单选题 .  SECTION A  MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
    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
    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-minute drive away.
    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.
    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 Kevlavik, where they were competing in West Iceland's yearly math contest, one of many throughout Iceland in which girls excel.
    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.
    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 Reykjavik 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."
    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 Kevlavik 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
    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.
    "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 Tubingen 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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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.
    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 Genographic 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.
    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 nort hern 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."
    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 THREE
    Perhaps it's the weather, which sometimes seals London with a gray ceiling for weeks on end. Or maybe it is Britons' penchant for understatement, their romantic association with the countryside or their love of gardens. Whatever the reason, while other cities grew upward as they developed, London spread outward, keeping its vast parks, its rows of townhouses and its horizon lines intact.
    But as the city's population and its prominence as a global business capital continue to grow, it sometimes seems ready to burst at the seams. In response, developers are turning to a type of building that used to be deeply unfashionable here, even as it flourished in other capitals of commerce: the skyscraper.
    In recent years, a cluster of sizable office towers have sprouted on the periphery of London, in its redeveloped Docklands at Canary Wharf. But skyscrapers now are pushing into the heart of the City, London's central financial district, and surrounding areas along the Thames.
    The mayor, Ken Livingstone, champions tall buildings as part of his controversial plans to remake central London as a denser, more urban sort of place, with greater reliance on public transport. First he angered some drivers by charging them a toll to enter the city center on workdays, and now he finds himself opposed by preservation groups, including English Heritage, that want to keep London's character as a low-rise city.
    For now, the mayor seems to be getting his way. One prominent tower, a 40-story building designed by Norman Foster for the Swiss Re insurance company was completed this year. A handful of others have received planning permission and at least a dozen more have been proposed.
    By far the most prominent of these buildings—and one that finally looks like it will go ahead after a drawn-out approval process—is the London Bridge Tower, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. The developer Irvine Sellar won government approval for the building late last year and says he is completing the financing and hopes to start work by early 2005.
    The 306-meter, or 1,016-foot, tower would be by far the tallest building in Britain, in all of Europe, in fact, surpassing the 264-meter Triumph Palace in Moscow, a residential building that was finished late last year.
    To be sure, even the London Bridge Tower would be modest by the standards of American or Asian skyscrapers, or some of the behemoths on the drawing boards for places like Dubai and Shanghai. The tallest building in the world at the moment is the 509-meter Talpei 101 tower in Talwan, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. But it will surely be surpassed soon amid a boom in construction that persists.
    In a city that has been reluctant to reach for the sky, perhaps it is appropriate that Piano is the architect for what probably will be London's tallest building. He is ambivalent about skyscrapers, too, and has designed only a handful alongside such projects as the Pompidou Center in Paris, with Richard Rogers, and parts of the reconstructed Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
    English Heritage has been far less enthusiastic, arguing that the building would obstruct views of a high-rise from a much earlier era, Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral. To overcome opposition, the building was designed with a mixed-use function. Much of the bottom half of the building will house offices, but above that there will be a "public piazza" with restaurants, exhibition spaces and other entertainment areas. Further above, the loftier, narrower floors will be taken up by a hotel and apartments. On the 65th floor there will be a viewing gallery. The upper 60 meters, exposed to the elements, will house an energy-saving cooling system in which pipes will be used to pump excess heat up from the offices below and dissipate it into the winds. "We knew we had no chance of getting it approved unless we had a high-quality design from a top international name," Sellar said.
    The emphasis on quality is a reflection not only of an aversion to skyscrapers, but also of a desire not to repeat mistakes. London had one previous fling with tall—or semi-tall—buildings, in the 1960s and 70s, but their blocky, concrete shapes did little to impress.
    PASSAGE FOUR
    Mark Twain's instructions were quite clear: his autobiography was to remain unpublished until 100 years after his death. Who could resist a pay cheque in the here and now for deferred immortality in the hereafter? More to the point, could any modem writer be certain their lives would still be interesting to anyone so long after their death?
    Pride never came into Twain's calculations. He was the American writer, the rags-to-riches embodiment of the American dream, and it never seems to have occurred to him that his popularity would fade. Nor has it. He is still the writer before whom everyone from Faulkner to Mailer has knelt. And even though his literary executors might not have followed his instructions to the letter—various chunks of his autobiography have been published over the years—the publication of the first of three planned collections of Twain's full autobiographical writings to coincide with the centenary of his death has still been one of the literary events of the year.
    Still more remarkable is that Twain's reputational longevity is based on so few books. As John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London, points out, "Huckleberry Finn has been largely off-limits in American schools and colleges because of Twain's use of the word 'nigger', so most readers only know him for his maxims and Tom Sawyer. And even that is overrated. What makes him the 'father' of American fiction?"
    Sutherland suggests the answer lies in voice, eye and attitude. Twain was a gifted public speaker; he turned literature into something that was heard as well as seen; and east himself as an innocent, with a decidedly resentful, feisty (好争辩的) gaze on the rest of the world. "Take these three elements," he says, "and, as Hemingway argued, you have the essence of a national literature. After Twain, no one could dismiss it as 'English literature written in America'. It was itself."
    And it's the voice that shines through his autobiography. "The general reader gets to see the man beyond the maxims," says Harriet Smith, editor of the Mark Twain Project, "What we get is him speaking to us from beyond the grave; even in the passages that seem quite boring his appeal still resonates for the infelicities—rather than being a flaw—are a window into how he thought and what jogged his memory."
    Above all, there is no linear narrative. He first toyed with the idea of writing his autobiography in the 1870s but abandoned the idea because he couldn't find a way of telling the truth about himself. Finally, after the death of his wife, Olivia, in 1904, he came up with two solutions. The first—almost certainly borrowed from the Freudian psychoanalytic model of free association—was to dictate his thoughts to a stenographer (速记); for 15 minutes each day he would start by deliberating on an item of news that had captured his attention and see where it led. The second was to self-impose a 100-year role, so that by the time any judgment was passed he would be "dead, unaware and indifferent".
    Not that any of this necessarily had the desired effect. "If you're relying on memory," says novelist Michael Frayn, "how—even with the best of intentions—can you distinguish between what you remember and what you make up? A biographer can seek corroboration elsewhere; a personal memoir does not have that advantage."
    Twain understood the value of his image and went to some lengths to protect it. Some of the more fascinating passages in the autobiography are those that have been crossed out. These are, more often than not, the ones about which he was particularly sensitive. And they aren't to do with the personal, such as his feelings of loss over the deaths of his wife and daughter, Susy, or his suspicions about being financially ripped off by his manager, Ralph Ashcroft, and his secretary., Isabel Lyon.
    "There are some extracts, including one in which he confuses the Virgin birth and the Immaculate Conception, in which he declares his religious scepticism robustly, about which Twain was extremely nervous," says Smith. "He was so worried he would be ostracised (排斥) and shunned for this by God-fearing Americans that he actually set a publication date of 2406 for those sections."
    Imagine. A man so protective and nervous of his own reputation that he sought to keep some of the ideas he thought might alienate his public silent for 500 years. Yet equally a man so sure of his reputation that he had no doubts people would still want to read him 500 years after his death. There, in essence, is Twain's ambivalence between the public and the private, between truth and spin. Needless to say, his executors didn't adhere to the 500-year demand and the American public continue to adore him regardless. Then Twain being Twain, he'd have hardly expected anything less.1.  Which of the following words can best describe Sandgerdi?(PASSAGE ONE)