单选题Conditions were ______ trees virtually disappeared from the inland, and 40% of Australia was transformed into a vast active dune field.

单选题It surely______his wishes to drop out of school because he longs for college life.

单选题If those "mad moments"—when you 'can't remember what your friend has told you or where you left your keys—are becoming more frequent, mental exercises and a healthy brain diet may help. Just as bodies require more maintenance with the passing years, so do brains, which scientists now know show signs of aging as early as the 20s and 30s. "Brain aging starts at a very young age, younger than any of us had imagined and these processes continue gradually over the years," said Dr. Gary Small, the director of the Center on Aging at the University of California, Los Angeles. "I'm convinced that it is never too early to get started on a mental or brain-fitness program," he added. In his book, The Memory Bible, the 51-year-old neuroscientist (神经学家) lists what he refers to as the 10 suggestions for keeping the brain young. They include training memory, building skills, reducing stress, mental exercises; brain food and a healthy lifestyle. It's a game plan for keeping brain cells sparking and neural networks in perfect shape. "Misplacing your keys a couple of times don't mean you should start labeling your cabinets. Memory loss is not an inevitable consequence of aging. Our brains can fight back," he said. Small provides the weapons for a full-scale attack. Simple memory tests give an indication of what you are up against and tools such as "look" and "connect" are designed to make sure that important things such as names and dates are never forgotten. "So if you wanted to learn names and faces, for example, you meet Mrs. Beatty and you notice a distinguishing facial feature, maybe a high eyebrow," said Small. "You associate the first thing that comes to mind. I think of the actor Warren Beatty so I create a mental picture of Warren Beatty kissing her brow." Small admits it may sound a bit strange but he says it works. "Mental exercises could be anything from doing crossword puzzles and writing with your left hand if you are right handed or learning a language. It could be anything that is fun that people enjoy doing," he added. He also recommends physical exercise, a low-fat diet and eating foods rich in fatty acids, such as fish, nuts, and fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants (抗氧化剂) including blueberries and onions in addition to reducing stress.

单选题Which of the following best states the "particular pedagogical purpose" mentioned in paragraph 3?

单选题While modulation/demodulation technology was being standardized for the most recent modems, several other peripheral standards were also being developed.

单选题I managed to ______ myself to the habits and customs in the United States. A. fit B. adopt C. adapt D. regulate

单选题Passage 1 Imagine a world in which there was suddenly no emotion--a world in which human beings could feel no love or happiness, no terror or hate. Try to imagine the consequences of such a transformation. People might not be able to stay alive; knowing neither joy nor pleasure, neither anxiety nor fear, they would be as likely to repeat acts that hurt them as acts that were beneficial. They could not learn: they could not benefit from experience because this emotionless world would lack rewards and punishments. Society would soon disappear: people would be as likely to harm one another as to provide help and support. Human relationships would not exist: in a world without friends or enemies, there could be no marriage, affection among companions, or bonds among members of groups. Society's economic underpinnings would be destroyed: since earning $10 million would be no more pleasant than earning $10, there would be no incentive to work. In fact, there would be no incentives of any kind. For as we will see, incentives imply a capacity to enjoy them. In such a world, the chances that the human species would survive are next to zero, because emotions are the basic instrument of our survival and adaptation. Emotions structure the world for us in important ways. As individuals, we categorize objects on the basis of our emotions. True, we consider the length, shape, size, or texture, but an object's physical aspects are less important than what it has done or can do to us--hurt us, surprise us, anger us or make us joyful. We also use categorizations colored by emotions in our families, communities, and overall society. Out of our emotional experiences with objects and events comes a social feeling of agreement that certain things and actions are "good" and others are "bad", and we apply these categories to every aspect of our social life--from what foods we eat and what clothes we wear to how we keep promises and which people our group will accept. In fact, society exploits our emotional reactions and attitudes, such as loyalty, morality, pride shame, guilt, fear and greed, in order to maintain itself. It gives high rewards to individuals who perform important tasks such as surgery, makes heroes out of individuals for unusual or dangerous achievements such as flying fighter planes in a war, and uses the legal and penal system to make people afraid to engage in antisocial acts.

