Almost all of us have been there: A sense of uneasiness strikes us when we see the battery running low on the smartphone. While today's smartphones enable us to surf the Internet, take pictures and play music, their limited, sometimes annoyingly short battery life has started to make people full of memories of early models. "My favorite phone of all time was a silver Nokia 6310i from the early 2000s. It may be primitive by today's standards, but it could run for 17 days on a single charge," wrote Daily Mail columnist David Derbyshire. But scientists spend no time thinking about the past. They have built an aluminium battery which could be a cheap, fast-charging alternative to current designs. You can squeeze, and practically bend it in half without breaking the packet. It is more environmentally friendly than alkaline batteries, and more safe than lithium batteries - it won't catch fire "even if you drill through it", as Hongjie Dai of Stanford University told The Telegraph. The battery is the work of a team led by Dai. And the best part is that it has a recharge time of around one minute. However, at present, the only problem is that it produces just half the voltage of a typical lithium battery. But Dai explained they were setting about changing the voltage and energy density ". "Our battery has everything else you'd dream that a battery should have. I see this as a new battery in its early days," he told The Telegraph. The passage suggests that _ . A) the aluminium battery catches fire easily if drilled B) the aluminium battery still needs improving before it can be widely used C) the aluminium battery is larger in size than alkaline batteries D) scientists find it a real challenge to change the voltage of the aluminium battery
B

The researchers, led by Hwang Woo-suk, insist they cloned an Afghan hound, only to help investigate human disease, including the possibility of cloning stem cells for treatment purposes. But others immediately renewed calls for a global ban on human reproductive cloning before the technology moves any farther. "Successful cloning of an increasing number of species confirms the general impression that it would be possible to clone any species of mammals, including humans," said Ian Wilmut, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh who produced the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, from an adult cell nearly a decade ago. Researchers have since cloned cats, goats, cows, mice, pigs, rabbits, horses, deer, mules and gaur, a large wild ox of Southeast Asia. So far, efforts to clone a monkey or another primate with the same techniques have failed. Uncertainties about the health and life span of cloned animals continue to exsist; Dolly died at a young age in 2003 after developing cancer and arthritis. Wilmut and others _ Hwang's achievement, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. But they said politicians and scientists must face the larger issue -- how to go on with the research without crossing the moral boundary of copying human life in the lab. "The ability to use the technology is hopeful," said Robert Schenken, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "However, the paper also points out that in dogs as in most species, cloning for reproductive purposes is unsafe." The cloned puppy was the lone success from more than 100 dogs implanted with more than 1,000 cloned embryos. In a news conference in Seoul, the cloning team also condemned the reproductive cloning of humans as "unsafe and inefficient." Human reproductive cloning already is banned in South Korea. Other nations, including the United States, are divided on whether to ban just human cloning or cloning of all kinds, including the production of stem cells. The cloning of human beings is banned in _ . A) South Korea B) the United States C) both South Korea and the United States D) neither South Korea nor the United States
A

If you know exactly what you want, the best route to a job is to get specialized training.A recent survey shows that companies like graduates in such fields as business and health care who can go to work immediately with very little on-the-job training. That's especially true of booming fields that are challenging for workers.At Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, for example, bachelor's degree graduates get an average of four or five job offers with salaries ranging from the high teens to the low 20s and plenty of chances for rapid advancement.Large companies, especially, like a background of formal education coupled with work experience. But in the long run, too much specialization doesn't pay off.Business, which has been flooded with MBAs, no longer considers the degree an automatic stamp of approval.The MBA may open doors and command a higher salary initially, _ . As further evidence of the erosion of corporate faith in specialized degrees, Michigan State's Scheetz cites a pattern in corporate hiring practices.Although companies tend to take on specialists as new hires, they often seek out generalists for middle and upper-level management."They want someone who isn't constrained by nuts and bolts to look at the big picture, " says Scheetz. Time and again labor-market analysts mention a need for talents that liberal-arts majors are assumed to have:writing and communication skills, organizational skills, open-mindedness and adaptability, and the ability to analyze and solve problems.David Birch claims he does not hire anybody with an MBA or an engineering degree, "I hire only liberal-arts people because they have a less-than-canned way of doing things, " says Birch.Liberal-arts means an academically thorough and strict program that includes literature, history, mathematics, economics, science, human behavior-plus a computer course or two.With that under your belt, you can feel free to specialize."A liberal-arts degree coupled with an MBA or some other technical training is a very good combination in... By saying "...but the impact of a degree washes out after five years"(Line 5, Para.3), the author means _ . A) most MBA programs fail to provide students with a solid foundation B) an MBA degree does not help promotion to managerial positions C) MBA programs will not be as popular in five years' time as they are now D) in five people will forget about the degree the MBA graduates have got
B