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“Anglo Saxon” Americans, those Americans of British ancestry, rarely _1_ themselves as an ethnic group. First, many of them are descendants of the original settlers. Second, they are widely _2_ throughout the nation. Third, they range, _3_ regards income, from the poor farmers and coal miners of the Appalachians in Tennessee _4_ wealthy oil men in Texas and the _5_ professional classes of New England. _6_, the “Anglo Saxon” remain the largest single ethnic group in America, _7_ about 45% of the population.It would be a mistake to imagine _8_ some foreigners do that Americans of other ethnic groups have imitated an “Anglo Saxon” way of life or _9_ “Anglo Saxon” customs. In the middle of the 19th century, the people of the U. S. A. were still predominantly “Anglo Saxon”, but even before the flood of non-“Anglo-Saxon” immigrants, the Americans were already _10_ more American than they were British._11_ their ethnic origins, the Americans of New England, the Midwest, the Far West, the South, and Southwest all have special characteristics of their region. Yet they also have certain things _12_ common.Most Americans have great vigor and enthusiasm. They prefer to discipline themselves rather than _13_ disciplined by others. They pride themselves _14_ their independence, their right to _15_ their own minds. They are prepared to take the initiative, _16_ when there is a risk in doing so. They have courage and do not _17_ easily. They will take any sort of job anywhere _18_ be unemployed. They do not care to be looked _19_ by the Government. The _20_ American changes his or her job nine or ten times during his or her working life.

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The relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political and intellectual development of these and all other societies; however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations. The findings of a research institution have consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radical higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living.Ironically, the first evidence for this idea appeared in the United States. Not long ago, with the country entering a recession and Japan at its pre-bubble peak, the U.S. workforce was derided as poorly educated and one of primary cause of the poor U.S. economic performance. Japan was, and remains, the global leader in automotive-assembly 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 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.1. The author holds in paragraph 1 that the importance of education in poor countries ________.2. A major difference between the Japanese and U.S workforces is that ________.3. The author quotes the example of our ancestors to show that education emerged ________.4. According to the last paragraph, development of education ________.

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Scattered around the globe are more than one hundred regions of volcanic activity known as hot spots (hot spot: a place in the upper mantle of the earth at which hot magma from the lower mantle upwells to melt through the crust usually in the interior of a tectonic plate to form a volcanic feature; also a place in the crust overlying a hot spot). Unlike most volcanoes, hot spots are rarely found along the boundaries of the continental and oceanic plates that comprise the Earth’s crust; most hot spots lie deep in the interior of plates and are anchored deep in the layers of the Earth’s surface. Hot spots are also distinguished from other volcanoes by their lavas, which contain greater amounts of alkali metals than do those from volcanoes at plate margins.In some cases, plates moving past hot spots have left trails of extinct volcanoes in much the same way that wind passing over a chimney carries off puffs of smoke. It appears that the Hawaiian Islands were created in such a manner by a single source of lava, welling up from a hot spot, over which the Pacific Ocean plate passed on a course roughly from the east toward the northwest, carrying off a line of volcanoes of increasing age. Two other Pacific island chains—the Austral Ridge and the Tuamotu Ridge—parallel the configuration of the Hawaiian chain; they are also aligned from the east toward the northwest, with the most recent volcanic activity near their eastern terminuses.That the Pacific plate and the other plates are moving is now beyond dispute; the relative motion of the plates has been reconstructed in detail. However the relative motion of the plates with respect to the Earth’s interior cannot be determined easily. Hot spots provide the measuring instruments for resolving the question of whether two continental plates are moving in opposite directions or whether one is stationary and the other is drifting away from it. The most compelling evidence that a continental plate is stationary is that, at some hot spots, lavas of several ages are superposed instead of being spread out in chronological sequence. Of course, reconstruction of plate motion from the tracks of hot-spot volcanoes assumes that hot spots are immobile, or nearly so. Several studies support such an assumption, including one that has shown that prominent hot spots throughout the world seem not to have moved during the past ten million years.Beyond acting as frames of reference, hot spots apparently influence the geophysical processes that propel the plates across the globe. When a continental plate comes to rest over a hot spot, material welling up from deeper layers forms a broad dome that, as it grows, develops deep fissures. In some instances, the continental plate may rupture entirely along some of the fissures so that the hot spot initiates the formation of a new ocean. Thus, just as earlier theories have explained the mobility of the continental plates, so hot-spot activity may suggest a theory to explain their mutability.1. The primary purpose of the passage is to ________.2. According to the passage, hot spots differ from most volcanoes in that hot spots ________.3. It can be inferred from the passage that evidence for the apparent course of the Pacific plate has been provided by the ________.4. It can be inferred from the passage that the spreading out of lavas of different ages at hot spots indicates that a ________.

