Catastrophic volcanic eruptions in Europe may have culled Neanderthals to the point where they couldn’t bounce back, according to a controversial new theory. Modern humans, though, squeaked by, thanks to fallback populations in Africa and Asia, researchers say. About 40, 000 years ago in what we now call Italy and the Caucasus Mountains, which straddle Europe and Asia, several volcanoes erupted in quick succession, according to a new study to be published in the October issue of the journal Current Anthropology. It’s likely the eruptions reduced or wiped out local bands of Neanderthals and indirectly affected farther-flung populations, the team concluded after analyzing pollen and ash from the affected area. The researchers examined sediments layer from around 40, 000 years ago in Russia’s Mezmaiskaya Cave and found that the more volcanic ash a layer had, the less plant pollen it contained. “We tested all the layers for this volcanic ash signature. The most volcanic-ash-rich layer—likely corresponding to the so-called Campanian Ignimbrite eruption, which occurred near Naples—had no [tree] pollen and very little pollen from other types of plants, “ said study team member Naomi Cleghorn. “It’s just a sterile layer.“ The loss of plants would have led to a decline in plant-eating mammals, which in turn would have affected the Neanderthals, who hunted large mammals for food. “This idea of an environmental cause for the Neanderthals’ demise has been out in the literature. What we’re trying to do is point out a specific mechanism, “ said Cleghorn, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Arlington. Other theories propose that modern humans played a vital role in the fall of the Neanderthals, either through competition, warfare, or interbreeding. If the volcanoes theory is correct, the Neanderthals’ end was much more tragic: dying slowly in a cold and desolate landscape bereft of food sources. “It’s hard to say what it would have beeri like to be the last few groups out there, seeing other groups less arid less over the years, “ Cleghorn said. The Neanderthals were a hardy species that lived through multiple ice ages and would have been familiar with volcanoes and other natural calamities. But the eruptions 40, 000 years ago were unlike anything Neanderthals had faced before, Cleghorn and company say. For one thing, all the volcanoes apparently erupted around the same time. And one of those blasts, the Campanian Ignimbrite, is thought to have been the most powerful eruption in Europe in the last 200, 000 years. “It’s much easier to adapt to something that’s happening over a couple of generations, “ Cleghorn said. “You can move around, you can find other places to live, and your population can rebound.“ “This is not that kind of event, “ she said. “This is unique.“ There may also have been small bands of Homo sapiens living in Europe at the time, Cleghorn said. They too would have been affected by the eruptions. But modern humans likely avoided extinction because they had larger populations in Africa and Asia, she said, while most Neanderthals were in Europe around this time. “With their small population groups, Neanderthals did not really have a great source population, “ Cleghorn said. “They didn’t really have the numbers and the density“ to rebuild their populations after the eruptions. The researchers acknowledge that there are gaps in the volcanoes theory. For instance, the time line needs to be better defined—did the volcanic eruptions occur in a period of months, years, or decades? “At this point, it’s impossible to pin down a reliable date“ for the eruptions, Cleghorn said. “We can’t say that this eruption happened 50 years before the next eruption. We just don’t have that kind of resolution.“ It’s also unknown exactly how long it took the Neanderthals to die out-—or how long after the eruptions modern humans began settling Europe in force, she said. Anthropologist John Hoffecker, though, suggests that modern humans had already begun crowding out Neanderthals in Europe long before the eruptions in question. Judging from discoveries of modern-human artifacts in former Neanderthal strongholds, Hoffecker said, “Neanderthals were clearly in trouble well before 40, 000 years ago, because modern humans were occupying certain places, such as Italy, where Neanderthals had been present. So something clearly had gone wrong there.“ Perhaps, he added, the volcanic eruptions just dealt the final blow. “I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case either, “ said Hoffecker, of the University of Colorado. “But at least that’s a plausible scenario that’s consistent with the chronology.“ Study co-author Cleghorn counters that the modern human populations living in Europe 40, 000 years ago were small and isolated, and only after the Neanderthals were gone did Homo sapiens populations explode. “If modern humans were making any forays into European Neanderthal territory prior to this, they were doing it only on the very margins, “ Cleghorn said. “What was keeping them from moving very quickly into the heart of Europe? We think Neanderthals were still holding their own and might have held out for much longer, if it hadn’t been for the devastating impact of these eruptions.“

