题目内容
（请给出正确答案）
A．immune
B．vulnerable
C．chronic
D．susceptible
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更多“As intriguing as these results…”相关的问题
Passage 6
The U.S. dollar was supposed to be at the end of its rope. Kicking the bucket. A dying symbol of a dying empire. Well, maybe not. The dollar continues to _1_ gloom-and-doom predictions. After a swoon (低迷）last year, the dollar is again enjoying a major _2_. The U.S. dollar index, which measures the dollar’s value against other major currencies, is just off an eight-month high. The main reason behind the dollar’s recovery is actually no real surprise at all. There is no _3_ able to replace the dollar as the world’s No.l currency. What makes currencies so fascinating is that their perceived value is always relative to other currencies. Sure, the U.S. budget deficit is _4_, the government’s debt is increasing, and Wall Street is still repairing itself. But the dollar remains the prettiest of a flock of ugly ducklings. Is any other major industrialized economy _5_ better off than the U.S.？ Not really. Just about the _6_ developed world is suffering with the same problems. That’s why when investors get nervous, they still rush to the good old dollar. The dollar wins because no one else is really in the game. The euro has been exposed as a _7_. Only a few months ago, economists truly believed the euro could _8_ the dollar as the top reserve currency. Now experts are questioning if the euro has a future at all. The Greek debt crisis has _9_ that the euro is only as strong as its weakest link. Maybe over the next 20 or 30 years，the dollar will slowly lose the _10_ status it holds today. That process, however, could well be driven by the appearance of new rivals.
A)fraud
B)consistently
C)dominant
D)expanding
E)entire
F)incentive
G)rival
H)alleged
I)defy
J)particularly
K)alternative
L)relative
M)revealed
N)intriguing
O)rally
第1空答案是：
听力原文： "If you ask me television is unhealthy," I said to my roommate Walter, as I walked into the living room, "while you are sitting passively in front of the TV set, your muscles are turning to fat, your complexion is fading, and your eyesight is being ruined."
"Shh," Walter put his finger to his lips, "this is an intriguing murder mystery."
"Really？" I replied. "But you know, the brain is destroyed by TV viewing. Creativity is killed by that box, and people are kept from communicating with one another. From my point of view, TV is the cause of declining interest in school and the failure of our entire educational system."
"Ah ha, I kind of see your point." Walter said softly, "But see？ The woman on the witness stand in this story is being questioned about a murder that was committed one hundred years ago."
Ignoring his enthusiastic description of the plot, I went on with my argument.
"As I see it," I explained, "not only are most TV programs badly written and produced, but viewers are also manipulated by the mass media. As far as I am concerned, TV watchers are cut off from reality, from nature, from other people, from life itself!" I was confident in my ability to persuade.
After a short silence, my roommate said: "Anyway, I've been planning to watch the football game. I am going to change the channel."
"Don't touch that dial!" I shouted, "I wanted to find out how the mystery turns out!"
I am not sure I got my point to cross.
Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
33. As the speaker walked into the living room, what was being shown on TV？
34. What does the speaker say about watching television？
35. What can we say about the speaker？
(29)
A．A murder mystery.
B．A football game.
C．A political debate.
D．A documentary.
The Vikings' Voyage to Eternity
Since the Merovingian Age, during the postRoman era of the 6th7th centuries AD, Norsemen have been associated with ships— for trade, exploration, and war. No aspect of Viking culture was entirely separate from the influence of ships, including their view of death. In fact, kings and heroes, believing that they would sail to the other world after death, had themselves buried in their ships. This is proved by the epics and sagas which tell of the heroic deeds of the Vikings, many of which have survived to our own day. The greatest details regarding early Scandinavian history, including the custom of ship burial, come from the writings of the Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson, who composed the Heimskringla (History of the Kings of Norway) .sometime between AD 1220 and 1235, plus numerous other works. Although much is lost in modern translations, the original poetry of the sagas remains on many levels, and historians are ever grateful to their predecessor for his attention to detail. For about four centuries, the sagas and legends were elaborate in their portrayal of ships. Documentation, of course, may have been added some untrue details for the sake of a good story.
In addition to the legends, there is visible evidence of the influence of ships and the sea in Viking lore (口头流传的知识), as a number of ship burials have been discovered in the past two centuries. Therefore, we can use both the archaeological and the literary evidence to piece together a small window into the world of the Vikings. It is particularly interesting that the ships that do remain to this day were buried on land, an intriguing practice which, due to its pagan(异教徒) implications, died out soon after the Viking con version(皈依) to Christianity. Boat burials, in combination with sagas, indicate that Viking activity, whether trading or raiding, de pended upon reliable ships to sail, and without them the longer sea crossings that we know to have occurred would have been impossible. The voyages that had become commonplace in the 9th century would have been unthinkable 100 years earlier.
