[单项选择]
The Teacher’s Influence upon the Development of
Attitudes
Of all the areas of learning, the most
important is the development of attitudes. Emotional reactions as well as
logical thought processes affect the behavior of most people.
"The burnt child fears the fire" is one instance: another is the rise of
dictators like Hitler. Both these examples also point out the fact that
attitudes stem from experience. In the one case the experience was direct and
impressive: in the other it was indirect and accumulative. The Nazis were filled
largely with the speeches they heard and the books they read.
The classroom teacher in the elementary school is in a strategic position to
influence attitudes. This true partly because children acquire attitudes from
those adults whose words they respect.
Another reason, it is
true that pupils often study somewhat deeply a subject in school that has only
been touched upon at home or has possibly never occurred to them before. To a
child who had previously acquired little knowledge of Mexico, his teacher’s
method of handling such a unit would greatly affect his attitude toward
Mexicans.
The media which the teacher can develop healthy
attitudes are innumerable. Social studies (with special reference to races,
beliefs and nationalities), science matters of health and safety, the very
atmosphere of the classroom, these are a few of the fertile fields for the
education of proper emotional reactions.
However, when children
come to school with undesirable attitudes, it is unwise for the teacher to
attempt to change their feelings by scolding them. She can achieve the proper
effect by helping them obtain constructive experiences.
To
illustrate, first grade pupils’ afraid of policemen will properly alter their
attitudes after a classroom chat with the neighborhood officer in which he
explains how he protects them. In the same way, a class of older children can
develop attitudes through discussion, research, outside reading and all day
trips.
Finally, a teacher must constantly evaluate her own
attitudes, because her influence can be harmful if she has personal prejudices.
This is especially true in respect to controversial issues and questions on
which children should be encouraged to reach their own decisions as a result of
objective analysis of the facts.The author writes this passage primarily in order to show us that
______.
A. attitudes affect our actions
B. teachers play a significant role in developing or changing pupils’
attitudes
C. attitudes can be changed by some classroom experiences
D. by their attitudes, teachers affect pupils’ attitudes
unintentionally
[单项选择]
The Smog (烟雾)
For over a
month, Indonesia was in crisis. Forest fires raged out of control as the country
suffered its worst drought for 50 years. Smoke from the fires mixed with
sunlight and hot dry air to form a cloud of smog. This pollution quickly spread
and within days it was hanging over neighbouring countries including Malaysia,
Singapore and Thailand.
When the smoke combined with pollution
from factories and cars, it soon became poisonous (有毒的). Dangerous amounts of CO
became trapped under the smog and pollution levels rose. People wheezed (喘息) and
coughed as they left the house and their eyes watered immediately.
The smog made it impossible to see across streets and whole cities
disappeared as grey soot (烟灰) covered everything. In some areas, water was hosed
(用胶管浇) from high-rise city buildings to try and break up the smog. Finally,
heavy rains, which came came in November. Put out the fires and clear the air.
But the environmental costs and health problems will remain Many people from
South-Eastern Asian cities already suffer from breathing huge amounts of car
exhaust fumes (汽车排放的废气) and factory pollution. Breathing problems could well
increase and many non-sufferers may have difficulties for the first time.
Wildlife has suffered too. In lowland forests, elephants, deer, and tigers have
been driven out of their homes by smog.
But smog is not just an
Asian problem. In fact, the word was first used in London in 1905 to describe
the mixture of smoke and thick fog. Fog often hung over the capital. Sometimes
the smog was so thick and poisonous that people were killed by breathing
problems or in accidents.
About 4,000 Londoners died within
five days as a result of thick smog in 1952.The air-pollution index went up to, 300 within a few days.
A. Right
B. Wrong
C. Not mentioned
[单项选择]
Benefited or Hurt
For the most
part, it seems, workers in rich countries have little to fear from
globalization, and a lot to gain. But is the same thing true for workers in poor
countries The answer is that they are even more likely than their rich country
counterparts to benefit, because they have less to lose and more to gain.
Orthodox economics takes an optimistic line on integration and the developing
countries. Openness to foreign trade and investment should encourage capital to
flow to poor economies. In the developing world, capital is scarce, so the
returns on investment there should be higher than in the industrialized
countries, where the best opportunities to make money by adding capital to labor
have already been used up. If pool countries lower their barriers to trade and
investment, the theory goes: rich foreigners will want to send over some of
their capital.
If this inflow of resources arrives in the form
of loans or portfolio investment, it will supplement domestic savings and loosen
the financial constraint on additional investment by local companies. If it
arrives in the form of new foreign controlled operations, FDI, so much the
better: this kind of capital brings technology and skills from abroad packaged
along with it, with less financial risk as well. In either case, the addition to
investment ought to push incomes up, partly by raising the demand for labor and
partly by making labor more productive.
This why workers in FDI
receiving countries should be in an even better position to profit from
integration than workers in FDI sending countries. Also, with or without inflows
of foreign capital, the same static and dynamic gains from trade should apply in
developing countries as in rich ones. This gain from trade logic often arouses
suspicion, because the benefits seem to come from nowhere. Surely one side or
the other must lose. Not so. The benefits that a rich country gets though trade
do not come at the expense of its poor country trading partners, or vice versa.
