题目内容
This past academic year, 146 New York City kids from 4 to 14 dutifully attended Rosalyn Chao’s Mandarin class at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral Academy. Many of the students were first-generation Americans; for several, Mandarin would be their third language, after English and Spanish. Get used to this picture; around the world, more adults and kids are learning Chinese. Beijing is pouring money into new Confucius Institutes (Chinese language and culture centers), and two U.S. senators recently proposed spending $1.3 billion on Chinese-language programs over the next five years. From Ulan Bator to Chicago, it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to learn the language now spoken by a fifth of the world’s population. Their reasoning is easy to understand. China is booming, and citizens around the globe want a piece of the action. Speaking Mandarin can facilitate communication with newly wealthy Chinese tourists or smooth bilateral trade relations. In a form of intense cultural diplomacy, Beijing is also promoting its films, music, art and language as never before. Front and center are the Confucius Institutes, modeled on the British Council, Germany’s Goethe Institutes or the Alliance Francaise. China’s Ministry of Education is sending thousands of language instructors to foreign programs and inviting foreign students from Asia, Africa and elsewhere to study in its universities. As a result, Beijing predicts that 100 million individuals will be studying Mandarin as a second language by the end of the decade. The U.S. Department of Education announced earlier this year that it hopes to have 5 percent of all elementary, secondary and college students enrolled in Mandarin studies by 2010. The Chinese boom hasn’t escaped criticism, however. For one thing, the language is hard, with more than 2,500 characters generally employed in daily writing and a complex tonal speaking system. Then there’s the danger that other important languages, such as Russian or Japanese, will be neglected; for example, there are now 10 times more students learning Mandarin than Japanese in the United States. And other countries fear a growing encroachment(侵蚀) of Chinese power; some Africans have complained about Beijing’s "neocolonialist(新殖民主义)" attitudes, for example, and this could breed resentment against Confucius Institutes on their soil. Yet most Mandarin students, like those at St. Pat’s, aren’t letting such concerns dissuade them. Mandarin represents a new way of thinking. Chao says that" we must begin preparing our students for the interconnected world." Accordingly, she has encouraged her Mandarin students to correspond with pen pals in Shanghai. Chao says that" in reading the Chinese students’ letters, we learned quickly that American students are far behind their Asian counterparts." If they hope to catch up to their Chinese competitors, her students--like the growing legions of Mandarin pupils around the globe -- are going to have to study hard indeed. The author wants to convey in the last paragraph that ______.
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夏季，某湖中藻类大量繁殖，形成水华，鱼类大量死亡，水有异味。 可能的污染物是
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Washington, DC has traditionally been an unbalanced city when it comes to the life of the mind. It has great national monuments, from the Smithsonian museums to the Library of Congress. But day-to-day cultural life can be thin. It attracts some of the country’s best brains. But far too much of the city’s intellectual life is devoted to the minutiae of the political process. Dinner table conversation can all too easily turn to budget reconciliation or social security. This is changing. On October 1st the Shakespeare Theatre Company opened a 775-seat new theatre in the heart of downtown. Sidney Harman hall not only provides a new stage for a theatre company that has hitherto had to make do with the 450-seat Lansburgh Theatre around the corner. It will also provide a platform for many smaller arts companies. The fact that so many of these outfits are queuing up to perform is testimony to Washington’s cultural vitality. The recently-expanded Kennedy Centre is by some measures the busiest performing arts complex. But it still has a growing number of arts groups which are desperate for mid-sized space down- town. Michael Kahn, the theatre company’s artistic director, jokes that, despite Washington’s aversion (厌恶) to keeping secrets, it has made a pretty good job of keeping quiet about its artistic life. The Harman Centre should act as a whistle blower. Washington still bows the knee to New York and Chicago when it comes to culture. But it has a good claim to be America’s intellectual capital. It has the greatest collection of think-tanks on the planet, and it regularly sucks in a giant share of the country’s best brains. Washington is second only to San Francisco for the proportion of residents twenty-five years and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Washington’s intellectual life has been supercharged during the Bush years, despite the Decider’s aversion to ideas. September 11th, 2001, put questions of global strategy at the center of the national debate. Most of America’s intellectual centers are firmly in the grip of the left-liberal establishment. For all their talk of "diversity" American universities are allergic to a diversity of ideas. Washington is one of the few cities where conservatives regularly do battle with liberals. It is also the center of a fierce debate about the future direction of conservatism. The danger for Washington is that this intellectual and cultural renaissance will leave the majority of the citizens untouched. The capital remains a city deeply divided between over-educated white itinerants and under- educated black locals. Still, the new Shakespeare theatre is part of job-generating downtown revival. Twenty years ago downtown was a desert of dilapidated(破旧的) buildings and bag people. Today it is bustling with life. If Washington is struggling to fix the world, at least it is making a reasonable job of fixing itself. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that ______.
从某种意义上来说，大脑就像肌肉一样，如果______锻炼某个部分，就会使该区域增强。科学家发现小提琴演奏家的大脑中用来控制左手的区域远大于常人，因为左手按压琴弦的工作比较_______，而右手拉弓弦则相对简单。同样，阅读盲文的盲人，其大脑中很大的区域______给触觉。 依次填入横线部分最恰当的一项是( )。
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