单选题 .  Section A
    In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
    Passage One
    Letty the old lady lived in a "Single Room Occupancy" hotel approved by the New York City welfare department and occupied by old losers, junkies, cockroaches and rats. Whenever she left her room—a tiny cubicle with a cot, a chair, a seven-year-old calendar and a window so filthy it blended with the unspeakable walls—she would pack all her valuables in two large shopping bags and carry them with her. If she didn't, everything would disappear when she left the hotel. Her "things" were also a burden. Everything she managed to possess was portable and had multiple uses. A shawl is more versatile than a sweater, and hats are no good at all, although she used to have lots of nice hats, she told me.
    The first day I saw Letty I had left my apartment in search of a "bag lady". I had seen these women round the city frequently, had spoken to a few. Sitting around the parks had taught me more about these city vagabonds. As a group, few were eligible for social security. They had always been flotsam and jetsam, floating from place to place and from job to job—waitress, short order cook, sales clerk, stock boy, maid, mechanic, porter—all those jobs held by faceless people. The "bag ladies" were a special breed. They looked and acted and dressed strangely in some of the most determinedly conformist areas of the city. They frequented Fourteen Street downtown, and the fancy shopping districts. They seemed to like crowds but remained alone. They held long conversations with themselves, with telephone poles, with unexpected cracks in the sidewalk. They hung around lunch counters and cafeterias, and could remain impervious to the rudeness of a determined waitress and sit for hours clutching a coffee cup full of cold memories.
    Letty was my representative bag lady. I picked her up on the corner of Fourteenth and Third Avenue. She had the most suspicious face I had encountered; her entire body, in fact, was pulled forward in one large question mark. She was carrying a double plain brown shopping bag and a larger white bag ordering you to vote for some obscure man for some obscure office and we began talking about whether or not she was an unpaid advertisement. I asked her if she would have lunch with me, and let me treat, as a matter of fact. After some hesitation and a few sharp glances over the top of her glasses, Letty the Bag Lady let me come into her life. We had lunch that day, the next, and later the next week.
    Being a bag lady was a full-time job. Take the problem of the hotels. You can't stay to long in any one of those welfare hotels, Letty told me, because the junkies figure out your routine, and when you get your checks, and you'll be robbed, even killed. So you have to move a lot. And every time you move, you have to make three trips to the welfare office to get them to approve the new place, even if it's just another cockroach-filled, rat-infested hole in the wall. During the last five years, Letty tried to move every two or three months.
    Most of our conversations took place standing in line. New York State had just changed the regulations governing Medicaid cards and Letty had to get a new card. That took two hours in line, one hour sitting in a large dank-smelling room, and two minutes with a social worker who never once looked up. Another time, her case worker at the welfare office sent Letty to try and get food stamps, and after standing in line for three hours she found out she didn't qualify because she didn't have cooking facilities in her room. "This is my social life," she said. "I run around the city and stand in line. You stand in line to see one of them fancy movies and calling it art; I stand in line for medicine, for food, for glasses, for the cards to get pills, for the pills; I stand in line to see people who never see who I am; at the hotel, sometimes I even have to stand in line to go to the john. When I die there'll probably be a line to get through the gate, and when I get up to the front of the line, somebody will push it closed and say, 'Sorry. Come back after lunch.' These agencies, I figure they have to make it as hard for you to get help as they can, so only really strong people or really stubborn people like me can survive."
    Letty would talk and talk; sometimes, she didn't seem to know I was even there. She never remembered my name, and would give a little start of surprise whenever I said hers, as if it had been a long time since anyone had said "Letty." I don't think she thought of herself as a person, anymore; I think she had accepted the view that she was a welfare case, a Mediaid card, a nuisance in the bus depot in the winter time, a victim to any petty criminal, existing on about the same level as cockroaches.                                 
    Passage Two
    About two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live in cities by the year 2020 and, according to the United Nations, approximately 3.7 billion people will inhabit urban areas some ten years later. As cities grow, so do the number of buildings that characterize them: office towers, factories, shopping malls and high-rise apartment buildings. These structures depend on artificial ventilation systems to keep clean and cool air flowing to the people inside. We know these systems by the term "air-conditioning".
    Although many of us may feel air-conditioners bring relief from hot, humid or polluted outside air, they pose many potential health hazards. Much research has looked at how the circulation of air inside a closed environment—such as an office building—can spread disease or expose occupants to harmful chemicals.
