单选题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    In this section there are four 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 tire best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO.
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1)This fishing village of 1,480 people is a bleak and lonely place. Set on the southwestern edge of Iceland, the volcanic landscape is whipped by the North Atlantic winds, which hush everything around them. A sculpture at the entrance to the village depicts a naked man facing a wall of seawater twice his height. There is no movie theater, and many residents never venture to the capital, a 50-min. drive away.
    (2)But Sandgerdi might be the perfect place to raise girls who have mathematical talent. Government researchers two years ago tested almost every 15-year-old in Iceland for it and found that boys trailed far behind girls. That fact was unique among the 41 countries that participated in the standardized test for that age group designed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. But while Iceland's girls were alone in the world in their significant lead in math, their national advantage of 15 points was small compared with the one they had over boys in fishing villages like Sandgerdi, where it was closer to 30.
    (3)The teachers of Sandgerdi's 254 students were only mildly surprised by the results. They say the gender gap is a story not of talent but motivation. Boys think of school as sufferings on the way to a future of finding riches at sea; for girls, it's their ticket out of town. Margret Ingporsdottir and Hanna Maria Heidarsdottir, both 15, students at Sandgerdi's gleaming school—which has a science laboratory, a computer room and a well-stocked library—have no doubt that they are headed for university. "I think I will be a pharmacist," says Heidarsdottir. The teens sat in principal Gudjon Kristjansson's office last week, waiting for a ride to the nearby town of Kevlavík, where they were competing in West Iceland's yearly math contest, one of many throughout Iceland in which girls excel.
    (4)Meanwhile, by the harbor, Gisli Tor Hauksson, 14, already has big plans that don't require spending his afternoons toiling over geometry. "I'll be a fisherman," he says, just like most of his ancestors. His father recently returned home from 60 days at sea off the coast of Norway. "He came back with 1.1 million krona," about $18,000, says Hauksson. As for school, he says, "it destroys the brain." He intends to quit at 16, the earliest age at which he can do so legally. "A boy sees his older brother who has been at sea for only two years and has a better car and a bigger house than the headmaster," says Kristjansson.
    (5)But the story of female achievement in Iceland doesn't necessarily have a happy ending. Educators have found that when girls leave their rural enclaves to attend universities in the nation's cities, their science advantage generally shrinks. While 61% of university students are women, they make up only one-third of Iceland's science students. By the time they enter the labor market, many are overtaken by men, who become doctors, engineers and computer technicians. Educators say they watch many bright girls suddenly flinch back in the face of real, head-to-head competition with boys. In a math class at a Reykjavík school, Asgeir Gurdmundsson, 17, says that although girls were consistently brighter than boys at school, "they just seem to leave the technical jobs to us." Says Solrun Gensdottir, the director of education at the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture: "We have to find a way to stop girls from dropping out of sciences."
    (6)Teachers across the country have begun to experiment with ways to raise boys to the level of girls in elementary and secondary education. The high school in Kevlavík tried an experiment in 2002 and 2003, separating 16-to-20-year-olds by gender for two years. That time the boys slipped even further behind. "The boys said the girls were better anyway," says Kristjan Asmundsson, who taught the 25 boys. "They didn't even try."
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1)Considering that anxiety makes your palms sweat, your heart race, and your brain seize up like a car with a busted transmission, it's no wonder people reach for the Xanax to vanquish it. But in a surprise, researchers who study emotion regulation—how we cope, or fail to cope, with the daily swirl of feelings—are discovering that many anxious people are bound and determined (though not always consciously) to cultivate anxiety. The reason, studies suggest, is that for some people anxiety boosts cognitive performance.
