The math problem is ______ to work out.

he problem with Paul. D) Find Paul a study group.

此题为判断题(对，错)。

think it will take your mind off that math problem that you were sweating over for the last two hours.

M: That'll be great, but the opera is in what？ Italian, right？ I think I have a better chance of understanding a math problem.

Q: What does the man imply？

(14)

A．He doesn't want to go to the opera tonight.

B．He has a chance to have a break from the math problem.

C．He wants to improve his math grade by watching operas.

D．He'll meet the woman when he has finished the math problem.

听力原文：M: Ma, I can't finish the math homework, it's too difficult to do.

W: You know what to do if there's a problem？

Q: What does the woman mean？

(19)

A．The child should know how to solve the math problems.

B．There won't be any difficulty in the math homework.

C．She wants to help the child with the math homework.

D．She wants to find out about the math problems.

ve. But there're always students in her office.

W: I have her for an evening class. Why don't I ask her？

Q: What will the woman probably do？

(17)

A．Ask the professor in her office.

B．Answer the question for the man.

C．Ask the professor when she will be available.

D．Ask the professor to contact the man.

ropped it, and now the on button doesn’t light up．

W：Oh! That's OK．It hasn't been working right for some time now.

Q：What's the man's problem？

(14)

A．He lost a button at work.

B．He doesn't know where he put the calculator.

C．He thought he broke something the woman lent him.

D．He's not sure how to solve the math problem.

I dropped it, and now the ON-button doesn't light up.

W: Oh, that's OK. It hasn't been working right for some time now.

Q: What is the man's problem？

(14)

A．He doesn't know where he put the calculator.

B．He lost a button at work.

C．He's not sure how to solve the math problem.

D．He thinks he broke something the woman lent him.

ow the on-button doesn't light up.

W: Oh, that's okay, it hasn't been working right for some time now.

Q: What was the man's problem？

(14)

A．He lost a button at work.

B．He doesn't know where he put the calculator.

C．He thinks he broke something the woman lent him.

D．He's not sure how to solve the math problem.

What's a better teaching method？

Jim Munch's experience

LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician.

So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the "constructivist" or "inquiry" program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.

Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization.

"My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program," Jim said recently. "Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us with something to teach us."

The constructivist math

Such experiences and emotions have burst into public discussion and no small amount of rancor(怨恨) in the last eight months in Penfield. This community of 35 000 has become one of the most obvious fronts in the nationwide math wars, which have flared from California to Pittsburgh to the former District 2 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, pitting progressives against traditionalists, with nothing less than America's educational and economic competitiveness at stake.

In these places and others, groups of parents have condemned constructivist math for playing down such basic computational tools as borrowing, carrying, place value, algorithms, multiplication tables and long division, while often introducing calculators into the classroom as early as first or second grade. Such criticism has run headlong into the celebration of constructivism by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and such leading teacher-training institutions as the Bank Street College of Education.

The strife has taken on a particular intensity here in Penfield, perhaps, because the town includes an unusually large share of engineers and scientists, because of the proximity(接近) of companies like Xerox, Kodak and Bausch & Lomb. Skilled themselves in math, they have refused to accept the premise that innovation means improvement, and in their own households they have seen evidence to the contrary.

For Joe Hoover, the epiphany came two years ago when he took his daughter, Kathryn, then in sixth grade, to lunch at McDonald's and realized she could not compute the correct change for their meal from a ＄ 20 bill.

For Claudia Lioy, it was seeing her daughter, Iris, then in third grade, plodding through a multiplication problem by counting 23 groups of four apples. When Mrs. Lioy pleaded with Iris's teacher simply to show the class a times table, the teacher replied, "But that's drill-and-kill."

For Ben Lee, it was having his teenage daughter, Olivia trying to answer probability problems by a method called "guess and check"-- until he pulled out his own 10thgrade math book to instruct her about the appropriate formula.

"I don't mind having kids appreciate what they learn," said Mr. Lee, an engineer who now works as a purchasing agent for Kodak. "But it's crazy to make a kid spend a night trying to solve a problem with these rudimentary and feeble tools."

Requests for more traditional math

By last spring, these parents had discovered one another

A．Y

B．N

C．NG

a. It's the one【B1】the teacher standing in the schoolroom door【B2】goodbye to students for the summer and calling【B3】them, "By the way, we won World War II."

