单选题During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair pay to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities. Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can reduce a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months. In just one generation, millions of mothers have gone to work, transforming basic family economics. Scholars, policymakers, and critics of all stripes have debated the social implications of these changes, but few have looked at the side effect: family risk has risen as well. Today's families have budgeted to the limits of their new two-paycheck status. As a result, they have lost the parachute they once has in times of financial setback-- a back-up earner (usually Mom) who could go into the workforce if the primary earner got laid off or fell sick. This "added-worker effect" could support the safety net offered by unemployment insurance or disability insurance to help families weather bad times. But today, a disruption to family fortunes can no longer be made up with extra income from an otherwise-stay-at-home partner. During the same period, families have been asked to absorb much more risk in their retirement income. Steelworkers, airline employees, and now those in the auto industry are joining millions of families who must worry about interest rates, stock market fluctuation, and the harsh reality that they may outlive their retirement money. For much of the past year, President Bush campaigned to move Social Security to a savings-account model, with retirees trading much or all of their guaranteed payments for payments depending on investment returns. For younger families, the picture is not any better. Both the absolute cost of healthcare and the share of it borne by families have risen--and newly fashionable health-savings plans are spreading from legislative halls to Wal-Mart workers, with much higher deductibles and a large new dose of investment risk for families' future healthcare. Even demographics are working against the middle class family, as the odds of having a weak elderly parent-- and all he attendant need for physical and financial assistance -- have jumped eightfold in just one generation. From the middle-class family perspective, much of this, understandably, looks far less like an opportunity to exercise more financial responsibility, and a good deal more like a frightening acceleration of the wholesale shift of financial risk onto their already overburdened shoulders. The financial fallout has begun, and the political fallout may not be far behind.

单选题The old man received a lot of respect for his ______ character.A. grandB. nobleC. highD. splendid

单选题 Time "talks" in the American culture and, for that matter, in many other cultures. {{U}}(31) {{/U}} it says is crucial in our relations with others. Some societies take their promises to {{U}}(32) {{/U}} deadlines seriously and keep appointments, and they impose penalties for being late or not completing a task in the {{U}}(33) {{/U}} time. In the United States, being late repeatedly for class in schools may lead to suspension. Late papers may {{U}}(34) {{/U}} as much as 10 percent reduction in the grade, or even a failing grade. Perhaps the most critical dimension in culture is the use of time. Each culture has its own concept of time. In Germanic cultures punctuality is a {{U}}(35) {{/U}} of respect and politeness; being late is rude. Germans believe people should be {{U}}(36) {{/U}} on time, neither too early, nor too late. Tothe Indonesian, time is an endless pool; why be {{U}}(37) {{/U}} or hurry? All cultures {{U}}(38) {{/U}} their own time system for granted and believe other cultures operate with the {{U}}(39) {{/U}} time frame. {{U}}(40) {{/U}} , misunderstandings are inevitable. To function in a foreign country, we must know its time system.

单选题If you ______ see Mr. Jim, you give him my regards. A. would B. shall C. should D. will

