The history of modem pollution problems shows that most have resulted from negligence and ignorance. We have an appalling tendency to interfere with nature before all of the possible consequences of our actions have been studied in depth. We produce and distribute radioactive substances, synthetic chemicals and many other potent compounds before fully comprehending their effects on living organisms. Our education is dangerously incomplete.
It will be argued that the purpose of science is to move into unknown territory, to explore, and to discover. It can be said that similar risks have been taken before, and that these risks are necessary to technological progress.
These arguments overlook an important element. In the past, risks taken in the name of scientific progress were restricted to a small place and brief period of time. The effects of the processes we now strive to master are neither localized nor brief. Air pollution covers vast urban areas. Ocean pollutants have been discovered in nearly every part of the world. Synthetic chemicals spread over huge stretches of forest and farmland may remain in the soil for decades and years to come. Radioactive pollutants will be found in the biosphere for generations. The size and persistence of these problems have grown with the expanding power of modern science.
One might also argue that the hazards of modem pollutants are small compared with the dangers associated with other human activity. No estimate of the actual harm done by smog, fallout, or chemical residues can obscure the reality that the risks are being taken before being fully understood.
The importance of these issues lies in the failure of science to predict and control human intervention into natural processes. The true measure of the danger is represented by the hazards we will encounter if we enter the new age of technology without first evaluating our responsibility to environment.
Which of the following adjectives may best describe the tone of this text

A:Unconcerned. B:Humorous. C:Serious. D:Exaggerated.

Everyday some 16m barrels of oil leave the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz. That is enough to fill a soft-drink can for everyone on earth, or to power every motor vehicle on the planet for 25 miles (40kin). Gulf oil accounts for 40% of global trade in the sticky stuff. More important, it makes up two-thirds of known deposits. Whereas at present production rates the rest of the world’s oil reserves will last for a mere 25 years, the Gulf’s will last for 100. In other words, the region’s strategic importance is set to grow and grow.
Or at least so goes the conventional wisdom, which is usually rounded out with scary talk of unstable supplies, spendthrift regimes and a potential fundamentalist menace. Yet all those numbers come with caveats. A great deal of oil is consumed by the countries that produce it rather than traded, so in reality the Gulf accounts for less than a quarter of the world’s daily consumption. As for reserves, the figures are as changeable as a mirage in the desert. The most comprehensive research available, conducted by the US Geological Survey, refers to an "expected" total volume for global hydrocarbon deposits that is about double current known reserves. Using that figure, and throwing in natural gas along with oil, it appears that the Gulf contains a more moderate 30% or so of the planet’s future fossil-fuel supplies. Leaving out the two Gulf states that are not covered in this survey--Iran and Iraq--the remaining six between them hold something like 20% of world hydrocarbon reserves, not much more than Russia.
All the same, it is still a hefty chunk; enough, you might think, to keep the people living atop the wells in comfort for the foreseeable future. But you might be wrong. At present, the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council have a combined national income roughly equal to Switzerland’s, but a population which, at around 30m, is more than four times as big. It is also the fastest-growing on earth, having increased at nine times the Swiss rate over the past quarter-century. Meanwhile the region’s share of world oil trade has fallen, as has the average price per barrel.
As a result, the income per person generated by GCC oil exports has been diminishing since the 1970s. True, surging demand from America and Asia has recently boosted the Gulf’s share of trade, but the medium-term outlook for oil pries remains weak. Combined with continued growth in oil consumption, this should create sustained upward pressure on prices. And high oil prices will speed the search for alternatives. Who knows, in 20 years’ time fuel cells and hydrogen power may have started to become commercial propositions.
In the eyes of the author, conventional opinion on the strategic importance of the Gulf oil is

A:reassuring. B:changeable. C:paradoxical. D:exaggerated.

