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Illiteracy may be considered more as an abstract concept than a condition. When a famous English writer used the (1)_____ over two hundred years ago, he was actually (2)_____ to people who could (3)_____ read Greek or Latin. (4)_____,it seems unlikely that university examiners had this sort of (5)_____ in mind when they reported on "creeping illiteracy" in a report on their students" final examination in 1988. (6)_____ the years, university lecturers have been (7)_____ of an increasing tendency towards grammatical sloppiness, poor spelling and general imprecision (8)_____ their students" ways of writing; and sloppy writing is all (9)_____ often a reflection of sloppy thinking. Their (10)_____ was that they had (11)_____ to do teaching their own subject (12)_____ teaching their undergraduates to write. Some lecturers believe that they have a (n) (13)_____ to stress the importance of maintaining standards of clear thinking (14)_____ the written word in a world dominated by (15)_____ communications and images. They (16)_____ on the connection between clear thinking and a form of writing that is not only clear, but also sensitive to (17)_____ of meaning. The same lecturers argue that undergraduates appear to be the victims of a "softening process" that begins (18)_____ the teaching of English in schools, but this point of view has, not (19)_____, caused a great deal of (20)_____.

A. duty
B. Jim
C. plan
D. engagement

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It is hard to box against a southpaw, as Apollo Creed found out when he fought Rocky Balboa in the first of an interminable series of movies. While "Rocky" is fiction, the strategic advantage of being left-handed in a fight is very real, simply because most right-handed people have little experience of fighting left-handers, but not vice versa. The orthodox view of human handedness is that it is connected to the bilateral specialisation of the brain that has concentrated language-processing functions on the left side of that organ. Because, long ago in the evolutionary past, an ancestor of humans underwent a contortion that twisted its head around 180°relative to its body, the left side of the brain controls the fight side of the body, and vice versa. In humans, the left brain is usually dominant. And on average, left-handers are smaller and lighter than right-handers. That should put them at an evolutionary disadvantage. Sporting advantage notwithstanding, therefore, the existence of left-handedness poses a problem for biologists. But Charlotte Faurie thinks he knows the answer. As any schoolboy could tell you, winning fights enhances your status. If, in prehistory, this translated into increased reproductive success, it might have been enough to maintain a certain proportion of left-handers in the population, by balancing the costs of being left-handed with the advantages gained in fighting. If that is tree, then there will be a higher proportion of left-handers in societies with higher levels of violence, since the advantages of being left-handed will be enhanced in such societies. Dr. Faurie set out to test this hypothesis. Fighting in modem societies often involves the use of technology, notably firms, that is unlikely to give any advantage to left-handers. So Dr. Faurie decided to confine his investigation to the proportion of left-handers and the level of violence in traditional societies. By trawling the literature, checking with police departments, and even going out into the field and asking people, Dr. Faurie found that the proportion of left-handers in a traditional society is, indeed, correlated with its homicide rate. One of the highest proportions of left-handers, for example, was found among the Yanomamo of South America. Raiding and warfare are central to Yanomamo culture. The murder rate is 4 per 1,000 inhabitants per year. And, according to Dr. Faufie, 22.6% of Yanomamo are left-handed. In contrast, Dioula-speaking people of Burkina Faso in West Africa are virtual pacifists. There are only 0.013 murders per 1,000 inhabitants among them and only 3.4% of the population is left-handed. While there is no suggestion that left-handed people are more violent than the right-handed, it looks as though they are more successfully violent. Perhaps that helps to explain the double meaning of the word "sinister". The author"s attitude toward left-handers is

A. impartial.
B. indifferent.
C. biased.
D. sympathetic.

Illiteracy may be considered more as an abstract concept than a condition. When a famous English writer used the (1)_____ over two hundred years ago, he was actually (2)_____ to people who could (3)_____ read Greek or Latin. (4)_____,it seems unlikely that university examiners had this sort of (5)_____ in mind when they reported on "creeping illiteracy" in a report on their students" final examination in 1988. (6)_____ the years, university lecturers have been (7)_____ of an increasing tendency towards grammatical sloppiness, poor spelling and general imprecision (8)_____ their students" ways of writing; and sloppy writing is all (9)_____ often a reflection of sloppy thinking. Their (10)_____ was that they had (11)_____ to do teaching their own subject (12)_____ teaching their undergraduates to write. Some lecturers believe that they have a (n) (13)_____ to stress the importance of maintaining standards of clear thinking (14)_____ the written word in a world dominated by (15)_____ communications and images. They (16)_____ on the connection between clear thinking and a form of writing that is not only clear, but also sensitive to (17)_____ of meaning. The same lecturers argue that undergraduates appear to be the victims of a "softening process" that begins (18)_____ the teaching of English in schools, but this point of view has, not (19)_____, caused a great deal of (20)_____.

