题目内容

TEXT A Inside his small office, Jim Sedlak picks the receiver and listens as worried callers sound off about the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s newest clinic of its distribution of pamphlets in their area. They don’t like it, they tell him, but they don’t know how to stop it. So Sedlak leans back in his chair and, drawing on almost 20 years of experience, tells them how tiny anti-abortion groups can tackle the nation’s largest abortion-rights group. Sedlak has been taking aim at Planned Parenthood for years through his small, grassroots anti-abortion organization, American Life League’s STOPP International, a two-man group whose sole mission is to bring down its giant ideological opponent. Planned Parenthood normally brushes off attacks from such "fringe groups", reserving its considerable strength for reproductive healthcare services and advocacy. But it’s hard to ignore recent anti-abortion legislative victories like the ban on so-called partial birth abortion passed in November, the more recent Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which defines fetuses as unborn children, and similar state measures against fetal homicide. Anti-abortion activities regaining ground, and that has forced Planned Parenthood to take a closer lock at the opposition. "It gives us a big challenge," Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt told NEWSWEEK, "but we’re ready." Feldt has learned that even individual efforts can have nationwide ripple effects. Take the case of John Pisciotta, director of Pro-life Waco and a Baylor University economies professor, who sparked a furor in Waco, Texas, this February when he decided to attack the relationship between the local Gift Scouts council and Planned Parenthood. The council, long a participant in a half-day Planned Parenthood conference on puberty education had ignored Pisciotta’s pleas to distance itself from what he considered "an assault on Christian morality." After chatting with Sedlak, a longtime friend, Psciotta recorded a 60-second spot for a Christian radio station urging listeners to reconsider supporting the scouts. Then, he asked them to boycott their Thin Mints. The cookie boycott wasn’t successful—sales actually rose 2 percent—hot the local council did break off its relationship with the group. And, much to Pisciotta’s surprise, his local concern became a national one. STOPP was flooded with phone calls from angry parents demanding to know whether their councils were linked with Planned Parenthood. Individual Girl Scouts troops have autonomy in choosing their programs, and national CEO Kim Cloninger has said that those aligned with Planned Parenthood would continue their relationships. Sedlak compile a list of them that he posted online last week. It’s up to individual viewers, he says, to decide what to do with that information. STOPP is ______.

A. an organization supporting abortion
B. an organization against abortion
C. a giant organization
D. an organization whose president is Gloria Feldt

查看答案
更多问题

What happened to Dick’s uncle

A. He got sick.
B. He broken his leg. C. He buy a bike.

SECTION A CONVERSATIONS In this section you will hear several conversations. Listen to the conversations carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 3 are based on the following conversation. At the end of the conversation, you will be given 15 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the conversation. What’s the aim of the 14th International AIDS Conference

A. To offer aids to the poor countries stricken by AIDS.
B. To ensure the operation of separating.
C. To popularize the mandatory testing.
D. To enhance people’s awareness of the threat of AIDS to the society.

SECTION A CONVERSATIONS In this section you will hear several conversations. Listen to the conversations carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 3 are based on the following conversation. At the end of the conversation, you will be given 15 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the conversation. If without major rescue, how many people would die of AIDS in the next 20 years

A. 20 million.
B. 30 million.
C. 40 million.
D. 60 million.

TEXT D Unlike any other scientific topics, consciousness—the first-person awareness of the world around—is truly in the eye of beholder. I know I am conscious. But how do I know that you are Through logical analogy—I am a conscious human being, and therefore you as a human being are also likely to be conscious—I conclude I am probably not the only conscious being in a world of biological puppets. Extend it to other creatures, and uncertainty grows. Is a dog conscious An elm A rock "We don’t have the mythical consciousness meter," said Dr. Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. "All we have directly to go on is behavior." So without even an elementary understanding of what consciousness is, the idea of instilling it into a machine—or understanding how a machine might evolve consciousness—becomes almost unfathomable. The field of artificial intelligence started out with dreams of making thinking or conscious machines, but to debate, its achievements have been modest. The field has evolved to focus more on solving practical problems like complex scheduling tasks than on imitating human behavior. But many believe that the original goals of artificial intelligence will be attainable within a few decades. Some people, like Dr. Hans Moravec, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, believe a human being is nothing more than a fancy machine, and that it will be possible to build a machine with the same features, that there is nothing magical about the brain and biological flesh. "I’m confident we can build robot with behavior that is just as rich as human being behavior," he said. "You could quiz it as much as you like about its internal mental life, and it would answer as any human being." To Dr. Moravec, if it acts consciously, it is conscious. To ask more is pointless. Dr. Chalmers, regards consciousness as an unutterable trait, and it may be useless to try to pin it down. "We’ve got to admit something here is irreducible," he said. "Some primitive precursor consciousness could go all the way down" to the smallest, most primitive organisms, he said. Dr. Chalmers too sees nothing fundamentally different between a creature of flesh and blood and one of metal, plastics and electronic circuits. "I’m quite open to the idea that machines might eventually become conscious," he said, adding that it would be "equally weird". And if a person gets into involved conversations with a robot about everything from Kant to baseball, "We’ll be as practically certain they are conscious as other people," he said. "Of course, that doesn’t resolve the theoretical question". But others say machines, regardless of how complex, will never match people. The arguments can become mysterious. In his book Shadows of the Mind, Dr. Roger Penrose, a mathematician at Oxford University, enlisted the incompleteness theorem in mathematics. He uses the theorem, which states that any system of theorems will invariably include statements that cannot be proven, to argue that any machine that uses computation—and hence all robots—will invariably fall short of the accomplishments of human mathematicians. Instead, he argues that consciousness is an effect of quantum mechanics in tiny structures in the brain that exceeds the abilities of any computer. The basic notion that underlies the statement of Dr. Hans Moravec is most possibly that ______.

A. action speaks louder than words
B. no essential difference exists between human beings and artificial machines
C. human beings in a sense are even inferior to the conscious machines
D. robot is conscious as long as he can have conversation freely with human beings

答案查题题库