单选题The letters MIS stood for ______.

单选题On the fourth Thursday of November, every year, Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day. The day is a national holiday which is set aside each year as a time to give thanks to God for our blessings (祝福). Legend has it that the first English colonists (殖民者) in Massachusetts (马萨诸塞州) started the custom. According to the story, the Pilgrims~ first winter in the New World was difficult. They had arrived too late to grow many crops, and without fresh food, half of the colonists died from disease. The following spring the Indians taught them how to grow corn. In the autumn of 1621, bountiful crops of corn, beans and pumpkins were harvested. The colonists had much to be thankful for, so a feast was planned. They invited their Indian friends to join them in a large feast to share in the bounties (慷慨) of the land. This is the first Thanksgiving. The traditional foods of the big Thanksgiving Day meal include roast turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and Indian bread puddings. Since the day is set aside for giving thanks, it has also become a traditional family day. Large dinners with many relatives are common throughout America on this special day.

单选题Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra two billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world"s leading water scientists.

单选题Several unpopular decisions ______ the governor's popularity.

单选题As soon as the children were ______ , their mother got them out of bed and into the bathroom.

单选题Faced with rising costs, decreased funding and laws in many states designed to keep public universities from raising tuition, many state school systems are making up for budget inadequacy by adding fees for everything from "technology" to "energy". Meanwhile, the average cost to attend a public school increased 47% between 2000 and 2007 (adjusted for inflation) according to the College Board, a non-profit that studies education costs and owns the SAT. State politicians are so eager to advocate low-cost higher education that "tuition" has become a dirty word. The F-word, on the other hand fees—has become a go-to charge for public universities strapped for cash. The 2006—2007 school year marked the first time fee increases outpaced tuition hikes, according to the College Board. Fees were up 8% and tuition 6% in 2007—2008 compared to the previous year. Why the fee frenzy? State legislatures across the country have instituted strict limits on tuition increases and require arduous bureaucratic and political procedures to change them. With financing for public universities on the decline since the 1980s, "everybody got very interested in what they could do to affect revenues, and fees Undoubtedly turned out to be one of the measures they could control," says David Brenaman, an economics professor at the University of Virginia who studies college financing. In Oregon, so many extras had been tacked on over the years that in 2007, fees added as much as 40% to the cost of tuition. When campuses saw their energy bills go up, students were charged a fee. When classrooms had to be wired for new technologies, students were charged a fee. "There were some that were one-time things that ended up staying a little bit longer," concedes Diane Saunders, director of communications for the Oregon University System. These covert tuition hikes did not go unnoticed. The Oregon Student Association, which represents pupils at the state"s seven public colleges, protested the enormous fees, arguing that they decreased transparency in the system and penalized students whose financial aid packages only covered tuition. In June, the system announced that mandatory fees would be rolled into tuition. "So families know what they"re facing up front and so students know what they"re facing up front," says Saunders, who credits the students for being "co-advocates" with the Oregon University System that is constantly lobbying the state legislature for more funding. With no state politician likely to campaign on a platform of dramatically increasing school tuitions, fees will continue to fill in the gaps. And as high oil prices continue to drive up the cost of energy and transportation—to name just two expensive items in any university budget—students are advised to read their bills carefully. And don"t forget to factor in the F-word.

单选题A. cofee B. deed C. beef D. seed

单选题In general, the health of older people is superior to______of previous generations.

单选题It is difficult for outsiders to gauge people"s sense of well-being, simply by viewing their lives. And yet despite the difficulty, economists seem increasingly determined to do just that, by trying to wrestle life"s intangibles into measurable data. Forty years after the Gross National Happiness index was invented by the King of Bhutan, happiness is finally gaining attraction as a serious national indicator. Last week, economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which represents 34 major economies, told a packed auditorium in Paris that they hoped their Better Life Index—launched a year ago—would persuade governments to focus as much on factors like environment and community cohesiveness, as on GDP measurements like productivity and income. "The index of material conditions is still extremely important," the OECD"s chief statistician Martine Durand told the audience of about 350 people, including economists and officials from around the world. "But what we are saying is that there is more to life than just money." Now several countries seem to have taken note. The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services is working on a national happiness index for Americans (whose "pursuit of happiness," The Washington Post noted, is fundamental to the country) that the U. S. would then track, much as it does income and working hours. And last year, in the midst of massive spending cuts, Britain"s Office of National Statistics began a Well-Being Index, at a cost of $ 3 million a year, collecting statistics on people"s levels of anxiety and confidence. Surprisingly, the first index showed Brits being generally happy with life, with older people being happiest of all. But no effort seems to match the ambition and scope of the OECD"s Better Life Index. Launched in May last year, it collates statistics in 36 countries (Russia and Brazil signed on this month) on 24 indicators; as of this year, those include gender and inequality. There are factors on the list that seem tricky to quantify, like "work-life balance," and "life satisfaction," as well as the more obvious ones like education, health, and income. Having worked for years to design the index, OECD statisticians then confronted the complexities of measuring factors which were subjective and vague. So they launched an online tool called "Your Better Life Index," allowing people anywhere to rank how important each factor on the list is to them, and then compare how their ideal stacks up against real-life statistics. In effect, the Better Life Index is now whatever each person decides it should be. If education is the most important thing to you, go live in Finland, not Mexico; if work-life balance is most important, Denmark is your place, while the U. S. ranks near bottom.

