题目内容
A．simplerB．more complexC．ore meaninglessD．more troublesome
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Children's Numerical Skills
People appear to be born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clock of mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning to walk and talk, they can set the table with impressive accuracy—one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of noting that they have placed five knives, spoons and forks on the table and, a bit later, that this amounts to fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later, he or she could enter a second-grade mathematics class without any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.
Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of cognitive psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children were observed as they slowly grasped—or, as the case might be, bumped into—concepts that adults take for granted, as they refused, for instance, to concede that quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short stout glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since demonstrated that young children, asked to count the pencils in a pile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the rudiments of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have also suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers—the idea of a oneness, a two ness, a three ness that applies to any class of objects and is a prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a table—is itself far from innate.
Children can set table even before they can walk and talk.
Many people imagine that Alzheimer's disease (早老性痴呆病), the degenerative disorder that ultimately leaves sufferers with total memory loss, is an inevitable result of aging. This is not so. 【C1】______ the risks of contracting the disease increase with age, there are many elderly people【C2】______ memories are perfect. Most of us are so ill-【C3】______ about all forms of memory loss that we label everything as "Alzheimer's'. Alzheimer's disease itself can【C4】______ people as young as 30 and can progress either quickly or slowly. It can also【C5】______ the blame for other non-degenerative conditions such as deep depression.【C6】______ , only an examination of the brain tissue during an autopsy (解剖) can produce an accurate【C7】______ of the disease.
The causes of Alzheimer's are unknown. They may be either【C8】______ or environmental. A study in 1996 of 13,000 people whose parents or siblings had the disease showed they had five times【C9】______ chance of succumbing 【C10】______ the age of 80 than those with no family【C11】______ of the problem.
There are other factors, however. In a study of identical twins, it was found that only about half of the twin pairs developed Alzheimer's and, when both twins【C12】______ . it, they did so as【C13】______ as 15 years apart. The possibility【C14】______ environment plays a part was【C15】______ by another 1996 study, this time of two groups of elderly Japanese men. One group lived in Hawaii, the other in Japan. The Hawaiian group had a much higher【C16】______ of the disease.
Aluminum has been blamed for the development of Alzheimer's. This is because a high level of aluminum has been found in the brains of sufferers. The disease was first diagnosed at the beginning of the 20th century. It was at this time【C17】______ aluminum was becoming widely available for use in cooking pots.
Memory loss, difficulty in【C18】______ familiar tasks, and problems with abstract thinking are all【C19】______ of the onset of the disease. One unusual feature is its impact on language. It attacks nouns first,【C20】______ verbs. Grammar is one of the last things to go.
【C1】
Section B
Directions: In this section, you will hear 3 short passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D.
听力原文： The helicopter can fly forwards, backwards, up, down, and sideways. It can also hover in the air. It needs no runway to operate from. It can land and take off from a flat roof-or a clearing in the jungle.
The main disadvantage of the helicopter is that it cannot fly as fast as most planes. It is also often noisy. Helicopters are widely used by the armed forces. They are also useful for sea and mountain rescue operations. In some cities they are used for regular passenger flights.
The helicopter is different from an aeroplane which gets its lift from fixed wings, and its thrust from a propeller or a jet. Instead of wings, the helicopter has a many-bladed rotor on its top. This is driven by the engine. The rotor blades are, however, the same shape as wings and they provide lift for the helicopter when they turn. The spinning rotor also propels the helicopter. The helicopter pilot maneuvers his craft by altering the angle of the rotor blades.
As the turning of the rotor tends to make the body of the helicopter turn as well, most helicopters have a small rotor on their tail.
(27)
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文： This week in the magazine, in "Nerd Camp," Burkhard Bilger writes about a camp for gifted teenagers. Here Bilger and The New Yorker's Daniel Cappello discuss the social, educational, and recreational problems facing the very smartest students.
D: Your article is about the Center for Talented Youth, a summer program for gifted children--"nerd camp," as many participants called it--at Johns Hopkins University. What is nerd camp？
B: Nerd camp is a lot like any other summer camp, only the kids spend most of their time studying instead of playing, and they have to be really, really smart to get in. There are nerd camps all over the country these days--about fifteen thousand students attend them every year, and thousands more attend day programs--in part because so many schools have dismantled their gifted programs. Only about two cents of every hundred dollars spent by the federal government is earmarked for the gifted, so a lot of these kids have been stranded Most of them start the regular school year already knowing nearly half of the things they're going to be taught. So these camps are places where they can stretch their legs, intellectually--which is a pretty astonishing thing to see. It's not unusual for a student at one of these camps to cover a year of algebra in two weeks.
D: Do you think advancing or skipping grades a good idea？
B: Most schools practice grade acceleration in a fairly clumsy way. If a kid is bored in his class, and his parents complain enough, he might be allowed to move up a year. The problem is, if he's as bright as many of the kids at the Johns Hopkins camp, he'll soon be ready to move past those older kids as well. And, of course, being the smallest, brightest kid in a class has never been a recipe for popularity. When I talked to Camilla Benbow , the clean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, she told me that schools simply use the wrong Criterion--age--to divide students up. Rather than lumping all the seven-year-olds in one group and all the eight-year-olds in another, they should group all students by ability--regardless of their age. "When they're ready to take Algebra I, let them take Algebra I,' she told me. "We don't buy shoes or piano books for children based on how old they are. Why is reading or math any different？"
D: At the nerd camps you visited, what was the social life like？ How do the kids deal with normal adolescent rites of passage？
B: I went to camps at Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and both places were pretty lively. The kids went to movies and excursions and weekly dances, and the dorms were predictably noisy. Some psychologists have suggested that students who are intellectually gifted also tend to mature faster than average, but I didn't see much evidence of that. They had the same boy-girl problems, the same hormonal jitters. But there was a re- al giddiness in the campers--a sense of relief at finally getting to hang out with kids who were like them.
D: What about genius？ How do we separate high intelligence from real genius, and how rare is it？
B: It's hard to know exactly what qualities are the most predictive of genius. Intelligence is important, obvious- ly, but it's not nearly enough. In the nineteen--twenties, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman tried to find the most gifted kids in California by having teachers nominate candidates and then giving them the Stan ford--Binet I. Q. test, which Terman had helped develop. He ended up with more than fifteen hundred exceptionally bright kids--people called them the "Termites"--and spent the rest of his life tracking their careers
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