M: Hi, Ms. Rowling. How old were you when you started to write, and what was your first bookW: I wrote my first finished story when I was about 6. It was about a small animal, a rabbit I mean, and I’ve been writing ever since.M: Why did you choose to be an authorW: If someone asked me how to achieve happiness, step one would be finding out what you love doing most and step two would be finding someone to pay you to do it. I consider myself very lucky indeed to be able to support myself by writing.M: Do you have any plans to write books for adultsW: My first two novels were for adults. I suppose I might write another one, hut I never really imagine a target audience when I’m writing. The ideas come first, so it really depends on the idea that grabs me next!M: Where did the ideas for the Harry Potter books come fromW: I’ve no idea where the ideas come from and I hope I never find out, it would spoil my excitement if it turned out I just have a funny little wrinkle on the surface of my brain which makes me think about invisible train platforms.M: How do you come up with the names of your charactersW: I invented some of the names in the Harry books, but I also collect strange names. I’ve gotten them from medieval saints, maps, dictionaries, plants, war memorials, and people I’ve met !M: Oh, you are really resourceful. What do we learn from the conversation about Ms. Rowling’s first book().
A. It was about animal.
B. It took her six years to write.
C. It was adapted from a fairy tale.
D. It was about a little girl and her pet.
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A report consistently brought back by visitors to the US is how friendly, courteous and helpful most Americans were to them. To be fair, this observation is also frequently made of Canada and Canadians, and should best be considered North American. There are, of course, exceptions. Small-minded officials, rude waiters, and ill-mannered taxi drivers are hardly unknown in the US. Yet it is an observation made so frequently that it deserves comment. For a long period of time and in many parts of the country, a traveler was a welcome break in an otherwise dull existence.Dullness and loneliness were common problems of the families who generally lived distant from one another. Strangers and travelers were welcome sources of diversion, and brought news of the outside world. The harsh realities of the frontier also shaped this tradition of hospitality.Someone traveling alone, if hungry, injured, or ill, often had nowhere to turn except to the nearest cabin or settlement. It was not a matter of choice for the traveler or merely a charitable impulse on the part of the settlers. It reflected the harshness of daily life: if you didn’t take in the stranger or take care of him, there was no one else who would. And someday, remember, you might be in the same situation. Today there are many charitable organizations which specialize in helping the weary traveler. Yet, the old tradition of hospitality to strangers is still very strong in the US, especially in the smaller cities and towns away from the busy tourist trails. "I was just traveling through, got talking with this American, and pretty soon he invited me home for dinner-amazing. " Such observations reported by visitors to the US are not uncommon, but are not always understood properly.The casual friendliness of many Americans should be interpreted neither as superficial nor as artificial, but as the result of a historically developed cultural tradition. As is true of any developed society, in America a complex set of cultural signals, assumptions, and conventions underlies all social interrelationships. And, of course, speaking a language does not necessarily mean that someone understands social and cultural patterns. Visitors who fail to "translate" cultural meanings properly often draw wrong conclusions. For example, when an American uses the word "friend", the cultural implications of the word may be quite different from those it has in the visitor’s language and culture. It takes more than a brief encounter on a bus to distinguish between courteous convention and individual interest. Yet, being friendly is a virtue that many Americans value highly and expect from both neighbors and strangers. Families in frontier settlements used to entertain strangers().
A. to improve their hard life
B. in view of their long-distance travel
C. to add some flavor to their own daily life
D. out of a charitable impulse
Every profession or trade, every art, and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to designate things or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in nomenclature. Such special dialects or jargons, are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by the devotees of the particular science or art, they have precision of a mathematical formula. Besides, they save time, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, they are rather on the outskirts of the English language than actually within its borders. Different occupations, however, differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts and other vocations, such as fanning and fishing, which have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very fibers of our language. Hence, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood, than most other technicalities. The special dialects of law, in their older strata, become pretty familiar to cultivated persons, and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet, every vocation still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has been much increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned with indifference when they have served their turn. Most of the new coinages are confined to special discussions and seldom get into general literature or conversation. Yet, no profession is nowadays, as all professions once were, a closed guild. The lawyer, the physician, the man of science, and the cleric associates freely with his fellow creatures, and does not meet them in a merely professional way. Furthermore, what is called popular science makes everybody acquainted with modem views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported in the newspapers, and everybody is soon talking about it--as in the case of the Roentgen rays and wireless telegraphy. Thus, our common speech is always taking up new technical terms and making them commonplace. What does the passage seem to imply
