SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONSIn this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.Passage OneCertainly no creature in the sea is odder than the common sea cucumber. All living creature, especially human beings, have their peculiarities, but everything about the little sea cucumber seems unusual. What else can be said about a bizarre animal that, among other eccentricities, eats mud, feeds almost continuously day and night but can live without eating for long periods, and can be poisonous but is considered supremely edible by gourmets For some fifty million years, despite all its eccentricities, the sea cucumber has subsisted on its diet of mud. It is adaptable enough to live attached to rocks by its tube feet, under rocks in shallow water, or on the surface of mud flats.Common in cool water on both Atlantic and Pacific shores, it has the ability to suck up mud or sand and digest whatever nutrients are present. Sea cucumbers come in a variety of colors, ranging from black to reddish brown to sand color and nearly white. One form even has vivid purple tentacles. Usually the creatures are cucumber shaped—hence their name—and because they are typically rock inhabitants, this shape, combined with flexibility, enables them to squeeze into crevices where they are safe from predators and ocean currents. Although they have voracious appetites, eating day and night, sea cucumbers have the capacity to become quiescent and live at a low metabolic rate—feeding sparingly or not at all for long periods, so that the marine organisms that provide their food have a chance to multiply. If it were not for this faculty, they would devour all the food available in a short time and would probably starve themselves out of existence. But the most spectacular thing about the sea cucumber is the way it defends itself. Its major enemies are fish and crabs. When attacked, it squirts all its internal organs into water. It also casts off attached structures such as tentacles. The sea cucumber will eviscerate and regenerate itself if it is attacked or even touched; it will do the same if the surrounding water temperature is too high or if the water becomes too polluted.Passage TwoAt a scientific meeting at Rockefeller University in May, Roger Buick of the University of Washington said that the 3.5 billion-year-old rocks in northwestern Australia hold traces of carbon that once made up living organisms.Even before Buick"s discovery, ample evidence indicated that life on Earth began while our 4.5 billion-year-old planet was very young. Simple organisms certainly flourished between 2 billion and 3 billion years ago, and claims of older evidence of life have periodically surfaced. But none have been universally embraced, and Buick"s claim is so new that other scientists haven"t fully reviewed it.Yet even if the geologist is right about his rocks, his discovery would leave unanswered one of life"s biggest mysteries: how life actually arose. While creationists attribute that spark of life to the hand of God, scientists are convinced there"s a natural explanation. Yet as close as they"ve come to pinning it down, some admit the particulars may never be fully resolved. Others are convinced that we"re edging closer to an answer—and to settling one of the oldest and most contentious questions in science and religion.To solve the riddle of genesis, biologists, astronomers, geologists, and chemists are attacking the problem from all angles—even trying to re-create life from scratch. In recent years, institutions, including Harvard University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and McMaster University in Canada, have formed "origins" institutes to probe the deepest history of life on Earth—and to search for life in the heavens. "The field is going through a minirenaissance," says chemical biologist Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.According to scientists, life began when chemistrybegatbiology—that is, when simple molecules assembled into more complex molecules that then began to self-replicate. But rocks that might harbor traces of such genesis events simply don"t exist, says Buick. During Earth"s opening act, space debris and cataclysmic volcanic upheavals destroyed the evidence, like an arsonist torching his tracks. The oldest known rocks are about 4 billion years old, yet even they formed roughly half a million millenniums after our planet"s surface cooled and water first pooled into shallow seas. Scientists widely suspect that life began during that long, undocumented interval.Theories about where and how life began range from the sublime to the bizarre. One camp says that deep-sea vents known as black smokers nurtured the first life. In the late 1970s, a team of researchers from Oregon State University unexpectedly discovered whole ecosystems thriving around a hot vent on the Pacific seafloor. Such vents, where molten rock from inside the Earth"s mantle heats seawater to as much as 660 degrees Fahrenheit, could have provided the energy and basic organic molecules needed to spark life.Another camp believes that ice—not boiling water—served as the cradle of life. Even the coldest ice contains seams of liquid. These watery pockets could have acted as test tubes for the earliest organic reactions. Experiments show that units of RNA the genetic material that was probably the forerunner to better-known DNA—spontaneously string themselves together in ice, supporting this theory.Still other scientists point to the skies. They argue that meteorites carrying amino acids and other important molecules seeded Earth with the necessary ingredient for life. Supporting the idea: high concentrations of amino acids inside meteorites (陨星) found on Earth and in gas clouds in space. A wilder offshoot of this theory, called panspermia (胚种论), suggests that whole bacteria—life itself—first evolved on Mars and then hitched a ride to Earth via small pieces of the Red Planet blasted here by asteroid or comet impacts. But no life has been found on Mars, and the one claim of fossil bacteria in a Martian meteorite, made by NASA scientists in 