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Have you ever noticed a certain similarity in public parks and back gardens in the cities of the West? A ubiquitous woodland mix of lawn grasses and trees has found its way throughout Europe and the United States, and it’s now spread to other cities around the world. As ecologist Peter GroffimanGroffman has noted, it’s increasingly difficult to tell one suburb apart from another, even when they’re located in vastly different climates such as Phoenix, Arizona, or Boston in the much chillier north-east of the US. And why do parks in New Zealand often feature the same species of trees that grow on the other side of the world in the UK?Inspired by the English and New England countrysides, early landscape architects of the 19th century created an aesthetic for urban public and private open space that persists to this day. But in the 21st century, urban green space is tasked with doing far more than simply providing aesthetic appeal. From natural systems to deal with surface water run-off and pollution to green corridors to increasing interest in urban food production, the urban parks of the future will be designed and engineered for functionality as well as for beauty.Imagine travelling among the cities of the mid-21st century and finding a unique set of urban landscapes that capture local beauty, natural and cultural history, and the environmental context. They are tuned to their locality, and diverse within as well as across cities. There are patches that provide shade and cooling, places of local food production, and corridors that connect both residents and wildlife to the surrounding native environment. Their functions are measured and monitored to meet the unique needs of each city for food production, water use, nutrient recycling, and habitat. No two green spaces are quite the same.Planners are already starting to work towards this vision. And if this movement has a buzzword it is “hyperfunctionality”—designs which provide multiple uses in a confined space. At the moment, urban landscapes are highly managed and limited in their spatial extent. Even the “green” cities of the future will contain extensive areas of buildings, roads, railways, and other built structures. These future cities are likely to contain a higher proportion of green cover than the cities of today, with an increasing focus on planting on roofs, vertical walls, and surfaces like car parks. But built environments will still be ever-present in dense megacities. We can greatly enhance the unity of green space through designs that provide a range of different uses in a confined space. A hyperfunctional planting, for example, might be designed to provide food, shade, wildlife habitat, and pollution removal all in the same garden with the right choice of plants and management practices.What this means is that we have to maximize the benefits and uses of urban parks, while minimizing the costs of building and maintaining them. Currently, green space and street plantings are relatively similar throughout the Western world, regardless of differences in local climate, geography, and natural history. Even desert cities feature the same sizable street trees and well-watered and well-fertilized lawns that you might see in more temperate climes. The movement to reduce the resources and water requirements of such urban landscapes in these arid areas is called “xeriscaping”—a concept that has so-far received mixed responses in terms of public acceptance. Scott Yabiku and colleagues at the Central Arizona Phoenix project showed that newcomers to the desert embrace xeriscaping more than long-time residents, who are more likely to prefer the well-watered aesthetic. In part, this may be because xeriscaping is justified more by reducing landscaping costs—in this case water costs—than by providing desired benefits like recreation, pollution mitigation, and cultural value. From this perspective, xeriscaping can seem more like a compromise than an asset.But there are other ways to make our parks and natural spaces do more. Nan Ellin, of the Ecological Planning Center in the US, advocates an asset-based approach to urbanism. Instead of envisioning cities in terms of what they can’t have, ecological planners are beginning to frame the discussion of future cities in terms of what they do have—their natural and cultural assets. In Utah’s Salt Lake City, instead of couching environmental planning as an issue of resource scarcity, the fixture park is described as “mountain urbanism” and the strong association of local residents with the natural environment of the mountain ranges near their home. From this starting point, the local climate, vegetation, patterns of rain and snowfall, and mountain topography are all deemed natural assets that create a new perspective when it comes to creating urban green space. In Cairns, Australia, the local master plan embraces “tropical urbanism” that conveys a sense of place through landscaping features, while also providing important functions such as shading and cooling in this tropical climate.The globally homogenized landscape aesthetic—which sees parks from Boston to Brisbane looking worryingly similar -will diminish in importance as future urban green space will be more receptive to local values and cultural perceptions of beauty. This will lead to a far greater diversity of urban landscape designs than are apparent today. Already, we are seeing new purposes for urban landscaping that are transforming the 20th century woodland park into bioswales—plantings designed to filter stormwater—green roofs, wildlife corridors and urban food gardens. However, until recently we have been lacking the datasets and science-based specification so for designs that work to serve all of these purposes at once.In New York City, Thomas Whitlow of Cornell University sends his students through tree-lined streets with portable, backpack-mounted air quality monitors. At home in his laboratory, he places tree branches in wind tunnels to measure pollution deposition onto leaves. It turns out that currently many street tree plantings are ineffective at removing air pollutants and instead may trap pollutants near the ground. Rather than relying on assumptions about the role of urban vegetation in improving the environment and health, future landscaping designs will be engineered based on empirical data and state of the art of simulations.New datasets on the performance of urban landscapes are changing our view of what future urban parks will look like and what it will do. With precise measurements of pollutant uptake, water use, plant growth rates, and greenhouse gas emissions, we are better able to design landscapes that require less intensive management and are less costly, while providing more social and environmental uses.1. According to the passage, which of the following serves as the BEST reason for the similarity in urban green space throughout the West? ________2. The following are all features of future urban green space ЕEXCEPT that ______.3. Why are some local residents opposed to “xeriscaping”?4. According to the passage, if planners adopt an asset-based approach, they will probably ______.5. According to the passage, future landscaping designs will rely more on ______.

