单选题Why could maglev trains replace short-fight commuter aircraft?

单选题Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists' only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for ex- pressing ioy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire' s flowers of evil You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda--to lure us to open our wallets to make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. What we forget—what our economy depends on is forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring tile greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you wiI1 die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

单选题I have no objection ______ your story again. A. to hear B. to hearing C. to having heard D. to have heard

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Most economists in the United States seem excited by the spell of the free market. Consequently, nothing seems good or normal that does not accord with the requirements of the free market. A price that is determined by the seller or, for that matter, established by anyone other than the aggregate of consumers seems harmful. Accordingly, it requires a major act of will to think of price-fixing (the determination of prices by the Seller) as both "normal" and having a valuable economic function. In fact, price-fixing is normal in all industrialized societies because the industrial system itself provides, as an effortless consequence of its own development, the price-fixing that it requires. Modern industrial planning requires and rewards great size. Hence, a comparatively small number of large firms will be competing for the same group of consumers. That each large firm will act with consideration of its own needs and thus avoid selling its products for more than its competitors charge is commonly recognized by advocates of free-market economic theories. But each large firm will also act with full consideration of the needs that it has in common with the other large firms competing for the same customers. Each large firm will thus avoid significant price-cutting, because price-cutting would be prejudicial to the common interest in a stable demand for products. Most economists do not see price-fixing when it occurs because they expect it to be brought about by a number of explicit agreements among large firms; it is not. Moreover, those economists who argue that allowing the free market to operate without interference is the most efficient method of establishing prices have not considered the economies of non-socialist countries other than the United States. These economies employ intentional price-fixing, usually in an overt fashion. Formal price-fixing by cartel and informal price-fixing by agreements covering the members of an industry are commonplace. Were there something peculiarly efficient about the free market and inefficient about price-fixing, the countries that have avoided the first and used the second would have suffered drastically in their economic development. There is no indication that they have. Socialist industry also works within a framework of controlled prices. In the early 1970's, the Soviet Union began to give firms and industries some of the flexibility in adjusting prices that a more informal evolution has accorded the capitalist system. Economists in the Unites States have hailed the change as a return to the free market. But Soviet firms are no more subject to prices established by a free market over which they exercise little influence than are capitalist firms; rather, Soviet firms have been given the power to fix prices. {{B}}Notes:{{/B}} spell 魔力; 一阵。aggregate 总体。

单选题With the awfully limited vocabulary to only a thousand words or fewer, the reader resembles a color blind artist who is only aware of a few colors and consequently his ability to create on canvas is lamentably restricted.

单选题If you are like most people, your intelligence varies from season to season. You are probably a lot sharper in the spring than you are at any other time of the year. A noted scientist, Ellsworth Huntington (1876—1974) concluded from other men"s work and his own among peoples in different climates that climate and temperature have a definite effect on our mental abilities. He found that cool weather is much more favorable for creative thinking than is summer heat. This does not mean that all people are less intelligent in the summer than they are during the rest of the year. It does mean, however, that the mental abilities of a large number of people tend to be lowest in the summer. Spring appears to be the best period of the year for thinking. One reason may be that in spring man"s mental abilities are affected by the same factors that bring about great changes in all nature. Fall is the nextbest season, then winter. As for summer, it seems to be good time to take a long vacation from thinking.

单选题Which of the following cities is closest m Miami in weather conditions?

单选题Before 1945, hardly anyone outside of New Mexico had ever heard of Alamogordo. In 1960 its population numbered 21,723. Ever since 1898, when the town had been built by the Southern Pacific Railroad, Alamogordo had been a lonely town. The land around it was largely desert, and largely empty. Because it was isolated and because the weather was almost always clear and beautiful; a spot of desert near Alamogordo was chosen as the test site for the first atomic bomb ever exploded. The secret name of the test was Zero. At dawn on July 16, 1945, the atomic bomb was set off. Observers agreed that they had witnessed something unlike anything ever seen by men before: a huge colorful fireball, more brilliant than the sun, flashing as it rose for miles into the air. Never before had men released so much power at one time, nor had any nation ever possessed a weapon as terrible and destructive as the atomic bomb. For several weeks, the test was kept secret. When an atomic bomb was dropped from an American plane on Hiroshima, Japan, newspapers and radio stations all over America told of the test of the bomb in New Mexico. Almost everybody was amazed to learn where the bomb had been made and tested; the deserts of the Southwest had hidden the secret well. When news of the atomic bomb and its destructiveness was announced, people all over the world wondered what other new weapons were being prepared in New Mexico desert. Some people doubted that the secret making atomic bombs could be kept from other countries. Some even doubted the wisdom of using so powerful a weapon. But no one doubted that a new kind of war—and a new kind of world—had begun at Alamogordo, one summer morning in 1946.

单选题The food price ______ by 10 percent during holiday.

