Compared with the traditional form, on...

单项选择题Luis Figueroa lives down the street from UC Merced, the newest campus in the University of California system. So it’s not surprising that the 21-year-old studies from the comfort of his own home. But he’s not enrolled at Merced: from his living-room computer, Figueroa is earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration at Columbia College in Missouri, some 2,000 miles away. At $630 per course — about $1,800 per semester — his online degree will cost far less than even in-state tuition at UC. Not only that, Figueroa is able to continue working full time in a management-training job with AT&T in Merced, a job he feels lucky to have in the current economic climate. "Once I realized I had time constraints, I knew the traditional classroom wouldn’t work," he says. "Courses online are open 24 hours a day, and I’m able to go there any time I want."
That convenience is one of the main reasons nearly 4 million American students took at least one online course in the 2007-08 school year, according to a study by the Sloan Foundation. The same study found that online enrollment is growing at a rate more than 10 times that of the higher-education population at large — 12.9 percent vs. 1.2 percent for traditional "in seat" students. Nowhere is the growth faster than among younger students like Figueroa who are opting for online learning, even when the traditional classroom is — in his case — right outside the front door. "This is a generation that lives online," says Vicky Phillips, founder and CEO of Geteducated.com, a service that ranks online learning institutions. "Everything is instant, accelerated, and accessible, and they expect their education to be that way too. For them there is no clear line between the virtual world and the actual world."
Once targeted at older, working adults, distance learning has moved into the education mainstream at stunning speed over the past couple of years, as technology allows ever- richer, more-interactive learning experiences online — and as college costs continue to rise and classrooms are packed to capacity. For traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, that has meant a scramble to enter a lucrative market that used to be the exclusive territory of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Established brand-name educators — including Stanford, Cornell, Penn State, and MIT, which has placed its entire curriculum online through its OpenCourseWare program — now offer extensive online learning options and are competing with the for-profits for students. "The stigma is gone," says Phillips. "Online learning has reached mass cultural acceptance. It’s no longer the ugly stepsister of the higher-education world."
Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic Schoolbus-like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a "virtual child." They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. "The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn," says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. "I like that so much better than having to rush to class or sit through a lecture that’s boring."
As the largest generation since the baby boom attends college at a time of shrinking budgets and soaring costs, many educators believe that online learning holds the greatest promise for expanding the capacity of the U.S. higher-education system. And digital classrooms will surely play an important role in helping the Obama administration pursue its goal of raising the percentage of college graduates in the U.S. to first in the world by 2020 (at least 10 other countries now stand in the way). The surge in students with jobs and families, and those in the military, has also caused online enrollments to soar. Sarah Gerke, an Army private stationed in Iraq, keeps up with her coursework at Columbia College in Missouri, despite the occasional bombing. "Even if I could attend in person," she writes in an e-mail from Camp Liberty, "I think I would stick with online classes for the convenience."
For public institutions such as the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts, online learning not only extends their brand, it’s a cost-effective way to serve more students. At UMassOnline, enrollment among students under the age of 25 has increased 91 percent over the past three years. At Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J., that growth rate over the same period is more than 100 percent. "The best way to lower the cost of higher education is to graduate on time," says UMass president Jack Wilson. "More and more we see students using online learning as an accelerator, a way to move more quickly through their undergraduate program."Compared with the traditional form, online education has all the advantages EXCEPT

A. online degree costs a lot less than in-class education.
B. online education has many conveniences.
C. online education is far more interesting than traditional form of education.
D. online education provides colorful activities which greatly enhance social life.

