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TEXT B There is a great concern in Europe and North America about declining standards of literacy in schools. In Britain, the fact that 30 percent of 16 year old have a reading age of 14 or less has helped to prompt massive educational changes. The development of literacy has far-reaching effects on general intellectual development and thus anything which impedes the development of literacy is a serious mather for us all. So the hunt is on for the cause of the decline in literacy. The search so far has forced on socioeconomic factors, or the effectiveness of "traditional" versus "modern" teaching techniques The fruitless search for the cause of the increase in illiteracy is a tragic example of file saying "They can’t see the wood for the trees". When teachers use picture books, they are simply continuing a long-established tradition that is accepted without question. And for the past two decades, illustrations in reading primers have become increasingly detailed and obtrusive, while language has become impoverished -- sometimes to the point of extinction. Amazingly, there is virtually no empirical evidence to support the use of illustrations in teaching reading. On the contrary, a great deal of empirical evidence shows that pictures interfere in a damaging way with all aspects of learning to read. Despite this, from North America to the Antipodes, the first books that many school children receive are totally without text. A teacher’s main concern is to help young beginning readers to develop not only the ability to recognize words, but the skills necessary to understand what these words mean. Even if a child is able to read aloud fluently, he or she may not be able to undersdand much of it: this is called "barking at text". The teacher’s task of improving comprehension is made harder by influences outisde the classroom. But the adverse effects of such things as television, video games, or limited language experiences at home, can be offset by experiencing "rich" language at school. Instead, it is not unusual for a book of 30 or more pages to have only one sentence full of repetitive phrases. The artwork is often marvellous, but the pictures make the language redundant, and the children have no need to imagine anything when they read such books. Looking at a picture actively prevents children younger than nine from creating a mental image, and can make it difficult for older children. In order to learn how to comprehend, they need to practise making their own meaning in response to text. They need to have their innate powers of imagination trained. As they grow older, many children turn aside from books without pictures, and it is a situation made more serious as our culture becomes more visual. It is hard to wean children off picture books when pictures have played a major part throughout their formative reading experiences, and when there is competition for their attention from so many other sources of entertainment. The least intelligent are most vulnerable, but tests show that even intelligent children are being affected. The response of educators has been to extend use of pictures in books and to simplify the language, even at senior levels. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge recently held joint conferences to discuss the noticeably rapid decline in literacy among their undergraduates. Pictures are also used to help motivate children to read bacause they are beautiful and eyecatching. But motivation to read should be provided by listening to stories well read, where children imagine in response to the story. Then, as they start to read, they have this experience to help them understand the language. If we present pictures to save children the trouble of developing these creative skills, then I think we are making a great mistake. Academic journals ranging from educational research, psychology, language learning, psycholinguistics, and so on cite experiments which demonstrate how detrimental pictures are for beginner readers. Here is a brief selection: The research results of the Canadian educationalist Dalt Willows were clear and consistent pictures affected speed and accuracy and the closer the pictures were to the Words. the slower and more inaccurate the child’s reading became. She claims that when children come to a word they already know, then the pictures are unnecessary and distracting. If they do now know a word and look to the pictures which are not closely related to the meaning of the word they are trying to understand. Jay Samuels, an American psychologist, found that poor readers given no pictures learnt significantly more words than those learning to read with books with pictures. He examined the work of other researchers who reported problems with the use of pictures and who had found that a word without a picture was superior to a word plus a picture. When children were given words and pictures, those who seemed to ignore the pictures and pointed at the words than children who pointed at the pictures, but they still learnt fewer words than the children who had no illustrated stimuli at all. The text suggests that ______.

A. pictures in books should be less detailed
B. pictures can slow down reading progress
C. picture books are best used with younger readers
D. pictures make modern books too expensive

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He was a Canadian, an attorney, he said, still practicing in Winnipeg. But he’d been spending April in Gatlinburg for almost 50 years. He and his wife would come with their son and daughter and explore the mountains on horseback, getting to know every scenic vantage point of Mount Le Conte, every turn in the bumbling Little Pigeon River. After the son Rad died and after the daughter was grown, Mr. B and his wife had kept up their visits. And he still continued to make the annual trek even though his wife had died three years ago. The mountains and the valley were touchstones for him, sites of pleasant memories that were revived with each visit. "I’ve had a love of my own", he said, his eyes misting. He asked detailed questions about our wedding and told us in detail of his own, some 60 year earlier. During brief periods when a conversational lapse threatened, he softly hummed "Hello, Young Lovers", the song from The King and Ⅰ. That night he sat alone during dinner, careful, he later told us, not to "get in love’s way". But he glanced often in our direction, and we knew he was not alone; he was deep in reverie, dining with his own true love.

