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Global warming is causing more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year, according to a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, an organization led by Annan, the former United Nations secretary general.The report, to be released Friday, analyzed data and existing studies of health, disaster, population and economic trends. It found that human-influenced climate change was raising the global death rates from illnesses including malnutrition (营养不良) and heat-related health problems.But even before its release, the report drew criticism from some experts on climate and risk, who questioned its methods and conclusions.Along with the deaths, the report said that the lives of 325 million people, primarily in poor countries, were being seriously affected by climate change. It projected that the number would double by 2030.Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the Forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable (易受伤害的) regions. Dr. Pielke said that “climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention”. But the report, he said, “will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed (有瑕疵的)”.However, Soren Andreasen, a social scientist at Dalberg Global Development Partners who supervised the writing of the report, defended it, saying that it was clear that the numbers were rough estimates. He said the report was aimed at world leaders, who will meet in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new international climate treaty.In a press release describing the report, Mr. Annan stressed the need for the negotiations to focus on increasing the flow of money from rich to poor regions to help reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards while still curbing the emissions of the heat-trapping gases. More than 90% of the human and economic losses from climate change are occurring in poor countries, according to the report.1. What is the finding of the Global Humanitarian Forum?2. What do we learn about the Forum’s report from the passage?3. What does Dr. Pielke say about the Forum’s report?4. What is Soren Andreasen’s view of the report?5. What does Kofi Annan say should be the focus of the Copenhagen conference?

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Several recent studies have found that being randomly (随机地) assigned to a roommate of another race can lead to increased tolerance but also to a greater likelihood (可能性) of conflict.Recent reports found that lodging with a student of a different race may decrease prejudice and compel students to engage in more ethnically diverse friendships.An Ohio State University study also found that black students living with a white roommate saw higher academic success throughout their college careers. Researchers believe this may be caused by social pressure.In a New York Times article, Sam Boakye—the only black student on his freshman year floor—said that “if you’re surrounded by whites, you have something to prove.”Researchers also observed problems resulting from pairing interracial students in residences. According to two recent studies, randomly assigned roommates of different races are more likely to experience conflicts so strained that one roommate will move out.An Indiana University study found that interracial roommates were three times as likely as two white roommates to no longer live together by the end of the semester.Grace Kao, a professor at Penn said she was not surprised by the findings. “This may be the first time that some of these students have interacted, and lived, with someone of a different race,” she said.At Penn, students are not asked to indicate race when applying tor housing.“One of the great things about freshman housing is that, with some exceptions, the process throws you together randomly,” said Undergraduate Assembly chairman Alec Webley. “This is the definition of integration.”“I’ve experienced roommate conflicts between interracial students that have both broken down stereotypes and reinforced stereotypes,” said one Penn resident advisor RA. The RA of two years added that while some conflicts “provided more multicultural acceptance and melding (融合)”, there were also “jarring cultural confrontations”.The RA said that these conflicts have also occurred among roommates of the same race. Kao said she cautions against forming any generalizations based on any one of the studies, noting that more background characteristics of the students need to be studied and explained.1. What can we learn from some recent studies?2. What does Sam Boakye’s remark mean?3. What does the Indiana University study show?4. What does Alec Webley consider to be the “definition of integration”?5. What does Grace Kao say about interracial lodging?

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When next year’s crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2009, they’ll be joined by a new face: Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old provost (教务长) of Yale, who’ll become Oxford’s vice-chancellor—a position equal to university president in America.Hamilton isn’t the only educator crossing the Atlantic. Schools in France, Egypt, Singapore, etc. have also recently made top-level hires from abroad. Higher education has become a big and competitive business nowadays, and like so many businesses, it’s gone global. Yet the talent flow isn’t universal. High-level personnel (人员) tend to head in only one direction: outward from America.The chief reason is that American schools don’t tend to seriously consider looking abroad. For example, when the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, a major source of the university’s budget. “We didn’t do any global consideration,” says Patricia Hayes, the board’s chair. The board finally picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and political activist (活动家) who is likely to do well in the main task of modern university presidents: fund-raising. Fund-raising is a distinctively American thing, since U.S. schools rely heavily on donations. The fund-raising ability is largely a product of experience and necessity.Many European universities, meanwhile, are still mostly dependent on government funding. But government support has failed to keep pace with rising student numbers. The decline in government support has made fund-raising an increasingly necessary ability among administrators (管理人员), and has hiring committees hungry for Americans.In the past few years, well-known schools around the world have joined the trend. In 2003, when Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard, another former Yale provost, as its vice-chancellor, the university publicly stressed that in her previous job she had overseen “a major strengthening of Yale’s financial position”.Of course, fund-raising isn’t the only skill outsiders offer. The globalization of education means more universities will be seeking heads with international experience of some kind to promote international programs and attract a global student body. Foreigners can offer a fresh perspective (视角) on established practices.1. What is the current trend in higher education discussed in the passage?2. What is the chief consideration of American universities when hiring top-level administrators?3. What do we learn about European universities from the passage?4. Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard as its vice-chancellor chiefly because ________.5. In what way do top-level administrators from abroad contribute to university development?