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1.单项选择题What if architects could build living systems rather than static buildings — dynamic structures that modify their internal and external forms in response to changes in their environment This provocative idea is making waves in the field of architecture. Houses, for example, might shrink in the winter to reduce surface area and volume, thus cutting heating costs. They could cover themselves to escape the heat of the summer sun or shake snow off the roof in winter. Skyscrapers could alter their aerodynamic profiles, swaying slightly to distribute increased loads during hurricanes.
Such "responsive architecture" would depend on two sorts of technology: control systems capable of deciding what to do, and structural components able to change the building’s shape as required. Architects have been working to improve the control systems in buildings for many years, but shape-shifting technology is at a much earlier stage of development.
One approach being pursued by researchers is to imitate nature. Many natural constructions, including spiders’ webs and cell membranes, are "tensegrity systems" — robust structures made up of many interconnected elements which can be manipulated to change shape without losing their structural integrity. "These structures can bend and twist, but no element in the structure bends and twists," says Robert Skelton of the Structural Systems and Control Laboratory at the University of California in San Diego. "It’s the architecture of life."
While Dr Skelton is working on solving the engineering equations associated with tensegrity systems, Tristan d’Estrée Sterk at the Office for Robotic Architectural Media & the Bureau for Responsive Architecture, an architectural practice based in Vancouver, Canada, has begun to construct prototypes of shape-changing "building envelopes" based on tensegrity structures. Lightweight skeletal frameworks, composed of rods and wires and controlled by pneumatic "muscles", serve as the walls of a building; adjusting their configuration to change the building’s shape. Mr.Sterk is also developing the "brain" needed to control such a building based on information from internal and external sensors.
Cars are already capable of monitoring their own performance and acting with a certain degree of autonomy, from cruise-control systems to airbag sensors. Such responsive behaviour is considered normal for a car; architects argue that the same sort of ideas should be incorporated into buildings, too.
And just as the performance of a car can be simulated in advance to choose the best design for a range of driving conditions, the same should be done for buildings, argues Gian Carlo Magnoli, an architect and the co-director of the Kinetic Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is devising blueprints for responsive houses. "We need to evolve designs for the best performing responsive-building models," he says.
So will we end up with cities of skyscrapers that wave in the breeze It sounds crazy. But, says Mr.Sterk, many ideas that were once considered crazy are now commonplace. "Electricity was a batty idea, but now it’s universal," he says. Dynamic, intelligent, adaptable buildings are "the logical next step", he claims.What’s the author’s attitude toward dynamic structures

A. Pessimistic.
B. Skeptical.
C. Ambivalent.
D. Optimistic.

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2.单项选择题It is a universally acknowledged fact that human beings possess a larger brain than animals. This allows us to coordinate our lives better and communicate with each other on a higher, more sophisticated level. Language is a mode of communication where with a limited number of words we can produce an infinite number of sentences. It gives us the chance to discuss ideas and look at the world with a critical eye. This process provides us with the opportunity to stimulate our intelligence which in turn enables us to improve our means of communication. It is of utmost importance to note that we have developed our linguistic abilities so that we not only have the option of interacting verbally and through signs but also on a written basis.
The central question to be examined is: How does language actually influence our specifically animal operations A case in point would be that when we look at an object, for example a tree, do we see it in its pure, realistic and natural way or is language imposing a certain influence in the way we look at this tree Do we regard it as an object of nature which is a tall woody plant having a single, usually, long and straight main stem, generally with a few or no branches on its lower part Or are we simply seeing it that way because of the context of the language in our culture One theory which supports this point of view is the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis.
Since the languages of the world differ in regard to their semantic and structural characteristics, it seems somewhat logical to argue that people speaking widely different languages would also differ in the way they viewed and thought about the world. An example may illustrate this point. If one must classify things such as camels, automobiles or snow in certain ways, then one must perceive them differently from someone who does not require to make these distinctions. Eskimos may have a number of different meanings for the word "snow", whereas we only have one. In Maltese, for example, there is no word which specifically describes the word "snow". It is translated as "silg" which literally translated means "ice". From this we can deduce that it is still debatable whether we perceive the world in its real form or whether we are affected by the language of our society without us realising. Hence one can infer that language imposes meaning on everything existing in our world through the human being.
Consequently, meaning must be placed at the center of any attempt to explain language. But, meaning lies not in the words but in the people. We use words to approximate the meanings we wish to communicate, but these words still remain imperfect and incomplete representations of our meanings. After having delved deeper into this subject, we can conclude that language is the trait which decisively distinguishes man from all other creatures and that human language is arguably the single most remarkable characteristic which we have and the one that most truly sets our species apart. Undeniably, other creatures do have a way of communicating with each other and appear to do this through some sort of signaling system which allows them to pass on information within their species and occasionally even with members outside their own species. The bottom line is that the human language is so utterly different from all of these other signaling systems, that we are obliged to treat it as a truly unique phenomenon.According to the author, which of the following is CORRECT

