Largely for "spiritual reasons", Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago and has studiously avoided public schools ever since. Yet last week, she was enthusiastically enrolling her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, in sign language and modern dance classes at Eagleridge Enrichment—a program run by the Mesa, Ariz. , public schools and taught by district teachers. Manos still wants to handle the basics, but likes that Eagleridge offers the extras, "things I couldn’t teach. " One doubt, though, lingers in her mind. why would the public school system want to offer home-school families anything A big part of the answer is economics. The number of home-schooled kids nationwide has risen to as many as 1.9 million from an estimated 345,000 in 1994, and school districts that get state and local dollars per child are beginning to suffer. In Maricopa County, which includes Mesa, the number of home-schooled kids has more than doubled during that period to 7,526, at about $ 4,500 a child, that’s nearly $ 34 million a year in lost revenue. Not everyone’s happy with these innovations. Some states have taken the opposite tack. Like about half the states, West Virginia refuses to allow home-schooled kids to play public-school sports. And in Arizona, some complain that their tax dollars are being used to create programs for families who, essentially, eschew participation in public life. "That makes my teeth grit," says Daphne Atkeson, whose 10-year-old son attends public school in Paradise Valley. Even some committed home-schoolers question the new programs, given their central irony., they turn home-schoolers into public-school students, says Bob Parsons, president of the Alaska Private and Home Educators Association. "We’ve lost about one third of our members to those programs. They’re so enticing. " Mesa started Eagleridge four years ago, when it saw how much money it was losing from home schoolers—and how unprepared some students were when they re-entered the schools. Since it began, the program’s enrollment has nearly doubled to 397, and last year the district moved Eagleridge to a strip mall (between a pizza joint and a laser-tag arcade). Parents typically drop off their kids once a week; because most of the children qualify as quarter-time students, the district collects $ 911 per child. "It’s like getting a taste of what real school is like," says 10-year-old Chad Lucas, who’s learning computer animation and creative writing. Other school districts are also experimenting with novel ways to court home schoolers. The town of Galena, Alaska, (pop. 600) has just 178 students. But in 1997, its school administrators figured they could reach beyond their borders. Under the program, the district gives home-schooling families free computers and Internet service for correspondence classes. In return, the district gets $ 3,100 per student enrolled in the program—$ 9.6 million a year, which it has used partly for a new vocational school. Such alternatives just might appeal to other districts. Ernest Felty, head of Hardin County schools in southern Illinois, has 10 home-schooled pupils. That may not sound like much— except that he has a staff of 68, and at $ 4,500 a child, "that’s probably a teacher’s salary," Fehy says. With the right robotics or art class, though, he could take the home out of home schooling. The statistics in Paragraph two helps us draw a conclusion that______.
A. economics is greatly influenced by so many home-schoolers
B. the number of the home-schoolers is steadily increasing
C. it is a great loss for the public school system to have so many home-schoolers
D. home-schooling has an incomparable advantage over the public school system
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[A] If you choose a career that does not fit you, you can start over.[B] Career planning overweighs any other factors.[C] Review your plans and progress periodically with another person.[D] Serious flaws in the ways many people make career decision.[E] Study yourself.[F] Set up some predictions about yourself in a career.[G] Write your career goals down.Career planning helps you to shape your career possibilities. It does not necessarily follow routine or logical steps. Each of us places weight on different factors and may consider certain phases of career planning at different times. Career planning includes gathering information about ourselves and about occupations, estimating the probable outcomes of various courses of action, and finally, choosing alternatives that we find attractive and feasible. Quite often career planning helps people to see the kinds of assistance they need to do what they want and helps direct them to available resources.(41)__________This is the key to career planning. Understanding what you are like, what you value, and what you want to become is the foundation for all career planning. To have a better insight into yourself, you are supposed to examine your strengths and weaknesses, your goals, and the trends in your personal development. The self-understanding that you gain enables you to imagine how certain occupations may best fit your personality, interests, abilities, and goals. All career decisions require us to learn both about ourselves and about work, and to integrate these two kinds of knowledge.(42)__________A technique useful for organizing ideas about your career development is to actually put them down by time blocks in your life, for example, ages nineteen to twenty-two, twenty-three to thirty... This action forces you to crystallize your thinking and to reorganize fuzzy and half-formed ideas. It may lead to new insights about your possibilities and may help you to see new relationships, patterns and trends, or to identify gaps in your thinking about your career development.(43)__________Consider the kind of person you are, what you’re likely to be like, what changes are likely to take place in an occupation, what basic problems you might meet, and what you need to solve your problems. These hypotheses, or educated guesses, should represent your understanding of yourself at present, what you can do, and what you will do.(44)__________Every so often, take stock of your situation and consider what steps have to be taken next. Taking inventory of progress and planning further steps can help you cope with the changes that you undergo and the changes that take place in the labor market. Talking over your plans with a college counselor, your parents, and your friends helps you define your goals and improve your career plan or make them work.(45)__________Today, growing numbers of people are changing careers or getting second start in careers that have greater appeal to them. Society no longer attaches the stigma of "instability" to the idea of career hopping, as it once did. Motives or reasons for changing career vary widely, but many people move because they feel stale or fed up with a grinding or dull routine. For some, a second start grows out of the realization that what they want out of life is not what they are doing, and they decide to do those things they enjoy and believe to be important. Certainly, time spent in one occupation is likely to narrow the range of later occupation choices; very few people have the motivation and financial resource to start a completely new career in mid-life. Most people move to related field that involves a minimum of new training. 41
