What is the author"s attitude towards ...

It might be easier to do something about North Korea"s nuclear truculence if we could make head or tail of the cryptic videos it has been posting on the web. The latest shows a dreaming man, some Korean script and a video of rockets flying through space while fires burn in skyscrapers and a pianist plays "We Are the World" at dirge tempo. Is this a harmless fantasy A thrown-down gauntlet Should the west respond with a statement Should it post a video of its own It is hard to know. Our traditional media are being "replaced" by the internet. But the "information" coming out of the information economy is often hard to decipher, and composed for purposes that are hard to discern.
The film academic Stephen Apkon argues in The Age of the Image , published this week, that it is possible to speak of a new kind of literacy, one built on figuring out such non-verbal messages. At its humblest level, his book is about the "language"" of film, but Mr Apkon has a larger philosophical point, too. Our culture is growing more global. While it still relies on words, they are increasingly wrapped up with images, and it is the images people remember. Elizabeth Daley, dean of the University of Southern California"s School of Cinematic Arts, believes writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance-the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.
Images have always mattered in public arguments more than we admit. Few people cared that Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, so unkempt did the Republican look. Mr Apkon quotes a neuroscientist who says people are so attuned to picking up subtle signals that they make decisions about whether they like or dislike politicians "immediately". And unsubtle, non-verbal messages with a great emotional wallop can now be broadcast more widely. Video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Sohan, captured during June 2009 protests against irregular Iranian elections, spread round the world. In the gut-wrenching Kony 2012 video (100m views in six days), American activists sought to enlist the US military in a manhunt for a Ugandan warlord.
Eyesight is the most trusted sense, Mr. Apkon notes, and that means we need to be careful with it. There is a standing danger that the public will grow so upset by images of mistreatment that it will demand the government send the army off to war. This is arguably what happened Somalia in 1992, with America"s poorly planned military response to the African country"s famine. In future, Mr. Apkon says, we are likely to need "a combination of scepticism and incisiveness", enabling citizens to "[critique ] what is put in front of them with some level of sophistication".
That is unlikely. When the passions provoked by visual imagery lead to the same conclusion as the logic of a verbal argument, people are generally comfortable coming to a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one of them must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr. Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around "hidden mental hungers", easily manipulating voters.
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today"s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the scepticism Mr. Apkon speaks of, certain institutions "go with" certain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything "Protestant" about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism"s rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culmination of the culture of the written word. Mr. Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, "tapped into a lever in the psyche more primal than mere facts".
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn"t democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the endingWhich of the following is INCORRECT according to the author

A．Images do not always matter in public arguments more than we admit
B．Videos on political issues are the most popular among all
C．Videos carrying messages with a great emotional wallop can attract attention
D．Activists must use street language to appeal to the audience

问答题

One November evening in 1989 I was loafing in my room at university when a friend began thumping on the door. "What is it" I shouted irritably. "The Berlin Wall just fell," he shouted back For months afterwards I walked around in a daze of wonder, as crowds ransacked secret-police headquarters and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Two lines from Wordsworth about the French Revolution, which I"d read in some article about the1989 revolutions, kept going through my mind:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
It was the most optimistic political moment I"ve lived through, my generation"s version of 1945 or 1968. 6 .
Now we"re at the peak of political pessimism. The political year is opening with almost nobody on either right or left expecting anything good. The great questions seem to be: how will an intervention in Syria go wrong And will the US House of Representatives vote to repeal "Obamacare" for the 41st time 7 The utopian urge persists; it has just migrated from politics to technology. Instead of developing a political policy to solve a problem, people now develop an app.
In politics, you can hardly count all the lights that have failed since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Faith in unregulated capitalism died with Lehman Brothers. Then Barack Obama, the Occupy movements and the Tea Party all rapidly disappointed their followers. In 2009 in Copenhagen, it became clear the world wouldn"t agree to combat climate change. Now the Arab spring is eating its own children, the Russian demonstrators have gone home, and hardly anyone believes in the European project any more. 8 , even before its intellectual underpinning was revealed as an academic paper whose authors had accidentally left important bits of data off their spreadsheet.
The western liberating impulse-previously directed at Iraq, Iran and Cuba-has died too. Myanmar finally opened up, and ethnic conflict promptly began. Even people who believed in al-Qaeda are now presumably disillusioned.
It"s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chavez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba"s revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. 9 Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of It portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates tots of western voters is rage at immigrants-an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK"s Labour party, says : "We"re in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don"t have the answers. "
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. 10 The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains: "Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, "OK, what are we going to do" Now they are busy remaking the world: Google"s Erie Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world"s poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. "They have something of the white knight about them," muses Adonis. "There is a profound tech-optimism."
In this budding tech-utopia, government scarcely features. Great technological achievements of the past—the atomic bomb, the moon landing and even the internet—began within the US government. Today, whether people like government or loathe it, they mostly ignore it.
A. Austerity became the latest light to fail
B. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies
C. Strangely, it actually turned out pretty well
D. But hope springs eternal
E. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today"s lot

