As they grow older, many children turn aside from books without pictures, and it is a situation made more serious as our culture becomes more visual. It is hard to wean children off picture books when pictures have played a major part throughout their formative reading experiences, and when there is competition for their attention from so many other sources of entertainment. The least intelligent are most vulnerable, but tests show that even intelligent children are being affected. The response of educators has been to extend the use of pictures in books and to simplify the language, even at senior levels. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge recently held joint conferences to discuss the noticeably rapid decline in literacy among their undergraduates. Pictures are also used to help motivate children to read because they are beautiful and eye-catching. But motivation to read should be provided by listening to stories well read, where children imagine in response to the story. Then, as they start to read, they have this experience to help them understand the language. If we present pictures to save children the trouble of developing these creative skills, then I think we are making a great mistake.
Academic journals ranging from educational research, psychology, language learning, psycholinguistic, and so on cite experiments, which demonstrate how detrimental picture are for
A. they read too loudly
B. there are too many repetitive words
C. they are discouraged from using their imagination
D. they have difficulty assessing its meaning
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The passage suggests that the author would be likely to agree with which of the following
A. Ⅰ and Ⅳ only
B. Ⅱ and Ⅲ only
C. Ⅲ and Ⅳ only
D. Ⅰ, Ⅱ, and Ⅲ only
Paris: Thanks to a French insurance company, brides and bridegrooms with cold feet no longer face financial disaster from a canceled wedding. For a small premium, they can take out a policy protecting them from love gone away or anything else that threatens to rain on their big day.
Despite France's economic woes, the amount of money spent on weddings is rising 5-10 per cent a year. And people in the Paris region now dish out an average of 60,000 francs on tying the knot. But life is unpredictable and non-refundable, so French insurers have stepped in to ease the risk, finding their own little niche in the business of love. They join colleagues in Britain, where insurers say wedding cancellation policies have been around for about a decade.
About 5 per cent of insured weddings there never make it to the altar. Indeed, better safe than sorry. "Obviously there are some who are superstitious, but in general people like the idea," said Jacqueline Loeb, head of a Parisian insurance company.
In the past six weeks, she has sold 15 policies at a premium of about 3 per cent of the amount a client wants to be insured for.
These careful customers, she said, have included a man who was worded his fiancee would have an allergic attack on her wedding day and a woman whose future mother-in-law was gravely ill.
The policy covers those and other nuptial impediments: an accident that forces a cancellation of a Wedding, an unexpected change of venue for the reception, damage caused at it, and even honeymoons that don't happen. As for the ultimate deal-breaker, cold feet, they are also insured-but only until eight days before the ceremony. British insurers, however, said they wouldn't touch that clause with a stick. Steve Warner, sales director of Insure Expo-Sure in London, says the six policies he sells each week in the wedding season protect against things like damaged wedding dresses, illness and death, but not changes of heart." Disinclination to marry is not covered," he said. Ms Loed, who says hers is the only French agency offering wedding policies, said she started the service last December.
A chateau outside Paris that hosts receptions was taking a beating from last-minute cancellations, and approached Ms Loed to see if there wash' t some way of protecting itself. She obliged, then started advertising with caterers and wedding departments in large department stores, and the idea has taken off nicely. "We respond to a need," she said.
What's the main purpose of the passage?
A. To thank a French insurance company for what has been done.
B. To explain how a French insurance company works.
C. To tell brides and bridegrooms what to do before getting married.
D. To ask husband and wife-to-be to take out an insurance policy.
SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. At the end of each news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions.
听力原文:Memorial Day honors those who died in all of America's wars. But the holiday began as a way to honor soldiers killed during the Civil War between the North and the South. On May thirtieth, eighteen sixty-eight, flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. Today, more than two hundred sixty thousand men and women are buried there. Some fought in the Revolutionary War in the seventeen hundreds. The eighty-hectare cemetery is in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Others buried at Arlington National Cemetery include government officials and Supreme Court justices. Presidents John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft are buried there.
The holiday began as a way to honor soldiers killed during______
A. Revolutionary War
B. the First World War
C. wars involved America
D. the Civil War
Some recent historians have argued that life in the British colonies in America from approximately 1763 to 1789 was marked by internal conflicts among colonists. Inheritors of some of the viewpoints of early twentieth century Progressive historians such as Beard and Becker, these recent historians have put forward arguments that deserve evaluation. The kind of conflict most emphasized by these historians is class conflict. Yet with the Revolutionary War dominating these years, how does one distinguish class conflict within that larger conflict? Certainly not by the side a person supported. Although many of these historians have accepted the earlier assumption that Loyalists represented an upper class, new evidence indicates that Loyalists, like rebels, were drawn from all socioeconomic class. (It is nonetheless probably true that a larger percentage of the well-to-do joined the Loyalists than joined the rebels.). Looking at the rebels side, we find little evidence for the contention that lower-class rebels were in conflict with upper-class rebels. Indeed, the war effort against Britain tended to suppress class conflicts. Where it did not, the disputing rebels of one or another class usually became Loyalists. Loyalism thus operated as a safety valve to remove socioeconomic discontent that existed among the rebels. Disputes occurred, of course, among those who remained on the rebel side, but the extraordinary social mobility of eighteenth—century American society (with the obvious exception of slaves) usually prevented such disputes from hardening along class lines. Social structure was in fact so fluid—though recent statistics suggest a narrowing of economic opportunity as the latter half of the century progressed—that to talk about social classes at all requires' the use of loose economic categories such as rich, poor, and middle class, or eighteenth-century designations like" the better sort." Despite these vague categories one should not claim unequivocally that hostility between recognizable classes cannot be legitimately observed. Outside of New York, however, there were very few instances of openly expressed class antagonism.
Having said this, however, one must add that there is much evidence to support the further claim of recent historians that sectional conflicts were common between 1763 and 1789. The" Paxton Boys" incident and the Regulator movement are representative examples of the widespread, and justified, discontent of western settlers against colonial or state governments dominated by eastern interests. Although undertones of class conflict existed beneath such hostility, the opposition was primarily geographical. Sectional conflict-- which also existed between North and South—deserves further investigation.
In summary, historians must be careful about the kind of conflict they emphasize in eighteenth-century American. Yet those who stress the achievement of a general consensus among the colonists cannot fully understand the consensus without understanding the conflicts that had to be overcome or repressed in order to reach it.
The author considers the contentions made by the recent historians discussed in the passage to be______
A. potentially verifiable
B. partially justified
C. logically contradictory
D. ingenious but flawed