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Proxemics is the study of what governs how closely one person stands to another. People who feel close will be close, though the actual distances will vary between cultures. For Americans we can discern four main categories of distance: intimate, personal, social and public. Intimate ranges from direct contact to about 45 centimeters. This is for the closest relationships such as those between husband and wife. Beyond this comes personal distance. This stands at between 45 and 80 centimeters. It is the most usual distance maintained for conversations between friends and relatives. Social distance covers people who work together or are meeting at social gatherings. Distances here tend to be kept between 1.30 to 2 meters. Beyond this comes public distance, such as that between a lecturer and his audience.
All cultures draw lines between what is an appropriate and what is an inappropriate social distance for different types of relationship. They differ, however, in where they draw these lines. Look at an international reception with representatives from the US and Arabic countries conversing and you will see the Americans pirouetting backwards around the hall pursued by their Arab partners. The Americans will be trying to keep the distance between themselves and their partners which they have grown used to regarding as "normal". They probably will not even notice themselves trying to adjust the distance between themselves and their partners, though they may have vague feeling that their Arab neighbors are being a bit "pushy". The Arab, on the other hand, coming from a culture where much closer distance is the norm, may be feeling that the Americans are being "stand-offish". Finding themselves happier standing close to and even touching those they are in conversation with they will persistently pursue the Americans round the room trying to close the distance between them.
The appropriateness of physical contact varies between different cultures too. One study of the number of times people conversing in coffee shops over a one hour period showed the following interesting variations: London, 0; Florida, 2; Paris, 10; and Puerto Rico 180. Not only does it vary between societies, however, it also varies between different subcultures within one society. Young people in Britain, for example, are more likely to touch and hug friends than are the older generation. This may be partly a matter of growing older, but it also reflects the fact that the older generation grew up at a time when touching was less common for all age groups. Forty years ago, for example, footballers would never hug and kiss one another on the field after a goal as they do today.
In proxemics, ______ governs the standing space between two persons.

A. distance
B. culture
C. conversation
D. relationship

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听力原文:Oh, what's this? This is my favorite carpet which really cost me a lot. It is made of real leather. What have you split on the carpet?
(22)

A. What is the carpet made of?
B. What was it you split?
C. You spoiled what was there.
D. You split it in the car.

Seven years ago, an Environmental Protection Agency statistician stunned researchers studying the effects of air pollution on health when he reported analyses indicating that as many as 60, 000 U. S. residents die each year from breathing federally allowed concentrations of airborne dust. This and subsequent studies figured prominently in EPA's decision last year to ratchet down the permitted concentration of breathable particles in urban air -- and in human airways.
At the time, many industrialists argued that they shouldn't have to pay for better pollution control because science had yet to suggest a plausible biological mechanism by which breathing low concentrations of urban dust might sicken or kill people.
Now, scientists at the University of Texas Houston Health Science Center describe how they uncovered what they think may be one of the basic elements of that toxicity.
On the alert for foreign debris, a community of white blood cells known as alveolar macrophages patrols small airways of the lung. When these cells encounter suspicious material, they identify it and send out a chemical clarion call to rally the immune system cells best suited to disabling and disposing of such matter.
The trick is to recruit only as many troops as are needed. If they call in too many, the lung can sustain inflammatory damage from friendly fire. Alongside the small troop of macrophages that stimulates defense measures, a larger squadron of macrophages halts immune activity when it threatens the host.
Andrij Holian and his coworkers in Houston have found that people with healthy lungs normally have 10 times as many suppressor macrophages as stimulatory ones. In people with asthma and other chronic lung diseases -- who face an increased risk of respiratory disease from inhaling urban dust -- that ratio may be only 3 to 1. The reason for the difference is not known.
In a report to be published in the March Environmental Health Perspectives, Holian's team describes test-tube studies of human alveolar macrophages. The macrophages showed no response to ask collected from the Mount St. Helen's eruption. However, when exposed to airborne dust from St. Louis and Washington, D. C. , most of the suppresser macrophages underwent apoptosis, or cellular suicide, while the stimulatory ones survived unaffected. Ash from burned residual oil, a viscous boiler fuel, proved even more potent at triggering suppressor cell suicides.
It this test-tube system models what's actually happening in the human lung, Holian told Science News, the different responses of the two classes of lung macrophages could result in an overly aggressive immune response to normal triggering events. Indeed, he says, it would be the first step in a cascade that can end in inflammatory lung injury. "We may one day be able to target this up stream event and prevent that injury."
"This is, I think, an important contribution to the overall story," says Daniel L. Costa of EPA's pulmonary toxicology branch in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Studies by EPA suggest that certain metals -- especially iron, vanadium, nickel, and copper -- in smoke from combustion of fossil fuels trigger particularly aggressive inflammatory responses by lung cells. Costa says these metals play a "preminent" role in the toxicity of airborne particulates. When EPA researchers removed the metals, they also removed the toxicity, he says. Moreover, he notes, these metals tend to reside on the smallest water-soluble particles in urban air --the fraction targeted for more aggressive controls under the new rules.
John Vandenberg, assistant director of EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, says Holian's results are "a nice complement to our studies."
This passage is mainly about ______.

A. how inhaled dust harms the lungs
B. the function of Environmental Protection Agency
C. the function of human alveolar macrophages
D. studies by Environmental Protection Agency

An education that aims at getting a student a certain kind of job is a technical education, justified for reasons radically different from why education is universally required by law. It is not simply to raise everyone's job prospects that all children are legally required to attend school into their teens. Rather, we have a certain conception of the American citizen, a character who is incomplete if he cannot competently asses how his livelihood and happiness are affected by things outside of himself. But this was not always the case, before it was legally required for all children to attend school until a certain age. It was widely acteristic of all industrialized countries, we came to accept that everyone is fit to be educated. Computer education advocates forsake this optimistic notion for a pessimism that betrays their otherwise cheery out-look. Banking on the confusion between educational and vocational reasons for bringing computers into schools, computer advocates often emphasize the job prospects of graduates over their educational achievement.
There are some good arguments for a technical education given the right kind of student. Many European schools introduce the concept of professional training early on in order to make sure children are properly equipped for the profession they want to join. It is, however, presumptuous to insist that there will only be so many jobs for so many scientists, so many businessmen, so many accountants. Besides, this is unlikely to produce the needed number of every kind of professional in a country as large as ours and where the economy is spread over so many states and involves so many international corporations.
But, for a small group of students, professional training might be the way to go since well-developed skills, all other factors being equal, can be the difference between having a job and not. Of course, the basics of using any computer these days are very simple. It does not take a life-long acquaintance to pick up various software programs. If one wanted to become a computer engineer, that is of course, an entirely different computer skills are only complementary to the host of great skills that are necessary to becoming any kind of professional. It should be observed, of course that no school, vocational or not, is helped by a confusion over its purpose.
The author thinks the present rush to put computers in the classroom is ______.

A. far-reaching
B. dubiously oriented
C. self-contradictory
D. radically reformatory

Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves -- anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art.
Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they arc getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography's prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960's. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting -- that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse -- presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art.
Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will for get that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity -- in short, an art.
The author is concerned with ______.

A. defining the Modernist attitude toward art
B. explaining how photography emerged as a fine art
C. explaining the attitude of serious contemporary photographers toward photography as art and placing those attitudes in their historical context
D. defining the various approaches that serious contemporary photographers take toward their art and assessing the value of each of those approaches

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