Text 4
Those who welcomed the railway saw it as more than a rapid and comfortable means of passing. They actually saw it as a factor in world peace. They did not foresee that the railway would be just one more means for the rapid movement of aggressive armies. None of them foresaw that the more we are together—the more chances there are of war. Any boy or girl who is one of a large family knows that.
Whenever any new invention is put forward, those for it and those against it can always find medical men to approve or condemn. The anti-railway group produced doctors who said that tunnels would be most dangerous to public health: they would produce colds, catarrhs(黏膜炎) and consumptions. The deafening noise and the glare of the engine fire, would have a bad effect on the nerves. Further, being moved through the air at a high speed would do grave injury to delicate lungs. In those with high blood pressure, the movement of the train might produce apoplexy. The sudden plunging of a train into the darkness of a tannel, and the equally sudden rush into full daylight, would cause great damage to eyesight. But the pro-railway group was of course able to produce equally famous medical men to say just the opposite. They said that the speed and swing of the train would equalize the circulation, promote digestion, tranquilize the nerves, and ensure good sleep.
The actual rolling-stock was anything but comfortable. If it was a test of endurance to sit for four hours outside a coach in rain, or inside in dirty air, the railway offered little more in the way of comfort. Certainly the first-class carriages had cushioned seats; but the second - class had only narrow bare boards, while the third - class had nothing at all; no seats and no roof; they were just open trucks. So that third - class passengers gained nothing from the few mode except speed. In the matter of comfort, indeed they lost; they did, on the coaches, have a seat, but now they had to stand all the way, which gave opportunities to the comic press. This kind of thing: "A man was seen yesterday buying a third - class ticket for the new London and Birmingham Railway. The state of his mind is being enquired into".
A writer in the early days of railways wrote feelingly of both second - and third - class carriages. He made the suggestion that the directors of the railways must have sent all over the world to find the hardest possible wood. Of the open third -class trucks he said that they had the peculiar property of meeting the rain from whatever quarter it came. He described them as horizontal shower - baths, from whose searching power there was no escape.

What is the tone of this passage（）

A:Practical. B:Humorous. C:Satirical. D:Exaggerated.

The past few years have been busy ones for human-rights organisations. In prosecuting the so-called war on terror, many governments in Western countries where freedoms seemed secure have been tempted to nibble away at them, while doughty campaigners such as Amnesty International (国际特殊组织) also exist for defence. Yet Amnesty no longer makes the splash it used to in the rich world. The organisation is as vocal as it ever was. But some years ago it decided to dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category called social and economic rights.
You might suppose that the more of rights you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech and free elections What use is a vote if you are starving Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them.
Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities, but there’s no use to call them "rights". When a government looks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers’ money is a political question best settled at the ballot box (投票箱). And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time.
It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities are called politics. That is why the rights that make open polities possible — free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment— are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all.
Many do-gooding outfits suffer from having too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to appeal to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrate on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. However, by trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again.
The underlined word "grandiloquent" (Line 6, Paragraph 4) most probably means ______

A:glorious. B:eloquent. C:exaggerated. D:excellent.

She knew how to make an entrance. Her dark hair cut in a severe pageboy, Ayn Rand would sweep into a room with a long black cape, a dollar-sign pin on her lapel and an ever present cigarette in an ivory holder. Melodramatic, yes, but Rand didn’t have time to be subtle. She had millions of people to convert to objectivism, her philosophy of radical individualism, limited government and avoidance of altruism and religion. Her adoring followers--some called them a cult--revered her as the high priestess of laissez-faire capitalism until her death in 1982 at age 77.
The bad economy has been good news for Rand’s legacy. Her fierce denunciations of government regulation have sent sales of her two best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, soaring. Yet her me-first brand of capitalism has been exccoriated (严厉批评) for fomenting (引发) the recent financial crisis. And her most famous former acolyte-onetime Fed chairman Alan Greenspan--has been blamed for inflating the housing bubble by refusing to intervene in the market.
In the midst of the newly rekindled debate, two excellent biographies have just been published: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller (Doubleday; 592 pages), is a comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand’s personal life, and Goddess of the Market : Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jenniter Burns (Oxford; 369 pages), leans more heavily on Rand’s theories and politics.
From her earliest years, Rand was a woman on a mission. Born in 1905 to a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Rand was 12 when the Bolshevik Revolution took place. Her family, suddenly poor, was forced to flee, and Rand’s hatred of communism and any sort of collectivism would guide her life. Arriving in the US in 1926 with a new name, Ayn (rhymes with fine) made her way to Hollywood, where she had modest success as a screenwriter and married an aspiring actor, Frank O’Connor. Her politicization came when she and her husband worked on Republican Wendell Willkie’s losing presidential campaign in 1940. According to Burns, "Before Willkie she had been pro-capitalist yet pessimistic, writing ’The capitalist world is low, unprincipled, and corrupt. ’ Now she celebrated capitalism as the ’noblest, cleanest and most idealistic system of all’. "
The Fountainhead, an epic novel chronicling the struggles of an architect named Howard Roark against conventional values, was her breakout work. In her race to get the sprawling 700-page book to press, she began taking the amphetamine Benzedrine (一种兴奋剂的名称) to fuel her efforts. "Rand used it to power her last months of work on the novel, including several 24-hour sessions correcting page proofs," writes Burns. The book brought Rand financial security and fame.
The word "Melodramatic" (Line 2, Paragraph 1) most probably means "______".

