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新东方官方网站 http://www.neworiental.org/Portal0/default1.htm 新东方官方网络课程 http://www.koolearn.com/ 新东方英语角 新东方教育科技集团在美国纽交所上市，首日收盘于20.88美元。新东方董事长、持有公司31.18%股权(4400万股)的俞敏洪的资产一跃超过10亿人民币，成为中国最富有的老师。 作为国内最大的英语培训机构，新东方声名赫赫。十几年来，它帮助数以万计的年轻人实现了出国梦，众多莘莘学子借此改变了自己的命运。有人评价说，“在中国，任何一个企业都不可能像新东方这样，站在几十万青年命运的转折点上，站在东西方交流的转折点上，对中国社会进步发挥如此直接而重大的作用。” 这样的赞誉现在看来也许并不为过，但对于创办新东方的俞敏洪来说，当初却根本没有这样的“雄才大略”。 失意的80年代 俞敏洪的授课风格被学生们总结为“激励型”，他常常用到的一个例子就是自己的经历。 1978年，俞敏洪高考失利后回到家里喂猪种地。由于知识基础薄弱等原因，俞敏洪第一次高考失败得很惨，英语才得了33分；第二年又考了一次，英语得了55分，依然是名落孙山。那时俞敏洪并没有远大的志向，作为一个农民的孩子，离开农村到城市生活就是他的梦想，而高考在当时是离开农村的惟一出路。尽管生活条件比较艰苦，俞敏洪仍在微弱的煤油灯下坚持学习。 1979年，县里办了一个外语补习班，俞敏洪挤了进去，这是他第一次学习外语。住在30人一间的大房子里，俞敏洪的感觉就是进了天堂：可以一整天都用来学习了，可以在电灯下读书了。到了第二年春节，俞敏洪在班里的成绩已经进入前几名。 功夫不负有心人，1980年，俞敏洪坚持考了三年后，最终考进了北京大学西语系。 在北大，俞敏洪是全班惟一从农村来的学生，开始不会讲普通话，结果从A班调到较差的C班。大三的一场肺结核又使俞敏洪休学一年，人也变得更加瘦削。 1985年，俞敏洪毕业留在北大成了一名教师。接下来是两年平淡的生活。中国随后出现的留学热潮，让俞敏洪也萌生了出国的想法。1988年俞敏洪托福考了高分，但就在他全力以赴为出国而奋斗时，美国对中国紧缩留学政策。以后的两年，中国赴美留学人数大减，再加上他在北大学习成绩并不算优秀，赴美留学的梦想在努力了三年半后付诸东流，一起逝去的还有他所有的积蓄。 为了谋生，俞敏洪到北大外面去兼课教书，后来又约几个同学一块儿出去办托福班，挣出国的学费。1990年秋天，俞敏洪的如意算盘被打碎了：因为打着学校的名头私自办学，北京大学在校园广播、有线电视和著名的三角地橱窗里高调宣布了对俞敏洪的处分决定。对此，俞敏洪没有任何思想准备。 被逼下海 1991年，俞敏洪被迫辞去了北京大学英语教师的职务，为了挽救颜面不得不离开北大，生命和前途似乎都到了暗无天日的地步。但正是这些折磨使他找到了新的机会。尽管留学失败，俞敏洪却对出国考试和出国流程了如指掌；尽管没有面子在北大呆下去，反而因此对培训行业越来越熟悉。 离开北大后，俞敏洪开始在一个叫东方大学的民办学校办培训班，学校出牌子，他上交15％的管理费。这一年他29岁，他的目标是挣一笔学费，摆脱生活的窘境，然后像他的同学和朋友一样到美国留学。 卢跃刚在他的《东方马车》一书中生动描述了俞敏洪这段创业经历：他在中关村第二小学租了间平房当教室，外面支一个桌子，放一把椅子，“东方大学英语培训班”正式成立。第一天，来了两个学生，看见“东方大学英语培训部”那么大的牌子，只有俞敏洪夫妻俩，破桌子，破椅子，破平房，登记册干干净净，人影都没有，学生满脸狐疑。俞敏洪见状，赶紧推销自己，像是江湖术士，凭着三寸不烂之舌，活说死说，让两个学生留下钱。夫妻俩正高兴着呢，两个学生又回来了。他们心里不踏实，把钱又要回去了…… 尽管困难重重，但拼死拼活干了一段时间后，俞敏洪的培训班渐渐有了起色。 眼看着培训班越来越火，俞敏洪渐渐萌生了自己办班的念头。1993年，在一间10平米透风漏雨的小平房里，俞敏洪创办了北京新东方学校。 俞敏洪说，最初成立新东方，只是为了使自己能够活下去，为了每天能多挣一点钱。作为一个男人，快到三十而立的年龄，连一本自己喜欢的书都买不起，连为老婆买条像样的裙子都做不到，整个家庭无家可归，连家徒四壁都谈不上，自己都觉得没脸活在世界上。当时他曾对自己说：只要能赚到十万元钱，就一辈子什么也不干了。 到今天，新东方已成为中国最大的私立教育服务机构，在全国拥有25所学校、111个学习中心和13个书店，大约有1700名教师分布在24个城市。目前累计已有300万名学生参与新东方培训，仅今年就有87.2万名。外语培训和考试辅导课程在新东方营收中所占比例高达89%，是该公司最主要的营收来源和增长动力。 俞敏洪说，“新东方走到今天，不在我的意料之中，因为最初只是为了糊口，招几个学生办个小小的补习班而已。新东方到了今天，我们就有了更多的期待，希望能够用自己的行为和思想，为中国学生做更多的事，为中国教育做更多的事，为中国未来做更多的事。” 一只土鳖带着一群海龟奋斗 新东方为何能从竞争激烈的英语培训市场脱颖而出，俞敏洪说自己最成功的决策，就是把那帮比他出息的海外朋友请了回来。 “任何一个人办了新东方都情有可原，但我就不能原谅。因为我在同学眼里是最没出息的人。我的成功给他们带来了信心，结果他们就回来了。” 1995年底，积累了一小笔财富的俞敏洪飞到北美，这里曾是他心牵梦绕的地方，当年就是为了凑留学的费用，他丢掉了在北大的教师职位。在加拿大，曾经同为北大教师的徐小平听了俞敏洪的创业经历怦然心动，毅然决定回国和俞敏洪一起创业。在美国，看到那么多中国留学生碰到俞敏洪都会叫一声“俞老师”，已在美国贝尔实验室工作的同学王强也深受刺激。1996年，王强终于下定决心回国。 在俞敏洪的鼓动下，昔日好友徐小平、王强、包凡一、钱永强陆陆续续从海外赶回加盟了新东方。经过在海外多年的打拼，这些海归身上都积聚起了巨大的能量。这批从世界各地汇聚到新东方的个性桀骜不驯的人，把世界先进的理念、先进的文化、先进的教学方法带进了新东方。 俞敏洪笑言自己是“一只土鳖带着一群海龟奋斗”。如何将这些有个性的人团结到一起，并让每个人都保持活力和激情，是俞敏洪首先要面对的问题。 俞敏洪说，在新东方，没有任何人把我当领导看，没有任何人会因为我犯了错误而放过我。在无数场合下，我都难堪到了无地自容的地步，我无数次后悔把这些精英人物召集到新东方来，又无数次因为新东方有这么一大批出色的人才而骄傲。因为这些人的到来，我明显地进步了，新东方明显地进步了。没有他们，我到今天可能还是个目光短浅的个体户，没有他们，新东方到今天还可能是一个名不见经传的培训学校。 像所有处于快速成长期的民营企业一样，新东方几年后也遇到了一次次人事危机。2001年8月，新东方创业三位元老之一的王强决定出走。卢跃刚在他的《东方马车》一书中详细描述了这段事实：“在场的人都清楚，新东方可能正沿着一个大家十分熟悉的道路向下滑行，可能面临一个私营企业由于决策失误、理念不合、利益纷争而导致的内部分裂，有可能出现盛极而衰、灰飞烟灭的庸俗结局。”庆幸的是，在俞敏洪的极力挽留之下，王强最终没有离开。 新东方的“内乱”没有就此结束。2003年，北京新东方学校另一位副校长、著名TSE（英语口语测试）教学专家杜子华离开了管理层。2004年，新东方的另外两外干将———江博和胡敏也低调离开新东方。 新东方在美国纽交所上市后，俞敏洪身价已逾10亿，其他董事会成员徐小平、包凡一、钱永强身价可能也将上亿。以后，在资本力量的左右下，这个“一只土鳖带着一群海龟奋斗”的故事能否顺利延续呢？ 新东方精神 如今，新东方已经成为无数人梦想的发源地和实现梦想的场所。成千上万人通过在新东方艰苦的学习，圆了自己的留学梦。 与新东方的英语培训一同冲向全国各地的，还有新东方精神。一位同行在参加完新东方去年的梦想之旅后总结道，新东方最重要的就是告诉了我们，尽管生活沧海桑田，依然不要停止追求自己的梦和理想！ 新东方精神到底是什么？俞敏洪说，“新东方精神对我而言，是我生命中一连串铭心刻骨的故事：是在被北大处分后无泪的痛苦，是在被美国大学拒收后无尽的绝望，是在被其他培训机构恐吓后浑身的颤抖，是在被医生抢救过来后撕心裂肺的哭喊；新东方精神对我而言，更是在痛苦之后决不回头的努力，在绝望之后坚韧不拔的追求，在颤抖之后不屈不饶的勇气，在哭喊之后重新积聚的力量。” 俞敏洪认为，人活着需要有一种感觉，新东方之所以被很多人接受，也是因为新东方有一种感觉存在，凡是到新东方来过的人，都在新东方感觉到了一种活力、一种顽强和一种豁达。 “十年风雨辉煌路，百年教育报国心”。俞敏洪希望新东方能为中国学生做更多的事，为中国教育做更多的事，为中国未来做更多的事。 不过，也有人对此不以为然。因“老罗语录”而名噪一时的新东方前教师罗永浩表示，“我认为媒体上说俞敏洪是最富有的英语教师的说法是不准确的，俞敏洪从来都不是一个英语教师，他只是一个商人。” 罗永浩在他的博客上写道，“我当初刚来新东方的时候，新东方在社会上成功地制造了一个一群理想主义者创业的美好形象，我来的时候对新东方有很多很好的向往、期待这样的东西。来了之后慢慢发现这个机构其实就是一个100%的纯商业机构，当然我不认为纯商业机构有什么不好，但是作为一个唯利是图的、没有原则的商业机构，总是宣传什么‘百年教育报国心’就比较恶心了。” 新东方就是这样在争议，甚至相互攻击中慢慢成长，过去是，将来可能也会是。 几年前，俞敏洪曾写道，“现在新东方做大了，自己所面对的困难反而越来越多了，有些困难是因为中国的客观现实造成的，但有些困难存在完全是因为我的无能和性格缺陷所致。放眼看去，我开始明白，只要新东方存在着、发展着，我所面临的困难和痛苦将会无穷无尽。多少次痛苦万分时，我下定决心要放弃新东方，希望离新东方越远越好，多少次在我离开新东方一段时间后，又对她如此的魂牵梦绕、日夜思念，只要听不到新东方的消息就茶饭不思，坐立不安。” 惶恐和不安几乎是众多企业领导者共同的体验，唯有战胜它们的人才能轻松走下去。现在，新东方已风风光光地在美国上市，不知道意气风发的俞敏洪能否走好下一步棋 新东方英语现代文背诵篇章 01 The Language of Music A painter hangs his or her finished pictures on a wall, and everyone can see it. A composer writes a work, but no one can hear it until it is performed. Professional singers and players have great responsibilities, for the composer is utterly dependent on them. A student of music needs as long and as arduous a training to become a performer as a medical student needs to become a doctor. Most training is concerned with technique, for musicians have to have the muscular proficiency of an athlete or a ballet dancer. Singers practice breathing every day, as their vocal chords would be inadequate without controlled muscular support. String players practice moving the fingers of the left hand up and down, while drawing the bow to and fro with the right arm—two entirely different movements. Singers and instruments have to be able to get every note perfectly in tune. Pianists are spared this particular anxiety, for the notes are already there, waiting for them, and it is the piano tuner’s responsibility to tune the instrument for them. But they have their own difficulties; the hammers that hit the string have to be coaxed not to sound like percussion, and each overlapping tone has to sound clear. This problem of getting clear texture is one that confronts student conductors: they have to learn to know every note of the music and how it should sound, and they have to aim at controlling these sound with fanatical but selfless authority. Technique is of no use unless it is combined with musical knowledge and understanding. Great artists are those who are so thoroughly at home in the language of music that they can enjoy performing works written in any century.
