Peahens at Whipsnade Zoo show a preference for
A．the most dominant male in a group
B．the biggest and strongest male
C．the male which displays most often
D．the male with the finest feathers

American education is every bit as polarized, red and blue, as American politics. On the crimson, conservative end of the spectrum are those who adhere to the back-to-basics credo: Kids, practice those spelling words and times tables, sit still and listen to the teacher; school isn't meant to be fun—hard work builds character. On the opposite, indigo extreme are the currently unfashionable "progressives", who believe that learning should be like breathing— natural and relaxed, that school should take its cues from a child's interests. As in politics, good sense lies toward the center, but the pendulum keeps sweeping sharply from right to left and back again. And the kids end up whiplashed.
Since the Reading Wars of the 1990s, the U.S. has largely gone red. Remember the Reading Wars？ In the 1980s, educators embraced "whole language" as the key to teaching kids to love reading. Instead of using "See Dick and Jane Run" primers, grade-school teachers taught reading with authentic kid lit: storybooks by respected authors, like Eric Carle （Polar Bear, Polar Bear). They encouraged 5-and 6-year-olds to write with "inventive spelling". It was fun. Teachers felt creative. The founders of whole language never intended it to displace the teaching of phonics or proper spelling, but that's what happened in many places. The result was a generation of kids who couldn't spell, including a high percentage who had to be turned over to special Ed instructors to learn how to read. That eventually ushered in the current joyless back-to-phonics movement, with its endless hours of reading-skill drills. Welcome back, Dick and Jane.
Now we're into the Math Wars. With American kids foundering on state math exams and getting clobbered on international tests by their peers in Singapore and Belgium, parents and policymakers have been searching for a culprit. They've found it in the math equivalent of whole language—so-called fuzzy math, an object of parental contempt from coast to coast. Fuzzy math, properly called reform. math, is the bastard child of teaching standards introduced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics （N.C.T.M) in 1989. Like whole language, it was a sensible approach that got distorted into a parody of itself. The reform. standards, for instance, called for teaching the uses of a calculator and estimation, but some educators took that as a license to stop drilling the multiplication tables, skip past long division and give lots of partial credit for wrong answers. "Some of the textbooks and materials were absolutely hideous," says R. James Milgram, a professor of mathematics at Stanford.
Adding to the math morass was the fact that 49 states （all but Iowa) devised their own math standards, with up to 100 different goals for each grade level. Textbook publishers responded with textbooks that tried to incorporate every goal of every state. "There are some 700-page third-grade math books out there," says N.C.T.M.'s current president Francis Fennell, professor of education at Maryland's McDaniel College.
Now the N.C.T.M. itself has come riding to the rescue. In a notably slim document, it has identified just three essential goals, or "focal points", for each grade from pre-K to eighth, none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance, the group recommends focusing on the quick recall of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of decimals and the ability to measure and compute the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes. "Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get conversations going at the state level about what really is important." In recent weeks, that's begun to happen. Florida and Utah and half a dozen other states are talking about revising their math standards to match the pared-down approach. That pleases academic mathematicians like Milgram, who notes that this kind of instruction is what works in math-proficient nations like Singa
A．Math, American Kids' Nightmare.
B．U.S. Education, the Retunrn of the Tradition.
C．Polarized Pol

Every summer, the peacocks that roam free within Whipsnade Wild Animal Park in Bedfordshire expose their magnificent trains to the critical and often disdainful gaze of the hens. They re-enact the mystery that tormented Charles Darwin to his dying day. how in this competitive world, where nature—as Tennyson said—is red in tooth and claw, could birds have evolved such an obvious extravagance？ How do they get away with it？ The zoologist Marion Petrie and her colleagues of the Open University are now exploiting the quasi-wild conditions of Whipsnade to try, a century after Darwin's death, to settle the matter.
Darwin argued that living creatures came to be the way they are by evolution, rather than by special creation; and that the principal mechanism of evolution was natural selection. That is, in a crowded and hence competitive world, the individuals best suited to the circumstances—the "fittest"—are the most likely to survive and have offspring.
But the implication is that fittest would generally mean toughest, swiftest, cleverest, most alert. The peacock's tail, by contrast, was at best a waste of space and in practice a severe encumbrance; and Darwin felt obliged to invoke what he felt was a separate mechanism of evolution, which he called "sexual selection". The driving mechanism was simply that females liked in his words—"beauty for beauty's sake".
But Darwin's friend and collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace, though in many ways more "romantic" than Darwin, was in others even more Darwinian. "Beauty for beauty's sake" he wanted nothing of. If peahens chose cocks with the showiest trains, he felt, then it must be that they knew what they were about. The cocks must have some other quality, which was not necessarily obvious to the human observer, but which the hens themselves could appreciate. According to Wallace, then, the train was not an end in itself, but an advertisement for some genuine contribution to survival.
Now, 100 years later, the wrangle is still unresolved, for the natural behavior. of peafowl is much harder to study than might be imagined. But 200 birds at Whipsnade, which live like wild birds yet are used to human beings, offer unique opportunities for study. Marion Petrie and her colleagues at Whipsnade have identified two main questions. First, is the premise correct—do peahens really choose the males with the showiest trains？ And, secondly, do the peacocks with the showiest trains have some extra, genuinely advantageous quality, as Wallace supposed, or is it really all show, as Darwin felt？
In practice, the mature cocks display in groups at a number of sites around Whipsnade, and the hens judge one against the other. Long observation from hides, backed up by photographs, suggests that the hens really do like the showiest males. What seems to count is the number of eye, spots on the train, which is related to its length; the cocks with the most eye-spots do indeed attract the most mates.
But whether the males with the best trains are also "better" in other ways remains to be pinned down. William Hamilton of Oxford University has put forward the hypothesis that showy male birds in general, of whatever species, are the most parasite free, and that their plumage advertises their disease-free state. There is evidence that this is so in other birds. But Dr. Petrie and her colleagues have not been able to assess the internal parasites in the Whipsnade peacocks to test this hypothesis. This year, however, she is comparing the offspring of cocks that have in the past proved attractive to hens with the offspring of cocks that hens find unattractive. Do the children of the attractive cocks grow faster？ Are they more healthy？ If so, then the females' choice will be seen to be utilitarian after all, just as Wallace predicted.
There is a final twist to this continuing story. The great mathematician and biologist R.A. Fisher in the thirties propos
A．To show that a peacock's train serves no useful purpose.
B．To solve a problem that Charles Darwin could not solve.

Personally the author __ Internet dating.
A．agrees on
B．approves of
C．believes in
D．opposes

The shopping centre does not close at noon time.
A．True
B．False

One day the wind said to the sun, "Look at that man walking along the road. I can get his coat off more quickly than you can."
"We will see about that," said the sun. "I will let you try first."
So the wind tried to make the man take off his coat. He blew and blew, but the man only pulled his coat more closely around himself.
"I give up," said the wind at last. "I cannot get his coat off." Then the sun tried. He shone as hard as he could. The man soon became hot and took off his coat.
______tried first.
A．The moon
B．The sun
C．The wind