(A)=Dr. Charles Adams (I)=Interviewer (I): Good evening and welcome to tonight’s program. Our guest is the world-known Dr. Charles Adams, who has sparked a great deal of attention over the past several years for his research in the area of language learning. His new book, Learning a Language over Eggs and Toast, has been on the best seller list for the past six weeks. Welcome to our program. (A): Ah, it’s a pleasure to be here. (I): Now, Dr. Adams. Tell us about the title of your book, Learning a Language over Eggs and Toast. (A): Well, one of the most important keys to learning another language is to establish a regular study program, like planning a few minutes every morning around breakfast time. (I): Now, sorry for saying this, but your ideas may sound a little simplistic to our viewers. I mean I took Spanish in high school for four years, and I didn’t become a proficient speaker of the language. (A): Well, I think there are many people that feel that way, and that’s just it. I’m not implying that we can become fluent speakers in a matter of a few minutes here and there, but rather following a regular, consistent, and focused course of study can help us on the way to the promised land of language mastery, and remember there is a difference between native fluency and proficiency in a language, and I am proposing the latter. (I): So what are some of the basic keys you are suggesting in the book? (A): Well, as I just mentioned, people need to plan out their study by setting realistic and attainable goals from the beginning. I mean, some people get caught up in the craze of learning the language in 30 days, only to become disenchanted when they don’t perform up to their expectations. And small steps, little by little, are the key. For example, planning to learn five new vocabulary words a day and to learn to use them actively is far better than learning 30 and forgetting them the next day. This is the end of Part One of the interview. Questions 1 to 5 are based on what you have just heard. Question One What does the title of Dr. Adams’s book suggest? Question Two What has troubled the interviewer? Question Three What kind of language study is NOT favored by Dr. Adams? Question Four Which aspect of language is proposed by Dr. Adams? Question Five What are the basic keys suggested in the book? A regular study program is essential to learning another language. Eating eggs and toast is important for learning another language. Learning another language is as easy as eating eggs and toast. A language-learning program should be set upon eggs and toast.

(I): Um-hum. Now you mentioned something about maximizing your learning potential by learning about your own individual learning styles. Can you elaborate on that? (A): Sure. People often have different ways of learning and approach learning tasks differently. Now, our preferences are determined by many factors, for example, personality, culture, and past experience. Basically there are three learning styles. The first type is called visual learning style. Visual learners prefer to see models of the patterns they are expected to learn; it is a learning style in which ideas, concepts, data and other information are associated with images and techniques. It is one of the three basic types of learning styles that also includes kinesthetic learning and auditory learning. Visual learners also prosper when shown graphs, graphic organizers, such as webs, concept maps and idea maps, plots, and illustrations such as stack plots and Venn plots, some of the techniques used in visual learning to enhance thinking and learning skills. Visual learners usually possess the qualities of having great instinctive direction and having the ability to easily visualize objects. (I): It really sounds complicated. Well then, how about the second type? (A): The second type is called auditory learning and auditory learners favor hearing instructions, for example, over reading them. Auditory learners may have a knack for ascertaining the true meaning of someone’s words by listening to audible signals like changes in tone. When memorizing a phone number, an auditory learner will say it out loud and then remember how it sounded to recall it. Auditory learners are good at writing responses to lectures they’ve heard. They’re also good at oral exams, effectively by listening to information delivered orally, in lectures, speeches and oral sessions. It is believed that when an auditory/verbal learner reads, it is almost impossible for the learner to comprehend anything without sound in the background. In these situations, listening to music or having different sounds in the background (TV, people talking, etc.) will help learners work better. (I): So, Dr. Adams, what is your learning style? (A): Well, I’m a very tactile learner. (I): You mean one who learns through hands-on experience? (A): Exactly. (I): So, how does knowing your learning style benefit you? (A): Well, this might seem a little unusual, but moving around while trying to learn and memorize material helps me a great deal. While I cut up tomatoes and onions for my breakfast in the morning, I might recite aloud vocabulary to the rhythm of the knife. But it is important to remember that often our learning styles are not singular in nature, but are often very multidimensional, and we tend to learn differently in different situations. (I): So can you tell me what my learning style is? (A): Well, you’re going to have to read my book to find that out. (I): Okay. We have just found out from Dr. Charles Adams, author of the book, Learning a Language over Eggs and Toast. Thanks for joining us. (A): My pleasure. This is the end of Part Two of the interview. Questions 6 to 10 are based on what you have just heard Questions Six Which of the following factors does NOT determine our preference in learning? Question Seven Which of the following is NOT true about the visual learners? Questions Eight Which background is NOT helpful to the auditory learners? Question Nine What is Dr. Adams’ own learning style? Question Ten Why does Dr. Adams say learning styles are not singular in nature? Culture. Personality. Education. Past experience.

