The great power of tornadoes is almost unbelievable. The speed of this whirling funnel shaped wind may be more than 500 miles per hour. It can tear up trees, carry buildings away, and can even lift large trucks off the highway. The tornado is like a giant vacuum sweeper that sucks up anything in its path. Experts believe that the most violent force of a tornado is found inside the funnel, where a vacuum is created because of very low air pressure. When this vacuum moves over a building which is filled with air under normal pressure, the difference between the air pressure inside the building and that outside causes the building to explode. The largest tornado on record had a funnel a mile wide. There are many interesting stories about the strange things that tornadoes have done in the U. S. Common wheat straw has been driven several inches into posts and trees. Buildings have been turned completely around on their foundations and have remained intact. People and animals have been carried hundreds of feet, often suffering no physical harm. Feathers have been removed from chickens. Cars, trucks, and even whole freight trains have been carried away. A tornado does not last long, about 20 to 30 minutes on the average. Usually it destroys an area about 16 miles long and the great damage that it does in one place last only about 30 seconds. Tornadoes normally occur on hot, humid days but not necessarily in the summer. The biggest and most destructive tornado in the U. S. struck on March 18,1925. Roaring along at a speed of 60 miles per hour, it swept clean a path a mile wide across the states of Missouri, Illinois, and Indian. In its 220 mile long journey across these three states, the tornado killed 689 people. More than 200 tornadoes strike in the United States every year. It is not possible to predict when a tornado will strike although the U. S. Weather Bureau gives storm warnings when conditions are right to cause a tornado. The safest place to be if a tornado seems likely is in some underground area such as a cellar or a basement.

Queen Elizabeth II’s pronunciation of English has been infected by her subjects. Aussie scientists say. Phoneticists from Sydney’s Macquarie University studied archive recordings of the Queen’s annual Christmas message to the Commonwealth from the 1950s to 1980s, analyzing her Majesty’s towels. They then compared those vowels with the standard accent of southern England, as used by female British broadcasters on the BBC in the 1980s, to see how the royal accent had changed. Their conclusion: the cut-glass speech of the early years of the Queen’s reign has become—how shall we say—somewhat commoner over the years. That in itself subtly mirrors the changes is Britain, from a country with a rigid social hierarchy four decades ago to one where class differences have blurred and in some areas disappeared. “The Queen’s pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern -British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy,“ the researchers say. Standard speech in southern England has been influenced by Cockneys, whose accent was initiated by Dick Van Dyke in the Walt Disney movie “Mary Poppins“. Purists will be reassured that the Queen’s “Hice (house) of Windsor“ will not become the “Ouse of Windsor“ (by dropping the’h’) in the foreseeable future. However, there have been changes in .10 out of the 11 vowel sounds in the standard English. These changes bring her speech closer to that of her Cockney subjects,the researchers found. An example of this is the way in which she pronounces “had“. In the 1950s, the royal pronunciation of this word almost rhymed with “bed“. But 30 years later, it had migrated halfway to the standard southern English pronunciation, which rhymes “had“ with “bad“. The Australian team say the pronunciation of all languages alters subtly over time, mainly because of influence from the young, and it is foolish for anyone to try to prevent change. “The chances of societies and academies successfully preserving a particular form of pronunciation against the influence of community and social changes are unlikely,“ they say. The research was published December 21 in Nature, the British science weekly.

Before the 1850’s the United States had a number of small colleges, most of them dating from colonial days. They were small, church connected institutions whose primary concern was to shape the moral character of their students. Throughout Europe, institutions of higher learning had developed, bearing the ancient name of university. In Germany a different kind of university had developed. The German university was concerned primarily with creating and spreading knowledge, not morals. Between mid century and the end of the 1800’s, more than nine thousand young Americans, dissatisfied with their training at home, went to Germany for advanced study. Some of them returned to become presidents of venerable colleges, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and transform them into modern universities. The new presidents broke all ties with the churches and brought in a new kind of faculty. Professors were hired for their knowledge of a subject, not because they were of the proper faith and had a strong arm for disciplining students. The new principle was that a university was to create knowledge as well as pass it on, and this called for a faculty composed of teacher’ scholars. Drilling and learning by rote were replaced by the German method of lecturing, in which the professor’s own research was presented in class. Graduate training leading to the Ph. D, an ancient German degree signifying the highest level of advanced scholarly attainment, was introduced. With the establishment of the seminar system, graduate students learned to question, analyze, and conduct their own research. At the same time, the new university greatly expanded in size and course offerings, breaking completely out of the old, constricted curriculum of mathematics, classics, rhetoric, and music. The president of Harvard pioneered the elective system, by which students were able to choose their own courses of study. The notion of major fields of study emerged. The new goal was to make the university relevant to the real pursuits of the world. Paying close heed to the practical needs of society, the new universities trained men and women to work at its tasks, with engineering students being the most characteristic of the new regime. Students were also trained as economists, architects, agriculturalists, social welfare workers, and teachers.

