万人模考英语一

It cannot be denied that the mass media is a big part of our culture, and it can also be a helper, adviser and teacher to our young generation. The mass media affects the lives of our young by acting as a（an）__1__ for a number of institutions and social contacts. In this way, it __2__ a variety of functions in human life.

The time spent in front of the television screen is usually at the __3__ of leisure: there is less time for games, amusement and rest. __4__ by what is happening on the screen, children not only imitate what they see but directly __5__ themselves with different characters. Americans have been concerned about the __6__ of violence in the media and its __7__ harm to children and adolescents for at least forty years. During this period, new media __8__, such as video games, cable television, music videos, and the Internet. As they continue to gain popularity, these media, __9__ television, __10__ public concern and research attention.

Another large societal concern on our young generation __11__ by the media, is body image. __12__ forces can influence body image positively or negatively. __13__ one, societal and cultural norms and mass media marketing __14__ our concepts of beauty. In the mass media, the images of __15__ beauty fill magazines and newspapers, __16__ from our televisions and entertain us __17__ the movies. Even in advertising, the mass media __18__ on accepted cultural values of thinness and fitness for commercial gain. Young adults are presented with a __19__ defined standard of attractiveness, a(n) __20__ that carries unrealistic physical expectations.

If you are anything like me,  you left the theater after Sex and the City 2 and thought, there ought to be a law against a looks-based culture in which the only way for 40-year-old actresses to be compensated like 40-year-old actors is to have them look and dress like the teenage daughters of 40-year-old actors.

Meet Deborah Rhode, a Stanford law professor who proposes a legal regime in which discrimination on the basis of looks is as serious as discrimination based on gender or race. In a provocative new book, the Beauty Bias, Rhode lays out the case for an America in which appearance discrimination is no longer allowed. That means Hooters can't fire its servers for being too heavy, as allegedly happened last month to a waitress in Michigan who says she received nothing but excellent reviews but weighed 132 pounds.

Rhode is at her most persuasive when arguing that in America, discrimination against unattractive women and short men is as pernicious and widespread as bias based on race, sex, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Rhode cites research to prove her point: 11 percent of surveyed couples say they would abort a fetus predisposed toward obesity. College students tell surveyors they’d rather have a spouse who is an embezzler, drug user, or a shoplifter than one who is obese. The less attractive you are in America, the more likely you are to receive a longer prison sentence, a lower damage award, a lower salary, and poorer performance reviews. You are less likely to be married and more likely to be poor.

And all of this is compounded by a virtually unregulated beauty and diet industry and soaring rates of elective cosmetic surgery. Rhode reminds us how Hillary Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor were savaged by the media for their looks, and says it’s no surprise that Sarah Palin paid her makeup artist more than any member of her staff in her run for the vice presidency.

The problem with making appearance discrimination illegal is that Americans just really, really like hot girls. And so long as being a hot girl is deemed a bona fide occupational qualification, there will be cocktail waitresses fired for gaining three pounds. It’s not just American men who like things this way. In the most troubling chapter in her book, Rhode explores the feminist movement’s complicated relationship to eternal youth. The truth is that women feel good about competing in beauty pageants. They love six-inch heels. They feel beautiful after cosmetic surgery. You can’t succeed in public life if you look old in America.

To put it another way, appearance bias is a massive societal problem with tangible economic costs that most of us—perhaps especially women—perpetuate each time we buy a diet pill or sneer at fat women. This doesn't mean we shouldn't work toward eradicating discrimination based on appearance. But it may mean recognizing that the law won’t stop us from discriminating against the overweight, the aging, and the imperfect, so long as it’s the quality we all hate most in ourselves.

Dreams are said to be the window to the mind. Through the study of dreams, we can catch glimpses into what our subconscious minds are thinking, or what is troubling us at our deepest levels. No all dreams are the same, however, either in content or in meaning. In this respect, the study of bad dreams, nightmares, can yield interesting observations in regard to the mind and status of the dreamer. Indeed, nightmares appear to have been the subject of far more studies than more pleasant dreams, if for no other reason than while pleasant dreams are easily forgotten upon awakening, nightmares tend to linger in our minds is sufficient to demand attention. 

The sources of our dreams are most commonly attributed to factors in our waking lives. Whether it be emotional challenges, stress in the workplace, relationship problems or a myriad of other possible factors, the thoughts and feelings created in our waking environments are believed to directly influence the content of our dreams. A particular dramatic or traumatic experience during the day would no doubt be encountered again in some form or another during the night.

Just as important as actual events in the determination of the content of our dreams are the pre-existing beliefs that we hold. If we encounter some kind of phenomena in our dreams, it is very likely that we already believed in the possibility of the phenomena before the dream. For example, if someone dreams of being abducted by aliens, it’s very likely that, before the dream, he already believed in the existence of aliens. To the extent that dreams are direct reflections of our minds, they will reflect accurately what we believe and hold to be true.

The way that we act in dreams bears consideration as well. Often times, our behavior in our dreams reflects hidden desires for that type of behavior in our waking lives. Someone who dreams of revenge may actually desire revenge in real life, and likewise someone who dreams of adventure night after night may be experiencing his mind playing out a desire for more excitement in his everyday life. 

