单选题A. die B. diet C. diary D. diamond

单选题A hundred years ago, the game we now call football did not exist. American football started during a game between two colleges. The teams had got together to play what they called "football", but each team played by different rules. One team played what we now call soccer. The other played what we now call rugby (橄榄球). Both games had been invented a thousand years before. In the first kind of football game ever played, all the men from one village tried to kick a ball into another village. The men of the second village tried to kick the ball into the first. Hundreds of people joined in, running everywhere, running crops and knocking down fences. In time, people agreed on some rules to keep order, but many rules were left open to change. Different rules developed in different places. When the two colleges met to play football, each followed its own rules. They mixed the games together and invented a new game. A hundred years later we call that game American football. In what ways do you suppose the game we know now will have changed in another hundred years?

单选题According to Schlesinger, the United States is ______.

单选题Text 1 Ideas about "spoiling" children have always involved consideration of just what is a spoiled child, how does spoiling occur, and what are the consequences of spoiling; They have always included concepts of a child's nature and concept of the ideal child and the ideal adult. The many mothers of 1820 who belonged to the early "maternal associations" struggled to uphold the ideas about child raising that had been prevalent in the 18th century. They had always been told that the spoiled child stood in danger of having trouble later in life (when exposed to all the temptations of the world) and, more importantly, stood in danger of spiritual ruin. At first, the only approach these mothers knew was to "break the will" of the child. This approach, coming initially from the theology of Calvin, the French protestant reformer, was inherited from the stern outlook of the Puritans. As one mother wrote, "No child has ever been known, since the earliest period of the world, destitute of an evil disposition however sweet it appears". Infant depravity, by which was meant the child's impulses, could be curbed only by breaking the will so that the child submitted implicitly to parental guidance. In 1834, a mother described this technique: Upon the father's order, her 16-month-old daughter had refused to say "Dear Mama", and had been left alone in a room where she screamed wildly for ten minutes. After the ten minutes, the child was commanded again, and again she refused, so she was whipped and ordered again. This continued for four hours until the child finally obeyed. Parents commonly reported that after one such trial of "will", the child became permanently submissive. In passing, we can note that knowledge about a child's "No" period might have moderated the disciplining of little children and the application of the adage "spare the rod and spoil the child" . By fleeing the child from its evil nature, parents believed they could then guide the child into acquiring the right character traits, such as honesty, industriousness, and society. These moral principles, fixed in the child's character, were to govern it throughout life, in a society where free enterprise, individual effort, and competition were believed to be the ruling forces.

单选题______ a rigid, unidirectional mode of demystification which saw all such other modes as subsidiary and peripheral, it began to see all alternatives to its mode of demystification as conspiracies against human good.

单选题—When were your legs injured?—It was on a Sunday last month______my father and I spent our holiday at the seaside.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} If you see a diamond ring on the fourth finger of a woman's left hand, you probably know what it means: in America, this has long been the digit of choice for betrothal jewelry, and the lore of the trade traces the symbolism back to ancient times. But if you see a diamond ring on the fourth finger of a woman's right hand, you may or may not know that it signifies an independent spirit, or even economic empowerment and changing gender mores. "A lot of women have disposable income," Katie Couric said recently on the "Today" show after showing viewers her Change right-hander. "Why wait for a man to give her a diamond ring?" This notion may be traced back, approximately, to September. That's when the Diamond Information Center began a huge marketing campaign aimed at articulating the meaning of right-hand rings-and thus a rationale for buying them. "Your left hand says 'we' ," the campaign declares. "Your right hand says 'me' ." The positioning is brilliant: the wearer may be married or unmarried and may buy the ring herself or request it as a gift. And while it can take years for a new jewelry concept to work itself thoroughly into the mainstream, the tight-band ring already has momentum. At the higher end of the scale, the jewelry maker Kwiat, which supplies stores like Saks, offers a line of Kwiat Spirit Rings that can retail for as much as ＄5, 000, and "we're selling it faster than we're manufacturing it," says Bill Gould, the company's chief of marketing. At the other end of the stale, mass-oriented retailers that often take a wait-and-see attitude have already jumped on the bandwagon. Firms like Kwiat were given what Gould calls "direction" from the Diamond information Center about the new ring's attributes-multiple diamonds in a north-south orientation that distinguishes it from the look of an engagement ring, and so on. But all this is secondary to the newly minted meaning. "The idea," Morrison says, "is that beyond a trend, this could become a sort of cultural imperative." A tall order? Well, bear in mind that "a diamond is forever" is not a saying handed down from imperial Rome. It was handed down from an earlier generation of De Beers marketers. Joyce Jonas, a jewelry appraiser and historian, notes that De Beers, in the 40's and 50's, took advantage of a changing American class structure to turn diamond rings into an (attainable) symbol for the masses. By now, Jonans observes, the stone alone "is just a commodity" . And this, of course, is what makes its invented significance more Crucial than ever.

