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"The landscape seen from our windows is certainly charming," said Annabel; "those cherry orchards and green meadows, and the river winding along the valley, and the church tower peeping out among the elms, they all make a most effective picture. There's something dreadfully sleepy and languorous about it, though; stagnation seems to be the dominant note. Nothing ever happens here; seedtime and harvest, an occasional outbreak of measles or a mildly destructive thunderstorm, and a little election excitement about once in five years, that is all that we have to modify the monotony of our existence. Rather dreadful, isn't it？"
"On the contrary," said Matilda, "I find it soothing and restful; but then, you see, I've lived in countries where things do happen, ever so ninny at a time, when you're not ready for them happening all at once." "That, of course, makes a difference," said Annabel.
"I have never forgotten," said Matilda, "the occasion when the Bishop of Bequar paid us an unexpected visit; he was on his way to lay the foundation stone of a mission-house or something of the sort." "I thought that out there you were always prepared for emergency guests turning up," said Annabel.
"I was quite prepared for half a dozen Bishops," said Matilda, "but it was rather disconcerting to find out after a little conversation that this particular One was a distant cousin of mine, belonging to a branch of the family that had quarreled bitterly and offensively with our branch about a Crown Derby dessert service; they got it, and we ought to have got it, in some legacy, or else we got it and they thought they ought to have it, I forget which; anyhow, I know they behaved disgracefully."
"It was rather trying, lint you could have left your husband to do most of the entertaining." "My husband was fifty miles up-country, talking sense, or what he imagined to be sense, to a village community that fancied one of their leading men was a were-tiger."
"A what tiger？" "A were-tiger; you've heard of were-wolves, haven't you, a mixture of wolf and human being and demon？ Well, in those parts they have were-tigers, or think they have, and I must say that in this case, so far as sworn and uncontested evidence went, they had every ground for thinking so. However, as we gave up witchcraft prosecutions about three hundred years ago, we don't like to have other people keeping on our discarded practices; it doesn't seem respectful to our mental and moral position,"
"I hope you weren't unkind to the Bishop," said Annabel. "Well, of course he was my guest, so I had to be outwardly polite to him, but he was tactless enough to rake up the incidents of the old quarrel, and to try to make out that there was something to be said for the way his side of the family had behaved; even if there was, which I don't for a moment admit, my house was not the place in which to say it. I didn't argue the matter, but I gave my cook a holiday to go and visit his aged parents some ninety miles away. The emergency cook was not a specialist in curries, in fact, I don't think cooking in any shape or form. could have been one of his strong points. I believe he originally came to us in the guise of a gardener, but as we never pretended to have anything that could be considered a garden he was utilised as assistant goatherd, in which capacity, I understand, he gave every satisfaction. When the Bishop heard that I had sent away the cook on a special and unnecessary holiday he saw the inwardness of the manoeuvre, and from that moment we were scarcely on speaking terms. If you have ever had a Bishop with whom you were not on speaking terms staying in your house, you will appreciate the situation."
Annabel confessed that her life-story had never included such a disturbing experience.
All of the following adjectives describe Annabel's impression of the landscape EXCEPT ______.
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When it comes to nursing articles, Sam suggest that parents should ______.
But much of the wobble has been fixed, thanks to a satellite known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or W. MAP. Since July 2001, WMAP has been orbiting in deep space, more than a million kilometers from Earth, studying the most ancient light in existence. And in a dramatic reminder that important space science is almost always done by machines, not fragile humans, it reported a series of precision measurements that will finally put cosmology on a firm foundation.
What the satellite found, says Princeton University's David Spergel, a theorist on the WMAP team, "is that the universe can be explained with five numbers. "First, the cosmos is 13. 7 billion years old, give or take a negligible couple of hundred million years. Second, the first stars turned on just 200 million years after the Big Bang, Finally, the universe is made of three things in the following proportions: 4% ordinary atoms; 23% "dark matter," whose nature is still unknown; and 73% "dark energy," the equally mysterious force whose antigravity effect is speeding up the cosmic expansion. "This," says astrophysicist John Bahcall, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, "is a rite of passage for cosmology, from speculation to precision science."