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Online programs to fight depression are already commercially available. While they sound efficient and cost-saving, a recent study reports that they are not effective, primarily because depressed patients are not likely to engage with them or stick with them.The study looked at computer-assisted cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and found that it was no more effective in treating depression than the usual care patients receive from a primary care doctor.Traditional CBT is considered an effective form of talk therapy for depression, helping people challenge negative thoughts and change the way they think in order to change their mood and behaviors. However, online CBT programs have been gaining popularity, with the attraction of providing low-cost help wherever someone has access to a computer.A team of researchers from the University of York conducted a randomized control trial with 691 depressed patients from 83 physician practices across England. The patients were split into three groups: one group received only usual care from a physician while the other two groups received usual care from a physician plus one of two computerized CBT programs. Participants were balanced across the three groups for age, sex, educational background, severity and duration of depression, and use of antidepressants.After four months, the patients using the computerized CBT programs had no improvement in depression levels over the patients who were only getting usual care from their doctors.““It’s an important, cautionary note that we shouldn’t get too carried away with the idea that a computer system can replace doctors and therapists,” says Christopher Dowrick, a professor of primary medical care at the University of Liverpool. “We do still need the human touch or the human interaction, particularly when people are depressed.”Being depressed can mean feeling “lost in your own small, negative, dark world”, Dowrick says. Having a person, instead of a computer, reach out to you is particularly important in combating that sense of isolation. “When you’re emotionally vulnerable, you’’re even more in need of a caring human being,” he says.1. What does the recent study say about online CBT programs?2. What has made online CBT programs increasingly popular?3. What is the major finding by researchers at the University of York?4. What is Professor Dowrick’s advice concerning online CBT programs?

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We have a crisis on our hands. You mean the global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who’s responsible? Actually, it’s more like, what is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it—Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.There’s been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before—there are more and more readers, and more and more books.The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example. Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long “digests” of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.1. Which of the following paragraphs briefly reviews the historical challenges for reading?2. The following are all cited as advantages of e-books EXCEPT ______.3. According to the passage, people need knowledge of modern technology and ______ to survive in the fast-changing society.4. Which of the following can best describe how the author feels toward single-sentence-long novels?5. What is the main idea of the passage?

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Today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts—which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are. One third to one half of Americans are introverts—in other words, one out of every two or three people you know. If you’re not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising, managing, married to or coupled with one.If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts. Closet introverts pass undetected on playgrounds, in high school locker rooms, and in the corridors of corporate America. Some fool even themselves, until some life event—a layoff, an empty nest, an inheritance that frees them to spend time as they like—jolts them into taking stock of their true natures. You have only to raise this subject with your friends and acquaintances to find that the most unlikely people consider themselves introverts.It makes sense that so many introverts hide even from themselves. We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there”. Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.Introversion—along with its cousinscousions sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. Even the word introvert is stigmatized—one informal study, by psychologist Laurie Helgoe, found that introverts described their own physical appearance in vivid language, but when asked to describe generic introverts they drew a bland and distasteful picture.But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions—from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer—came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there.1. According to the author, there exists, as far as personality styles are concerned, a discrepancy between ______.2. The ideal extrovert is described as being all the following EXCEPT ______.3. According to the author, our society only permits ______ to have whatever personality they like.4. According to the passage, which of the following statements BEST reflects the author’s opinion?

