He amassed a ______ fortune.
A.considerably
B.considerable
C.considerate
D.considered
A.considerably
B.considerable
C.considerate
D.considered
Mr. Musk is a guy who gets things done. The founder of two “moonshot” tech companies, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is bringing electric vehicles to mass market and 26 humans to live on other planets. Lest this strike the amateur techie—not that readers of The Independent would ever count among them—as so much hot air, you can be reassured that the near $13bn (£8.8bn) fortune this entrepreneur has 27 comes from practical achievements rather than hypothetical ones.
A lot of clever people are 28 about artificial intelligence, fearing that robots will one day become so 29 they’ll murder all of us. These fears are mostly 30 : as with hysteria about genetic modification, we humans are generally wise enough to manage these problems with alacrity and care.
And just think of how wonderful it would be if you had a live-in robot. It could — 31 — be like having a babysitter and masseuse rolled into one — or, if that required 32 intelligence beyond the ken of Mr. Musk’s imagined machine, at least some one to chop the carrots, wash the car and mow the lawn. Once purchased and trained, this would allow the 33 user to save money and time, freeing up 34 space in our busy lives to, for instance, read The Independent.
That is why we welcome Mr. Musk’s latest 35 , and wish him well. As long as robots add to the sum of human happiness, reduce suffering or cumbersome activity, and create time to read world-class journalism, The Independent will be their fans. Especially since journalism is one job robots will never do.
A) amassed
B) casual
C) emotional
D) enabling
E) eventually
F) exaggerated
G) extravagant
H) generously
I) misleading
J) precious
K) reward
L) smart
M) sphere
N) terrified
O) venture
A.be more prone to heart disease, hypertension, and mouth cancers
B.are proner to heart disease, hypertension, and mouth cancers
C.are more prone to heart disease, hypertension, and mouth cancers
D.experience heart disease, hypertension, and mouth cancers at heightened rates
E.suffer heart disease, hypertension, and mouth cancers at a higher risk
A.Certain organs are more reponsive than others to the hormones created by environmental pollutants.
B.The incidence of breast cancer correlates with the presence of environmental pollutants.
C.A great deal of evidence has been amassed linking environmental pollutants with cancer in animals.
D.Cancer diagnosis has become more reliable than it once was.
E.Cancer of the liver, an organ that is hormonally responsive to environmental pollutants, is rising globally.
Book Value
A Older people in particular are often taken aback by the speed with which the Internet's "next big thing" can cease being that. It even happens to Rupert Murdoch, a septuagenarian me dia mogul. Two years ago he bought MySpace, a social-networking site that has becomed the world's largest. The other day, however, Mr Murdoch was heard lamenting that MySpace appears already to be last year's news, because everybody is now going to Facebook, the second-largest social network on the web, with 31 million registered users at the last count Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard and not even 20 a the time, along with two of his friends. The site requires users to provide their real names and e-mail addresses for registration, and it then links them up with current and former friend., and colleagues with amazing ease. Each Facebook ,profile" becomes both a repository of each user's information and photos, and a social warren where friends gossip, exchange messages and "poke" one another.
B Facebook is generating so much excitement this summer that bloggers are likening Mi Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, the charismatic boss of Apple, and calling his company "the nex Google" on the assumption that a stock market listing must be imminent. It may be. Mr Zuck. erberg has rejected big offers from new- and old-media giants such as Yahoo! and Viacom One of his three sisters, who also works for Facebook, has posted a silly video online that makes fun of Yahoo!'s takeover bid and sings about "going for IPO". And Facebook has advertised for a "stock administration manager" with expertise in share regulations. Yet Mr Zuckerberg insists that he is "a little bit surprised about how focused everybody is on the 'exit'." The truth is that he is sick of talking about it. The venture capitalists backing Facebook may want to cash out, but Mr Zuckerberg is only 23 and doesn't need the money. He also happens to believe—rather as Google's young founders do—that he can, and should, change the world. A flotation would be a big distraction.
