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B How should one invest a sum of money in these clays of inflation (通货膨胀) Left in a bank it will hardly keep its value, however high the interest rate is. Only a brave man, or a very rich one, dares to buy and sell on the Stock Market. Today it seems that one of the best ways to protect your savings, and even increase your wealth is to buy beautiful objects from the past. Here I am going to offer some advice on collecting antique clocks, which I personally consider are among the most interesting of antiques. I sometimes wonder what a being from another planet might report back about our way of life. "The planet Earth is ruled by a mysterious creature that sits or stands in a room and makes a strange ticking sound. It has a face with twelve black marks and two hands. Men can do nothing without its permission, and it fastens its young round people’s wrists so that everywhere men go they are still under its control. This creature is the real master of Earth and men are its slaves." Whether or not we are slaves of time today depends on our culture and personality, but it is believed that many years ago kings kept special slaves to tell the time. Certain men were very clever at measuring the time of day according to the beating of their own hearts. They were made to stand in a fixed place and every hour or so would shout the time. So it seems that the first clocks were human beings. However, men quickly found more convenient and reliable ways of telling the time. They learned to use the shadows cast by the sun. They marked the hours on candles, used sand in hour-glasses, and invented water-clocks. Indeed, any serious student of antiques should spend as much time as possible visiting palaces, stately homes and museums to see some of the finest examples of clocks from the past. Antique clocks could be very expensive, but one of the joys of collecting clocks is that it is still possible to find quite cheap ones for your own home. After all, if you are going to be ruled by the time, why not invest in air antique clock and perhaps make a future profit The purpose of the passage is ______.
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G The police fired tear gas and arrested more than 5000 passively resisting protestors Friday in an attempt to break up the largest antinuclear demonstration ever staged in the United States. More than 135000 demonstrators confronted the police on the construction site of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant scheduled to provide power to most of southern New Hampshire. Organizers of the huge demonstration said that the protest was continuing despite the police actions. More demonstrators were arriving to keep up the pressure on state authorities to cancel the project. The demonstrator had charged that the project was unsafe in the densely populated area, would create thermal pollution in the bay, and had no acceptable means for disposing of its radioactive wasters. The demonstrations would go on until the jails and the courts were so overloaded that the state judicial system would collapse. Governor Stanforth Thumper insisted that there would be no reconsideration of the power project and no delay in its construction set for completion in three years. "This project will begin on time and the people of this state will begin to receive its benefits on schedule. Those who break the law in misguided attempts to sabotage the project will be dealt with according to the law," he said. And the police called in reinforcements from all over the state to handle the disturbances. The protests began before dawn Friday when several thousand demonstrators broke through the police lines around the cordoned-off construction site. They carried placards that read "No Nukes is Good Nukes," "Sunpower, Not Nuclear Power," and "Stop Private Profits from Public Peril. " They defied police order to move from the area. Tear gas canisters fired by the police failed to dislodge the protestors who had been prepared with their own gas masks or facecloths. Finally the gas-masked and helmeted police charged into the crowd to drag off the demonstrators one by one. The protestors did not resist the police, but refused to walk away under their own power. Those arrested would be charged with unlawful assembly, trespassing, and disturbing the peace. Who had gas masks
On our first day’s driving on the Scottish island of Mull, my husband and I came to a stretch of water that we had to cross on a small ferry boat. The ferryman asked if we would (21) waiting ten minutes while he transported a family of cows (22) the water to their summer pasture. This (23) with the cows stuck in my mind as a (24) of Mull, a place far removed from the hurried confusion of city life. For, travelers in (25) of a quiet, peaceful place, there can be few better ends. We (26) the island to be a charming mix of mountains, castles and sandy beaches. One of the best days of our trip was (27) we joined a nature tour of the island, and had the (28) fortune to see a (29) of rare creatures, including red deer and golden eagles. But no visit to Mull is (30) without a trip to the small island of Iona. Iona has great historical (31) because it is the place where early Scottish kings were (32) Our first attempt to get to Iona had to be (33) owing to the heavy rain which is (34) characteristic of the island. It was another three days before we could get to Iona, but in the end it was well (35) the wait and was the highlight of our trip.
B When you think of the tremendous technological progress we have made, it’s amazing how little we have developed in other respects. We may speak contemptuously of the poor old Romans because they relished the orgies of slaughter that went on in their arenas. We may despise them because they mistook these goingson for entertainment. We may forgive them condescendingly because they lived 2000 years ago and obviously knew no better. But are our feelings of superiority really justified Are we any less bloodthirsty Why do boxing matches, for instance, attract such universal interest Don’t the spectators who attend them hope they will see some violence Human beings remain as bloodthirsty as ever they were. The only difference between ourselves and the Romans is that while they were honest enough to admit that they enjoyed watching hungry lions tearing people apart and eating them alive, we find all sorts of sophisticated arguments to defend sports which should have been banned long ago; sports which are quite as barbarous as, say, public hangings or bearbaiting. It really is incredible that in this day and age we should still allow hunting or bullfighting, that we should be prepared to sit back and watch two men batter each other to pulp in a boxing ring, that we should be relatively unmoved by the sight of one or a number of racing cars crashing and bursting into flames. Let us not deceive ourselves. Any talk of “the sporting spirit” is sheer hypocrisy. People take part in violent sports because of the high rewards they bring. Spectators are willing to pay vast sums of money to see violence. A world heavyweight championship match, for instance, is frontpage news. Millions of people are disappointed if a big fight is over in two rounds instead of fifteen. They feel disappointment because they have been deprived of the exquisite pleasure of witnessing prolonged torture and violence. Why should we ban violent sports if people enjoy them so much You may well ask. The answer is simple: they are uncivilized. For centuries man has been trying to improve himself spiritually and emotionally—admittedly with little success. But at least we no longer tolerate the sight of madmen being cooped up in cages, or public floggings of any of the countless other barbaric practices which were common in the past. Prisons are no longer the grim forbidding places they used to be. Social welfare systems are in operation in many parts of the world. Big efforts are being made to distribute wealth fairly. These changes have come about not because human beings have suddenly and unaccountably improved, but because positive steps were taken to change the law. The law is the biggest instrument of social change that we have and it may exert great civilizing influence. If we banned dangerous and violent sports, we would be moving one step further to improving mankind. We would recognize that violence is degrading and unworthy of human beings. The purpose of the author in writing this passage is （）.
Passage Three Nothing says "Happy Birthday!" like having a coin released in your honor by the United States Mint(铸币局), and 2009 has become an especially festive year as the Mint rolled out nine different coins in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday. Four pennies with new designs on the reverse side were issued starting February 12. The image of a cabin represents his birthplace. Because Lincoln’s family was poor, and no one could have predicted his later importance, the actual cabin is long gone. Therefore the design is based on the "symbolic cabin" displayed at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in Kentucky. The other designs show Abraham taking a break to read a book, the young lawyer Lincoln in front of the Illinois state capitol and a Lincoln-free image of the half finished U. S. Capitol dome as it looked during his time in office. These four coins-produced with today’s standard mix of 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper-are intended for general circulation. The Mint also released five collectible coins that sell for more than their face value. Special editions of the four penny designs were produced with the metal content used in 1909 ; a mix of 95 percent copper and 5 percent tin and zinc. In addition, in the world of "bigger" money, 2009 has brought the Lincoln Commemorative One-Dollar Coin-made up of 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper-with an image that has a Gettysburg Address theme. What does Paragraph 2 tell about the cabin on the coins
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