2023年考研英语一真题答案

The weather in Texas may have cooled since the recent extreme heat, but the temperature will be high at the State Board of Education meeting in Austin this month as officials debate how climate change is taught in Texas schools.

Pat Hardy, who sympathises with the views of the energy sector, is resisting proposed changes to science standards for pre-teen pupils. These would emphasise the primacy of human activity in recent climate change and encourage discussion of mitigation measures.

Most scientists and experts sharply dispute Hardy's views. "They casually dismiss the career work of scholars and scientists as just another misguided opinion. " says Dan Quinn, senior communications strategist at the Texas Freedom Network, a non-profit group that monitors public education. "What millions of Texas kids learn in their public schools is determined too often by the political ideology of partisan board members, rather than facts and sound scholarship. "

Such debates reflect fierce discussions across the US and around the world, as researchers, policymakers, teachers and students step up demands for a greater focus on teaching about the facts of climate change in schools.

A study last year by the National Center for Science Education, a non-profit group of scientists and teachers, looking at how state public schools across the country address climate change in science classes, gave barely half of US states a grade B + or higher. Among the 10 worst performers were some of the most populous states, including Texas, which was given the lowest grade ( F) and has a disproportionate influence because its textbooks are widely sold elsewhere.

Glenn Branch, the centre's deputy director, cautions that setting state-level science standards is only one limited benchmark in a country that decentralises decisions to local school boards. Even if a state is considered a high performer in its science standards, "that does not mean it will be taught" , he says.

Another issue is that, while climate change is well integrated into some subjects and at some ages—such as earth and space sciences in high schools—it is not as well represented in curricula for younger children and in subjects that are more widely taught, such as biology and chemistry. It is also less prominent in many social studies courses.

Branch points out that, even if a growing number of official guidelines and textbooks reflect scientific consensus on climate change, unofficial educational materials that convey more slanted perspectives are being distributed to teachers. They include materials sponsored by libertarian think-tanks and energy industry associations.

Communities throughout New England have been attempting to regulate short-term rentals since sites like Airbnb took off in the 2010s. Now, with record-high home prices and historically low inventory, there's an increased urgency in such regulation, particularly among those who worry that developers will come in and buy up swaths of housing to flip for a fortune on the short-term rental market.

In New Hampshire, where the rental vacancy rate has dropped below 1 percent, housing advocates fear unchecked short-term rentals will put further pressure on an already strained market. The state Legislature recently · voted against a bill that would've made it illegal for towns to create legislation restricting short-term rentals.

"We are at a crisis level on the supply of rental housing, " said Nick Taylor, executive director of the Workforce Housing Coalition of the Greater Seacoast. Without enough affordable housing in southern New Hampshire towns, "employers are having a hard time attracting employees, and workers are having a hard time finding a place to live, " Taylor said.

However, short-term rentals also provide housing for tourists, pointed out Ryan Castle, CEO of a local association of realtor. "A lot of workers are servicing the tourist industry, and the tourism industry is serviced by those people coming in short term, " Castle said, "and so it's a cyclical effect. "

Short-term rentals themselves are not the crux of the issue, said Keren Hom, an expert on affordable housing policy. "I think individuals being able to rent out their second home is a good thing. If it's their vacation home anyway, and it's just empty, why can't you make money off it?" Hom said. Issues arise, however, when developers attempt to create large-scale short-term rental facilities-de facto hotels--to bypass taxes and regulations. " I think the question is, shouldn't a developer who's really building a hotel, but disguising it as not a hotel, be treated and taxed and regulated like a hotel?" Hom said.

At the end of 2018, Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts signed a bill to rein in those potential investor-buyers. The bill requires every rental host to register with the state , mandates they carry insurance, and opens the potential for local taxes on top of a new state levy. Boston took things even further, requiring renters to register with the city's Inspectional Services Department.