C Metaphorically, Mr Zuckerberg views himself as similar to the pioneering Renaissance map-makers who amassed and combined snippets of information and then charted new lands and seas so that other people could use their maps to find, say, new trade routes. In Mr Zucker-berg's case, the map charts human relationships. Whereas many of the other social networks on the web primarily help people to make new contacts online—whether for hanky panky, marriage or business—Mr Zuckerberg is exclusively interested in "mapping out" the "real and pre-existing connections" among people, he says.
D The fancy mathematical name he has for this map is a "social graph", a model of nodes and links in which nodes are people and connections are friendships. Once this social graph, or map, is in place, it becomes a potent mechanism for spreading information. For instance, he says, "we automatically know who should have a new photo album," because as soon as one person uploads it to the site, all her friends see it, and the friends of friends might notice too. Other social networks can also do this, of course, but Facebook is distinctive in several ways. First, it is currently considered classier than, say, MySpace. One academic researcher argues that Facebook is for "good kids", whereas MySpace is for blue-collar kids, "art fags", "goths" and "gangstas". Facebook's roots are indeed preppie. Mr Zuckerberg took Latin, Greek and fencing at Phillips Exeter Academy and started Facebook at Harvard, after all. From there, it spread to other elite universities, and it only opened up to the general population last September.
E Mr Zuckerberg, however, thinks that the bigger difference is that Facebook is now becoming a "platform". By this he means that it is evolving into a technology on top of which others can build new software tools and businesses. In May, Mr Zuckerberg op
Why does the author mention "herbs," "shrubs," and "trees"?
A.To provide examples of plant types that cannot tolerate high levels of harmful minerals
B.To show why so many plants are hyperaccumulators
C.To help explain why hyperaccumulators can be found in so many different places
D.To emphasize that hyperaccumulators occur in a wide range of plant types
The World of the Flat-footed Fly
George Poinar has been fascinated by amber, and the insects embedded in it, since childhood. Now a professor of entomology at the Berkeley Campus of the University of California, he has successfully combined these interests to produce Life in Amber, a scholarly and yet very readable book. In it he tells the story of this curious, almost magical substance and the unique record of fossilized life that became trapped and entombed in the sticky resin as it oozed from the forest trees of the ancient past.
Amber has been endowed with special worth from prehistoric times, Adornments of amber have been found that date back as far as 35,000 BC, and in 1701, King Frederick I of Prussia commissioned an entire room made of amber as a gift for Peter the Great of Russia. Historically that probably represented the peak of value for amber. Since then our appreciation of it as a decorative material worth its weight in gold has declined somewhat. In Victorian times amber beads had something of a renaissance as an adornment. It now holds greater value as a potential store of fossil DNA.
Scientific interest in amber has also fluctuated. The embedded small organisms, particularly insects but also frogs and feathers, have always been part of amber's allure. In the first century AD, Pliny noted that amber was the discharge of a pine-like tree, originated in the north and often contained small insects. It was not until the 19th century that collection of the amber flora and fauna really got under way. The largest hoard was of Baltic origin, amassed by Wilhelm Stantien, an innkeeper, and Moritz Becker, a merchant. They took their collecting seriously and used mining techniques to extract pieces of amber from clays of Tertiary age that had formed during the Eocene, 38 million years ago, in the Samland peninsula, near Kaliningrad (the former Kbnigsberg) on the Russian Baltic seaboard. Their efforts resulted in about 120,000 amber-embedded animal and plant fossils. These were housed in the Geological Institute Museum at Kbnigsberg University. Unfortunately, despite being dispersed for safety during the Second World War much of this amazing collection was lost.
Although the depth of this unique view of the insect life in Baltic forests of Eocene age is sadly no longer available in a single collection, we can see something of it. There are still large collections of Baltic amber in public museums around the world but even in total they do not amount to much more than that one unrepeatable collection. The Natural History Museum in London has a "mere" 25,000 specimens.