A. very
B. much
C. too
D. quite

The planet"s wild creatures face a new threat—from yuppies, empty nesters, singletons and one parent families. Biologists studying the pressure on the planet"s dwindling biodiversity today report on a new reason for alarm. Although the rate of growth in the human population is decreasing, the number of individual households is exploding. Even where populations have actually dwindled—in some regions of New Zealand, for instance—the number of individual households has increased, bemuse of divorce, career choice, smaller families and longer lifespans. Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University and colleagues from Stanford University in California report in Nature, in a paper published online in advance, that a greater number of individual households, each containing on average fewer people, meant more pressure on natural resources. Towns and cities began to sprawl as new homes were built. Each household needed fuel to heat and light it; each household required its own plumbing, cooking and refrigeration. "In larger households, the efficiency of resource consumption will be a lot higher, because more people share things", Dr. Liu said. He and his colleagues looked at the population patterns of life in 141 countries, including 76 "hotspot" regions unusually rich in a variety of endemic wildlife. These hot spots included Australia, New Zealand, the US, Brazil, China, India, Kenya, and Italy. They found that between 1985 and 2000 in the "hotspot" parts of the globe, the annual 3.1% growth rate in the number of households was far higher than the population growth rate of 1.8%. "Had the average household" size remained at the 1985 level", the scientists report, "there would have been 155m fewer households in hotspot countries in 2000. Paradoxically, smaller households do not mean smaller homes. In Indian River County, Florida, the average area of a one-storey, single family house increased 33% in the past three decades". Dr. Liu"s work grew from the alarming discovery that the giant pandas living in China"s Wolong reserve were more at risk now than they were when the reserve was first established. The local population had grown, but the total number of homes had increased more swiftly, to make greater inroads into the bamboo forests. Gretchen Daily of Stanford, one of the authors, said: "We all depend on open space and wild places, not just for peace of mind but for vital services such as crop pollination, water purification and climate stabilization. The alarming thing about this study is the finding that, if family groups continue to become smaller and smaller, we might continue losing biodiversity—even if we get the aggregate human population size stabilized". The first paragraph mainly tells us that

A. the amount of wildlife is diminishing.
B. the population of human is decreasing.
C. New Zealanders live an unstable life.
D. the structure of families is changing.

The planet"s wild creatures face a new threat—from yuppies, empty nesters, singletons and one parent families. Biologists studying the pressure on the planet"s dwindling biodiversity today report on a new reason for alarm. Although the rate of growth in the human population is decreasing, the number of individual households is exploding. Even where populations have actually dwindled—in some regions of New Zealand, for instance—the number of individual households has increased, bemuse of divorce, career choice, smaller families and longer lifespans. Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University and colleagues from Stanford University in California report in Nature, in a paper published online in advance, that a greater number of individual households, each containing on average fewer people, meant more pressure on natural resources. Towns and cities began to sprawl as new homes were built. Each household needed fuel to heat and light it; each household required its own plumbing, cooking and refrigeration. "In larger households, the efficiency of resource consumption will be a lot higher, because more people share things", Dr. Liu said. He and his colleagues looked at the population patterns of life in 141 countries, including 76 "hotspot" regions unusually rich in a variety of endemic wildlife. These hot spots included Australia, New Zealand, the US, Brazil, China, India, Kenya, and Italy. They found that between 1985 and 2000 in the "hotspot" parts of the globe, the annual 3.1% growth rate in the number of households was far higher than the population growth rate of 1.8%. "Had the average household" size remained at the 1985 level", the scientists report, "there would have been 155m fewer households in hotspot countries in 2000. Paradoxically, smaller households do not mean smaller homes. In Indian River County, Florida, the average area of a one-storey, single family house increased 33% in the past three decades". Dr. Liu"s work grew from the alarming discovery that the giant pandas living in China"s Wolong reserve were more at risk now than they were when the reserve was first established. The local population had grown, but the total number of homes had increased more swiftly, to make greater inroads into the bamboo forests. Gretchen Daily of Stanford, one of the authors, said: "We all depend on open space and wild places, not just for peace of mind but for vital services such as crop pollination, water purification and climate stabilization. The alarming thing about this study is the finding that, if family groups continue to become smaller and smaller, we might continue losing biodiversity—even if we get the aggregate human population size stabilized". According to Dr. Liu"s paper, the dwindling of biodiversity is due to

A. the reduction in average home size.
B. the improvement of living conditions.
C. the increasing number of residences.
D. the decline of population growth rate.

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