单选题 Science writer Tom Standage draws apt parallels between the telegraph and the gem of late 20th-century technology, the Internet. Both systems grew out of the cutting edge science of their time. The telegraph's land lines, underwater cables, and clicking gadgets reflected the 19th century's research in electromagnetism. The Internet's computers and high-speed connections reflect 20th-century computer science, information theory, and materials technology. But, while gizmos make a global network possible, it takes human cooperation to make it happen. Standage's insight in this regard adds depth to his technological history. It underscores the relevance to our own time of the struggles of Samuel Morse in America, William Cooke in England, and other telegraph pioneers. They made the technology work efficiently, sold it to a skeptical public, and overcame national and international bureaucratic obstacles. The solutions they found smooth the Internet's way today. Consider a couple of technical parallels. Telegrams were sent from one station to the next, where they were received and retransmitted until they reached their destination. Stations along the way were owned by different entities, including national governments. Internet data is sent from one server computer to another that receives and retransmits it until it reaches its destination. Again the computers have a variety of owners. Then there is the social impact. The Internet is changing the way we do business and communicate. It makes possible virtual communities for individuals scattered around the planet who share mutual interests. Yet important as this may turn out to be, it is affecting a world that was already well connected by radio, television, and other telecommunications. The Associated Press, Reuters, and other news services would have spread the Start report quickly without the Internet. In this respect, the global telegraph network was truly revolutionary. The unprecedented availability of global news in real time gave birth to the Associated Press and Reuters news services. It gave a global perspective to newspapers that had focused on local affairs. A provincialism that geographical isolation had forced on people for millennia was gone forever. Some prophets naively hailed this as a force for world peace. They predicted that tensions over cultural and ethnic differences would relax as people interacted in real time. Visionaries say the same about the Internet. While communications can smooth this process, they don't automatically make it happen. As the experience of the past century and a half has shown, peace takes the will to make it work and sustained effort by all parties.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} If you are a tourist interested in seeing a baseball game while in New York, you can find out which of its teams are in town simply by sending a message to AskForCents.com. In a few minutes, the answer comes back, apparently supplied by a machine, but actually composed by a human. Using humans to process information in a machine-like way is not new: it was pioneered by the Mechanical Turk, a famed 18th-century chess-playing machine that was operated by a hidden chessmaster. But while computers have since surpassed the human brain at chess, many tasks still baffle even the most powerful electronic brain. For instance, computers can find you a baseball schedule, but they cannot tell you directly if the Yankees are in town. Nor can they tell you whether sitting in the bleachers is a good idea on a first date. AskForCents can, because its answers come from people. "Whatever question you can come up with, there's a person that can provide the answer—you don't have the inflexibility of an algorithm-driven system," says Jesse Heitler, who developed AskForCents. Mr. Heitler was able to do this thanks to a new software tool developed by Amazon, the online retailer, that allows computing tasks to be farmed out to people over the internet. Aptly enough, Amazon's system is called Mechanical Turk. Amazon's Turk is part toolkit for software developers, and part online bazaar: anyone with intemet access can register as a Turk user and start performing the Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) listed on the Turk website (mturk.com). Companies can become "requesters by setting up a separate account, tied to a bank account that will pay out fees, and then posting their HITs. Most HITs pay between one cent and $5. So far, people from more than 100 countries have performed HITs, though only those with American bank accounts can receive money for their work; others are paid in Amazon gift certificates. Mr. Heitler says he had previously tried to build a similar tool, but concluded that the in-frastucture would be difficult to operate profitably. Amazon already has an extensive software infrastructure designed for linking buyers with sellers, however, and the Turk simply extends that existing model. Last November Amazon unveiled a prototype of the system, which it calls "artificial artificial intelligence". The premise is that humans are vastly superior to computers at tasks such as pattern recognition, says Peter Cohen, director of the project at Amazon, so why not let software take advantage of human strengths? Mr. Cohen credits Amazon's boss, Jeff Bezos, with the concept for the Turk. Other people have had similar ideas. Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem, an American firm that builds software tools modeled on natural systems, has built what he calls the "Hunch Engine" to combine human intelligence with computer analysis. The French postal service, for example, has used it to help its workers choose the best delivery routes, and pharmaceutical researchers are using it to determine molecular structures by combining their gut instincts with known results stored in a database. And a firm called Seriosity hopes to tap the collective brainpower of the legions of obsessive players of multiplayer online games such as "World of War-craft ", by getting them to perform small real-world tasks (such as sorting photographs) while playing, and paying them in the game's own currency.

单选题A creek B. flood C. bonus D. pledge

单选题Americans are people obsessed with child-rearing. In their books, magazines, talk shows, parent training courses, White House conferences, and chats over the back fence, they endlessly debate the best ways to raise children. Moreover, Americans do more than debate their theories; they translate them into action. They erect playgrounds for the youngsters' pleasure, equip large schools for their education, and train skilled specialists for their welfare. Whole industries in America are devoted to making children happy, healthy and wise. But this interest in childhood is relatively new. In fact, until very recently people considered childhood just a brief, unimportant prelude to adulthood and the real business of living. By and large they either ignored children, beat them, or fondled them carelessly, much as we would amuse ourselves with a litter of puppies. When they gave serious thought to children at all, people either conceived of them as miniature adults or as peculiar, unformed animals. Down through the ages the experiences of childhood have been as varied as its duration. Actions that would have provoked a beating in one era elicit extra loving care in another. Babies who have been nurtured exclusively by their mothers in one epoch are left with day-care workers in another. In some places children have been trained to straddle unsteady canoes, negotiate treacherous mountain passes, and carry heavy bundles on their heads. In other places they have been taught complicated piano concerti and long multiplication tables. But diverse as it has been, childhood has one common experience at its core and that is the social aspect of nurture. All children need adults to bring them up. Because human young take so long to become independent, we think that civilization may have grown up around the need to feed and protect them. Certainly, from the earliest days of man, adults have made provision for the children in their midst.