A. People can always find the right words.
B. People often fail to use words properly.
C. People wish to communicate with each other.
D. Words cannot communicate our meanings perfectly.

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3.单项选择题Flats were almost unknown in Britain until the 1850s when they were developed, along with other industrial dwellings, for the laboring classes. These vast blocks were plainly a convenient means of easing social conscience by housing large numbers of the ever-present poor on compact city sites. During the 1880s, however, the idea of living in comfortable residential chambers caught on with the affluent upper and upper-middle classes, and controversy as to the advantages and disadvantages of flat life was a topic of conversation around many a respectable dinner-table. In Paris and other major European cities, the custom whereby the better-off lived in apartments, or fiats, was well established. Up to the late nineteenth century in England only bachelor barristers had established the tradition of living in rooms near the Law Court: any self-respecting head of household would insist upon a West End town house as his London home, the best that his means could provide.
The popularity of flats for the better-off seems to have developed for a number of reasons. One is the introduction of the railways, which had enabled a wide range of people to enjoy a holiday staying in a suite at one of the luxury hotels which had begun to spring up during the previous decade. Hence, there is no doubt that many of the early luxury fiats were similar to hotel suites, even being provided with communal dining-rooms and central boilers for hot water and heating. Rents tended to be high to cover overheads, but savings were made possible by these communal amenities and by tenants being able to reduce the number of family servants.
One of the earliest substantial London developments of flats for the well-to-do was begun soon after Victoria Railway Station was opened in 1860, as the train service provided an efficient link with both the City and the South of England. Victoria Street, adjacent to both the Station and Westminster, had already been formed, and under the direction of the architect, Henry Ashton, was being lined, with blocks of residential chambers in the Parisian manner. These fiats were commodious indeed, offering between eight and fifteen rooms apiece, including appropriate domestic offices. The idea was an emphatic departure from the tradition of the London house and achieved immediate Success.
Perhaps the most notable block in the vicinity was Queen Anne’s Mansions, partly designed by E.R. Robson in 1884 and recently demolished. For many years, this was London’s loftiest building and had strong claims to be the ugliest. The block modeled on the American skyscraper, and was nearly 200 feet high. The cliff-like walls of dingy brick completely overshadowed the modest thoroughfare nearby. Although bleak outside, the mansion fiats were palatial within, with sumptuously furnished communal entertaining and dining rooms, and lifts to the uppermost floors. The success of these tall blocks of flats could not have been achieved, of course, without the invention of the lift, or ’ascending carriage’ as it was called when first used in the Strand Law Courts in the 1870s.Which of the following is true about the interior and exterior of Queen Anne’s Mansions

A. They were elegantly decorated both inside and outside.
B. They were grim from the outside and had a modest decor inside.
C. They were flashy from the street but nondescript inside.
D. They were plain outside but with lavish interior.

