories or “murder mysteries” have never had it so good. When you read about the achievements of the great train robbery, it makes you wonder whether you are reading about some glorious resistance movement. The hardened criminal is cuddled and cosseted by the sociologists on the one hand and adored as a hero by the masses on the other. It’s no wonder he is a privileged person who expects and receives VIP treatment wherever he goes.Capital punishment used to be a major deterrent. It made the violent robber think twice before pulling the trigger. It gave the cold-blooded prisoner something to ponder about while he was shaking up or serving his arsenic cocktail. It prevented unarmed policemen from being killed while pursuing their duty by killers armed with automatic weapons. Above all, it protected the most vulnerable members of society, young children, from brutal violence. It is horrifying to think that the criminal can literally get away with murder. We all know that “life sentence” does not mean what it says. After ten years or so of good conduct, the most desperate villain is free to return to society where he will live very comfortably, thank you, on the proceeds of his crime, or he will go on committing offences until he is caught again.People are always willing to hold liberal views at the expense of others. It’s always fashionable to pose as the defender of the under-dog, so long as you, personally, remain unaffected. Did the defenders of crime, one wonders, in their desire for fair-play, consult the victims before they suspended capital punishment? Hardly, you see they couldn’t, because all the victims were dead.1.According to the passage, which of the following is the author’s opinion?2.The tone taken by the author towards these defenders of crime in the passage is （ ）.3.“Capital punishment” most probably means（ ） .4.Which of the following is true according to the passage?5.What conclusion can be drawn from the passage?

She makes no （ ）of their affair in public and he understands that he is not to refer to it with these new acquaintances.

Culture is transmitted largely by language and by the necessity for people in close contact to cooperate. The more extensive the communications network，the greater the exchange of ideas and beliefs and the more alike people become—in toleration of diversity if nothing else. Members of a culture or a nation are generally in closer contact with one another than with members of other cultures or nations. They become more like each other and more unlike others. In this way，there develops “national character，” which is the statistical tendency for a group of people to share values and follow similar behavior patterns.Frequently，the members of one culture will interpret the “national characteristics” of another group in terms of their own values. For example，the inhabitants of a South Pacific island may be considered “lazy” by citizens of some industrialized nations. On the other hand，it may be that the islanders place a great value on social relationships but little value on “productivity，” and crops grow with little attention. The negative connotation of the label “lazy” is thus unjustified from the point of view of the island culture.Stereotypes，such as “lazy”，“inscrutable，” and “dishonest” give people the security of labels with which to react to others in a superficial way，but they are damaging to real understanding among members of different cultures. People react more to labels than to reality. A black American Peace Corps volunteer，for instance，is considered and called a white man by black Africans. The “we-they” distinction applies to whatever characteristic the “we” have and the “they” do not have—and the characteristics attributed to the “they” are usually ones with a negative value.The distinction becomes most obvious in times of conflict. For this reason，it is often suggested the only thing that might join all men together on this planet would be an invasion from outer space. “We，” the earthlings, would then fight “them，” the outsiders.Given the great diversities—real and imagined—among people of the world，is there any foundation for hope that someday all men might join together to form a single and legitimate world government? The outcome will probably depend on the political evolution of mankind.1.What makes people more tolerant of diversity between different groups?2.“National character” is built among people who（ ）.3.To some industrialized nations，the mentioned South Pacific islanders are （ ）.4.With stereotypes，people tend to（ ）.5.What is true about the black American Peace Corps volunteer?6.It is possible to form a single and legitimate world government only when （ ） .