It is commonly believed in United States that school is where people go to get an education. Nevertheless, it has been said that today children interrupt their education to go to school. The distinction between schooling and education implied by this remark is important. Education is much more open-ended and all-inclusive than schooling. Education knows no bounds. It can take place anywhere, whether in the shower or in the job, whether in a kitchen or on a tractor. It includes both the formal learning that takes place in schools and the whole universe of informal learning. The agents of education can range from a revered grandparent to the people debating politics on the radio, from a child to a distinguished scientist. Whereas schooling has a certain predictability, education quite often produces surprises. A chance conversation with a stranger may lead a person to discover how little is known of other religions. People are engaged in education from infancy on. Education, then, is a very broad, inclusive term. It is a lifelong process, a process that starts long before the start of school, and one that should be an integral part of one’s entire life. Schooling, on the other hand, is a specific, formalized process, whose general pattern varies little from one setting to the next. Throughout a country, children arrive at school at approximately the same time, take assigned seats, are taught by an adult, use similar textbooks, do homework, take exams, and so on. The slices of reality that are to be learned, whether they are the alphabet or an understanding of the working of government, have usually been limited by the boundaries of the subject being taught. For example, high school students know that there not likely to find out in their classes the truth about political problems in their communities or what the newest filmmakers are experimenting with. There are definite conditions surrounding the formalized process of schooling.
Prices determine how resources are to be used. They are also the means by which products and services that are in limited supply are rationed among buyers. The price system of the United States is a complex network composed of the prices of all the products bought and sold in the economy as well as those of a myriad of services, including labor, professional, transportation, and public-utility services. The interrelationships of all these prices make up the “system” of prices. The price of any particular product or service is linked to a broad, complicated system of prices in which everything seems to depend more or less upon everything else. If one were to ask a group of randomly selected individuals to define “price”, many would reply that price is an amount of money paid by the buyer to the seller of a product or service or, in other words that price is the money values of a product or service as agreed upon in a market transaction. This definition is, of course, valid as far as it goes. For a complete understanding of a price in any particular transaction, much more than the amount of money involved must be known. Both the buyer and the seller should be familiar with not only the money amount, but with the amount and quality of the product or service to be exchanged, the time and place at which the exchange will take place and payment will be made, the form of money to be used, the credit terms and discounts that apply to the transaction, guarantees on the product or service, delivery terms, return privileges, and other factors. In other words, both buyer and seller should be fully aware of all the factors that comprise the total “package” being exchanged for the asked-for amount of money in order that they may evaluate a given price.
The modern age is an age of electricity. People are so used to electric lights, radio, televisions, and telephones that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. When there is a power failure, people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets because there are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators. Yet, people began to understand how electricity works only a little more than two centuries ago. Nature has apparently been experimenting in this field for million of years. Scientists are discovering more and more that the living world may hold many interesting secrets of electricity that could benefit humanity. All living cell send out tiny pulses of electricity. As the heart beats, it sends out pulses of record; they form an electrocardiogram, which a doctor can study to determine how well the heart is working. The brain, too, sends out brain waves of electricity, which can be recorded in an electroencephalogram. The electric currents generated by most living cells are extremely small – often so small that sensitive instruments are needed to record them. But in some animals, certain muscle cells have become so specialized as electrical generators that they do not work as muscle cells at all. When large numbers of these cell are linked together, the effects can be astonishing. The electric eel is an amazing storage battery. It can seed a jolt of as much as eight hundred volts of electricity through the water in which it live. ( An electric house current is only one hundred twenty volts.) As many as four-fifths of all the cells in the electric eel’s body are specialized for generating electricity, and the strength of the shock it can deliver corresponds roughly to length of its body.
There are many theories about the beginning of drama in ancient Greece. The on most widely accepted today is based on the assumption that drama evolved from ritual. The argument for this view goes as follows. In the beginning, human beings viewed the natural forces of the world-even the seasonal changes-as unpredictable, and they sought through various means to control these unknown and feared powers. Those measures which appeared to bring the desired results were then retained and repeated until they hardened into fixed rituals. Eventually stories arose which explained or veiled the mysteries of the rites. As time passed some rituals were abandoned, but the stories, later called myths, persisted and provided material for art and drama. Those who believe that drama evolved out of ritual also argue that those rites contained the seed of theater because music, dance, masks, and costumes were almost always used, Furthermore, a suitable site had to be provided for performances and when the entire community did not participate, a clear division was usually made between the "acting area" and the "auditorium." In addition, there were performers, and, since considerable importance was attached to avoiding mistakes in the enactment of rites, religious leaders usually assumed that task. Wearing masks and costumes, they often impersonated other people, animals, or supernatural beings, and mimed the desired effect-success in hunt or battle, the coming rain, the revival of the Sun-as an actor might. Eventually such dramatic representations were separated from religious activities. Another theory traces the theater's origin from the human interest in storytelling. According to this vies tales (about the hunt, war, or other feats) are gradually elaborated, at first through the use of impersonation, action, and dialogue by a narrator and then through the assumption of each of the roles by a different person. A closely related theory traces theater to those dances that are primarily rhythmical and gymnastic or that are imitations of animal movements and sounds.
06 Television Television-----the most pervasive and persuasive of modern technologies, marked by rapid change and growth-is moving into a new era, an era of extraordinary sophistication and versatility, which promises to reshape our lives and our world. It is an electronic revolution of sorts, made possible by the marriage of television and computer technologies. The word "television", derived from its Greek (tele: distant) and Latin (visio: sight) roots, can literally be interpreted as sight from a distance. Very simply put, it works in this way: through a sophisticated system of electronics, television provides the capability of converting an image (focused on a special photoconductive plate within a camera) into electronic impulses, which can be sent through a wire or cable. These impulses, when fed into a receiver (television set), can then be electronically reconstituted into that same image. Television is more than just an electronic system, however. It is a means of expression, as well as a vehicle for communication, and as such becomes a powerful tool for reaching other human beings. The field of television can be divided into two categories determined by its means of transmission. First, there is broadcast television, which reaches the masses through broad-based airwave transmission of television signals. Second, there is nonbroadcast television, which provides for the needs of individuals or specific interest groups through controlled transmission techniques. Traditionally, television has been a medium of the masses. We are most familiar with broadcast television because it has been with us for about thirty-seven years in a form similar to what exists today. During those years, it has been controlled, for the most part, by the broadcast networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, who have been the major purveyors of news, information, and entertainment. These giants of broadcasting have actually shaped not only television but our perception of it as well. We have come to look upon the picture tube as a source of entertainment, placing our role in this dynamic medium as the passive viewer.
Andrew Carnegie, known as the King of Steel, built the steel industry in the United States, and , in the process, became one of the wealthiest men in America. His success resulted in part from his ability to sell the product and in part from his policy of expanding during periods of economic decline, when most of his competitors were reducing their investments. Carnegie believed that individuals should progress through hard work, but he also felt strongly that the wealthy should use their fortunes for the benefit of society. He opposed charity, preferring instead to provide educational opportunities that would allow others to help themselves. "He who dies rich, dies disgraced," he often said. Among his more noteworthy contributions to society are those that bear his name, including the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, which has a library, a museum of fine arts, and a museum of national history. He also founded a school of technology that is now part of Carnegie-Mellon University. Other philanthrophic gifts are the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to promote understanding between nations, the Carnegie Institute of Washington to fund scientific research, and Carnegie Hall to provide a center for the arts. Few Americans have been left untouched by Andrew Carnegie's generosity. His contributions of more than five million dollars established 2,500 libraries in small communities throughout the country and formed the nucleus of the public library system that we all enjoy today.
The American Revolution was not a sudden and violent overturning
of the political and social framework, such as later occurred in
France and Russia, when both were already independent nations. Significant
changes were ushered in, but they were not breathtaking. What happened
was accelerated evolution rather than outright revolution. During
the conflict itself people went on working and praying, marrying
and playing. Most of them were not seriously disturbed by the actual
fighting, and many of the more isolated communities scarcely knew
that a war was on. Yet even the political overturn was not so revolutionary as one might suppose. In some states, notably Connecticut and Rhode Island, the war largely ratified a colonial self-rule already existing. British officials, everywhere ousted, were replaced by a home-grown governing class, which promptly sought a local substitute for king and Parliament.
If by "suburb" is meant an urban margin that grows more rapidly than its already developed interior, the process of suburbanization began during the emergence of the industrial city in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Before that period the city was a small highly compact cluster in which people moved about on foot and goods were conveyed by horse and cart. But the early factories built in the 1840's were located along waterways and near railheads at the edges of cities, and housing was needed for the thousands of people drawn by the prospect of employment. In time, the factories were surrounded by proliferating mill towns of apartments and row houses that abutted the older, main cities. As a defense against this encroachment and to enlarge their tax bases, the cities appropriated their industrial neighbors. In 1854, for example, the city of Philadelphia annexed most of Philadelphia County. Similar municipal maneuvers took place in Chicago and in New York. Indeed, most great cities of the United States achieved such status only by incorporating the communities along their borders. With the acceleration of industrial growth came acute urban crowding and accompanying social stress-conditions that began to approach disastrous proportions when, in 1888, the first commercially successful electric traction line was developed. Within a few years the horse-drawn trolleys were retired and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and connected every major urban area, fostering a wave of suburbanization that transformed the compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis. This first phase of mass-scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous emergence of the urban Middle Class, whose desires for homeownership in neighborhoods far from the aging inner city were satisfied by the developers of single-family housing tracts.
Standard usage includes those words and expressions understood, used, and accepted by a majority of the speakers of a language in any situation regardless of the level of formality. As such, these words and expressions are well defined and listed in standard dictionaries. Colloquialisms, on the other hand, are familiar words and idioms that are understood by almost all speakers of a language and used in informal speech or writing, but not considered appropriate for more formal situations. Almost all idiomatic expressions are colloquial language. Slang, however, refers to words and expressions understood by a large number of speakers but not accepted as good, formal usage by the majority. Colloquial expressions and even slang may be found in standard dictionaries but will be so identified. Both colloquial usage and slang are more common in speech than in writing. Colloquial speech often passes into standard speech. Some slang also passes into standard speech, but other slang expressions enjoy momentary popularity followed by obscurity. In some cases, the majority never accepts certain slang phrases but nevertheless retains them in their collective memories. Every generation seems to require its own set of words to describe familiar objects and events. It has been pointed out by a number of linguists that three cultural conditions are necessary for the creation of a large body of slang expressions. First, the introduction and acceptance of new objects and situations in the society; second, a diverse population with a large number of subgroups; third, association among the subgroups and the majority population. Finally, it is worth noting that the terms "standard" "colloquial" and "slang" exist only as abstract labels for scholars who study language. Only a tiny number of the speakers of any language will be aware that they are using colloquial or slang expressions. Most speakers of English will, during appropriate situations, select and use all three types of expressions. 11 Archaeology Archaeology is a source of history, not just a bumble auxiliary discipline. Archaeological data are historical documents in their own right, not mere illustrations to written texts, Just as much as any other historian, an archaeologist studies and tries to reconstitute the process that has created the human world in which we live - and us ourselves in so far as we are each creatures of our age and social environment. Archaeological data are all changes in the material world resulting from human action or, more succinctly, the fossilized results of human behavior. The sum total of these constitutes what may be called the archaeological record. This record exhibits certain peculiarities and deficiencies the consequences of which produce a rather superficial contrast between archaeological history and the more familiar kind based upon written records. Not all human behavior fossilizes. The words I utter and you hear as vibrations in the air are certainly human changes in the material world and may be of great historical significance. Yet they leave no sort of trace in the archaeological records unless they are captured by a dictaphone or written down by a clerk. The movement of troops on the battlefield may "change the course of history," but this is equally ephemeral from the archaeologist's standpoint. What is perhaps worse, most organic materials are perishable. Everything made of wood, hide, wool, linen, grass, hair, and similar materials will decay and vanish in dust in a few years or centuries, save under very exceptional conditions. In a relatively brief period the archaeological record is reduce to mere scraps of stone, bone, glass, metal, and earthenware. Still modern archaeology, by applying appropriate techniques and comparative methods, aided by a few lucky finds from peat-bogs, deserts, and frozen soils, is able to fill up a good deal of the gap.