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4.单项选择题Luis Figueroa lives down the street from UC Merced, the newest campus in the University of California system. So it’s not surprising that the 21-year-old studies from the comfort of his own home. But he’s not enrolled at Merced: from his living-room computer, Figueroa is earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration at Columbia College in Missouri, some 2,000 miles away. At $630 per course — about $1,800 per semester — his online degree will cost far less than even in-state tuition at UC. Not only that, Figueroa is able to continue working full time in a management-training job with AT&T in Merced, a job he feels lucky to have in the current economic climate. "Once I realized I had time constraints, I knew the traditional classroom wouldn’t work," he says. "Courses online are open 24 hours a day, and I’m able to go there any time I want."
That convenience is one of the main reasons nearly 4 million American students took at least one online course in the 2007-08 school year, according to a study by the Sloan Foundation. The same study found that online enrollment is growing at a rate more than 10 times that of the higher-education population at large — 12.9 percent vs. 1.2 percent for traditional "in seat" students. Nowhere is the growth faster than among younger students like Figueroa who are opting for online learning, even when the traditional classroom is — in his case — right outside the front door. "This is a generation that lives online," says Vicky Phillips, founder and CEO of Geteducated.com, a service that ranks online learning institutions. "Everything is instant, accelerated, and accessible, and they expect their education to be that way too. For them there is no clear line between the virtual world and the actual world."
Once targeted at older, working adults, distance learning has moved into the education mainstream at stunning speed over the past couple of years, as technology allows ever- richer, more-interactive learning experiences online — and as college costs continue to rise and classrooms are packed to capacity. For traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, that has meant a scramble to enter a lucrative market that used to be the exclusive territory of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Established brand-name educators — including Stanford, Cornell, Penn State, and MIT, which has placed its entire curriculum online through its OpenCourseWare program — now offer extensive online learning options and are competing with the for-profits for students. "The stigma is gone," says Phillips. "Online learning has reached mass cultural acceptance. It’s no longer the ugly stepsister of the higher-education world."
Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic Schoolbus-like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a "virtual child." They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. "The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn," says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. "I like that so much better than having to rush to class or sit through a lecture that’s boring."
As the largest generation since the baby boom attends college at a time of shrinking budgets and soaring costs, many educators believe that online learning holds the greatest promise for expanding the capacity of the U.S. higher-education system. And digital classrooms will surely play an important role in helping the Obama administration pursue its goal of raising the percentage of college graduates in the U.S. to first in the world by 2020 (at least 10 other countries now stand in the way). The surge in students with jobs and families, and those in the military, has also caused online enrollments to soar. Sarah Gerke, an Army private stationed in Iraq, keeps up with her coursework at Columbia College in Missouri, despite the occasional bombing. "Even if I could attend in person," she writes in an e-mail from Camp Liberty, "I think I would stick with online classes for the convenience."
For public institutions such as the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts, online learning not only extends their brand, it’s a cost-effective way to serve more students. At UMassOnline, enrollment among students under the age of 25 has increased 91 percent over the past three years. At Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J., that growth rate over the same period is more than 100 percent. "The best way to lower the cost of higher education is to graduate on time," says UMass president Jack Wilson. "More and more we see students using online learning as an accelerator, a way to move more quickly through their undergraduate program."If you take course at UMassOnline,

A. you’ll get a special degree different from campus-going counterparts’.
B. you can spend a shorter time to get a degree than going to campus.
C. you’ll receive higher standardized curricula than traditional education.
D. you can accept class counseling from teachers at anytime you want.

