Read the following passage carefully and then decide whether the statements which follow are true(T)or false(F). Most serious scientists spend a good part of their waking hours amid papers and preprints, equations and equipment, conducting experiments, talking about graphs and data, arguing about ideas and theories, teaching, and writing grant proposals. But if they browse in bookstores or glance in the book review sections of journals, they cannot fail to find a fascinating phenomenon in the scientific landscape; books proclaiming the extrarational implications of science are proliferating. Religion and mysticism are inching their way back into the arena of science whence(some thought)they had been gradually weeded out during the past two centuries. Right from the days of Kepler and Galileo, scientists have generally had a religious side to them: After all, except when they encounter faiths of a different shade, religions normally have only civilizing effects on the human heart. Isaac Newton believed in a personal God, explicitly calling himself His servant. Leonard Euler was deeply religious, and so were Augustin Cauchy and Michael Faraday. One author has written a 100-page volume filled with quotations from eminent scientists expressing their religious convictions. No reflecting scientist can be immune to the awe and majesty of the physical world, nor insensitive to the deep mystery underlying life and consciousness, though some troy not express it in traditional ways. But the scientific worldview arrived at by collective and extensive inquiries, fortified by countless instruments and carefully-erected conceptual tools, has been in awkward contradiction to explanations of how the world began and behaves, or how life emerged, as reported in the holy books of human history. As a result, ever since the Copernican revolution, there have been confrontations between scientific theories and religious worldviews. In 1896, A. D. White published his erudite work, which was an embarrassingly candid exposure, instance after instance, of the dogged obstinacy of the religious establishment in upholding ancient doctrines in the face of mounting scientific evidence to the contrary. After a full century, however, the situation seems to have changed drastically. A plethora of extrapolations of science are cropping up whose goal is to reestablish prescience. Many popular books, TV specials, magazine articles, and conference papers are joyously declaring that the ancients were not as much in the dark as Bacon and company had imagined; that, if anything, they had, through intuition and revelation, pretty much summed up the essence of twentieth-century physics and cosmology: from the strange physics of vacuums to the big bang. In the view of quite a few writers(including some practicing scientists of repute), physics has shown that Hindu mystics were right in picturing the cosmos as the Dancing Divine; that Chinese philosophers were on target when they spoke of yin and yang, for these referred implicitly to the conservation of matter and energy; and that the Book of Genesis formulates the principle of evolution in metaphorical meters. It has been claimed that receding galaxies provide experimental confirmation of what cabalists had already recognized in medieval times, and inklings of the esoteric formulations of quantum physics(the so-called S-matrix theory)have been detected in Buddhist sutras. Whether or not mainstream professional scientists take note of it, whether or not they attach weight to such claims, a significant fact in the closing decade of our century is that mysticism and old-time religion are back in full vigor in public consciousness, not just as enriching dimensions of the human spirit, nor even as competing modes of knowing or perceiving, but as profound intuitive visions that have at long last been "scientifically proven". A good deal of academic discussion is dedicated either to showing how limited and misleading the intellect is or to proving that nonrationally-derived insights have been confirmed by the most recent scientific theories. The last decade of the 20th century saw a change of view in the science field regarding ancient wisdom: after all, profound intuitions are valuable as they successfully predicted contemporary scientific findings.
A. TRUE
B. FALSE
Germany has gold reserves of just under 3, 400 tons, the second-largest reserves in the world after the United States. Much of that is in the safekeeping of central banks outside Germany, especially in the U. S. One would think that with such a valuable stash, worth around 133 billion($170 billion), the German government would want to keep a close eye on its whereabouts. But now a bizarre dispute has broken out between different German institutions over how closely the reserves should be checked. Germany"s federal audit office, the Bundesrechnungshof, which monitors the government"s financial management, is unhappy with how the central bank, the Bundesbank, keeps tabs on its gold. According to media reports, the auditors are dissatisfied with the fact that gold reserves in Frankfurt are more closely monitored than those held abroad. In Germany, spot checks are carried out to make sure that the gold bars are in the right place. But for the German gold that is stored on the Bundesbank"s behalf by the U. S. Federal Reserve in New York, the Bank of England in London and the Banque de France in Paris, the German central bank relies on the assurances of its foreign counterparts, that the gold is where it should be. The three foreign central banks give the Bundesbank annual statements confirming the size of the reserves, but the Germans do not usually carry out physical inspections of the bars. According to German media reports, the Bundesrechnungshof has now recommended in its confidential annual audit of the Bundesbank for 2011 that Germany"s central bank check its foreign gold reserves with yearly spot checks. The Bundesbank has rejected the demand, arguing that central banks do not usually check each others" reserves, and there are no doubts about the integrity and the reputation of these foreign depositories. Germany moved some of its gold reserves abroad during the Cold War to protect them from a possible Soviet attack. Some of the gold was moved back to Frankfurt after the collapse of communism. But the Bundesbank argues that it still makes sense to store some gold in major financial centers so that it can be sold quickly