From Boston to Los Angeles, from New York City to Chicago to Dallas, museums are either planning, building, or wrapping up wholesale expansion programs. These programs already have radically altered facades and floor plans or are expected to do so in the not-too-distant future. In New York City alone, six major institutions have spread up and out into the air space and neighborhoods around them or are preparing to do so. The reasons for this confluence of activity are complex, but one factor is a consideration everywhere - space. With collections expanding, with the needs and functions of museums changing, empty space has become a very precious commodity. Probably nowhere in the country is this more true than at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has needed additional space for decades and which received its last significant facelift ten years ago. Because of the space crunch, the Art Museum has become increasingly cautious in considering acquisitions and donations of art, in some cases passing up opportunities to strengthen its collections. Deaccessing - or selling off - works of art has taken on new importance because of the museum's space problems. And increasingly, curators have been forced to juggle gallery space, rotating one masterpiece into public view while another is sent to storage. Despite the clear need for additional gallery and storage space, however," the museum has no plan, no plan to break out of its envelope in the next fifteen years," according to Philadelphia Museum of Art's president.
In the late 1960's, many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems, and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized. Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities. Skyscrapers are also lavish consumers, and wasters, of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120, 000 kilowatts-enough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day. Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful. The heat loss (or gain)through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double-glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings. Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city's sanitation facilities, too. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year-as much as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut , which has a population of more than 109, 000.
The preservation of embryos and juveniles is a rate occurrence in the fossil record. The tiny, delicate skeletons are usually scattered by scavengers or destroyed by weathering before they can be fossilized. Ichthyosaurs had a higher chance of being preserved than did terrestrial creatures because, as marine animals, they tended to live in environments less subject to erosion. Still, their fossilization required a suite of factors: a slow rate of decay of soft tissues, little scavenging by other animals, a lack of swift currents and waves to jumble and carry away small bones, and fairly rapid burial. Given these factors, some areas have become a treasury of well-preserved ichthyosaur fossils. The deposits at Holzmaden, Germany, present an interesting case for analysis. The ichthyosaur remains are found in black, bituminous marine shales deposited about 190 million years ago. Over the years, thousands of specimens of marine reptiles, fish and invertebrates have been recovered from these rocks. The quality of preservation is outstanding, but what is even more impressive is the number of ichthyosaur fossils containing preserved embryos. Ichthyosaurs with embryos have been reported from 6 different levels of the shale in a small area around Holzmaden, suggesting that a specific site was used by large numbers of ichthyosaurs repeatedly over time. The embryos are quite advanced in their physical development; their paddles, for example, are already well formed. One specimen is even preserved in the birth canal. In addition, the shale contains the remains of many newborns that are between 20 and 30 inches long. Why are there so many pregnant females and young at Holzmaden when they are so rare elsewhere? The quality of preservation is almost unmatched and quarry operations have been carried out carefully with an awareness of the value of the fossils. But these factors do not account for the interesting question of how there came to be such a concentration of pregnant ichthyosaurs in a particular place very close to their time of giving birth.
For the last 82years, Sweden's Nobel Academy has decided who will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, thereby determining who will be elevated from the great and the near great to the immortal. But today the Academy is coming under heavy criticism both from the without and from within. Critics contend that the selection of the winners often has less to do with true writing ability than with the peculiar internal politics of the Academy and of Sweden itself. According to Ingmar Bjorksten , the cultural editor for one of the country's two major newspapers, the prize continues to represent "what people call a very Swedish exercise: reflecting Swedish tastes." The Academy has defended itself against such charges of provincialism in its selection by asserting that its physical distance from the great literary capitals of the world actually serves to protect the Academy from outside influences. This may well be true, but critics respond that this very distance may also be responsible for the Academy's inability to perceive accurately authentic trends in the literary world. Regardless of concerns over the selection process, however, it seems that the prize will continue to survive both as an indicator of the literature that we most highly praise, and as an elusive goal that writers seek. If for no other reason, the prize will continue to be desirable for the financial rewards that accompany it; not only is the cash prize itself considerable, but it also dramatically increases sales of an author's books.
In the late eighteenth century, battles raged in almost every corner of Europe, as well as in the Middle East, south Africa ,the West Indies, and Latin America. In reality, however, there was only one major war during this time, the war between Britain and France. All other battles were ancillary to this larger conflict, and were often at least partially related to its antagonist’ goals and strategies. France sought total domination of Europe . this goal was obstructed by British independence and Britain’s efforts throughout the continent to thwart Napoleon; through treaties. Britain built coalitions (not dissimilar in concept to today’s NATO) guaranteeing British participation in all major European conflicts. These two antagonists were poorly matched, insofar as they had very unequal strengths; France was predominant on land, Britain at sea. The French knew that, short of defeating the British navy, their only hope of victory was to close all the ports of Europe to British ships. Accordingly, France set out to overcome Britain by extending its military domination from Moscow t Lisbon, from Jutland to Calabria. All of this entailed tremendous risk, because France did not have the military resources to control this much territory and still protect itself and maintain order at home. French strategists calculated that a navy of 150 ships would provide the force necessary to defeat the British navy. Such a force would give France a three-to-two advantage over Britain. This advantage was deemed necessary because of Britain’s superior sea skills and technology because of Britain’s superior sea skills and technology, and also because Britain would be fighting a defensive war, allowing it to win with fewer forces. Napoleon never lost substantial impediment to his control of Europe. As his force neared that goal, Napoleon grew increasingly impatient and began planning an immediate attack.
Sleep is very ancient. In the electroencephalographic sense we share it with all the primates and almost all the other mammals and birds: it may extend back as far as the reptiles. There is some evidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and dreamless, depend on the life-style of the animal, and that predators are statistically much more likely to dream than prey, which are in turn much more likely to experience dreamless sleep. In dream sleep, the animal is powerfully immobilized and remarkably unresponsive to external stimuli. Dreamless sleep is much shallower, and we have all witnessed cats or dogs cocking their ears to a sound when apparently fast asleep. The fact that deep dream sleep is rare among pray today seems clearly to be a product of natural selection, and it makes sense that today, when sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animals are less frequently immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones. But why should they sleep deeply at all? Why should a state of such deep immobilization ever have evolved? Perhaps one useful hint about the original function of sleep is to be found in the fact that dolphins and whales and aquatic mammals in genera seem to sleep very little. There is, by and large, no place to hide in the ocean. Could it be that, rather than increasing an animal’s vulnerability, the University of Florida and Ray Meddis of London University have suggested this to be the case. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quite on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep. The point seems particularly clear for the young of predatory animals. This is an interesting notion and probably at least partly true.
Before the 1850’s, the United States had a number of small colleges, most of them dating from colonial days. They were small, church connected institutions whose primary concern was to shape the moral character of their students. Throughout Europe, institutions of higher learning had developed, bearing the ancient name of university. In German university was concerned primarily with creating and spreading knowledge, not morals. Between mid-century and the end of the 1800’s, more than nine thousand young Americans, dissatisfied with their training at home, went to Germany for advanced study. Some of them return to become presidents of venerable colleges-----Harvard, Yale, Columbia---and transform them into modern universities. The new presidents broke all ties with the churches and brought in a new kind of faculty. Professors were hired for their knowledge of a subject, not because they were of the proper faith and had a strong arm for disciplining students. The new principle was that a university was to create knowledge as well as pass it on, and this called for a faculty composed of teacher-scholars. Drilling and learning by rote were replaced by the German method of lecturing, in which the professor’s own research was presented in class. Graduate training leading to the Ph.D., an ancient German degree signifying the highest level of advanced scholarly attainment, was introduced. With the establishment of the seminar system, graduate student learned to question, analyze, and conduct their own research. At the same time, the new university greatly expanded in size and course offerings, breaking completely out of the old, constricted curriculum of mathematics, classics, rhetoric, and music. The president of Harvard pioneered the elective system, by which students were able to choose their own course of study. The notion of major fields of study emerged. The new goal was to make the university relevant to the real pursuits of the world. Paying close heed to the practical needs of society, the new universities trained men and women to work at its tasks, with engineering students being the most characteristic of the new regime. Students were also trained as economists, architects, agriculturalists, social welfare workers, and teachers.
people appear to born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning to walk and talk, they can set the table with impress accuracy---one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of nothing that they have placed five knives, spoons and forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later, he or she could enter a second enter a second-grade mathematics class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment. Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of
cognitive psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily
learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children were observed
as they slowly grasped-----or, as the case might be, bumped into-----concepts
that adults take for quantity is unchanged as water pours from a
short glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since demonstrated
that young children, asked to count the pencils in a pile, readily
report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed into
finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments
of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have
also suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers------the
idea of a oneness,
The ways of history are so intricate and the motivations of human actions so complex that it is always hazardous to attempt to represent events covering a number of years, a multiplicity of persons, and distant localities as the expression of one intellectual or social movement; yet the historical process which culminated in the ascent of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency can be regarded as the outstanding example not only of the birth of a new way of life but of nationalism as a new way of life. The American Revolution represents the link between the seventeenth century, in which modern England became conscious of itself, and the awakening of modern Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. It may seem strange that the march of history should have had to cross the Atlantic Ocean, but only in the North American colonies could a struggle for civic liberty lead also to the foundation of a new nation. Here, in the popular rising against a “tyrannical” government, the fruits were more than the securing of a freer constitution. They included the growth of a nation born in liberty by the will of the people, not from the roots of common descent, a geographic entity, or the ambitions of king or dynasty. With the American nation, for the first time, a nation was born, not in the dim past of history but before the eyes of the whole world. 21 The Origin of Sports When did sport begin? If sport is, in essence, play, the claim might be made that sport is much older than humankind, for , as we all have observed, the beasts play. Dogs and cats wrestle and play ball games. Fishes and birds dance. The apes have simple, pleasurable games. Frolicking infants, school children playing tag, and adult arm wrestlers are demonstrating strong, transgenerational and transspecies bonds with the universe of animals – past, present, and future. Young animals, particularly, tumble, chase, run wrestle, mock, imitate, and laugh (or so it seems) to the point of delighted exhaustion. Their play, and ours, appears to serve no other purpose than to give pleasure to the players, and apparently, to remove us temporarily from the anguish of life in earnest. Some philosophers have claimed that our playfulness is the most noble part of our basic nature. In their generous conceptions, play harmlessly and experimentally permits us to put our creative forces, fantasy, and imagination into action. Play is release from the tedious battles against scarcity and decline which are the incessant, and inevitable, tragedies of life. This is a grand conception that excites and provokes. The holders of this view claim that the origins of our highest accomplishments ---- liturgy, literature, and law ---- can be traced to a play impulse which, paradoxically, we see most purely enjoyed by young beasts and children. Our sports, in this rather happy, nonfatalistic view of human nature, are more splendid creations of the nondatable, transspecies play impulse.
