Jim says()everyone will be affected by the tax increases,but I'm sure he's exaggerating.
A.only about
B.nearly about
C.just about
D.all about
A.only about
B.nearly about
C.just about
D.all about
In Dave Barrys opinions, meetings______.
A.have been blocking human progress
B.may fade away from the human world
C.are an important part of the human race
D.are meant to solve problems for humans
When the author says "You will miss smile" in paragraph two, he means______.
A. you will feel that Americans do not seem very friendly
B. you will be puzzled why Americans do not smile at you
C. you will fail to notice that Americans are pleasant and happy
D. you will find that Americans don't have much sense of humor
听力原文:M: Oh, it's so cold. We haven't had such a severe winter for so long, have we?
W: Yes, the forecast says it's going to get worse before it warms up.
What do we learn from the conversation?
A.The weather is mild compared to the past years.
B.They are having the coldest winter ever.
C.The weather will soon get winner.
D.The weather may get even colder.
"I worked a bit with NASA engineers," says Voss, "but I did it mostly by analysis. I used a handheld calculator, not a computer, to do a thermodynamic analysis. "At the end of the summer, he, like the other NASA-ASEE fellows working at Marshall, summarized his findings in a formal presentation and detailed paper. It was a valuable moment for Voss because the ASEE program gave him added understanding of NASA, deepened his desire to fly in space, and intensified his application for astronaut status.
It was not an easy process. Voss was actually passed over when he first applied for the astronaut program in 1978. Over the next nine years he reapplied repeatedly, and was finally accepted in 1987. Since then he has participated in three space missions. The 50-year-old Army officer, who lives in Houston, is now in training for a four-month mission as a crew member on the International Space Station starting in July 2000.
Voss says the ASEE program is wonderful for all involved. "It brings in people from the academic world and gives NASA a special property for a particular period of time. It brings some fresh eyes and fresh ideas to NASA, and establishes link with our colleges and universities," Voss explains. "There's an exchange of information and an exchange of perspectives that is very important."
For the academic side, Voss says, the ASEE program also "brings institutions of higher learning more insight into new technology. We give them an opportunity to work on real-world problems and take it back to the classroom. "
Why was the hydraulic fuel pump seal important for the space shuttle?
A.Because previous seals all failed.
B.Because it was very complex in running the space program.
C.Because great care has to be taken of the hydraulic fuel pump sealing.
D.Because any crack in the seals would cause disastrous results for the astronauts.
Why do we go wrong about our friends or our enemies? Sometimes what people say hides their real meaning. And if we don' t really listen closely we miss the feeling behind the words. Suppose someone tells you, "You' re a lucky dog." That' s being friendly. But "lucky dog?" There' s a bit of envy in those words. Maybe he doesn' t see it himself. But bringing in the "dog" puts you down a little. What he may be saying is that he doesn' t think you deserve your luck.
"Just think of all the things you have to be thankful for is another noise that says one thing and means another. It could mean that the speaker is trying to get you to see your problem as part of your life as a whole. But is he? Wrapped up in this phrase is the thought that your problem isn' t important. It' s telling you to think of all the starving people in the world when you haven't got a date for Saturday night.
How can you tell the real meaning behind someone' s words? One way is to take a good look at the person talking. Do his words fit the way he looks? Does what he says agree with the tone of voice? His posture? The look in his eyes? Stop and think. The minute you spend thinking about the real meaning of what people say to you may save another mistake.
This passage is mainly about ______.
A.how to interpret what people say
B.what to do when. you listen to others talking
C.how to avoid mistakes when you communicate with people
D.why we go wrong with people sometimes
The word "powerhouse"in paragraph one means ()
A、a small powerplant
B、a good restaurant
C、an energetic person
D、an angry woman
"Resumes arrive with stains. Some candidates don't bother to spell the company's name correctly. Once I see a mistake, I eliminate the candidate," Crossley concludes. "If they cannot take care of these details, why should we trust them with a job?"
Can we pay too much attention to details? Absolutely. Perfectionists struggle over little things at the cost of something larger they work toward. "To keep from losing the forest for the trees, "says Charles Garfield, associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco," we must constantly ask ourselves how the details we're working on fit into the larger picture. If they don't, we should drop them and move to something else."
Garfield compares this process to his work as a computer scientist at NASA. "The Apollo II moon launch was slightly off-course 90 percent of the time," says Garfield, "but a successful landing was still likely because we knew the exact coordinates of our goal. This allowed us to make adjustments as necessary. "Knowing where we want to go helps us judge the importance of every task we undertake.
Too often we believe what accounts for others' success is some special secret or a lucky break. But rarely is success so mysterious. Again and again, we see that by doing little things within our grasp well, large rewards follow.
