Horse-drawn coaches were neither a competitive nor a comfortable alternative given the deplorable state of the nation’s highways and though bicycles were popular in both town and country, they, too, were hampered by poor road surfaces.

A.restrained B.supported C.favored D.damaged

A sense of smell is something we are born with. Or is it?Until recently scientists believed that the commonsense view was wrong: research had suggested that we learn to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant smells by experience. From early experiments that involved asking children between three and five years old what they thought of certain smells, researchers concluded that children must learn their appreciation of pleasant and unpleasant smells as they get older, rather than being born with it. One of the most surprising results of these tests was that the children said they liked the smell of faeces nearly as often as they said they liked banana.Psychologist Hilary Schmidt understandably found this research hard to accept. She looked at the way the tests were conducted, and applied lessons from other work on child psychology to design her own experiments. She noted that children younger than five will often answer ‘Yes’ to leading questions even if the answers are contradictory. She therefore decided to set her experiment up as a game. She asked the children if they would give a particular smelly thing to Oscar the Grouch, a popular television character who lives in a dustbin and likes ‘smelly’ things, or to Big Bird, another television character who likes ‘nice’ things. She found that the children distinguished between pleasant and unpleasant smells in much the same way as an adult. With the help of younger and younger subjects, she hopes to shed light on the importance of the inherited component of the sense.Children younger than seven or eight are notoriously bad at recognizing what an object is from its shape alone. Schmidt points to an experiment she has carried out with children under five who were given a large styrofoam ball and a small, but heavy, lead ball to compare. After they had a chance to feel the two, she took the balls away, and showed them another pair of Styrofoam and lead ball. When she asked them which of the two would be the heavier, they invariably pointed to the Styrofoam ball just because it was bigger. Despite their earlier experience, they had not grasped the idea of what an object is made of—its substance—as well as size and shape. But in other experiments when she introduced odors, she found that children under five understood that smell was an important characteristic of substance, and children could use a scent to recognize substance irrespective of the shape or size in which it was presented to them.Schmidt has also found that girls are more sensitive to smell than boys. The sex difference is well known in adults, but not in children. Explaining the difference in adults has centered on the suggestion that as girls get older, they tend to take part in activities such as cooking, which train them to distinguish between smells. Another suggestion was that after puberty, female hormones bring about some change in the olfactory equipment. But Schmidt’s observations that the sex difference exists in children does not fit in with either explanation.31. According to the text, it is well-known that our sense of smell is ______.32. Which would Hilary Schmidt most probably agree to?33. Schmidt’s styrofoam and lead ball experiment shows that younger children ______.34. The word “subjects” (Para. 3) most probably means ______.35. From the last sentence of the text, we can infer that Schmidt may ______.

Most economists in the United States seem captivated by the spell of the free market. Consequently, nothing seems good or normal that does not accord with the requirements of the free market. A price that is determined by the seller or, for that matter, established by anyone other than the aggregate of consumers seems pernicious. Accordingly, it requires a major act of will to think of price-fixing (the determination of prices by the seller) as both “normal” and having a valuable economic function. In fact, price-fixing is normal in all industrialized societies because the industrial system itself provides, as an effortless consequence of its own development, the price-fixing that it requires. Modern industrial planning requires and rewards great size. Hence, a comparatively small number of large firms will be competing for the same group of consumers. That each large firm will act with consideration of its own needs and thus avoid selling its products for more than its competitors charge is commonly recognized by advocates of free-- market economic theories. But each large firm will also act with full consideration of the needs that it has in common with the other large firms competing for the same customers. Each large firm will thus avoid significant price cutting, because price cutting would be prejudicial to common interest in a stable demand for products. Most economists do not see price-fixing when it occurs because they expect it to be brought about by a number of explicit agreements among large firms; it is not.Moreover those economists who argue that allowing the free market to operate without interference is the most efficient method of establishing prices have not considered the economies of non-socialist-countries other than the United States. These economies employ intentional price fixing, usually in an overt fashion. Formal price-fixing by cartel and informal price-fixing by agreements covering the members of an industry are commonplace. Were there something peculiarly efficient about the free market and inefficient about price-fixing, the countries that have avoided the first and used the second would have suffered drastically in their economic development. There is no indication that they have.Socialist industry also works within a framework of controlled prices. In the early 1970’s the Soviet Union began to give firms and industries some of the flexibility in adjusting prices that a more informal evolution has accorded the capitalist system. Economists in the United States have hailed the change as a return to the free market. But Soviet firms are no more subject to prices established by a free market over which they exercise little influence than are capitalist firms; rather, Soviet firms have been given the power to fix prices.50. The author’s attitude toward “Most economists” in the United States (para 1) can best be described as ____.51. It can be inferred from the author’s argument that a price fixed by the seller “seems pernicious” (para 1) because ____.52. The suggestion in the text that price fixing in industrialized societies is normal arises from the author’s statement that price-fixing is ____.53. According to the author, price fixing in non-socialist countries is often ____.