The problem with the joke, of course, is that it's【B4】funny. The recent surveys on【B5】illiteracy(无知) are beginning to numb(令人震惊): nearly one third of American 17-year-olds cannot even【B6】which countries the United States【B7】against in that war. One third have no【B8】when the Declaration of Independence was【B9】. One third thought Columbus reached the New World after 1750. Two thirds cannot correctly【B10】the Civil War between 1850 and 1900.【B11】when they get the answers right, some are【B12】guessing.

Unlike math or science, ignorance of history cannot be【B13】connected to loss of international【B14】. But it does affect our future【B15】a democratic nation and as individuals. The【B16】news is that there is growing agreement【B17】what is wrong with the【B18】of history and what needs to be【B19】to fix it. The steps are tentative(尝试性的)【B20】yet to be felt in most classrooms.

【B1】

A．about

B．in

C．for

D．by

听力原文：M: Amy, are you interested in joining us for the party this weekend？

W: I'd love to. (19)But I have tutoring then.

M: Tutoring？ I can hardly imagine that you need a help with a class.

W: (19) I mean I'm tutoring someone else, I go downtown to tutor a few students at the high school.

M: I find that hard to believe. And what subject do you tutor, math or something else？

W: Right. You see, the city is trying to raise the standards for its math classes. (20)The problem is, a lot of the kids are far behind when they get to junior high school.

M: Yeah, I have read such report in the newspaper. But does the time schedule conflict with your own classes？

W: (21)I only have three students for forty minutes each weekend, Most of the tutors there are students at the university, so our classes aren't over there. And we are volunteers, so the program doesn't cost a lot and the city education department likes us. M: Can you afford to take that much time away from your own studying？

W: Some weeks is kind of hard especially when the examination is approaching. But anyway I may as well get used to teaching easy materials to the students, so as to get the practical experience.

M: And it must be nice to help people.

W: Definitely, Forty minutes a week isn’t much time, (22)but all the three of my students have improved in the months we’ve worked together, It’s really inspiring.

(23)

A．She will take some lessons.

B．She will travel in the downtown.

C．She win attend the party.

D．She will do the teaching job.

memorial meetings throughout the year. A new Einstein will emerge, scientists say. But it may take a long time. After all, more than 200 years separated Einstein from his nearest rival, Isaac Newton.

Many physicists say the next Einstein hasn't been born yet, or is a baby now. That's because the quest for a unified theory that would account for all the forces of nature has pushed current mathematics to its limits. New math must be created before the problem can be solved. But researchers say there are many other factors working against another Einstein emerging anytime soon.

For one thing, physics is a much different field today. In Einstein's day, there were only a few thousand physicists worldwide, and the theoreticians who could intellectually rival Einstein probably would fit into a streetcar with seats to spare.

Education is different, too. One crucial aspect of Einstein's training that is overlooked is the years of philosophy he read as a teenager—Kant, Schopenhauer and Spinoza, among others. It taught him how to think independently and abstractly about space and time, and it wasn't long before he became a philosopher himself.

"The independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan(工匠) or specialist and a real seeker after truth, " Einstein wrote in 1944.

And he was an accomplished musician. The interplay between music and math is well-known. Einstein would furiously play his violin as a way to think through a knotty physics problem.

Today, universities have produced millions of physicists. There aren't many jobs in science for them, so they go to Wall Street and Silicon Valley to apply their analytical skills to more practical—and rewarding—efforts.

"Maybe there is an Einstein out there today, " said Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, "but it would be a lot harder for him to be heard. "

Especially considering what Einstein was proposing.

"The actual fabric of space and time curving？ My God, what an idea!" Greene said at a recent gathering at the Aspen Institute. "It takes a certain type of person who will bang his head against the wall because you believe you'll find the solution. "

Perhaps the best examples are the five scientific papers Einstein wrote in his "miracle year" of 1905. These "thought experiments" were pages of calculations signed and submitted to the prestigious journal Annalen der Physik by a virtual unknown. There were no footnotes or citations.

What might happen to such a submission today？

"We all get papers like those in the mail, " Greene said. "We put them in the junk file. "

What do scientists seem to agree upon judging from the first two paragraphs？

A．Einstein pushed mathematics almost to its limits.

B．It will take another Einstein to build a unified theory.

C．No physicist is likely to surpass Einstein in the next 200 years.

D．It will be some time before a new Einstein emerges.