单选题Why are mobiles so popular? Because people love to talk to each other. And it is easier with a mobile phone. In countries like Russia and China, people use tile mobile phone in places where there is no ordinary telephone. Business people, use mobiles when they're traveling. In some countries, like Japan, many people use their mobile phones to send email message and access the Internet. They use a new kind of mobile phone called "i mode". You can even use a mobile phone to listen to music. Mobile phones are very fashionable with teenagers. Parents buy mobile phones for their children. They can call borne if they are in trouble and need help. So they feel safer. But teenagers mostly use them to keep in touch with their friends or play simple computer games. It's cool to be the owner of a small expensive mo- bile. Research shows that teenage owners of mobile phones smoke less. Parents and schools are happy that teenagers are safer and smoke less. But many people dislike them. They hate it when the businessman opposite them on the train has a loud conversation on his phone. Or when the mobile phone rings in a cafe or restaurant. But there is a much more serious problem. It's possible that the mobile phone can heat up the brain because we hold the phone so close to our heaD. Scientists fear that mobiles can perhaps be bad for your memory and even give you cancer.

单选题Jack would rather his younger sister ______ in the same hospital as he does. A. worked B. works C. to work D. work

单选题There are a number of formats for reporting research, such as articles to appear in journals, reports addressed to funding agencies, theses or dissertations as part of the requirements for university degrees, and papers to be presented at conferences. These formats differ from one another mostly in their purposes and the audiences whom they address. We will now briefly describe them. The journal article is a way of reporting research for professional journals or edited collections. The research is reporting in a brief, yet informative way, focusing mostly on the main features of the research such as the purpose, review of the literature (often referred to as "background"), procedures used for carrying out the research accompanied by tables, charts, and graphs, and interpretations of the results (often referred to as discussion). The content and emphasis of the journal article will vary according to the intended readers (research or practitioners) and it is important for the researcher to be aware of the background and interest of the readers of the journal. Articles intended to be read by practitioners will emphasize the practical implications and recommendations of the research, while articles intended to be read by researchers will describe in detail the method used to collect data, the construction of data collection procedures, and the techniques used for analyzing the data. It is important for the novice researcher to be aware of the fact that articles submitted to journals go through a process of evaluation by experts who make a judgment and recommend whether they should be published or not. The thesis or dissertation is a format for reporting research which graduate students write as part of fulfilling the requirements for an advanced academic degree. The student is expected to describe in great detail all the phases of the research so it can be examined and evaluated carefully by the reader. Thus the thesis or dissertation includes the purpose and significance of the study, the rationale, a thorough review of the literature, detailed information as to the research tools and the procedures involved in their development, a description of data analysis and the results, and an interpretation of the results in the form of conclusions, implications, and recommendation. This detailed description of the process of the research is needed to provide the professors with an indication of the student's ability to carry out research. The conference paper is a way of reporting research at conferences, seminars and colloquia. At such meetings research papers are usually presented orally. They are similar to the research article since research is reported in a concise, yet informative way, focusing on the most essential elements of the research. Handouts and transparencies can also accompany the presentations. As with the research article, here too, the content and emphasis of the oral report will depend to a large extent on the type of audience present at the meeting, and whether they are researchers or practitioners.

单选题The ______ has left for the Antarctic and it will come back in six months. A. expedition B. execution C. exploration "D. delegation

单选题Jim did not like our plan; so he {{U}}countered{{/U}} it with one of his own.

单选题The______manuscripts are still able to tell a lot about the author who charmed the world with his works several hundred years ago.

单选题Those schools are so strapped for cash that Huckabee just slashed a planned teacher-salary increase from $3,000 to less than $600. A. shifted B. cut C. modified D. drafted

单选题In our society the razor of necessity cuts close. You must make a buck to survive the day. You must work to make a buck. The job is often a chore, rarely a delight. No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses or breaks the spirit, one must work. Lately there has been a questioning of this "work ethic", especially by the young. Strangely enough, it has touched off profound grievances in others hitherto silent and anonymous. Unexpected precincts are being heard from in a show of discontent by blue collar and white. On the evening bus the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways middle-management men pose without grace behind their wheels, as they flee city and job. In all, there is more than a slight ache. And there dangles the impertinent question: Should there not be another increment, earned though not yet received, to one's daily work—an acknowledgment of a man's being? In fact, what all of us are looking for is a calling, not just a job. Jobs alone are not being enough for people.

单选题There are no inevitable outcomes of social class in child rearing. At the same time, there is no question that social class is important factor in how children are raised and the kind of adults that children become. Regarding social class, sociologists have found that parents socialize their children into the behaviors and norms of their work worlds. Members of the working class are closely supervised and are expected to follow explicit rules at their jobs. If they do not follow the precise rules and do as they are told, they will not keep their jobs. Their experience influences how they deal with their children. As a result, their concern is less with their children"s motivations and more with their children"s outward conformity. Thus they are more apt to use physical punishment in managing their children. On the other hand, middle-class parents, who are expected to take more initiative on the job, are more concerned that their children develop curiosity, self-expression, and self-control. They are also more likely to withdraw privileges or affection than to use physical punishment.