According to the passage ,some job applicants were rejected ______.
A.because of their inadequate attention paid to details, such as the stains and misspelt company name
B.because of their inadequate education as shown in their poor spelling in writing a resume
C.because they failed to give a detailed description of their background in their applications
D.because they eliminated their names from the applicants list themselves
The Blessing and Curse of the People Who Never Forget
A handful of people can recall almost every day of their lives in enormous detail—and after years of research, neuroscientists (神经科学专家) are finally beginning to understand how they do it.
[A] For most of us, memory is a mess of blurred and faded pictures of our lives. As much as we would like to cling on to our past, even the saddest moments can be washed away with time.
[B] Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the details of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work. “My memory is like a library of video tapes, walk-throughs of every day of my life from waking to sleeping,” he explains.
[C] Veiseh can even put a date on when those tapes started recording: 15 December 2000, when he met his first girlfriend at his best friend&39;s 16th birthday party. He had always had a good memory, but the thrill of young love seems to have shifted a gear in his mind: from now on, he would start recording his whole life in detail. “I could tell you everything about every day after that.”
[D] Needless to say, people like Veiseh are of great interest to neuroscientists hoping to understand the way the brain records our lives. A couple of recent papers have finally opened a window on these people’s extraordinary minds. And such research might even suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity.
[E] ‘Highly superior autobiographical memory’(or HSAM for short) first came to light in the early 2000s, with a young woman named Jill Price. Emailing the neuroscientist and memory researcher Jim McGaugh one day, she claimed that she could recall every day of her life since the age of 12. Could he help explain her experiences?
[F] McGaugh invited her to his lab, and began to test her: he would give her a date and ask her to tell him about the world events on that day. True to her word, she was correct almost every time.
[G] It didn’t take long for magazines and documentary film-makers to come to understand her “total recall”,and thank to the subsequent media interest, a few dozen other subjects (including Veiseh) have since come forward and contacted the team at the University of California, Irvine.
[H] Interestingly, their memories are highly self-centred: although they can remember “autobiographical” life events in extraordinary detail, they seem to be no better than average at recalling impersonal information, such as random (任意选取的)lists of words. Nor are they necessarily better at remembering a round of drinks, say. And although their memories are vast, they are still likely to suffer from “false memories”.Clearly, there is no such thing as a “perfect” memory—their extraordinary minds are still using the same flawed tools that the rest of us rely on. The question is, how?
[I] Lawrence Patihis at the University of Southern Mississippi recently studied around 20 people with HSAM and found that they scored particularly high on two measures: fantasy proneness (倾向)and absorption. Fantasy proneness could be considered a tendency to imagine and daydream, whereas absorption is the tendency to allow your mind to become fully absorbed in an activity to pay complete attention to the sensations (感受)and the experiences. “I’m extremely sensitive to sounds, smells and visual detail,” explains Nicole Donohue, who has taken part in many of these studies. “I definitely feel things more strongly than the average person.”
[J] The absorption helps them to establish strong foundations for recollection, says Patihis, and the fantasy proneness means that they revisit those memories again and again in the coming weeks and months. Each time this initial memory trace is “replayed”, it becomes even stronger. In some ways, you probably go through that process after a big event like your wedding day,but the difference is that thanks to their other psychological tendencies, the HSAM subjects are doing it day in, day out, for the whole of their lives.
[K] Not everyone with a tendency to fantasise will develop HSAM, though, so Patihis suggests that something must have caused them to think so much about their past. “Maybe some experience in their childhood meant that they became obsessed (着迷)with calendars and what happened to them,”says Patihis.
[L] The people with HSAM I?ve interviewed would certainly agree that it can be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, it allows you to relive the most transformative and enriching experiences. Veiseh, for instance, travelled a lot in his youth. In his spare time,he visited the local art galleries, and the paintings are now lodged deep in his autobiographical memories.
[M] “Imagine being able to remember every painting, on every wall, in every gallery space, between nearly 40 countries,” he says. “That’s a big education in art by itself.” With this comprehensive knowledge of the history of art, he has since become a professional painter.
[N] Donohue, now a history teacher, agrees that it helped during certain parts of her education. “I can definitely remember what I learned on certain days at school. I could imagine what the teacher was saying or what it looked like in the book.”
[O] Not everyone with HSAM has experienced these benefits, however. Viewing the past in high definition can make it very difficult to get over pain and regret. “It can be very hard to forget embarrassing moments,” says Donohue. “You feel the same emotions—it is just as raw, just as fresh... You can’t turn off that stream of memories, no matter how hard you try.” Veiseh agrees. “It is like having these open wounds—they are just a part of you,” he says.
