By defining religion as a sacred engagement with what is taken to be a spiritual reality, it is possible to consider the importance of religion in human life without making claims about what it really is or ought to be. Religion is not an object with a single, fixed meaning, or even a zone with clear boundaries. It is an aspect of human experience that may intersect, incorporate, or transcend other aspects of life and society. Such a definition avoid the drawbacks of limiting the investigation of religion to Western or biblical categories such as monotheism (belief in one god only) or to church structure, which are not universal. For example, in tribal societies, religion unlike the Christian church usually is not a separate institution but pervades the whole of public and private life.

　　In Buddhism, gods are not as central as the idea of a Buddha. In many traditional cultures, the idea of a sacred cosmic order is the most prominent religious belief. Because of this variety, some scholars prefer to use a general term such as the sacred to designate the common foundation of religious life.

　　Religion in this understanding includes a complex of activities that cannot be reduced to any single aspect of human experience. It is a part of individual life but also of group dynamics. Religion includes patterns of behavior but also patterns of language and thought. It is sometimes a highly organized institution that sets itself apart from a culture, and it is sometimes an integral part of a culture. Religious experience may be expressed in visual symbols, dance and performance, elaborate philosophical systems, legendary and imaginative stories, formal ceremonies, and detailed rules of ethical conduct and law. Each of these elements assumes innumerable cultural forms. In some ways there are as many forms of religious expression as there are human cultural environments.

　　1.What is the passage mainly concerned about?

　　A.Religion has a variety of interpretation.

　　B.Religion is a reflection of ignorance.

　　C.Religion is not only confined to the Christian categories.

　　D.Religion includes all kinds of activities.

　　2.What does the word “observance” probably convey in Para. 1?

　　A.notice

　　B.watching

　　C.conformity

　　D.experience

　　3.According to the passage what people generally consider religion to be?

　　A.Fantastic observance

　　B.Spiritual practice

　　C.Individual observance of tradition

　　D.A complex of activities

　　4.Which of the following is not true?

　　A.It is believed by some that religion should be what it ought to be.

　　B.“The path of enlightenment” is a definition that the author doesn’t agree to.

　　C.According to the author, the committed believers define religion improperly.

　　D.The author doesn’t speak in favor of the definition of “the sacred”.

　　5.Which of the following is religion according to the passage?

　　A.Performance of human beings.

　　B.Buddha, monotheism and some tribal tradition.

　　C.Practice separated from culture.

　　D.All the above.

　　答案：ACBDB

　　It being not only possible but even easy to predict which ten-year-old boys are at greatest risk of growing up to be persistent offenders, what are we doing with the information? Just about the last thing that we should do is to wait until their troubles have escalated in adolescence and then attack them with the provisions of the new Criminal Justice Bill.

　　If this bill becomes law, magistrates will have the power to impose residential care orders. More young people will be drawn into institutional life when all the evidence shows that this worsens rather than improves their prospects. The introduction of short sharp shocks in detention centers will simply give more young people a taste of something else they don’t need; the whole regime of detention centers is one of toughening delinquents, and if you want to train someone to be anti-establishment, “I can’t think of a better way to do it,” says the writer of this report.

　　The Cambridge Institute of Criminology comes up with five key factors that are likely to make for delinquency: a low income family a large family, parents deemed by social workers to be bad at raising children, parents who themselves have a criminal record, and low intelligence in the child. Not surprisingly, the factors tend to overlap. Of the 63 boys in the sample who had at least three of them when they were ten, half became juvenile delinquents—compared with only a fifth of the sample as a whole.

　　Three more factors make the prediction more accurate: being judged troublesome by teachers at the age of ten, having a father with at least two criminal convictions and having another member of the family with a criminal record. Of the 35 men who had at least two of these factors in their background 18 became persistent delinquents and 8 more were in trouble with the law.

　　Among those key factors, far and away the most important was having a parent with a criminal record, even if that had been acquired in the distant past, even though very few parents did other than condemn delinquent behavior in their children.

　　The role of the schools emerges as extremely important. The most reliable prediction of all on the futures of boys came from teachers’ ratings of how troublesome they were at the age of ten. If the information is there in the classroom there must be a response that brings more attention to those troublesome children: a search for things to give them credit for other than academic achievement, a refusal to allow them to go on playing truant, and a fostering of ambition and opportunity which should start early in their school careers.

　　1.According to the author, delinquency should be tackled ___.

　　A.before adolescence

　　B.during institutional treatment

　　C.during adolescence

　　D.when the problem becomes acute

　　2.The number of young offenders could be reduced by the way of ___.

　　A.new legal measures

　　B.better residential care

　　C.brief periods of harsh punishment

　　D.examination of their backgrounds

　　3.What is the outcome result of putting young offenders into detention centers?

　　A.They become more violent

　　B.They receive useful training

　　C.They become used to institutions

　　D.They turn against society

　　4.Ten-year-old children likely to become offenders are usually___.

　　A.spoilt children from small families.

　　B.bright children in a poor family.

　　C.dull children with many brothers and sisters.

　　D.children whose parents have acquired wealth dishonestly.

　　5.The writer concludes that potential offenders could be helped by ___.

　　A.spending more time at school

　　B.more encouragement at school

　　C.more activities outside school

　　D.stricter treatment from teachers

　　答案：ADDCB