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5.单项选择题What if architects could build living systems rather than static buildings — dynamic structures that modify their internal and external forms in response to changes in their environment This provocative idea is making waves in the field of architecture. Houses, for example, might shrink in the winter to reduce surface area and volume, thus cutting heating costs. They could cover themselves to escape the heat of the summer sun or shake snow off the roof in winter. Skyscrapers could alter their aerodynamic profiles, swaying slightly to distribute increased loads during hurricanes.
Such "responsive architecture" would depend on two sorts of technology: control systems capable of deciding what to do, and structural components able to change the building’s shape as required. Architects have been working to improve the control systems in buildings for many years, but shape-shifting technology is at a much earlier stage of development.
One approach being pursued by researchers is to imitate nature. Many natural constructions, including spiders’ webs and cell membranes, are "tensegrity systems" — robust structures made up of many interconnected elements which can be manipulated to change shape without losing their structural integrity. "These structures can bend and twist, but no element in the structure bends and twists," says Robert Skelton of the Structural Systems and Control Laboratory at the University of California in San Diego. "It’s the architecture of life."
While Dr Skelton is working on solving the engineering equations associated with tensegrity systems, Tristan d’Estrée Sterk at the Office for Robotic Architectural Media & the Bureau for Responsive Architecture, an architectural practice based in Vancouver, Canada, has begun to construct prototypes of shape-changing "building envelopes" based on tensegrity structures. Lightweight skeletal frameworks, composed of rods and wires and controlled by pneumatic "muscles", serve as the walls of a building; adjusting their configuration to change the building’s shape. Mr.Sterk is also developing the "brain" needed to control such a building based on information from internal and external sensors.
Cars are already capable of monitoring their own performance and acting with a certain degree of autonomy, from cruise-control systems to airbag sensors. Such responsive behaviour is considered normal for a car; architects argue that the same sort of ideas should be incorporated into buildings, too.
And just as the performance of a car can be simulated in advance to choose the best design for a range of driving conditions, the same should be done for buildings, argues Gian Carlo Magnoli, an architect and the co-director of the Kinetic Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is devising blueprints for responsive houses. "We need to evolve designs for the best performing responsive-building models," he says.
So will we end up with cities of skyscrapers that wave in the breeze It sounds crazy. But, says Mr.Sterk, many ideas that were once considered crazy are now commonplace. "Electricity was a batty idea, but now it’s universal," he says. Dynamic, intelligent, adaptable buildings are "the logical next step", he claims.To which of the following does Magnoli probably agree

A. Cruise-control systems should be incorporated into buildings.
B. Architects need to perfect the designs of responsive building for the best models.
C. The development of buildings is nothing compared to that of cars.
D. The performance of a building should be monitored in advance.

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6.单项选择题It is a universally acknowledged fact that human beings possess a larger brain than animals. This allows us to coordinate our lives better and communicate with each other on a higher, more sophisticated level. Language is a mode of communication where with a limited number of words we can produce an infinite number of sentences. It gives us the chance to discuss ideas and look at the world with a critical eye. This process provides us with the opportunity to stimulate our intelligence which in turn enables us to improve our means of communication. It is of utmost importance to note that we have developed our linguistic abilities so that we not only have the option of interacting verbally and through signs but also on a written basis.
The central question to be examined is: How does language actually influence our specifically animal operations A case in point would be that when we look at an object, for example a tree, do we see it in its pure, realistic and natural way or is language imposing a certain influence in the way we look at this tree Do we regard it as an object of nature which is a tall woody plant having a single, usually, long and straight main stem, generally with a few or no branches on its lower part Or are we simply seeing it that way because of the context of the language in our culture One theory which supports this point of view is the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis.
Since the languages of the world differ in regard to their semantic and structural characteristics, it seems somewhat logical to argue that people speaking widely different languages would also differ in the way they viewed and thought about the world. An example may illustrate this point. If one must classify things such as camels, automobiles or snow in certain ways, then one must perceive them differently from someone who does not require to make these distinctions. Eskimos may have a number of different meanings for the word "snow", whereas we only have one. In Maltese, for example, there is no word which specifically describes the word "snow". It is translated as "silg" which literally translated means "ice". From this we can deduce that it is still debatable whether we perceive the world in its real form or whether we are affected by the language of our society without us realising. Hence one can infer that language imposes meaning on everything existing in our world through the human being.
Consequently, meaning must be placed at the center of any attempt to explain language. But, meaning lies not in the words but in the people. We use words to approximate the meanings we wish to communicate, but these words still remain imperfect and incomplete representations of our meanings. After having delved deeper into this subject, we can conclude that language is the trait which decisively distinguishes man from all other creatures and that human language is arguably the single most remarkable characteristic which we have and the one that most truly sets our species apart. Undeniably, other creatures do have a way of communicating with each other and appear to do this through some sort of signaling system which allows them to pass on information within their species and occasionally even with members outside their own species. The bottom line is that the human language is so utterly different from all of these other signaling systems, that we are obliged to treat it as a truly unique phenomenon.Which of the following is the most significant function of language