Collectibles have been a part of almost every culture since ancient times. Whereas some objects have been collected for their usefulness, others have been selected for their aesthetic beauty alone. In the United States, the kinds of collectibles currently popular range from traditional objects such as stamps, coins, rare books, and art to more recent items of interest like dolls, bottles, baseball cards, and comic books. Interest in collectibles has increased enormously during the past decade, in part because some collectibles have demonstrated their value as investments. Especially during cycles of high inflation, investors try to purchase tangibles that will at least retain their current market values. In general, the most traditional collectibles will be sought because they have preserved their value over the years, there is an organized auction market for them, and they are most easily sold in the event that cash is needed. Some examples of the most stable collectibles are old masters, Chinese ceramics, stamps, coins, rare books, antique jewelry, silver, porcelain, art by well-known artists, autographs, and period furniture. Other items of more recent interest include old photograph records, old magazines, post cards, baseball cards, art glass, dolls, classic cars, old bottles, and comic books. These relatively new kinds of collectibles may actually appreciate faster as short-term investments, but may not hold their value as long-term investments. Once a collectible has had its initial play, it appreciates at a fairly steady rate, supported by an increasing number of enthusiastic collectors competing for the limited supply of collectibles that become increasingly more difficult to locate.
Although Henry Ford’s name is closely associated with the concept of mass production, he should receive equal credit for introducing labor practices as early as 1913 that would be considered advanced even by today’s standards. Safety measures were improved, and the work day was reduced to eight hours, compared with the ten-or twelve-hour day common at the time. In order to accommodate the shorter work day, the entire factory was converted from two to three shifts. In addition, sick leaves as well as improved medical care for those injured on the job were instituted. The Ford Motor Company was one of the first factories to develop a technical school to train specialized skilled laborers and an English language school for immigrants. Some efforts were even made to hire the handicapped and provide jobs for former convicts. The most widely acclaimed innovation was the five-dollar-a-day minimum wage that was offered in order to recruit and retain the best mechanics and to discourage the growth of labor unions. Ford explained the new wage policy in terms of efficiency and profit sharing. He also mentioned the fact that his employees would be able to purchase the automobiles that they produced – in effect creating a market for the product. In order to qualify for the minimum wage, an employee had to establish a decent home and demonstrate good personal habits, including sobriety, thriftiness, industriousness, and dependability. Although some criticism was directed at Ford for involving himself too much in the personal lives of his employees, there can be no doubt that, at a time when immigrants were being taken advantage of in frightful ways, Henry Ford was helping many people to establish themselves in America.
The ancestry of the piano can be traced to the early keyboard instruments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries --- the spinet, the dulcimer, and the virginal. In the seventeenth century the organ, the clavichord, and the harpsichord became the chief instruments of the keyboard group, a supremacy they maintained until the piano supplanted them at the end of the eighteenth century. The clavichord’s tone was metallic and never powerful; nevertheless, because of the variety of tone possible to it, many composers found the clavichord a sympathetic instrument for intimate chamber music. The harpsichord with its bright, vigorous tone was the favorite instrument for supporting the bass of the small orchestra of the period and for concert use, but the character of the tone could not be varied save by mechanical or structural devices. The piano was perfected in the early eighteenth century by a harpsichord maker in Italy (though musicologists point out several previous instances of the instrument). This instrument was called a piano e forte (sort and loud), to indicate its dynamic versatility; its strings were struck by a recoiling hammer with a felt-padded head. The wires were much heavier in the earlier instruments. A series of mechanical improvements continuing well into the nineteenth century, including the introduction of pedals to sustain tone or to soften it, the perfection of a metal frame, and steel wire of the finest quality, finally produced an instrument capable of myriad tonal effects from the most delicate harmonies to an almost orchestral fullness of sound, from a liquid, singing tone to a sharp, percussive brilliance.
Accustomed though we are to speaking of the films made before 1927 as “silent”, the film has never been, in the full sense of the word, silent. From the very beginning, music was regarded as an indispensable accompaniment; when the Lumiere films were shown at the first public film exhibition in the United States in February 1896, they were accompanied by piano improvisations on popular tunes. At first, the music played bore no special relationship to the films; an accompaniment of any kind was sufficient. Within a very short time, however, the incongruity of playing lively music to a solemn film became apparent, and film pianists began to take some care in matching their pieces to the mood of the film. As movie theaters grew in number and importance, a violinist, and perhaps a cellist, would be added to the pianist in certain cases, and in the larger movie theaters small orchestras were formed. For a number of years the selection of music for each film program rested entirely in the hands of the conductor or leader of the orchestra, and very often the principal qualification for holding such a position was not skill or taste so much as the ownership of a large personal library of musical pieces. Since the conductor seldom saw the films until the night before they were to be shown(if indeed, the conductor was lucky enough to see them then), the musical arrangement was normally improvised in the greatest hurry. To help meet this difficulty, film distributing companies started the practice of publishing suggestions for musical accompaniments. In 1909, for example, the Edison Company began issuing with their films such indications of mood as “ pleasant”, “sad”, “lively”. The suggestions became more explicit, and so emerged the musical cue sheet containing indications of mood, the titles of suitable pieces of music, and precise directions to show where one piece led into the next. Certain films had music especially composed for them. The most famous of these early special scores was that composed and arranged for D.W Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, which was released in 1915. Note: 26. International Business and Cross-cultural Communication The increase in international business and in foreign investment has created a need for executives with knowledge of foreign languages and skills in cross-cultural communication. Americans, however, have not been well trained in either area and, consequently, have not enjoyed the same level of success in negotiation in an international arena as have their foreign counterparts. Negotiating is the process of communicating back and forth for the purpose of reaching an agreement. It involves persuasion and compromise, but in order to participate in either one, the negotiators must understand the ways in which people are persuaded and how compromise is reached within the culture of the negotiation. In many international business negotiations abroad, Americans are perceived as wealthy and impersonal. It often appears to the foreign negotiator that the American represents a large multi-million-dollar corporation that can afford to pay the price without bargaining further. The American negotiator’s role becomes that of an impersonal purveyor of information and cash. In studies of American negotiators abroad, several traits have been identified that may serve to confirm this stereotypical perception, while undermining the negotiator’s position. Two traits in particular that cause cross-cultural misunderstanding are directness and impatience on the part of the American negotiator. Furthermore, American negotiators often insist on realizing short-term goals. Foreign negotiators, on the other hand, may value the relationship established between negotiators and may be willing to invest time in it for long-term benefits. In order to solidify the relationship, they may opt for indirect interactions without regard for the time involved in getting to know the other negotiator.
In science, a theory is a reasonable explanation of observed events that are related. A theory often involves an imaginary model that helps scientists picture the way an observed event could be produced. A good example of this is found in the kinetic molecular theory, in which gases are pictured as being made up of many small particles that are in constant motion. A useful theory, in addition to explaining past observations, helps to predict events that have not as yet been observed. After a theory has been publicized, scientists design experiments to test the theory. If observations confirm the scientist’s predictions, the theory is supported. If observations do not confirm the predictions, the scientists must search further. There may be a fault in the experiment, or the theory may have to be revised or rejected. Science involves imagination and creative thinking as well as collecting information and performing experiments. Facts by themselves are not science. As the mathematician Jules Henri Poincare said, “Science is built with facts just as a house is built with bricks, but a collection of facts cannot be called science any more than a pile of bricks can be called a house.”
In a way, any hypothesis is a leap into the unknown. It extends the scientist’s thinking beyond the known facts. The scientist plans experiments, performs calculations, and makes observations to test hypotheses. Without hypothesis, further investigation lacks purpose and direction. When hypotheses are confirmed, they are incorporated into theories.
One of the most important social developments that helped to make possible a shift in thinking about the role of public education was the effect of the baby boom of the 1950's and 1960's on the schools. In the 1920's, but especially in the Depression conditions of the 1930's, the United States experienced a declining birth rate --- every thousand women aged fifteen to forty-four gave birth to about 118 live children in 1920, 89.2 in 1930, 75.8 in 1936, and 80 in 1940. With the growing prosperity brought on by the Second World War and the economic boom that followed it young people married and established households earlier and began to raise larger families than had their predecessors during the Depression. Birth rates rose to 102 per thousand in 1946,106.2 in 1950, and 118 in 1955. Although economics was probably the most important determinant, it is not the only explanation for the baby boom. The increased value placed on the idea of the family also helps to explain this rise in birth rates. The baby boomers began streaming into the first grade by the mid 1940's and became a flood by 1950. The public school system suddenly found itself overtaxed. While the number of schoolchildren rose because of wartime and postwar conditions, these same conditions made the schools even less prepared to cope with the food. The wartime economy meant that few new schools were built between 1940 and 1945. Moreover, during the war and in the boom times that followed, large numbers of teachers left their profession for better-paying jobs elsewhere in the economy. Therefore in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the baby boom hit an antiquated and inadequate school system. Consequently, the “ custodial rhetoric” of the 1930’s and early 1940’s no longer made sense that is, keeping youths aged sixteen and older out of the labor market by keeping them in school could no longer be a high priority for an institution unable to find space and staff to teach younger children aged five to sixteen. With the baby boom, the focus of educators and of laymen interested in education inevitably turned toward the lower grades and back to basic academic skills and discipline. The system no longer had much interest in offering nontraditional, new, and extra services to older youths.
Telecommuting-- substituting the computer for the trip to the job ----has been hailed as a solution to all kinds of problems related to office work. For workers it promises freedom from the office, less time wasted in traffic, and help with child-care conflicts. For management, telecommuting helps keep high performers on board, minimizes tardiness and absenteeism by eliminating commutes, allows periods of solitude for high-concentration tasks, and provides scheduling flexibility. In some areas, such as Southern California and Seattle, Washington, local governments are encouraging companies to start telecommuting programs in order to reduce rush-hour congestion and improve air quality. But these benefits do not come easily. Making a telecommuting program work requires careful planning and an understanding of the differences between telecommuting realities and popular images. Many workers are seduced by rosy illusions of life as a telecommuter. A computer programmer from New York City moves to the tranquil Adirondack Mountains and stays in contact with her office via computer. A manager comes in to his office three days a week and works at home the other two. An accountant stays home to care for her sick child; she hooks up her telephone modern connections and does office work between calls to the doctor. These are powerful images, but they are a limited reflection of reality. Telecommuting workers soon learn that it is almost impossible to concentrate on work and care for a young child at the same time. Before a certain age, young children cannot recognize, much less respect, the necessary boundaries between work and family. Additional child support is necessary if the parent is to get any work done. Management too must separate the myth from the reality. Although the media has paid a great deal of attention to telecommuting in most cases it is the employee’s situation, not the availability of technology that precipitates a telecommuting arrangement. That is partly why, despite the widespread press coverage, the number of companies with work-at-home programs or policy guidelines remains small.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “icebox” had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals, and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War( 1861-1865),as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into household use. Even before 1880,half of the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had been invented. Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science of refrigeration, was rudimentary. The commonsense notion that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included wrapping up the ice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation and circulation needed for an efficient icebox. But as early as 1803, and ingenious Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, had been on the right track. He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington, for which the village of Georgetown was the market center. When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market, he found that customers would pass up the rapidly melting stuff in the tubs of his competitors to pay a premium price for his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, one-pound bricks. One advantage of his icebox, Moore explained, was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool. 31 British Columbia British Columbia is the third largest Canadian provinces, both in area and population. It is nearly 1.5 times as large as Texas, and extends 800 miles(1,280km) north from the United States border. It includes Canada’s entire west coast and the islands just off the coast. Most of British Columbia is mountainous, with long rugged ranges running north and south. Even the coastal islands are the remains of a mountain range that existed thousands of years ago. During the last Ice Age, this range was scoured by glaciers until most of it was beneath the sea. Its peaks now show as islands scattered along the coast. The southwestern coastal region has a humid mild marine climate. Sea winds that blow inland from the west are warmed by a current of warm water that flows through the Pacific Ocean. As a result, winter temperatures average above freezing and summers are mild. These warm western winds also carry moisture from the ocean. Inland from the coast, the winds from the Pacific meet the mountain barriers of the coastal ranges and the Rocky Mountains. As they rise to cross the mountains, the winds are cooled, and their moisture begins to fall as rain. On some of the western slopes almost 200 inches (500cm) of rain fall each year. More than half of British Columbia is heavily forested. On mountain slopes that receive plentiful rainfall, huge Douglas firs rise in towering columns. These forest giants often grow to be as much as 300 feet(90m) tall, with diameters up to 10 feet(3m). More lumber is produced from these trees than from any other kind of tree in North America. Hemlock, red cedar, and balsam fir are among the other trees found in British Columbia.
