单选题Since the earliest times in England, the traveler"s inn has always been a warm and hospitable place, a gathering place for voyagers to rest and recover. The tireless landlord, the local customers sharing drinks and food, the welcoming atmosphere, have all become part of the legend of the typical English country and city life. In later centuries, the English tavern took on the role of community gathering place, being the location where friendly chatter and fierce social debate mixed with business discussions, and food, wine, beer and coffee were consumed as the noise of convivial (酒宴的) exchanges rose. In modern times, the English pub often continues to function as the communal meeting place, especially for people whose homes are too small to entertain any number of guests or friends. In many Asian countries, the local restaurant serves a similar social function. In Ireland, the pub has acted as a central attraction for poorer villagers in the rural areas, and as a literary and social focus in the cities. In keeping with the sociable nature of pub gatherings, music as well as talk has become a central part of this institution in Ireland. Now people around the world are able to experience the friendly nature of the Irish pub, which follows in the wake of its English equivalent as a welcome and growing export. English pubs have been found in America, in parts of Europe and throughout the world where English people have settled. Today the Irish pub is witnessing an outburst of international popularity as Westerners turn away from their television and computer screens and seek to put a human face to their social contacts. They are finding it in the bars and corners of Irish pubs, where Guinness stout, the Irish national drink, is available in the tall, dark creamy pint glasses and Irish music is the regular fare. In Mr. McCarville"s view, a pub is a place where you and your friends should be able to walk in and have a drink and talk to each other. But in traditional pubs everywhere there is loud raucous music so that customers can"t talk. He says that in all the traditional pubs in Australia they are putting poker machines, and Mr. McCarville saw many vacant looking people gambling. He feels that these pubs are no longer pleasant places to go to have a drink because you can"t talk to anyone. "The one place where conversation has always been great is an Irish pub, so everywhere they are set up they become very popular," he says. "There is music in them, but it is Irish music. It may be traditional or modern Irish music, but it is happy, infectious music which stimulates the mood of the place and does not overpower it. " So Irish pubs are spreading.

单选题The reception was attended by various ______ members of the local community and representatives of regional industries. A. protuberant B. conspicuous C. prominent D. projecting

单选题The two countries will assign counter-drug officials to their respective embassies on a______ basis.

单选题The sudden change of weather made the temperature ______ a lot.

单选题Sometimes they ______ their students' poor comprehension to a lack of intelligence. A. distribute B. attribute C. contribute D. consider

单选题Key James, Secretary of Health and Human Resources in the Virginia State government, loves to turn the tables on those who don't think it's possible to be middle-class, conservative, educated and still be truly black. Once, during an abortion debate, a woman in the audience angrily told James she was so middle-class she didn't have a clue about real African American life. "If you understood what these women go through," the woman said, "you would realize that abortion is their only choice." James then asked the woman to consider a poor black mother on welfare. She already has four children and an alcoholic husband who has all but abandoned the family. Now she discovers another child is on the way. "How would you counsel that woman? " asked James. "Have an abortion," the woman responded. "That child would have a very poor quality of life." "I have a vested interest in your answer," James said. "The woman I described was my mother. I was the fifth of six children born into poverty. And, in case you're interested, the quality of my life is just fine!/

单选题It was for this reason ______ she left her homeland and moved to a mountain village.

单选题Hydrocarbons, ______ by engine exhausts, react with nitrogen oxides in the presence of sunlight to form complex toxic gases.

单选题Iceland lies far north in the Atlantic, with its northernmost tip actually ______ the Arctic circle. A. touched B. touches C. touching D. being touched

单选题I was unaware of the critical points involved, so my choice was quite ______.

单选题This story tells us ______.

单选题Go (围棋) is an ancient Asian game. In recent years, computer experts, particularly those 27 in artificial intelligence, have felt the fascination. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has 28 to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly 29 Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and 30 that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player. The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 31 and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend 32 by surrounding it with stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in 33 the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition. In the 34 of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds. But the 35 go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly; they have trouble making it correctly. 36 , the allure (吸引力) of computer Go increases as the difficulties it poses encourages programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence. A. complexity B. Consequently C. course D. horizontal E. humbled F. humiliated G. Nonetheless H. obstacles I. reflecting J. responding K. slanted L. specializing M. submitted N. subscribed O. territory

单选题Black FridayEveryone likes to shop for gifts for the holiday season, but few people know the history of holiday shopping. While people have heard of Black Friday; most do not know its origins. Black F

单选题It was sunrise on an August morning when the captain and his crew cast their nets some 50 miles south of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. As the net was pulled over, the contents were poured out follo

单选题Running can strengthen your heart and muscles, but ,it can damage your knee joints and the bones in your feet.

单选题The terrorists kidnapped the director of the company and demanded a large sums of money for his ______. A. liberty B. relief C. relaxation D. release

单选题We have at present not any ______ of the furniture as you required. A. mark B, inventory C. stock D. account

单选题It is too early to say whether IBM's competitors will be able to ______ their products to the new hardware at an affordable cost.