单选题What kind of food had the author certainly not tasted during the war?

单选题In the Americans' minds, there are boundaries that other people are simply not supposed to cross. When the boundaries are crossed, Americans will______stiffen and their mariner will become cool.(2011年南京师范大学考博试题)

单选题{{B}}Passage Two{{/B}} Ben Mickle, Matt Edwards, and Kshipra Bhawalkar looked as though they had just emerged from a minor auto wreck. The members of Duke University's computer programming team had solved only one problem in the world finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest in San Antonio on Apr. 12. The winning team, from Saratov State University in Russia, solved six puzzles over the course of the grueling five-hour contest. Afterward, Duke coach Owen Astrachan tried to cheer up his team by pointing out that they were among "the best of the best" student programmers in the world. Edwards, 20, still distraught, couldn't resist a self-deprecating dig: "We're the worst of the best of the best." Duke wasn't the only U.S. school to be skunked (因得分不够而被淘汰)at the prestigious computing contest. Of the home teams, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked among the 12 highest finishers. Most top spots were seized by teams from Eastern Europe and Asia. Until the late 1990s, U. S. teams dominated these contests. But the tide has turned. Last year not one was in the top dozen. The poor showings should serve as a wake-up call for government, Industry, and educators. The output of American computer science programs is plummeting, even while that of Eastern European and Asian schools is rising. China and India, the new global tech powerhouses, are fueled by 900 000 engineering graduates of all types each year, more than triple the number of U.S. grads. Computer science is a key subset of engineering. "If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business ,and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine," warns Richard Florida, a professor at George Mason University. Software programmers are the seed corn of the Information Economy, yet America isn't producing enough. The Labor Dept. forecasts that "computer/math scientist" jobs, which include programming, will increase by 40%, from 2.5 million in 2002 to 3.5 million in 2012. Colleges aren't keeping up with demand. A 2005 survey of freshmen showed that just 1.1% planned to major in computer science, down from 3.7% in 2000. For young Americans, a computing career isn't the draw even a few years ago. Never mind that experienced programmers make upwards of $100000 and that the brainiest of them are the objects of heated bidding wars. Students fear that if they become programmers they'll lose their jobs to counterparts in India and China. Analysts say those worries are overblown: Programmers with leadership and business skills will do just fine. But the message isn't getting through. Then there's the thrill factor, or lack thereof. Given the opportunity to make a mint on Wall Street or land a comfortable academic job, many math and science students are turning away from software. "I couldn't really get excited about sitting in front of a computer and just writing programs," says Duke junior Brandon Levin, who has taken computer courses but is majoring in math and plans a career in academia.

单选题The boy spent as much time watching TV as he ______ studying. A) does B) had C) was D) did

单选题In Redwood City, police can hear gunfire within ______.