A. To classify things.
B. To make distinctions.
C. To communicate meaning.
D. To impose meaning.

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7.单项选择题Flats were almost unknown in Britain until the 1850s when they were developed, along with other industrial dwellings, for the laboring classes. These vast blocks were plainly a convenient means of easing social conscience by housing large numbers of the ever-present poor on compact city sites. During the 1880s, however, the idea of living in comfortable residential chambers caught on with the affluent upper and upper-middle classes, and controversy as to the advantages and disadvantages of flat life was a topic of conversation around many a respectable dinner-table. In Paris and other major European cities, the custom whereby the better-off lived in apartments, or fiats, was well established. Up to the late nineteenth century in England only bachelor barristers had established the tradition of living in rooms near the Law Court: any self-respecting head of household would insist upon a West End town house as his London home, the best that his means could provide.
The popularity of flats for the better-off seems to have developed for a number of reasons. One is the introduction of the railways, which had enabled a wide range of people to enjoy a holiday staying in a suite at one of the luxury hotels which had begun to spring up during the previous decade. Hence, there is no doubt that many of the early luxury fiats were similar to hotel suites, even being provided with communal dining-rooms and central boilers for hot water and heating. Rents tended to be high to cover overheads, but savings were made possible by these communal amenities and by tenants being able to reduce the number of family servants.
One of the earliest substantial London developments of flats for the well-to-do was begun soon after Victoria Railway Station was opened in 1860, as the train service provided an efficient link with both the City and the South of England. Victoria Street, adjacent to both the Station and Westminster, had already been formed, and under the direction of the architect, Henry Ashton, was being lined, with blocks of residential chambers in the Parisian manner. These fiats were commodious indeed, offering between eight and fifteen rooms apiece, including appropriate domestic offices. The idea was an emphatic departure from the tradition of the London house and achieved immediate Success.
Perhaps the most notable block in the vicinity was Queen Anne’s Mansions, partly designed by E.R. Robson in 1884 and recently demolished. For many years, this was London’s loftiest building and had strong claims to be the ugliest. The block modeled on the American skyscraper, and was nearly 200 feet high. The cliff-like walls of dingy brick completely overshadowed the modest thoroughfare nearby. Although bleak outside, the mansion fiats were palatial within, with sumptuously furnished communal entertaining and dining rooms, and lifts to the uppermost floors. The success of these tall blocks of flats could not have been achieved, of course, without the invention of the lift, or ’ascending carriage’ as it was called when first used in the Strand Law Courts in the 1870s.The immediate success of the flats in Victoria Street could be attributed to

A. the unusual number of rooms each fiat contained.
B. their revolutionary style of architecture.
C. the ease with which they could be used as offices.
D. their French style of architecture.

