We are surprised by the ease()he deals with such great pressure.

A.to

B.by

C.at

D.with

A.lying

B.laying

C.lie

D.lay

We were all surprised when he made it clear that he（)（leave) office soon.

We were more than surprised to see them again.（英译中)

A.dispatched

B.has been dispatched

C.will dispatch

D.was dispatched

s. Sound has a waste product, too, in the form. of noise. Noise has been called unwanted sound. Noise is growing and it may get much worse before it gets any better.

Scientists, for several years, have been studying how noise affects people and animals. They are surprised by what they have learned. Peace and quiet are becoming harder to find. Noise pollution is a threat that should be looked at carefully.

There is a saying that it is so noisy that you can't hear yourself think. Doctors who study noise believe that we must sometimes hear ourselves think. If we don't, we may have headaches, other aches and pains, or even worse mental problems.

Noise adds more tension to a society that already faces enough stress.

But noise is not a new problem. In ancient Rome, people complained so much about noise that the government stopped chariots(战车) from moving through the streets at night!

Ways of making less noise are now being tested. There are even laws controlling noise. We cannot return to the "good old days" of peace and quiet. But we can reduce noise—if we shout loudly enough about it.

Why are scientists surprised by the findings in their noise study？

A．Because the world is becoming increasingly noisy.

B．Because they have learned that noise is also is also a kind of pollution.

C．Because noise is an unwanted waste for human beings.

D．Because people knew little about noise before.

A.not a mental process

B.more of a physical process than a mental action

C.a process that involves our entire bodies

D.a process that involves the muscles as well as the brain

be what we now have to call—lamely, enviously—whole persons. If it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a person's "inside" and "outside," they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive—and so ugly. One of Socrates' main pedagogical acts was to be ugly—and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of his how full of paradoxes life really was.

2 They may have resisted Socrates' lesson. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off—with the greatest facility—the "inside"(character, intellect) from the "outside" (looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.

3 It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human excellence. By limiting excellence (virtus in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity set beauty adrift—as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes, the sex which, however fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.

4 A beautiful woman, we say in English, but a handsome man. "Handsome" is the masculine equivalent of—and refusal of—a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtones, by being reserved for women only. That one can call a man "beautiful" in French and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries—unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant version of Christianity—still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if one exists, is of degree only. In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex—to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.

The author means ______ by "whole persons" in Para.

A．persons of beauty

B．persons of virtue

C．persons of excellence

D．none of the above

A.To my surprise

B.I was surprised

C.Surprised

D.Surprising

person's knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to device anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations text what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person's true ability and aptitude.

As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends oil them. They are the mark of success of failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn't matter that you weren't feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don't count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career？ Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students？

A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves arc often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.

The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge's decision you have the right Of appeal, but not after an examiner's. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person's true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them？ This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire.

The main idea of this passage is ______.

A．examinations exert a pernicious influence on education

B．examinations are ineffective

C．examinations are profitable for institutions

D．examinations are a burden on students