单选题A. powderB. ownC. meadowD. follow

单选题His knowledge of language and international relations ______him in his work.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} In 1880, Sir Joshua Waddilove, a Victorian philanthropist, founded Provident Financial to provide affordable loans to working-class families in and around Bradford, in northern England. This month his company, now one of Britain's leading providers of "home credit"— small, short-term, unsecured loans—began the nationwide rollout of Vanquis, a credit card aimed at people that mainstream lenders shun. The card offers up to ￡ 200 ($ 380) of credit, at a price: for the riskiest customers, the annual interest rate will be 69%. Provident says that the typical interest rate is closer to 50% and that it charges no fees for late payments or breaching credit limits. Still, that is triple the rate on regular credit cards and far above the 30% charged by store cards. And the Vanquis card is being launched just when Britain's politicians and media are full of worry about soaring consumer debt. Last month, a man took his own life after running up debts of ￡ 130000 on 22 different credit cards. Credit cards for "sub-prime" borrowers, as the industry delicately calls those with poor credit records, are new in Britain but have been common in America for a while. Lenders began issuing them when the prime market became saturated, prompting them to look for new sources of profit. Even in America, the sub-prime market has plenty of room for growth. David Robertson of the Nilson Report, a trade magazine, reckons that outstanding sub-prime credit-card debt accounts for only 3% of the $ 597 billion that Americans owe on plastic. The sub-prime sector grew by 7.9% last year, compared with only 2.6% for the industry as a whole. You might wonder, though, how companies can make money from lending to customers they know to be bad risks—or at any rate, how they can do it legitimately. Whereas delinquencies in the credit-card industry as a whole are around 4%-5% , those in the sub-prime market are almost twice as high, and can reach 15% in hard times. Obviously, issuers charge higher interest rates to compensate them for the higher risk of not being repaid. And all across the credit-card industry, the assessment and pricing of risks has been getting more and more refined, thanks largely to advances in technology and data processing. Companies also use sophisticated computer programs to track slower payment or other signs of increased risk. Sub-prime issuers pay as much attention to collecting debt as to managing risk; they impose extra charges, such as application fees; and they cap their potential losses by lending only small amounts ($ 500 is a typical credit limit). All this is easier to describe than to do, especially when the economy slows. After the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, several sub-prime credit-card providers failed. Now there are only around 100, of which nine issue credit cards. Survivors such as Metris and Providian, two of the bigger sub-prime card companies, have become choosier about their customers' credit histories. As the economy recovered, so did lenders' fortunes. Fitch, a rating agency, says that the proportion of sub-prime credit-card borrowers who are more than 60 days in arrears (a good predictor of eventual default) is the lowest since November 2001. But with American interest rates rising again, some worry about another squeeze. As Fitch's Michael Dean points out, sub-prime borrowers tend to have not just higher-rate credit cards, but dearer auto loans and variable-rate mortgages as well. That makes a risky business even riskier.

单选题--I always look out when crossing the street.--You are right. You can't be too ______.A. nervous B. carefulC. careless D. hurried

单选题The parents ______ their daughter to marry the poor young man.

单选题A：You look a little pale. Are you OK? B： ______, I feel terrible.

单选题I am standing on the seventh-floor balcony of an apartment building overlooking the heart of Moscow. It is a dark city, some might say grim. It looks and feels as if it has been worn down to its bare bones: broken sidewalks, cracked facades, weeds rooted in the very mortar. This city is not easy to look at. So I avert my eyes, and they settle on a little boy sleeping inside the apartment. His name is Alexei. He is 7. With every rise and fall of his chest, Moscow, the used, broken city, is renewed for me a thousand times. A dark place has given me light in the form of my adoptive son. Alexei has been my son for only two days, but I have been waiting three years for him. That's when I began the adoption process, three years ago, before I even knew of Alexei's existence. Never in my imaginings did I think that I would one day be so far from home, counting my son's breaths, counting the hours until we would board a plane for America, a place that he had no conception of "Alexei, " I had said through a translator as I knelt before him at the orphanage and helped him with his socks. " What do you know about America?" His reply was immediate: "I will have all the gum I want. " Most people adopt infants or very little children so that as much of their history as possible will be given to them by their parents. But Alexei carries a radiance of native culture: his memories of orphanage life in the once-closed city of Tula; the large, gracious, doting Russian women who have cared for him all his life; the aromatic Russian food he loves, and the language, that impossible, expressive, explosive Russian language that sometimes separates me from him like a wall, but also summons us to heroic legends as we attempt to communicate. I have been in Russia for two weeks. But it wasn't until the fourth day that I was brought to see Alexei. My Russian contact drove me through 100 miles of a country struggling to get back on its feet after years of internal neglect; pitted roadways, crumbling bridges, warped roofs. It made me recall what someone had once said about Russia, that she is a third-world country with a first-world army. We finally came to an orphanage. Once inside, I stood in a near-empty room, reminding myself that this was the culmination of three years of scrutiny, disappointment, and dead-ends. There were moments when I had told myself, "It's so much easier to have a kid the natural way. Nobody asks any questions. " But as a single man, a biological child was not a ready option. I now recognized these as idle thoughts, for I realized that Alexei, even sight unseen, would be as much mine as if he were my natural son. The door opened. A woman came out, her hand on the shoulder of a little boy just awakened from sound sleep. I gave Alexei a Pez candy dispenser, something as alien to him as life in America. After a few moments of scrutiny, he filled with candy, a sure sign of intelligence, for Pez, dispensers are notoriously difficult to load. At the end of our first meeting I knelt before Alexei and told him I would be back to get him in a week.

