I’ll Be Bach

    Composer David Cope is the inventor of a computer program that writes original works of classical music. It took Cope 30 years to develop the software. Now most people can’t tell the difference between music by the famous German composer J. S. Bach (1685-1750) and the Bach-like compositions from Cope’s computer.

    It all started in 1980 in the United States, when Cope was trying to write an opera. He was having trouble thinking of new melodies, so he wrote a computer program to create the melodies. At first this music was not easy to listen to. What did Cope do? He began to rethink how human beings compose music. He realized that composers，brains work like big databases. First, they take in all the music that they have ever heard. Then they take out the music that they dislike. Finally, they make new music from what is left. According to Cope, only the great composers are able to create the database accurately, remember it, and form new musical patterns from it.

    Cope built a huge database of existing music. He began with hundreds of works by Bach. The software analyzed the data：it broke it down into smaller pieces and looked for patterns. It then combined the pieces into new patterns. Before long, the program could compose short Bach-like works. They weren’t good, but it was a start.

    Cope knew he had more work to do-he had a whole opera to write. He continued to improve the software. Soon it could analyzemore complex music. He also added many other composers, including his own work, to the database.

    A few years later，Cope’s computer program, called “Emmy”，was ready to help him with his opera. The process required a lot ofcollaboration between the composer and Emmy. Cope listened to the computer’s musical ideas and used the ones that he liked. With Emmy, the opera took only two weeks to finish. It was called Cradle Falling, and it was a great success! Cope received some of the best reviews of his career, but no one knew exactly how he had composed the work.

    Since that first opera, Emmy has written thousands of compositions. Cope still gives Emmy feedback on what he likes and doesn’tlike of her music, but she is doing most of the hard work of composing these days!

词汇：

original/əˈrɪdʒənəl / adj．有独创性的

collaboration/ kəˌlæbəˈreɪʃən / n．合作

review/rɪ"vju:/ n．评论

feedback/"fi:dbæk / n．反馈

注释

J.S. Bach约翰·塞巴斯蒂安·巴赫（德语：Johann Sebastian Bach，1685年3月31日一1750年7月28日），巴洛克时期的德国作曲家，杰出的管风琴、小提琴、大键琴演奏家，同作曲家亨德尔和泰勒曼齐名。巴赫被普遍认为是音乐史上最重要的作曲家之一，并被尊称为“西方‘现代音乐’之父”，也是西方文化史上最重要的人物之一。

The music composed by David cope is about ______.

A:Classical music B:pop music C:drama D:country music

I’ll Be Bach

    Composer David Cope is the inventor of a computer program that writes original works of classical music. It took Cope 30 years to develop the software. Now most people can’t tell the difference between music by the famous German composer J. S. Bach (1685-1750) and the Bach-like compositions from Cope’s computer.

    It all started in 1980 in the United States, when Cope was trying to write an opera. He was having trouble thinking of new melodies, so he wrote a computer program to create the melodies. At first this music was not easy to listen to. What did Cope do? He began to rethink how human beings compose music. He realized that composers，brains work like big databases. First, they take in all the music that they have ever heard. Then they take out the music that they dislike. Finally, they make new music from what is left. According to Cope, only the great composers are able to create the database accurately, remember it, and form new musical patterns from it.

    Cope built a huge database of existing music. He began with hundreds of works by Bach. The software analyzed the data：it broke it down into smaller pieces and looked for patterns. It then combined the pieces into new patterns. Before long, the program could compose short Bach-like works. They weren’t good, but it was a start.

    Cope knew he had more work to do-he had a whole opera to write. He continued to improve the software. Soon it could analyzemore complex music. He also added many other composers, including his own work, to the database.

    A few years later，Cope’s computer program, called “Emmy”，was ready to help him with his opera. The process required a lot ofcollaboration between the composer and Emmy. Cope listened to the computer’s musical ideas and used the ones that he liked. With Emmy, the opera took only two weeks to finish. It was called Cradle Falling, and it was a great success! Cope received some of the best reviews of his career, but no one knew exactly how he had composed the work.

    Since that first opera, Emmy has written thousands of compositions. Cope still gives Emmy feedback on what he likes and doesn’tlike of her music, but she is doing most of the hard work of composing these days!