答案： C[解析] 句意：那时，我们的政治表现出奇地好。联系上文可知答案为C。

单项选择题

Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first "massive open online courses", these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers-Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX-offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.
Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The "summer slump" across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.
The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.
Furthermore, Indian Mooc users include a higher proportion of younger people, even controlling for India"s large youth population: more than 80 percent of Indian visitors to Mooc sites are under 34, while US and European visitors are fairly evenly spread across age groups. Indians also spend roughly five times as long as average visitors on Mooc sites.
Why India It may be because India has the largest population of university-age students in the world (94m and growing), while higher education in India is inadequate in quantity and quality due to poor government regulation and corruption. With 17m students in higher education, India has one of the world"s lowest higher-education enrollment ratios, even among developing nations.
Young Indians" enthusiasm for Moocs shows that there is an appetite for higher education, with or without sufficient supply of physical seats. But what is surprising is that Indians should be so motivated to visit Moocs when they are not yet accredited. You still cannot get a qualification from a Mooc. So are Moocs only aspirational for young Indians-the equivalent of flipping through a glossy university catalogue-or could they, in combination with targeted assessments, deliver tangible benefits to students and reap a return in exchange for outcomes delivered
Many Mooc providers are already bundling courses into "packages" that roughly correspond to short certificated programmes. Universities still fear offering Mooc degrees, which could cannibalise fee-paying courses. But that will not stop ambitious education providers in emerging markets such as India offering real-world qualifications.
So Moocs could indeed be a disruptive development in emerging markets-where the majority of the world"s youth reside. India lacks higher-education places but foreign universities face barriers to entry. So why not tap the Indian market through Moocs in combination with targeted assessments
While it is unlikely that Moocs will dramatically change the economics of going to college for an American teenager, Moocs could be transformative in markets where there is not enough capacity to meet demand for university education. Just as some developing countries have bypassed fixed-line telephony for mobile solutions, Moocs could help developing countries to leapfrog the bricks-and-mortar model of higher education. And universities might be able to do well from them: for higher education, the fortune may indeed be at the bottom of the pyramid.Which of the following is TRUE about MOOC

A．Mooc was first launched by Havard University
B．High-profile universities are not interested
C．User number is growing rapidly especially in US
D．India now ranks the second in terms of the MOOC market

单项选择题

Where do pesticides fit into the picture of environmental disease We have seen that they now pollute soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world
We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can cause extremely severe poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, farm workers, and others exposed to sufficient quantities of pesticides are very sad and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly pollute our world.
Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the danger to the individual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasons the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shake off what may seem to us a threat of future disaster. "Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious signs," says a wise physician, Dr. Rene Dubos, "yet some of their worst enemies slowly approach them unnoticed."Which of the following is closest in meaning to the sentence "Man is part of nature." (Para. 1)

A．Man appears indifferent to what happens in nature
B．Man acts as if he does not belong to nature
C．Man can avoid the effects of environmental pollution
D．Man can escape his responsibilities for environmental protection

问答题

One November evening in 1989 I was loafing in my room at university when a friend began thumping on the door. "What is it" I shouted irritably. "The Berlin Wall just fell," he shouted back For months afterwards I walked around in a daze of wonder, as crowds ransacked secret-police headquarters and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Two lines from Wordsworth about the French Revolution, which I"d read in some article about the1989 revolutions, kept going through my mind:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
It was the most optimistic political moment I"ve lived through, my generation"s version of 1945 or 1968. 6 .
Now we"re at the peak of political pessimism. The political year is opening with almost nobody on either right or left expecting anything good. The great questions seem to be: how will an intervention in Syria go wrong And will the US House of Representatives vote to repeal "Obamacare" for the 41st time 7 The utopian urge persists; it has just migrated from politics to technology. Instead of developing a political policy to solve a problem, people now develop an app.
In politics, you can hardly count all the lights that have failed since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Faith in unregulated capitalism died with Lehman Brothers. Then Barack Obama, the Occupy movements and the Tea Party all rapidly disappointed their followers. In 2009 in Copenhagen, it became clear the world wouldn"t agree to combat climate change. Now the Arab spring is eating its own children, the Russian demonstrators have gone home, and hardly anyone believes in the European project any more. 8 , even before its intellectual underpinning was revealed as an academic paper whose authors had accidentally left important bits of data off their spreadsheet.
The western liberating impulse-previously directed at Iraq, Iran and Cuba-has died too. Myanmar finally opened up, and ethnic conflict promptly began. Even people who believed in al-Qaeda are now presumably disillusioned.
It"s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chavez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba"s revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. 9 Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of It portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates tots of western voters is rage at immigrants-an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK"s Labour party, says : "We"re in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don"t have the answers. "
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. 10 The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains: "Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, "OK, what are we going to do" Now they are busy remaking the world: Google"s Erie Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world"s poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. "They have something of the white knight about them," muses Adonis. "There is a profound tech-optimism."
In this budding tech-utopia, government scarcely features. Great technological achievements of the past—the atomic bomb, the moon landing and even the internet—began within the US government. Today, whether people like government or loathe it, they mostly ignore it.
A. Austerity became the latest light to fail
B. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies
C. Strangely, it actually turned out pretty well
D. But hope springs eternal
E. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today"s lot