单选题According to "The Indian Burying Ground" , some Indian tribes buried their dead in a______ position.

单选题Because noises {{U}}modulate{{/U}} radiofrequency, radio stations use a band of frequencies to prevent interference with other stations. A. govern B. adapt C. temper D. renovate

单选题Thanks to sponsorship, the fee to ______ will be＄25 ______ and participants will have to pay only travel expenses.

单选题Singletons, referring to those who live alone, are being comforted by well-meaning friends and family and told that not having a partner is not the end of the world. So, it would seem that they can say, yes, it is not. But no, in fact, it is the end. A gloomy study has just been released that says that the international trend towards living alone is putting an unprecedented strain on our ecosystem. For a number of reasons--relationship breakdown, career choice, longer life spans, smaller families—the number of individual households is growing. And this is putting intolerable pressure on natural resources, and accelerating the extinction of endangered plant and animal species. And there is worse news. Running a refrigerator, television, cooker, plumbing system just for selfish little you is a disastrous waste of resources on our over-populated planet. "The efficiency of resource consumption" is a lot higher in households of two people or more, simply because they share everything. Well imagine that. Just when you thought living alone was OK, you would find that all the time you were the enemy of mankind. Every time you put the kettle on the stove for a cup of coffee you were destroying Mother Earth. Indeed, it is not just your mother who is a bit worried by your continuing single status—you are letting down the entire human race by not having a boyfriend or girlfriend. The trouble is that society has a group instinct and people panic and hit out when they see other people quietly rebelling and straying away from the "standard" of family and coupledom. The suggestion is that singledom should be at best a temporary state. Unless you are assimilated into a larger unit, you can never be fully functional. Try "communal living." There are all these illustrations of young attractive people having a "great time," laughingly bumping into each other. It looks like an episode of the TV series "Friends. " And the message is clear: Togetherness is good, solitude is bad, and being single on your own is not allowed.

单选题The author implies that This World was located ______.

单选题 At the Kyoto conference on global warming in December 1997, it became abundantly clear how complex it has become to work out international agreements relating to the environment because of economic concerns unique to each country. It is no longer{{U}} (21) {{/U}}to try to forbid certain activities or to reduce{{U}} (22) {{/U}}of certain substances. The global challenges of the inter-link between the environment and development increasingly{{U}} (23) {{/U}}us to the core of the economic life of states. During the late 1980s we were able, through international agreements, to make deep{{U}} (24) {{/U}}in emissions{{U}} (25) {{/U}}the ozone layer. These reductions were made possible{{U}} (26) {{/U}}the harmful substances could be replaced{{U}} (27) {{/U}}negative effects on employment and the economies of states. Although the threat of global warming has been known to world for decades, we know that the effects of measures,{{U}} (28) {{/U}}harsh measures taken in some countries, would be nullified if{{U}} (29) {{/U}}countries do not control their emissions. Important and populous low- or medium-income countries are not{{U}} (30) {{/U}}willing to undertake legal commitments about their energy uses. We must,{{U}} (31) {{/U}}find a solution to the threat of global warming early in the 21st century. Such a{{U}} (32) {{/U}}would require a degree of shared vision and common responsibilities new to humanity. Success lies in the force of imaginations, in imagining what{{U}} (33) {{/U}}if we failed to act. Although many living in cold regions would welcome the global-warming effect of a warmer summer,{{U}} (34) {{/U}}would cheer arrival of the{{U}} (35) {{/U}}tropical diseases, especially where there has been none.

单选题The WHO has to come up with new and effective measures to______the spread of the epidemic disease.

单选题During the storm we took ______ in the doorway of a shop．

单选题Polar explorers have to be extremely ______ to endure the abominable climate and other hardships.

