单选题 Listen to the following passage. Altogether the passage will be read to you four times. During the first reading, which will be done at normal speed, listen and try to understand the meaning. For the second and third readings, the passage will be read sentence by sentence, or phrase by phrase, with intervals of 15 seconds. The last reading will be done at normal speed again and during this time you should check your work. You will then be given 1 minute to check through your work once more. The Story of Tea Tea remained unknown to the western world/until the sixteenth century,/when European explorers who traveled to China and other Far Eastern countries/returned with a host of new foods, spices, and beverages.

单选题News about the Gulf War came pouring from a number of unnamed ______.

单选题A: Do you think you could lend me some of your records?B: Until when?A: Oh, just over the holidays.B: I'm not sure. ______

单选题I've worked here since I ______ Harvard Business School. A. leave B. left C. have left D. had left

单选题It's necessary that the president______in time to attend the meeting.

单选题A: I'm much grateful to you for everything you've done for me. B: __________________ A. Forget about it. B. That's all right. C. I'm pleased to be at your service. D. You are very welcome to visit our country.

单选题There" s growing______among the electorate with the old two-party system.

单选题 Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the enormous number of student questions in the online class, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. This online course is a core requirement of Georgia Tech's online Master of Science in Computer Science program. Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants, but that wasn't enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students. Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support. When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered, their motivation to continue begins to fade. Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson, which is based on the IBM Watson platform. Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first, the virtual assistant wasn't too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all the 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers. After some adjustments and sufficient time, Jill was able to answer the students' questions correctly 97% of the time. The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn't know she was a computer. The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn't tell it apart from a real human being. Goel didn't inform them about Jill's true identity until April 26. The students were actually very positive about the experience. The goal of Professor Goel's virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. The name Jill Watson will, of course, change to something else next semester. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence than, say, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.

单选题In the deserted factory several huge machines were left to rust and {{U}}decay{{/U}}.

单选题Even more crucially, they are the product of an outdated political system which has consistently sacrificed the long term to the short term and abandoned principles for ______ .

单选题$50 billion might seem a lot of money, but it's a mere ______ in terms of what global capital markets can and do absorb.

单选题The battle is of great significance when viewed in the ______ of the progress of the war.

单选题The two ferry disasters occurred

单选题I don' t think he is serious, ______ ?

单选题______ is a slightly sour thick liquid made from milk with bacteria added to it, sometimes sweetened and flavored with fruit and sometimes eaten plain.

单选题(Human) society, (or in any) community, (may be spoken) (of as) a social organism.

单选题The actual cost of the building was much higher than our original ______.

单选题A simple pair of pants may contain a multitude of meanings. In the 1850s, jeans were the unemotional, durable dress of those that came to California to labor in the gold fields. Seams were strengthened with metal pins to make them hold, a technology borrowed from the construction of horse blankets. Cloth for beasts of burden was translated to the needs of men of burden. These were the clothes of hard-laboring people, and these pants held little promise for the men who wore them, save the promise that they would be ready for the next day's labors. During the same decade, in the court of one European queen, "the gown worn by a fashionable lady in attendance contained 1,100 yards of material not including lace and other ornaments." American women of wealth were also wrapped in an abundance of cloth. While makers of jeans worried over how many men could be fitted into a given amount of cloth, for women of wealth the concern was with how many yards of cloth could be attractively arranged upon a given individual. This was the mark of prosperity: to wear enough material on one's back to clothe many of more modest means. The fashionable rich could not imagine themselves wearing the vulgar canvas pants of workers and "peasants". Neither could working-class people reasonably imagine themselves in the costumes of wealth and power. Tile only fashion link between them— subtle at best—was the stern top hat of wealthy capitalists, a coal-black cylinder symbolizing the factory chimney pipes that brought profit to one, hardship to the other. Blue jeans only signified labor and sweat. Years later, the clothing of nineteenth-century laborers would assume new and different meanings. Humble beginnings became increasingly obscure within the unfolding of popular culture. In the movies, the horse riders of the early cattle industry were reborn as symbols of a noble, rural simplicity, and blue jeans became conspicuous within the landscape of the American media. On the screen these pants teased the imaginations of city folk, who longed for a simpler and less corrupt life. While laborers would continue to wear them at work, now the well-off might put on a pair at home or in the garden—an escape from the discipline of the business world. In the 1950s, blue jeans became a statement by those who wished to boycott the values of a consumer-based society that was concerned only with acquisition. Blue-jeans-wearing rebels of popular movies were an expression of contempt towards the empty and obedient silence of Cold-War America; the positive images of American consumer society were under siege. What had been a piece of traditional American culture—blue jeans—became a rejection of traditional culture.

单选题The text intends to express the idea that ______.