答案： D[解析] 句意：不过，人类的希望永无止境。该段前半部分写pessimism，后半部分写前进的动力，可知本题选D。

单项选择题

It might be easier to do something about North Korea"s nuclear truculence if we could make head or tail of the cryptic videos it has been posting on the web. The latest shows a dreaming man, some Korean script and a video of rockets flying through space while fires burn in skyscrapers and a pianist plays "We Are the World" at dirge tempo. Is this a harmless fantasy A thrown-down gauntlet Should the west respond with a statement Should it post a video of its own It is hard to know. Our traditional media are being "replaced" by the internet. But the "information" coming out of the information economy is often hard to decipher, and composed for purposes that are hard to discern.
The film academic Stephen Apkon argues in The Age of the Image , published this week, that it is possible to speak of a new kind of literacy, one built on figuring out such non-verbal messages. At its humblest level, his book is about the "language"" of film, but Mr Apkon has a larger philosophical point, too. Our culture is growing more global. While it still relies on words, they are increasingly wrapped up with images, and it is the images people remember. Elizabeth Daley, dean of the University of Southern California"s School of Cinematic Arts, believes writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance-the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.
Images have always mattered in public arguments more than we admit. Few people cared that Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, so unkempt did the Republican look. Mr Apkon quotes a neuroscientist who says people are so attuned to picking up subtle signals that they make decisions about whether they like or dislike politicians "immediately". And unsubtle, non-verbal messages with a great emotional wallop can now be broadcast more widely. Video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Sohan, captured during June 2009 protests against irregular Iranian elections, spread round the world. In the gut-wrenching Kony 2012 video (100m views in six days), American activists sought to enlist the US military in a manhunt for a Ugandan warlord.
Eyesight is the most trusted sense, Mr. Apkon notes, and that means we need to be careful with it. There is a standing danger that the public will grow so upset by images of mistreatment that it will demand the government send the army off to war. This is arguably what happened Somalia in 1992, with America"s poorly planned military response to the African country"s famine. In future, Mr. Apkon says, we are likely to need "a combination of scepticism and incisiveness", enabling citizens to "[critique ] what is put in front of them with some level of sophistication".
That is unlikely. When the passions provoked by visual imagery lead to the same conclusion as the logic of a verbal argument, people are generally comfortable coming to a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one of them must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr. Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around "hidden mental hungers", easily manipulating voters.
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today"s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the scepticism Mr. Apkon speaks of, certain institutions "go with" certain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything "Protestant" about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism"s rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culmination of the culture of the written word. Mr. Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, "tapped into a lever in the psyche more primal than mere facts".
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn"t democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the endingWhat does the author mean by saying "writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance —the language of a scholarly establishment"

A．Videos are like Italian that served as the street language
B．A video is worth more than a thousand words"
C．Writing would face extinction, just as Latin
D．Writing would be less popular among common people

单项选择题

Where do pesticides fit into the picture of environmental disease We have seen that they now pollute soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world
We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can cause extremely severe poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, farm workers, and others exposed to sufficient quantities of pesticides are very sad and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly pollute our world.
Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the danger to the individual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasons the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shake off what may seem to us a threat of future disaster. "Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious signs," says a wise physician, Dr. Rene Dubos, "yet some of their worst enemies slowly approach them unnoticed."What is the author"s attitude towards the environmental effects of pesticides

A．Pessimistic
B．Indifferent
C．Defensive
D．Concerned

单项选择题

Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first "massive open online courses", these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers-Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX-offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.
Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The "summer slump" across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.
The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.
Furthermore, Indian Mooc users include a higher proportion of younger people, even controlling for India"s large youth population: more than 80 percent of Indian visitors to Mooc sites are under 34, while US and European visitors are fairly evenly spread across age groups. Indians also spend roughly five times as long as average visitors on Mooc sites.
Why India It may be because India has the largest population of university-age students in the world (94m and growing), while higher education in India is inadequate in quantity and quality due to poor government regulation and corruption. With 17m students in higher education, India has one of the world"s lowest higher-education enrollment ratios, even among developing nations.
Young Indians" enthusiasm for Moocs shows that there is an appetite for higher education, with or without sufficient supply of physical seats. But what is surprising is that Indians should be so motivated to visit Moocs when they are not yet accredited. You still cannot get a qualification from a Mooc. So are Moocs only aspirational for young Indians-the equivalent of flipping through a glossy university catalogue-or could they, in combination with targeted assessments, deliver tangible benefits to students and reap a return in exchange for outcomes delivered
Many Mooc providers are already bundling courses into "packages" that roughly correspond to short certificated programmes. Universities still fear offering Mooc degrees, which could cannibalise fee-paying courses. But that will not stop ambitious education providers in emerging markets such as India offering real-world qualifications.
So Moocs could indeed be a disruptive development in emerging markets-where the majority of the world"s youth reside. India lacks higher-education places but foreign universities face barriers to entry. So why not tap the Indian market through Moocs in combination with targeted assessments
While it is unlikely that Moocs will dramatically change the economics of going to college for an American teenager, Moocs could be transformative in markets where there is not enough capacity to meet demand for university education. Just as some developing countries have bypassed fixed-line telephony for mobile solutions, Moocs could help developing countries to leapfrog the bricks-and-mortar model of higher education. And universities might be able to do well from them: for higher education, the fortune may indeed be at the bottom of the pyramid.Which of the following statements is NOT TRUE according to the author