[P] This means they often have to make a special effort to lay the past to rest. Bill, for instance, often gets painful “flashbacks”,in which unwanted memories intrude into his consciousness, but overall he has chosen to see it as the best way of avoiding repeating the same mistakes. “Some people are absorbed in the past but not open to new memories, but that’s not the case for me. I look forward to each day and experiencing something new.”
36.People with HSAM have the same memory as ordinary people when it comes to impersonal information.
37.Fantasy proneness will not necessarily cause people to develop HSAM.
38.Veiseh began to remember the details of his everyday experiences after he met his first young love.
39.Many more people with HSAM started to contact researchers due to the mass media.
40.People with HSAM often have to make efforts to avoid focusing on the past.
41.Most people do not have clear memories of past events.
42.HSAM can be both a curse and a blessing.
43.A young woman sought explanation from a brain scientist when she noticed her unusual memory.
44.Some people with HSAM find it very hard to get rid of unpleasant memories.
45.A recent study of people with HSAM reveals that they are liable to fantasy and full absorption in an activity.
听力原文:W: Wake up, Erik, time to rise and shine.
M: Ha, oh, hi, Jane, I must have fallen asleep while I was reading.
W: You and everyone else. It looks more like a campground than a library.
M: Well, the dorm's too noisy to study in, and I guess this place is too quiet.
W: Have you had any luck finding a topic for your paper?
M: No, Prof. Grant told us to write about anything in cultural anthropology. For once I with she had not given us so much of a choice.
W: Well, why not write about the ancient civilizations of Mexico. You seem to be interested in that part of the world.
M: I am, but there is too much material to cover. I'll be writing forever, and Grant only wants five to seven pages.
M: So then limit it to one region of Mexico, say the Uka town. You've been there and you said it's got lots of interesting relics.
M: That's not a bad idea. I brought many books and things back with me last summer, that would be great resource material, now if I can only remember where I put them.
Why has the woman come to talk to the man?
A.To discuss his trip to Mexico.
B.T0 bring him a message from Professor Grant.
C.To ask for help with an anthropology assignment.
D.To see what progress he's made on his paper.
CYCLES MOVE WITH THE TIMES
Times have been hard for the UK cycle industry. Poor weather and competition from abroad have had a serious effect on sales. Manufacturers have had to cut back and last month more than 40 job losses were announced at Cycle World, one of the country's main bicycle factories in Leicester. But the company says it is fighting to win back customers, using such strategies as improved after-sales and bikes built to specific customer requirements.
Two years ago, Cycle World sold off its bike-making machinery in an effort to cut costs and save money. The company's Leicester factory is now only an assembly plant as most of the parts are imported.
The company produces half a million bikes a year across the full Cycle World range, with nearly all of these being sold in the UK. Production is largely done by hand. Workers use the batch production method - everyone making up to 600 bikes of a particular model at any one time.
At the height of its success, Cycle World employed 7,000 people but, like many areas of manufacturing, it has since shrunk. Its 1950s purpose- built factory now employs just 470 permanent workers, with numbers rising to 700 as temporary staff are taken on to meet seasonal demands in sales.
The weather has encouraged more people to buy bikes.
A.Right
B.Wrong
C.Doesn't say
SECTION A CONVERSATIONS
Directions: In this section you will hear several conversations. Listen to the conversations carefully and then answer the questions that follow.
听力原文:W: How can I help you?
M: I'd like to return this sweater for a refund. I bought it a week ago.
W: Well, what seems to be the problem?
M: Isn't it obvious by just looking at it? The first time I washed and dried it, the thing shrank at least five sizes.
W: I see what you mean, but did you follow the washing instructions? I think it says here ... right here on the label to hand wash it and then to dry it on low heat.
M: How was I supposed to know that? The label is written in Chinese! And something else i The stitching is coming undone and the color faded from a nice dark blue to a seaweed green.
W: Listen, sir. What I can do is allow you to exchange the sweater for another one.
M: I don't want to exchange it for anything! I just want my money back!
W: Well, I can give you credit on your next purchase, and since the item you purchased was on clearance, we can't give you a refund. Anyway, you can only return items with a receipt within six days, and unfortunately, that was yesterday in your case.
M: But, your store was closed yesterday because of the national holiday. Listen, I give up. Your store policies are completely unreasonable, and how do you expect people to shop here?
W: You did... Ha, ha...
M: Take your sweater. You should open up a pet store and sell it as a dog sweater.
What is among the reasons why the man wants to return the item?
A.It is the wrong size.
B.The fabric is coming apart.
C.It is stained.
D.It has no label.