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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. Kofi Annan’s United Nations Information Technology Service aims at ______.

A. improving UN staff’s computer skill
B. promoting the use of the Internet over the world
C. providing medical knowledge to poor hospitals
D. promoting the use of the Internet in the United States

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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. What should a student in an age of exploding information do with new sources of information

A. They should guard against the wrong information.
B. They should be able to tell the difference between them.
C. They should know how to interpret and organize them.
D. They should be able to process them and identify the reliable ones.

思想政治工作的“__________________”作用,是指思想政治工作的__________________作用。

Passage two Almost every day the media discovers an African community fighting some form of environmental threat from land fills. Garbage dumps, petrochemical plants, refineries, bus depots, and the list go on. For years, residents watched helplessly as their communities became dumping grounds. But citizens didn't remain silent for long. Local activists have been organizing under the mantle of environmental justice since as far back as 1968. More than three decades ago, the concept of environmental justice h ad not registered on the radar screens of many environmental or civil rights groups. But environmental justice fits squarely under the civil rights umbrella. It should not be forgotten that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis on an environmental and economic justice mission in 1968, seeking support for striking garbage workers who were underpaid and whose basic duties exposed them to environmentally hazardous conditions. In 1979 landmark environmental discrimination lawsuit filed in Houston. Followed by similar litigation efforts in the 1980s, rallied activists to stand up to corporations and demand government intervention. In 1991, a new breed of environmental activists gathered in Washington, D.C., to bring national attention to pollution problems threatening low-income and minority communities Leaders introduced the concept of environmental justice, protesting that Black, poor and working-class communities often received less environmental protection than White or more affluent communities. The first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit effectively broadened what "the environment" was understood to mean. It expanded the definition to include where we live, work, play, worship and go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. In the process, the environmental justice movement changed the way environmentalism is practiced in the United States and, ultimately, worldwide. Because many issues identified at the inaugural summit remain unaddressed, the second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was convened in Washington, D.C., this past October. The second summit was planned for 500 delegates; but more than 1,400 people attended the four-day gathering. "We are pleased that the Summit II was able to attract a record number of grassroots activists, academicians, students, researchers, government officials We proved to the world that our planners, policy analysts and movement is alive and well, and growing," says Beverly Wright, chair of the summit. The meeting produced two dozen policy papers that show environmental and health disparities between people of color and Whites. With respect to getting environmental justice, Summit II aimed for ()

A. showing the achieved success
B. attracting national attention
C. identifying relevant issues
D. finding solutions to the problems

Passage FourJan Hendrik Schon's success seemed too good to be true, and it was. In only four years as a physicist at Bell Laborites, Schon, 32, had co-authored 90 scientific papers--one every 16 days--dealing new discoveries in superconductivity, lasers, nanotechnology and quantum physics. This output astonished his colleagues, and made them suspicious. When one co-worker noticed that the same table of data appeared in two separate papers--which also happened to appear in the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, Science and Nature-the jig was up. In October 2002 a Bell Labs investigation found that: Schon had falsified and fabricated data. His career as a scientist was finished .Scientific scandals, witch are as old as science itself, tend to follow similar patterns of presumption and due reward.In recent years, of course, the pressure on scientists to publish in the top journals has increased, making the journals much more crucial to career success. The questions are whether Nature and Science have become to too powerful as arbiters of what science reach to the public, and whether the journals are up to their task as gatekeepers.Each scientific specialty has its own set of journals. Physicists have Physical Review Letters; neuroscientists have Neuron, and so forth. Science and Nature, though, are the only two major journals that cover the gamut of scientific disciplines, from meteorology and zoology to quantum physics and chemistry. As a result, journalists look to them each week for the cream of the crop of new science papers. And scientists look to the journals in part to reach journalists. Why do they care? Competition for grants has gotten so fierce that scientists have sought popular renown to gain an edge over their rivals. Publication in specialized journals will win the acclaims from academics and satisfy the publish-or-perish imperative, but Science and Nature come with the added bonus of potentially getting your paper written up in The New York Times and other publications.Scientists tend to pay more attention to the big two than to other journals. When more scientists know about a particular paper, they're more apt to cite it in their own papers. Being oft-cited will increase a scientist's "Impact Factor," a measure of how often papers are cited by peers. Funding agencies use the "Impact Factor" as a rough measure of the influence of scientists they're considering supporting. The expression "the cream of the crop" in Paragraph 3 likely means ()

A. the most of all
B. best of all
C. the recently released
D. the widely spread

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