    (2)In one recent study, psychologist Maya Tamir of Hebrew University in Jerusalem gave 47 under-graduates a standard test of neuroticism, which asks people if they agree with such statements as "I get stressed out easily." She then presented the volunteers with a list of tasks, either difficult (giving a speech, taking a test) or easy (washing dishes), and asked which emotion they would prefer to be feeling before each. The more neurotic subjects were significantly more likely to choose feeling worried before a demanding task; non-neurotic subjects chose other emotions. Apparently, the neurotics had a good reason to opt for anxiety: when Tamir gave everyone anagrams to solve, the neurotics who had just written about an event that had caused them anxiety did better than neurotics who had recalled a happier memory. Among non-neurotics, putting themselves in an anxious frame of mind had no effect on performance.
    (3)In other people, anxiety is not about usefulness but familiarity, finds psychology researcher Brett Ford of the University of Denver. She measured the "trait emotions" (feelings people tend to have most of the time) of 139 undergraduates, using a questionnaire that lists emotions and asks "to what extent you feel this way in general." She then grouped the students into those characterized by "trait fear" (those who tended to be anxious, worried, or nervous), "trait anger" (chronically angry, irritated, or annoyed), and "trait happy" (the cheerful, joyful gang). Six months later, the volunteers returned to Ford's lab. This time she gave them a list of emotions and asked which they wanted to experience. Not surprisingly, the cheerful bunch wanted to be happy. But in a shock for those who think anyone who is chronically anxious can't wait to get their hands on some Ativan (氯羟安定), those with "trait fear" said they wanted to be worried and nervous—even though it felt subjectively unpleasant. (The "trait angry" students tended to prefer feeling the same way, too.) Wanting to feel an emotion is not the same thing as enjoying that emotion, points out neuroscientist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, who discovered that wanting and liking are mediated by two distinct sets of neurotransmitters.
    (4)In some cases, the need to experience anxiety can lead to a state that looks very much like addiction to anxiety. "There are people who have extreme agitation, but they can't understand why," says psychiatrist Harris Stratyner of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. They therefore latch on to any cause to explain what they're feeling. That rationalization doubles back and exacerbates the anxiety. "Some people," he adds, "get addicted to feeling anxious because that's the state that they've always known. If they feel a sense of calm, they get bored; they feel empty inside. They want to feel anxious." Notice he didn't say "like."
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1)A period of climate change about 130,000 years ago would have made water travel easier by lowering sea levels and creating navigable lakes and rivers in the Arabian Peninsula, the study says. Such a shift would have offered early modern humans—which arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago—a new route through the formerly scorching northern deserts into the Middle East. The new paper was spurred by the discovery of several 120,000-year-old tools at a desert archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates. The presence of the tools—whose design is uniquely African, experts say—so early in the region suggests early humans marched out of Africa into the Arabian Peninsula directly from the Horn of Africa, roughly present-day Somalia. Previously, scientists had thought humans first left via the Nile Valley or the Far East.
    (2)"Up till now we thought of cultural developments leading to the opportunity of people to move out of Africa," said study co-author Hans-Peter Uerpmann, a retired archaeobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. "Now we see, I think, that it was the environment that was the key to this," Uerpmann said during a press briefing Wednesday.
    (3)The discovery "leaves a lot of possibilities for human migrations, and keeping this in mind, might change our view completely." During the past few years, a series of tools were discovered at the Jebel Faya site in the U.A.E., some of which—such as hand axes—had a two-sided appearance previously seen only in early Africa.
    (4)Scientists used luminescence dating to determine the age of sand grains buried with the stone tools. This technique measures naturally occurring radiation stored in the sand. For the climatic data, scientists studied the climate records of ancient lakes and rivers in cave stalagmites, as well as changes in the level of the Red Sea. This warmer period 130,000 years or so ago caused more rainfall on the Arabian Peninsula, turning it into a series of lush rivers that humans might have boated or rafted.
    (5)During this period the southern Red Sea's levels dropped, offering a "brief window of time" for humans to easily cross the sea—which was then as little as 2.5 miles wide, according to Adrian Parker, a physical geographer from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom.
    (6)Once humans entered the peninsula, they dispersed and likely reached the Jebel Faya site by about 125,000 years ago, according to the study, published in the journal Science.