TEXT A Bermard Bailyn has recently reinterpreted the early history of the United States by applying new social research findings on the experiences of European migrants. In his reinterpretation, migration becomes the organizing principle for rewriting the history of preindustrial North America. His approach rests on four separate propositions. The first of these asserts that residents of early modern England moved regularly about their countryside; migrating to the New World was simply a "natural spillover". Although at first the colonies held little positive attraction for the English -- they would rather have stayed home -- by the eighteenth century people increasingly migrated to America because they regarded it as the land of opportunity. Secondly, Bailyn holds that, contrary to the notion that used to flourish in American history textbooks, there was never a typical New World community. For example, the economic and demographic character of early New England towns varied considerably. Bailyn’s third proposition suggests two general patterns prevailing among the many thousand migrants: one group came as indentured servants, another came to acquire land. Surprisingly, Bailyn suggests that those who recruited indentured servants were the driving forces of transatlantic migration. These colonial entrepreneurs helped determine the social character of people who came to preindustrial North America. At first, thousands of unskilled laborers were recruited; by the 1730’s, however, American employers demanded skilled artisans. Finally, Bailyn argues that the colonies were a haft-civilized hinterland of the European culture system. He is undoubtedly correct to insist that the colonies were part of an Anglo-American empire. But to divide the empire into English core and colonial perphery, as Bailyn does, devalues the achievements of colonial culture, as Bailyn claims, that high culture in the colonies never matched that in England. But what of seventeenth-century New England, where the settlers created effective laws, built a distinguished university, and published books Bailyn might respond that New England was exceptional. However, the ideas and institutions developed by New England Puritans had powerful effects on North American culture. Although Bailyn goes on to apply his approach to some thousands of indentured servants who migrated just prior to the revolution, he fails to link their experience with the political development of the United States. Evidence presented in his work suggests how we might make such a connection. These indentured servants were treated as slaves for the period during which they had sold their time to American employers. It is not surprising that as soon as they served their time they passed up good wages in the cities and headed west to ensure their personal independence by acquiring land. Thus, it is in the west that a peculiarly American political culture began, among colonists who were suspicious of authority and intensely antiaristocrafic. According to the passage, Bailyn and the author agree on which of the following statements about the culture of colonial New England

A. High culture of New England never equaled the high culture of England.
B. The colonists imitated the high culture of England, and did not develop a culture that was uniquely their own.
C. The Southern colonies were greatly influenced by the high culture of New England.
D. New England communities were able to treat laws and build a university, but unable to create anything innovative in the arts.

Faith Hill was ______.

A. a named favorite musician
B. the favorite motion picture actor
C. the favorite dramatic actor
D. the favorite comic actor

TEXT E The magnet for tourists, the symbol of the city, Manhattan is probably the most deceptive of the boroughs to outsiders who generally limit themsevles to quick looks at the Theater District around Times Square (moving gingerly past the seediness of 42nd Street west of Broadway), the shopping promenade of Fifth Avenue, the munificence of the temples of finance on and near Wall Street, the eccentricities of bohemian life in the East Village and Soho, the exotica of Chinatown, or the special flavours of Little Italy and Harlem. At first glance, Manhattan is only the city of skyscrapers, glaring lights, and frenzied pace, an island of the strange, the neurotic, and the avantgarde. Crammed into its 23 square miles (57 square kilometres) are more than 1,400,000 residents. Its waterfront, formed by the Harlem, East, and Hudson rivers, is 43 miles (69 Kilometres ) in length, but only scattered groups of slum children swim in the pollution; and the few fisherment find only scanty catches. To the residents of the island, each section is a hometown. Those who live in the West 70s, 80s, and 90s -- the Upper West Side, though streets run above 200 at the northern tip -- know their neighbourhoods as a cosmopolitan mixture of languages, occupations, and income levels. Someone says is the origin of much of the chaos of the party. On the Upper East Side, east of Central Park, is a different mixture, generally more affluent. The Chelsea area of the West 20s, with its tenements, renovated brownstones, and huge cooperatives built by labour unions, has a more sedate pace than the East Village and Soho (derived from "south of Houston Street"), comprising much of the old Lower East Side and containing the city’s major concentration of stuggling writers and artists. Greenwich Village, the old centre of bohemian life, has become a favourite dwelling place for affluent professionals and successful authors and artists. Harlem means more than just tenements, housing projects, and black politics. It means a vibrant street life ranging from sports to stoop seminars, and it is spiced with luxury apartment houses with doormen, inhabited almost entirely by blacks. Yorkville, in the East 80s, retains pockets of Czech, Hungarian, and German cultures in a clash of old tenements and towering luxury apartment houses. The neighbourhood taverns of the Irish proliferate through Inwood at the northernmost part of the island, where the borough of Manhattan spills over the harlem River to encompass an enclave of a few square blocks within mainland Bronx. In Inwood lie manhattan’s few remaining forested acres, and on open recreation areas the Irish keep alive their national sports of hurling and Gaelic football -- much as courts are maintained for bocciball games in Little Italy many miles to the south, On Morningside Heights around Columbia University, the civilities of the academic world overlook the bleak stretches of harlem below and to the east and north. Even fantastic Lower Manhattan, from the Battery, with its ferry slips at the island’s tip, to City Halls, has begun taking on the atmosphere of a neighbourhood. Apartment houses have gone up in the vicinity of City Hall, and the overwhelming skyscraper jungle around Wall Street, which is home to hundreds of financial and insurance institutions and some of the nation’s largest banks, exerts international power. According to this passage, Manhattan is ______.

A. the origin of much of the chaos of the Democratic Party
B. nothing but a mixture of languages, occupations, and income levels
C. short of affluent professionals
D. proud of the overwhelming skyscraper jungle around Wall Street

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