Botany, the study of plants, occupies a peculiar position in the history of human knowledge. For many thousands of years it was the one field of awareness about which humans had anything more than the vaguest of insights. It is impossible to know today just what our Stone Age ancestors knew about plants, but form what we can observe of pre-industrial societies that still exist a detailed learning of plants and their properties must be extremely ancient. This is logical. Plants are the basis of the food pyramid for all living things even for other plants. They have always been enormously important to the welfare of people not only for food, but also for clothing, weapons, tools, dyes, medicines, shelter, and a great many other purposes. Tribes living today in the jungles of the Amazon recognize literally hundreds of plants and know many properties of each. To them, botany, as such, has no name and is probably not even recognized as a special branch of “ knowledge” at all. Unfortunately, the more industrialized we become the farther away we move from direct contact with plants, and the less distinct our knowledge of botany grows. Yet everyone comes unconsciously on an amazing amount of botanical knowledge, and few people will fail to recognize a rose, an apple, or an orchid. When our Neolithic ancestors, living in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, discovered that certain grasses could be harvested and their seeds planted for richer yields the next season the first great step in a new association of plants and humans was taken. Grains were discovered and from them flowed the marvel of agriculture: cultivated crops. From then on, humans would increasingly take their living from the controlled production of a few plants, rather than getting a little here and a little there from many varieties that grew wild- and the accumulated knowledge of tens of thousands of years of experience and intimacy with plants in the wild would begin to fade away.
Scattered through the seas of the world are billions of tons of small plants and animals called plankton. Most of these plants and animals are too small for the human eye to see. They drift about lazily with the currents, providing a basic food for many larger animals. Plankton has been described as the equivalent of the grasses that grow on the dry land continents, and the comparison is an appropriate one. In potential food value, however, plankton far outweighs that of the land grasses. One scientist has estimated that while grasses of the world produce about 49 billion tons of valuable carbohydrates each year, the sea’s plankton generates more than twice as much. Despite its enormous food potential, little effect was made until recently to farm plankton as we farm grasses on land. Now marine scientists have at last begun to study this possibility, especially as the sea’s resources loom even more important as a means of feeding an expanding world population. No one yet has seriously suggested that “ plankton-burgers” may soon become popular around the world. As a possible farmed supplementary food source, however, plankton is gaining considerable interest among marine scientists. One type of plankton that seems to have great harvest possibilities is a tiny shrimp-like creature called krill. Growing to two or three inches long, krill provides the major food for the great blue whale, the largest animal to ever inhabit the Earth. Realizing that this whale may grow to 100 feet and weigh 150 tons at maturity, it is not surprising that each one devours more than one ton of krill daily.
In the oysters were raised in much the same way as dirt farmers raised tomatoes- by transplanting them. First, farmers selected the oyster bed, cleared the bottom of old shells and other debris, then scattered clean shells about. Next, they ”planted” fertilized oyster eggs, which within two or three weeks hatched into larvae. The larvae drifted until they attached themselves to the clean shells on the bottom. There they remained and in time grew into baby oysters called seed or spat. The spat grew larger by drawing in seawater from which they derived microscopic particles of food. Before long, farmers gathered the baby oysters, transplanted them once more into another body of water to fatten them up. Until recently the supply of wild oysters and those crudely farmed were more than enough to satisfy people’s needs. But today the delectable seafood is no longer available in abundance. The problem has become so serious that some oyster beds have vanished entirely. Fortunately, as far back as the early 1900’s marine biologists realized that if new measures were not taken, oysters would become extinct or at best a luxury food. So they set up well-equipped hatcheries and went to work. But they did not have the proper equipment or the skill to handle the eggs. They did not know when, what, and how to feed the larvae. And they knew little about the predators that attack and eat baby oysters by the millions. They failed, but they doggedly kept at it. Finally, in the 1940’s a significant breakthrough was made. The marine biologists discovered that by raising the temperature of the water, they could induce oysters to spawn not only in the summer but also in the fall, winter, and spring. Later they developed a technique for feeding the larvae and rearing them to spat. Going still further, they succeeded in breeding new strains that were resistant to diseases, grew faster and larger, and flourished in water of different salinities and temperatures. In addition, the cultivated oysters tasted better!
An important new industry, oil refining, grew after the Civil war. Crude oil, or petroleum – a dark, thick ooze from the earth – had been known for hundreds of years, but little use had ever been made of it. In the 1850’s Samuel M. Kier, a manufacturer in western Pennsylvania, began collecting the oil from local seepages and refining it into kerosene. Refining, like smelting, is a process of removing impurities from a raw material. Kerosene was used to light lamps. It was a cheap substitute for whale oil, which was becoming harder to get. Soon there was a large demand for kerosene. People began to search for new supplies of petroleum. The first oil well was drilled by E.L. Drake, a retired railroad conductor. In 1859 he began drilling in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The whole venture seemed so impractical and foolish that onlookers called it “ Drake’s Folly”. But when he had drilled down about 70 feet(21 meters), Drake struck oil. His well began to yield 20 barrels of crude oil a day. News of Drake’s success brought oil prospectors to the scene. By the early 1860’s these wildcatters were drilling for “ black gold” all over western Pennsylvania. The boom rivaled the California gold rush of 1848 in its excitement and Wild West atmosphere. And it brought far more wealth to the prospectors than any gold rush. Crude oil could be refined into many products. For some years kerosene continued to be the principal one. It was sold in grocery stores and door-to-door. In the 1880’s refiners learned how to make other petroleum products such as waxes and lubricating oils. Petroleum was not then used to make gasoline or heating oil.
The theory of plate tectonics describes the motions of the lithosphere, the comparatively rigid outer layer of the Earth that includes all the crust and part of the underlying mantle. The lithosphere(n.[地]岩石圈)is divided into a few dozen plates of various sizes and shapes, in general the plates are in motion with respect to one another. A mid-ocean ridge is a boundary between plates where new lithospheric material is injected from below. As the plates diverge from a mid-ocean ridge they slide on a more yielding layer at the base of the lithosphere. Since the size of the Earth is essentially constant, new lithosphere can be created at the mid-ocean ridges only if an equal amount of lithospheric material is consumed elsewhere. The site of this destruction is another kind of plate boundary: a subduction zone. There one plate dives under the edge of another and is reincorporated into the mantle. Both kinds of plate boundary are associated with fault systems, earthquakes and volcanism, but the kinds of geologic activity observed at the two boundaries are quite different. The idea of sea-floor spreading actually preceded the theory of plate tectonics. In its original version, in the early 1960’s, it described the creation and destruction of the ocean floor, but it did not specify rigid lithospheric plates. The hypothesis was substantiated soon afterward by the discovery that periodic reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field are recorded in the oceanic crust. As magma rises under the mid-ocean ridge, ferromagnetic minerals in the magma become magnetized in the direction of the magma become magnetized in the direction of the geomagnetic field. When the magma cools and solidifies, the direction and the polarity of the field are preserved in the magnetized volcanic rock. Reversals of the field give rise to a series of magnetic stripes running parallel to the axis of the rift. The oceanic crust thus serves as a magnetic tape recording of the history of the geomagnetic field that can be dated independently; the width of the stripes indicates the rate of the sea-floor spreading.
Icebergs are among nature’s most spectacular creations, and yet most people have never seen one. A vague air of mystery envelops them. They come into being ----- somewhere ------in faraway, frigid waters, amid thunderous noise and splashing turbulence, which in most cases no one hears or sees. They exist only a short time and then slowly waste away just as unnoticed. Objects of sheerest beauty they have been called. Appearing in an endless variety of shapes, they may be dazzlingly white, or they may be glassy blue, green or purple, tinted faintly of in darker hues. They are graceful, stately, inspiring ----- in calm, sunlight seas. But they are also called frightening and dangerous, and that they are ---- in the night, in the fog, and in storms. Even in clear weather one is wise to stay a safe distance away from them. Most of their bulk is hidden below the water, so their underwater parts may extend out far beyond the visible top. Also, they may roll over unexpectedly, churning the waters around them. Icebergs are parts of glaciers that break off, drift into the water, float about awhile, and finally melt. Icebergs afloat today are made of snowflakes that have fallen over long ages of time. They embody snows that drifted down hundreds, or many thousands, or in some cases maybe a million years ago. The snows fell in polar regions and on cold mountains, where they melted only a little or not at all, and so collected to great depths over the years and centuries. As each year’s snow accumulation lay on the surface, evaporation and melting caused the snowflakes slowly to lose their feathery points and become tiny grains of ice. When new snow fell on top of the old, it too turned to icy grains. So blankets of snow and ice grains mounted layer upon layer and were of such great thickness that the weight of the upper layers compressed the lower ones. With time and pressure from above, the many small ice grains joined and changed to larger crystals, and eventually the deeper crystals merged into a solid mass of ice.
Topaz is a hard, transparent mineral. It is a compound of aluminum, silica, and fluorine. Gem topaz is valuable. Jewelers call this variety of the stone “precious topaz”. The best-known precious topaz gems range in color from rich yellow to light brown or pinkish red. Topaz is one of the hardest gem minerals. In the mineral table of hardness, it has a rating of 8, which means that a knife cannot cut it, and that topaz will scratch quartz. The golden variety of precious topaz is quite uncommon. Most of the world’s topaz is white or blue. The white and blue crystals of topaz are large, often weighing thousands of carats. For this reason, the value of topaz does not depend so much on its size as it does with diamonds and many other precious stones, where the value increases about four times with each doubling of weight. The value of a topaz is largely determined by its quality. But color is also important: blue topaz, for instance, is often irradiated to deepen and improve its color. Blue topaz is often sold as aquamarine and a variety of brown quartz is widely sold as topaz. The quartz is much less brilliant and more plentiful than true topaz. Most of it is variety of amethyst: that heat has turned brown. NOTE:
If the salinity of ocean waters is analyzed, it is found to vary only slightly from place to place. Nevertheless, some of these small changes are important. There are three basic processes that cause a change in oceanic salinity. One of these is the subtraction of water from the ocean by means of evaporation--- conversion of liquid water to water vapor. In this manner the salinity is increased, since the salts stay behind. If this is carried to the extreme, of course, white crystals of salt would be left behind. The opposite of evaporation is precipitation, such as rain, by which water is added to the ocean. Here the ocean is being diluted so that the salinity is decreased. This may occur in areas of high rainfall or in coastal regions where rivers flow into the ocean. Thus salinity may be increased by the subtraction of water by evaporation, or decreased by the addition of fresh water by precipitation or runoff. Normally, in tropical regions where the sun is very strong, the ocean salinity is somewhat higher than it is in other parts of the world where there is not as much evaporation. Similarly, in coastal regions where rivers dilute the sea, salinity is somewhat lower than in other oceanic areas. A third process by which salinity may be altered is associated with the formation and melting of sea ice. When sea water is frozen, the dissolved materials are left behind. In this manner, sea water directly materials are left behind. In this manner, sea water directly beneath freshly formed sea ice has a higher salinity than it did before the ice appeared. Of course, when this ice melts, it will tend to decrease the salinity of the surrounding water. In the Weddell Sea Antarctica, the densest water in the oceans is formed as a result of this freezing process, which increases the salinity of cold water. This heavy water sinks and is found in the deeper portions of the oceans of the world. NOTE：
Atmospheric pressure can support a column of water up to 10 meters high. But plants can move water much higher; the sequoia tree can pump water to its very top more than 100 meters above the ground. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the movement of water in trees and other tall plants was a mystery. Some botanists hypothesized that the living cells of plants acted as pumps. But many experiments demonstrated that the stems of plants in which all the cells are killed can still move water to appreciable heights. Other explanations for the movement of water in plants have been based on root pressure, a push on the water from the roots at the bottom of the plant. But root pressure is not nearly great enough to push water to the tops of tall trees. Furthermore, the conifers, which are among the tallest trees, have unusually low root pressures. If water is not pumped to the top of a tall tree, and if it is not pushed to the top of a tall tree, then we may ask: how does it get there? According to the currently accepted cohesion-tension theory, water is pulled there. The pull on a rising column of water in a plant results from the evaporation of water at the top of the plant. As water is lost from the surface of the leaves, a negative pressure, or tension, is created. The evaporated water is replaced by water moving from inside the plant in unbroken columns that extend from the top of a plant to its roots. The same forces that create surface tension in any sample of water are responsible for the maintenance of these unbroken columns of water. When water is confined in tubes of very small bore, the forces of cohesion (the attraction between water molecules) are so great that the strength of a column of water compares with the strength of a steel wire of the same diameter. This cohesive strength permits columns of water to be pulled to great heights without being broken.
