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听力原文： The first postal service in North America began in New England in the 17th century. All mail arriving in Massachusetts colony was sent to the home of the appointed official in Boston. In turn, he would deliver the mail from Boston on horseback to its destination, receiving one penny for each good article of mail. Later in the century postal services were established between Philadelphia and Delaware. In 1691, the British crown appointed the first postmaster general to have charge of the mail for all the colonies in North America. Later, Benjamin Franklin served as the postmaster general for the British government and then was made postmaster by the newly formed United States government. Franklin was responsible for establishing the United States postal system on permanent basis. He increased the number of post offices, introduced the use of stagecoaches to carry mail, and started a package service system. Later, in the nineteenth century, as railroad and steam boats appeared, they were used to carry mail into the towns. Some communities, especially those out west, were far from the services of transportation. To serve them, the post office developed a system called "star routes". Private contractors paid to deliver mail to the communities from railways by horse and wagon. The postal service, which was started over 3 centuries ago, has developed into an extensive government service with post offices in every city, town, and village in the United States.
Many believe that ________ has the best chance of becoming a universal tongue.
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听力原文： The high court in Zimbabwe has been hearing a case in which senior government officials and the family of President Mugabe have been accused of corruption. The court heard allegations that large sums of money from the American aid programme were paid illegally to people of high rank. Documents produced in court said the President's wife Grace Mugabe was given nearly 200,000 US dollars towards the cost of a thirty-room mansion. Judgment on the case has been indefinitely delayed. The BBC correspondent in Harare says it now joins a growing list of controversial issues waiting to be resolved. There are increasing allegations of corruption, mismanagement, incompetence and fraud in official circles.
The news is mainly about ______ in Zimbabwe.
Although the distribution of recorded music went digital with the introduction of the compact disc in the early 1980s, technology has had a large impact on the way music is made and recorded as well. At the most basic level, the invention of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a language enabling computers and sound synthesizers to talk to each other, has given individual musicians powerful tools with which to make music.
"The MIDI interface enabled basement musicians to gain power which had been available only in expensive recording studios," one expert observed. "It enables synthesis of sounds that have never existed before, and storage and subsequent simultaneous replay and mixing of multiple sound tracks. Using a moderately powerful desktop computer running a music composition programme and a $500 synthesizer, any musically literate person can write -- and play! -- a string quartet in an afternoon."
Whereas many musicians use computers as a tool in composing or producing music, Tod Machover uses computers to design the instruments and environments that produce his music. As a professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has pioneered hyperinstrurnents: hybrids of computers and musical instruments that allow users to create sounds simply by raising their hands, pointing with a "virtual baton," or moving their entire body in a "sensor chair."
Similar work on a "virtual orchestra" is being done by Geoffrey Wright, head of the computer music programme at John Hopkins University's Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland. Wright uses conductors' batons that emit infrared light beams to generate data about the speed and direction of the batons, data that can then be translated by computers into instructions for a synthesizer to produce music.
In Machover's best-known musical work, Brain Opera (1996), 125 people interact with each other and a group of hyperinstruments to produce sounds that can be blended into a musical performance. The final opera is assembled from these sound fragments, material contributed by people on the Web, and Machover's own music. Machover says he is motivated to give people "an active, directly participatory relationship with music."
More recently, Machover helped design the Meteorite Museum, a remarkable underground museum that opened in June 1998 in Essen, Germany. Visitors approach the museum through a glass atrium, open an enormous door, enter a cave, and then descend by ramps into various multimedia rooms. Machover composed the music and designed many of the interactions for these rooms. In the Transflow Room, the undulating walls are covered with 100 rubber pads shaped like diamonds. "By hitting the pads you can make and shape a sound and images in the room. Brain Opera was an ensemble of individual instruments, while the Transflow Room is a single instrument played by 40 people. The room blends the reactions and images of the group."