单选题I work as an office assistant in a small but growing garden equipment manufacturing company in California. A few months ago, my boss gave me the job of writing some sales letters which would be sent to the existing customers of our company. The objective was to get some of our existing customers to purchase a new product that our company had just launched. Now, I had never written sales letters before in my life and had no idea of how to writ even the first word. And even if I ended up writing a few lines, because I was so inexperience, chances were that the sales letters and business letters, would bomb completely and would hardly generate any sales for our company. So, in order to learn how to create more effective sales letter I went to the Internet and looked up a few sites which were selling samples, templates and examples of sales letters that claimed would "increase sales by 10 000% ". Because they weren't too expensive, I bought 2 such packages. Big mistake. I found that the samples and templates of the sales letters and business letters included in them looked so cheap that there was no way. I was going to send them to our customers. Even I would have done a better job of writing sales letters! So I searched some more, and came across a site belonging to a person living in Maryland called Yanik Silver. He too was selling some templates and samples of sales letters and business letters. After having been duped with 2 such packages, I was naturally suspicious. I read through his site and found that he was offering a money back guarantee. While that made me feel a bit more comfortable, I first had to determine whether this person would be around to honor the guarantee should I want to return the package. So I sent an email to him(just to test whether he replies to customers' emails)and I got a reply from him within 4 hours. I also saw a comment in his site by one of his customers who had actually got a refund from him as soon as he had asked for the refund. Feeling more comfortable, I decided to go ahead and buy the package that he was selling. Well, I was blown away! The samples, examples and templates of the sales letters and business letters included in his package were precisely the ones that I was looking for. And they were far, far better than any of the templates included in the 2 other packages I had bought. I quickly customized one of the sales letter templates to fit my needs, had it approved by my boss, and sent them over to our customers. Within 2 weeks from the time that I sent out the letter, about 36% of the customers who received the letter ended up buying our new product. You could say that my boss was impressed with what I had done! Since then, I have written quite a few sales letters for our company(simply by customizing the templates included in Yank's package)and all of them have generated excellent sales for us. So, if you want to learn how to write sales letters that get the sale, I highly recommend Yanik's package.

单选题After that sagging barn collapsed, the farmer burned it down.

单选题Surprisingly enough, modern historians have rarely interested themselves in the history of the American South in the period before the South began to become self-consciously and distinctively " Southern"—the decades after 1815. Consequently, the cultural history of Britain"s North American empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been written almost as if the Southern colonies had never existed. The American culture that emerged during the Colonial and Revolutionary eras has been depicted as having been simply an extension of New England Puritan culture. However, Professor Davis has recently argued that the South stood apart from the rest of American society during this early period, following its own unique pattern of cultural development. The case for Southern distinctiveness rests_ upon two related premises: first, that the cultural similarities among the five Southern colonies were far more impressive than the differences, and second, that what made those colonies alike also made them different from the other colonies. The first, for which Davis offers an enormous amount of evidence, can be accepted without major recitations, the second is far more problematic. What makes the second premise problematic is the use of the Puritan colonies as a basis for comparison. Quite properly,Davis decries the excessive influence ascribed by historians to the Puritans in the formation of American culture. Yet Davis inadvertently adds weight to such ascriptions by using the Puritans as the standard against which to assess the achievements and contributions of Southern colonials. Throughout, Davis focuses on the important and undeniable differences between the Southern and Puritan colonies in motives for and patterns of early settlement, in attitudes toward nature and Native Americans, and in the degree of receptivity to metropolitan cultural influences. However, recent scholarship has strongly suggested that those aspects of early New England culture that seem to have been most distinctly Puritan, such as the strong religious orientation and the communal impulse, were not even typical of New England as a whole, but were largely confined to the two colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus, what in contrast to the Puritan colonies appears to Davis to be peculiarly Southern-acquisitiveness. A strong interest in polities and the law, and a tendency to cultivate metropolitan cultural models were not only more typically English than the cultural patterns exhibited by Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also almost certainly characteristic of most other early modern British colonies from Barbados north to Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Within the larger framework of American colonial life, then, not the Southern but the Puritan colonies appear to have been distinctive, and even they seem to have been rapidly assimilating to the dominant cultural patterns by the last Colonial period.

单选题She said she would work it out herself, ______ ask me for help．A．and not toB．but notC．and prefer notD．rather than

单选题The reason ______ he explained was not ______ ! expected.

单选题There was ice on the road, and the doctor's car hit a tree and turned over three times. To his surprise, he was not hurt. He got off the car and walked to the nearest house. He wanted to telephone the garage for help. The door was opened by one of his patients. "Oh, Doctor," she said, "l have only just telephoned you. You must have a very fast car. You have got here very quickly in deed. There has been a very bad accident on the road outside. I saw it through the window. I am sure the driver will need your help./