The Vikings treated their mortal warriors with as much respect as their Gods, and this is evident in Norse mythology, particularly with the tale of Balder. This god of light was killed by a "dart of mistletoe" thrown by tile mischievous Loki, resulting in "the greatest misfortune ever to befall gods and men". Balder was given a luxurious ship burial as recorded in the Prose Edda.
Epics and sagas were tales of pride and grandeur. Naval power, perfected early by Norsemen, had an exceptional place in these tales, and continued to be used in Christian narratives after the Conversion. There is not a great deal in the way of illustrated evidence for the earliest period of boat building by the Nordic people, but the record does increase from about the 11th century AD until the end of the Viking era. There is also literary evidence, present in many heroic sagas, of the abundance of Viking exploration and acquisition of land, beginning in about the 9th century. The most valuable evidence, however, undoubtedly comes from archaeology.
In archaeological terms, the survival of a boat burial depends entirely upon the soil in which it was buried. For example, soil that surrounded the early 7th century AD find at Ladby is highly acidic, thus all that remained of the original vessel were the rivets(铆钉) in a ghostly outline. Nevertheless, this and other finds, allows us to determine how the ships were made.
The Nydam boat, found in 1863 in Southern Jutland, dates from the fifth century and is a former form. of the characteristic long boat associated with the height of the Viking period. Previously, ships had been designed for both trading and warfare, but the Nydam boat, measuring 76ft overall, shows characteristics that indicate that it was built primarily as a warship. This tre
A．Y
B．N
C．NG
Ice Hotel Sweden
Sweden's Ice Hotel, first constructed in the late 1980's, is built from scratch every year. A new design, new suites, a brand new reception—in fact everything in it is crisp and new. Every year our building techniques improve and our snow-how increases.
The Ice Hotel is situated on the shores of the Tome River, in the old village of Jukkasjarvi in Swedish Lapland. The incredible structure is one of the best places for an intriguing hotel stay in Sweden, and perhaps the world. 10,000 tons of crystal clear ice from the "ice manufacturing plant", the Tome River, and 30,000 tons of pure snow generously supplied by Mother Nature are needed to build the Ice Hotel every year.
The Sweden Ice Hotel opens for business beginning in December (depending on the weather) and ends in March.
Covering more than 30,000 square feet, the Ice Hotel features an Ice Chapel, the hotel itself, an ice art exhibition hall, a cinema and last but not least, the world famous "Absolute Ice Bar".
Accommodation
The hotel sleeps over 100 guests, and every bedroom is unique. The sight, as you open the main, reindeer-skin doors, is simply breathtaking—a grand, ice pillared hallway illuminated by a spectacular ice chandelier(枝形吊灯).
Since the temperatures are well below freezing (The indoor temperature varies in the vicinity of -4 and -9 degrees centigrade, depending on the temperature outside and the amount of overnight guests.), our guests will inevitably have a few doubts before tucking themselves in their sleeping bags in one of the stylish ice suites. Our hotel guide will be happy to explain everything you need to know about sleeping in the Ice Hotel.
You will be supplied with a specially made sleeping bag (made by Fjallraven who know a thing or two about sleeping in the Arctic) complete with a sleeping bag liner. In the morning a hot drink will be brought to you, after which you can enjoy a cozy early morning sauna(桑拿) followed by breakfast.
Double Room
You sleep in a thermal sleeping bag(insulated body bags first developed for astronauts walking on the moon) on a special bed built of snow and ice, covered with mattresses and reindeer pelts. You are awakened in the morning with a cup of hot beverage at your bedside. Breakfast buffet and morning sauna included.
Suite
Unique rooms decorated with ice art and sculptures. Each suite is illuminated by candlelight. You sleep in a thermal sleeping bag on a special bed of snow and ice, covered with reindeer skins. You are awakened in the morning with a cup of hot juice at your bedside. Breakfast buffet and morning sauna included. Warm outer clothing is included in the price.
Aurora(级光) House Cabins
The Aurora House cabins have two separate bedrooms for 3 persons, meaning a single bed and a double bed. The rooms have a ceiling skylight for a view of Midnight Sun or Northern Lights. There is a lounge area with refrigerator, water boiler, TV and telephone, bathroom with shower and toilet. Breakfast included.
Chalet(坡顶小屋) Cabins
The Chalet cabins have two separate bedrooms and 4 beds in total, bunk-bed style. arrangement. There is a sitting room, TV and telephone, bathroom with shower and toilet. Breakfast included.