(devastate) But not one that excites a sudden and______ passion at first sight.

(consistent) The irony is that many officials in Washington agree in private that their policy is______

(increasing) His father began to lose his memory bit by bit, becoming______ forgetful.

How do the other researchers look upon Chagnon’s view on the Yanomami?

Who takes care of the elderly in the United States today? The fact is that family members provide over 80% of the care that elderly people need. In most cases the elderly live in their own homes, a very small percentage of America’s elderly live in nursing homes. Samuel Preston, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studied how the American family is changing. He reported that by the time the average American couple reaches about 40 years of age,their parents are usually still alive. The statistics show the change in lifestyles and responsibilities of aging Americans. The average middle-aged couple can look forward to caring for elderly parents sometime after their own children have grown up. Moreover, because people today live longer after an illness than people did years ago, family members must provide long term care. These facts also mean that after caregivers provide for their elderly parents,who will eventually die, they will be old and may require care too. When they do, their spouses (配偶) will probably take care of them because they have had fewer children than their parents did. Because Americans are living longer than ever, more social workers have begun to study ways of care giving to improve the care of the elderly. They have found that all caregivers share a common characteristic:They believe that they are the best people for the job. The social workers have also discovered three basic reasons why the caregivers take on the responsibility of caring for an elderly, dependent relative. Many caregivers believe they had an obligation (职责)to help their relatives. Some think that helping others makes them feel more useful. Others hope that by helping someone now, they will deserve care when they become old and dependent.

(decide) He stood there for a moment______

(require) Next it was a matter of adjusting the work sheets and job______ in such a way as to get Charity assigned to us.

(demonstrate) Here,again, the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no______ right answer.

(profound) It is not possible to write a page without experiencing positive pleasure at the richness and variety, the flexibility and the______ of our mothertongue.

(delight) I feel the______ , velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions.

(entertain) Television, tapes, CDs, VCRs and audio-visual cameras have turned the home into an______ center.

One of the major causes of the prevalent anxiety about the future of the family is rooted not so much in actuality as in the tension between idealized expectations for the family in American culture and the reality itself. Nostalgia for a lost nonexistent family tradition has prejudiced our understanding of the changes that families are experiencing in contemporary society. Furthermore, the current anxiety over the family’ s fate reflects not merely problems in the family itself, but a variety of other social problems that are eventually projected on the family. The real problems that the American family is facing today are not symptoms of breakdown, as is often suggested. Rather they reflect the difficulties that the family faces in its adaptation to recent social changes, particularly in the loss of the flexibility in household membership that the family had in the past, the reduction of the variety of its functions, and to some extent the weakening of its adaptability. Current anxieties also reflect the difficulties that American society has been experiencing in accepting a great diversity in family life and alternative family forms. The idealization of the family as a refuge from the outside world has lessened its ability to cope with diversity. The continuous emphasis on the family as a universal private retreat and as an emotional haven (安息所)is misguided in light of our knowledge of the past. Early American families fulfilled a broad array of functions that went beyond its more restricted emotional functions in the present. Most of the family’s roles in the past were intertwined with larger community. Rather than being the custodian (管理人) of privacy, the family prepared its members for interaction with the larger society. Family relationships were valued not merely for their emotional content but for a wide range of services and contributions to the collective family unit.

The crew of a clipper ship had to work together smoothly to keep the ship sailing. To help, they sang work songs called sea chanteys. The chanteyman sang out the verses. They set the rhythm for the work to be done. The chanteyman made up his own lines, and the men joined in the chorus. The songs were about sailing, fishing, love, war, anything and everything. The men heaved or pulled the ropes on the beat of the chorus. Different rhythms were necessary for different shipboard jobs. There were slow capstan chanteys sung while turning the capstan, a large wheel on deck used to pull up the anchor. There were halyard chanteys sung while pulling up the sails. Pumping chanteys were sung, when the sailors manned the pumps amidships, and short-haul chanteys were sung for any job that required quick, sharp pulls.