A．India"s internet penetration is quite high
B．India is a largely English-speaking country
C．India has a huge supply and demand problem of education
D．India"s higher education system is poorly developed

单项选择题

Where do pesticides fit into the picture of environmental disease We have seen that they now pollute soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world
We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can cause extremely severe poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, farm workers, and others exposed to sufficient quantities of pesticides are very sad and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly pollute our world.
Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the danger to the individual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasons the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shake off what may seem to us a threat of future disaster. "Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious signs," says a wise physician, Dr. Rene Dubos, "yet some of their worst enemies slowly approach them unnoticed."In the author"s view, the sudden death caused by exposure to large amounts of pesticides ______.

A．is not the worst of the negative consequences resulting from the use of pesticides
B．now occurs most frequently among all accidental deaths
C．has sharply increased so as to become the center of public attention
D．is unavoidable because people can"t do without pesticides in farming

问答题

One November evening in 1989 I was loafing in my room at university when a friend began thumping on the door. "What is it" I shouted irritably. "The Berlin Wall just fell," he shouted back For months afterwards I walked around in a daze of wonder, as crowds ransacked secret-police headquarters and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Two lines from Wordsworth about the French Revolution, which I"d read in some article about the1989 revolutions, kept going through my mind:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
It was the most optimistic political moment I"ve lived through, my generation"s version of 1945 or 1968. 6 .
Now we"re at the peak of political pessimism. The political year is opening with almost nobody on either right or left expecting anything good. The great questions seem to be: how will an intervention in Syria go wrong And will the US House of Representatives vote to repeal "Obamacare" for the 41st time 7 The utopian urge persists; it has just migrated from politics to technology. Instead of developing a political policy to solve a problem, people now develop an app.
In politics, you can hardly count all the lights that have failed since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Faith in unregulated capitalism died with Lehman Brothers. Then Barack Obama, the Occupy movements and the Tea Party all rapidly disappointed their followers. In 2009 in Copenhagen, it became clear the world wouldn"t agree to combat climate change. Now the Arab spring is eating its own children, the Russian demonstrators have gone home, and hardly anyone believes in the European project any more. 8 , even before its intellectual underpinning was revealed as an academic paper whose authors had accidentally left important bits of data off their spreadsheet.
The western liberating impulse-previously directed at Iraq, Iran and Cuba-has died too. Myanmar finally opened up, and ethnic conflict promptly began. Even people who believed in al-Qaeda are now presumably disillusioned.
It"s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chavez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba"s revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. 9 Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of It portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates tots of western voters is rage at immigrants-an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK"s Labour party, says : "We"re in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don"t have the answers. "
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. 10 The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains: "Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, "OK, what are we going to do" Now they are busy remaking the world: Google"s Erie Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world"s poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. "They have something of the white knight about them," muses Adonis. "There is a profound tech-optimism."
In this budding tech-utopia, government scarcely features. Great technological achievements of the past—the atomic bomb, the moon landing and even the internet—began within the US government. Today, whether people like government or loathe it, they mostly ignore it.
A. Austerity became the latest light to fail
B. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies
C. Strangely, it actually turned out pretty well
D. But hope springs eternal
E. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today"s lot

答案： A[解析] 句意：最新灭掉的一盏，名叫“财政紧缩”。根据“light”一词即可判断此题选A。

单项选择题

It might be easier to do something about North Korea"s nuclear truculence if we could make head or tail of the cryptic videos it has been posting on the web. The latest shows a dreaming man, some Korean script and a video of rockets flying through space while fires burn in skyscrapers and a pianist plays "We Are the World" at dirge tempo. Is this a harmless fantasy A thrown-down gauntlet Should the west respond with a statement Should it post a video of its own It is hard to know. Our traditional media are being "replaced" by the internet. But the "information" coming out of the information economy is often hard to decipher, and composed for purposes that are hard to discern.
The film academic Stephen Apkon argues in The Age of the Image , published this week, that it is possible to speak of a new kind of literacy, one built on figuring out such non-verbal messages. At its humblest level, his book is about the "language"" of film, but Mr Apkon has a larger philosophical point, too. Our culture is growing more global. While it still relies on words, they are increasingly wrapped up with images, and it is the images people remember. Elizabeth Daley, dean of the University of Southern California"s School of Cinematic Arts, believes writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance-the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.
Images have always mattered in public arguments more than we admit. Few people cared that Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, so unkempt did the Republican look. Mr Apkon quotes a neuroscientist who says people are so attuned to picking up subtle signals that they make decisions about whether they like or dislike politicians "immediately". And unsubtle, non-verbal messages with a great emotional wallop can now be broadcast more widely. Video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Sohan, captured during June 2009 protests against irregular Iranian elections, spread round the world. In the gut-wrenching Kony 2012 video (100m views in six days), American activists sought to enlist the US military in a manhunt for a Ugandan warlord.
Eyesight is the most trusted sense, Mr. Apkon notes, and that means we need to be careful with it. There is a standing danger that the public will grow so upset by images of mistreatment that it will demand the government send the army off to war. This is arguably what happened Somalia in 1992, with America"s poorly planned military response to the African country"s famine. In future, Mr. Apkon says, we are likely to need "a combination of scepticism and incisiveness", enabling citizens to "[critique ] what is put in front of them with some level of sophistication".
That is unlikely. When the passions provoked by visual imagery lead to the same conclusion as the logic of a verbal argument, people are generally comfortable coming to a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one of them must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr. Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around "hidden mental hungers", easily manipulating voters.
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today"s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the scepticism Mr. Apkon speaks of, certain institutions "go with" certain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything "Protestant" about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism"s rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culmination of the culture of the written word. Mr. Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, "tapped into a lever in the psyche more primal than mere facts".
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn"t democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the endingWhat is the author"s attitude towards "seeing is believing"