American black bears appear in a variety of colors despite their name. In the eastern part of their range, most of these brown, red, or even yellow coats. To the north, the black bear is actually gray or white in color. Even in the same litter, both brown and black furred bears may be born. Black bears are the smallest of all American bears, ranging in length from five to six feet, weighing from three hundred to five hundred pounds Their eyes and ears are small and their eyesight and hearing are not as good as their sense of smell. Like all bears, the black bear is timid, clumsy, and rarely dangerous , but if attacked, most can climb trees and cover ground at great speeds. When angry or frightened, it is a formidable enemy. Black bears feed on leaves, herbs. Fruit, berries, insects, fish, and even larger animals. One of the most interesting characteristics of bears, including the black bear, is their winter sleep. Unlike squirrels, woodchucks, and many other woodland animals, bears do not actually hibernate. Although the bear does not during the winter moths, sustaining itself from body fat, its temperature remains almost normal, and it breathes regularly four or five times per minute. Most black bears live alone, except during mating season. They prefer to live in caves, hollow logs, or dense thickets. A little of one to four cubs is born in January or February after a gestation period of six to nine months, and they remain with their mother until they are fully grown or about one and a half years old. Black bears can live as long as thirty years in the wild , and even longer in game preserves set aside for them.
The invention of the incandescent light bulb by Thomas A. Edison in 1879 created a demand for a cheap, readily available fuel with which to generate large amounts of electric power. Coal seemed to fit the bill, and it fueled the earliest power stations. (which were set up at the end of the nineteenth century by Edison himself). As more power plants were constructed throughout the country, the reliance on coal increased throughout the country, the reliance on coal increased. Since the First World War, coal-fired power plants had a combined in the United States each year. In 1986 such plants had a combined generating capacity of 289,000 megawatts and consumed 83 percent of the nearly 900 million tons of coal mined in the country that year. Given the uncertainty in the future growth of the nearly 900 million tons of coal mined in the country that year. Given the uncertainty in the future growth of nuclear power and in the supply of oil and natural gas, coal-fired power plants could well provide up to 70 percent of the electric power in the United States by the end of the century. Yet, in spite of the fact that coal has long been a source of electricity and may remain on for many years(coal represents about 80 percent of United States fossil-fuel reserves), it has actually never been the most desirable fossil fuel for power plants. Coal contains less energy per unit of weight than weight than natural gas or oil; it is difficult to transport, and it is associated with a host of environmental issues, among them acid rain. Since the late 1960’s problems of emission control and waste disposal have sharply reduced the appeal of coal-fired power plants. The cost of ameliorating these environment problems along with the rising cost of building a facility as large and complex as a coal-fired power plant, have also made such plants less attractive from a purely economic perspective. Changes in the technological base of coal-fired power plants could restore their attractiveness, however. Whereas some of these changes are intended mainly to increase the productivity of existing plants, completely new technologies for burning coal cleanly are also being developed.
There were two widely divergent influences on the early development of statistical methods. Statistics had a mother who was dedicated to keeping orderly records of government units (states and statistics come from the same Latin root status) and a gentlemanly gambling father who relied on mathematics to increase his skill at playing the odds in games of chance. The influence of the mother on the offspring, statistics, is represented by counting, measuring, describing, tabulating, ordering, and the taking of censuses—all of which led to modern descriptive statistics. From the influence of the father came modern inferential statistics, which is based squarely on theories of probability. Describing collections involves tabulating, depicting and describing collections of data. These data may be quantitative such as measures of height, intelligence or grade level------variables that are characterized by an underlying continuum---or the data may represent qualitative variables, such as sex, college major or personality type. Large masses of data must generally undergo a process of summarization or reduction before they are comprehensible. Descriptive statistics is a tool for describing or summarizing or reducing to comprehensible form the properties of an otherwise unwieldy mass of data. Inferential statistics is a formalized body of methods for solving another class of problems that present great of problems characteristically involves attempts to make predictions using a sample of observations. For example, a school superintendent wishes to determine the proportion of children in a large school system who come to school without breakfast, have been vaccinated for flu, or whatever. Having a little knowledge of statistics, the superintendent would know that it is unnecessary and inefficient to question each child: the proportion for the sample of as few as 100 children. Thus , the purpose of inferential statistics is to predict or estimate characteristics of a population from a knowledge of the characteristics of only a sample of the population.
Glaciers are a possible source of fresh water that has been overlooked until recently. Three-quarters of the Earth’s fresh water supply is still tied up in glacial ice, a reservoir of untapped fresh water so immense that it could sustain all the rivers of the world for 1,000 years. Floating on the oceans every year are 7,659 trillion metric tons of ice encased in 10000 icebergs that break away from the polar ice caps, more than ninety percent of them from Antarctica. Huge glaciers that stretch over the shallow continental shelf give birth to icebergs throughout the year. Icebergs are not like sea ice, which is formed when the sea itself freezes, rather, they are formed entirely on land, breaking off when glaciers spread over the sea. As they drift away from the polar region, icebergs sometimes move mysteriously in a direction opposite to the wind, pulled by subsurface currents. Because they melt more slowly than smaller pieces of ice, icebergs have been known to drift as far north as 35 degrees south of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean. To corral them and steer them to parts of the world where they are needed would not be too difficult. The difficulty arises in other technical matters, such as the prevention of rapid melting in warmer climates and the funneling of fresh water to shore in great volume. But even if the icebergs lost half of their volume in towing, the water they could provide would be far cheaper than that produced by desalinization, or removing salt from water.
A summary of the physical and chemical nature of life must begin, not on the Earth, but in the Sun; in fact, at the Sun’s very center. It is here that is to be found the source of the energy that the Sun constantly pours out into space as light and heat. This energy is librated at the center of the Sun as billions upon billions of nuclei of hydrogen atoms collide with each other and fuse together to form nuclei of helium, and in doing so, release some of the energy that is stored in the nuclei of atoms. The output of light and heat of the Sun requires that some 600 million tons of hydrogen be converted into helium in the Sun every second. This the Sun has been doing for several thousands of millions of year. The nuclear energy is released at the Sun’s center as high-energy gamma radiation, a form of electromagnetic radiation like light and radio waves, only of very much shorter wavelength. This gamma radiation is absorbed by atoms inside the Sun to be reemitted at slightly longer wavelengths. This radiation , in its turn is absorbed and reemitted. As the energy filters through the layers of the solar interior, it passes through the X-ray part of the spectrum eventually becoming light. At this stage, it has reached what we call the solar surface, and can escape into space without being absorbed further by solar atoms. A very small fraction of the Sun’s light and heat is emitted in such directions that after passing unhindered through interplanetary space, it hits the Earth.
Human vision like that of other primates has evolved in an arboreal environment. In the dense complex world of a tropical forest, it is more important to see well that to develop an acute sense of smell. In the course of evolution members of the primate line have acquired large eyes while the snout has shrunk to give the eye an unimpeded view. Of mammals only humans and some primates enjoy color vision. The red flag is black to the bull. Horses live in a monochrome world .light visible to human eyes however occupies only a very narrow band in the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Ultraviolet rays are invisible to humans though ants and honeybees are sensitive to them. Humans though ants and honeybees are sensitive to them. Humans have no direct perception of infrared rays unlike the rattlesnake which has receptors tuned into wavelengths longer than 0.7 micron. The world would look eerily different if human eyes were sensitive to infrared radiation. Then instead of the darkness of night, we would be able to move easily in a strange shadowless world where objects glowed with varying degrees of intensity. But human eyes excel in other ways. They are in fact remarkably discerning in color gradation. The color sensitivity of normal human vision is rarely surpassed even by sophisticated technical devices.
A folk culture is a small isolated, cohesive, conservative, nearly self-sufficient group that is homogeneous in custom and race with a strong family or clan structure and highly developed rituals. Order is maintained through sanctions based in the religion or family and interpersonal. Relationships are strong. Tradition is paramount, and change comes infrequently and slowly. There is relatively little division of labor into specialized duties. Rather, each person is expected to perform a great variety of tasks, though duties may differ between the sexes. Most goods are handmade and subsistence economy prevails. Individualism is weakly developed in folk cultures as are social classes. Unaltered folk cultures no longer exist in industrialized countries such as the United States and Canada. Perhaps the nearest modern equivalent in Anglo America is the Amish, a German American farming sect that largely renounces the products and labor saving devices of the industrial age. In Amish areas, horse drawn buggies still serve as a local transportation device and the faithful are not permitted to own automobiles. The Amish’s central religious concept of Demut “humility”, clearly reflects the weakness of individualism and social class so typical of folk cultures and there is a corresponding strength of Amish group identity. Rarely do the Amish marry outside their sect. The religion, a variety of the Mennonite faith, provides the principal mechanism for maintaining order. By contrast a popular culture is a large heterogeneous group often
highly individualistic and a pronounced many specialized professions.
Secular institutions of control such as the police and army take
the place of religion and family in maintaining order, and a money-based
economy prevails. Because of these contrasts, “popular” may be viewed
as clearly different from “folk”. The popular is replacing the folk
in industrialized countries and in many developing nations. Folk-made
objects give way to their popular equivalent, usually because the
popular item is more quickly or cheaply produced, is easier or time
saving to use or leads more prestige to the owner. Bacteria are extremely small living things. While we measure our own sizes in inches or centimeters, bacterial size is measured in microns. One micron is a thousandth of a millimeter: a pinhead is about a millimeter across. Rod-shaped bacteria are usually from two to four microns long, while rounded ones are generally one micron in diameter. Thus if you enlarged a rounded bacterium a thousand times, it would be just about the size of a pinhead. An adult human magnified by the same amount would be over a mile(1.6 kilometer) tall. Even with an ordinary microscope, you must look closely to see bacteria. Using a magnification of 100 times, one finds that bacteria are barely visible as tiny rods or dots. One cannot make out anything of their structure. Using special stains, one can see that some bacteria have attached to them wavy-looking “hairs” called flagella. Others have only one flagellum. The flagella rotate, pushing the bacteria through the water. Many bacteria lack flagella and cannot move about by their own power, while others can glide along over surfaces by some little-understood mechanism. From the bacteria point of view, the world is a very different place from what it is to humans. To a bacterium water is as thick as molasses is to us. Bacteria are so small that they are influenced by the movements of the chemical molecules around them. Bacteria under the microscope, even those with no flagella, often bounce about in the water. This is because they collide with the watery molecules and are pushed this way and that. Molecules move so rapidly that within a tenth of a second the molecules around a bacteria have all been replaced by new ones; even bacteria without flagella are thus constantly exposed to a changing environment.
Sleet is part of a person’s daily activity cycle. There are several different stages of sleep, and they too occur in cycles. If you are an average sleeper, your sleep cycle is as follows. When you fist drift off into slumber, your eyes will roll about a bit, you temperature will drop slightly, your muscles will relax, and your breathing well slow and become quite regular. Your brain waves slow and become quite regular. Your brain waves slow down a bit too, with the alpha rhythm of rather fast waves 1 sleep. For the next half hour or so, as you relax more and more, you will drift down through stage 2 and stage 3 sleep. The lower your stage of sleep. slower your brain waves will be. Then about 40to 69 minutes after you lose consciousness you will have reached the deepest sleep of all. Your brain will show the large slow waves that are known as the delta rhythm. This is stage 4 sleep. You do not remain at this deep fourth stage all night long, but instead about 80 minutes after you fall into slumber, your brain activity level will increase again slightly. The delta rhythm will disappear, to be replaced by the activity pattern of brain waves. Your eyes will begin to dart around under your closed eyelids as if you were looking at something occurring in front of you. This period of rapid eye movement lasts for some 8 to 15 minutes and is called REM sleep. It is during REM sleep period, your body will soon relax again, your breathing will slip gently back from stage 1 to stage 4 sleep----only to rise once again to the surface of near consciousness some 80 minutes later.