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8.单项选择题Luis Figueroa lives down the street from UC Merced, the newest campus in the University of California system. So it’s not surprising that the 21-year-old studies from the comfort of his own home. But he’s not enrolled at Merced: from his living-room computer, Figueroa is earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration at Columbia College in Missouri, some 2,000 miles away. At $630 per course — about $1,800 per semester — his online degree will cost far less than even in-state tuition at UC. Not only that, Figueroa is able to continue working full time in a management-training job with AT&T in Merced, a job he feels lucky to have in the current economic climate. "Once I realized I had time constraints, I knew the traditional classroom wouldn’t work," he says. "Courses online are open 24 hours a day, and I’m able to go there any time I want."
That convenience is one of the main reasons nearly 4 million American students took at least one online course in the 2007-08 school year, according to a study by the Sloan Foundation. The same study found that online enrollment is growing at a rate more than 10 times that of the higher-education population at large — 12.9 percent vs. 1.2 percent for traditional "in seat" students. Nowhere is the growth faster than among younger students like Figueroa who are opting for online learning, even when the traditional classroom is — in his case — right outside the front door. "This is a generation that lives online," says Vicky Phillips, founder and CEO of Geteducated.com, a service that ranks online learning institutions. "Everything is instant, accelerated, and accessible, and they expect their education to be that way too. For them there is no clear line between the virtual world and the actual world."
Once targeted at older, working adults, distance learning has moved into the education mainstream at stunning speed over the past couple of years, as technology allows ever- richer, more-interactive learning experiences online — and as college costs continue to rise and classrooms are packed to capacity. For traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, that has meant a scramble to enter a lucrative market that used to be the exclusive territory of for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. Established brand-name educators — including Stanford, Cornell, Penn State, and MIT, which has placed its entire curriculum online through its OpenCourseWare program — now offer extensive online learning options and are competing with the for-profits for students. "The stigma is gone," says Phillips. "Online learning has reached mass cultural acceptance. It’s no longer the ugly stepsister of the higher-education world."
Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic Schoolbus-like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a "virtual child." They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. "The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn," says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. "I like that so much better than having to rush to class or sit through a lecture that’s boring."
As the largest generation since the baby boom attends college at a time of shrinking budgets and soaring costs, many educators believe that online learning holds the greatest promise for expanding the capacity of the U.S. higher-education system. And digital classrooms will surely play an important role in helping the Obama administration pursue its goal of raising the percentage of college graduates in the U.S. to first in the world by 2020 (at least 10 other countries now stand in the way). The surge in students with jobs and families, and those in the military, has also caused online enrollments to soar. Sarah Gerke, an Army private stationed in Iraq, keeps up with her coursework at Columbia College in Missouri, despite the occasional bombing. "Even if I could attend in person," she writes in an e-mail from Camp Liberty, "I think I would stick with online classes for the convenience."
For public institutions such as the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts, online learning not only extends their brand, it’s a cost-effective way to serve more students. At UMassOnline, enrollment among students under the age of 25 has increased 91 percent over the past three years. At Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J., that growth rate over the same period is more than 100 percent. "The best way to lower the cost of higher education is to graduate on time," says UMass president Jack Wilson. "More and more we see students using online learning as an accelerator, a way to move more quickly through their undergraduate program."By Immersive Education method, students can

A. enjoy some feats in physical classroom that gravity renders impossible.
B. go to a city plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks and so on.
C. learn how to be a parent by raising an adopted child through Internet.
D. have a simulated trip through the human body in front of a computer.

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9.单项选择题What if architects could build living systems rather than static buildings — dynamic structures that modify their internal and external forms in response to changes in their environment This provocative idea is making waves in the field of architecture. Houses, for example, might shrink in the winter to reduce surface area and volume, thus cutting heating costs. They could cover themselves to escape the heat of the summer sun or shake snow off the roof in winter. Skyscrapers could alter their aerodynamic profiles, swaying slightly to distribute increased loads during hurricanes.
Such "responsive architecture" would depend on two sorts of technology: control systems capable of deciding what to do, and structural components able to change the building’s shape as required. Architects have been working to improve the control systems in buildings for many years, but shape-shifting technology is at a much earlier stage of development.
One approach being pursued by researchers is to imitate nature. Many natural constructions, including spiders’ webs and cell membranes, are "tensegrity systems" — robust structures made up of many interconnected elements which can be manipulated to change shape without losing their structural integrity. "These structures can bend and twist, but no element in the structure bends and twists," says Robert Skelton of the Structural Systems and Control Laboratory at the University of California in San Diego. "It’s the architecture of life."
While Dr Skelton is working on solving the engineering equations associated with tensegrity systems, Tristan d’Estrée Sterk at the Office for Robotic Architectural Media & the Bureau for Responsive Architecture, an architectural practice based in Vancouver, Canada, has begun to construct prototypes of shape-changing "building envelopes" based on tensegrity structures. Lightweight skeletal frameworks, composed of rods and wires and controlled by pneumatic "muscles", serve as the walls of a building; adjusting their configuration to change the building’s shape. Mr.Sterk is also developing the "brain" needed to control such a building based on information from internal and external sensors.
Cars are already capable of monitoring their own performance and acting with a certain degree of autonomy, from cruise-control systems to airbag sensors. Such responsive behaviour is considered normal for a car; architects argue that the same sort of ideas should be incorporated into buildings, too.
And just as the performance of a car can be simulated in advance to choose the best design for a range of driving conditions, the same should be done for buildings, argues Gian Carlo Magnoli, an architect and the co-director of the Kinetic Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is devising blueprints for responsive houses. "We need to evolve designs for the best performing responsive-building models," he says.
So will we end up with cities of skyscrapers that wave in the breeze It sounds crazy. But, says Mr.Sterk, many ideas that were once considered crazy are now commonplace. "Electricity was a batty idea, but now it’s universal," he says. Dynamic, intelligent, adaptable buildings are "the logical next step", he claims.What contribution does Sterk make to responsive architecture