    One of the more widely publicised dangers is that of Legionnaire's disease, which was first recognised in the 1970s. This was found to have affected people in buildings with air-conditioning systems in which warm air pumped out of the system's cooling towers was somehow sucked back into the air intake, in most cases due to poor design. This warm air was, needless to say, the perfect environment for the rapid growth of disease-carrying bacteria originating from outside the building, where it existed in harmless quantities. The warm, bacteria-laden air was combined with cooled, conditioned air and was then circulated around various parts of the building. Studies showed that even people outside such buildings were at risk if they walked past air exhaust ducts. Cases of Legionnaire's disease are becoming fewer with newer system designs and modifications to older systems, but many older buildings, particularly in developing countries, require constant monitoring.
    The ways in which air-conditioners work to "clean" the air can inadvertently cause health problems, too. One such way is with the use of an electrostatic precipitator, which removes dust and smoke particles from the air. What precipitators also do, however, is to emit large quantities of positive air ions into the ventilation system. A growing number of studies show that overexposure to positive air ions can result in headaches, fatigue and feelings of irritation.
    Large air-conditioning systems add water to the air they circulate by means of humidifiers. In older systems, the water used for this process is kept in special reservoirs, the bottoms of which provide breeding grounds for bacteria and fungi which can find their way into the ventilation system. The risk to human health from this situation has been highlighted by the fact that the immune systems of approximately half of workers in air-conditioned office buildings have developed antibodies to fight off the organisms found at the bottom of system reservoirs. Chemical disinfectants, called "biocides", that are added to reservoirs to make them germ-free, are dangerous in their own right in sufficient quantities, as they often contain compounds such as pentachlorophenol, which is strongly linked to abdominal cancers.
    Finally, it should be pointed out that the artificial climatic environment created by airconditioners can also adversely affect us. In a natural environment, whether indoor or outdoor, there are small variations in temperature and humidity. Indeed, the human body has long been accustomed to these normal changes. In an air-conditioned living or work environment, however, body temperatures remain well under 37℃, our normal temperature. This leads to a weakened immune system and thus greater susceptibility to diseases such as colds and flu.
   
    Passage Three
    The other day, I walked into an airport men's room, which was empty except for one man, who appeared to be having a loud, animated conversation with a urinal. Ten years ago, I would have turned right around and walked briskly back out of there. One rule my parents stressed when I was a child was: "Never stay in a restroom with a man who talks to the plumbing."
    But, of course, as a modern human, I knew that this man was talking on his cell phone, using one of those earpiece thingies, with the little microphone on the wire, the kind that people feel they must shout at, to make sure their vital messages are getting through.
    It's not clear to me why so many people in airports use the earpiece thingies. Why do they need to keep their hands free? Do they expect some emergency to suddenly arise that will require them to have both hands free while talking?
    Or maybe they're afraid that if they hold the phone next to their head, the radiation will give them brain cancer. If so, an option they might consider is wrapping their heads in aluminum foil. Granted, this would make them look stupid. But not nearly as stupid as they look shouting into their earpiece wires.
    So anyway, there I was, in this restroom, standing maybe six feet from this guy, both of us facing the wall, him shouting at his urinal about some business thing involving specifications, and at some point he said "I swear this is a direct quote—I am handling it." This caused me to emit an involuntary snorting sound (not loud; certainly nowhere near as loud as this guy was talking; just a little snortlet), which caused the guy to stop talking and—violating the No.1 Guy Rule of Restroom Etiquette? —turn his head and look directly at me, so I could see (using peripheral vision) that he was irritated by my rude interruption of his conversation. Then he went back to shouting at the urinal.
    The point is that every key element of this scenario—the cell phone, the airplane, the zipper— is made possible by technology. We know that technology is a wonderful thing. But at what point does technology go too far? Is it fair to say that cell phones, if used thoughtfully and politely, are OK, but that if a person attaches an earpiece thingy and walks around shouting in public, bystanders should be allowed to snatch the wire and sprint off down the airport concourse, with the shouter's earphone, and possibly even the shouter's detached ear, bouncing gaily behind on the floor?
    I think we all agree that the answer is: Yes. When technology goes too far, ordinary citizens must take action. But the question is: How do we define "too far"? I will tell you. We define "too far" as "when scientists start putting weapons on cockroaches." This is actually happening, according to an article in the Sept. 6 issue of Science magazine, brought to my attention by alert reader Richard Sweetman. This article states that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have been "mounting tiny cannons on the backs of cockroaches." That is correct: These researchers have been outfitting live cockroaches with backpacks containing "plastic tubes filled with explosives."