if necessary. Although the Bundesbank does not provide exact details about the distribution, it has revealed that the largest share of Germany"s gold is held in New York, followed by Frankfurt, London and Paris. In times of uncertainty about the future of Europe"s common currency, gold is a hot topic, and some Germans take a dim view of the fact that much of the country"s gold—which theoretically belongs to the people—is held abroad. Some members of parliament have even expressed doubts as to whether the foreign gold reserves really exist. Philipp Missfelder, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union(CDU), wanted to see the gold for himself and traveled to New York in person to inspect the holdings, according to the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. Peter Gauweiler, a Bundestag member with the Christian Social Union(CSU), is also skeptical about the foreign gold reserves. In recent years he has attempted to gain more information about Germany"s gold through parliamentary questions. Last year, he had an economics professor prepare an expert report on the subject, which concluded that the Bundesbank was not fulfilling its inventory regulations by failing to physically inspect the gold. Gauweiler doubts that the Bundesbank would have immediate access to all its gold if necessary, suggesting that part of the gold may have even been lent out—a claim that the Bundesbank rejects. Some Germans even want to bring the gold reserves back to Germany. An initiative called " Gold Action" is campaigning under the slogan: "Repatriate Our Gold!" Its petition has been signed by prominent industrialist Hans-Olaf Henkel and Frank Schaffler, a parliamentarian with the business-friendly Free Democrats. The initiative alleges that there is an "acute" danger that the German gold could be expropriated as a result of the financial and debt crisis. They argue that the German government could soon be forced to sell gold to cover the costs of the crisis. But the Bundesbank wants to leave the gold where it is. Observers point out that apart from the high cost of transporting the gold back to Frankfurt, the symbolic effect of Germany repatriating its gold reserves might unsettle the nervous financial markets, who could see it as a sign of an impending collapse of the euro. What is the central idea of this passage
A. Germany does checks on its gold reserves in foreign banks.
B. Germans worry about the safety of their gold reserves abroad.
C. Germany"s gold reserves stored in the U. S. are not safe.
D. The Bundesbank failed to fulfill its inventory duties on gold.
Please read the following passage and translate it into Chinese. Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you, but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral "Don"t relinquish power; don"t give away your lands. " But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it: " Give away your lands if you want to, but don"t expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won"t gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for other, and not as a roundabout way of getting advantage for yourself. "
In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the "virus" she wanted to spread was literacy. The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point; giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watchers to nonwatchers, infecting children and their parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact well after the children stopped watching the show. Cooney probably wouldn"t have used these concepts or described her goals in precisely this way. But what she wanted to do, in essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy. She called her idea Sesame Street. By any measure, this was an audacious idea. Television is a great way to reach lots of people, very easily and cheaply. It entertains and dazzles. But it isn"t a particularly educational medium. Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist who joined with Cooney in founding Sesame Street, says that when he was first asked to join the project, back in the late 1960s, he was skeptical. "I had always been very much into fitting how you teach to what you know about the child, " he says. "You try to find the kid"s strengths, so you can play to them. You try to understand the kid"s weaknesses, so you can avoid them. Then you try and teach that individual kid"s profile ... Television has no potential, no power to do that. " Good teaching is interactive. It engages the child individually. It uses all the senses. It responds to the child. But a television is just a talking box. In experiments, children who are asked to read a passage and are then tested on it will invariably score higher than children asked to watch a video of the same subject matter. Educational experts describe television as "low involvement. " Television is like a strain of the common cold that can spread like lightning through a population, but only causes a few sniffles and is gone in a day. But Cooney and Lesser and a third partner—Lloyd Morrisett of the Markle Foundation in New York—set out to try anyway. They enlisted some of the top creative minds of the period. They borrowed techniques from television commercials to teach children about numbers. They used the live animation of Saturday morning cartoons to teach lessons about learning the alphabet. They brought in celebrities to sing and dance and star in comedy sketches that taught children about the virtues of cooperation or about their own emotions. Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children"s show had, and the extraordinary thing was that it worked. Virtually every time the show"s educational value has been tested—and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history—it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. There are few educators and child psychologists who don"t believe that the show managed to spread its infectious message well beyond the homes of those who watched the show regularly. The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of a rule of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor. They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television"s weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky. The term "educational Tipping Point" in Paragraph 1 probably means ______.
A. crucial point in mental growth
B. yardstick of literacy
C. stimulus to learning
D. point where change begins