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Throughout this long, tense election, everyone has focused on the presidential candidates and how they’ll change America. Rightly so. But selfishly, I’m more fascinated by Michelle Obama and what she might be able to do, not just for this country, but for me as an African-American woman. As the potential First Lady, she would have the world’s attention. And that means that for the first time people will have a chance to get up close and personal with the type of African-American woman they so rarely see.Usually, the lives of black women go largely unexamined. The prevailing theory seems to be that we’re all hot-tempered single mothers who can’t keep a man. Even in the world of make-believe, black women still can’t escape the stereotype of being eye-rolling, oversexed females raised by our never-married, alcoholic (酗酒的) mothers.These images have helped define the way all black women are viewed, including Michelle Obama. Before she ever gets the chance to commit to a cause, charity or foundation as First Lady, her most urgent and perhaps most complicated duty may be simply to be herself.It won’t be easy. Because few mainstream publications have done in-depth features on regular African-American women, little is known about who we are, what we think and what we face on a regular basis. For better or worse, Michelle will represent us all.Just as she will have her critics, she will also have millions of fans who usually have little interest in the First Lady. Many African-American blogs have written about what they’d like to see Michelle bring to the White House—mainly showing the world that a black woman can support her man and raise a strong black family. Michelle will have to work to please everyone—an impossible task. But for many African-American women like me, just a little of her poise (沉着), confidence and intelligence will go a long way in changing an image that’s been around for far too long.1. Why does Michelle Obama hold a strong fascination for the author?2. What is the common stereotype of African-American women according to the author?3. What do many African-Americans write about in their blogs?4. What does the author say about Michelle Obama as a First Lady?5. What do many African-American women hope Michelle Obama will do?

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This is supposed to be an enlightened age, but you wouldn’t think if you could hear what the average man thinks of the average woman! Women won their independence years ago. After a long, bitter struggle, they now enjoy the same educational opportunities as men in most parts of the world. (1) They have proved repeatedly that they are equal and often superior to men in almost every field. It is men, not women who still carry on the sex war because their attitude remains basically hostile. Even in the most progressive societies, women continue to be regarded as second-rate citizens. To hear some men talk, you’d think that women belonged to a different species. (2) The hard-fought battle for recognition has been won, but it is by no means over.On the surface, the comments made by men about women’s abilities seem light-hearted. The same tired jokes about women drivers are repeated day in, day out. This apparent light-heartedness dose not conceal the real contempt that men feel for women. However much men sneer at women, their claims to superiority are not borne out by statistics. (3) We all know that women cause far fewer accidents than men. They are too conscientious and responsible to drive like maniacs (疯子). But this is a minor quibble. Women have succeeded in any job you care to name. As politicians, soldiers, doctors, factory-hands, university professors, farmers, company directors, lawyers, bus-conductors, scientists and presidents of countries they have often put men to shame. And we must remember that they frequently succeed brilliantly in all these fields in addition to bearing and rearing children.(4) Yet men go on maintaining the fiction that there are many jobs women can’t do. Top-level political negotiation between countries, business and banking are almost entirely controlled by men, who jealously guard their so-called “rights”. Even in otherwise enlightened places like Switzerland women haven’t even been given the cote.The truth is that men cling to their supremacy because of their basic inferiority complex. They shun real competition. They know in their hearts that women are superior and they are afraid of being beaten at their own game. One of the most important tasks in the world is to achieve peace between the nations. (5) You can be sure that if women were allowed to sit round the conference table, they would succeed brilliantly, as they always do, there men have failed for centuries.