    (7)Geneticist Spencer Wells called the discovery a "very interesting find," especially because the Arabian Peninsula is becoming a hot spot for archaeological finds—particularly underwater, since the Persian Gulf was a fertile river delta during early human migrations. But he noted that the study doesn't "rewrite the book on what we know about human migratory history." That's because tools dating to the same period have already been found in Israel, so it's "consistent with what we suspected" about an earlier wave of migration into the Middle East, said Wells, director of the National Geographic Society's Geographic Project. Wells also noted there's no evidence yet that the migrants in the new paper were our ancestors—the group, and their genes, may have died out long ago.
    (8)Bence Viola, of the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, agreed the finding was interesting but not that surprising, also citing the evidence of humans in Israel about 120,000 years ago. Viola, who wasn't involved in the study, added that the migration route proposed in the paper makes sense on another level—the Arabian Peninsula would have been something early humans were used to. "If you look even today, the environment in the Horn of Africa, in Somalia or northern Ethiopia, is similar to what you see in Oman or Yemen—not like the big desert," Viola noted. "It's not like they needed to adapt to a completely different environment—it's an environment that they knew."
    (9)Why they made the trek is another question, since they wouldn't have been hurting for food or resources in their African homeland, Viola noted. "Curiosity," he said, "is a pretty human desire."
    PASSAGE FOUR
    (1)Is there anything more boring than hearing about someone else's dream? And is there anything more miraculous than having one of your own? The voluptuous pleasure of Haruki Murakami's enthralling fictions—full of enigmatic imagery, random nonsense, and profundities that may or may not hold up in the light of day—reminds me of dreaming. Like no other author I can think of, Murakami captures the juxtapositions of the trivial and the momentous that characterize dream life, those crazy incidents that seem so vivid in the moment and so blurry and preposterous later on. His characters live ordinary lives, boiling pasta for lunch, riding the bus, and blasting Prince while working out at the gym. Then suddenly and matter-of-factly, they do something utterly nuts, like strike up a conversation with a coquettish Siamese cat. Or maybe mackerel and sardines begin to rain from the sky. In Murakami's world, these things make complete, cock-eyed sense.
    (2)Like many of Murakami's heroes, Kafka Tamura in Kafka on the Shore has more rewarding relationships with literature and music than with people. (Murakami's passion for music is infections; nothing made me want to rush out and purchase a Brahms CD until I read his Sputnik Sweetheart.) On his 15th birthday, Kafka runs away from his Tokyo home for obscure reasons related to his famous sculptor father. His choice of a destination is arbitrary. Or is it? "Shikoku, I decide. That's where I'll go...The more I look at the map—actually every time I study it—the more I feel Shikoku tugging at me."
    (3)On the island of Shikoku, Kafka makes himself a fixture at the local library, where he settles into a comfortable sofa and starts reading The Arabian Nights: "Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom that common sense can't keep bottled up." As in a David Lynch movie, all the library staffers are philosophical eccentrics ready to advance the surreal narrative. Oshima, the androgynous clerk, talks to Kafka about (inevitably) Kafka and the merits of driving while listening to Schubert ("a dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right there"). The tragically alluring head librarian, Miss Saeki, once wrote a hit song called "Kafka on the Shore"—and may or may not be Kafka's long-lost mother. Alarmingly, she also stars in his erotic fantasies.
    (4)In alternating chapters, Murakami records the even odder antics of Nakata, a simpleminded cat catcher who spends his days chatting with tabbies in a vacant Tokyo lot. One afternoon, a menacing dog leads him to the home of a sadistic cat killer who goes by the name Johnnie Walker. Walker ends up dead by the end of the encounter; back in Shikoku, Kafka unaccountably finds himself drenched in blood. Soon, Nakata too begins feeling an inexplicable pull toward the island.
    (5)If this plot sounds totally demented, trust me, it gets even weirder than that. Like a dream, you just have to be there. And, like a dream, what this dazzling novel means—or whether it means anything at all—we may never know.1.  Which of the following word can best describe Sandgerdi?______(PASSAGE ONE)