【正文】 re in charge, and we need to do the same. We can literally 39。s a miracle material. Indeed, more than a ton “ 英語客棧 ” 網(wǎng)址： 友情提供：英語客棧 第 7 頁 共 14 頁 of concrete is produced each year for every man, woman and child on Earth. Yet concrete is generally ignored outside the engineering world, a victim of its own ubiquity and the industry39。 archives (B) the public money should be used to retain the manuscripts of these writers (C) the British have also bought these artifacts from artists from other countries (D) this kind of trading is quite normal and should not be surprising 7. When the former culture secretary Smith said that It won39。m afraid, the reality of the world, he said. We have many artifacts in the UK that belong to other cultures. The campaign argues, however, that valuable research sources are being lost. Foreign institutions sometimes charge for access to the material and, as the authors retain copyright, the papers cannot be made available on the inter. This is about our cultural heritage as well as the obvious research opportunities, said Motion, whose campaign group includes Michael Hoh39。s l__aw Nuclear cont_______roversy 1. The phrase watered down in the sentence The statutory requirement for pupils learn a science subject will be watered down under a new curriculum introduced next year. (para. 1) can best be replaced by which of the following? (A) removed pletely (B) reduced much in force (C) revised greatly (D) reinforced to a certain extent 2. Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage? (A) The government had to use financial incentives to attract more science teachers. (B) Some of the secondary school science teachers are not adequately qualified. “ 英語客棧 ” 網(wǎng)址： 友情提供：英語客棧 第 5 頁 共 14 頁 (C) The new science GCSE will include the benefits and risks of contemporary scientific developments. (D) A harder science GCSE will also be introduced as a pulsory course. 3. What is Professor Blakemore39。s College London, who told ministers that science lessons were often dull and boring and required pupils to recall too many facts. Their report said: Contemporary analyses of the labour market suggest that our future society will need a larger number of individuals with a broader understanding of science both for their work and to enable them to participate as citizens in a democratic society. However, Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, warned that reducing the hard science taught in schools would create problems. I can understand the government39。 archives being sold to universities in America. They are leading a 15strong group of eminent literary figures demanding tax breaks, government funding and lottery cash to help British institutions match the bids of their rich American rivals. The campaign es amid fears that the papers of Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, may go abroad. All three are understood to have been approached recently by agents acting for institutions in America. In recent years British authors whose papers have been sold abroad include the novelists Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes and Malcolm Bradbury and the playwrights David Hare and Tom Stoddard. The works of JM Barrie, the writer of Peter Pan, Graham Greene, DH Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh are already held abroad. In 1997, a year before his death, Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate, sold his archive for about ~500,000 to Emory University 39。 archives 39。 manuscripts is on the rise. (B) The British literary people are peting with their American rivals. (C) American institutions are buying British writers39。s creation does not require reinforcement, a property shared by other concretes that use chemical additives called plasticizers to reduce the amount of water in their position. Using less water makes concrete stronger, but until the development of plasticizers, it also made concrete sticky, dry, and hard to handle, says Christian Meyer, a civil engineering professor at Columbia University. The engineer would specify a certain strength, a certain amount of waterand as soon as a supervisor turned his back, in would go a bucket of water, says Dr. Meyer of the time before plasticizers. Making stronger concretes, says Li, allows less to be used, reducing waste and giving architects more freedom. You can have such futuristic designs if you don39。 worth on any subject, high or low. But if everyone is a critic, is that still criticism? Or are we heading toward the end of criticism7 If all opinions are equally valid, there is no need for experts. Democracy works in life, but art is undemocratic. The result of this ultimately meaningless barrage is that more and more we are living in a profoundlyor shallowlyuncritical age. A critic, as T. S. Eliot famously observed, must by very intelligent. Now, can anybody assume that the invasion of cyberspace by opinion upon opinion is proof of great intelligence and constitutes informed criticism rather than uniformed artistic chaos2 Of course, like any selfrespecting critic, 1 have always encouraged my readers to think for themselves. They were to consider my positive or negative assessments, which i always tried to explain, a challenge to think along with me: here is my reasoning, follow it, then agree or disagree as you see fit. In an uncritical age, every pseudonymous chatroom chatterbox provides a snappy, selfconfident judgment, without the process of arriving at it being clear to anyone, including the chatterer. Blogs, too, tend to be invitations to leap before a second look. Do the impassioned ramblings fed into a hungry blogosphere represent responses from anyone other