Passage One We find that bright children are rarely held back by mixed-ability teaching. On the contrary, both their knowledge and experience are enriched.We feel that there are many disadvantages in streaming( 把…按能力分班)pupils.It does not take into account the fact that children develop at different rates. It can have a bad effect on both the bright and the not-so-bright child.After all, it can be quite discouraging to be at the bottom of the top grade! Besides, it is rather unreal to grade people just according to their intellectual ability.This is only one aspect of their total personality.We are concerned to develop the abilities of all our pupils to the full, not just their academic ability.We also value personal qualities and social skills and we find that mixed-ability teaching contributes to all these aspects of learning. In our classrooms, we work in various ways. The pupils often work in groups: this gives them the opportunity to learn to cooperate, to share, and to develop their leadership skills.They also learn how to cope with personal problems as well as learning how to think, to make decisions, to analyze and evaluate, and to communicate effectively.The pupils learn from each other as well as from the teacher. Sometimes the pupils work in pairs;sometimes they work on individual tasks and assignments, and they can do this at their own speed.They also have some formal class teaching when this is appropriate.We encourage our pupils to use the library, and we teach them the skills they need in order to do this efficiently.An advanced pupil can do advanced work;it does not matter what age the child is.We expect our pupils to do their best, not their least, and we give them every encouragement to attain this goal. The writer’s purpose in writing this passage is to ( ).
A. argue for teaching bright and not-so-bright pupils in the same class
B. recommend pair work and group work for classroom activities
C. offer advice on the proper use of the library
D. emphasize the importance of appropriate formal classroom teaching
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Passage Four Throughout the past century humanity did everything in its power to control nature. We dammed earth’s rivers, chopped down the forests and exhausted the soils. Burning up fuels, we pumped a great deal of greenhouse gases into the air, altering the chemistry of the atmosphere and warming the planet in just a few decades.And as our population began in the year 2000 above the 6 billion mark, still spreading across the continents, dozens of animal and plant species were dying out every, day, including the first primate(灵长类) to disappear in more than 100 years. As the start of the 21st century there were unmistakable signs that nature was beginning to take its revenge. Melting ice in both poles of the earth suggested that the climate was changing rapidly. Weather was even more changeable than usual, giving some places too little rain and others too much.Fires raced across the dried American West last summer, and recent storms spread damages from Britain to China.No specific event could be directly blamed on global warming.Floods and drought will be more frequent and severe.Other sad signs from an overburdened planet include falling grain and fish harvests and fierce competition for scarce water supplies. But there were also, in the year 2000, signs of great awareness.Connected by the Internet, hundreds of millions of people gathered for the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. Governments from Washington to Lima took steps to protect the large wild areas from development. Progress was made toward using more renewable energy from the wind and the sun, and new cars that used both gasoline and electricity spotted(显示) fuel-economy statistics. The goal for the new century is "sustainable development" .Is that possible It depends on how well we understand that humanity is part of nature, not lord and master. It can be inferred from the passage that scarce water supplies are directly caused by ( ).
A. less ice in both poles
B. the more changeable weather
C. something not mentioned in the text
D. the larger population
Passage Two There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me.I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage (孤儿院) turned me into an old man. I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little soldier that I had become and then I would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my dormitory. After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the house parent chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the bushes scattered around the orphanage. I carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after another, and then took thegn from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet. How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty.I had walked many times out into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterflies could land on my head, face and hands so I could look at them up close. When the telephone rang the house parent laid the large cardboard paper down on the back cement(水泥) step and went inside to answer the phone.I walked up to the cardboard and looked at the one butterfly who he had just pinned to the large paper. It was still moving about so I reached down and touched it on the wing causing one of the pins to fall out.It started flying around and around trying to get away but it was still pinned by the one wing with the other straight pin.Finally its wing broke off and the butterfly fell to the ground and just trembled. I picked up the torn wing and the butterfly and I spat on its wing and tried to get it to stick back on so it could fly away and be free before the house parent came back.But it would not stay on him. According to the passage, the author’s life in the orphanage was ( ).
A. dull and full of strict rules
B. simple and easy
C. happy and full of hope
D. hard and busy
Not too many decades ago it seemed "obvious" both to the general public and to sociologists that modern society has changed people"s natural relations, loosened their responsibilities to kin and neighbors, and substituted in their place superficial relationships with passing acquaintances. However, in recent years a growing body of research has revealed that the "obvious" is not true. It seems that if you are a city resident, you typically know a smaller proportion of your neighbors than you do if you are a resident of a smaller community. But, for the most part, this fact has few significant consequences. It does not necessarily follow that if you know few of your neighbors you will know no one else.Even in very large cities, people maintain close social ties within small, private social worlds. Indeed, the number and quality of meaningful relationships do not differ between more and less urban people. Small-town residents are more involved with kin than are big-city residents. Yet city dwellers compensate by developing friendships with people who share similar interests and activates. Urbanism may produce a different style of life, but the quality of life does not differ between town and city. Nor are residents of large communities any likelier to display psychological symptoms of stress or alienation, a feeling of not belonging, than are residents of smaller communities. However, city dwellers do worry more about crime, and this leads them to a distrust of strangers.These findings do not imply that urbanism makes little or no difference. If neighbors are strangers to one another, they are less likely to sweep the sidewalk of an elderly couple living next door or keep an eye out for young trouble makers. Moreover, as Wirth suggested, there may be a link between a community"s population size and its social heterogeneity. For instance, sociologists have found much evidence that the size of a community is associated with bad behavior including gambling, drugs, etc. Large-city urbanites are also more likely than their small-town counterparts to have a cosmopolitan outlook, to display less responsibility to traditional kinship roles, to vote for leftist political candidates, and to be tolerant of nontraditional religious groups, unpopular political groups, and so-called undesirables. Everything considered, heterogeneity and unusual behavior seem to be outcomes of large population size. Which of the following statements best describes the organization of the first paragraph
A. Two contrasting views are presented.
B. An argument is examined and possible solutions given.
C. Research results concerning the quality of urban life are presented in order of time.
D. A detailed description of the difference between urban and small-town life is given.
Early in the age of affluence that followed World War Ⅱ, an American retailing analyst named Victor Lebow proclaimed, "Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate."Americans have responded to Lebow"s call, and much of the world has followed.Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial lands and is even embedded in social values. Opinion surveys in the world"s two largest economies—Japan and the United Sates—show consumerist definitions of success becoming ever more prevalent.Overconsumption by the world"s fortunate is an environmental problem unmatched in severity by anything but perhaps population growth. Their surging exploitation of resources threatens to exhaust or unalterably spoil forests, soils, water, air and climate.Ironically, high consumption may be a mixed blessing in human terms, too. The time-honored values of integrity of character, good work, friendship, family and community have often been sacrificed in the rush to riches.Thus many in the industrial lands have a sense that their world of plenty is somehow hollow—that, misled by a consumerist culture, they have been fruitlessly attempting to satisfy what are essentially social, psychological and spiritual needs with material things.Of course, the opposite of overconsumption—poverty—is no solution to either environmental or human problems. It is infinitely worse for people and bad for the natural world too. Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, and hungry nomads turn their herds out onto fragile African grassland, reducing it to desert.If environmental destruction results when people have either too little or too much, we are left to wonder how much is enough. What level of consumption can the earth support When does having more cease to add noticeably to human satisfaction It can be inferred from the passage that ______.
A. human spiritual needs should match material affluence
B. there is never an end to satisfying people"s material needs
C. whether high consumption should be encouraged is still an issue
D. how to keep consumption at a reasonable level remains a problem