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Passage Three Emotions and values play an enormous role in how we process information and make choices. We are beset by cognitive biases that throw what would be sound decision-making off-balance. Take loss aversion: psychologists have found that human beings tend to be more concerned about avoiding losses than achieving gains, holding onto what they have even when this is not in their best interests.

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Passage Three It has been two decades since the fate of a bashful bird that most people had never seen came to symbolize the bitter divide over whether to save or saw down the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Yet it was not until Thursday that the federal government offered its final plan to prevent the bird, the northern spotted owl, from going extinct. After repeated revisions, constant court fights and shifting science, the Fish and Wildlife Service presented a plan that addresses a range of threats to the owl, including some that few imagined when it was listed as a threatened species in 1990. The newer threats include climate change and the arrival of a formidable feathered competitor, the barred owl, in the soaring old-growth evergreens of Washington, Oregon and California where spotted owls nest and hunt. One experiment included in the plan: shooting hundreds of barred owls to see whether that helps spotted owls recover. Even after all these years since the spotted owl became the cause célèbre of the environmental movement, it is far from clear that the plan is a solution. Advocates on both sides say it will inevitably be challenged, and both sides have expressed frustration with the Obama administration on the issue. The spotted owl is declining by an average of 3 percent per year across its range. While some populations in Southern Oregon and Northern California are more stable, some of the steepest rates of decline are here in Washington. Some study areas in the Olympic and Cascade ranges show annual declines as high as 9 percent. The listing of the spotted owl as a threatened species led to a virtual ban on logging in many older federal forests, inspiring angry lawsuits and threats of violence by rural loggers against owl advocates, who often came from urban areas. “Nothing against the bird, but it’s wreaked a lot of havoc in the Pacific Northwest for the past 20 years,” said Ray Wilkeson, president of the Oregon Forest Industries Council, which represents loggers, sawmills and others in the industry. “A lot of human suffering has resulted from this. Now there’re new threats to the owl that may be beyond anybody’s ability to control.” Although the plan does not map critical habitat — the mapping process is more than a year away from completion, a fact that frustrates conservationists – it proposes expanding protections for owls beyond areas currently set aside. The existing areas were outlined by the Northwest Forest Plan, which was approved a year after President Clinton’s Timber Conference, revised under President George W. Bush to allow more logging and reinstated by the Obama administration. The American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said the plan would impose “massive new restrictions on both federal and private lands.” But supporters say it will provide more wood for mills by increasing forest thinning and restoration work to battle threats like disease and fire that could increase with climate change. The plan would provide timber companies incentives to create potential spotted owl habitat. Officials from the Forest Service and from the Bureau of Land Management, which oversee logging on federal land, expressed support for the plan. While timber advocates question protections for a bird that some say may be bound for extinction, conservationists say that it is too soon to give up on the spotted owl, and that the fight to save it has served broader benefits of the forest, from cleaner water and air to habitat for hundreds of other species, including endangered salmon. “The spotted owl is the icon,” Dr. Forsman said, “but there are a lot of other players in terms of species and protecting biodiversity in these forests.”Questions 11-15 are based on Passage Three. Who doubt about the plan

A. Only timber advocates.
B. Only owl advocates.
C. Advocates from both urban and rural areas.
D. Both owl advocates and timber advocates.

Passage Two Nowadays there is a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century. Right now we’re aiming too low. Competency in reading and math — the focus of so much No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing – is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise: utterly necessary but insufficient. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here’s what they are: Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are“global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages” — not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history. Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy — the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated – “put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that’s been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary combinations — design and technology, mathematics and art – “that produce YouTube and Google,” says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t. “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,” says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education. Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s work place.‘‘Most innovations today involve large teams of people,” says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. “We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.”Questions 6-10 are based on Passage Two. The passage is mainly concerned with______.

A. the No Child Left Behind program as a minimum requirement
B. interdisciplinary combination for 21st century school education
C. the overall competence required of a student in the 21st century
D. emotional intelligence as a means to career success in the 21st century

Passage One From time to time, we need an expert. In such situations, the Internet has been like a gift from the gods. In the old days, authorities were near at hand for expert advice: the village seamstress on how to make a buttonhole, the blacksmith on how to take care of a horse’s hooves, or the apothecary on what to do about warts. On the Internet, advice and answer sites are popping up all over the place, with self-proclaimed experts at the ready. Exp.com claims to have “tens of thousands of experts who can help you,”while the more restrained Abuzz.com, owned by The New York Times, limits its pitch to “Ask Anything! Real People. Real Answers.” It’s said that expert sites or knowledge networks represent the latest stage in the Internet’s evolution, a “democratization of expertise.” However, if your question is about something other than “Who invented the light bulb”, the answers are likely to be a wild potpourriof personal opinions. Top colleges and universities are rushing into online education, but the big news is the proliferation of a new breed of for-profit online institutions bringing Internet education to the masses.“The Internet will probably be the single most democratizing force in education,” says Columbia Business School Dean Meyer Feldberg, who envisions educational programs being routed through the net to hundreds of millions of people. The largest online institution is the University of Phoenix, with some 6,000 students today and hopes of reaching 200,000 students in 10 years. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in business management, technology, education, and nursing. The university notes that its degree programs cost far less and may take some students far less time to complete. On the other hand, a Business Week survey of 247 companies found that only a handful would consider hiring applicants who earned their MBA degrees online.Whether that will change as for-profit online universities improve their offerings and graduates prove their worth-is anyone’s guess. The rest of the world is moving into cyberspace more slowly than the United States, and, in the developing world, the Internet has hardly penetrated at all. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is determined to change this through the United Nations Information Technology Service, which will train large numbers of people to tap into the income enhancing power of the Internet. Annan is also proposing an Internet health network that will provide state-of-the-art medical knowledge to 10,000 clinics and hospitals in poor countries.Questions l-5 are based on Passage One. The underlined phrase“state-of-the-art” in paragraph 6 means______.

A. advanced and in large quantity
B. very creative and artistic
C. skillful and attractive
D. very modern

思想政治教育的目的:为思想政治教育活动__________________,为思想政治教育活动__________________,为思想政治教育活动的效果__________________。

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