Before it could be resolved through a new centralization of dynastic power under a new mandate, the intellectual crisis of the Confucian beliefs brought on by the impact of the West undermined the social order itself, which was made more vulnerable by the（ ）of its political institutions.
Passage One
Questions 22 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.
Scar Jo is not the first American to convey the impression that you can get by in Paris without speaking French; David Sedaris found plenty of material writing about his dread of learning French when he lived in Paris. He avoided the challenge largely by hiding away all day in theaters, watching English-language films. Director Wes Anderson loves his place in Paris, but freely admits he doesn’t speak the language at least not well enough to understand queries at press conferences. Hence, the question: Can you actually live in Paris without speaking French?As someone married to a Frenchman, with whom I live in Paris a few months of every year, I’ll offer my quick answer: Yes. But if you can’t really talk to Parisians, you will never hit the beautiful, thoughtful, gentle sweet soft spot that lies behind their French shyness and lack of confidence—which presents itself as coldness or crankiness. Finding that sweet spot, via hours chatting with them in cafes and bars, allowed me to love Parisians after a long period of finding them completely impossible. If you are going to learn, the only way to go is total immersion. So:1. Take lessons or hire a tutor to sit in a cafe and speak French with you as often as you can afford. (And given the number of well-educated, unemployed Paris youth seeking work, it’s not that expensive.)2. Insist that your French friends speak only French with you. This is painful and will send you home at the end of the day with an aching head. But you’ll also soon realize just how different everyday French is from the stilted, outdated French you learned in school. Only very formal or written cases call for beginning questions with “Est-ce que...” or for using the nous form for us anymore. And lest you take offense when a Parisian replies to your French with her English, remember—it’s her chance to show off and practice her ESL. Parisians want you to know that they are far more likely to speak good English than French people outside of Paris, whose English mastery embarrassingly falls behind not just Northern Europe but Eastern Europe, and whose confidence levels about speaking English, accordingly, are also low.Also, don’t take offense if someone seems to be almost daring you to speak French. Says my friend Cindra Feuer, who has been living on and off in Paris for nearly two years with her French girlfriend: Her father speaks good English, but he always talks to me in French. I thought it was a challenge until my girlfriend told me that he was just insecure about speaking less than perfect English around me. And therein lies a big difference between Parisians and Americans, and our schooling systems. We were schooled and we live in a culture where it’s okay to stumble, to try and fail, to be less than perfect. The old, rote, didactic, shame-based French schooling system dies hard. French people are often afraid to speak English unless they can feel assured it’s impeccable. You, however, should cast shame aside. And if you don’t have time for a tutor, here’s a quick guide on how to fake it.5. According to the author, if one can’t really talk to Parisians, he will ________.6. Parisians like replying to others’ French with their English because ________.7. What does the author say about Parisians when compared with Americans?8. What is the author going to write about at the end of the passage?
The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologists long regarded it as an example of adaptation by natural selection, but for physicists it bordered on the miraculous.Newton’s laws of motion assume that the total amount of spin of a body cannot change unless an external torque speeds it up or slow it down. If a cat has no spin when it is released and experiences no external torque, it ought not to be able to twist around as it falls.In the speed of its execution, the righting of a tumbling cat resembles a magician’s trick. The gyrations of the cat in midair are too fast for the human eye to follow, so the process is obscured. Either the eye must be speeded up, or the cat’s fall slowed down for the phenomenon to be observed. A century ago the former was accomplished by means of high-speed photography using equipment now available in any pharmacy.But in the nineteenth century the capture on film of a falling cat constituted a scientific experiment. The experiment was described in a paper presented to the Paris Academy in 1894. Two sequences of twenty photographs each, one from the side and one from behind, show a white cat in the act of righting itself. Grainy and quaint though they are, the photos show that the cat was dropped upside down with no initial spin, and still landed on its feet. Careful analysis of the photos reveals the secret: As the cat rotates the front of its body clockwise, the rear and tail twist counterclockwise, so that the total spin remains zero, in perfect accord with Newton’s laws. Halfway down, the cat pulls in its legs before reversing its twist and then extends them again, with the desired end result.The explanation was that while nobody can acquire spin without torque, a flexible one can readily change its orientation, or phase. Cats know this instinctively, but scientists could not be sure how it happened until they increased the speed of their perceptions a thousand fold.
In ______ times, human beings did not travel for pleasure, but to find a more favorable climate.