单选题We sometimes hear that essays are an old-fashioned form, that so-and-so is the "last essayist", but the facts of the marketplace argue quite otherwise. Essays of nearly any kind are so much easier than short stories for a writer to sell, so many more see print, it's strange that though two fine anthologies (collections) remain that publish the year's best stories, no comparable collection exists for essays. Such changes in the reading public's taste aren't always to the good, needless to say. The art of telling stories predated even cave painting, surely; and if we ever find ourselves living in caves again, it (with painting and drumming) will be the only art left, after movies, novels, photography, essays, biography, and all the rest have gone down the drain--the art to build from. Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am. Autobiographies which aren't novels are generally extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the human voice talking, its order being the mind's natural flow, instead of a systematized outline of ideas. Though more changeable or informal than an article or treatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn't be uttered in fewer words than the essayist has used. Essays don't usually boil down to a summary, as articles do, and the style of the writer has a "nap" to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap (绒毛) on a piece of wool and can't be brushed flat. Essays belong to the animal kingdom, with a surface that generates sparks, like a coat of fur, compared with the flat, conventional cotton of the magazine article writer, who works in the vegetable kingdom, instead. But, essays, on the other hand, may have fewer "levels" than fiction, because we are not supposed to argue much about their meaning. In the old distinction between teaching and storytelling, the essayist, however cleverly he tries to conceal his intentions, is a bit of a teacher or reformer, and an essay is intended to convey the same point to each of us. An essayist doesn't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he can shape or shave his memories, as long as the purpose is served of explaining a truthful point. A personal essay frequently is not autobiographical at all, but what it does keep in common with autobiography is that, through its tone and tumbling progression, it conveys the quality of the author's mind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are directly concerned with the mind and the mind's peculiarity, the very freedom the mind possesses is conferred on this branch of literature that does honor to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination of the essay.

单选题In ancient times the {{U}}custom{{/U}} of shaking hands served to transfer power or authority.

单选题A: Have you a single room with bath for tonight and tomorrow night?B: ______. A. Yes. The rooms have been sold out. B. No. Just a moment, please. C. Yes, our rooms are very good. D. Sorry, we haven't any singles left, I'm afraid.

单选题"Employees have the responsibility to say here's what I want, here's what I need, here's what would make me stay." Says author and {{U}}consultant{{/U}} Beverly Kaye.

单选题Maggie ran back to the kitchen, ______ carefully in her hands. A. eggs to be held B. holding the eggs C. eggs were held D. held the eggs

单选题When traveling, you are advised to take traveler's checks, which provide a secure ______ to carrying your money in cash.(2010年厦门大学考博试题)

单选题 Watch a baby between six and nine months old, and you will observe the basic concepts of geometry being learned. Once the baby has mastered the idea that space is three-dimensional, it reaches out and begins grasping various kinds of objects. It is then, from perhaps nine to fifteen months, that the concepts of sets and numbers are formed. So far, so good. But now an ominous development takes place. The nerve fibers in the brain insulate themselves in such a way that the baby begins to hear sounds very precisely. Soon it picks up language, and it is then brought into direct communication with adults. From this point on, it is usually downhill all the way for mathematics, because the child now becomes exposed to all the nonsense words and beliefs of the community into which it has been so unfortunate as to have been born. Nature, having done very well by the child to this point, having permitted it the luxury of thinking for itself for eighteen months, now abandons it to the arbitrary conventions and beliefs of society. But at least the child knows something of geometry and numbers, and it will always retain some memory of the early halcyon days, no matter what vicissitudes it may suffer later on. The main reservoir of mathematical talent in any society is thus possessed by children who are about two years old, children who have just learned to speak fluently.

单选题The Hocanes A appear B friendly and peaceful , C but they are deeply suspicious of D another tribes.

单选题I'll lend you my cassette recorder ______ I've done with it.