Construction of the Ice Hotel
The building materials are free(zing) and are delivered in abundance, every year, at the appropriate time. The moment the thermometer hits 3 degrees below freezing (the temperature required by the snow cannons), the building of the Ice Hotel commences.
A staggering 30,000 tons of snow is sprayed on to specially made metal moulds (vaulted steel pillars). Once the snow is sufficiently hard, the moulds are removed and used again to make further snow sections. The entire process last
A．Y
B．N
C．NG
THE PARTY GENE
Steven Benner jokingly calls himself a dilettante (业余艺术好爱者). A biochemist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Benner learns a wide range of disciplines, from bioinformatics to astrobiology. His aim is to gain insight into the basic chemical rules that govern how life works -- both here and, ultimately, on other planets. But although science drew his gaze to the skies, it was alcohol that brought him back down to Earth. Or, to be more exact, the enzymes that can both make and consume it.
Alcohol dehydrogenase (脱氢酶) is best known as the enzyme (酶) that breaks down alcohol in the body, and as such it has been studied exhaustively. But Benner and other researchers in the field have now turned to its evolution, and their work is providing fresh insight into the puzzle of why some creatures, such as yeast, came to make alcohol and why so many others, including ourselves, can tolerate it.
Alcohol dehydrogenase -- ADH for short -- is a blanket term applied to a large and diverse group of enzymes. In many creatures, including ourselves, they help to convert alcohols, such as ethanol, into com- pounds that other enzymes can break down and extract energy from. But in a number of microorganisms, they can help the reverse reaction, making alcohols as part of the process of extracting energy from sugars.
The stars of these alcohol-producers are the yeasts. Not only do Saccharomyces species of yeast churn out oodles of ethanol, they can also tolerate far higher concentrations of it than other microorganisms. Brewer' s yeast owes this ability to two alcohol dehydrogenases: ADH1, which makes ethanol, and ADH2, which breaks it down for use as an energy source. Yeast not only brews its own moonshine, it consumes it too —"to the last drop", as Benner says.
At first sight, this makes no sense. Making ethanol from sugar and then consuming it is energetically far more wasteful than simply consuming the sugar. Researchers have long pondered why yeast goes to all that trouble. Although it might be nice to think that there is a creature ont there whose raison d'etre is to party, evolution doesn't work that way.
Make or break
Benner and his team came across the explanation when hunting for the origins of ADH in yeast. Benner is interested in combining the study of genes and proteins with geology and palaeontology to gain insight into the history of life on Earth and present-day protein function. "Every biomolecule is better understood if we know its history as well as its structure," he says.
The ADHgenes in yeast make an intriguing subject for this approach. When yeast gained its ability to make alcohol, it must have done so as a result of a selection pressure in its environment and, what is more, this would have had a knock-on effect on other creatures. So working out when and how the ADH enzymes came to be could open a small window onto what ecosystems were like back then.
ADH genes and the proteins they make are well studied and have been isolated from many different species of yeast, so Benner' s team had plenty of useful material to work with. The goal was to reconstruct the original gene that was duplicated to give rise to ADHI and ADH2, and to ask what its function was -- did it make alcohol, or did it break it down'？
From a database of the sequences of related ADH genes in various yeasts --combined with additional ADH genes specially sequenced for this study -- Benner and his colleagues assembled an evolutionary tree of yeast ADH. This showed where the ancestral gene would have fitted in and helped the researchers work out its most likely aminoacid (氨) sequence. Inferring the past from the present isn't perfect, so they ended up with 12 slightly difterent candidate genes.
Fruitful collaboration
The group then reconstructed all 12 genes and test
A．Y
B．N
C．NG
Around the World in Eight Megabytes
When Microsoft put the original Flight Simulator program onto the market, in the early 1980s, I tried it for a while and then gave up. I had thought it would be fun to "take off" from Meigs Field, the airport on the Chicago lakefront where the simulator was programmed to start, and fly between the skyscrapers of the city toward whatever destination I chose. But the on- screen scenery turned out to be sketchy and uninteresting. Worse, I had no idea how to "land" the plane, at Meigs or anywhere else, and the program was not much help in teaching me. After ten or twenty flights that ended mainly with nosedives into the lake or countryside, I decided I could have more fun in other ways.
A dozen years later I became interested in learning to fly (and land) real airplanes, and I thought I should look at simulators again. There were now a range of programs, which were much more effective in teaching flying skills--or at least certain skills. They had also become a form. of entertainment and virtual adventure captivating enough to attract vast numbers of users worldwide. According to Guinness World Records 2001, Microsoft's Flight Simulator had sold a total of 21 million copies by June of 1999.