单选题Taken together, income, occupation, and education are good measures of people's social standing. Using a layered model of stratification, most sociologists describe the class system in the United States as divided into several classes: upper, upper middle, middle, lower middle, and lower class. Each class is defined by characteristics such as income, occupational prestige, and educational attainment. The different groups are arrayed along a continuum with those with the most money, education, and prestige at the top and those with the least at the bottom. In the United States, the upper class owns the major share of corporate and personal wealth; it includes those who have held wealth for generations as well as those who have recently become rich. Only a very small proportion of people actually constitute the upper class, but they control vast amounts of wealth and power in the United States. They exercise enormous control throughout society. Most of their wealth is inherited. Despite social myths to me contrary, the best predictor of future wealth is the family into which you are born. Each year, the business magazine Forbes publishes a list of the "Forbes 400" — the four hundred wealthiest families and individuals in the country. Of all the wealth represented on the Forbes 400 list, more than half is inherited. Those on the list who could be called " self-made" were not typically of modest origins; most inherited significant assets(Forbes, 1997; Sklar and Collins, 1997). Those in the upper class with newly acquired wealth are known as the nouveau niche. Although they may have vast amounts of money, they are often not accepted into "old rich" circles. The upper middle class includes those with high incomes and high social prestige. They tend to be well-educated professionals or business executives. Their earnings can be quite high indeed—successful business executives can earn millions of dollars a year. It is difficult to estimate exactly how many people fall into this group because of the difficulty of drawing lines between the upper, upper middle, and middle class. Indeed, the upper middle class is often thought of as "middle class" because their lifestyle sets the standard to which many aspire, but this lifestyle is simply beyond the means of a majority of people in the United States. The middle class is hard to define; in part, being "middle class" is more than just economic position. By far the majority of Americans identity themselves as middle class even though they vary widely in lifestyle and in resources at their disposal. But the idea that the United States is an open-class system leads many to think that the majority have a middle-class lifestyle because, in general, people tend not to want to recognize class distinctions in the United States. Thus, the middle class becomes the ubiquitous norm even though many who call themselves middle class have a tenuous hold on this class position. In the hierarchy of social class, the lower middle class includes workers in the skilled trades and low-income bureaucratic workers, many of whom may actually define themselves as middle class. Examples are blue-collar workers(those in skilled trades who do manual labor)and many service workers, such as secretaries, hairdressers, waitresses, police, and firefighters. Medium to low income, education, and occupational prestige define the lower middle class relative to the class groups above it. The term " lower" in this class designation refers to the relative position of the group in the stratification system, but it has a pejorative sound to many people, especially to people who are members of this class. The lower class is composed primarily of the displaced and poor. People in this class have little formal education and are often unemployed or working in minimum-wage jobs. Forty percent of the poor work; 10 percent work year-round and full time—a proportion that has generally increased over time. Recently, the concept of the underclass has been added to the lower class. The underclass includes those who have been left behind by contemporary economic developments. Rejected from the economic system, those in the underclass may become dependent on public assistance or illegal activities.

单选题I ______ tell her the truth.

单选题We should always ______ our opinion ______ facts.

单选题If you smoke, you' d better hurry. From July 1st pubs all over England will, by law, be no-smoking areas. So will restaurants, offices and even company cars, if more than one person uses them. England's smokers are following a well-trodden path. The other three bits of the United Kingdom have already banned smoking in almost all enclosed public spaces, and there are anti-smoking laws of varying strictness over most of Western Europe. The smoker's journey from glamour through toleration to suspicion is finally reaching its end in pariah status. But behind this pubhc-health success story lies a darker tale. Poorer people are much more likely to smoke than richer ones--a change from the 1950s, when professionals and laborers were equally keen. Today only 15% of men in the highest professional classes smoke, but 42% of unskilled workers do. Despite punitive taxation--20 cigarettes cost around ￡ 5.00 ( $10.00), three-quarters of which is tax--55% of single mothers on benefits smoke. The figure for homeless men is even higher; for hard-drug users it is practically 100%. The message that smoking kills has been heard, it seems, but not by all. Having defeated the big killers of the past--want, exposure, poor sanitation-- governments all over the developed world are turning their attention to diseases that stem mostly from how individuals choose to live their lives. But the same deafness afflicts the same people when they are strongly encouraged to give up other sorts of unhealthy behavior. The lower down they are on practically any pecking order--job prestige, income, education, background-the more likely people are to be fat and unfit, and to drink too much. That tempts governments to shout ever louder in an attempt to get the public to listen- and nowhere do they do so more aggressively than in Britain. One reason is that pecking orders matter more than in most other rich countries : income distribution is very unequal and the unemployed, disaffected, ill-educated rump is comparatively large. Another reason is the frustration of a government addicted to targets, which often aim not only to improve something but to lessen inequality in the process. A third is that the National Health Service is free to patients, and paying for those who have arguably brought their ill-health on themselves grows alarmingly costly. Britain's aggressiveness, however, may be pointless, even counter-productive. There is no reason to believe that those who ignore measured voices will listen to shouting. It irritates the majority who are already behaving responsibly, and it may also undermine all government pronouncements on health by convincing people that they have an ultra-cautious margin of error built in. Such hectoring may also be missing the root cause of the problem. According to Mr. Marmot, who cites research on groups as diverse as baboons in captivity, British civil servants and Oscar nominees, the higher rates of ill health among those in more modest walks of life can be attributed to what he calls the "status syndrome". People in privileged positions think they are worth the effort of behaving healthily, and find the will-power to do so. The implication is that it is easier to improve a person's health by weakening the connection between social position and health than by targeting behavior directly. Some public-health experts speak of social cohesion, support for families and better education for all. These are bigger undertakings than a bossy campaign; but more effective, and quieter.

单选题The concept of a loyal opposition—the ______ of modern democracy—rarely prevails and, much more frequently, opposition is equated with treason and ruthlessly suppressed.

单选题What does "Both styles" in Line 3, Paragraph 1 refer to?

单选题My money ______, Could you please lend me some? A. has run out of B. has run out C. was run out of D. has been run out

单选题Though widely-accepted on the Internet, "Duang" is a character which does not even exist in the Chinese dictionary. However, it ______ like wildfire online in China since it appeared.

单选题Why do you want to find a new job ______ you've got such a good one already?A. thatB. whereC. whichD. when