While the items encountered in our dreams are of great importance in the analysis of dreams, it must be recognized and understood that the same item in two different dreams can easily have entirely different meanings for the two dreamers. For example, a horse in the dreams of an avid equestrian can signify comfort and relaxation, whereas the same horse in the dreams of a hunter can represent excitement and challenge.

Despite decades of scientific research, no one yet knows how much damage human activity is doing to the environment. Humans are thought to be responsible for a whole host of environmental problems，ranging from global warming to ozone depletion. What is not in doubt, however, is the devastating effect humans are having on the animal and plant life of the planet. All species depend in some way on each other to survive. And the danger is that, if you remove one species from this very complex web of interrelationships, you have very little idea about the knock-on effects of other extinctions.” Complicating matters is the fact that there are no obvious solutions to the problem. Unlike global warming and ozone depletion—which, if the political will was there, could be reduced by cutting gas emissions—preserving biodiversity remains an intractable problem

The latest idea is “sustainable management”, which is seen as a practical and economical way of protecting species from extinction. This means humans should be able to use any species of animal or plant for their benefit, provided enough individuals of that species are left alive to ensure its continued existence. For instance, instead of depending on largely ineffective laws against poaching, it gives local people a good economic reason to preserve plants and animals. In Zimbabwe, there is a sustainable management project elephants. Foreign tourists pay large sums of money to kill these animals for sport. This money is then given to the inhabitants of the area where the hunting takes place. In theory, locals will be encouraged to protect elephants, instead of poaching them— or allowing others to poach them—because of the economic benefit involved.

This sounds like a sensible strategy, but it remains to be seen whether it will work．With corruption endemic in many developing countries, some observers are skeptical that the money will actually reach the people it is intended for. Others wonder how effective the locals will be at stopping poachers.

There are also questions about whether sustainable management is practical when it comes to protecting areas of great bio-diversity such as the world’s tropical forests. In theory, the principle should be the same as with elephants—allow logging companies to cut down a certain number of trees, but not so many as to completely destroy the forest. Sustainable management of forests requires controls on the number of trees which are cut down, as well as investment in replacing them. But because almost all tropical forests are located in countries which desperately need revenue from logging, there are few regulations to do this. Moreover, unrestricted logging is so much more profitable that wood prices from managed forests would cost up to five times more—an increase that consumers，no matter how "green", are unlikely to pay.

For these reasons, sustainable management of tropical forests is unlikely to become widespread in the near future. This is disheartening news. It's estimated these forests contain anything from 50 to 90 percent of all animal and plant species on Earth. Scientist Professor Norman Myers sees this situation as a gigantic "experiment we're conducting with our planet". "We don't know what the outcome will be. If we make a mess of it, we can't move to another planet… It's a case of one planet, one experiment."

Human relations have commanded people’s attention from early times. The ways of people have been recorded in innumerable myths, folktales, novels, poems, plays, and popular or philosophical essays. Although the full significance of a human relationship may not be directly evident, the complexity of feelings and actions that can be understood at a glance is surprisingly great. For this reason psychology holds a unique position among the sciences． 

“Intuitive” knowledge may be remarkably penetrating and can significantly help us understand human behavior whereas in the physical sciences such common sense knowledge is relatively primitive. If we erased all knowledge of scientific physics from our world, not only would we not have cars and television sets, we might even find that the ordinary person was unable to cope with the fundamental mechanical problems of pulleys and levers.

On the other hand, if we removed all knowledge of scientific psychology from our world, problems in interpersonal relations might easily be coped with and solved much as before. We would still “know” how to avoid doing something asked of us and how to get someone to agree with us; we would still “know” when someone was angry and when someone was pleased. One could even offer sensible explanations for the “whys’’ of much of the self’s behavior and feelings. In other words，the ordinary person has a great and profound understanding of the self and of other people which, though unformulated or only vaguely conceived, enables one to interact with others in more or less adaptive ways. Kohler in referring to the lack of great discoveries in psychology as compared with physics, accounts for this by saying that “people were acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology.”

Paradoxically, with all this natural, intuitive, commonsense capacity to grasp human relations, the science of human relations had been one of the last to develop. Different explanations of this paradox have been suggested. One is that science would destroy the vain and pleasing illusions people have about themselves; but we might ask why people have always loved to read pessimistic, debunking writings, from Ecclesiastes to Freud．It has also been proposed that just because we know so much about people intuitively, there has been less incentive for studying them scientifically: why should one develop a theory, carry out systematic observations, or make predictions about the obvious? In any case, the field of human relations, with its vast literary documentation but meager scientific treatment, is in great contrast to the field of physics in which there are relatively few nonscientific books．

Directions: The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 1-5, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent text by choosing from the list [1] -[7]  to fill in each numbered box. Two paragraphs have been placed for you in Boxes. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET l.