单选题The phrase "smoking gun" in the first paragraph probably means

单选题Ellen Pao spent the last few years spotlighting the technology industry"s lack of diversity, in court and beyond. Erica Baker caused a stir at Google when she started a spreadsheet last year for employees to share their salaries, highlighting the pay disparities between those of different genders doing the same job. Laura I. Gómez founded a start-up focused on improving diversity in the hiring process. Now the three are starting an effort to collect and share data to help diversify the rank-and-file employees who make up tech companies. The nonprofit venture, called Project Include, was unveiled on Tuesday. As part of Project Include, the group plans to extract commitments from tech companies to track the diversity of their work forces over time and eventually share that data with other start-ups. The effort will focus on start-ups that employ 25 to 1,000 workers, in the hope of spurring the companies to think about equality sooner rather than later. The project will also ask for participation from venture capital firms that advise and mentor the start-ups. Project Include aims to have 18 companies as part of its first cohort; a few have already signed up. The group will meet regularly for seven months to define and track specific metrics. At the end of that period, the group will publish an anonymized set of results to show the progress—or lack thereof—that the start-ups have made around diversity. The group"s push is intended to cut through tech"s slow pace of change on diversity. Large companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have openly admitted their failings in creating diverse work forces, and some have started programs to move the needle. But that has not seemed to spur much movement in views on the issue. In December, for instance, Michael Moritz, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, made headlines when he said in an interview that his firm—which had no female investment partners in the United States—would focus on hiring women but would not "lower its standards" to do so. He also said the firm was blind to gender and race. "It is this incredibly self-serving mythology that we are the best and the brightest, and that the best ideas rise to the top and will get funded," said Ms. Kapor Klein, noting there is plenty of data to show that minority access to tech programs and networks is worse than that of white males. "Despite an avalanche of rigorous data to the contrary, the belief in pure meritocracy persists."

单选题According to C. Ogden and I. Richards,______is regarded as the crucial intermediary between______and______. (西安外国语学院2006研)

单选题Passage Two A panel of government officials is worried. The air quality in some areas is not good. The air is polluted with soot. The officials worry that the air is harmful to the people who breathe the air. The officials are experts. They study the environment. They discuss ways to stop the air pollution. The panel decided to make some changes to the law. The new plan places strict limits on how much soot can be released into the air. Now, a measurement of 65 parts of soot is considered safe. The new plan would reduce that number to 30. The daily limit of pollution in the air would be cut in half. These new standards would affect industry. The limits would also affect people who own wood stoves and fireplaces. The county will keep track of the air quality every day. People would be required to stop burning wood when the levels are high. They could also install a kind of special fireplace. These fireplaces burn very little wood. They do not pollute the air as much. Some counties will punish families who violate the ban. They will have to pay a fine for not complying with the law. Some states do not have much industry. Their pollution problem is not too bad. They would still have to regulate how much pollution is released into the air. The experts hope that this ban will help keep the air cleaner. Before the plan becomes a law the public will have a chance to comment on it. Citizens will have ninety days to ask questions and voice concerns about the plan. Then it will become a law.

单选题Companies working on CRM aim at

单选题To English travelers in Italy, the use of forks seemed ______ .

单选题"In every known human society the male"s needs for achievement can be recognized. In a great number of human societies men"s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness in fact has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feat." This is the conclusion of the anthropologist Margaret Mead about the way in which the roles of men and women in society should be distinguished. If talk and print are considered it would seem that the formal emancipation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of women and about the complicated system of defences which men have thrown up around their hitherto accepted advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types of occupation and sociable groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubt of the seriousness of women"s pretensions to the level of intellect and resolution that men, it is supposed, bring to the business of running the world. There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men"s status. In the first place, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the woman Prime Minister, in India, Sri Lanka and Israel. Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. More diffusely there are the increasingly numerous convergences between male and female behaviour: the approximation to identical styles in dress and coiffure, the sharing of domestic tasks, and the admission of women to all sorts of hitherto exclusively male leisure-time activities. Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive or natural conditions of human life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaeology, but that does not matter since it is not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardly felt expectations of people"s sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiation between the roles of the two sexes. In this rudimentary natural society men go out to hunt and fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women keep the fire going. Amorous initiative is firmly reserved to the man, who sets about courtship with a club.

单选题A severe weather alert is now in effect for ______ southern Ohio and Indiana. A. whole B. the whole C. all of D. the all