Apart from the Moon and occasional comets and asteroids, Venus is often our nearest neighbor. Its orbit brings it closer to Earth than any other planet—only 26 million miles away at certain times. Despite that proximity, for a long time it was generally termed “the planet of mystery.” This is because the atmosphere of Venus is so dense and so cloud-laded that its surface is permanently hidden from sight.The first attempt to learn more about Venus was to analyze its upper atmosphere using spectroscopic methods. In size and mass, Venus is almost the equal of Earth, and its gravitational field is only slightly weaker than ours, so that logically it might be expected to have the same kind of atmosphere—but this is emphatically not so. Scientists found that the main constituent of its atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Since this is a heavy gas that would be expected to sink, it was reasonable to assume that carbon dioxide made up most of the atmosphere down to ground level. Carbon dioxide acts in the manner of a greenhouse, trapping the Sun’s heat, so it followed that Venus was likely to be a very torrid sort of world.Yet opinions differed. According to one theory, the clouds contained a great deal of water. It was even claimed that the surface might be largely ocean covered, in which case: the atmosphere carbon dioxide would have fouled the water and produced seas of soda water. Another intriguing theory made Venus very similar to the Earth of over 200 million years ago. There would be marshes, luxuriant vegetation of the fern and horsetail variety, and primitive life-forms such as giant dragonflies. If so, then Venus might presumably evolve the same way Earth has done.In 1962 the American probe Mariner 2 bypassed Venus at less than 22,000 miles and gave us our first reliable information. The surface proved to be very hot indeed; we now know that the maximum temperature is almost 500°C. The atmosphere really is almost pure carbon dioxide, and those shining clouds are rich in sulfuric acid. All ideas of a pleasant, oceanic Venus had to be abandoned. In 1975 Venera 9, a Russian automatic lander, visited Venus and sent back pictures directly from the surface. The scene—a rocky, scorched landscape—could hardly be more hostile. Subsequent probes have confirmed this impression.Why is Venus so unlike Earth? The answer can only lie in its lesser distance from the Sun. It seems that in the early days of the solar system the Sun was less luminous than it is now, in which case Venus and Earth may have started to evolve along the same lines, but when the Sun became more powerful the whole situation changed. Earth, at 93 million miles, was just out of harm’s way, but Venus, at 67 million, was not. The water in oceans vaporized, the carbonates were driven out of the rocks, and in a relatively short time or the cosmic scale, Venus was transformed from a potentially life-bearing world into the inferno of today.25. The primary purpose of this passage is to ______.26. The statement “In size ... so” (bold in Paragraph 2) functions primarily to ______.27. The primary purpose of the third paragraph is to ______.28. In order for the hypothesis in “There would ... dragonflies” (bold in Paragraph 3) to be correct, which statement could NOT be true of conditions on Venus?29. The statement in “In 1962 … information” (bold in Paragraph 4) suggests that the ______.30. The tone of the statement in “The answer ... Sun” (bold in Paragraph 5) is best described as ______.

Employers need to better understand people who are disabled. Most of us take offence at the assumption that collecting Social Security Income can provide us everything we need. Unemployment is humiliating and awfully boring, and there’s no meaning there. Excluding someone because he or she has a disability that does not affect performance is equivalent to wrongs such as hiring based on race. Everyone deserves to have the opportunity to do a good job, and as a result have a sense of pride in being a part of society.

We rarely perceive more than a minute ______ of the sights and sounds that fall upon our sense organs; the great majority pass us by.