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Parents of wailing babies, take comfort: You are not alone. Chimpanzee babies fuss. Sea gull chicks squawk. Burying beetle larvae tap their parents’ legs. Throughout the animal kingdom, babies know how to get their parents’ attention. Exactly why evolution has produced all this fussing, squawking and tapping is a question many biologists are trying to answer.(1) Someday, that answer may shed some light on the mystery of crying in human babies. “It may point researchers in the right direction to find the causes of excessive crying,” said Joseph Soltis, a bioacoustics expert at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Soltis published an article on the evolution of crying in the current issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.Young animals vary in how much they cry, squawk or otherwise communicate with their parents, and studies with mice, beetles and monkeys show that this variation is partly based on genes.Some level of crying in humans, of course, is based on gas pains and messy diapers. (2) But as for the genetic contribution, you might expect that natural selection would favor genes for noisier children, since they would get more attention.Before long, however, this sort of deception may be ruinous. If the signals of offspring became totally unreliable, parents would no longer benefit from paying attention. (3) Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that natural selection should therefore favor so-called honest advertisements.Some biologists have speculated that these honest advertisements may not just tell a parent which offspring are hungry. They might also show their parent that they are healthy and vigorous and therefore worth some extra investment.The babies of rhesus macaque monkeys cry out to their mothers and tend to cry even more around the time their mothers wean (断奶) them. The mothers, in response, begin to ignore most of their babies’ distress calls, since most turn out to be false alarms.“Initially, mothers respond any time an infant cries,” said Dario Maestripieri, a primatologist at the University of Chicago, (4) “But as the cries increase, they respond less and less. They become more skeptical. So infants start crying less. So they go through these cycles, adjusting their responses.”Kim Bard, a primatologist at the University of Plymouth in England, has spent more than a decade observing chimpanzee babies. “Chimps can cry for a long time if something terrible is happening to them, but when you pick them up, they stop,” Bard said. “I’ve never seen any chimpanzees in the first three months of life be inconsolable.”Maestripieri and other researchers say these evolutionary forces may have also shaped the cries of human babies. “All primate infants cry,” Maestripieri said. (5) “It’s a very conserved behavior. It’s not something humans have evolved on their own.”

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Until the 1980s, the American homeless population comprised mainly older males. Today, homelessness strikes much younger part of society. In fact, a 25-city survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1987 found that families with children make up the fastest growing part of the homeless population. Many homeless children gather in inner cities; this transient (变化无常的) and frequently frightened student population creates additional problems—both legal and educational—for already overburdened urban school administrators and teachers.Estimates of the number of homeless Americans range from 350,000 to three million. Likewise, estimates of the number of homeless school children vary radically. A U.S. Department of Education report, based on state estimates, states that there are 220,000 homeless school-age children, about a third of whom do not attend school on a regular basis. But the National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there are at least two times as many homeless children, and that less than half of them attend school regularly.One part of the homeless population that is particularly difficult to count consists of the “throwaway” youths who have been cast of their homes. The Elementary School Center in New York City estimates that there are 1.5 million of them, many of whom are not counted as children because they do not stay in family shelters and tend to live by themselves on the streets.Federal law, the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, includes a section that addresses the educational needs of homeless children. The educational provisions of the McKinney Act are based on the belief that all homeless children have the right to a free, appropriate education.1. It is implied in the first paragraph that ________.2. The National Coalition for the Homeless believes that the number of homeless children is ________.3. One part of the homeless population is difficult to estimate. The reason might well be ________.4. The McKinney Act is mentioned in this passage in order to show that ________.5. The passage mainly deals with ________.

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The greatest contribution to civilization in the century may well be the air-conditioning—and American leads just as amazing is the speed with which this situation came to be. Air-conditioning began to spread in industries as a production aid during World War Ⅱ. Today most Americans need to take air-conditioning for granted to homes, offices, factories, theatres, shops, studios, schools, hotels, and restaurants.But not everybody is aware that high cost and easy comfort are merely two of the effects of the vast cooling of American. In fact, air conditioning has substantially altered the country’s character and customs.Many of the byproducts are so conspicuous that they are scarcely noticed. To begin with, air-conditioning transformed the face of America by making possible those glassy, boxy, sealed-in skyscrapers. It has been indispensable, no less, to the functioning of sensitive advanced computers, whose high operating temperatures require that they be constantly cooled.It has, at will, forced families into retreating into families with closed doors and shut windows, reducing the interactions of neighborhood life. It is really surprising that the public’s often noted withdrawal into self-pursuit and privacy has coincided with the historic spread of air-conditioning. Though science has little studied how habitual air-conditioning affects mind and body, some medical experts suggest that, like other technical avoidance of natural variations in climate, air-conditioning may damage the human capacity to adapt to stress. If so, air-conditioning is only like many other greatly useful technical developments that liberate man from nature by increasing his productivity and power in some way—while indirectly weakening him in others.1. According to this selection, which of the following constitutes the unique character of U.S.?2. According to the author, the chief consequence brought about by the wide application of air-conditioning is ________.3. The tone of this selection reveals that air-conditioning ________.4. Who benefits the least from air-conditioning according to the author?5. What is the author’s overall attitude towards air-conditioning?

