When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. "We need courses for this thing — yesterday!"

　　Uriagereka, associate provost for faculty affairs at the University of Maryland in College Park, knew ___1____ what his boss meant. Campus administrators around the world had been buzzing for months about massive open online courses, or MOOCs: Internet-based teaching programs ___2____ to handle thousands of students ___3____, in part using the tactics of social-networking websites. To ___4____ video lectures, much of the learning comes from online comments, questions and ___5____. Participants even mark one another's tests.

　　MOOCs had exploded into the ___6____ consciousness in summer 2011, when a free artificial-intelligence course offered by Stanford University in California attracted 160,000 students from around the world — 23,000 of whom finished it. Now, Coursera in Mountain View, California — one of the three researcher-led start-up companies actively developing MOOCs — was inviting the University of Maryland to ___7____ up to five courses for broadcast on its software platform. Loh wanted in. "He was very clear," says Uriagereka. "We needed to be a part of this."

　　Similar conversations have been taking place at ___8____ universities around the world, as dozens — 74, at the last count — rush to sign up. Science, engineering and technology courses have been in the vanguard (前沿) of the movement, but offerings in management, ___9____ and the arts are growing in popularity (see 'MOOCs rising'). "In 25 years of ___10____ higher education, I've never seen anything move this fast," says Mitchell Stevens, a sociologist at Stanford and one of the leaders of an ongoing, campus-wide discussion series known as Education's Digital Future.

　　[A] academic

　　[B] contended

　　[C] designed

　　[D] discussions

　　[E] exactly

　　[F] eventually

　　[G] humanities

　　[H] major

　　[I] observing

　　[J] original

　　[K] recognition

　　[L] simultaneously

　　[M] submit

　　[N] supplement

　　[O] undermines

　　英語六級選詞填空閱讀預測

　　1. 【E】exactly

　　2.【C】designed

　　3.【L】 simultaneously

　　4.【N】supplement

　　5.【D】discussions

　　6.【A】academic

　　7.【M】submit

　　8.【H】major

　　9.【G】humanities

　　10.【I】observing

　　英語六級選詞填空閱讀預測二：

　　Directions: In this section, there is apassage with ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blankfrom a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read thepassage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bankis identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each itemon Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any ofthe words in the bank more than once.

　　A novel way of making computer memories, using bacteria　FOR half a century, the (1) __________of progress in the computer industry has been to do more with less.

　　Moore's law famously observes that the number of transistors which can be crammed into a given space (2)__________ every 18 months.

　　The amount of data that can be stored has grown at a similar rate.

　　Yet as (3)__________ get smaller, making them gets harder and more expensive.

　　On May 10th Paul Otellini, the boss of Intel, a big American chipmaker, put the price of a new chip factory at around $10 billion.

　　Happily for those that lack Intel's resources, there may be a cheaper option—namely to mimic Mother Nature,

　　who has been building tiny (4)__________, in the form of living cells and their components, for billions of years, and has thus got rather good at it.

　　A paper published in Small, a nanotechnology journal , sets out the latest example of the (5)__________.

　　In it, a group of researchers led by Sarah Staniland at the University of Leeds, in Britain, describe using naturally occurring proteins to make arrays of tiny magnets,

　　similar to those employed to store information in disk drives.

　　The researchers took their (6)__________ from Magnetospirillum magneticum, a bacterium that is sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field thanks to the presence within its cells of flecks of magnetite, a form of iron oxide.

　　Previous work has isolated the protein that makes these miniature compasses. Using genetic engineering, the team managed to persuade a different bacterium—Escherichia coli, a ubiquitous critter that is a workhorse of biotechnology—to (7)__________ this protein in bulk.

　　Next, they imprinted a block of gold with a microscopic chessboard pattern of chemicals.

　　Half the squares contained anchoring points for the protein.

　　The other half were left untreated as controls.

　　They then dipped the gold into a solution containing the protein, allowing it to bind to the treated squares, and dunked the whole lot into a heated (8)__________ of iron salts.

　　After that, they examined the results with an electron microscope.

　　Sure enough, groups of magnetite grains had materialised on the treated squares, shepherded into place by the bacterial protein.

　　In principle, each of these magnetic domains could store the one or the zero of a bit of information, according to how it was polarised.

　　Getting from there to a real computer memory would be a long road.

　　For a start, the grains of magnetite are not strong enough magnets to make a useful memory, and the size of each domain is huge by modern computing (9)__________.

　　But Dr Staniland reckons that, with enough tweaking, both of these objections could be dealt with.

　　The (10)__________ of this approach is that it might not be so capital-intensive as building a fab.

　　Growing things does not need as much kit as making them.

　　If the tweaking could be done, therefore, the result might give the word biotechnology a whole new meaning.

　　A) components

　　B) advantage

　　C) standards

　　D) compliments

　　E) essence

　　F) inspiration

　　G) disadvantage

　　H) doubles

　　I) solution

　　J) resolution

　　K) devices

　　L) manufacture

　　M) spirit

　　N) product

　　O) technique

　　英語六級選詞填空閱讀預測二答案：

　　1.E)essence

　　2.H)doubles

　　3.A)components

　　4.K)devices

　　5.O)technique

　　6.F)inspiration

　　7.L)manufacture

　　8.I)solution

　　9.C)standards

　　10.B)advantage