Hom said similar registration requirements could benefit struggling cities and towns, but "if we want to make a change in the housing market, the main one is we have to build a lot more. "

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If you're heading for your nearest branch of Waterstones, the biggest book retailer in the UK, in search of the Duchess of Sussex's new children's book The Bench, you might have to be· prepared to hunt around a bit; the same may be true of The President's Daughter, the new thriller by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. Both of these books are published next week by Penguin Random House ( PRH) , a company currently involved in a stand-off with Waterstones.

The problem began late last year, when PRH confirmed that it had introduced a credit limit 1ith Waterstones " at a very significant level". The trade magazine The Bookseller reported that Waterstones branch managers were being told to remove PRH books from prominent areas such as tables, display spaces and windows, and were " quietly retiring them to their relevant sections".

PRH declined to comment on the issue, but a spokesperson for Waterstones told me : " Waterstones are currently operating with reduced credit terms from PRH, the only publisher in the UK to place any limitations on our ability to trade. We are not boycotting PRH titles but we are doing our utmost to ensure that availability for customers remains good despite the lower overall levels of stock. We are hopeful with our shops now open again that normality will return and that we will be allowed to buy appropriately. Certainly, our shops are exceptionally busy. The sales for our May Books of the Month surpassed any month since 2018. "

In the meantime, PRH authors have been the losers. Big-name PRH authors may suffer a bit, but it's those mid-list authors, who normally rely on Waterstones staff's passion for promoting books by lesser-known writers, who will be praying for an end to the dispute.

It comes at a time . when authors are already worried about the consequences of the proposed merger between PRH and another big publisher, Simon & Schuster-the reduction in the number of unaligned UK publishers is likely to lead to fewer bidding wars,, lower advances, and more conformity in . terms of what is published.

"This is all part of a wider change towards concentration of power and cartels. Literary agencies are getting bigger to have the clout to negotiate better terms with publishers, publishers consolidating to deal with Amazon, " . says Lownie. "The publishing industry talks about diversity in terms of authors and staff but it also needs a plurality of ways of delivering intellectual contact, choice and different voices. After all, many of the most interesting books in recent years have come from small publishers. "

We shall see whether that plurality is a casualty of the current need among publishers to be big enough to take on all-comers.

Scientific papers are the recordkeepers of progress in research. Each year researchers publish millions of papers in more than 30, 000 journals. The scientific community measures the quality of those papers in a number of ways, including the perceived quality of the journal ( as reflected by the title's impact factor) and the number of citations a specific paper accumulates. The careers of scientists and the reputation of their institutions depend on the number and prestige of the papers they produce, but even more so on the citations attracted by these papers.

Citation cartels, where journals, authors, and institutions conspire to inflate citation numbers, have existed for a long time. In 2016 , researchers developed an algorithm to recognize suspicious citation patterns, including groups of authors that disproportionately cite one another and groups of journals that cite each other frequently to increase the impact factors of their publications. Recently, another expression of this predatory behavior has emerged: so-called support service consultancies that provide language and other editorial support to individual authors and to journals sometimes advise contributors to add a number of citations to their articles.

The advent of electronic publishing and authors' need to find outlets for their papers resulted in thousands of new journals. The birth of predatory journals wasn't far behind. These journals can act as milk cows where every single article in an issue may cite a specific paper or a series of papers. In some instances, there is absolutely no relationship between the content of the article and the citations. The peculiar part is that the journal that the editor is supposedly working for is not profiting at all-it is just providing citations to other journals. Such practices can lead an article to accrue more than 150 citations in the same year that it was published.

How insidious is this type of citation manipulation? In one example, an individual-acting as author, editor, and consultant-was able to use at least 15 journals as citation providers to articles published by five scientists at three universities. The problem is rampant in Scopus, a citation database, which includes a high number of the new "international" journals. In fact, a listing in Scopus seems to be a criterion to be targeted in this type of citation manipulation.

Scopus itself has all the data necessary to detect this malpractice. Red flags include a large number of citations to an article within the first year. And for authors who wish to steer clear of citation cartel activities: when an editor, a reviewer, or a support service asks you to add inappropriate references, do not oblige and do report the request to the journal.