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Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it’s the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can’t take it too seriously, because “ever” really means “as long as the records go hack”, which is only as far as the late 1800s. Scientists have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though—not for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of a given year by such proxy measurements as growth marks in corals, deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as there were hundreds of years ago compared with today.And in the most comprehensive compilation of such data to date, says a new report from the National Research Council, it looks pretty certain that the last few decades have been hotter than any comparable period in the last 400 years. That’s a blow to those who claim the current warm spell is just part of the natural up and down of average temperatures—a frequent assertion of the global-warming-doubters crowd.The report was triggered by doubts about past-climate claims made last year by climatologist Michael Mann, of the University of Virginia (he’s the creator of the “hockey stick” graph A1 Gore used in “An Inconvenient Truth” to dramatize the rise in carbon dioxide in recent years). Mann claimed that the recent warming was unprecedented in the past thousand years—that led Congress to order up an assessment by the prestigious Research Council. Their conclusion was that a thousand years was reasonable, but not overwhelmingly supported by the data. But the past 400 was—so resoundingly that it fully supports the claim that today’s temperatures are unnaturally warm, just as global warming theory has been predicting for a hundred years. And if there’s any doubt about whether these proxy measurements are really legitimate, the NRC scientists compared them with actual temperature data from the most recent century, when real thermometers were in widespread use. The match was more or less right on.In the past nearly two decades since TIME first put global warming on the cover, then, the argument against it has gone from “it isn’t happening” to “it’s happening, but it’s natural”, to “it’s mostly natural”—and now, it seems, that assertion too is going to have to drop away. Indeed, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee and who asked for the report declared that it did nothing to support the notion of a controversy over global warming science—a controversy that opponents keep insisting is alive.1. What does this passage mainly deal with?2. What is “proxy measurement” in Paragraph 1 likely to refer to?3. What does the report from NRC indicate?4. Which of the statement is NOT true concerning the controversy about global warming?5. What is the author’s attitude towards global warming theory?

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The key to these questions is the emotional response we call anxiety. Unlike hunger or thirst, which build and dissipate (驱散) in the immediate present, anxiety is the sort of feeling that sneaks up on you from the day after tomorrow. It’s supposed to keep you from feeling too safe. Without it, few of us would survive.All animals, especially the small, scurrying kind, appear to feel anxiety. Humans have felt it since the days they shared the planet with saber-toothed tigers. But we live in a particularly anxious age. The initial shock of Sept. 11 has worm off, and the fear has lifted, but millions of Americans continue to share a kind of generalized mass anxiety. A recent TIME/CNN poll found that eight months after the event, nearly two-thirds of Americans think about the terror attacks at least several times a week. And it doesn’t take much for all the old fears to come rushing back. What was surprising about the recent drumbeat of terror warnings was how quickly it triggered the anxiety so many of us thought we had put behind us.This is one of the mysteries of anxiety. While it is a normal response to physical danger-and can be a useful tool for focusing the mind when there’s a deadline looming (或隐或现)—anxiety becomes a problem when it persists too long beyond the immediate threat. Sometimes there’s an obvious cause, as with the shell-shocked soldiers of World War I or the terror-scarred civilians of the World Trade Center collapse. Other times, we don’t know why we can’t stop worrying.There is certainly a lot of anxiety going around. Anxiety disorder—which is what health experts call any anxiety that persists to the point that it interferes with one’s life—is the most common mental illness in the U.S. In its various forms, ranging from very specific phobias (恐惧症) to generalized anxiety disorder, it afflicts 19 million Americans.And yet, according to a survey published last January by researchers from UCLA, less than 25% of Americans with anxiety disorders receive any kind of treatment for their condition. “If mental health is the stepchild of the health-care system,” says Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. “then anxiety is the stepchild of the stepchild.”Sigmund Freud was fascinated with anxiety and recognized early on that there is more than one kind. He identified two major forms of anxiety: one more biological in nature and the other more dependent on psychological factors. Unfortunately, his followers were so obsessed with his ideas about sex drives and unresolved conflicts that studies of the physical basis of anxiety languished (减退).1. What can be the most suitable title of this passage?2. Why does the author give the example of the terrorist attack on Sept. 11?3. Which of the following statement is NOT true according to the passage?4. What does Jerilyn Ross mean by “If mental health is the stepchild of the health-care system...then anxiety is the stepchild of the stepchild.” in Paragraph 5?5. What can be inferred from the last paragraph?

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