A:Exaggerated B:Melodic C:Decent D:Dramatical

From the 18th through the mid-19th century, whale oil provided light to much of the Western world. At its peak, whaling employed 70,000 people and was the United States’ fifth-largest industry. The U. S. stood as the world’s foremost whale slayer. Producing millions of gallons of oil each year, the industry was widely seen as unassailable, with advocates scoffing at would-be illumination substitutes like. lard oil and camphene. Without whale oil, so the thinking went, the world would slide backward toward darkness.
By today’s standard, of course, slaughtering whales is considered barbaric. Two hundred years ago there was no environmental movement to speak of. But one wonders if the whalers, finding that each year they needed to go farther afield from Nantucket Island to kill massive sea mammals, ever asked themselves: what will happen when we run out of whales Such questions today constitute the cornerstone of the ever-louder logic of sustainability.
Climate alarmists and campaigning environmentalists argue that the industrialized countries of the world have made sizable withdrawals on nature’s fixed allowance, and unless we change our ways, and soon, we are doomed to an abrupt end. Take the recent proclamation from the United Nations Environment Program, which argued that governments should dramatically cut back on the use of resources. The mantra has become commonplace: our current way of living is selfish and unsustainable. We are wrecking the world. We are cutting down the rainforest. We are polluting the water. We are polluting the air. We are killing plants and animals, destroying the ozone layer, burning the world through our addiction to fossil fuels, and leaving a devastated planet for future generations. In other words, humanity is doomed.
It is a compelling story, no doubt. It is also fundamentally wrong, and the consequences are severe. Tragically, exaggerated environmental worries—and the willingness of so many to believe them—could ultimately prevent us from finding smarter ways to actually help our planet and ensure the health of the environment for future generations.
Because, our fears notwithstanding, we actually get smarter. Although Westerners were once reliant on whale oil for lighting, we never actually ran out of whales. Why High demand and rising prices for whale oil spurred a search for and investment in the 19th-century version of alternative energy. First, kerosene from petroleum replaced whale oil. We didn’t run out of kerosene, either: electricity supplanted, it because it was a superior way to light our planet.
For generations, we have consistently underestimated our capacity for innovation. There was a time when we worried that all of London would be covered with horse manure because of the increasing use of horse-drawn carriages. Thanks to the invention of the car, London has 7 million inhabitants today. Dung disaster averted.
In fact, would-be catastrophes have regularly been pushed aside throughout human history, and so often because of innovation and technological development. We never just continue to do the same old thing. We innovate and avoid the anticipated problems.
According to the author, the message from the UN Environment Program

A:should be taken seriously if we want to save humanity. B:can only hinder humans from averting possible disasters. C:has exaggerated the situation but is true of the present world. D:has offered us nothing new about the sustainability of the planet.

Drug use is rising dramatically among the nation’ s youth after a decade of decline. From 1993 to 1994, marijuana use among young people (1) from 12 to 17 jumped 50 percent. One in five high school seniors (2) marijuana daily. Monitoring the Future, which (3) student drug use annually, reports that negative attitudes about drugs have declined for the fourth year in a row. (4) young people see great risk in using drugs. Mood-altering pharmaceutical drugs are (5) new popularity among young people. Ritalin, (6) as a diet pill in the 1970s and now used to (7) hyperactive children, has become a (8) drug on college campuses. A central nervous system (9) , Ritalin can cause strokes, hypertension, and seizures. Rohypnol, produced in Europe as a (10) tranquilizer, lowers inhibitions and suppresses short-term memory, which has led to some women being raped by men they are going out with. (11) taken with alcohol, its effects are greatly (12) . Rock singer Kurt Cobain collapsed from an (13) of Rohypnol and champagne a month before he committed (14) in 1994. In Florida and Texas, Rohypnol has become widely abused among teens, who see the drug as a less expensive (15) for marijuana and LSD. Alcohol and tobacco use is increasing among teenagers, (16) younger adolescents. Each year, more than one million teens become regular smokers, (17) they cannot legally purchase tobacco. By 12th grade, one in three students smokes. In 1995, one in five 14-year-olds reported smoking regularly, a 33 percent jump (18) 1991. Drinking among 14-year-olds climbed 50 percent from 1992 to 1994,and all teens reported substantial increases in (19) drinking. In 1995, one in five 10th graders reported having been drunk in the past 30 days. Two-thirds of high school seniors say they know a (20) with a drinking problem.