For millions of years, Africa’s vegetation had always been controlled by the interactions of climate; geology, soil, and groundwater conditions; and the activities of animals. The addition of humans to the latter group, however, has increasingly rendered unreal the concept of a fully developed “natural” vegetation—i.e., one approximating the ideal of a vegetational climax. Nevertheless, in broad terms, climate remains the dominant control over vegetation. Zonal belts of precipitation, reflection latitude and contrasting exposure to the Atlantic and Indian oceans and their currents, give some reality to related belts of vegetation. (1) _______.In this discussion the idea of zones is retained only in a broad descriptive sense.

(2)_______. In addition, over time more floral regions of varying shape and size have been recognized. Many schemes have arisen successively, all of which have had to take views on two important aspects: the general scale of treatment to be adopted, and the degree to which human modification is to be comprehended or discounted.

(3)_______. Quite the opposite assumption is now frequently advanced. An intimate combination of many species—in complex associations and related to localized soils, slopes, and drainage—has been detailed in many studies of the African tropics. In a few square miles there may be a visible succession from swamp with papyrus, the grass of which the ancient Egyptians made paper and from which the word “paper” originated, through swampy grassland and broad-leaved woodland and grass to a patch of forest on richer hillside soil, and finally to juicy fleshy plants on a nearly naked rock summit.

(4)_______. Correspondingly, classifications have differed greatly in their principles for naming, grouping, and describing formations: some have chosen terms such as forest, woodland, thorn-bush, thicket, and shrub for much of the same broad tracts that others have grouped as wooded savanna (treeless grassy plain) and steppe (grassy plain with few trees). This is best seen in the nomenclature, naming of plants, adopted by two of the most comprehensive and authoritative maps of Africa’s vegetation that have been published: R. W. J. Keay’s Vegetation Map of Africa South of the Tropic of Cancer and its more widely based successor, The Vegetation Map of Africa, compiled by Frank White. In the Keay map the terms “savanna” and “steppe” were adopted as precise definition of formations, based on the herb layer and the coverage of woody vegetation; the White map, however, discarded these two categories as specific classifications. Yet any rapid absence of savanna as in its popular and more general sense is doubtful.

(5)________. However, some 100 specific types of vegetation identified on the source map have been compressed into 14 broader classifications.

［1］As more has become known of the many thousands of African plant species and their complex ecology, naming, classification, and mapping have also become more particular, stressing what was actually present rather than postulating about climatic potential.

［2］In regions of higher rainfall, such as eastern Africa, savanna vegetation is maintained by periodic fires. Consuming dry grass at the end of the rainy season, the fires burn back the forest vegetation, check the invasion of trees and shrubs, and stimulate new grass growth.

［3］Once, as with the scientific treatment of African soils, a much greater uniformity was attributed to the vegetation than would have been generally accepted in the same period for treatments of the lands of western Europe or the United States.

［4］The vegetational map of Africa and general vegetation groupings used here follow the White map and its extensive annotations.

［5］African vegetation zones are closely linked to climatic zones, with the same zones occurring both north and south of the equator in broadly similar patterns. As with climatic zones, differences in the amount and seasonal distribution of precipitation constitute the most important influence on the   development of vegetation.

［6］Early attempts at mapping and classifying Africa’s vegetation stressed this relationship: sometimes the names of plant zones were derived directly from climates.

［7］The span of human occupation in Africa is believed to exceed that of any other continent. All the resultant activities have tended, on balance, to reduce tree cover and increase grassland; but there has been considerable dispute among scholars concerning the natural versus human-caused development of most African grasslands at the regional level.

When global warming finally came, it stuck with a vengeance. In some regions, temperatures rose several degrees in less than a century. Sea levels shot up nearly 400 feet, flooding coastal settlements and forcing people to migrate inland. Deserts spread throughout the world as vegetation shifted drastically in North America, Europe and Asia.（1）After driving many of the animals around them to near extinction, people were forced to abandon their old way of life for a radically new survival strategy that resulted in widespread starvation and disease. The adaptation was farming: the global-warming crisis that gave rise to it happened more than 10,000 years ago.

（2）As environmentalists convene in Rio de Janeiro this week to ponder the global climate of the future, earth scientists are in the midst of a revolution in understanding how climate has changed in the past—and how those changes have transformed human existence. Researchers have begun to piece together an illuminating picture of the powerful geological and astronomical forces that have combined to change the planet’s environment from hot to cold, wet to dry and back again over a time period stretching back hundreds of millions of years.

Most importantly, scientists are beginning to realize that the climatic changes have had a major impact on the evolution of the human species. New research now suggests that climate shifts have played a key role in nearly every significant turning point in human evolution: from the dawn of primates some 65 million years ago to human ancestors rising up to walk on two legs, from the huge expansion of the human brain to the rise of agriculture.（3）Indeed, the human history has not been merely touched by global climate change, some scientists argue, it has in some instances been driven by it.

The new research has profound implications for the environmental summit in Rio. Among other things, the findings demonstrate that dramatic climate change is nothing new for planet Earth.（4）The benign global environment that has existed over the past 10,000 years—during which agriculture, writing, cities and most other features of civilization appeared—is a mere bright spot in a much larger pattern of widely varying climate over the ages.（5）In fact, the pattern of climate change in the past reveals that Earth’s climate will almost certainly go through dramatic changes in the future—even without the influence of human activity.