单选题 Questions2-5 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

单选题 Grow Plants Without Water A. Ever since humanity began to farm our own food, we've faced the unpredictable rain that is both friend and enemy. It comes and goes without much warning, and a field of lush (茂盛的) leafy greens one year can dry up and blow away the next. Food security and fortunes depend on sufficient rain, and nowhere more so than in Africa, where 96% of farmland depends on rain instead of the irrigation common in more developed places. It has consequences: South Africa's ongoing drought—the worst in three decades—will cost at least a quarter of its corn crop this year. B. Biologist Jill Farrant of the University of Cape Town in South Africa says that nature has plenty of answers for people who want to grow crops in places with unpredictable rainfall. She is hard at work finding a way to take traits from rare wild plants that adapt to extreme dry weather and use them in food crops. As the earth's climate changes and rainfall becomes even less predictable in some places, those answers will grow even more valuable. 'The type of farming I'm aiming for is literally so that people can survive as it's going to get more and more dry,' Farrant says. C. Extreme conditions produce extremely tough plants. In the rusty red deserts of South Africa, steep-sided rocky hills called inselbergs rear up from the plains like the bones of the earth. The hills are remnants of an earlier geological era, scraped bare of most soil and exposed to the elements. Yet on these and similar formations in deserts around the world, a few fierce plants have adapted to endure under ever-changing conditions. D. Farrant calls them resurrection plants (复苏植物). During months without water under a harsh sun, they wither, shrink and contract until they look like a pile of dead gray leaves. But rainfall can revive them in a matter of hours. Her time-lapse (间歇性拍摄的) videos of the revivals look like someone playing a tape of the plant's death in reverse. E. The big difference between 'drought-tolerant' plants and these tough plants: metabolism. Many different kinds of plants have developed tactics to weather dry spells. Some plants store reserves of water to see them through a drought; others send roots deep down to subsurface water supplies. But once these plants use up their stored reserve or tap out the underground supply, they cease growing and start to die. They may be able to handle a drought of some length, and many people use the term 'drought tolerant' to describe such plants, but they never actually stop needing to consume water, so Farrant prefers to call them drought resistant. F. Resurrection plants, defined as those capable of recovering from holding less than 0.1 grams of water per gram of dry mass, are different. They lack water-storing structures, and their existence on rock faces prevents them from tapping groundwater, so they have instead developed the ability to change their metabolism. When they detect an extended dry period, they divert their metabolisms, producing sugars and certain stress-associated proteins and other materials in their tissues. As the plant dries, these resources take on first the properties of honey, then rubber, and finally enter a glass-like state that is 'the most stable state that the plant can maintain,' Farrant says. That slows the plant's metabolism and protects its dried-out tissues. The plants also change shape, shrinking to minimize the surface area through which their remaining water might evaporate. They can recover from months and years without water, depending on the species. G. What else can do this dry-out-and-revive trick? Seeds—almost all of them. At the start of her career, Farrant studied 'recalcitrant seeds (顽拗性种子),' such as avocados, coffee and lychee. While tasty, such seeds are delicate—they cannot bud and grow if they dry out (as you may know if you've ever tried to grow a tree from an avocado pit). In the seed world, that makes them rare, because most seeds from flowering plants are quite robust. Most seeds can wait out the dry, unwelcoming seasons until conditions are right and they sprout (发芽). Yet once they start growing, such plants seem not to retain the ability to hit the pause button on metabolism in their stems or leaves. H. After completing her Ph.D. on seeds, Farrant began investigating whether it might be possible to isolate the properties that make most seeds so resilient (迅速恢复活力的) and transfer them to other plant tissues. What Farrant and others have found over the past two decades is that there are many genes involved in resurrection plants' response to dryness. Many of them are the same that regulate how seeds become dryness-tolerant while still attached to their parent plants. Now they are trying to figure out what molecular signaling processes activate those seed-building genes in resurrection plants—and how to reproduce them in crops. 'Most genes are regulated by a master set of genes,' Farrant says. 'We're looking at gene promoters and what would be their master switch.' I. Once Farrant and her colleagues feel they have a better sense of which switches to throw, they will have to find the best way to do so in useful crops. 'I'm trying three methods of breeding,' Farrant says: conventional, genetic modification and gene editing. She says she is aware that plenty of people do not want to eat genetically modified crops, but she is pushing ahead with every available tool until one works. Farmers and consumers alike can choose whether or not to use whichever version prevails: 'I'm giving people an option.' J. Farrant and others in the resurrection business got together last year to discuss the best species of resurrection plant to use as a lab model. Just like medical researchers use rats to test ideas for human medical treatments, botanists use plants that are relatively easy to grow in a lab or greenhouse setting to test their ideas for related species. The Queensland rock violet is one of the best studied resurrection plants so far, with a draft genome (基因图谱) published last year by a Chinese team. Also last year, Farrant and colleagues published a detailed molecular study of another candidate, Xerophyta viscosa, a tough-as-nail South African plant with lily-like flowers, and she says that a genome is on the way. One or both of these models will help researchers test their ideas—so far mostly done in the lab—on test plots. K. Understanding the basic science first is key. There are good reasons why crop plants do not use dryness defenses already. For instance, there's a high energy cost in switching from a regular metabolism to an almost-no-water metabolism. It will also be necessary to understand what sort of yield farmers might expect and to establish the plant's safety. 'The yield is never going to be high,' Farrant says, so these plants will be targeted not at Iowa farmers trying to squeeze more cash out of high-yield fields, but subsistence farmers who need help to survive a drought like the present one in South Africa. 'My vision is for the subsistence farmer,' Farrant says. 'I'm targeting crops that are of African value.'