For centuries it has been recognized that mammals and birds differ from other animals in the way they regulate body temperature. Ways of characterizing the difference have become more accurate and meaningful over time, but popular terminology still reflects the old division into “warm-blooded” and “cold-blooded” species; warm-blooded included mammals and birds whereas all other creatures were considered cold-blooded. As more species were studied, it became evident that this classification was inadequate. A fence lizard or a desert iguana—each cold-blooded----usually has a body temperature only a degree or two below that of humans and so is not cold. Therefore the next distinction was made between animals that maintain a constant body temperature, called home0therms, and those whose body temperature varies with their environments, called poikilotherms. But this classification also proved inadequate, because among mammals there are many that vary their body temperatures during hibernation. Furthermore, many invertebrates that live in the depths of the ocean never experience change in the depths of the ocean never experience change in the chill of the deep water, and their body temperatures remain constant.
12.27作文（罗勇） 1、包装 ①书写、习惯 ②格式（如书信右上角的时间）、结构（两头小、中间大、字数分配50-80-50） ↗长句↖ ③选词造句→短句←交错使用（15句，1/3写长句，30字左右，长句后接一两句短句过渡） ↘难句：强调句（最好使） 2、货真价实 ↗情景文字 ①不要跑题（跑题则一半分数以下），审题（三维）→提纲 ↘图或表上的信息 ②内容衔接（思维跨度不要太大）→总述和概述 ↘注意句子完整 ③方法多样性
一、大作文 （一）描绘：描述性语言、可加议论性观点 （二）议述：作者意图、个人评价 （三）总结（好的：预期一下未来；坏的：采取措施防治）/ 例证 具体讲： （一） 描绘：总体背景介绍+细节刻画图或表上的信息 1、背景介绍 例一：人类克隆（试管婴儿 / 一个老婆四个一模一样的老公，“谁才是真的？”） The problem of the use of genetic technologies on human being has [caused/aroused public concern]/[loomed up/cropped up as a burning/challenging topic]. 例二：中国青少年犯罪比率上升（表） In the recent years, China experienced/witnessed/was plagued with an alarming increase in juvenile delinquency. 例三：人和社会的发展与环境的协调（寓意图、对比图） Currently, the topic/phenomenon of environment versus development has been in the limelight. Nowhere is the clash more evident/visible than in China, where the largest population confronts deforestation, pollution and acid rain on a range scale. 2、细节描绘 例：04年作文题 The (a set of) cartoon depicts a vivid scene in which an athlete dripping sweat is rushing to the end. Unquestionably/Undoubtedly/Beyond doubt, he wins the game but it is not the key message conveyed/implied/delivered by the picture. Apparently/Basically, the striking feature is that there is a line marked as both “the start” and “the end”, which means after the player came to the finishing-line, a new race is waiting to him. 另：对于图表描述不光要用上升下降等词，还要使用比较句型结构。 compare with/to …as much as that… more than, less than by 2000, [the number reach the peak/bottom]/[the largest number appeared]. （二） 议述 引言句+分论点、事实信息罗列 如：As a matter of fact, the purpose of the drawer/drawing is to make us [pay high/more attention to…]/[rethink/have a fresh look at…]. 例一：兼职part-time job brainstorming I. Advantages: ↗pocket money ①make money →follow interest ↘tuition fees ↗on one’s own ↗life→make friends ②experience ↘custom, culture ↘work→lay a solid foundation for future career ↘be familiar with new fields II. Disadvantages: ①money: be so young that they are bound to be cheated/be induced to do… ②experience→science and technology accelerate/speed up → invalid ↘hurt/injury/do harm to/endanger III. what should we do? ①a second language ②computer operation and application ③后果degrade one’s academic performance 完整表述： Acquiring knowledge at school without practical work experience is like working on one leg. Occasionally, although a student could attain some experience, nevertheless/yet such experience too frequently is [valid or even harmful]/[a bane rather than a boon]. That is to say, its demerits outweigh merits. Why? This is natural and necessary. Not only may the acceleration of science and technology bring about new tools/skills with each passing day, but also our work circumstances will change as the society develops. The fact that college students must get a good command of a second language as well as master the operation and application of computer requires them not to do part-time job. If they take part-time job, their energy and time will not be enough and their academic will degrade.
12.28作文 例二：出国留学 brainstorming ↗ dream of (doing) 原因（好处）→ the mere way to achieve success ↘ curricula arrangement, teaching method ↓why?/how?/which channel? good learning condition ↓what? up-to-date teaching equipment first-class research facilities world famous professors 坏处：money → tuition fees 而在国内don’t worry about ↘ living expense communication: language and cultural barrier 而在国内parent’s care and support facilitate 例三：盗版问题（最新光盘，四元一张；港台歌曲，十元三盒；流行书刊，一律二折） （乾坤大挪移）Nowadays, the problem of piracy has been in the limelight. According to the cartoon we could find that books, VCDs, tapes and other high-tech products have been copied. When a new product enters into the market, we are bound to discover that its pirated counterpart will soon swarm/flood into the same market. Never in the nation’s history has the problem of piracy been more severe than now. There is no denying that pirated commodities has not only resulted in a great loss to producer /manufacturers, inventors and writers, but also disturb/have a confusion in the market. Why? In that the pirated goods often cost less than the original ones, they enjoy a pretty good selling in spite of their shoddy quality. The genuine ones, however/by contrast, sell poorly. A current investigation/study/ report/survey/poll indicates/manifests/reveals that consumers spend approximately ￥20 billion on the pirated counterparts instead of the genuine ones annually. In addition, such pirated product, especially books, will do harm to/endanger the producers’ reputation due to too many misprinting. （三） 结论 另：养宠物话题 With the quickening pace of modern life and fierce competition in the society, many people feel a sense of loneliness, not only because of the lack of normal communication in the family but also since absence of intercourse among the neighborhood. Cats and dogs or other pets will fill your void. 1、 总结性发言 例：养宠物 [Taking into account all the factors]/[which has been discussed above], we can safely come to a conclusion that keep-pets has both positive and negative influences. What we must do is to make sure that not only are its benefits encouraged and developed/retained but also we have to strive to/attempt to/endeavor to eliminate its unfavorable impacts. 2、 号召与后果 例：腐败现象 It is time that our government/authority should speak out against corruption and take firm/strong/stern action to punish him whoever takes bribes and embezzles funds. For the official corruption [if permitted to continue]/[If let this situation go as it is] will tarnish the government’s popularity/image and may lead to ultimate/terminate downfall. 3、 具体的建议 例：学生吸烟比率上升 In any case, we ought to do more than talk about the rise in student smoking. Our high schools and colleges must bring in some cancer experts/specialists/researchers who run films/slides for students, showing the dreadful consequence caused by cigarette smoking. We can also arrange/schedule visits to hospital wards for lung cancer patients. In short, we should take student smoking seriously.
12.29作文 二、应用文 书信 ↗①语气 / 措辞客气 公务信件→②格式：开头（写明目的）、结尾（期待回音） ↘③词汇 / 语法（言简意赅，长句最多25个字） 另：无论是大作文还是小作文，都不用些标题，如果想写则须注意以下问题： ①实词大写；②字母长度大于等于4个的虚词大写；③第一个单词的位置，不论实词还是虚词都要大写；④动词短语不做标题 补充：1、投诉信（换宿舍） Dec.29th, 2004 Dear Sir or Madam/To whom it may concern/Dear Mr. Dean Zhang, I’m writing to inform you that I wish to moving to a new room next term. I prefer a single room, as I rind the present sharing arrangement inconvenient. I must explain that the reason for dissatisfaction is my roommate’s inconsiderate behavior. For one thing, his friends constantly visit him; for another, he regularly holds noisy parties. In addition, he too often borrows my private things without my permission. Consequently, I find it difficult for me to concentrate on my studies. I’m sure that you will agree that I must move into a room of my own, where I would be far from such distraction. I would be grateful if you would take my requirement into consideration, as well as provide me with a room, preferably not in the same building but as near to college campus as possible. Yours faithfully XXX 2、感谢信（感谢车祸中及时救助你的人） I’m writing to express my heartful gratitude. I’m referring to the unfortunate crash, when I was knocked off my bike by a taxi. But for your timely taking first aid and sending me to a nearby hospital, I fear that the consequence might have been much more serious. The doctor says that my broken leg is healing well, and cuts and bruises will soon be completely better, what’s more, the taxi company agreed to pay my hospital bills. Everyone holds that it is your quick-witted action in the emergency that has led to satisfactory outcome. Although many people talk about the need to be unselfish and to ready to help others, we see few people practicing what they preach. You showed by your selfless action that you are an exception. If there are more people like you, the world would be a much nicer one. 3、求购 / 预定信（为朋友庆祝生日） I’m preparing a birthday party for a friend, and writing o inquire if you restaurant could offer private rooms with catering service. If so, I want to reserve one room for next Friday (oct.16th) from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. The room should be big enough to accommodate more than 50 people comfortably. And the party will be hold in a cocktail style; therefore a majority of us will be standing up for most of the time. So ten chairs are needed in the room. If there isn’t a bar, a drinks table should be set up. For entertainment, Karaoke of Disk jockey may be acceptable. Will you please contact me in two days? You can reach at 13820XXXXXX in the daytime and at 2737XXXX in the night. Thanks for you consideration once more.