1996, has been almost universally rejected.Passage ThreeAmong the plains Indians, two separatestrainsof decorative art evolved: the figurative, representational art created by the men of the tribe, and the geometric, abstract art crafted by the women. According to Dunn and Highwater, the artist"s sex governed both the kind of article to be decorated and the style to be followed in its ornamentation. Thus, the decorative works created by tribesmen consistently depict living creatures (men, horses, buffalo) or magical beings (ghosts and other supernatural life-forms). Those created by women, however, are clearly nonrepresentational: no figures of men or animals appear in this classically geometric art.Art historians theorize that this abstract, geometric art, traditionally the prerogative of the women, predates the figurative art of the men. Descending from those aspects of Woodland culture that gave rise to weaving, quillwork, and beadwork, it is a utilitarian art, intended for the embellishment of ordinary, serviceable objects such as parfleche (生牛皮) boxes, saddlebags, and hide robes. The abstract designs combine classical geometric figures into formal patterns, a ring of narrow isosceles (等边的) triangles arranged on the background of large central circle creates the well-known "feather and circle" pattern. Created in bold primary colors (red, yellow, blue), sometimes black or green, and often outlined in dark paint or glue size, these nonrepresentational designs are nonetheless intricately detailed.Although the abstract decorations crafted by the women are visually striking, they pale in significance when compared to the narrative compositions created by the men. Created to tell a story, these works were generally heroic in nature, and were intended to commemorate a bold and courageous exploit or a spiritual awakening. Unlike realistic portraits, the artworks emphasized action, not physical likeness. Highwater describes their making as follows. "These representational works were generally drafted by a group of men—often the individuals who had performed the deeds being recorded—who drew on untailored hide robes and tepee liners made of skins. The paintings usually filled the entire field; often they were conceived at different times as separate pictorial vignettes documenting specific actions. In relationship to each other, these vignettes (小插图) suggest a narrative."The tribesmen"s narrative artwork depicted not only warlike deeds but also mystic dreams and vision quests. Part of the young male"s rite of passage into tribal adulthood involved his discovering his own personal totem or symbolic guardian. By fasting or by consuming hallucinatory (幻想的) substances, the youth opened himself to the revelation of his "mystery object," a symbol that could protect him from both natural and supernatural dangers.What had been in the early 1700s a highly individualistic, personal iconography changed into something very different by the early nineteenth century. As Anglos came west in ever greater numbers, they brought with them new materials and new ideas. Just as European glass beads came to replace native porcupine quills in the women"s applied designs, cloth eventually became used as a substitute for animal hides. The emphasis of plains artwork shifted as well: tribes people came to create works that celebrated the solidarity of Indians as a group rather than their prowess as individuals.Passage Four"Education", says Aristotle, "is the creation of a sound mind in a sound body." It encompasses in itself the all round development of an individual. The success of spreading education to the widest possible area lies in the way it is imparted. With the ever changing technology scenario, the methods of imparting education too have been undergoing changes. But education itself is an age old process, rather as old as the human race itself. It was man"s education through Nature, our greatest teacher, that he learned how to make fire by rubbing stones or invented the wheal to make tasks easier. Education in real earnest helps us in restraining the objectionable predisposition(天性) in ourselves. The aims of education have been categorized variously by different scholars. While Herbert Spencer believed in the "complete-living aim", Herbert advocated the moral aim. The complete living aim signifies that education should prepare us for life. This view had also been supported by Rousseau and Mahatma Gandhi. They believed in the complete development or perfection of nature.All round development has been considered as the first and foremost aim of education. At the same time education ensures that there is a progressive development of innate abilities. Pestalozzi is of the view "Education is natural, harmonious and progressive development of man"s innate powers." Education enables us to control, give the right direction and the final sublimation(升华) of instincts. It creates good citizens. It helps to prepare the kids for their future life. Education inculcates certain values and principles and also prepares a human being for social life. It civilizes the man.The moral aim of Herbart states that education should ingrain moral values in children. He is of the view that education should assist us in curbing our inferior whims and supplant them with superior ideas. This moral aim has also been stressed upon by Gandhi in the sense of formation of character. The preachers of this aim do not undermine the significance of knowledge, vocational training or muscular strength. But simultaneously they have also laid stress on their view that the undisclosed aim of education is to assist development of moral habits.Then there is the social aim which means that education should produce effective individuals in the sense that they realize their responsibilities towards the society. And we all know that man is a social being. The interactive ability is a must as it is through interaction that we come to know of our responsibilities. Edmund Burke asks and he himself answers: "What is education A parcel of books Not at all, but an intercourse with the world, with men and with affairs."