单选题Under the right circumstances, choosing to spend time alone can be a huge psychological blessing. In the 1980s, the Italian journalist and author Tiziano Terzani, after many years of reporting across Asia, holed himself up in a cabin in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. "For a month I had no one to talk to except my dog Baoli," he wrote in his book A Fortune Teller Told Me . Terzani passed the time with books, observing nature, "listening to the winds in the trees, watching butterflies, enjoying silence." For the first time in a long while he felt free from the unending anxieties of daily life: "At last I had time to have time." Terzani"s embrace of isolation was relatively unusual: Humans have long considered solitude an inconvenience, something to avoid, a punishment, a realm of loners. Science has often associated it with negative outcomes. Freud, who linked solitude with anxiety, noted that, "in children the first fears relating to situations are those of darkness and solitude." John Cacioppo, a modern social neuro-scientist who has extensively studied loneliness—what he calls "chronic perceived isolation"—contends that, beyond damaging our thinking powers, isolation can even harm our physical health. But increasingly scientists are approaching solitude as something that, when pursued by choice, can prove a therapy. This is especially true in times of personal disorder, when the instinct is often for people to reach outside of themselves for support. "When people are experiencing crisis it"s not always just about you. It"s about how you are in society," explains Jack Fong, a sociologist at California State Polytechnic University who has studied solitude. In other words, when people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they"re shaped by that context. Thomas Merton, a monk and writer who spent years alone, held a similar notion. "We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our breast," he writes in Thoughts in Solitude . "People can go for a walk or listen to music and feel that they are deeply in touch with themselves."

单选题 Remember global warming? Back in December, the threat of climate change was thundering, and the rich countries agreed to cut their carbon-dioxide and other green-house-related emissions. Since then, interest has cooled markedly, and many European countries are already running away from the promises they made so loudly a few months ago. But there has been much talk, and a bit of action, to encourage renewable (可更新的) energies such as wind, hydro, solar and all living organisms. These emit no greenhouse gases, but tend to cost more than coal, oil or gas. The better, simpler idea is to remember that the easiest way to reduce something is to tax it—in this case, by taxing the carbon content of power. The dirtier the power, the more tax it would pay. So dirty coal would be more expensive than clean coal, which would see its price rise in relation to oil, which would be even more expensive compared to gas, which would lose some of its price advantage over renewables. Unless a carbon tax was so huge as to be economically crippling, it would not remove the price differential (差别) between all renewables and fossil fuels. But it would narrow that gap, by fixing the differing environmental costs into the price—a useful principle in itself. It would also give renewable producers a strong incentive to cut costs, and fossil-fuel suppliers an motivation to clean their products. Precedents suggest strongly that a carbon tax would be effective. But the disadvantage to carbon taxes is political. After almost a decade of trying, the European Union gave up an attempt at a European carbon tax last year. Germany's ruling coalition is fighting against a proposed energy tax. In America, politicians believe that even mentioning the notion is certain death. But many of the political objections could be met if a carbon tax were made up for the loss elsewhere, for example by lowering payroll or sales taxes. There is always suspicion when governments come up with clever new ways to tax, and rightly so. The response to that suspicion should be to win the argument, not to abandon it.

单选题Basketball is still a young game. in the winter or 1891, a certain college was having trouble with its boy students. The weather was so terrible that the students had to stay indoors. Since they could not enjoy their sports outside as usual, they were unhappy, and some of them often got into fights from time to time. Finally, one of the teachers at the college, J. E. Naismith, was asked to invent a new game for the students. It was not an easy job because such a game had to be played indoors, and the court was not very large. Naismith thought for a few days and invented a kind of ball game. It was a fast. exciting game with much moving and passing of the ball. It was played between two teams. To make score, the ball had to be thrown into a basket ten feet high above the floor on the wail. At each end of the court there was such a basket. At first, Naismith had planned to have the ball thrown into a box. As he could not find boxes of the right size, he had to use fruit basket in- stead. That is how the game got its name.

