单选题What ______ if I had been asked to join, I cannot tell.

单选题According to a survey, which was based on the responses of over 188,000 students, today's traditional-age college freshmen are "more materialistic and less altruistic (利他主义的)" than at any time in the 17 years of the poll. Not surprising in these hard times, the students' major objective " is to be financially well off. Less important than ever is developing a meaningful philosophy of life. " It follows then that today the most popular course is not literature or history but accounting. Interest in teaching, social service and the "altruistic" fields is at a low. On the other hand, enrollment in business programs, engineering and computer science is way up. That's no surprise either. A friend of mine (a sales representative for a chemical company) was making twice the salary of her college instructors her first year on the job—even before she completed her two-year associate degree. While it's true that we all need a career, it is equally true that our civilization has accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge in fields far removed from our own and that we are better for our understanding of these other contributions—be they scientific or artistic. It is equally true that, in studying the diverse wisdom of others, we learn how to think. More important, perhaps, education teaches us to see the connections between things, as well as to see beyond our immediate needs. Weekly we read of unions who went on strike for higher wages, only to drive their employer out of business. No company; no job. How shortsighted in the long run! But the most important argument for a broad education is that in studying the accumulated wisdom of the ages, we improve our moral sense. I saw a cartoon recently which shows a group of businessmen looking puzzled as they sit around a conference table; one of them is talking on the intercom (对讲机) :"Miss Baxter," he says, "could you please send in someone who can distinguish right from wrong?" From the long-term point of view, that's what education really ought to be about.

单选题I strongly believe that understanding is more important than love, especially when it comes to parenting and intimate relationships. As a psychologist for more than twenty years I can tell you that I have never had an adult looking back at her childhood and complaining that her parents were too understanding. And similarly, I have met many divorced people who still love each other but yet they never really understood each other. The painful reality is that love is just not enough. I"ll admit that there are people who I love and who I still need to better understand. I hope I"ll continue my work to understand them. The willingness to understand is very important. It is not always easy, but healthy love is strengthened by the willingness to understand. Love without understanding will wilt like flowers without water. Our egos are what seem to get in the way of understanding those who we love and care about. Often it is our need to be right that makes what others think and feel so wrong for us. I have certainly been quite guilty of this in some of my relationships. As I have written repeatedly in my books, empathy, is truly the emotional glue that holds all close relationships together. Empathy allows us to slow down and try to walk in the shoes of those we love. The deeper our empathy, the deeper—and healthier—our love. Not all relationships are meant to be. Yet all relationships that are meant to flourish in a healthy way, must stress understanding just as much, if not more, than love.

单选题Most people buy a lot of gifts just before Christmas. But some people think they buy too much. They have started a special day called Buy Nothing Day. They don't want anyone to go shopping on that day. Buy Nothing Day is November 29. It's 25 days before Christmas. The idea for Buy Nothing Day started in Vancouver. British Columbia. Now people all over the United States celebrate Buy Nothing Day. In California, parents and children get together to read stories, sing songs and paint pictures. The children talk about why they don't need a lot of toys. This year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, high school students wanted to tell other students about Buy Nothing Day. They organized a simple dinner to give people information about Buy Nothing Day. They asked restaurants in the neighborhood to donate(赠送)the food. They made posters(海报)and talked to other students about it. The dinner was a big success, and many students agreed not to buy anything on November 29. The students at the high school liked the idea of this new tradition. Next year, they want to have another dinner to inform more people about Buy Nothing Day!

单选题According to the author, the primary role of the major community in helping the neighborhoods of poverty is ______.

单选题Opponents of affirmative action say the battle over the use of race in college admissions is hardly over, despite the Supreme Court"s ruling Monday upholding the goal of a diverse student body. Higher education leaders overwhelmingly hailed the decision, saying it reaffirmed policies used by most .selective colleges and universities. But some critics raised the possibility of more lawsuits, and promised to continue pressuring the Department of Education"s Office of Civil Rights to investigate questionable policies. "We"re talking about admission programs, scholarships, any program only for minorities or in which the standards used to judge admissions are substantially different," says Linda Chavez, founder and president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative non-profit group. Others say they"ll take their case to voters. "We have to seriously contest all this at the ballot box," says University of California regent Ward Connerly, who helped win voter approval of California"s Proposition 209, which prohibits considering race or gender in public education, hiring and contracting. Because of that law, Monday"s ruling had no practical impact in the state. "It may be time for us to let the (Michigan) voters decide if they want to use race as a factor in admissions," Connerly said Monday. Meanwhile, U. S. Education Secretary Rod Paige, consistent with President Bushes stance opposing affirmative action, said the Department of Education will "continue examining and highlighting effective race-neutral approaches to ensure broad access to and diversity within our public institutions". Even Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O"Connor, in one of the opinions, recommended that states look for lessons in race-neutral programs being tried in California and elsewhere. While the ruling said admission officials may consider race in the selection process, colleges and universities are not obligated to do so. "Ultimately in the debate, diversity is a choice, not a legal mandate", says Arthur Coleman, a former Department of Education official who now helps colleges and universities ensure constitutional policies. The public, too, remains conflicted, largely along racial lines. According to a January poll by the non-profit research organization Public Agenda, 79% of Americans said it is important for colleges to have a racially diverse student body, while just 54% said affirmative action programs should continue. In a Gallup poll conducted days before the ruling, 49% of adults said they favor affirmative action and 43% did not, with blacks and Hispanics far more likely to favor the practice than whites. And some educators doubt that with Monday"s ruling, those opposing affirmative action will change their minds. For now, admission officials and university lawyers are poring over the ruling to determine how or whether to adjust policies. While most tend to be closed-mouthed about admission policies, many say they don"t expect significant changes.