单选题Which comments disagree with the author on the author on the cause of soda sale slowdown?

单选题Between the invention of agriculture and the commercial revolution that marked the end of the Middle Ages, wealth and technology developed slowly indeed. Medieval historians tell of the centuries it took for key inventions like the watermill or the heavy plow to diffuse across the landscape. During this period, increases in technology led to increases in the population, with little if any appearing as an improvement in the median standard of living. Even the first century of the industrial revolution produced more "improvements" than "revolutions" in standards of living. With the railroad and the spinning and weaving of textiles as important exceptions, most innovations of that period were innovations in how goods were produced and transported, and in new kinds of capital, but not in consumer goods. Standards of living improved but styles of life remained much the same. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a faster and different kind of change. For the first time, technological capability outran population growth and natural resource scarcity. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the typical inhabitant of the leading economies—a British, a Belgian, an American, or an Australian had perhaps three times the standard of living of someone in a pre-industrial economy. Still, so slow was the pace of change that people, or at least aristocratic intellectuals, could think of their predecessors of some two thousand years before as effectively their contemporaries. Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman aristocrat and politician, might have felt more or less at home in the company of Thomas Jefferson. The plows were better in Jefferson's time. Sailing ships were much improved. However, these might have been insufficient to create a sense of a qualitative change in the order of life for the elite. Moreover, being a slave of Jefferson was probably a lot like being a slave of Cicero. So slow was the pace of change that intellectuals in the early nineteenth century debated whether the industrial revolution was worthwhile, whether it was an improvement or a degeneration in the standard of living. Opinions were genuinely divided, with as optimistic a liberal as John Stuart Mill coming down on the "pessimist" side as late as the end of the 1840s. In the twentieth century, however, standards of living exploded. In the twentieth century, the magnitude of the growth in material wealth has been so great as to make it nearly impossible to measure. Consider a sample of consumer goods available through Montgomery Ward in 1895 when a one-speed bicycle cost $65. Since then, the price of a bicycle measured in "nominal" dollars has more than doubled (as a result of inflation). Today, the bicycle is much less expensive in terms of the measure that truly counts, its "real" price: the work and sweat needed to earn its east. In 1895, it took perhaps 260 hours' worth of the average American worker's production to amass enough money to buy a one-speed bicycle. Today an average American worker can buy one—and of higher quality—for less than 8 hours worth of production. On the bicycle standard (measuring wealth by counting up how many bicycles the labor can buy) the average American worker today is 36 times richer than his or her counterpart was in 1895. Other commodities would tell a different story. An office chair has become 12.5 times cheaper in terms of the time it takes the average worker to produce enough to pay for it. A Steinway piano or an accordion is only twice as cheap. A silver teaspoon is 25 percent more expensive. Thus the answer to the question "How much wealthier are we today than our counterparts of a century ago?" depends on which commodities you view as important. For many personal services—having a butler to answer the door and polish your silver spoons—you would find little difference in average wealth between 1895 and 1990: an hour of a butler's time costs about the same then as now. For mass-produced manufactured goods—like bicycles—we are wealthier by as much as 36 times.

单选题The idea of test-tube babies may make you either delighted at the wonders of modern medicine or irritated while considering the moral, or legal, or technological implications of starting life in a laboratory. But if you've ever been pregnant yourself, one thing is certain: You wonder what it's like to carry a test-tube baby. Are these pregnancies normal? Are the babies normal? The earliest answers come from Australia, where a group of medical experts at the Queen Victoria Medical Center in Melbourne have taken a look at the continent's first nine successful in vitro pregnancies. The Australians report that the pregnancies themselves seemed to proceed according to plan, but at birth some unusual trends did show up. Seven of the nine babies turned out to be girls. Six of the nine were delivered by Caesarean section. Undone baby, a twin, was born with a serious heart defect and a few days later developed life-threatening problems. What does it all mean? Even the doctors don't know for sure, because the numbers are so small. The proportion of girls to boys is high, but until there are many more test-tube babies none will know whether that's something that just happened to be like that or something special that happens when egg meets sperm in a test tube instead of a Fallopian tube. The same thing is true of the single heart defect; it usually shows up in only 15 out of 60, 000 births in that part of Australia, but the fact that it occurred in one out of nine test-tube babies does not necessarily mean that they are at special risk. One thing the doctors can explain is the high number of Caesareans. Most of the mothers were older, had long histories of fertility problems and in some cases had had surgery on the fallopian tubes, all of which made them likely candidates for Caesareans anyway. The Australian researchers report that they are quite encouraged. All the babies are now making normal progress even the twin with the birth defects.

单选题A person's caloric requirements vary ______ his life.