单选题I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery… A) assonance B) antithesis C) overstatement D) alliteration

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} In 1929 John D. Rockefeller decided it was time to sell shares when even a shoe-shine boy offered him a share tip. During the past week The Economist's economics editor has been advised by a taxi driver, a plumber and a hairdresser that "you can't go wrong" investing in housing-the more you own the better. Is this a sign that it is time to get out? At the very least, as house prices around the world climb to ever loftier heights, and more and more people jump on to the buy-to-let ladder, it is time to expose some of the fallacies regularly trotted out by so many self-appointed housing experts. One common error is that house prices must continue to rise because of a limited supply of land. For instance, it is argued that "house prices will always rise in London because lots of people want to live here". But this confuses the level of prices with their rate of change. Home prices are bound to be higher in big cities because of land scarcity, but this does not guarantee that urban house prices will keep rising indefinitely-just look at Tokyo's huge price-drops since 1990. And, though it is true that a fixed supply of homes may push up house prices if the population is rising, this would imply a steady rise in prices, not the 20% annual jumps of recent years. A second flawed argument is that low interest rates make buying a home cheaper, and so push up demand and prices. Lower interest rates may have allowed some people, who otherwise could not have afforded a mortgage, to buy a home. But many borrowers who think mortgages are cheaper are suffering from money illusion. Interest rates are not very low in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Initial interest payments may seem low in relation to income, but because inflation is also low it will not erode the real burden of debt as swiftly as it once did. So in later years mortgage payments will be much larger in real terms. To argue that low nominal interest rates make buying a home cheaper is like arguing that a car loan paid off over four years is cheaper than one repaid over two years. Fallacy number three is a favourite claim of Alan Greenspan, chairman of America's Federal Reserve. This is that price bubbles are less likely in housing than in the stockmarket because higher transaction costs discourage speculation. In fact, several studies have shown that both in theory and in practice bubbles are more likely in housing than in shares. A study by the IMF finds that a sharp rise in house prices is far more likely to be followed by a bust than is a share-price boom.

单选题Back in the 1870s, Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galeton wanted to define the face of a criminal. He assembled photographs of men convicted of heinous crimes and made a composite by lining them up on a single photographic plate. The surprise: everybody liked the villain, including Galton himself. He reasoned that the villainous irregularities he supposed belonged to criminal faces had disappeared in the averaging process. In the next century, scientists began to show reliably that faces combined digitally on computers were likable—more so than the individual faces from which they were composed. Although people clearly admire the long legs of Brazilian model Ana Hickmann or Dolly Parton's breasts, in general humans like averages. Researchers confirmed that humans judge real faces by their differences or similarities from a norm. But they also found that the norm can change quickly: When researchers showed 164 people sets of 100 computer-generated faces representing a slow transition from male to female—and from Japanese to Caucasian—it turned out that the test subjects' idea of what constitute an "average" face shifted depending on the first face they saw. When they were flashed a super masculine face first, more faces on the spectrum impressed them, by contrast, as female. The masculine face had, in effect, set a standard. From then on, other faces had to be more masculine in order to rate as belonging to the gender. The study noted a similar shift using a scale of faces moving from surprise to disgust. The authors, who published their results in the journal Nature, conclude that in real life we also quickly change ore" perception of the midpoint—what's normal—depending on what we see. We may not be aware that our judgment has changed; we simply see differently, says Michael Webster, a psychologist at the University of Nevada in Reno and coauthor of the study. One implication is that individual and social attitudes toward what's acceptable, and what's beautiful, change over time. "If you look at plastic-surgery trends, in the 1950s and 1960s you saw little upturned noses," notes Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff, author of the book Survival of the Prettiest : The Science of Beauty. "Now the noses are broader and the lips are plumper. We're seeing images from around the globe, and it's changing our idea of the average. " So if you're unhappy with some aspect of your face, take comfort: beauty is a moving target.

单选题They want to buy a forty-foot sailing boat ______ they plan to sail around the world. A．that B．for which C．on which D．where

单选题Ants first captured the attention of software engineers in the early 1990s. A single ant cannot do much on its own, but a group of ants (51) can solve complex problems. That inspired people like Marco Dorigo, who is one of the founders of a (52) known as group intelligence. Ants are good at choosing the shortest possible route between a food (53) and their nest. This reminds us of a classic computational travelling-salesman problem. Given a list of cities and their (54) apart, the salesman must find the shortest route needed to visit each city once. As the number of cities (55) , the problem gets more complicated. Ants solve their own problem using chemical signals called pheromones (信息素), when an ant finds food, she takes it back to the nest, (56) a pheromone trail that will attract others. The more ants that (57) the trail, the stronger it becomes. (58) , the pheromones evaporate (挥发) quickly, so once all the food has been collected, the trail soon goes cold. This rapid evaporation means long trails are less (59) than short ones, all else being equal. Pheromones thus turn the (60) intelligence of the individual ants into something more powerful.

单选题He didn't tell me where he had spent his holidays. ______ to know. A. Neither I cared B. Not did I care C. I didn't care D. Neither did I care

单选题The information in the form may come from ______.

单选题—Shall we go swimming? —Ok, I'll just go and get ______.A. to changeB. changingC. changedD. it changed

单选题Woman: Tim, why don"t you like Sue? She seems to be a very good girl. Man: A very good girl? She always has her nose in the air. Question: Why doesn"t Tim like Sue?