PASSAGE THREE

PASSAGE FOUR

Below are two short excerpts on the relation between ambition and happiness. Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should: 1. sum up the main ideas in both; 2. explain your view on the relationship between ambition and happiness. Excerpt 1 Ambition and Happiness (http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2009/11/ambition-and-happiness.html) Viewed in one way, ambition is a good thing, and its absence in people, especially in the young, we consider to be a defect. Without ambition, there can be no realization of one’s potential. Happiness is connected with the latter. We are happy when we are active in pursuit of choice-worthy goals that we in some measure attain. On the other hand, there is no happiness without contentment, which requires the curtailing of ambition. There is thus a tension between two components of happiness. It is a tension between happiness as self-actualization and happiness as contentment. To actualize oneself one must strive. One strives for what one doesn’t have. Striving is predicated upon felt lack. But one who lacks what he desires is not content, not at peace, and so is unhappy in one sense of the term. One who longs for what is permanently out of reach will be permanently unhappy, always striving, never arriving. Not only will he not get what he wants, he will fail to appreciate what he has. To be happy one must strive for, and in some measure attain, choice-worthy ends. That requires ambition. But the attaining is not enough; one must rest in and enjoy what one has attained. That requires the curtailing of ambition. Excerpt 2 Are Ambitious People Happier? http://www.fastcompany.com/3008604/leadership-now/are-ambitious-people-happier By Drake Baer Though it’s central to American life, the ambition-happiness tension receives surprisingly little academic attention, though new research drawing from a 90-year longitudinal study of gifted children sheds new light. From what the researchers found, ambition had clear causes and effects on lives as they grew into maturity. The most ambitious had common traits: They had parents with occupational prestige, and their personalities were organized, disciplined, and goal-seeking. As you’d expect, the more ambitious were better educated, made more money, and landed more prestigious jobs. But ambition did not predict for well-being in the same way: It was only weakly connected with well-being and in fact negatively associated with longevity. Meaning that ambitious people died earlier. One of the researchers, John D. Kammeyer-Mueller, tells us that ambition didn’t impact how satisfied people felt with their lives—they felt they had accomplished more with them—but that project-based happiness got in the way of personal relationships. As the researchers write, this “darker side“ needs to be further explored: “...It may be that ambitious individuals have both virtuous characteristics for the self (like goal striving and higher levels of work activity) and negative characteristics for others around them ambitious individual (like a desire to “win at all costs, “ or a willingness to undermine others to achieve their own ends).“ But it’s probably both. People are complex: In the course of a life—or a morning commute—you could be both pro-social and anti-social, kind and cruel. And while Machiavelli resonates with us, so does a giver like Adam Grant.