Science fiction has a tendency to become science fact. Something like Hal, the on-board spaceship computer capable of ethical decision making and intelligence in Arthur Clarke’s 2001:A space Odyssey , is being discussed seriously in modern artificial-intelligence (AI) laboratories. (46) That is not to say that computers will evolve exactly as Clarke envisioned, any more than propulsion systems developed in the way Jules Verne imagined three-quarters of a century before a rocked sent a spaceship to the moon. (47)However, computer scientists are developing systems that come very close to mimicking parts of human cognition;it seems plausible that something like Hal will be around before you depart from this earth.(48) Computerized cognition, or artificial intelligence (AI), as it is often called, is broadly defined as that branch of computer science that deals with the development of computers (hardware) and computer programs (software) that emulate human cognitive functions. Cognition involves perception, memory, thinking, language processing and many other related functions which are carried out in a more or less exact way. You can, for example, see and recognize your friend’s face; compose a sensible poem set in iambic pentameter; mentally calculate the most direct route from your home to the college, and distinguish sour milk from fresh milk. We do things like this every day with no effort. We also do a lot of foolish things, such as put shampoo on our toothbrush. We are human and that’s a problem for computers, being perfect machines that never make a mistake, "computer errors" notwithstanding.If a computer could simulate human thought and actions precisely, then it would be as good as we are in doing the list of things mentioned earlier, but also be just as fallible as we are. (49)It is important to recognize the distinction between those who want to write programs that will perform human tasks well, such as the program we are presently using that draws a squiggly red line under misspelled words and those who aim to clone human thought. Computers and their impressive programs have become such an indispensable part of our everyday life that we wonder how we got along without them—still, they aren’t clever enough to shampoo with toothpaste.When we discuss AI, it is usually intertwined with Cognitive psychology and neuroscience. (50) Ideas from one field, for example, neuroscience, might be incorporated into another, for example, artificial intelligence, and yet other ideas from cognitive psychology might be applied to both other areas. All three—AI, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience (especially neuroscience)— build a platform for cognitive science. However, computer scientists are developing systems that come very close to mimicking parts of human cognition;it seems plausible that something like Hal will be around before you depart from this earth.
Science fiction has a tendency to become science fact. Something like Hal, the on-board spaceship computer capable of ethical decision making and intelligence in Arthur Clarke’s 2001:A space Odyssey , is being discussed seriously in modern artificial-intelligence (AI) laboratories. (46) That is not to say that computers will evolve exactly as Clarke envisioned, any more than propulsion systems developed in the way Jules Verne imagined three-quarters of a century before a rocked sent a spaceship to the moon. (47)However, computer scientists are developing systems that come very close to mimicking parts of human cognition;it seems plausible that something like Hal will be around before you depart from this earth.(48) Computerized cognition, or artificial intelligence (AI), as it is often called, is broadly defined as that branch of computer science that deals with the development of computers (hardware) and computer programs (software) that emulate human cognitive functions. Cognition involves perception, memory, thinking, language processing and many other related functions which are carried out in a more or less exact way. You can, for example, see and recognize your friend’s face; compose a sensible poem set in iambic pentameter; mentally calculate the most direct route from your home to the college, and distinguish sour milk from fresh milk. We do things like this every day with no effort. We also do a lot of foolish things, such as put shampoo on our toothbrush. We are human and that’s a problem for computers, being perfect machines that never make a mistake, "computer errors" notwithstanding.If a computer could simulate human thought and actions precisely, then it would be as good as we are in doing the list of things mentioned earlier, but also be just as fallible as we are. (49)It is important to recognize the distinction between those who want to write programs that will perform human tasks well, such as the program we are presently using that draws a squiggly red line under misspelled words and those who aim to clone human thought. Computers and their impressive programs have become such an indispensable part of our everyday life that we wonder how we got along without them—still, they aren’t clever enough to shampoo with toothpaste.When we discuss AI, it is usually intertwined with Cognitive psychology and neuroscience. (50) Ideas from one field, for example, neuroscience, might be incorporated into another, for example, artificial intelligence, and yet other ideas from cognitive psychology might be applied to both other areas. All three—AI, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience (especially neuroscience)— build a platform for cognitive science. It is important to recognize the distinction between those who want to write programs that will perform human tasks well, such as the program we are presently using that draws a squiggly red line under misspelled words and those who aim to clone human thought
One day Tom bought, for two dollars, a large number of used books. He put them in a (36) and pulled them to the (37) . He was to (38) at work until three in the morning. At three, he (39) to walk home. The streets were dark. Tom could (40) wait to arrive home and began to read his new books." (41) !" a voice shouted. But Tom was too (42) to hear the shout well.A moment later, a gunshot (43) his ear. He heard the shot. Tom turned to see what was (44) . An angry policeman ran toward him. The policeman thought that the bag did not (45) Tom. He shouted at Tom, "Drop it !"" (46) !" the policeman ordered.Tom opened it and the old books (47) out of it."Why not stop (48) when I shouted" the policeman asked, "If I had shot (49) , you would have been dead." "I didn’t (50) you," Tom said, "I am almost deaf."The policeman told Tom he was (51) for having shot at him." (52) would be better for you not to walk on the (53) at night." he said.Tom smiled, and told the policeman that his job (54) a telegrapher was a night job. The policeman could think of (55) to answer this. 51()
A. regretted
B. surprised
C. sorry
D. mercy