    Of course, the researchers have a scientific reason for doing this: They are on LSD. No, really, it has something to do with figuring out how cockroaches have such good balance (You almost never see a cockroach fall off a bicycle.). The researchers have used their findings to construct a working robot roach that is, according to Science, the size of a breadbox. Swell! If there's anything this world needs more than armed cockroaches, it's giant, mechanized cockroaches!
    Newspaper story from the year 2010: "A homeowner in Santa Rosa, California, was found shot to death in his kitchen Friday. Police said the man apparently was felled by 500 rounds of small-bore cannon fire, mostly in his ankles, indicating that this was the work of the gang of armed research cockroaches that escaped from a Berkeley lab. Police said the motive in the slaying was apparently a Ring Ding. In a related development, an escaped robot cockroach broke into an Oakland Wal-Mart and made off with an estimated 17,000 AA batteries." Ask yourself: Is that the kind of story you want to read in your newspaper? No, seriously, this is bad. We need somebody in authority to look into this right away. Maybe Dick Cheney could handle it.         
    Passage Four
    In the go-go years of the late 1990s, no economic theorist looked better than Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian champion of capitalism who died in 1950. His distnction? A theory he called "creative destruction". The idea was straight-forward: in with the new, out with the old. Companies had life cycles, just as people do. They were born, they grew up. And when a better competitor came along, they died due to capital starvation. It was the way things were, and the way they should be. The markets had no sentiment. Capitalism was relentless, unforgiving.
    In their book Creative Destruction (367 pages. Doubleday. $ 27.50), Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan of the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. apply Schumpeter's logic in the context of a technology-driven economy. They want their corporate readers to understand the implications of one basic idea: there is an inescapable conflict between the internal needs of a corporation and the total indifference capital markets have for those needs. Managers care desperately about the survival of their companies. Investors don't give a hoot. This was always true, the authors say, but until recently nobody really noticed because of the relatively languid pace of economic change. No more. In the 1920s, when the first Standard & Poor's index was compiled, a listed company had a life expectancy of more than 65 years. In 1998 the annual turnover rate of S&P firms was nearly 10 percent, implying a corporate lifetime of only 10 years.
    How does anyone manage in this environment? Foster and Kaplan argue that companies today must embrace "discontinuity", the idea that everything they have always done is now irrelevant. Consider Intel: by its top executives' own accounts, the company had to kill its ground-breaking memory-chip business once it became clear that Japanese companies could deliver essentially the same product at a lower price. Intel then moved into the much more lucrative microprocessor business. It was an obvious decision, but one that was hard to make. Memory chips were Intel's core competence. They were at the heart of the company's self-image. The transition was wrenching, said Intel chief Andrew Grove. But as a result, the company survived and prospered.
    From now forgotten automobile companies like Studebaker to early technology leaders like Wang, the corporate landscape is littered with the bones of companies that couldn't adapt to change. At bottom, say Foster and Kaplan, corporations are managed for survival. "They presume continuity in the business environment. They fail to introduce new products for fear of cannibalizing current product lines. They turn down acquisition opportunities to keep from diluting earnings. They prize rational decision making and internal control systems. They resist contrary information, and often punish managers who voice it. And all the while, capital markets are dedicated to finding and funding new competitors. Incumbents ignore this fact to their peril, if they don't cannibalize their product lines, someone else will do it for them. Even the greatest of brand names are not immune." As the authors ask rhetorically, would IBM even exist today had it stuck to its core business in mainframe computers? "Unless the corporation can learn to overcome the natural bias for denial," they write, "it will, in the long term, fail, or at best underperform."
    The successful company, Foster and Kaplan conclude, is one that manages for discontinuity. It presumes change. It is comfortable with fluid and even vague decision making. It has relatively flat hierarchies. In short, it adopts the fearlessness of capital markets themselves. And it doesn't have to be a start-up, or even a young company. Typical success stories include Coming, which shifted its business from glass to optical fiber just in time to capture a growing market, and General Electric, which dumped one fifth of its asset base in the first four years of Jack Welch's tenure as CEO.
    Not long ago, it was fashionable to liken business to warfare. Executives were reading Sun-tm, Machiavelli and Clausewitz for guidance on how to overcome the competition. But business differs from war in one vital respect. In war the advantage lies with the defense. In the New Economy, as Foster and Kaplan make clear, it belongs to the attacker.    1.  Which of the following is closest in meaning to "flotsam and jetsam" in the second paragraph?(Passage One)