Computer Crime I. Introduction Current situation: the increase in the number and types of computer crime II. 【T1】______of computer criminals 【T1】______ A. relatively honest B.【T2】______ 【T2】______ — most being males — females being accomplices C. aged between 【T3】______ 【T3】______ D. bright, eager, highly motivated, adventuresome E. 【T4】____profiles: ranging from young teens to elders, from black to 【T4】______ white, from short to tall III. Definitions of computer crime—changing over 【T5】______ 【T5】______ A. once defined as a form of 【T6】______ 【T6】______ B. defined as a federal crime hacking into credit and other data bases protected by【T7】_____ 【T7】______ C. defined as 【T8】______to computers to obtain money, goods or 【T8】______ services or classified information IV. 【T9】______of computer crime 【T9】______ A. 【T10】______of money e.g. The Well Fargo Bank discovered an employee using the bank 【T10】______ computer to embezzle $21.3 million. B. credit card and 【T11】______ e.g. A computer hacker gained illegal access to a credit data base. 【T11】______ C. 【T12】______of computer time e.g. Excessive computer game time in business means stealing of work 【T12】______ time. V. Protection 【T13】______ A. hardware identification 【T13】______ B. 【T14】______software C. disconnecting critical bank applications 【T14】______ D.【T15】______ 【T15】______Computer Crime Good morning, today’s lecture is the very first of a series of lectures on types of modern crimes, so I’d like to discuss the first type—computer crime right now. As computer crimes are getting more and more rampant, laws must be passed to address the increase in the number and types of those crimes. Over the last twenty years, large computers are used to track reservations for the airline industry, process billions of dollars for banks, manufacture products for industry, and conduct major transactions for businesses because more and more people now have computers at home and at the office. So, who committed computer crimes? What’s the definition of computer crime and what forms does computer crime take on? And what are our protection measures? We shall answer the preceding questions one by one. First, what kinds of people tend to commit computer crimes? According to experts, computer criminals tend to be relatively honest and in a position of trust: few would do anything to harm another human, and most do not consider their crime to be truly dishonest. Most are males: women have tended to be accomplices, although later they are becoming more aggressive. Computer criminals tend to usually be between the ages of 14-30 ; they are usually bright, eager, highly motivated, adventuresome, and willing to accept technical challenges. It is tempting to liken computer criminals to other criminals, ascribing characteristics somehow different from “normal“ individuals, but that is not the case. It is believed that the computer criminal often marches to the same drum as the potential victim but follows an unanticipated path. There is no actual profile of a computer criminal because they range from young teens to elders, from black to white, from short to tall. Second, we shall discuss the evolutionary definition of computer crime. Definitions of computer crime have changed over the years as the users and misusers of computers have expanded into new areas. When computers were first introduced into businesses, computer crime was defined simply as a form of white-collar crime committed inside a computer system. Congress has been reacting to the outbreak of computer crimes. The U.S. House of Judiciary Committee approved a bipartisan computer crime bill that was expanded to make it a federal crime to hack into credit and other data bases protected by federal privacy statutes. This bill is generally creating several categories of federal crimes for unauthorized access to computers to obtain money, goods or services or classified information. Third, computer crimes can take on many forms. The first form is swindling or stealing of money which is one of the most common computer crime. An example of this kind of crime is the Well Fargo Bank that discovered an employee was using the bank’s computer to embezzle $21.3 million, which is the largest U.S. electronic bank fraud on record. The second form is called credit card scams. This is one that fears many people for good reasons. The following story is a real case. A fellow computer hacker is someone who uses his computer to access credit data bases. In a talk that I had with him he tried to explain what he did and how he did it. He is a very intelligent person because he gained illegal access to a credit data base and obtained the credit history of local residents. He then allegedly used the residents’ names and credit information to apply for 24 Master cards and Visa cards. He used the cards to issue himself at least 40, 000 in cash from a number of ATM machines. He was caught once but was only withdrawing $200 because the police couldn’t prove that he was the one who did the other ones. Finally, one of the thefts involving the computer is the theft of computer time. Most of us don’t realize this as a crime, but the congress considers this as a crime. Every day people are urged to use the computer but sometimes the use becomes excessive or improper or both. For example, at most colleges, computer time is thought of as free-good students and faculty often computerize mailing lists for their churches or fraternity organizations which might be written off as good public relations. But, use of the computers for private consulting projects without payment to the university is clearly improper. In business it is similar. Management often looks the other way when employees play computer games or generate a Snoopy calendar. But, if this becomes excessive the employees are stealing work time. Although considered less severe than other computer crimes, such activities can represent a major business loss. Finally, how to protect our computers from the hackers’ intrusion? Protection measures such as hardware identification, access controls software and disconnecting critical bank applications should be devised. However, computers don’t commit crimes; people do. The criminals’ best advantage is ignorance on the part of those protecting the system. Proper internal controls reduce the opportunity for fraud. OK, now we will come to the end of today’s lecture. Something we must be aware of is that computer crimes are growing fast because the evolution of technology is fast, but the evolution of law is slow. Anyway, I hope after today’s lecture, you’ll understand better the definition and forms of computer crime and the practical protection measures against it.

