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"The lone ranger rode into the sunset and jumped on his horse" is a violation of the maxim

A. manner.
B. quantity
C. relevance
D. quality

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As Sharon hinted, the intended Israeli offensive into the occupied territory was not likely. Why not?

A. Because Israeli troops had already counterattacked the Palestinian militants properly, killing two and injuring one.
Because Mahmoud Abbas had promised to do whatever to prevent further Palestinian rocketing.
C. Because Premier Sharon wanted to avoid overaction for only one Israeli was killed and six others wounded.
D. Because US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would visit Israel hater this week to save the truce.

More than any other poet Lord Byron has been identified with his own heroes with Childe Harold, the romantic traveller; with Manfred, the outcast from society; with Don Juan, the cynical, heartless lover. Although Byron did use his own life as the material for much of his poetry, it is by no means purely autobiographical. It is, however, in his long poems that Byron's genius most truly resides rather than in the lyrics which usually represent him in selections.
Byron was born into an aristocratic family of doubtful reputation. His father died of drink and debauchery when Byron was 3, and when he was 10 his great uncle-Lord Byron-also died. Byron inherited the title, a vast house called New stead Abbey, and estates already mortgaged or in decay.
Byron's father, by his first marriage, had a daughter, Augusta, Byron's half-sister. His father's second wife, Byron's own mother, was a proud Calvinistic Scotswoman named Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born with a malformed foot-a disability which tortured him with self-consciousness in his youth. He went to Harrow and to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, amongst other eccentricities, he kept a bear. While an undergraduate he published his first book of poems, Hours of Idleness. The adverse criticism it deservedly got stung Byron not to despair but to revenge, and he replied with a satire in the manner of Pope called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. After Cambridge, Byron went on the grand tour of Europe, traditional for men of his education; but owing to the Napoleonic Wars, his route took him, not overland, as was usual by way of Paris to Rome, but by sea to Lisbon, Spain, and the Mediterranean. For nearly 2 years he wandered about Greece and the Aegean Islands. This was the shaping time of his imagination.
When he was 23, his mother died, and he came home, an extremely handsome young man, to install himself boisterously at New stead Abbey. He entered London society and spoke in the House of Lords.. It was now that he showed his friend, R. C. Dallas, a new satire, Hints from Horace. Dallas, secretly not much impressed, asked if he had anything else; Byron quite casually said that he had a lot of Spenserian stanzas. Dallas read them with astonishment and delight, showed them to Murray the publisher, and on 20 February 1812, the first two cantos of Childe Harold were: published. They took the town by storm. Byron became famous overnight. He could not now write fast enough, and in the next 4 years appeared a series of romantic poems, the best among them being The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos. It is said that 14,000 copies of The Corsiar were sold in a day.
Byron had always been susceptible to women and attractive to them; now that he was successful, they threw themselves at his head. For 3 years he lived in the limelight, and then, quite unaccountably, married Ann Milbanke, a frigid, correct, intellectual woman, entirely unsuited to him but with a lot of money. She bore him a daughter and left him within a year, hinting that he had an immoral relationship with his half-sister Augusta. Society turned against him, as lavish now with calumny and spite as it had been with praise and flattery. Byron would not stay to be insulted; he left England for good.
The next few years were spent mostly in Venice, where Byron established himself with a menagerie of strange animals and conducted various love affairs. It was in Italy that his masterpiece Don Juan was written. This brilliant, caustic, rambling satire is written in a colloquial style. which is the result of a mastery of technique. Byron, always a fluent writer, was not over-critical of his own work; but Beppo, A Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan more than justify his reputation as a great poet. His influence on European literature--both by what he wrote and by the general idea of the romantic figure of Childe Harold--the typical Byronic hero-was very great.
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A. Byron's poetry is autobiographical in nature.
Byron was born in a wealthy aristocratic family without good reputation.
C. Byron, a romantic poem, had interest in politics.
D. It took years for Byron to became well known.

Which of the following is NOT implied in the passage?

A. Large numbers of patients are willing to try the new treatment.
B. The negative power in our bodies may cause cancer.
C. Emotional stress may lead to cancer.
D. Positive forces of our minds can prevent cancer from growing.

But scientists have long acknowledged the existence of a "finagle factor"-a tendency by many scientists to give a helpful nudge to the data to produce desired results. The latest example of the finagle factor in action comes from Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard biologist, who has examined the important 19th century work of Dr. Samuel George Morton.
Morton was famous in his time not only for amassing a huge collection of skulls but also for anything the cranial capacity, or brain size, of the skulls' as a measure of intelligence. He concluded that whites had the largest brains, that the brains of Indians and blacks were smaller, and therefore, that whites constitute a superior race.
Gould went back to Morton's original data and concluded that the results were an example of the finagle at work. "I have reanalyzed Morton's data," Gould wrote last week in the journal, Science, "and I find that they are a patch work of assumption and finagling, controlled, probably unconsciously, by his conventional prior ranking."
Morton reached his conclusions, Gould found, by leaving out embarrassing data, using incorrect procedures, making simple arithmetical mistakes (always in his favour) and changing his criteria again, always in favour of his argument.
Left alone, that finding would not be particularly disturbing. Morton has been thoroughly discredited by now. Scientists do not believe that brain size reflects intelligence, and Morton's brand of raw racism is out of style.
But Gould goes on to say that Morton's story is only "an admittedly egregious example of a common problem in scientific work". Some of the leading figures in science are believed to have used the finagle factor.
One of them is Gregor Mendel, the Bohemian monk whose work is the foundation of modern genetics. The success of Mendel's work was based on finding a three-to-one ratio in the dominant and recessive characteristics of hybrid plants he was breeding. He found that ratio. But scientists recently have gone back to his data and have found that the results are literally too good to be true. Like Morton, Mendel gave himself the benefit of the doubt.
And so, apparently, did Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer whose masterwork, The Almagest, summed up the case for a solar system that had the earth at its centre. Recent studies indicate that Ptolemy either faked some key data or resorted heavily to the finagle factor.
All this is important because the finagle factor is still at work. In the saccharin(糖精) controversy, for example, it was remarked that all the studies sponsored by the sugar industry found that the artificial sweeteners were unsafe, while all the studies sponsored by the diet food industry found nothing wrong with saccharin.
No one suggested that the scientists were dishonest; it was just that they quite naturally had a strong tendency to find data that would support their beliefs. The same tendency is observable in almost every Controversial area of science today-the fight over race and intelligence, the argument about nuclear energy, and so on.
It is only occasional that the finagle factor breaks out into pure dishonesty. One example seems to be the research of Cyril Burt, the British scientist whose studies were used to support the belief that intelligence is mostly inherited. It now appears that Burt invented not only a good part of his results but also made up two collaborators whose names appear on his scientific papers.
The moral that Gould draws from his study of Morton is not that scien

A. It is an important factor that must be included in scientific research.
B. It is a tendency to use collected data to produce desired results.
C. It is a tendency to interpret the data in one's favour.
D. It is a factor which, if handled appropriately, will help Settle controversy,

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