Part A
Directions: Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. (40 points)
There's one thing above all wrong with the new British postal codes: not everyone has that sort of memory. Some of us, of course, forget even h6use numbers and the present postal districts, but that matters less when there is a human being at every stage to spot the mistake. When all the sorting is done in one operation by a man sitting at a machine, typing special marks onto an envelope, one slip on your part could send your letter way outside the area where the local postman or a friendly neighbor knows your name.
Otherwise the new codes are all the Post Offices claims. They are the most carefully designed in the world, ideal for computers. A confusion of letters and numbers, they have two parts separated by the gap in the middle. Together they classify a letter not only the city where it is going but right down to the round of the particular postman who is to carry it, and even to a group of houses or a single big building. In the long run this will speed the mail and cut costs.
The long run is 10 years away, though. In fact there are only 12 Post Offices in the country which have the right machines fully working, and the system cannot work at full efficiency until it is nationwide. Yet the Post Office wants us to start using the codes now, so that we shall be trained when the machines are ready.
But will we? A businessman I met, praising the virtues of the new system, explained that large companies like his could have codes of their own. What was his code? "Oh, dear me. Now you've got me. Awfully sorry. Hold on a minute while I find a sheet of my headed notepaper." Then he read painfully, as if spelling out a word in a foreign language, "W-I-X-6A-B".
According to the passage, what matters most in letter delivery in Britain is that______
A. the new postal codes must be memorized
B. house numbers must not be forgotten
C. present postal districts must be borne in mind
D. special marks on an envelope must be accurate
If a child inherits something from his mother, such as an especially sensitive ear, a peculiar structure of the hands or of the vocal organs, he will______.
A. surely become a musician
B. mostly become a poet
C. possibly become a doctor
D. become a musician on the condition that all these factors are organized around music
Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics-but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have attacked 'antiscience' in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.
Defenders of science have also voiced their concerns at meetings such as "The Flight from Science and Reason", held in New York City in 1995, and "Science in the Age of (Miss) information", which assembled last June near Buffalo.
Antiscience clearly means different things to different people; Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists, philosophers and other academics who have questioned sciences objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts, creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.
A survey of news stories in 1996 reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well, from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.
Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber, those manifesto, published in 1995, scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience, as an essay in US News & World Report last May seemed to suggest.
The environmentalists, inevitably, respond to such critics. The true enemies of science, argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, a pioneer of environmental studies, are those who question the evidence supporting global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth.
Indeed, some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. "The term 'antiscience' can lump together too many, quite different things", notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his 1993 work Science and Anti-Science. "They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened."
The word "schism" (Para. 1) in the context probably means______
A. confrontation
B. dissatisfaction
C. separation
D. contempt
Which of the following is excluded in a symptom of organophosphate poisoning?______
A. Exhaustion
B. Speech difficulty
C. Impulses to kill oneself
D. Impulse to commit crimes