12.30翻译（高翼） 一、真题回顾 预测热点：1、战争与和平，反恐 2、资源、能源、环境保护 3、信息及网络技术 4、纳米技术 5、生命科学 二、难度分析 05年难度要比04年难一些 94 99 01 04 05
三、词汇 1、生词 ①构词法 例：95年（72）validate（valid有效的）；（75）underprivileged（privilege特权） 97年（72）entitlement（entitle使有权利）；（73）astrophysicists（astro-天体，宇宙，astrology占星术） 00年（71）centralized（central主要的，中心的）；（74）industrialized（industrial工业的） ②结合上下文（对称位置的单词、词组可做同义推理） 例：94年（71）not so much A as B（另through，because of） 95年（74）qualities品质（可数） 98年（73）balloon-borne球载 99年（75）view as视作（同义see as，regard as） ③跳过不译 2、一词多译 ①结合上下文判断 例：94年第一句school学派 98年（72）clouds宇宙云 99年（73）transfer改变，转变 00年（75）migration人口迁徙，人口流动（不能译作移民，移民是带政治色彩的） ②结合搭配对象 例：95年（75）gross明显的（如果知道“总的”是不正确的，而又不知道应该是什么意思，可跳过不译） 96年（72）establishment机构（74）elegant完美的，对应（75）elegance 97年（73）extend给予，提供 ③从逻辑性上判断 例：94年（74）heaven天空，太空 99年（71）recreated重现 ④词性 例：to better（v. 改善）the condition of the workers we have no time to deliberate（v.思考，考虑）on the issue 3、代词 注意代词的形容词用法与指示代词的区别 例：this（指示性形容词，这个）bag This（指示代词，这）is mine 97年（75）that人们对动物的同情心（注意：当多个代词指定同一内容时，只需译一个） 01年（71）当指代混乱时，要指明所指代内容（注意：如果指代的内容在上下文中不好找，则直接译为这，那，它，它们等） 4、单复数问题 例：98（71）scientists科学家们 四、句子 1、时态 ①将来时，“将”安体现 例：01年（71） ②完成时，“了”字体现 例：01年（72） ③进行时，“正在”体现 例：00年（73） 2、语态，译时可将被动形式变为主动形式 例：96年（73）；99年（73）；97年（73） 如果主语无法补充，而又不能译成被动形式，则需意译 例：95年（72）be regarded…译为“……所必不可少的” 00年（72)be bound up with…本意为“与……捆绑”，此处译为“与……紧密相关”（73）be exposed to…本意为“被置于……下”，此处译为“接触到……” 五、特殊句型与结构 1、more…than… ①beyond超越 例：Her beauty is more than words can describe. ②与其……不如……，more后是“不如”than后是“与其” 例：His works seem more likely a collection of separate scenes than a novel. 2、little/no more than仅仅 例：Of him little is known more than he’s a doctor. 3、nothing else than/but=nothing but只不过是；完全是 例：①What the man said was nothing else but nonsense. “完全是” ②I have done nothing else than finishing my tasks. “只不过是” 4、rather than否定后者肯定前者 例：①He was reading newspaper rather than writing letters. ②He rather than you should be responsible for the loss. 5、not so much A as B与not A but B不同，前者AB均可取，但强调B，后者表不取A取B 6、not possibly表完完全全、根本地否定，“根本不”的意思 例：Their views couldn’t possibly be misunderstood. 7、not…nearly as much as远远不如 例：The earth does not pull the cat to it nearly as much as it pulls a big rock. 8、to say nothing of=not to speak of=not to mention表加 例：①She takes singing and dancing lesson, not to speak of swimming. ②At that moment, he could not afford food, not to speak of luxuries. 9、all but后加形容词则表almost；后加名词则表all except 例：①Failure, for them, become all but impossible. ②All but little children thought the trip was exciting. 10、other than除掉，不同于 例：Reactions other than desired ones often happen. 11、not…but…不是……而是…… 12、as well as注意并列的对象 例：①He agrees with you as well as I. 表He与I的并列 ②He agrees with you as well as me. 表you与me的并列 六、其他 没有必要通读全文，遇到代词和一词多译的情况要结合上下文；此外出现的人名地名需要译的，约定的，如纽约，牛顿要写成规范的中文，对于非约定的，可根据读音编个中文然后后面加括号附上英文。 附：学科中英文名称对照表 Aeronautical and astronautically Engineering：航空和航天工程 Aerodynamics：空气动力学 Aesthetics：美学 Algebra：代数学 Anthropology：人类学 Archaeology：考古学 Architecture：建筑学 Astronomy：天文学 Biology and bioengineering：生物学和生物工程 Business and management：商业与管理 Chemistry and chemical engineering：化学和化学工程 Civil and environmental engineering：土木和环境工程 Computer science：计算机科学 Dynamics：力学 Earth and atmospheric sciences：地球和大气科学 Ecology：生态学 Economics：经济学 Educational technology：教育科技 Electrical engineering：电机工程 Elementary-particle physics基本粒子物理学 Environment and energy：环境和能源 Ethnics：伦理学 Geochemistry：地球化学 Geography：地理学 Geology：地质学 Geophysics：地球物理 Geometry：几何学 Health physics：保健物理学 Humanities：人文学科 Hydrodynamics：流体力学 Journalism：新闻学 Languages and literature：语言与文学 Libraries：图书馆学 Linear algebra：线性代数 Linguistics语言学 Logistics：物流学 Media arts and sciences：媒体艺术与科学 Meteorology：气象学 Materials sciences and engineering：材料科学与工程 Mechanical engineering：机械工程 Medical sciences：医学 Nanoscience and nanotechnology：纳米科技 Nuclear engineering：核子工程 Oceanography and ocean engineering：海洋学和海洋工程 Operational research：运筹学 Optics：光学 Philosophy：哲学 Physiology：生理学 Political science：政治学 Robotics and artificial intelligence：机器人与人工智能 Statistics：统计学 Social sciences：社会科学 Sociology：社会学 System engineering：系统工程 Thermodynamics：热力学 Urban studies and planning：城市研究与规划 Zoology：动物学
12.31七选五（高翼） 解题技巧： 1、就近原则寻找信息线索； 2、选项中出现时间年代时，往往要注意与原文中年代的前后对应关系； 3、选项中出现代词时，往往该选项不能放在首句，要注意指代成立的条件。 4、绝对选项常是干扰项，意思太泛太窄要小心； 5、警惕无关离题词，两项相近有答案； 6、选项对比原文时，与原文重复或同义改写的字越多的往往就是正确选项； 7、总体观、相互补，做题不用按顺序，选先做易后做难，莫忘近邻上下文； 8、放在段尾的名字有时也会有提示词：①因果连词；②总结性连词；③转折性连词
1.9阅读（魏越越） 一、定位 1、题干选项 ①数字、年代 ②大写字母 ③生僻且复杂的词（专业词汇） ④中心概念（相关、相近） 一般前三种情况出现的较多 2、顺序原则：即出题顺序与文章段落一般情况下是一直的，但也有例外。 二、题型 1、词汇题 问法：The word/phrase “...”（line … paragraph …）most probably was … ①单词：A超纲词，考本意 B常见词，考转意；②短语：全部考转意 做法：①返回原文，找到核心词；②注意核心词附近相同词性的内容；③结合上下文，注意同位语，特别标点，定语从句及前后缀 注意：短语题中字面意思的选项永远是错的 另：相邻两句间关系：①转折②并列或顺接 例题：94.66、94.57、95.57、94.51、01.69、02.47、03.43、98.52 关于词汇题要考的词： 白词（即认识的） 灰词（为不考本意的词） 以下为灰词的总结！ import重要性、意义、含义 understand知性 reason理性 reasoning推理 knowledge知道、知晓 term条件；措辞 industry产业 law法规、规则 act法案 community社会 agent动因 productivity经济 implication影响（本义：暗示） code法则，准则 politics斗争，手腕 tip①指导，忠告②插图，插页 might力量 sport（动）夸耀 exercise（动）施加影响 word（名）消息；（动）措辞 measure法案 leave（名）休假；（动）使得，让……（如leave the window open） passage通过 spell（名）=period keep（名）生计 黑词（即不认识的） 推断方法： ①下定义，标志词：A is/means/refers to… ②同位语：A, one of …. ③近义词：A or B（A与B不一定是近义词，可能毫不相关） A, or B、A and B（A与B绝对是近义词） ④解释：A is that is… （后一个is后面的内容是对A的解释）/That is…（是对上一句尾句名词的解释） ⑤标点符号（）和—— ⑥构词法（in-只有三对不表相反义，如下：） flammable可燃的inflammable易燃 valuable有价值的invaluable无价值的 ravel解开，松开irravel与ravel同义（咪咪没查到这个单词） ⑦定语从句 ⑧前后对比，如： on the other hand；contras；on the contrary；转折词 ⑨常识 ⑩专业词汇 2、举例题 问法：The example of “…” in the passage is used to … When mentioning “…”, the author is talking about 结论是例子所服务的对象，例子所说明的道理 做法：结合例子，精读例子前面一句话 注意：例子里的细节信息不能出现在正确选项里 例：94.63、04.53 另：①如果出现一个结论，下面有A、B、C、D四个顺序出现的例子，问D例子说明了什么。也就是说为结论服务的例子不止一个时，要在第一个例子里面找结论，这个结论而往往是段首句。②再如问A（第16行）与B（第22行）两个例子是为了说明什么，此是A与B必服务于一个结论，因此A与B之间的内容不必看，直接找A前面的句子。 窍门：当support/show/reveal/demonstrate/strengthen出现时看看是否是结论中的某个词的同义变换 3主题题 问法：mainly discuss/mainly about/best title不论题目出现在什么位置，一定要最后做 做法：①综合各段首句，如果第一段有转折词，重点往往在转折词后面；②名词性词组和文章的高频词汇是主体内容；如；③若文章有主题句，则与主题句相对应的为正确答案，对于A问题答案型：如01.59；B花开两朵型：文章有两个核心概念，围绕展开论述，又分为：a并进型：在第一段提出两个核心概念，下面并重地对两个核心概念进行论述，要找两个概念间的区别和联系，如94.54；b大花小花型：重点找大花（从文章篇幅就能看出）。 注意：①首段陷阱，如94.58、94.61、98.70；②逆向思维，两个选项相似的进行排除；③主题干扰选项：A局部信息：选项内容小于文章内容 B范围过宽，选项内容远大于文章内容 例：96.66、00.59、02.45 4指代题 问法：it/they/them 做法：①返回原文，找出出题的指代词；②向上搜索，找最近的名词性短语或句子；③将找到的词、词组或句子替换为该指代词，看其意思是否通畅；④将找到的词、词组或句子与四个选项相比较，找出最佳答案 例：95.59 注意：要半个分句半个分句地（即以逗号为准）向上找对应成份 5细节题 定位：同义变换：换同义词；句式 注意：绝对化语言往往是错误选项（其他题目也适应），没有原文根据的绝对化语言为错误答案①最高级：-est，most，least，顺序最高级first，last，at most；②唯一性：only，sole(ly)，unique(ly)，exclusive(ly)，alone 例：98.65、97.11、00.57 6态度题 I全文态度，问法：From the test, we can see that the writer seems … II局部态度：问法：Sb.’s attitude toward sth./sb. Is … 做法：对于I全文态度，分析各段首句，总结作者表态度的动词、形容词或副词；对于II局部态度题，定位核心词在原文中出现的位置，在其附近寻找带有感情色彩的动词、形容词或副词，如：97.54、03.52、03.58、04.58 表态度词的总结： ①语气弱，观点不明确 light-hearted轻松的 jocular开玩笑的 facetious嘻皮笑脸的 indifference漠不关心的 impassive同上 ambivalence模棱两开的 suspicious怀疑的 puzzling困惑的 ②语气过重 过坏： condemnation咒骂 indignant愤怒 envious妒嫉 offensive令人讨厌的 insincere不忠诚的 callous冷漠无情的 defiance藐视 derision嘲笑的 scornful鄙视的 cynical愤世嫉俗的 spiteful痛恨的 bias偏见的 disgusting令人恶心的 过好： fervent狂热 adulatory拍马屁 ③中性词： neutral中立的（选项中的“吴孟达”） cautious小心的，慬慎的 ④观点明确的词语 critical批评的 approve/disapprove赞同的/不赞同的 support支持的 negative/positive负面的/积极的 ⑤客观性词 objective impartial 做法：①看选项，排除过于轻描淡写、态度观点不明确的态度词；②排除语气过重的态度词；③排除相近选项；④保留观点明确的词、客观性词和中性词；⑤看题干确定感情态度的指向，再判断该的性质；⑥最后做出选择先后顺序：客观、支持、反对、中性 例：97.70、98.62、99.54 7推理题 问法：learn，infer，imply，suggest，conclude，true or false 做法：不许推理！一推就错。按细节题的做法 错误选项的特点：①与原文矛盾；②原文中没有出现过的内容；③把原文单词重新组合使语义剧变 正确选项的特点：原文中某句话的同义变换 例：95.62、97.56、97.62、99.58、99.63.66、01.65、02.52 补充：微观阅读法 1、看标点符号：破折号（——），冒号（：），分号（；） 2、抓句子主干 3、注意对照词： ①namely，in other words，likewise，that is to say ②转折词： 显性：but，yet，however，on the other hand，others，in contrast，nevertheless，on the contrary…… 隐性：while，(al)though，despite，whereas（前面四个出现时，重点是这词后面的那个分句），the trouble is，the problem is，what is harder to do，is not，does not…… ③表结果的连词：thus，consequence…… ④表递进：furthermore，in addition to，add to…… 4、出题点： ①列举句；②举例，打比喻；③某人物的论断；④转折处；⑤复杂句；⑥因果朵；⑦特殊标点；⑧段首段尾句 新东方100句涵盖所有考研词汇
新东方学校 1、 On this area of the sea, the pandas like to drink tea with peas
in soda.在海里的这个地区，熊猫们喜欢就着苏打碗豆喝茶。 31、 Our choice of justice has led to the abundant service of juice
and device of attendance.我们的正义选择导致了丰富的汁液供应及照看设计。
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