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Call it the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to learn new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later.The learning paradox is at the heart of “productive failure,” a phenomenon identified by researcher Manu Kapur. Kapur points out that while the model adopted by many teachers when introducing students to new knowledge providing lots of structure and guidance early on, until the students show that they can do it on their own—makes intuitive sense, it may not be the best way to promote learning. Rather, it’s better to let the learners wrestle with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start. In a paper published recently, Kapur applied the principle of productive failure to mathematical problem solving in three schools.With one group of students, the teacher provided strong “scaffolding”—instructional support—and feedback. With the teacher’s help, these pupils were able to find the answers to their set of problems. Meanwhile, a second group was directed to solve the same problems by collaborating with one another, without any prompts from their instructor. These students weren’t able to complete the problems correctly. But in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when the two groups were tested on what they’d learned, the second group “significantly outperformed” the first.The apparent struggles of the floundering((挣扎的))group have what Kapur calls a “hidden efficacy”: they lead people to understand the deep structure of problems, not simply their correct solutions. When these students encounter a new problem of the same type on a test, they’re able to transfer the knowledge they’ve gathered more effectively than those who were the passive recipients of someone else’s expertise.In the real world, problems rarely come neatly packaged, so being able to discern their deep structure is key. But, Kapur notes, none of us like to fail, no matter how often Silicon Valley entrepreneurs praise the beneficial effects of an idea that fails or a start-up company that crashes and burns. So we need to “design for productive failure” by building it into the learning process. Kapur has identified three conditions that promote this kind of beneficial struggle. First, choose problems to work on that “challenge but do not frustrate”. Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they’re doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions to the problems. And to those students who protest this tough-love teaching style: you’ll thank me later.1. Why does the author call the learning process a paradox?2. What does Kapur disapprove of in teaching?3. What do people tend to think of providing strong “scaffolding” in teaching?4. What kind of problem should be given to students to solve according to Kapur?

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Cultural rules determine every aspect of food consumption. Who eats together defines social units. For example, in some societies, the nuclear family is the unit that regularly eats together. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has pointed out that, for the English, the kind of meal and the kind of food that is served relate to the kinds of social links between people who are eating together. She distinguishes between regular meals, Sunday meals when relatives may come, and cocktail parties for acquaintances. The food served symbolizes the occasion and reflects who is present. For example, only snacks are served at a cocktail party. It would be inappropriate to serve a steak or hamburgers. The distinctions among cocktails, regular meals, and special dinners mark the social boundaries between those guests who are invited for drinks, those who are invited to dinner, and those who come to a family meal. In this example, the type of food symbolizes the category of guest and with whom it is eaten.In some New Guinea societies, the nuclear family is not the unit that eats together. The men take their meals in a men’s house, separately from their wives and children. Women prepare and eat their food in their own houses house and take the husband’s portion to the men’s house. The women eat with their children in their own houses. This pattern is also widespread among Near Eastern societies.Eating is a metaphor that is sometimes used to signify marriage. In many New Guinea societies, like that of the LuseLesu on the island of New Ireland in the Pacific and that of the Trobriand Islanders, marriage is: symbolized by the couple’s eating together for the first time. Eating symbolizes their new status as a married couple. In U.S.: society, it is just the reverse. A couple may go out to dinner on a first date.Other cultural rules have to do with taboos against eating certain things. In some societies, members of a clan, a type of kin (family) group, are not allowed to eat the animal or bird that is their totemic ancestor. Since they believe themselves to be descended from that ancestor, it would be like eating that ancestor or eating themselves.There is also an association between food prohibitions and rank, which is found in its most extreme form in the caste system of India. A caste system consists of ranked groups, each with a different economic specialization. In India, there is an association between caste and the idea of pollution. Members of highly ranked groups can be polluted by coming into contact with the bodily secretions, particularly saliva, of individuals of lower-ranked castes. Because of the fear of pollution, Brahmans and other high-ranked individuals will not share food with, not eat from the same plate as, not even accept food from an individual from a low-ranking caste.1. According to the passage, the English make clear distinctions between ______.2. According to the passage, eating together indicates all the following EXCEPT ______.3. Which of the following can best serves as the topic of the passage?

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