New data released today from the Partnership for a Drug Free America suggest that not only are girls now drinking more than boys, they turn to drugs and alcohol for more serious reasons as well. The report, which analyzed results from the 2009 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study (PATS), a survey of teen attitudes and behaviors, shows that the number of middle- and high-school girls who say they drink has increased by 11 percent in the past year. Boys have stayed at about the same level, hovering around 52 percent. These numbers are more indicative of a long-term trend than a sudden uptick. In 2005 the rate of girls who had used alcohol in the past year as surveyed by the Partnership hit 57 percent, only to fall back to 55 percent in 2007 and 53 percent in 2008. (During that same time, boys continued to fall within a couple of percentage points of 50 percent, but the changes were not statistically significant.) These aren’t the only data to note issues involving girls and drinking. According to Monitoring the Future, an ongoing study that monitors the habits and attitudes of young Americans, the number of high-school students who admitted being drunk in the previous 30 days has changed dramatically for boys compared with girls. In 1998, 39 percent of boys were reported being drunk in the previous 30 days, compared with 26.6 percent of girls. Ten years later, in 2008, 29.2 of boys were reported being drunk during the 30-day period, while girls stayed relatively steady at 26.2 percent. “The numbers go down for boys and girls, but they go down much more dramatically for boys, “ says Amelia Arria, director of the center on young adult health and development at the University of Maryland, School of Public Health. “It represents a 25-percent decrease for boys, but only a 1-percent decrease for girls. Girls are staying kind of level, and boys are dropping.“ For years, boys were the focus of underage-drinking interventions, but for the past decade, researchers have seen a close in the gender gap. Researchers speculate that more products devoted to making drinking easier and tastier—the sugar-laden beverages known as alco-pops—-are a factor. “There’s a whole new raft of products that have come out in the last 10 to 12 years that were oriented to young females, “ says David Jerigan, executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth. “Alcohol now gets sold to girls as a functional food: it gets sold with calorie information, a drink of fitness, a drink with health benefits.“ But girls may be less concerned about their figure than they are about, well, everything else. The Partnership for a Drug Free America results also show that girls are more likely to associate drugs and alcohol with a way to avoid problems and relieve stress. (Boys, on the other hand, show dramatic increases in seeing drugs and alcohol as social lubricants: in 2009 compared with 2008, they were 16 percent more likely to see them as a way to make socializing easier, and 23 percent more likely to label drinking as a necessary ingredient for a party.) Teen girls are more likely to be attuned to their feelings, says Leslie Walker, M.D., director of adolescent medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and therefore may seek alcohol as a way to self-medicate. “Girls tend to be more internalized with issues that are happening anyway. It makes sense that if they have some stress and things that they are dealing with, they’re going to take care of themselves instead of reaching out.“ Recent research on the adolescent brain has shown significant differences between males and females. Arria says, “Girls tend to be more sensitive to emotional stress, neurologically. Girls mature a little bit earlier in parts of the brain; boys develop later in those areas.“ That increased sensitivity, she says, combined with more relaxed attitudes and easier access to alcohol, may explain the difference in boys and girls when it comes to drinking. It’s also possible that the more developed emotional brain allows girls to be more self-aware and honest about their motivations than boys. “I think early on, girls are more willing to admit negative emotions than boys, “ says Eric Wagner, professor at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work at Florida International University. “They might be drinking for the same reasons as boys, but boys are much less likely to admit those reasons.“ In his interventions with high-school students, says Wagner, kids are still very much drawn to traditional gender stereotypes, with boys associating drinking with a type of macho culture. The stress of figuring out gender roles, of doing well in school, and of the larger social and economic realities has led this generation’s teenagers to be more anxious than previous generations, says Walker. “It’s a particularly stressful time for kids right now. They’re seeing their parents stressed right now about the economy and jobs and thinking, what is there going to be for me?“ Adults, says Walker, often minimize the stress felt by their children, which can seem trivial compared with grown-up problems—after all, kids don’t have to worry about paying the mortgage. But to teenagers, that stress is very real, and the coping mechanisms they use to deal with that stress set a lifelong pattern. “They’re learning the tools right then for what they’re going to use to handle adversity for the rest of their lives.“ And as more and more studies show the danger of alcohol on developing brains, it’s important that the tools they use now won’t damage them later.