The great power of tornadoes is almost unbelievable. The speed of this whirling funnel shaped wind may be more than 500 miles per hour. It can tear up trees, carry buildings away, and can even lift large trucks off the highway. The tornado is like a giant vacuum sweeper that sucks up anything in its path. Experts believe that the most violent force of a tornado is found inside the funnel, where a vacuum is created because of very low air pressure. When this vacuum moves over a building which is filled with air under normal pressure, the difference between the air pressure inside the building and that outside causes the building to explode. The largest tornado on record had a funnel a mile wide. There are many interesting stories about the strange things that tornadoes have done in the U. S. Common wheat straw has been driven several inches into posts and trees. Buildings have been turned completely around on their foundations and have remained intact. People and animals have been carried hundreds of feet, often suffering no physical harm. Feathers have been removed from chickens. Cars, trucks, and even whole freight trains have been carried away. A tornado does not last long, about 20 to 30 minutes on the average. Usually it destroys an area about 16 miles long and the great damage that it does in one place last only about 30 seconds. Tornadoes normally occur on hot, humid days but not necessarily in the summer. The biggest and most destructive tornado in the U. S. struck on March 18,1925. Roaring along at a speed of 60 miles per hour, it swept clean a path a mile wide across the states of Missouri, Illinois, and Indian. In its 220 mile long journey across these three states, the tornado killed 689 people. More than 200 tornadoes strike in the United States every year. It is not possible to predict when a tornado will strike although the U. S. Weather Bureau gives storm warnings when conditions are right to cause a tornado. The safest place to be if a tornado seems likely is in some underground area such as a cellar or a basement.

“Out through that window, exactly three years ago, 【C1】______ . They never came back. In crossing the country to the shooting-ground they were all three swallowed in a bog. It had been that terrible wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years became suddenly dangerous. 【C2】______. That was the worst part of it. “ Here the child’s voice lost its calm sound and became almost human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back someday, they and the little brown dog that was lost with them, 【C3】______. That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dark. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing a song, 【C4】______, because she said it affected her nerves. 【C5】______, sometimes on quiet evenings like this, I almost get a strange feeling that they will all walk in through the window-“ She stopped and trembled. It was a relief to Framton 【C6】______. “I hope Vera has been amusing you?“ she said. “She has been very interesting,“said Framton. “I hope you don’t mind the open window, “said Mrs. Sappleton brightly;“my husband and brothers will be home soon from shooting, 【C7】______. They’ve been shooting birds today near the bog, so they’ll make my poor carpets dirty. 【C8】______ ?“ She talked on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the hopes of shooting in the winter. To Framton it was all quite terrible. He made a great effort, 【C9】______ .He was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a part of her attention, and her eyes were frequently looking past him to the open window and the grass beyond. It was certainly unfortunate 【C10】______. (From The Open Window) A. Do you know B. that he should have paid his visit on this sorrowful day C. and they always come in this way D. Their bodies were never found E. All you men do that sort of thing, don’t you F. and walk in at that window just as they used to do G. which was only partly successful, to turn the talk on to a more cheerful subject H. her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting I. as he always did to annoy her J. when the aunt came busily into the room and apologized for being late

(respect) The______“sir“ is not always used in the northern and western parts of the country.

about log dawn unrealized privilege masterpiece legend especially while behalf There is a 【G1】______ of an artist who long sought for a piece of sandalwood, out of which to carve a Madonna, He was 【G2】______ to give up in despair, leaving the vision of his life 【G3】______ ,when in a dream he was bidden to carve his Madonna from a block of oak wood which was destined for the fire. He obeyed, and produced a 【G4】______ from a log of common fire-wood. Many of us lose great opportunities in life by waiting to find sandalwood for our carvings, when they really lie hidden in the common 【G5】______ that we burn. One man goes through life without seeing chances for doing anything great,【G6】______ another close beside him snatches from the same circumstances and 【G7】______ opportunities for achieving grand results. Opportunities? They are everywhere. “America is another name for opportunities. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine providence in 【G8】______ of the human race. “ Never before were there such grand openings, such chances, such opportunities. 【G9】______ is this true for girls and young women. A new era is 【G10】______ for them. Hundreds of occupations and professions, which were closed to them only a few years ago, are now inviting them to enter. (From Opportunities Where You Are)

What is Chagnon’s view of the Yanomami? What is his explanation?

Low air pressure inside funnel of a tornado creates a______. ( )

A tornado may reach a speed of more than______ . ( )

The most favorable kind of weather for a tornado is______. ( )

The largest recorded tornado funnel was______ . ( )

Which place(s) is the safest place to stay if a tornado seems to happen? ( )