Simulators' success is certainly deserved. Not many people fly real airplanes; fewer than 650,000 Americans are licensed pilots. But a larger group probably would like to fly. And even people who have almost no interest in flying (surely everybody finds it a little bit exciting to pretend to zoom through the air) or who view computer games as inherently creepy would find it hard to ignore the best modem versions. On a big, high-resolution computer screen you can find yourself facing all amazingly exact rendition of a Learjet cockpit, flying low over the Grand Canyon at dawn, with flashes of lightning visible in the distance, as you listen to air-traffic controllers direct you to the Flagstaff airport. You can take off in a pontoon plane from a lagoon in Bali, fly over paddies on the terraced hillsides, and then head toward java's volcanic craters. You can approach Ayers Rock, in the center of Australia, and watch shadows move across it as the sun goes down. You can indulge in much of the visual romance of flying, without the time, expense, and training required to pilot a real plane.
These riveting effects are the result of an intriguing de facto division of labor. The programs themselves are ail commercial products, from Microsoft and a number of small firms. But a wide variety of add-ons and improvements come from tens of thousands of hobbyists around the world, who spend countless hours polishing or improving some aspect of a program--and then post their work on the Internet for others to share. The flight-sim culture is a delightful reminder of a long-forgotten era, somewhere back in the 1990s, when people were excited about creating software for the new things it would let them do, not simply as a means of gaining market share.
The flight-sim market resembles the rest of the software business mainly in that the most popular offering is from Microsoft. The current version of Microsoft's program is Flight Simulator 2000, or FS2000, which computer discounters offer for about $50. (A "professional" version costs about $70. It includes more simulated airplanes and a larger number of places whose scenery is presented in extra-realistic detail.) With FS2000 and most other programs you can "fly" from practically any point on earth to any other; the differences among the programs lie mostly in the degree of scenic detail, plus certain aspects of the airplanes' look and performance. With all these programs you can also specify the weather conditions through which you'll pass on any particular trip: clouds, wind, turbulence, rain. The fanciest programs let you download the real-time weather for your route, from aviation sites on the
A．Y
B．N
C．NG
The Science of Lasting Happiness
The day I meet Sonja Lyubomirsky, she keeps getting calls from her Toyota, Prius dealer. When she finally picks up, she is excited by the news：she can buy the car she wants in two days. Lyubomirsky wonders if her enthusiasm might come across as materialism, but I understand that she is buying an experience as much as a possession. Two weeks later, in late January, the 40-year-old Lyubomirsky, who smiles often and seems to approach life with zest and good humor, reports that she is "totally loving the Prius". But will the feeling wear off soon after the new-car smell, or will it last, making a naturally happy person even more so？
The Possibility of Lasting Happiness
An experimental psychologist investigating the possibility of lasting happiness, Lyubomirsky understands far better than most of us the folly of pinning our hopes on a new car--or on any good fortune that comes our way. We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such "hedonic adaptatiou" (享乐适应)comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who ended up no happier than nonwinners a year. after their windfall (意外横财). Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances--such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live--do so little to boost our overall happiness. Not only that, but studies of twins and adoptees have shown that about 50 percent of each person's happiness is determined from birth. This "genetic set point" alone makes the happiness glass look half empty, because any upward swing in happiness seems doomed to fall back to near your baseline. "There's been a tension in the field, "explains Lyubomirsky's main collaborator, psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon of the University of Missouri-Columbia. "Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come down."
The Happiness Pie
Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people's differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent？ "Because nobody had put it together before, that's unexplained," Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be "intentional activity", mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation's downward pull.
Lyubomirsky has been studying these activities in hopes of finding out whether and how people can stay above their set point. In theory, that is possible in much the same way regular diet and exercise can keep athletes' weight below their genetic set points. But before Lyubomirsky began, there was "a huge vacuum of research on how to increase happiness", she says. The lottery study in particular "made people shy away from interventions", explains eminent University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, the father of positive psychology and a mentor to Lyubomirsky. When science had scrutinized (细察) happiness at all, it was mainly through correlational studies, which cannot tell what came first--the happiness or what it is linked to--let alone determine the cause and effect. Finding out that individuals with strong social ties are more satisfied with their lives than loners, for example, begs the question of whether friends make us happier or whether happy people are simply like lier to seek and attract friends.
Lyubemirsky's Research
Lyubomirsky began studying happiness as a graduate student in 1989 after an intriguing conversation with her adviser, Stanford University psychologist Lee D. Ro
A．Y
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