Read the following text. Choose the best word (s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1.12（）

A:enlarged B:confirmed C:exaggerated D:magnified

What is the tone of this passage

A:Practical. B:Humorous. C:Satirical. D:Exaggerated.

CORNELL’S SUICIDE PROBLEM. That’s the description that broadcasted across the bottom of CNN during this morning’s segment about the university installing fences to prevent people from jumping into the gap. Actually, CNN, it’s not a suicide problem so much as a media problem—a problem stemming from outlets like yours that are quick to spread the myth that Cornell is the "suicide school".
The New York Times is guilty, too. After the third Cornell suicide in less than a month, the Times ran a front-page story that said the university was on "high alert about the mental health of its students" and that the recent deaths "have cast a golly atmosphere over the university and renewed talk of Cornell’s reputation—unsup-ported, say officials—as a high-stress ’suicide school’". But it’s not until deep into the jump, on April 25th, that the article addresses the actual statistics, which indicate that Cornell’s rate of suicides is no higher than the national average for a university of that size (about two a year). Other high-pressure colleges have more troubling numbers to contend with. MIT’s suicide rate since 1964, when the university started keeping track, is about 14.6 per 100,000 students, according to an article in MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, compared to about 4.3 per 100,000 over the same time period at Cornell. And although the recent concentration of Cornell suicides is tragic and remarkable, it comes on the heels of four years without a single one. But the suicide-free years don’t make headlines; jumpers do.
Granted, I’m a proud Cornell alumna, so I’m particularly sensitive about these misconceptions. But I like to think I’m relatively objective about my alma mater. Cornell suicides, when they occur, tend to be dramatic. They get national media attention with frightening images like the ones CNN was flashing today of guys in uniforms watching the campus bridges. The idea of a stressed-out undergraduate throwing himself into a deep gap—it’s frightening, and it stays with you. So much so that you probably remember it as more exaggerated a problem than it actually is. Individuals can’t be faulted for that—our brains do funny things with unreliable evidence. But media outlets are different, and should be found at fault when they fan these misconceptions.
According to the first paragraph, the suicide problem in Cornell University is ______.

A:a psychological problem of the students B:a management problem of the university C:a social problem caused by the government D:a man-made problem exaggerated by the media

She knew how to make an entrance. Her dark hair cut in a severe pageboy, Ayn Rand would sweep into a room with a long black cape, a dollar-sign pin on her lapel and an ever present cigarette in an ivory holder. Melodramatic, yes, but Rand didn’t have time to be subtle. She had millions of people to convert to objectivism, her philosophy of radical individualism, limited government and avoidance of altruism and religion. Her adoring followers--some called them a cult--revered her as the high priestess of laissez-faire capitalism until her death in 1982 at age 77.
The bad economy has been good news for Rand’s legacy. Her fierce denunciations of government regulation have sent sales of her two best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, soaring. Yet her me-first brand of capitalism has been exccoriated (严厉批评) for fomenting (引发) the recent financial crisis. And her most famous former acolyte-onetime Fed chairman Alan Greenspan--has been blamed for inflating the housing bubble by refusing to intervene in the market.
In the midst of the newly rekindled debate, two excellent biographies have just been published: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller (Doubleday; 592 pages), is a comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand’s personal life, and Goddess of the Market : Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jenniter Burns (Oxford; 369 pages), leans more heavily on Rand’s theories and politics.
From her earliest years, Rand was a woman on a mission. Born in 1905 to a bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Rand was 12 when the Bolshevik Revolution took place. Her family, suddenly poor, was forced to flee, and Rand’s hatred of communism and any sort of collectivism would guide her life. Arriving in the US in 1926 with a new name, Ayn (rhymes with fine) made her way to Hollywood, where she had modest success as a screenwriter and married an aspiring actor, Frank O’Connor. Her politicization came when she and her husband worked on Republican Wendell Willkie’s losing presidential campaign in 1940. According to Burns, "Before Willkie she had been pro-capitalist yet pessimistic, writing ’The capitalist world is low, unprincipled, and corrupt. ’ Now she celebrated capitalism as the ’noblest, cleanest and most idealistic system of all’. "
The Fountainhead, an epic novel chronicling the struggles of an architect named Howard Roark against conventional values, was her breakout work. In her race to get the sprawling 700-page book to press, she began taking the amphetamine Benzedrine (一种兴奋剂的名称) to fuel her efforts. "Rand used it to power her last months of work on the novel, including several 24-hour sessions correcting page proofs," writes Burns. The book brought Rand financial security and fame.

The word "Melodramatic" (Line 2, Paragraph 1) most probably means "（）".

A:Exaggerated B:Melodic C:Decent D:Dramatical