By now, it should come as no surprise when scientists discover yet another case of experience changing the brain. From the sensory information we absorb to the movements we make, our lives leave footprints on the bumps and fissures of our cortex, so much so that experiences can alter “hard-wired“ brain structures. Through rehab, stroke patients can coax a region of the motor cortex on the opposite side of the damaged region to pinch-hit, restoring lost mobility; volunteers who are blindfolded for just five days can reprogram their visual cortex to process sound and touch. Still, scientists have been surprised at how deeply culture—the language we speak, the values we absorb—shapes the brain, and are rethinking findings derived from studies of Westerners. To take one recent example, a region behind the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex supposedly represents the self: it is active when we (“we“ being the Americans in the study) think of our own identity and traits. But with Chinese volunteers, the results were strikingly different. The “me“ circuit hummed not only when they thought whether a particular adjective described themselves, but also when they considered whether it described their mother. The Westerners showed no such overlap between self and mom. Depending whether one lives in a culture that views the self as autonomous and unique or as connected to and part of a larger whole, this neural circuit takes on quite different functions. “Cultural neuroscience, “ as this new field is called, is about discovering such differences. Some of the findings, as with the “me/mom“ circuit, buttress longstanding notions of cultural differences. For instance, it is a cultural cliche that Westerners focus on individual objects while East Asians pay attention to context and background (another manifestation of the individualism-collectivism split). Sure enough, when shown complex, busy scenes, Asian-Americans and non-Asian-Americans recruited different brain regions. The Asians showed more activity in areas that process figure-ground relations—holistic context—while the Americans showed more activity in regions that recognize objects. Psychologist Nalini Ambady of Tufts found something similar when she and colleagues showed drawings of people in a submissive pose (head down, shoulders hunched) or a dominant one (arms crossed, face forward) to Japanese and Americans. The brain’s dopamine-fueled reward circuit became most active at the sight of the stance—dominant for Americans, submissive for Japanese—that each volunteer’s culture most values, they reported in 2009. This raises an obvious chicken-and-egg question. Cultural neuroscience wouldn’t be making waves if it found neurobiological bases only for well-known cultural differences. It is also uncovering the unexpected. For instance, a 2006 study found that native Chinese speakers use a different region of the brain to do simple arithmetic (3 + 4) or decide which number is larger than native English speakers do, even though both use Arabic numerals. The Chinese use the circuits that process visual and spatial information and plan movements (the latter may be related to the use of the abacus). But English speakers use language circuits. It is as if the West conceives numbers as just words, but the East imbues them with symbolic, spatial freight. “One would think that neural processes involving basic mathematical computations are universal, “ says Ambady, but they “seem to be culture-specific.“ Not to be the skunk at this party, but I think it’s important to ask whether neuroscience reveals anything more than we already know from, say, anthropology. For instance, it’s well known that East Asian cultures prize the collective over the individual, and that Americans do the opposite. Ambady thinks cultural neuroscience does advance understanding. Take the me/mom finding, which, she argues, “attests to the strength of the overlap between self and people close to you in collectivistic cultures and the separation in individualistic cultures. It is important to push the analysis to the level of the brain.“ Especially when it shows how fundamental cultural differences are—so fundamental, perhaps, that “universal notions“ such as human rights, democracy, and the like may be no such thing.

PASSAGE ONE

PASSAGE TWO

To live, learn, and work successfully in an increasing 【S1】______ complex and information-rich society, students must be able to use technology effectively. Within an effective educational setting, technology can enable students to become able 【S2】______ information users and effective users of productivity tools. Parents want their children to graduate with skills that prepare them to either get a job in today’s marketplace and advance to higher levels of education and training. 【S3】______ Employers want to hire employees who are honest, reliable, literary, and able to reason, communicate, make decisions, and 【S4】______ learn. Communities want schools to prepare their children to become good citizens and productive members of society in an increasingly technological and information-basing world. 【S5】______ National leaders, the U.S. Department of Education, and other federal agencies admit the essential role of technology in 21 st 【S6】______ century education. The challenge facing America’s schools is the empowerment of all children to function effectively in their future, future 【S7】______ marked increasingly with change, information growth, and evolving technologies. Technology is a powerful tool with enormous potential for paving high-speed highways from outdated educational systems to systems capable of providing learning opportunities for all, to better serve for the needs of 21 st 【S8】______ century work, communications, learning, and life. Technology had become a powerful catalyst in promoting learning, 【S9】______ communications, and life skills for economic survival in today’s world. Educational leaders are encouraged to providing learning 【S10】______ opportunities that produce technology-capable students.