单选题A study of art history might be a good way to learn more about a culture than is possible to learn in general history classes. Most typical history courses concentrate on politics, economics and war. But art history focuses on much more than this because art reflects not only the political values of a people, but also religious beliefs, emotions and psychology. In addition, information about the daily activities of our ancestors can be provided by art. In short, art expresses the essential qualities of a time and a place, and a study of it clearly offers us a deeper understanding than can be found in most history books. In history books, objective information about the political life of a country is presented; that is, facts about politics are given, but opinions are not expressed. Art, on the other hand, is subjective (主观的): it reflects emotions and opinions. The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya was perhaps the first truly "political" artist. In his well-known painting The Third of May, 1808, he criticized the Spanish government for its abuse (滥用) of power over people. In the same way, art can reflect a culture's religious beliefs. For hundreds of years in Europe, religious art had been almost the only type of art that existed. Churches and other religious buildings were filled with paintings that described people and stories from the Bible. Although most people couldn't read, they could still understand the Bible stories in the pictures on church walls. By contrast, one of the main characteristics of art in the Middle East was (and stilt is) its absence of human and animal images. This reflects the Islamic belief that statues (雕像) are not holy.

单选题At the end of the story Walt thought ______.

单选题The wagon trains had to______Indian territory to reach California.

单选题Issues of price, place, promotion, and product are ______ conventional concerns in planning marketing strategies. A. among the most B. among the many of C. these of the most D. most of those

单选题Which of the following words does not describe the features of Irving" s writings?______

单选题After an hour's discussion, the curriculum designers and computer programmers reached a consensus: that the new package of language learning materials should be both amusing and ______ for the users.

单选题Speaker A: Excuse me, could you tell me where the entrance to the subway is?Speaker B: ______

单选题No sooner had the building been built______it collapsed in a strong earthquake.

单选题 A. {{U}}ex{{/U}}ample B. {{U}}ex{{/U}}plain C. {{U}}ex{{/U}}pensive D. {{U}}ex{{/U}}cuse

单选题 A recent development is the local area network (LAN). {{U}}(21) {{/U}}its name implies, it{{U}} (22) {{/U}}a local area—possibly as small as a single room, typically an area like an university campus or the premises of a particular business. Local area networks were developed to{{U}} (23) {{/U}}a need specific to microcomputers—the sharing of expensive resources. Microcomputers are cheap, {{U}}(24) {{/U}}highcapacity disc stores, fast and/or good quality printers, etc. are expensive. The object of the LAN is to allow{{U}} (25) {{/U}}microcomputers shared access to these expensive resources. Since the microcomputers are{{U}} (26) {{/U}}, it is a necessary feature of a LAN that the method of connection to the network, and the network hardware{{U}} (27) {{/U}}, must also be cheap. A local area network links a number of computers and a number of sewers{{U}} (28) {{/U}}provide communal facilities, e. g. file storage. (A server usually includes a small microprocessor for control purposes.) The computers and servers are known{{U}} (29) {{/U}}stations. There are two methods of{{U}} (30) {{/U}}in common use, tings and broadcast networks. In the ring method( often called a Cambridge Ring)all the stations are linked in a ring, {{U}}(31) {{/U}}includes one special station, the monitor station. In broadcast networks, all the stations are{{U}} (32) {{/U}}to a single linear cable (usually co-ax cable), and any transmission will be received by all stations. {{U}} (33) {{/U}}technology is used, local area networks are a development of the greatest importance. {{U}}(34) {{/U}}as programming is simplified by an approach that thinks in terms of small procedures or programs, each doing a well-defined job, the computer system of tomorrow is likely to be{{U}} (35) {{/U}}lots of small systems, each doing a specific job, linked by a local area network.

单选题The story of Peter Pan is so fascinating that all the children like it.

单选题In terms of communication in another language, marketers should not be too _____.

单选题 Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics—the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And ff scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close. As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robot-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy—far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone. But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves—goals that pose a real challenge. "While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error," says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, "we can't yet give a robot enough 'common sense' to reliably interact with a dynamic world." Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries. What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain's roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented—and human perception far more complicated—than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on the earth can't approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don't know quite how we do it.

单选题My eldest sister went on with the story and young children around her ______ with " wonderful!" from time to time.

单选题The spontaneity of children's artwork A(sets) it B(apart from) the regulated uniformity of C(much) D(of) what otherwise go on in traditional elementary classrooms.

单选题The mother is told that her child is desperately ill--the chance of survival are slim, and the treatment is as dreadful as the disease.