A．Positive
B．Dangerous
C．Negative
D．Useful

单项选择题

Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first "massive open online courses", these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers-Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX-offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.
Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The "summer slump" across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.
The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.
Furthermore, Indian Mooc users include a higher proportion of younger people, even controlling for India"s large youth population: more than 80 percent of Indian visitors to Mooc sites are under 34, while US and European visitors are fairly evenly spread across age groups. Indians also spend roughly five times as long as average visitors on Mooc sites.
Why India It may be because India has the largest population of university-age students in the world (94m and growing), while higher education in India is inadequate in quantity and quality due to poor government regulation and corruption. With 17m students in higher education, India has one of the world"s lowest higher-education enrollment ratios, even among developing nations.
Young Indians" enthusiasm for Moocs shows that there is an appetite for higher education, with or without sufficient supply of physical seats. But what is surprising is that Indians should be so motivated to visit Moocs when they are not yet accredited. You still cannot get a qualification from a Mooc. So are Moocs only aspirational for young Indians-the equivalent of flipping through a glossy university catalogue-or could they, in combination with targeted assessments, deliver tangible benefits to students and reap a return in exchange for outcomes delivered
Many Mooc providers are already bundling courses into "packages" that roughly correspond to short certificated programmes. Universities still fear offering Mooc degrees, which could cannibalise fee-paying courses. But that will not stop ambitious education providers in emerging markets such as India offering real-world qualifications.
So Moocs could indeed be a disruptive development in emerging markets-where the majority of the world"s youth reside. India lacks higher-education places but foreign universities face barriers to entry. So why not tap the Indian market through Moocs in combination with targeted assessments
While it is unlikely that Moocs will dramatically change the economics of going to college for an American teenager, Moocs could be transformative in markets where there is not enough capacity to meet demand for university education. Just as some developing countries have bypassed fixed-line telephony for mobile solutions, Moocs could help developing countries to leapfrog the bricks-and-mortar model of higher education. And universities might be able to do well from them: for higher education, the fortune may indeed be at the bottom of the pyramid.What is the biggest bottleneck of MOOC

A．It lacks enough funding since it"s free
B．It cannot provide qualifications
C．Universities would not offer high-profile courses
D．It stops expanding in the developed world

单项选择题

Where do pesticides fit into the picture of environmental disease We have seen that they now pollute soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world
We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can cause extremely severe poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, farm workers, and others exposed to sufficient quantities of pesticides are very sad and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly pollute our world.
Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the danger to the individual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasons the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shake off what may seem to us a threat of future disaster. "Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious signs," says a wise physician, Dr. Rene Dubos, "yet some of their worst enemies slowly approach them unnoticed."People tend to ignore the delayed effects of exposure to chemicals because ______.

A．limited exposure to them does little harm to people"s health
B．the present is more important for them than the future
C．the danger does not become apparent immediately
D．humans are capable of withstanding small amounts of poisoning

问答题

One November evening in 1989 I was loafing in my room at university when a friend began thumping on the door. "What is it" I shouted irritably. "The Berlin Wall just fell," he shouted back For months afterwards I walked around in a daze of wonder, as crowds ransacked secret-police headquarters and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Two lines from Wordsworth about the French Revolution, which I"d read in some article about the1989 revolutions, kept going through my mind:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
It was the most optimistic political moment I"ve lived through, my generation"s version of 1945 or 1968. 6 .
Now we"re at the peak of political pessimism. The political year is opening with almost nobody on either right or left expecting anything good. The great questions seem to be: how will an intervention in Syria go wrong And will the US House of Representatives vote to repeal "Obamacare" for the 41st time 7 The utopian urge persists; it has just migrated from politics to technology. Instead of developing a political policy to solve a problem, people now develop an app.
In politics, you can hardly count all the lights that have failed since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Faith in unregulated capitalism died with Lehman Brothers. Then Barack Obama, the Occupy movements and the Tea Party all rapidly disappointed their followers. In 2009 in Copenhagen, it became clear the world wouldn"t agree to combat climate change. Now the Arab spring is eating its own children, the Russian demonstrators have gone home, and hardly anyone believes in the European project any more. 8 , even before its intellectual underpinning was revealed as an academic paper whose authors had accidentally left important bits of data off their spreadsheet.
The western liberating impulse-previously directed at Iraq, Iran and Cuba-has died too. Myanmar finally opened up, and ethnic conflict promptly began. Even people who believed in al-Qaeda are now presumably disillusioned.
It"s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chavez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba"s revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. 9 Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of It portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates tots of western voters is rage at immigrants-an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK"s Labour party, says : "We"re in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don"t have the answers. "
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. 10 The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains: "Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, "OK, what are we going to do" Now they are busy remaking the world: Google"s Erie Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world"s poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. "They have something of the white knight about them," muses Adonis. "There is a profound tech-optimism."
In this budding tech-utopia, government scarcely features. Great technological achievements of the past—the atomic bomb, the moon landing and even the internet—began within the US government. Today, whether people like government or loathe it, they mostly ignore it.
A. Austerity became the latest light to fail
B. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies
C. Strangely, it actually turned out pretty well
D. But hope springs eternal
E. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today"s lot

