For years we have believed we were either healthy or sick.【51】, during the mid-1990s, scie
(51)
A.Besides
B.However
C.Meantime
D.Therefore
(51)
A.Besides
B.However
C.Meantime
D.Therefore
Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behaviour. Viewed biologically, the modern footballer is in reality a member of a hunting group. His killing weapon has turned into a harmless football and his prey (猎物) into a goal mouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, he enjoys the hunter’s triumph of killing his prey.
To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our forefathers. They spent over a million years evolving (进化) as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in the hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies, became greatly changed. They became chasers, runners, jumpers, aimers, throwers and prey-killers. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers.
Then about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their improved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use--that of controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunt became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, awaiting their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunt were no longer essential for survival.
The skills and thirst for hunting remained, however, and demanded new outlets. Hunting for sport replaced hunting for necessity. This new activity involved all the original hunting sequences but the aim of the operation was no longer to avoid starvation. Instead the sportsmen set off to test their skill against prey that were no longer essential to their survival. To be sure, the kill may have been eaten but there were other much simpler ways of obtaining a meaty meal.
The author believes that sporting activities ().
A.are forms of biological development
B.have actually developed from hunting
C.are essentially forms of taming the prey .
D.have changed the ways of hunting
That annual bicycle race, the Tour de France, much loved by the French, is a good case in point. Just a few years back it was a strictly continental affair with France, Belgium and Holland, Spain and Italy taking part in. But in recent years it has been dominated by Colombian mountain climbers, and American and Irish riders.
The people who really matter welcome the shift toward globalization. Peugeot, Michelin and Panasonic are multi-national corporations that want worldwide returns for the millions they invest in teams. So it does them literally a world of good to see this unofficial world championship become just that.
This is undoubtedly an economic-based revolution we are witnessing here, one made possible by communications technology, but made to happen because of marketing considerations. Sell the game and you can sell Coca Cola or Budweiser as well.
The skillful way in which American football has been sold to Europe is a good example of how all sports will develop. The aim of course is not really to spread the sport for its own sake, but to increase the number of people interested in the major money-making events. The economics of the Superbowl are already astronomical. With seats at US $125, gate receipts alone were a staggering $10,000,000. The most important statistic of the clay, however, was the $10,000,000 in TV advertising fees. Imagine how much that becomes when the eyes of the world are watching.
So it came as a terrible shock, but not really as a surprise, to learn that some people are now suggesting that soccer change from being a game of two 45-minute halves, to one of four 25-minute quarters. The idea is unashamedly to capture more advertising revenue, without giving any thought for the integrity of a sport which relies for its essence on the flowing nature of the action.
Moreover, as sports expand into world markets, and as our choice of sports as consumers also grows, we will demand to see them played at a higher and higher level. In boxing we have already seen numerous, dubious world title categories because people will not pay to see anything less than a "World Title" fight, and this means that the title fights have to be held in different countries around the world!
Globalization of sporting culture means that ______.
A.more people are taking up sports
B.traditional sports are getting popular
C.many local sports are becoming international
D.foreigners are more interested in local sports
A hundred years ago, before all these devices were invented, if a person wanted to entertain himself with a song or a piece of music, he would have to do the singing himself or pick up a violin and play it. Now, all he has to do is turn on the radio or TV. As a result, singing and music have declined.
Italians used to sing all the time. Now, they only do it in Hollywood movies, Indian movies are mostly a series of songs and dances trapped around silly stories. As a result, they don't do much singing in Indian villages anymore. Indeed, ever since radio first came to life, there has been a terrible decline in amateur (业余的) singing throughout the world.
There are two reasons for this sad decline. One, human beings are astonishingly lazy. Put a lift in a building, and people would rather take it than climb even two flights of steps. Similarly, invent a machine that sings, and people would rather let the machine sing than sing themselves. The other reason is that people are easily embarrassed. When there is a famous, talented musician readily available by pushing a button, which amateur violinist or pianist would want to try to entertain family or friends by himself?
These earnest reflections came to me recently when two CDs arrived in the mail. They are historic recordings of famous writers reading their own works. It was thrilling to hear the voices from a long dead past in the late 19th century. But today, reading out loud anything is no longer common. Today, we sing songs to our children until they are about two, we read simple books to them till they are about five, and once they have learnt to read themselves, we become deaf. We're alive only to the sound of the TV and the stereo (立体声音响).
I count myself extremely lucky to have been born before TV became so common: I was about six before TV appeared. To keep us entertained my mother had to do a good deal of singing and tell us endless tales. It was the same in many other homes. People spoke a language; they sang it, they recited it; it was something they could feel.