Recall that according to the theory, trade is a positive sum game. In all these
transactions, sides exporters and importers, borrowers and lenders, shareholders
and workers can gain.The phrase "take an optimistic line on" in the second paragraph
probably means to ______.
A. take the same side with
B. hold the optimistic idea about
C. stand at the same line with
D. stand in the opposite line with
[单项选择]
The Natural Balance being Altered
The balance of nature is a very elaborate and delicate system of check
and countercheck. It is continually being altered as climates change, as new
organisms evolve, as animals or plants spread to new areas. But the alterations
have in the past, for the most part, been slow. whereas with the arrival of
civilized man, their speed has been multiplied much: from the evolutionary
time-scale, where change is measured by periods of ten or a hundred thousand
years, they have been transferred to the human time-scale in which centuries and
even decades count.
Everywhere man is altering the balance of
nature. He is facilitating the spread of plants and animals into new regions.
Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. He is covering huge areas with
new kinds of plants, or with houses, factories, slagheaps and other products of
his civilization. He gets rid of some species on a large scale, but favors the
multiplication of others. In brief, he has done more in five thousand years to
alter the biological aspect of the planet than has nature in five million
years.
Many of these changes which he has brought about have
had unforeseen consequences. Who would have thought that the throwing away of a
piece of Canadian waterweed would have caused half the waterways of Britain to
be blocked for a decade Or that provision of pot cacti for lonely settlers’
wives would have led to Eastern Australia being covered with forests of prickly
pears
Who would have predicted that the cutting down of
forests on the Adriatic coast, or in parts of Central Africa, could have reduced
the land to a semi-desert with the very soil washed away from the bare rock Who
would have thought that improved communications would have changed history by
the spreading of disease-sleeping sickness into East Africa, measles into Ocean.
AIDS around the whole world
These are spectacular examples,
but examples on a smaller scale are everywhere to be found. We made a nature
sanctuary for rare birds, providing absolute security for all species; and we
may find that some common and hardy kind of birds multiplies beyond measure and
drive away the rare kinds in which we are particularly interested. We see, owing
to some little change brought about by civilization, the starting spread over
the English countryside in hordes. We improve the yielding capacities of our
cattle; and find that how they exhaust the pastures which were sufficient for
less demanding stock. We gaily set about killing the carnivores that disturb our
domestic animals, the hawks that eat our fowls and game-birds; and find that in
so doing we are also removing the brake that restrains the multiplication of
mice and other little rodents that gnaw away the farmers’ profits.So far as the alterations of the balance of nature are concerned, man
______.
A. is somewhat more responsible than nature itself
B. plays a much greater role than nature itself
C. has done more than nature in recent years
D. is more likely to blame than nature
[填空题]
Electromagnetic Energy
White
light seems to be a combination of all colors. The energy that comes from a
source of light is not limited to the kind of energy you can see. Heat is given
off by a flame or an electric light. On a cloudy day it is possible to get a
sunburn even though you feel cool. Visible light and the kind of energy that
produce warmth and sunburn are examples of electromagnetic energy.
The sun is 93 million miles from the earth. Yet we can use energy from
the sun because electromagnetic energy travels through space.
Many other kinds of energy are also types of electromagnetic energy. Radio,
television, and radar signals travel from transmitters to receivers as
low-energy electromagnetic waves, infrared (红外线的) radiation is an
electromagnetic wave. When it is absorbed by matter, heat is produced. Waves of
infrared and visible light have more energy than waves of radio, television, or
radar. Ultraviolet rays (紫外线) and X-rays are electromagnetic waves with even
greater amounts of energy. Infrared radiation is used in cooking food and
heating buildings. Sunlight and electric lights are part of our requirements for
normal living. Ultraviolet radiation is useful in killing certain disease
organisms. X-rays and gamma rays have so mush energy that they travel right
through solid objects. They can be used to detect and treat cancer. X-rays are
used in industry to find hidden cracks in metal, and in medicine to reveal
broken bones.
Usually we use electricity to generate
electromagnetic energy. The source of most of our energy is the sun. Heat from
the sun causes water to evaporate. When the water falls to the earth as rain,
some of it is trapped behind dams and then used to operate electric generators.
Other generators are powered by coal, but the energy stored in coal came from
the sun, too.
Until recently, the source of the tremendous
amount of energy given off by the sun was a puzzle. If the sun depended on
chemical reactions, it would have used up all its energy long ago. Experiments
with electromagnetic radiation led to the theory that mass can be converted into
energy. About forty years after the theory was proposed, nuclear energy was
harnessed (利用) by man. Chemical energy comes from electron (电子) rearrangement.
Nuclear energy comes from a change in the nucleus of an atom. Compared with
chemical reactions, nuclear reactions release millions of times more energy per
pound of fuel. We now believe that the sun’s energy comes from the nuclear
reactions in which hydrogen is changed into helium (氦).
Nuclear
energy is beginning to compete with coal as an economical source of power to
generate electricity. It is also being used to operate engines in large ships.
Scientists continue to seek new and better methods of obtaining and using
energy.Paragraph 4 ______.