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For hundreds of millions of years, turtles have struggled out of the sea to lay their eggs on sandy beaches, long before there were nature documentaries to celebrate them, or GPS satellites and marine biologists to track them, or volunteers to hand-carry the hatchlings down to the water’s edge lest they become disoriented by headlights and crawl towards a motel parking lot instead. A formidable wall of bureaucracy has been erected to protect their prime nesting on the Atlantic coastlines. With all that attention paid to them, you’d think these creatures would at least have the gratitude not to go extinct.But Nature is indifferent to human notions of fairness, and a report by the Fish and Wildlife Service showed a worrisome drop in the populations of several species of North Atlantic turtles, notably loggerheads, which can grow to as much as 400 pounds. The South Florida nesting population, the largest, has declined by 50% in the last decade, according to Elizabeth Griffin, a marine biologist with the environmental group Oceana. The figures prompted Oceana to petition the government to upgrade the level of protection for the North Atlantic loggerheads from “threatened” to “endangered”—meaning they are in danger of disappearing without additional help.Which raises the obvious question: what else do these turtles want from us, anyway? It turns out, according to Griffin, that while we have done a good job of protecting the turtles for the weeks they spend land (as egg-laying females, as eggs and as hatchlings), we have neglected the years spend in ocean. “The threat is from commercial fishing,” says Griffin. Trawlers (which drag large nets through the water and along the ocean floor) and long line fishers (which can deploy thousands of hooks on lines that can stretch for miles) take a heavy toll on turtles.Of course, like every other environmental issue today, this is playing out against the background of global warming and human interference with natural ecosystems. The narrow strips of beach on which the turtles lay their eggs are being squeezed on one side by development and on the other by threat of rising levels as the oceans warm. Ultimately we must get a handle on those issues as well, or a creature that outlived the dinosaurs will meet its end at the hands of humans, leaving our descendants to wonder how creature so ugly could have won so much affection.1. We can learn from the first paragraph that ________.2. What does the author mean by “Nature is indifferent to human notions of fairness” (Line 1, Para. 2)?3. What constitutes a major threat to the survival of turtles according to Elizabeth Griffin?4. How does global warming affect the survival of turtles?

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We sometimes think humans are uniquely vulnerable to anxiety, but stress seems to affect the immune defenses of lower animals too. In one experiment, for example, behavioral immunologist (免疫学家) Mark Laudenslager at the University of Denver, gave mild electric shocks to 24 rats. Half the animals could switch off the current by turning a wheel in their enclosure, while the other half could not. The rats in the two groups were paired so that each time one rat turned the wheel it protected both itself and its helpless partner from the shock. Laudenslager found that the immune response was depressed below normal in the helpless rats but not in those that could turn off the electricity. What he has demonstrated, he believes, is that lack of control over an event, not the experience itself, is what weakens the immune system.Other researchers agree. Jay Weiss, a psychologist at Duke University School of Medicine, has shown that animals who are allowed to control unpleasant stimuli don’t develop sleep disturbances or changes in brain chemistry typical of stressed rats. But if the animals are confronted with situations they have no control over, they later behave passively when faced with experiences they can control. Such findings reinforce psychologists’ suspicions that the experience or perception of helplessness is one of the most harmful factors in depression.One of the most startling examples of how the mind can alter the immune response was discovered by chance. In 1975 psychologist Robert Ader at the University of Rochester School of Medicine conditioned (使形成条件反射) mice to avoid saccharin (糖精) by simultaneously feeding them the systems caused stomach upsets. Associating the saccharin with the stomach pains, the mice quickly learned to avoid the sweetener. In order to extinguish this dislike for the sweetener, Ader re-exposed the animals to saccharin, this time without the drug, and was astonished to find that those mice that had received the highest amount of sweetener during their earlier conditioning died. He could only speculate that he had so successfully conditioned the rats that saccharin alone now served to weaken their immune systems enough to kill them.1. Laudenslager’s experiment showed that the immune system of those rats who could turn off the electricity ________.2. According to the passage, the experience of helplessness causes rats to ________.3. The reason why the mice in Ader’s experiment avoided saccharin was that ________.4. The passage tells us that the most probable reason for the death of the mice in Ader’s was that ________.

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The energy contained in rock within the earth’s crust represents a nearly unlimited energy source, but until recently commercial retrieval has been limited to underground hot water and/or steam recovery systems. These systems have been developed in areas of recent volcanic activity, where high rates of heat flow cause visible eruption of water in the form of geysers and hot springs. In other areas, however, hot rock also exists near the surface but there is insufficient water present to produce eruptive phenomena. Thus a potential hot dry rock (HDR) reservoir exists whenever the amount of spontaneously produced geothermal fluid has been judged inadequate for existing commercial systems.As a result of recent energy crisis, new concepts for creating HDR recovery systems—which involve drilling holes and connecting them to artificial reservoirs placed deep within the crust—are being developed. In all attempts to retrieve energy from HDR’s artificial stimulation will be required to create either sufficient permeability or bounded flow paths to facilitate the removal of heat by circulation of a fluid over the surface of the rock.The HDR resource base is generally defined to included crustal rock that is hotter than 150°C, is at depths less than ten kilometers and can be drilled with presently available equipment. Although wells deeper than ten kilometers are technically feasible, prevailing economic factors will obviously determine the commercial feasibility of wells at such depths. Rock temperatures as low as 100°C may be useful for space heating (heating of spaces especially for human comfort by any means (as fuel, electricity, or solar radiation) with the heater either within the space or external to it); however, for producing electricity, temperatures greater than 200 °C are desirable.The geothermal gradient, which specifically determines the depth of drilling required to reach a desired temperature, is a major factor in the recoverability of geothermal resources. Temperature gradient maps generated from oil and gas well temperature-depth records kept by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists suggest that trappable high-temperature gradients are distributed all across the United States. (There are many areas, however, for which no temperature gradient records exist.)Indications are that the HDR resource base is very large. If an average geothermal temperature gradient of 22°C per kilometer of depth is used, a staggering 13, 000, 000 quadrillion B.T.U.s of total energy are calculated to be contained in crustal rock to a ten-kilometer depth in the United States. If we conservatively estimate that only about 0.2 percent is recoverable, we find a total of all the coal remaining in the United States. The remaining problem is to balance the economics of deeper, hotter, more costly wells and shallower, cooler, less expensive wells against the value of the final product, electricity and/or heat.1. The primary purpose of the passage is to ________.2. The passage would be most likely to appear in a ________.3. According the passage, an average geothermal gradient of 22°C per kilometer of depth can be used to ________.4. It can be inferred from the passage that the availability of temperature-depth records for any specific area in the United States depends primarily on the ________.

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