Professional actors' performance is extraordinarily revealing. But I still prefer my own reading, because it's mine. For the same reason, people find karaoke (卡拉OK) liberating. It is almost the only electronic thing that gives them back their own voice. Even if their voices are hopelessly out of tune, at least it is meaningful self-entertainment.
The main idea of this passage is that ______.
A.TV and radio can amuse us with beautiful songs and music
B.TV and radio prevent us from self-entertainment
C.people should sing songs and read books aloud themselves
D.parents should sing songs and read books aloud to their children
As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends oil them. They are the mark of success of failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn't matter that you weren't feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don't count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students?
A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves arc often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.
The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge's decision you have the right Of appeal, but not after an examiner's. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person's true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire.
The main idea of this passage is ______.
A.examinations exert a pernicious influence on education
B.examinations are ineffective
C.examinations are profitable for institutions
D.examinations are a burden on students
A.I was a student ten years ago
B.We didn’t teachers in 1990
C.He studied not English yesterday
D.He didn’t studied English last week
Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recessing and Japan at its prebubble peak, the U.S. workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of the primary cause of the poor U.S. economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotiveassembly productivity. Yet the research revealed that the U.S. factories of Honda, Nissan, and Toyota achieved about 95 percent of the productivity of their Japanese counterparts—a result of the training that U.S. workers received on the job.
More recently, while examining housing construction, the researchers discovered that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican workers in Houston, Texas, consistently met best-practice labor productivity standards despite the complexity of the building industry’s work.
What is the real relationship between education and economic development? We have begun to suspect that continuing economic growth promotes the development of education even when governments don’t force it. After all, that’s how education got started. When our ancestors were hunters and gatherers 10,000 years ago, they didn’t have time to wonder much about anything besides finding food. Only when humanity began to get its food in a more productive way was there time for other things.
As education improved, humanity’s productivity potential increased as well. When the competitive environment pushed our ancestors to achieve that potential, they could in turn afford more education. This increasingly high level of education is probably a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the complex political systems required by advanced economic performance. Thus poor countries might not be able to escape their poverty traps without political changes that may be possible only with broader formal education. A lack of formal education, however, doesn’t constrain the ability of the developing world’s workforce to substantially improve productivity for the foreseeable future. On the contrary, constraints on improving productivity explain why education isn’t developing more quickly there than it is.
第31题:The author holds in paragraph 1 that the importance of education in poor countries
A.is subject to groundless doubts.
B.has fallen victim of bias.
C.is conventionally downgraded.
D.has been overestimated.
A.We will have an English party next Tuesday
B.We have an English party on Tuesday
C.We will have a party next Tuesday
While it's true that just about every cell in the body has the instructions to make a complete human, most of those instructions are inactivated, and with good reason: the last thing you want for your brain cells is to start churning out stomach acid or your nose to turn into a kidney. The only time cells truly have the potential to turn into any and all body parts is very early in a pregnancy, when so-called stem cells haven't begun to specialize.
Yet this untapped potential could be a terrific boon to medicine. Most diseases involve the death of healthy cells-brain cells in Alzheimer's, cardiac cells in heart disease, pancreatic cells in diabetes, to name a few. If doctors could isolate stem cells, then direct their growth, they might be able to furnish patients with healthy replacement tissue.
It was incredibly difficult, but last fall scientists at the University of Wisconsin managed to isolate stem ceils and get them to grow into neural, gut, muscle and bone cells. The process still can't be controlled, and may have unforeseen limitations; but if efforts to understand and master stem-cell development prove successful, doctors will have a therapeutic tool of incredible power.
The same applies to cloning, which is really just the other side of the coin; true cloning, as first shown with the sheep Dolly two years ago, involves taking a developed cell and reactivating the genome within, resetting its developmental instructions to a pristine state. Once that happens, the rejuvenated cell can develop into a full-fledged animal, genetically identical to its parent.
For agriculture, in which purely physical characteristics like milk production in a cow or low fat in a hog have real market value, biological carbon copies could become routine within a few years. This past year scientists have done for mice and cows what Ian Wilmut did for Dolly, and other creatures are bound to join the cloned menagerie in the coming year.
Human cloning, on the other hand, may be technically feasible but legally and emotionally more difficult. Still, one day it will happen. The ability to reset body cells to a pristine, undeveloped state could give doctors exactly the same advantages they would get from stem cells., the potential to make healthy body tissues of all sorts, and thus to cure disease. That could prove to be a true "miracle cure."
The writer holds that the potential to make healthy body tissues will ______.
A.aggravate moral issues of human cloning
B.bring great benefits to human beings
C.help scientists decode body instructions
D.involve employing surgical instruments
A.We have two new friends today
B.We have a new friend today
C.We have one friend today