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单选题For more than thirty years after astronauts first set foot on the Moon, scientists have been unable to unravel the mystery of where the Earth's only satellite came from. But now there is direct evidence that the Moon was born after a giant collision between the young Earth and another planet. Previous studies of rocks from the Earth and the Moon have been unable to distinguish between the two, suggesting that they formed from the same material. But this still left room for a number of theories explaining how—for example, that the Moon and Earth formed from the same material at the same time. It was even suggested that the early Earth spun so fast it formed a bulge that eventually broke off to form the Moon. Franck Poitrasson, and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have compared Moon rocks with rocks from Earth and discovered a surprising difference. They analysed the weight of the elements present in the rock using a highly accurate form of mass spectroscopy(光谱研究) that involves vaporising a sample by passing it through an argon (氩) flame. Although they appeared very similar in most respects, the Moon rocks had a higher ratio of iron-57 to iron-54 isotopes(同位素)than the Earth rocks. "The only way we could explain this difference is that the Moon and the Earth were partly vaporised during their formation," says Poitrasson. Only the popular "giant planetary impact" theory could generate the temperatures of more than 1700℃ needed to vaporise iron. In this scenario, a Mars-sized planet known as Theia crashed into Earth 50 million years after the birth of the Solar System. This catastrophic collision would have released 100 million times more energy than the impact believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs—enough to melt and vaporise a large portion of the Earth and completely destroy Theia. The debris from the collision would have been thrown into orbit around the Earth and eventually coalesced to form the Moon. When iron is vaporised, the lighter isotopes burn off first. And since the ejected debris that became the Moon would have been more thoroughly vaporised, it would have lost a greater proportion of its lighter iron isotopes than Earth did. This would explain the different ratios that Poitrasson has found.

单选题When the boy playing by the river fell into the river, I was out of the room ______.A. in flashB. in a flashC. as a flashD. for a flash

单选题______when he saw his wife's face did Tom realize the true meaning of her remark.

单选题My golf is not very good just now. I've been busy and I'm out of______.

单选题I would appreciate it ______ you call back this afternoon for the doctor's appointment．A．untilB．ifC．whenD．that

单选题Speaker A: Looks like you've got a lot of reading to do. Speaker B: ______ A. Do you like reading in your spare time? B. Yes, if you like, you may borrow some of my books. C. And that's just for my philosophy class. D. That's right, because reading is a good way to enlarge your vocabulary.

单选题{{B}}Passage Two{{/B}} 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For most of the 20th century, Asia asked itself what it could learn from the modern, innovating West. Now the question must be reversed. What can the West's overly indebted and sluggish (经济滞涨的) nations learn from a nourishing Asia? Just a few decades ago, Asia's two giants were stagnating (停滞不前) under faulty economic ideologies. However, once China began embracing market economy reforms in the 1980s, followed by India in the 1990s, both countries achieved rapid growth. Crucially, as they opened up their markets, they balanced market economy with sensible government direction. As the Indian economist Amartya Sen has wisely said, "The invisible hand of the market has often relied heavily on the visible hand of government." Contrast this middle path with America and Europe, which have each gone ideologically over-board in their own ways. Since the 1980s, America has been increasingly clinging to the ideology of uncontrolled free markets and dismissing the role of government—following Ronald Regan's idea that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem". Of course, when the markets came crashing down in 2007, it was decisive government intervention that saved the day. Despite this fact, many Americans are still strongly opposed to "big government". If Americans could only free themselves from their antigovernment doctrine, they would begin to see that the America's problems are not insoluble. A few sensible federal measures could put the country back on the right path. A simple consumption tax of, say, 5% would significantly reduce the country's huge government deficit without damaging productivity. A small gasoline tax would help free America from its dependence on oil imports and create incentives for green energy development. In the same way, a significant reduction of wasteful agricultural subsidies could also lower the deficit. But in order to take advantage of these common-sense solutions, Americans will have to put aside their own attachment to the idea of smaller government and less regulation. American politicians will have to develop the courage to follow what is taught in all American public-policy schools: that there are good taxes and bad taxes. Asian countries have embraced this wisdom, and have built sound long-term fiscal (财政的) policies as a result. Meanwhile, Europe has fallen prey to a different ideological trap: the belief that European governments would always have infinite resources and could continue borrowing as if there were no tomorrow. Unlike the Americans, who felt that the markets knew best, the Europeans failed to anticipate how the markets would react to their endless borrowing. Today, the European Union is creating a $580 billion fund to ward off sovereign collapse. This will buy the EU time, but it will not solve the bloc's larger problem.