Would you jump off the Great Wall of China for 300 pounds a day? A stunt person is a man or woman who does all the dangerous bits of acting work in films or on TV. This can be anything from a simple fall into a swimming pool, or walking off the top of a tall building. It sounds like a job that you would have to be made to try, but there are actually lots of people who want to do it. Sarah France, twenty-four, is one of Britain's sixteen professional stunt women ---there are one hundred and sixty stunt men in the country. We asked Sarah how she came to be a stunt woman. "When I was young I was trained to be a dancer, and for seven years after school I was hardly out of work. A dancer's life is pretty short, though, and my father suggested I should think about doing stunt work after I'd given up dancing. I thought about it for the next two years and decided to have a go. For six months, I worked really hard every day. I had to learn different skills---swimming, jumping, horse -riding, etc." Sarah finished the course in just five months and applied to the office which decides whether you're accepted as a professional stunt person or not. Two weeks after she was accepted, Sarah was throwing off the Great Wall of China in Superman IV. "I was very lucky to get work so quickly. I had a small part, playing a traveler who fell off the Wall after an earthquake. The traveler's life was saved by Superman, of course! Actually, I fell forty-five feet into a pile of cardboard boxes! You can't use anything softer than that or you will be brought back into view of the cinema. Instead you just have to learn to fall properly. It's quite dangerous but I enjoy it." Soon after Sarah got her new job as a stunt person, _ . A) an earthquake took place near the Great Wall B) she fell off the Great Wall and hurt herself C) she was asked to act in Superman IV D) she learned how to fall properly
C
Reading is not the only way to gain knowledge of the work in the past. There is another large reservoir which may be called experience, and the college students will find that every craftsman has something he can teach and will generally teach gladly to any college student who does not look down upon them. The information from them differs from that in textbooks and papers chiefly in that its theoretical part -- the explanations of why things happen -- is frequently quite fantastic . But the demonstration and report of what happens, and how it happens are correct even if the reports are in completely unscientific terms. Presently the college students will learn, in this case also, what to accept and what to reject. One important thing for a college student to remember is that if Aristotle could talk to the fisherman, so can he. Another source of knowledge is the vast store of traditional practices handed down from father to son , or mother to daughter, of old country customs ,of folklore . All this is very difficult for a college student to examine, for much knowledge and personal experience is needed here to separate good plants from wild grass.The college students should learn to realize and remember how much of real value science has found in _ and how often scientific discoveries of what had existed in this area long age. The main idea of this passage is about _ . A) what to learn from the parents B) how to gain knowledge C) why to learn from craftsman D) how to deal with experience
B
Q: In times of economic crisis. Americans turn to their families for support. If the Great Depression is any guide, we may see a drop in our skyhigh divorce rate. But this won't necessarily represent. an increase in happy marriages. In the long run, the Depression weakened American families, and the current crisis will probably do the same. We tend to think of the Depression as a time when families pulled together to survive huge job losses, By 1932. when nearly one-quarter of the workforce was unemployed, the divorce rate had declined by around 25% from 1929 But this doesn't mean people were suddenly happier with their marriages. Rather, with incomes decreasing and insecure jobs, unhappy couples often couldn't afford to divorce. They feared neither spouse could manage alone. Today, given the job losses of the past year, fewer unhappy couples will risk starting separate households, Furthermore, the housing market meltdown will make it more difficult for them to finance their separations by selling their homes. After financial disasters family members also tend to do whatever they can to help each other and their communities, A 1940 book. The Unemployed Man and His Family, described a family in which the husband initially reacted to losing his job "with tireless search for work."He was always active, looking for odd jobs to do. The problem is that such an impulse is hard to sustain Across the country, many similar families were unable to maintain the initial boost in morale . For some, the hardships of life without steady work eventually overwhelmed their attempts to keep their families together. The divorce rate rose again during the rest of the decade as the recovery took hold. Millions of American families may now be in the initial stage of their responses to the current crisis, working together and supporting one another through the early months of unemployment. Today's economic crisis could well generate a similar number of couples whose relationships have been irreparably ruined. So it's only when the... In the initial stage, the current economic crisis is likely to _ . A) tear many troubled families apart B) contribute to enduring family ties C) bring about a drop in the divorce rate D) cause a lot of conflicts in the family
A: C
Q: Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children's party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. We have run our economies, he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world's resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship--a closed system, alone in space, carrying limited supplies. We need, said Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. "Ecological economists", as they call themselves, want to revolutionise its aims and assumptions. What do they say--and will their ideas achieve lift-off? To its advocators, ecological economics is neither ecology nor economics, but a mix of both. Their starting point is to recognise that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists. There are two ways our economies can grow, ecological economists point out: through technological change, or through more intensive use of resources. Only the former, they say, is worth having. They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource exhaustion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. In its place they advocate moreholistic approaches, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a composite index that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer. The solution, says Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist and eco-guru, is a "steady-state" economy, where the use of... According to ecological economists, what is the mistake existing in conventional textbooks? A) Ecology and economics are not mixed together B) Human economy isn't recognized as parts of nature C) The environment has both resources and wastes D) Diagrams connect firms, households and the government
A: B