WMAP learned this and more by scrutinizing the faint whisper of microwaves left over from the Big Bang. Hidden in that radiation are patterns of warmer and cooler spots, marking places where matter was a little more or less dense than average--spots that would eventually evolve into the clusters of galaxies and empty spaces that we see today. These patterns were first detected in crude form. by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite in 1992, But without enough detail for much to be said about them. But with a resolution some 40 times as sharp as COBE's, WMAP has plenty to say. "It's a lot like matching fingerprints," says Spergel. "We ran computer simulations based on many different values for all of the numbers, generated patterns for each and found the one that best matched what we actually saw."
WMAP also confirmed what earlier experiments had suggested about a basic characteristic of the milverse; the geometry of space-time, in the Einsteinian sense, is flat. That's consistent with a theory called inflation, which posits that the cosmos underwent a period of turbocharged expansion before it was a second old. "I have to admit," says Bahcall, "that I was skeptical of the picture theorists had put together. Inflation, dark matter, dark energy--it's all pretty implausible. But this implausible, crazy universe has now been confirmed with exquisite detail."
That's not to say that WMAP has answered every question. Nobody knows what dark matter and dark energy are, and the theory of inflation, while strengthened, is far from proved. Beyond that, there are some strange measurements in WMAP's data that might be mere statistical flukes or might point to some major monkey wrench that could still throw cosmology into turmoil. "We should know better after we get in more data," says Charles Bennett of the Goddard Space Flight Venter, who is the V team leader.
But cosmologists won't be sitting around waiting. "You're going to see a thousand papers based on these results," says Tegmark, who is already working on several. "It's an exciting time to be in this field"
It can be inferred from the first paragraph that cosmologists ______.
Slobodan Davidovic was given a 15-year prison sentence because ______.
The companies are lured by a booming market in which capitalist competition is still scarce. The num her of university students is expected to double in the next 25 years to 170 million worldwide. Demand greatly exceeds supply, because the 1990s saw massive global investment in primary and secondary schools, but not in universities. The number of children enrolled in primary or secondary schools rose by 18 percent around the world--more than twice the rate of increase in any previous decade. Now these kids are often graduating from high school to find no openings in national universities, which nevertheless don't welcome for-profit competition. The Brazilian university teachers' union warned that foreign corporations would turn higher education into "a diploma industry". Critics raised the specter of declining quality and a loss of Brazil's "sovereign control" over education.
For-profit universities met with similar suspicion when they first opened in the United States. By the 1980s they were regularly accused of offering substandard education and had to fight for acceptance and respect. Lately, they have flourished by catering to older students who aren't looking for keg parties, just a shortcut to a better career. For-profit colleges now attract 8 percent of four-year students in the United States, up from 3 percent a decade ago. By cutting out frills, including sports teams, student centers and summer vacation, these schools can operate with profit margins of 20 to 30 percent.
In some countries, the American companies operate as they do at home. Apollo found an easy fit in Brazil, where few universities have dorms, students often take off time between high school and college, and there's no summer vacation--just two breaks in July and December. In other Latin countries, Sylvan has taken a different approach, buying traditional residential colleges like the Universidad del Valle de Mexico (UVM). It has boosted enrollment by adding and heavily advertising courses in career-track fields like business and engineering, and adding no-frills satellite campuses. Sensitive to the potential hostility against foreign buyers, Sylvan keeps original school names, adding its own brand, Sylvan International Universities, to publicity materials, and keeps tuition in line with local private schools.
Most of the schools that Sylvan has purchased were managed by for-profits to begin with, including the prestigious Les Roches Hotel Management School in Switzerland. But in general, Says Urdan, Sylvan's targets "have not been run with world-class business practices. They're not distressed, but there's an opportunity for them to be better managed." When Sylvan paid $ 50 million for a controlling stake in UVM two years ago, the school had revenues of about $ 80 million and an enrollment of 32,000. The success of the for-profits is nothing to be afraid of, says World Bank education expert Jamil Salmi: "I don't think they will replace traditional universities, but they can push some more traditional providers to be more innovative and more attentive to the needs of the labor market."
Some students at Sylvan schools in Latin America welcome the foreign invasion. At the Universidad de las Americas in Santiago, Daniela Villagran says friends tease her
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