可能今年有的城市房地产价格会下降。据此可以推出:
A. 可能今年有的城市房地产价格不会下降。
B. 可能今年所有的城市房地产价格都不会下降。
C. 必然今年有的城市房地产价格会下降。
D. 不必然今年所有的城市房地产价格都不会下降。
E. 必然今年所有的城市房地产价格不会下降。
Pity those who aspire to put the initials PhD after their names. After 16 years of closely supervised education, prospective doctors of philosophy are left more or less alone to write the equivalent of a large book. Most social-science postgraduates have still not completed their theses by the time their grant runs out after three years. They must then get a job and finish in their spare time, which can often take a further three years. By then, most new doctors are sick to death of the narrowly defined subject which has blighted their holidays and ruined their evenings. The Economic and Social Research Council, which gives grants to postgraduate social scientists, wants to get better value for money by cutting short this agony. It would like to see faster completion rates; until recently, only about 25% of PhD candidates were finishing within four years. The ESRC’s response has been to stop PhD grants to all institutions where the proportion taking less than four years is below 10% ; in the first year of this policy the national average shot up to 39%. The ESRC feels vindicated in its toughness, and will progressively raise the threshold to 40% in two years. Unless completion rates improve further, this would exclude 55 out of 73 universities and polytechnics — including Oxford University, the London School of Economics and the London Business School. Predictably, howls of protest have come from the universities, who view the blacklisting of whole institutions as arbitrary and negative. They point out that many of the best students go quickly into jobs where they can apply their research skills, but consequently take longer to finis their theses. Polytechnics with as few as two PhD candidates complain that they are penalized by random fluctuations in student performance. The colleges say there is no hard evidence to prove that faster completion rates result from greater efficiency rather than lower standards or less ambitious doctoral topics. The ESRC thinks it might not be a bad thing if PhD students were more modest in their aims. It would prefer to see more systematic teaching of research skills and fewer unrealistic expectations placed on young men and women who are undertaking their first piece of serious research. So in future its grants will be given only where it is convinced that students are being trained as researchers, rather than carrying out purely knowledge-based studies. The ESRC can not dictate the standard of thesis required by external examiners, or force departments to give graduates more teaching time. The most it can do is to try to persuade universities to change their ways. Recalcitrant professors should note that students want more research training and a less elaborate style of thesis, too. Oxford University would be excluded out of those universities that receive PhD grants from ESRC, because the completion rate of its PhD students’ theses within four years is lower than ______.
A. 25%
B. 40%
C. 39%
D. 10%
Read the following passage carefully and then write a summary of it in English in about 150 words. Many of today’s young people have a difficult time seeing any moral dimension to their actions. There are a number of reasons why that’s true, but none more prominent than a failed system of education that eschews teaching children the traditional moral values that bind Americans together as a society and a culture. That failed approach, called "decision-making" , was introduced in schools 25 years ago. It tells children to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. It replaced "character education". Character education didn’t ask children to reinvent the moral wheel; instead, it encouraged them to practice habits of courage, justice and self-control. In the 1940s, when a character education approach prevailed, teachers worried about students chewing gum; today they worry about robbery and rape. Decision-making curriculums pose thorny ethical dilemmas to students, leaving them with the impression that all morality is problematic and that all questions of right and wrong are in dispute. Youngsters are forced to question values and virtues they’ve never acquired in the first place or upon which they have only a tenuous hold. The assumption behind this method is that students will arrive at good moral conclusions if only they are given the chance. But the actual result is moral confusion. For example, a recent national study of 1, 700 sixth- to ninth-graders revealed that a majority of boys considered rape to be acceptable under certain conditions. Astoundingly, many of the girls agreed. This kind of moral illiteracy is further encouraged by values-education programs that are little more than courses in self-esteem. These programs are based on the questionable assumption that a child who feels good about himself or herself won’t want to do anything wrong. But it is just as reasonable to make an opposite assumption: namely, that a child who has uncritical self-regard will conclude that he or she can’t do anything bad. Such naive self-acceptance results in large part from the non-directive, non-judgmental as-long-as-you-feel-comfortable-with-your-choices mentality that has pervaded public education for the last two and one-half decades. Many of today’s drug education, sex education and values-education courses are based on the same 1960s philosophy that helped fuel the explosion in teen drug use and sexual activity in the first place. Meanwhile, while educators are still fiddling with outdated "feel-good" approaches, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles are burning. Youngsters are leaving school believing that matters of right and wrong are always merely subjective. If you pass a stranger on the street and decide to murder him because you need money—if it feels right—you go with that feeling. Clearly, murder is not taught in our schools, but such a conclusion—just about any conclusion—can be reached and justified using the decision-making method. It is time to consign the fads of "decision-making" and "non-judgmentalism" to the ash heap of failed policies, and return to a proved method. Character education provides a much more realistic approach to moral formation. It is built on an understanding that we learn morality not by debating it but by practicing it.
Scientists have long understood that supermassive black holes weighing millions or billions of suns can tear apart stars that come too close. The black hotels gravity pulls harder on the nearest part of the star, an imbalance that pulls the star apart over a period of minutes or hours, once it gets close enough. Scientists say this uneven pulling is not the only hazard facing the star. The strain of these unbalanced forces can also trigger a nuclear explosion powerful enough to destroy the star from within. Matthieu Brassart and Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, France, carried out computer simulations of the final moments of such an unfortunate star’s life, as it veered towards a supermassive black hole. When the star gets close enough, the uneven forces flatten it into a pancake shape. Some previous studies had suggested this flattening would increase the density and temperature inside the star enough to trigger intense nuclear reactions that would tear it apart. But other studies had suggested that the picture would be complicated by shock waves generated during the flattening process and that no nuclear explosion should occur. The new simulations investigated the effects of shock waves in detail, and found that even when their effects are included, the conditions favor a nuclear explosion. " There will be an explosion of the star — it will be completely destroyed," Brassart says. Although the explosion obliterates the star, it saves some of the star’s matter from being devoured by the black hole. The explosion is powerful enough to hurl much of the star’s matter out of the black hole’s reach, he says. The devouring of stars by black holes may already have been observed, although at a much later stage. It is thought mat several months after the event that rips the star apart, its matter starts swirling into the hole itself. It heats up as it does so, releasing ultraviolet light and X-rays. If stars disrupted near black holes really do explode, then they could in principle allow these events to be detected at a much earlier stage, says Jules Hatpern of Columbia University in New York, US2. "It may make it possible to see the disruption of that star immediately if it gets hot enough," he says. Brassart agrees. "Perhaps it can be observed in the X-rays and gamma rays, but it’s something that needs to be more studied," he says. Supernova researcher Chris Fryer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, US3, says the deaths of these stars are difficult to simulate, and he is not sure whether the researchers have proven their case that they explode in the process. Something destructive could happen to a star that gets too close to a black hole. Which of the following destructive statements is NOT mentioned in the passage
A. The black hole could tear apart the star.
B. The black hole could trigger a nuclear explosion in the star.
C. The black hole could dwindle its size considerably.
D. The black hole could devour the star.