答案： E[解析] 句意：曼德拉都在病床上奄奄一息了对时局的影响还不减当年。本段以举例为主，阐述政治走下坡路的事实，曼德拉也是例...

单项选择题

It might be easier to do something about North Korea"s nuclear truculence if we could make head or tail of the cryptic videos it has been posting on the web. The latest shows a dreaming man, some Korean script and a video of rockets flying through space while fires burn in skyscrapers and a pianist plays "We Are the World" at dirge tempo. Is this a harmless fantasy A thrown-down gauntlet Should the west respond with a statement Should it post a video of its own It is hard to know. Our traditional media are being "replaced" by the internet. But the "information" coming out of the information economy is often hard to decipher, and composed for purposes that are hard to discern.
The film academic Stephen Apkon argues in The Age of the Image , published this week, that it is possible to speak of a new kind of literacy, one built on figuring out such non-verbal messages. At its humblest level, his book is about the "language"" of film, but Mr Apkon has a larger philosophical point, too. Our culture is growing more global. While it still relies on words, they are increasingly wrapped up with images, and it is the images people remember. Elizabeth Daley, dean of the University of Southern California"s School of Cinematic Arts, believes writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance-the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.
Images have always mattered in public arguments more than we admit. Few people cared that Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, so unkempt did the Republican look. Mr Apkon quotes a neuroscientist who says people are so attuned to picking up subtle signals that they make decisions about whether they like or dislike politicians "immediately". And unsubtle, non-verbal messages with a great emotional wallop can now be broadcast more widely. Video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Sohan, captured during June 2009 protests against irregular Iranian elections, spread round the world. In the gut-wrenching Kony 2012 video (100m views in six days), American activists sought to enlist the US military in a manhunt for a Ugandan warlord.
Eyesight is the most trusted sense, Mr. Apkon notes, and that means we need to be careful with it. There is a standing danger that the public will grow so upset by images of mistreatment that it will demand the government send the army off to war. This is arguably what happened Somalia in 1992, with America"s poorly planned military response to the African country"s famine. In future, Mr. Apkon says, we are likely to need "a combination of scepticism and incisiveness", enabling citizens to "[critique ] what is put in front of them with some level of sophistication".
That is unlikely. When the passions provoked by visual imagery lead to the same conclusion as the logic of a verbal argument, people are generally comfortable coming to a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one of them must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr. Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around "hidden mental hungers", easily manipulating voters.
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today"s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the scepticism Mr. Apkon speaks of, certain institutions "go with" certain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything "Protestant" about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism"s rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culmination of the culture of the written word. Mr. Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, "tapped into a lever in the psyche more primal than mere facts".
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn"t democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the endingAccording to the author, what may "image-based communication" influence voter"s behavior

A．People might vote on their identities
B．People might vote on their "hidden mental hungers"
C．People might vote on arguments, independent of identity
D．People might vote on political advertisers who have better stories

单项选择题

Where do pesticides fit into the picture of environmental disease We have seen that they now pollute soil, water, and food, that they have the power to make our streams fishless and our gardens and woodlands silent and birdless. Man, however much he may contrary, is part of nature. Can he escape a pollution that is now so thoroughly distributed throughout our world
We know that even single exposures to these chemicals, if the amount is large enough, can cause extremely severe poisoning. But this is not the major problem. The sudden illness or death of farmers, farm workers, and others exposed to sufficient quantities of pesticides are very sad and should not occur. For the population as a whole, we must be more concerned with the delayed effects of absorbing small amounts of the pesticides that invisibly pollute our world.
Responsible public health officials have pointed out that the biological effects of chemicals are cumulative over long periods of time, and that the danger to the individual may depend on the sum of the exposures received throughout his lifetime. For these very reasons the danger is easily ignored. It is human nature to shake off what may seem to us a threat of future disaster. "Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious signs," says a wise physician, Dr. Rene Dubos, "yet some of their worst enemies slowly approach them unnoticed."It can be concluded from Dr. Dubos" remarks that ______.