词汇：

original/əˈrɪdʒənəl / adj．有独创性的

collaboration/ kəˌlæbəˈreɪʃən / n．合作

review/rɪ"vju:/ n．评论

feedback/"fi:dbæk / n．反馈

注释

J.S. Bach约翰·塞巴斯蒂安·巴赫（德语：Johann Sebastian Bach，1685年3月31日一1750年7月28日），巴洛克时期的德国作曲家，杰出的管风琴、小提琴、大键琴演奏家，同作曲家亨德尔和泰勒曼齐名。巴赫被普遍认为是音乐史上最重要的作曲家之一，并被尊称为“西方‘现代音乐’之父”，也是西方文化史上最重要的人物之一。

Who is Emmy?

A:a database B:a computer software C:a composer who helped David D:an opera

Prices are sky-high, with profits to match. But looking further ahead, the industry faces wrenching change, says an expert of energy.
"The time when we could count on cheap oil and even cheaper natural gas is clearly ending. "That was the gloomy forecast delivered in February by Dave O’Reilly, the chairman of Chevron Texaco, to hundreds of oilmen gathered for a conference in Houston. The following month, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez gleefully echoed the sentiment: "The world should forget about cheap oil."
The surge in oil prices, from ＄10 a barrel in 1998 to above ＄50 in early 2005,has prompted talk of a new era of sustained higher prices. But whenever a "new era" in oil is hailed, scepticism is in order. After all, this is essentially a cyclical business in which prices habitually yo-yo. Even so, an unusually loud chorus is now joining Messrs O’Reilly and Chavez, pointing to intriguing evidence of a new "price floor" of ＄30 or perhaps even ＄40. Confusingly, though, there are also signs that high oil prices may be caused by a speculative bubble that could burst quite suddenly. To see which camp is right, two questions need answering: why did the oil price soar And what could keep it high
To make matters more complicated, there is in fact no such thing as a single "oil price": rather, there are dozens of varieties of crude trading at different prices. When newspapers write about oil prices, they usually mean one of two reference crudes: Brent from the North Sea, or West Texas Intermediate (WTI) . But when ministers from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) discuss prices, they usually refer to a basket of heavier cartel crudes, which trade at a discount to WTI and Brent. All oil prices mentioned in this survey are per barrel of WTI
The recent volatility in prices is only one of several challenges facing the oil industry. Although at first sight Big Oil seems to be in rude health, posting record profits, this survey will argue that the western oil majors will have their work cut out to cope with the rise of resource nationalism, which threatens to choke off access to new oil reserves. This is essential to replace their existing reserves, which are rapidly declining. They will also have to respond to efforts by governments to deal with oil’s serious environmental and geopolitical side-effects. Together, these challenges could yet wipe out the oil majors.
Judging from Paragraph 3, we may infer that oil prices will______.

A:enter into a "new era" B:reach a new "price floor" C:get to a new high D:be hard to predict

Income inequality in the United State remained relatively stable for a period of nearly forty years. Beginning in the 1970’s, however, this period of stability ended, as the first signs of widening income inequality became apparent. Over the course of the 1970’s and 1980’s , an increasingly clear trend toward greater income inequality emerged. By the end of the 1980’s, the top 20 percent of workers were receiving the largest share of income ever recorded by government figures, and the bottom three fifths were receiving the lowest shares ever recorded. This trend has continued into the 1990’s and currently shows no signs of decline. When the indicators of growing inequality were first observed in the 1970’s, some researchers argued that the effects were merely temporary artifacts of short-term labor market disturbances. The new occupational structure appears to be one with an increase of well-paid technical, scientific and professional jobs at the top, a sliding middle class, and a growing poorly-paid service and retail jobs at the bottom. Several important labor-force changes appeared to be contributing to the shifting occupational structure.
As occupational reconstructing and growing income inequality have become increasingly evident, a heated debate as to the causes and magnitude of these changes arose. Two dominant bodies of thought emerged around the issue: the job-skill mismatch thesis and the polarization thesis. Mismatch theorists argue that there is an increasing distance between the high skill requirements of post-industrial jobs and the inadequate training and mediocre qualifications of workers. They see the post-industrial economy leaving behind unskilled workers, especially women and minorities. For the mismatch theorist, the trend toward greater inequality is temporary arid will dissipate once the supply of workers acquires the skills demanded by a post-industrial economy. And they predict that the workers will experience an upgrading in their wages over the long run. Polarization theorists, on the other hand, believe that the rise in inequality is permanent, a result of the shift to a service-based economy. This vision of the postindustrial economy is characteristically polarized. The problem according to these theorists, is the type of jobs being generated in the new economy, not worker attributes. Because they believe the causes are structural and permanent, polarization theorists would deny the efficacy of public policies designed to educate and train unskilled workers. They predict a long-term continuation of the trend towards increasing income inequality.
Studies show that the long-run increase in income inequality is also related to changes in the Nation’s labor market and its household composition. The wage distribution has become considerably more unequal with more highly skilled, trained and educated workers at the top experiencing real wage gains and those at the bottom real wage losses. One factor is the shift in employment from those goods-producing industries that have disproportionately provided high-wage opportunities for low-skilled workers, towards services that disproportionately employ college graduates, and towards low-wage sectors such as retail trade. But within industry, shifts in labor demand away from less-educated workers are perhaps a more important explanation of eroding wages than the shift out of manufacturing.
Also cited as putting downward pressure on the wages of less-educated workers are intensifying global competition and immigration, the decline of the proportion of workers belonging to unions, the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, the increasing need for computer skills, and the increasing use of temporary workers.

