While traveling in America, she ______ herself of the opportunity to learn English.
A.ushered B.utilized C.used D.availed
While traveling in America, she ______ herself of the opportunity to learn English.
Nuclear power’s danger to health, safety, and even life itself can be summed up in one word: radiation.Nuclear radiation has a certain mystery about it, partly because it cannot be detected by human senses. It can't be seen or heard, or touched or tasted, even though it may be all around us. There are other things like that. For example, radio waves are all around us but we can’t detect them, sense them without a radio receiver. Similarly, we can’t sense radioactivity without a radiation detector. But unlike common radio waves, nuclear radiation is not harmless to human beings and other living things.At very high levels, radiation can kill an animal or human being outright by killing masses of cells in vital organs; but even the lowest levels can do serious damage. There is no level of radiation that is completely safe. If the radiation does not hit anything important, the damage may not be significant. This is the case when only a few cells are hit. And if they are killed outright, your body will replace the dead cells with healthy ones. But if the few cells are only damaged, and if they reproduce themselves, you may be in trouble. They reproduce themselves in a deformed way. They can grow into cancer. Sometimes this does not show up for many years.This is another reason for some of the mystery about nuclear radiation. Serious damage can be done without the victim being aware at the time that damage has occurred. A person can be irradiated and feel fine. Then die of cancer in five, ten, or twenty years later as a result. Or a child can be born weak or liable to serious illness as a result of radiation absorbed by its grandparents.Radiation can hurt us. We must know the truth.1.According to the passage, the danger of nuclear power lies in( ).2.Radiation can cause serious consequences even at the lowest level ( ).3.Radiation can hurt us in the way that it can ( ).4.Which of the following can be best inferred from the passage?
It was obvious that he had been drinking far too much from the way he came( )down the street.
By the time she leaves the stage next month, she( )for sixty years.
Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia(痴呆)in old age.This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs(痴呆)the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function. A command system directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind—like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.Why does the tussle(搏斗)between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed(磨炼)by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often—you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompea Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age, and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life.1.According to the passage, the more recent and old views of bilingualism differ mainly in( ).2.The fact that interference is now seen as a blessing in disguise means that ( ).3.What is the role of Paragraph Four in relation to Paragraph Three?4.Which of the following can account for better performance of bilinguals in doing non-inhibition tasks?5.What is the main theme of the passage?
Unfortunately, his damaging attacks on the ramifications of the economic policy have been( )by his wholehearted acceptance of that policy’s underlying assumptions.