A. The English language is always becoming larger and larger.
B. The words of the English language are always changing.
C. One can never be sure of what a word means without consulting an expert.
D. Technical terms in most nonscientific fields have little chance of becoming part of the main body of the language in these scientific days.
Every profession or trade, every art, and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to designate things or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in nomenclature. Such special dialects or jargons, are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by the devotees of the particular science or art, they have precision of a mathematical formula. Besides, they save time, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, they are rather on the outskirts of the English language than actually within its borders. Different occupations, however, differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts and other vocations, such as fanning and fishing, which have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very fibers of our language. Hence, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood, than most other technicalities. The special dialects of law, in their older strata, become pretty familiar to cultivated persons, and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet, every vocation still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has been much increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned with indifference when they have served their turn. Most of the new coinages are confined to special discussions and seldom get into general literature or conversation. Yet, no profession is nowadays, as all professions once were, a closed guild. The lawyer, the physician, the man of science, and the cleric associates freely with his fellow creatures, and does not meet them in a merely professional way. Furthermore, what is called popular science makes everybody acquainted with modem views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported in the newspapers, and everybody is soon talking about it--as in the case of the Roentgen rays and wireless telegraphy. Thus, our common speech is always taking up new technical terms and making them commonplace. When the author refers to professions as no longer being "closed guilds", he means that______.
A. it is much easier to become a professional today than it was in the past
B. there is more social intercourse between professionals and others
C. popular science has told their secrets to the world
D. anyone can now understand anything in a profession
When prehistoric man arrived in new parts of the world, something strange happened to the large animals. They suddenly became extinct. Smaller species survived. The large, slow-growing animals were easy game, and were quickly hunted to extinction. Now something similar could be happening in the oceans.That the seas are being over fished has been known for years. What researchers such as Ransom Myers and Boris Worm have shown is just how fast things are changing. They have looked at half a century of data from fisheries around the world. Their methods do not attempt to estimate the actual biomass (the amount of living biological matter) of fish species in particular parts of the ocean, but rather changes in that biomass over time. According to their latest paper published in Nature, the biomass of large predators (animals that kill and eat other animals) in a new fishery is reduced on average by 80% within 15 years of the start of exploitation. In some long-fished areas, it has halved again since then.Dr. Worm acknowledges that these figures are conservative. One reason for this is that fishing technology has improved. Today’s vessels can find their prey using satellites and sonar, which were not available 50 years ago. That means a higher proportion of what is in the sea is being caught, so the real difference between present and past is likely to be worse than the one recorded by changes in catch sizes. In the early days, too, longlines would have been more saturated with fish. Some individuals would therefore not have been caught, since no baited hooks would have been available to trap them, leading to an underestimate of fish stocks in the past. Furthermore, in the early days of longline fishing, a lot of fish were lost to sharks after they had been hooked. That is no longer a problem, because there are fewer sharks around now.Dr. Myers and Dr. Worm argue that their work gives a correct baseline, which future management efforts must take into account. They believe the data support an idea current among marine biologists, that of the "shifting baseline. " The notion is that people have failed to detect the massive changes which have happened in the ocean because they have been looking back only a relatively short time into the past. That matters because theory suggests that the maximum sustainable yield that can be cropped from a fishery comes when the biomass of a target species is about 50% of its original levels. Most fisheries are well below that, which is a bad way to do business. By saying "these figures are conservative" (Line 1, paragraph 3), Dr. Worm means that ().
A. fishing technology has improved rapidly
B. the catch sizes are actually smaller than recorded
C. the marine biomass has suffered a greater loss
D. the data collected so far are out of date