A:essentially new B:pioneering C:evolutionary D:epoch-making

Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behaviour. Viewed biologically, the modern footballer is in reality a member of a hunting group. His killing weapon has turned into a harmless football and his prey into a goal-mouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, he enjoys the hunter’s triumph of killing his prey.
To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our forefathers. They spent over a million years evolving as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in tie hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies, became greatly changed. They became chasers, runners, jumpers, aimers, throwers and prey-killers. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers.
Then about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their improved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use—that of controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunting became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, awaiting their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunting were no longer essential for survival.
The skills and thirst for hunting remained, however, and demanded new outlets. Hunting for sport replaced hunting for necessity. This new activity involved all the original hunting sequences but the aim of the operation was no longer to avoid starvation. Instead the sportsmen set off to test their skill against prey that were no longer essential to their survival. To be sure, the kill may have been eaten but there were other much simpler ways of obtaining a meaty meal.

A:are forms of biological development B:have actually developed from hunting C:are essentially forms of taming the prey D:have changed the ways of hunting

Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behaviour. Viewed biologically, the modern footballer is in reality a member of a hunting group. His killing weapon has turned into a harmless football and his prey into a goal-mouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, he enjoys the hunter’s triumph of killing his prey.
To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our forefathers. They spent over a million years evolving as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in tie hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies, became greatly changed. They became chasers, runners, jumpers, aimers, throwers and prey-killers. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers.
Then about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their improved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use—that of controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunting became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, awaiting their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunting were no longer essential for survival.
The skills and thirst for hunting remained, however, and demanded new outlets. Hunting for sport replaced hunting for necessity. This new activity involved all the original hunting sequences but the aim of the operation was no longer to avoid starvation. Instead the sportsmen set off to test their skill against prey that were no longer essential to their survival. To be sure, the kill may have been eaten but there were other much simpler ways of obtaining a meaty meal.
The author believes that sporting activities.

A:are forms of biological development B:have actually developed from hunting C:are essentially forms of taming the prey D:have changed the ways of hunting

Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behaviour. Viewed biologically, the modern footballer is in reality a member of a hunting group. His killing weapon has turned into a harmless football and his prey into a goal-mouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, he enjoys the hunter’s triumph of killing his prey.
To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our forefathers. They spent over a million years evolving as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in tie hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies, became greatly changed. They became chasers, runners, jumpers, aimers, throwers and prey-killers. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers.
Then about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their improved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use—that of controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunting became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, awaiting their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunting were no longer essential for survival.
The skills and thirst for hunting remained, however, and demanded new outlets. Hunting for sport replaced hunting for necessity. This new activity involved all the original hunting sequences but the aim of the operation was no longer to avoid starvation. Instead the sportsmen set off to test their skill against prey that were no longer essential to their survival. To be sure, the kill may have been eaten but there were other much simpler ways of obtaining a meaty meal.
The author believes that sporting activities.

A:are forms of biological development B:have actually developed from hunting C:are essentially forms of taming the prey D:have changed the ways of hunting

Passage Two

A:are forms of biological development B:have actually developed from hunting C:are essentially forms of taming the prey D:have changed the ways of hunting