单选题Every time Tom Went to Mr. White, he would ______.

单选题After I paid the money, the shop assistant gave me a ______.

单选题It is A(estimated) that a scientific principle has B(a life expectancy) of approximately C(a decade) before D(it drastically) revised or replaced by newer information.

单选题I don't think it's sensible of you to ______ your greater knowledge in front of the chairwoman, for it may well offend her. A. show up B. show off C. show out D. show away

单选题The church of La Placita, "the little square", formally called Nuestra Se ora Reina de Los Angeles, was founded under Spanish rule at around the same time as the pueblo bearing the same name, the future Los Angeles. Catholicism and Hispanic culture seemed inseparable there. They still largely are. Virtually all Father Estrada's parishioners are Hispanic, most of them of Mexican extraction. When Guatemalan and Salvadorean refugees showed up in the 1980s, it was natural for them, as good Catholics, to find sanctuary at La Placita, where they slept on the pews and Father Estrada gave them food. It was natural again in 2006, when the country went on an anti-immigrant binge, for many of the Latino counter-marches to start from La Placita. Latinos still come from all over southern California for baptisms and prayer, social services and a sense of community. But more and more grandmothers also come to Father Estrada with worries about children or grandchildren who have become hermanos separados, separated brothers, after defecting to an evangelical church, usually one with a Pentecostal flavour. The converts may have followed one of the evangelicals who come to La Placita to recruit, or friends whom they met at a spiritual rock concert or picnic. "I don't worry, but I find it to be challenging," says Father Estrada. Some 68% of Hispanics in America are still Catholic, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, and their absolute number, thanks to immigration and higher birth rates, continues to increase. But about 15% are now born-again evangelicals, who are fast gaining "market share", as Gaston Espinosa, a professor of religion at Claremont McKenna College, puts it. He estimates that about 3.9m Latino Catholics have converted, and that "for everyone who comes back to the Catholic Church, four leave it. " The main reason, he thinks, is ethnic identity. Evangelical services are not only in Spanish, as many Catholic sermons are nowadays, but are performed by Latinos rather than Irish or Polish-American priests, with the cadences, rhythms, innuendos and flow familiar from the mother country. The evangelical services tend to be livelier than Catholic liturgy and to last longer, often turning into an outing lasting the whole day. Women play greater roles, and there are fewer parishioners for each pastor than in the Catholic Church. The evangelical churches are also more "experiential", says Samuel Rodriguez, a third- generation Puerto Rican Pentecostal pastor and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, an evangelical association. In the Catholic Church, a believer's relationship with Jesus is mediated through hierarchies and bureaucracies, he says, whereas the evangelical churches provide direct access to Jesus. The Pentecostals go one step further, with the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians) letting believers speak in tongues and pray for divine healing. "This is the first group in America to reconcile both the vertical and the horizontal parts of the cross," says Mr. Rodriguez. By this he means that the Latino evangelical churches emphasise not only " covenant, faith and righteousness" (the vertical part), as white evangelicals do, but also " community, public policy and social justice" (the horizontal part), as many black evangelicals, but fewer white ones, do. To Latino evangelicals it is all one thing, he says, and the social outreach the church provides goes far beyond any government programme, with pastors snatching young men away from gang life and fighting to uphold the rights of immigrants. This also means that Latino evangelicals as a political force are distinct from white evangelicals. Many of the whites have veered hard right, hating abortion and gay marriage and reliably voting Republican, though less so very recently. Latinos tend to be even more pro-life and traditional marriage than whites, says Mr. Rodriguez, but only because they know that "mom and dad in the home is the prime antidote to gangs and drugs. " That same pragmatism makes them believe in government services and the taxes that pay for them, and of course in immigrant rights. As voters, he reckons, Latino evangelicals are therefore the quintessential independents, up for grabs by either party. But it may be American Catholicism that changes the most. About a third of American Catholics are Latino now, and their share is growing. They are also different Catholics, with more than half describing themselves as " charismatics ", according to the Pew report. Charismatics remain in their traditional denomination, but believe in some aspects of Pentecostalism, such as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially the speaking in tongues. Latino charismatics see themselves as a renewal movement within Catholicism, as it converges with other churches. And in general all churchgoing Latinos tend to see themselves as renewing Christianity in America. That makes them a powerful force as demographic changes turn America ever more Hispanic, and increasingly different from secular Europe.

单选题It took us only a few hours to______the paper off all four walls.

单选题Government inspectors came to ______ Sam's meat-packing company.

单选题It would be more effective to persuade the teenager smokers to give up smoking if ______.

单选题The purpose of the advertisement is ______.