2015考研英语作文素材精选 (五)
考研英语作文是一个考察综合运用语言的部分，需要同学们运用逻辑思维下笔成文，因此，考前看一些意义深远、质量好的文章很有必要。以下是2015考研英语作文备考素材精选，请作参考。2015考研英语作文素材精选 (五)
17.Evolution of sleep
Sleep is very ancient. In the electroencephalographic sense we share it
with all the primates and almost all the other mammals and birds: it may extend
back as far as the reptiles.
There is some evidence that the two types of sleep, dreaming and dreamless,
depend on the life-style of the animal, and that predators are statistically
much more likely to dream than prey, which are in turn much more likely to
experience dreamless sleep. In dream sleep, the animal is powerfully immobilized
and remarkably unresponsive to external stimuli. Dreamless sleep is much
shallower, and we have all witnessed cats or dogs cocking their ears to a sound
when apparently fast asleep. The fact that deep dream sleep is rare among pray
today seems clearly to be a product of natural selection, and it makes sense
that today, when sleep is highly evolved, the stupid animals are less frequently
immobilized by deep sleep than the smart ones. But why should they sleep deeply
at all? Why should a state of such deep immobilization ever have evolved?
Perhaps one useful hint about the original function of sleep is to be found
in the fact that dolphins and whales and aquatic mammals in genera seem to sleep
very little. There is, by and large, no place to hide in the ocean. Could it be
that, rather than increasing an animal's vulnerability, the University of
Florida and Ray Meddis of London University have suggested this to be the case.
It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quite on their own
initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm
of sleep. The point seems particularly clear for the young of predatory animals.
This is an interesting notion and probably at least partly true.
18.Modern American Universities
Before the 1850's, the United States had a number of small colleges, most
of them dating from colonial days. They were small, church connected
institutions whose primary concern was to shape the moral character of their
students.
Throughout Europe, institutions of higher learning had developed, bearing
the ancient name of university. In German university was concerned primarily
with creating and spreading knowledge, not morals. Between mid-century and the
end of the 1800's, more than nine thousand young Americans, dissatisfied with
their training at home, went to Germany for advanced study. Some of them return
to become presidents of venerable colleges-----Harvard, Yale, Columbia---and
transform them into modern universities. The new presidents broke all ties with
the churches and brought in a new kind of faculty. Professors were hired for
their knowledge of a subject, not because they were of the proper faith and had
a strong arm for disciplining students. The new principle was that a university
was to create knowledge as well as pass it on, and this called for a faculty
composed of teacher-scholars. Drilling and learning by rote were replaced by the
German method of lecturing, in which the professor's own research was presented
in class. Graduate training leading to the Ph.D., an ancient German degree
signifying the highest level of advanced scholarly attainment, was introduced.
With the establishment of the seminar system, graduate student learned to
question, analyze, and conduct their own research.
At the same time, the new university greatly expanded in size and course
offerings, breaking completely out of the old, constricted curriculum of
mathematics, classics, rhetoric, and music. The president of Harvard pioneered
the elective system, by which students were able to choose their own course of
study. The notion of major fields of study emerged. The new goal was to make the
university relevant to the real pursuits of the world. Paying close heed to the
practical needs of society, the new universities trained men and women to work
at its tasks, with engineering students being the most characteristic of the new
regime. Students were also trained as economists, architects, agriculturalists,
social welfare workers, and teachers.
19.children's numerical skills
people appear to born to compute. The numerical skills of children develop
so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal clock of
mathematical maturity guiding their growth. Not long after learning to walk and
talk, they can set the table with impress accuracy---one knife, one spoon, one
fork, for each of the five chairs. Soon they are capable of nothing that they
have placed five knives, spoons and forks on the table and, a bit later, that
this amounts to fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition,
they move on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a
child were secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later,
he or she could enter a second enter a second-grade mathematics class without
any serious problems of intellectual adjustment.
Of course, the truth is not so simple. This century, the work of cognitive
psychologists has illuminated the subtle forms of daily learning on which
intellectual progress depends. Children were observed as they slowly
grasped-----or, as the case might be, bumped into-----concepts that adults take
for quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short glass into a tall thin
one. Psychologists have since demonstrated that young children, asked to count
the pencils in a pile, readily report the number of blue or red pencils, but
must be coaxed into finding the total. Such studies have suggested that the
rudiments of mathematics are mastered gradually, and with effort. They have also
suggested that the very concept of abstract numbers------the idea of a
oneness,
a twoness, a threeness that applies to any class of objects and is a
prerequisite for doing anything more mathematically demanding than setting a
table-----is itself far from innate
20 The Historical Significance of American Revolution
The ways of history are so intricate and the motivations of human actions
so complex that it is always hazardous to attempt to represent events covering a
number of years, a multiplicity of persons, and distant localities as the
expression of one intellectual or social movement; yet the historical process
which culminated in the ascent of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency can be
regarded as the outstanding example not only of the birth of a new way of life
but of nationalism as a new way of life. The American Revolution represents the
link between the seventeenth century, in which modern England became conscious
of itself, and the awakening of modern Europe at the end of the eighteenth
century. It may seem strange that the march of history should have had to cross
the Atlantic Ocean, but only in the North American colonies could a struggle for
civic liberty lead also to the foundation of a new nation. Here, in the popular
rising against a "tyrannical" government, the fruits were more than the securing
of a freer constitution. They included the growth of a nation born in liberty by
the will of the people, not from the roots of common descent, a geographic
entity, or the ambitions of king or dynasty. With the American nation, for the
first time, a nation was born, not in the dim past of history but before the
eyes of the whole world.
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