Popular misconceptions about amber exist; for example, suggesting that it is the fossilized resin of coniferous trees from the Baltic region, and that its abundance is the result of some unusual condition of these ancient trees. It is true that an astonishing amount of amber has been recovered from this region. However, the most likely candidate to have produced the Baltic amber is an araucariacean tree similar to the living Agathis from New Zealand, which secretes resin. This could well accumulate in this order of magnitude, given the geological time scale of hundreds of thousands, if not million of years. And, as Poinar discusses, the Baltic region was only one of many different areas, on a worldwide scale, from the Dominican Republic, which is his own favourite hunting ground, to China and Romania, that produced amber in Tertiary times. Furthermore, amber resin producing trees are shown to have an extended geological history extending back to Cretaceous times, more than 100 million years ago and possibly as far back as the Carboniferous (more than 300 million years ago ). Many of these older ambers have not been rigorously investigated with modem techniques but Poinar has collected all the available published knowledge on their biological content.
&n
A.Y
B.N
C.NG
My mother was a thrower-outer—the scourge of packed closets, the emptier of overfilled drawers. I was a bringer-backer. We once clashed over my cherished tennis shoes, which she mistakenly took to the garbage simply because I was stuffing cardboard in the soles to plug the holes. I had to rescue them twice.
Ours was a fundamental clash in human nature, surely as old as the species itself. Some of our hominid ancestors were gatherers who also picked up bright pebbles; others were hunters of clutter who demanded. "Can't we get rid of some of this stuff?" From those who amassed, we have museums, libraries, attics that groan. From the winnowers, we have public sanitation, rarity (if everything were saved, nothing would be rare) and a way to the front door.
The passage implies that
A.keeping secrets is rarely done.
B.happy families seldom have secrets.
C.unhappy families usually have secrets.
D.family secrets are short-lived.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic and important changes that took place in the
Mesozoic era occurred late in that era, among the small organisms that populate the
uppermost, sunlit portion of the oceans--the plankton. The term "plankton" is a broad
one, designating all of the small plants and animals that float about or weakly propel
(5) themselves through the sea. In the late stages of the Mesozoic era. during the Cretaceous
period, there was a great expansion of plankton that precipitated skeletons or shells
composed of two types of mineral: silica and calcium carbonate. This development
radically changed the types of sediments that accumulated on the seafloor, because,
while the organic parts of the plankton decayed after the organisms died, their mineralized
(10)skeletons often survived and sank to the bottom. For the first time in the Earth's long
history, very large quantities of silica skeletons, which would eventually harden into rock,
began to pile up in parts of the deep sea. Thick deposits of calcareous ooze made up of
the tiny remains of the calcium carbonate-secreting plankton also accumulated as never
before. The famous white chalk cliffs of Dover, in the southeast of England, are just one
(15)example of the huge quantities of such material that amassed during the Cretaceous
period; there are many more. Just why the calcareous plankton were so prolific during
the latter part of the Cretaceous period is not fully understood. Such massive amounts
of chalky sediments have never since been deposited over a comparable period of time.
The high biological productivity of the Cretaceous oceans also led to ideal conditions
(20)for oil accumulation. Oil is formed when organic material trapped in sediments is slowly
buried and subjected to increased temperatures and pressures, transforming it into
petroleum. Sediments rich in organic material accumulated along the margins of the
Tethys Seaway, the tropical east-west ocean that formed when Earth's single landmass
(known as Pangaea) split apart during the Mesozoic era. Many of today's important oil
(25)fields are found in those sediments--in Russia, the Middle East, the Gulf of Mexico, and
in the states of Texas and Louisiana in the United States.
What does the passage mainly discuss?
A.How sediments were built up in oceans during the Cretaceous period
B.How petroleum was formed in the Mesozoic era
C.The impact of changes in oceanic animal and plant life in the Mesozoic era
D.The differences between plankton found in the present era and Cretaceous plankton
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