A．people find invisible diseases difficult to deal with
B．attacks by hidden enemies tend to be fatal
C．diseases with obvious signs are easy to cure
D．people tend to overlook hidden dangers caused by pesticides

单项选择题

Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first "massive open online courses", these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers-Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX-offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.
Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The "summer slump" across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.
The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.
Furthermore, Indian Mooc users include a higher proportion of younger people, even controlling for India"s large youth population: more than 80 percent of Indian visitors to Mooc sites are under 34, while US and European visitors are fairly evenly spread across age groups. Indians also spend roughly five times as long as average visitors on Mooc sites.
Why India It may be because India has the largest population of university-age students in the world (94m and growing), while higher education in India is inadequate in quantity and quality due to poor government regulation and corruption. With 17m students in higher education, India has one of the world"s lowest higher-education enrollment ratios, even among developing nations.
Young Indians" enthusiasm for Moocs shows that there is an appetite for higher education, with or without sufficient supply of physical seats. But what is surprising is that Indians should be so motivated to visit Moocs when they are not yet accredited. You still cannot get a qualification from a Mooc. So are Moocs only aspirational for young Indians-the equivalent of flipping through a glossy university catalogue-or could they, in combination with targeted assessments, deliver tangible benefits to students and reap a return in exchange for outcomes delivered
Many Mooc providers are already bundling courses into "packages" that roughly correspond to short certificated programmes. Universities still fear offering Mooc degrees, which could cannibalise fee-paying courses. But that will not stop ambitious education providers in emerging markets such as India offering real-world qualifications.
So Moocs could indeed be a disruptive development in emerging markets-where the majority of the world"s youth reside. India lacks higher-education places but foreign universities face barriers to entry. So why not tap the Indian market through Moocs in combination with targeted assessments
While it is unlikely that Moocs will dramatically change the economics of going to college for an American teenager, Moocs could be transformative in markets where there is not enough capacity to meet demand for university education. Just as some developing countries have bypassed fixed-line telephony for mobile solutions, Moocs could help developing countries to leapfrog the bricks-and-mortar model of higher education. And universities might be able to do well from them: for higher education, the fortune may indeed be at the bottom of the pyramid.Which of the following is NOT MENTIONED according to the passage

A．Provide courses in Chinese and other languages as well
B．Try to combine courses with targeted assessments
C．Develop courses on mobile platforms
D．Bypass bricks-and-mortar schools

问答题

One November evening in 1989 I was loafing in my room at university when a friend began thumping on the door. "What is it" I shouted irritably. "The Berlin Wall just fell," he shouted back For months afterwards I walked around in a daze of wonder, as crowds ransacked secret-police headquarters and Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. Two lines from Wordsworth about the French Revolution, which I"d read in some article about the1989 revolutions, kept going through my mind:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
It was the most optimistic political moment I"ve lived through, my generation"s version of 1945 or 1968. 6 .
Now we"re at the peak of political pessimism. The political year is opening with almost nobody on either right or left expecting anything good. The great questions seem to be: how will an intervention in Syria go wrong And will the US House of Representatives vote to repeal "Obamacare" for the 41st time 7 The utopian urge persists; it has just migrated from politics to technology. Instead of developing a political policy to solve a problem, people now develop an app.
In politics, you can hardly count all the lights that have failed since the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Faith in unregulated capitalism died with Lehman Brothers. Then Barack Obama, the Occupy movements and the Tea Party all rapidly disappointed their followers. In 2009 in Copenhagen, it became clear the world wouldn"t agree to combat climate change. Now the Arab spring is eating its own children, the Russian demonstrators have gone home, and hardly anyone believes in the European project any more. 8 , even before its intellectual underpinning was revealed as an academic paper whose authors had accidentally left important bits of data off their spreadsheet.
The western liberating impulse-previously directed at Iraq, Iran and Cuba-has died too. Myanmar finally opened up, and ethnic conflict promptly began. Even people who believed in al-Qaeda are now presumably disillusioned.
It"s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chavez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba"s revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. 9 Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of It portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates tots of western voters is rage at immigrants-an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK"s Labour party, says : "We"re in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don"t have the answers. "
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. 10 The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains: "Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, "OK, what are we going to do" Now they are busy remaking the world: Google"s Erie Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world"s poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. "They have something of the white knight about them," muses Adonis. "There is a profound tech-optimism."
In this budding tech-utopia, government scarcely features. Great technological achievements of the past—the atomic bomb, the moon landing and even the internet—began within the US government. Today, whether people like government or loathe it, they mostly ignore it.
A. Austerity became the latest light to fail
B. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies
C. Strangely, it actually turned out pretty well
D. But hope springs eternal
E. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today"s lot

答案： B[解析] 句意：从此，政治家的公信力不断下降。本段阐述政治专家的没落和技术专家的兴起，关键词“technologist...