For many years it was common in the United States to associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into these occupations. The first Chinese to reach the United States came during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for gold. In that largely unoccupied land, the men staked a claim for themselves by placing markers in the ground. However, either because the Chinese were so different from the others or because they worked so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they became the scapegoats of their envious competitors. They were harassed in many ways. Often they were prevented from working their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding them to own claims. The Chinese therefore started to seek out other ways of earning a living. Some of them began to do the laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants. (There were almost no women in California in those days, and the Chinese filled a real need by doing this “woman’s work“.) Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen. In the early 1860’s many more Chinese arrived in California. This time the men were imported as work crews to construct the first transcontinental railroad. They were sorely needed because the work was so strenuous and dangerous, and it was carried on in such a remote part of the country that the railroad company could not find other labourers for the job. As in the case of their predecessors, these Chinese were almost all males; and like them, too, they encountered a great deal of prejudice. The hostility grew especially strong after the railroad project was complete, and the imported labourers returned to California — thousands of them, all out of work. Because there were so many more of them this time, these Chinese drew even more attention than the earlier group did. They were so different in every respect: in their physical appearance, including a long “pigtail“ at the back of their otherwise shaved heads; in the strange, non-Western clothes they wore; in their speech (few had learned English since they planned to go back to China); and in their religion. They were contemptuously called “heathen Chinese“ because there were many sacred images in their houses of worship. When times were hard, they were blamed for working for lower wages and taking jobs away from white men, who were in many cases recent immigrants themselves. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in several cities, culminating in arson and blood shed. Chinese were barred from using the courts and also from becoming American citizens. Californians began to demand that no more Chinese be permitted to enter their state. Finally, in 1882, they persuaded Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which stopped the immigration of Chinese labourers. Many Chinese returned to their homeland, and their numbers declined sharply in the early part of this century. However, during the World War II, when China was an ally of the United States, the Exclusion laws were ended; a small number of Chinese were allowed to immigrate each year, and Chinese could become American citizens. In 1965, in a general revision of our immigration laws, many more Chinese were permitted to settle here, as discrimination against Asian immigration was abolished. Chinese Americans retain many aspects of their ancient culture, even after having lived here for several generations. For example, their family ties continue to be remarkably strong (encompassing grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and others). Members of the family lend each other moral support and also practical help when necessary. From a very young age children are imbued with the old values and attitudes, including respect for their elders and a feeling of responsibility to the family. This helps to explain why there is so little juvenile delinquency among them. The high regard for education which is deeply embedded in Chinese culture and the willingness to work very hard to gain advancement, are other noteworthy characteristics of theirs. This explains why so many descendants of uneducated labourer have succeeded in becoming doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. (Many of the most outstanding Chinese American scholars, scientists, and artists are more recent arrivals, who come from China’s former upper class and who represent its high cultural traditions.)

洋教师说： “这文章写得当然好，而且绝妙无比，你们听——”他拿起作文念起来， “我们学校最美的地方，不是教室，不是操场，也不是校门口那个带喷水的小花坛，而是食堂。瞧，玻璃干净得几乎叫你看不到它的存在——”洋教师念到这儿，眼睛调皮地一亮，眉毛一挑， “听听，多么幽默!” 幽默?怎么会是幽默?大家还没弄明白。洋教师接着念道： “如果你不小心在学校食堂跌了一跤，你会惊奇地发现你并没有跌跤，因为你身上半点尘土也没留下；如果你长期在学校食堂里工作，恐怕你会把苍蝇是什么样子都忘了……”洋教师又停住，舌头“得”地弹一声，做一个怪脸说， “听呀，还要多幽默，我简直笑得念不下去了。” 学生们忽然明白了什么。

What does “bounce back“ mean in the first paragraph?

According to the volcanoes theory, which of the following is NOT the reason for Neanderthals’ extinction?

We can learn from the fifth paragraph all the following EXCEPT that______

The volcanoes theory cannot convince everyone because______.