A. He makes archetypes of shape-changing building frames.
B. He uses rods and wires to be the walls of a building.
C. He does more for responsive architecture than Dr Skelton.
D. He has invented the "brain" to control building.

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10.单项选择题It is a universally acknowledged fact that human beings possess a larger brain than animals. This allows us to coordinate our lives better and communicate with each other on a higher, more sophisticated level. Language is a mode of communication where with a limited number of words we can produce an infinite number of sentences. It gives us the chance to discuss ideas and look at the world with a critical eye. This process provides us with the opportunity to stimulate our intelligence which in turn enables us to improve our means of communication. It is of utmost importance to note that we have developed our linguistic abilities so that we not only have the option of interacting verbally and through signs but also on a written basis.
The central question to be examined is: How does language actually influence our specifically animal operations A case in point would be that when we look at an object, for example a tree, do we see it in its pure, realistic and natural way or is language imposing a certain influence in the way we look at this tree Do we regard it as an object of nature which is a tall woody plant having a single, usually, long and straight main stem, generally with a few or no branches on its lower part Or are we simply seeing it that way because of the context of the language in our culture One theory which supports this point of view is the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis.
Since the languages of the world differ in regard to their semantic and structural characteristics, it seems somewhat logical to argue that people speaking widely different languages would also differ in the way they viewed and thought about the world. An example may illustrate this point. If one must classify things such as camels, automobiles or snow in certain ways, then one must perceive them differently from someone who does not require to make these distinctions. Eskimos may have a number of different meanings for the word "snow", whereas we only have one. In Maltese, for example, there is no word which specifically describes the word "snow". It is translated as "silg" which literally translated means "ice". From this we can deduce that it is still debatable whether we perceive the world in its real form or whether we are affected by the language of our society without us realising. Hence one can infer that language imposes meaning on everything existing in our world through the human being.
Consequently, meaning must be placed at the center of any attempt to explain language. But, meaning lies not in the words but in the people. We use words to approximate the meanings we wish to communicate, but these words still remain imperfect and incomplete representations of our meanings. After having delved deeper into this subject, we can conclude that language is the trait which decisively distinguishes man from all other creatures and that human language is arguably the single most remarkable characteristic which we have and the one that most truly sets our species apart. Undeniably, other creatures do have a way of communicating with each other and appear to do this through some sort of signaling system which allows them to pass on information within their species and occasionally even with members outside their own species. The bottom line is that the human language is so utterly different from all of these other signaling systems, that we are obliged to treat it as a truly unique phenomenon.It can be inferred that the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis advocates all the following EXCEPT

A. language shapes people’s world views.
B. the differences in language reflect the different views of different people.
C. in addition to instinct, people are also affected by the confines of their language.
D. what one thinks is determined by their language.

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