Machover's projects at MIT include Music Toys and Toys of Tomorrow, which are creating devices that he hopes will eventually make a Toy Symphony possible. Machover describes one of the toys as an embroidered ball the size of a small pumpkin with ridges on the outside and miniature speakers inside. "We've recently figured out how to send digital information through fabric or thread," he said. "So the basic idea is to squeeze the ball and where you squeeze and where you place your fingers will affect the sound produced. You can also change the pitch to high or low, or harmonize with other balls."
Computer music has a long way to go before it wins mass acceptance, however. Martin Goldsmith, host of National Public Radio's Performance Today, explains why:"I think that a reason a great moving piece of computer music hasn't been written yet is that—in this instance—the technology stands between the creator and the receptor and prevents a real human connection," Goldsmi
Once found almost entirely in the western United States and in As. ia, dinosaur fossils are now being discovered on all seven continents. A host of new revelations emerged in 1998 that promise to reshape scientists' views of dinosaurs, including what they looked like and when and where they lived.
It is doubtful that Tyrannosaurus Rex had lips or that Triceratops had cheeks, says Lawrence Witmer, an assistant professor of anatomy at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Witmer was a leading researcher for a study on dinosaur anatomy that was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, which concluded on October 3 in Snowbird, Utah.
Witmer's study reached its conclusions by using high-tech computerized axial tomography (CT or CAT) scans along with comparative anatomy studies. For example, the theory that Triceratops and similar dinosaur species had cheeks was based on past comparisons with mammals such as sheep. But Witmer's careful analysis found the structure of the triceratops jaw and skull made it more likely that Triceratops had a beak like that of an eagle. Witmer said that scientists should use birds and crocodiles as models when researching the appearance of dinosaurs.
In early October scientists announced that they had confirmed the discovery of a new type of ceratopsian dinosaur. The dinosaur's bones, found in New Mexico in 1996, are forcing paleontologists to rethink their theories about when eeratopsians migrated to what is now North America.
Scientists previously thought that ceratopsians, the group that included the well known Triceratops, arrived in North America from Asia between 70 million and 80 million years ago. During this time, the late Cretaceous Period, the earth's two supercontinents—Laurasia in the north and Gondwanaland in the south—were in the process of pulling apart, cutting dinosaur populations off from each other and interrupting migratory patterns.
The fossilized bones, found by eight-year-old Christopher Wolfe and his father, paleontologist Doug Wolfe of the Mesa Southwest Museum in Arizona, date to about 90 million years ago. This could mean that ceratopsians originated in North America and migrated to Asia rather than the reverse, paleontologists said. Doug Wolfe named' the important new species of dinosaur Zuniceratops Christopheri after his son.
An expedition from the Universities of Alaska in Anchorage and Fairbanks has discovered a region in remote northern Alaska so rich in fossilized dinosaur tracks that team members dubbed it the "dino expressway". The trampled area was found during the summer of 1998 on Alaska's North Slope near the Brooks Range.
The team found 13 new track sites and made casts from the prints of five different types of dinosaurs. The rock in which the prints were found dates to more than 100 million years ago, or about 25 million years older than the previously discovered signs of dinosaurs in the Arctic region. Paleontologists said that the new findings provide important evidence that dinosaurs migrated between Asia and North America during the early and mid-Cretaceous Period, before Asia split off into its own continent.
Two rich fossil sites in the hills of Bolivia have been recently discovered, exciting paleontologists and dinosaur buffs. This discovery includes one of the most spectacular dinosaur trackways ever found.
The discovery of a large site in the mountain region of Kila Kila in southern Bolivia was announced in early October. Here scientists found the tracks of at least two unknown species of dinosaur. These included a large quadruped (four-footed) dinosaur that was probably about 20m (about 70 ft) long.
The other site, located not far from the Bolivian city of Sucre, was uncovered in a cement quarry by workers several years ago but was not brought to paleontologists' attention until the middle of 1998. The site features a
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