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Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that senior women professors in the institute’s school of science had lower salaries and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did. Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up elsewhere. One study—conducted in Sweden, of all places—showed that female medical-research scientists had to be twice as good as men to win research grants. These pieces of work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and female scientists at British universities.Sara Connolly, a researcher at the University of East Anglia’s school of economics, has been analyzing the results of a survey of over 7,000 scientists and she has just presented her findings at this year’s meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is around £ 1,500 ($2,850) a year.That is not, of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is that the courses of men’s and women’s lives mean the gap is caused by something else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr. Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over £ 4,000 a year more than female ones.To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr. Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained, and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to 77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23% gap in pay, which Dr. Connolly attributes to discrimination.Besides pay, her study also looked at the " glass-ceiling" effect—namely that at all stages of a woman’s career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman to settle into a professorial chair.Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr. Connolly’s compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of their male counterparts, than do their sisters in industry or research institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words, delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia does. Which of the followings can be attributed to Dr. Connolly’s study()

A. Pay discrimination between male and female scientists
B. Fewer resources for research by women scientists
C. The super qualities possessed by male scientists
D. The role of analyzing the results of a survey

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The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is becoming mature. A man reaches the mature (1) of his reasoning powers and mental faculties (2) before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen. And then, too, in the case of woman, it is the only reason of a sort--very mean in its (3) . That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing (4) but what is quite close to them, (5) fast to the present moment, taking appearance for (6) , and preferring (7) to matters of the first importance. For it is (8) his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, (9) the brute, but looks about him and considers the past and the future; and this is the origin of (10) , as well as that of care and anxiety which so many people (11) Both the advantages and the disadvantages, which this (12) , are (13) in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted, (14) , while she has an immediate understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of (15) is narrow and does not reach to what is (16) ; so that things which are absent, or past, or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is the reason why women are inclined to be (17) and sometimes carry their desire to a (18) that borders upon madness. In their hearts, women think it is men’s business to earn money and theirs to spend it--if possible during their husband’s life, (19) , at any rate, after his death. The very fact that their husband hands them (20) his earnings for purposes of housekeeping strengthens them in this belief. 2()

A. barely
B. scarcely
C. rarely
D. hardly

The marvelous telephone and television network that has now enmeshed the whole world, making all men neighbors, cannot be extended into space. It will never be possible to converse with anyone on another planet. Even with today’s radio equipment, the messages will take minutes—sometimes hours—on their journey, because radio and light waves travel at the same limited speed of 186, 000 miles a second.Twenty years from now you will be able to listen to a friend on Mars, but the words you hear will have left his mouth at least three minutes earlier, and your reply will take a corresponding time to reach him. In such circumstances, an exchange of verbal messages is possible—but not a conversation.To a culture which has come to take instantaneous communication for granted, as part of the very structure of civilized life, this "time barrier" may have a profound psychological impact. It will be a perpetual reminder of universal laws and limitations against which not all our technology can ever prevail. For it seems as certain as anything can be that no signal--still less any material object—can ever travel faster than light.The velocity of light is the ultimate speed limit, being part of the very, structure of space and time. Within the narrow confines of the solar system, it will not handicap us too severely. At the worst, these will amount to twenty hours—the time it takes a radio signal to span the orbit of Pluto, the outer-most planet.It is when we move out beyond the confines of the solar system that we come face to face with an altogether new order of cosmic reality. Even today, many otherwise educated men—like those savages who can count to three but lump together all numbers beyond four—cannot grasp the profound distinction between solar and stellar space. The first is the space enclosing our neighboring worlds, the planets; the second is that which embraces those distant suns, the stars, and it is literally millions of times greater. There is no such abrupt change of scale in the terrestrial affairs.Many conservative scientists, appalled by these cosmic gulfs, have denied that they can ever be crossed. Some people never learn ; those who sixty years ago scoffed at the possibility of flight, and ten years ago laughed at the idea of travel to the planets, are now quite sure that the stars will always be beyond our reach. And again they are wrong, for they have failed to grasp the great lesson of our age— that if something is possible in theory, and no fundamental scientific laws oppose its realization, then sooner or later it will be achieved.One day we shall discover a really efficient means of propelling our space vehicles. Every technical device is always developed to its limit and the ultimate speed for spaceships is the velocity of light. They will never reach that goal, but they will get very near it. And then the nearest star will be less than five years voyaging from the earth. For light to travel across the solar system, it will take()

A. a year
B. nearly a day
C. two months
D. thirty minutes

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is becoming mature. A man reaches the mature (1) of his reasoning powers and mental faculties (2) before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen. And then, too, in the case of woman, it is the only reason of a sort--very mean in its (3) . That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing (4) but what is quite close to them, (5) fast to the present moment, taking appearance for (6) , and preferring (7) to matters of the first importance. For it is (8) his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, (9) the brute, but looks about him and considers the past and the future; and this is the origin of (10) , as well as that of care and anxiety which so many people (11) Both the advantages and the disadvantages, which this (12) , are (13) in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted, (14) , while she has an immediate understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of (15) is narrow and does not reach to what is (16) ; so that things which are absent, or past, or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is the reason why women are inclined to be (17) and sometimes carry their desire to a (18) that borders upon madness. In their hearts, women think it is men’s business to earn money and theirs to spend it--if possible during their husband’s life, (19) , at any rate, after his death. The very fact that their husband hands them (20) his earnings for purposes of housekeeping strengthens them in this belief. 6()

A. fancy
B. practice
C. reality
D. illusion

People have good reason to care about the welfare of animals. Ever since the Enlightenment, their treatment has been seen as a measure of mankind’s humanity. It is no coincidence that William Wilberforce and Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, two leaders of the movement to abolish the slave trade, helped found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the 1820s. An increasing number of people go further: mankind has a duty not to cause pain to animals that have the capacity to suffer. Both views have led people gradually to extend treatment once reserved for mankind to other species.But when everyday lives are measured against such principles, they are fraught with contradictions. Those who would never dream of caging their cats and dogs guzzle bacon and eggs from ghastly factory farms. The abattoir and the cattle truck are secret places safely hidden from the meat-eater’s gaze and the child’s story book. Plenty of people who denounce the fur-trade (much of which is from farmed animals) quite happily wear leather (also from farmed animals).Perhaps the inconsistency is understandable. After hundreds of years of thinking about it, people cannot agree on a system of rights for each other, so the ground is bound to get shakier still when animals are included. The trouble is that confusion and contradiction open the way to the extremist. And because scientific research is remote from most people’s lives, it is particularly vulnerable to their campaigns.In fact, science should be the last target, wherever you draw the boundaries of animal welfare. For one thing, there is rarely an alternative to using animals in research. If there were, scientists would grasp it, because animal research is expensive and encircled by regulations. Animal research is also for a higher purpose than a full belly or an elegant outfit. The world needs new medicines and surgical procedures just as it needs the unknowable fruits of pure research.And science is, by and large, kind to its animals. The couple of million (mainly rats and mice) that die in Britain’s laboratories are far better looked- after and far more humanely killed than the billion or so (mainly chickens ) on Britain’s farms. Indeed, if Darley Oaks makes up its loss of guinea pigs with turkeys or dairy cows, you can be fairly sure animal welfare in Britain has just taken a step backwards. The first paragraph is written to()

A. put forward sound reason to care about the welfare of animals
B. emphasize the glory of the Enlightenment
C. introduce the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
D. provide background knowledge for the discussion to be expanded

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