单选题 .  SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
    PASSAGE ONE
    (1) Ralph felt a kind of affectionate reverence for the conch (海螺), even though he had fished the thing out of the lagoon himself. He faced the place of assembly and put the conch to his lips. The others were waiting for this and came straight away. The place of assembly filled quickly; Jack, Simon, Maurice, most of the hunters, on Ralph's right; the rest on the left, under the sun. Piggy came and stood outside the triangle. This indicated that he wished to listen, but would not speak; and Piggy intended it as a gesture of disapproval.
    (2) "The thing is: we need an assembly."
    (3) No one said anything but the faces turned to Ralph were intent. He flourished the conch. He had learnt as a practical business that fundamental statements like this had to be said at least twice, before everyone understood them. One had to sit, attracting all eyes to the conch, and drop words like heavy round stones among the little groups that crouched or squatted. He was searching his mind for simple words so that even the littluns would understand what the assembly was about.
    (4) "We need an assembly. Not for fun. But to put things straight."
    (5) He paused for a moment and automatically pushed back his hair. Piggy tiptoed to the triangle, his ineffectual protest made, and joined the others. Ralph went on.
    (6) "We have lots of assemblies. Everybody enjoys speaking and being together. We decide things. But they don't get done. We were going to have water brought from the stream and left in those coconut shells under fresh leaves. So it was, for a few days. Now there's no water. The shells are dry. People drink from the river."
    (7) There was a murmur of assent. He licked his lips.
    (8) "Then there's huts. Shelters."
    (9) The murmur swelled again and died away.
    (10) "You mostly sleep in shelters. Tonight, except for Samneric up by the fire, you'll all sleep there. Who built the shelters?"
    (11) Clamor rose at once. Everyone had built the shelters. Ralph had to wave the conch once more.
    (12) "Wait a minute! I mean, who built all three? We all built the first one, four of us the second one, and me'n Simon built the last one over there. That's why it's so tottery (摇摇欲坠的). No. Don't laugh. That shelter might fall down if the rain comes back. We'll need those shelters then."
    (13) Piggy held out his hands for the conch but Ralph shook his head. His speech was planned, point by point. He paused, feeling for his next point. "And another thing."
    (14) Someone called out. "Too many things."
    (15) There came a mutter of agreement. Ralph overrode them.
    (16) "And another thing. We nearly set the whole island on fare. And we waste time, rolling rocks, and making little cooking fires. Now I say this and make it a rule, because I'm chief. We won't have a fire anywhere but on the mountain. Ever."
    (17) There was a row immediately. Boys stood up and shouted and Ralph shouted back.
    (18) "Because if you want a fire to cook fish or crab, you can jolly well go up the mountain. That way we'll be certain."
    (19) Hands were reaching for the conch in the light of the setting sun. He held on and leapt on the trunk.
    (20) "All this I meant to say. Now I've said it. You voted me for chief. Now you do what I say."
    (21) They quieted, slowly, and at last were seated again. Jack stood up, scowling in the gloom, and held out his hands.
    (22) "I haven't finished yet."
    (23) "But you've talked and talked!"
    (24) "I've got the conch."
    (25) Jack sat down, grumbling.
    (26) "Then the last thing. This is what people can talk about."
    (27) He waited till the platform was very still.
    (28) "Things are breaking up. I don't understand why. We began well; we were happy. And then—Then people started getting frightened."
    (29) A murmur, almost a moan, rose and passed away. Ralph went on, abruptly.
    (30) "But that's littluns' talk. We'll get that straight. We've got to talk about this fear and decide there's nothing in it. I'm frightened myself, sometimes; only that's nonsense! Like bogies. Then, when we've decided, we can start again and be careful about things like the fire." A picture of three boys walking along the bright beach flitted through his mind. "And be happy."
    (31) Ceremonially, Ralph laid the conch on the trunk beside him as a sign that the speech was over. What sunlight reached them was level.
    PASSAGE TWO
    (1) Men and women tend to choose different career paths, and researchers have identified this as the biggest reason men make more money. So if men and women were equally represented across all occupations, would it close that gender pay gap?
    (2) Teaching is just one example of an occupation segregated along gender lines. According to the Labor Department, about 80 percent of elementary- and middle-school teachers are women. A wide array of other jobs in the United States are overwhelmingly done by one gender or the other—from low-wage cafeteria workers (61 percent women) all the way up to the C-suite (75 percent of chief executives are men).
    (3) But according to a study released on July 13 by the job-search site CareerBuilder, that could be changing. Women are entering traditionally male-dominated jobs in greater numbers, and vice versa. One of the more dramatic examples: A full 95 percent of firefighters are men, but nearly a third of new firefighters hired since 2009 have been women, according to the study. On the other side of the coin, just 20 percent of elementary school teachers are men, yet men make up nearly half of all new hires in the field over the past eight years.
    (4) The softening of those gendered barriers, and evolving perceptions of which jobs are appropriate for whom, is a product of fundamental changes in the US economy, and, if the trend continues, could inch women closer to equal pay with their male counterparts. But it's not a silver bullet. The pay gap is a multifaceted problem without a clean fix—men still out-earn women even within the same occupations, and a dearth of women at the top of the career ladder persists.