单项选择题

It might be easier to do something about North Korea"s nuclear truculence if we could make head or tail of the cryptic videos it has been posting on the web. The latest shows a dreaming man, some Korean script and a video of rockets flying through space while fires burn in skyscrapers and a pianist plays "We Are the World" at dirge tempo. Is this a harmless fantasy A thrown-down gauntlet Should the west respond with a statement Should it post a video of its own It is hard to know. Our traditional media are being "replaced" by the internet. But the "information" coming out of the information economy is often hard to decipher, and composed for purposes that are hard to discern.
The film academic Stephen Apkon argues in The Age of the Image , published this week, that it is possible to speak of a new kind of literacy, one built on figuring out such non-verbal messages. At its humblest level, his book is about the "language"" of film, but Mr Apkon has a larger philosophical point, too. Our culture is growing more global. While it still relies on words, they are increasingly wrapped up with images, and it is the images people remember. Elizabeth Daley, dean of the University of Southern California"s School of Cinematic Arts, believes writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance-the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.
Images have always mattered in public arguments more than we admit. Few people cared that Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, so unkempt did the Republican look. Mr Apkon quotes a neuroscientist who says people are so attuned to picking up subtle signals that they make decisions about whether they like or dislike politicians "immediately". And unsubtle, non-verbal messages with a great emotional wallop can now be broadcast more widely. Video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Sohan, captured during June 2009 protests against irregular Iranian elections, spread round the world. In the gut-wrenching Kony 2012 video (100m views in six days), American activists sought to enlist the US military in a manhunt for a Ugandan warlord.
Eyesight is the most trusted sense, Mr. Apkon notes, and that means we need to be careful with it. There is a standing danger that the public will grow so upset by images of mistreatment that it will demand the government send the army off to war. This is arguably what happened Somalia in 1992, with America"s poorly planned military response to the African country"s famine. In future, Mr. Apkon says, we are likely to need "a combination of scepticism and incisiveness", enabling citizens to "[critique ] what is put in front of them with some level of sophistication".
That is unlikely. When the passions provoked by visual imagery lead to the same conclusion as the logic of a verbal argument, people are generally comfortable coming to a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one of them must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr. Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around "hidden mental hungers", easily manipulating voters.
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today"s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the scepticism Mr. Apkon speaks of, certain institutions "go with" certain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything "Protestant" about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism"s rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culmination of the culture of the written word. Mr. Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, "tapped into a lever in the psyche more primal than mere facts".
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn"t democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the endingWhich of the following constitutes the best title for this passage

A．In the unthinking age, seeing is believing
B．Images matter less today than in the past
C．Democracy has lost its appeal nowadays
D．Images in the Information Age

单项选择题

Since 2011, when Stanford University launched its first "massive open online courses", these free, internet-enabled programmes have cropped up everywhere, engaging millions of users. The largest Mooc providers-Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and EdX-offer free tuition, supplied by universities, often to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. But just a year after Moocs really started taking off, offering the promise of real disruption to the centuries-old higher-education business, user growth has started to slow.
Until May this year, visitors to Moocs were increasing rapidly. But since then the picture has become markedly less rosy. Over the past quarter the major Mooc providers in the US have seen stagnation or slowing growth in visitor numbers. The "summer slump" across the education sector might normally explain this kind of drop. However, this comes even as the major platforms have supplemented their offerings with more new courses and high-profile partner universities.
The decline, however, has not been universal, and exceptions to the trend may offer hints about how the market for Moocs could develop. Available data on visits to the major Mooc sites between November 2012 and August 2013 indicate that visits from India have doubled over the past nine months. India still has only about a third the number of Mooc users as the US. But that still makes it the largest market for Moocs outside America, even though it has only a fraction of the broadband penetration. As a largely English-speaking country, India illustrates how Moocs might develop in emerging markets if more content was available in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Indonesian or Portuguese.
Furthermore, Indian Mooc users include a higher proportion of younger people, even controlling for India"s large youth population: more than 80 percent of Indian visitors to Mooc sites are under 34, while US and European visitors are fairly evenly spread across age groups. Indians also spend roughly five times as long as average visitors on Mooc sites.
Why India It may be because India has the largest population of university-age students in the world (94m and growing), while higher education in India is inadequate in quantity and quality due to poor government regulation and corruption. With 17m students in higher education, India has one of the world"s lowest higher-education enrollment ratios, even among developing nations.
Young Indians" enthusiasm for Moocs shows that there is an appetite for higher education, with or without sufficient supply of physical seats. But what is surprising is that Indians should be so motivated to visit Moocs when they are not yet accredited. You still cannot get a qualification from a Mooc. So are Moocs only aspirational for young Indians-the equivalent of flipping through a glossy university catalogue-or could they, in combination with targeted assessments, deliver tangible benefits to students and reap a return in exchange for outcomes delivered
Many Mooc providers are already bundling courses into "packages" that roughly correspond to short certificated programmes. Universities still fear offering Mooc degrees, which could cannibalise fee-paying courses. But that will not stop ambitious education providers in emerging markets such as India offering real-world qualifications.
So Moocs could indeed be a disruptive development in emerging markets-where the majority of the world"s youth reside. India lacks higher-education places but foreign universities face barriers to entry. So why not tap the Indian market through Moocs in combination with targeted assessments
While it is unlikely that Moocs will dramatically change the economics of going to college for an American teenager, Moocs could be transformative in markets where there is not enough capacity to meet demand for university education. Just as some developing countries have bypassed fixed-line telephony for mobile solutions, Moocs could help developing countries to leapfrog the bricks-and-mortar model of higher education. And universities might be able to do well from them: for higher education, the fortune may indeed be at the bottom of the pyramid.Which of the following might be the best title for this passage

A．Mooc witnesses its fastest development in the past several years
B．Moocs might matter even more in emerging markets
C．Mooc will be better developed if it uses the global language of English
D．Mooc will take the place of traditional courses offered in the universities very soon

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