    (5) "We could have perfect gender parity and still have a pay gap, but it's still good news," says Emily Liner, an economist and senior policy advisor. Gender parity hasn't improved markedly for every career, but the study finds that women have made inroads in the past eight years in occupations including CEOs, lawyers, web developers, dentists, sales managers, marketing managers, chemists, and financial analysts. There's even been a big increase in women hired as sports coaches and scouts. Some of these shifts for men and women are borne out elsewhere. According to the US Census Bureau, the number of men in nursing careers, while still small, has tripled since the 1970s.
    (6) A number of factors could be driving that migration. For men, Ms. Liner says, the evolution into a service economy is altering perceptions of what is acceptable work. "Automation and globalization are the reasons men are considering jobs they may not have before," she says. For both men and women, seeing peers take those less conventional career paths can get the ball rolling toward gender parity even faster. "It's, 'I know someone who does this who is similar to me.' That might be causing some acceleration there."
    (7) In terms of increasing the 80 cents a woman earns for every dollar a man does, easing the job market's gender segregation could play a big role. Liner, in her research on how gender is linked to salaries, found that jobs that account for the top 10 percent of earnings in the US are almost entirely male-dominated. In contrast, women occupy over two-thirds of the lowest-wage jobs that the Labor Department tracks—entry-level retail and food service positions. Even within those low-wage categories, there are often stark gender divides. Parking lot attendants, for example, are overwhelmingly male, and they make about $3,000 more per year on average than cashiers, who skew female.
    (8) Historically, too, just the influx of women or men into certain careers has influenced their prestige and earning potential. Computer programming started out as unglamorous work done primarily by women, but became better-paying and respected as men became the majority. The reverse is true for a number of jobs now occupied primarily by women.
    (9) But not all of them. Pharmacists make up an occupational group that has both increased the number of women in its ranks over the long term and retained high earnings. Pharmacy is the second-highest-paying profession in the US, and has a smaller pay gap than other prestigious fields, including business and law. In a 2014 speech, Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin credited the job's flexibility, made possible by technology and the standardization of the work itself, as a major factor in its ability to recruit women and retain them even as they start families.
    PASSAGE THREE
    (1) Louis Armstrong is rightly lauded as one of the most influential jazz artists of all time, but less frequently appreciated is the impact he had on ending segregation in the United States. In 1931, when Charles Black Jr. was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas, he went to see Armstrong play at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, hoping, in his own words, that there would be "lots of girls there". Instead, he was struck by the music. "He was the first genius I had ever seen," Black wrote in 1986. "It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man... And if this was true, what happened to the rest of it?"
    (2) Black later became a constitutional lawyer, and in 1954 he wrote the legal briefs for Linda Brown, the 10-year-old plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education. That experience of being awed by an artist's genius ended up contributing to a landmark case declaring racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The Harvard art history and African American studies professor Sarah Lewis cites this moment as an example of how culture enables people to see beyond their own blind spots. Art that gets us to pause, she argues, can lead us to a new vision of the world.
    (3) Last year, Lewis guest-edited an edition of Aperture magazine titled "Vision and Justice", which explored the intersection of photography and black American, and how the medium has contributed to social progress. She discussed the power of images and the political role of artists with the architect Michael Murphy on Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Acknowledging the role that culture plays in justice, Lewis said, is something people tend to do only in times of crisis. But even in the current moment, she argued, when more visuals are produced every two minutes than were created during the entire 19th century, images still wield great power when they force people to slow down.
    (4) One example Lewis cited wasn't an artwork at all, but a plaque unveiled at Harvard last year to commemorate slaves who worked at the university in the 17th century. She also referred to an instantly iconic photograph of President Barack Obama bending down to let a small boy touch his head. And she quoted President John Kennedy's 1963 speech at Amherst College, in which Kennedy considered the power of artists in society, stating: "We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."
    (5) While that may be so, Murphy said, it doesn't mean art can't be weaponized. The co-founder and CEO of MASS Design Group, a non-profit firm advocating for "architecture that promotes justice and human dignity," reiterated the idea that forcing people to pause can enable them to restructure their thinking. Architecture is conceptually slow, he argued, since most buildings take at least five years to move from design to completion. He referred to MASS's proposal for a Holocaust memorial in London, which would create a pile of six million individual stones in the middle of the city, each one inscribed with the name of a victim. Visitors would be encouraged to take the stones home. The end result, Murphy said, would be that "six million people... agree to participate, engage, take a stone, and embrace a more just and tolerant society."
    (6) "There are images that are impossible to forget, searing themselves into our collective consciousness," my colleague Yoni Appelbaum wrote last year, after an extraordinary photo of a peaceful protester facing down two armed policemen went viral. As Lewis said, these are the visuals that prompt us to pause, and show us "not only the things we want to celebrate, but the things we need to remember."1.  According to the context, the conch may be a symbol of ______. (PASSAGE ONE)