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单选题All these reference books are ______ to me by my supervisor.
单选题The title of the biography The American Civil War Fighting for the Lady could hardly be more provocative. Thomas Keneally, an Australian writer, is unapologetic. In labeling a hero of the American civil war a notorious scoundrel he switches the spotlight from the brave actions of Dan Sickles at the battle of Gettysburg to his earlier premeditated murder, of the lover of his young and pretty Italian-American wife, Teresa. It is not the murder itself that disgusts Mr Keneally but Sickles's treatment of his wife afterwards, and how his behavior mirrored the hypocritical misogyny of 19th-century America. The murder victim, Philip Barton Key, Teresa Sickles's lover, came from a famous old southern family. He was the nephew of the then chief justice of the American Supreme Court and the son of the writer of the country's national anthem. Sickles, a Tammany Hall politician in New York turned Democratic congressman in Washington, shot Key dead in 1859 at a corner of Lafayette Square, within shouting distance of the White House. But the murder trial was melodramatic, even by the standards of the day. With the help of eight lawyers, Sickles was found not guilty after using the novel plea of "temporary insanity". The country at large was just as forgiving, viewing Key's murder as a gallant crime of passion. Within three years, Sickles was a general on the Unionist side in the American civil' War and, as a new friend of Abraham and Mary Lincoln, a frequent sleepover guest at the White House. Mrs Sickles was less fortunate. She was shunned by friends she had made as the wife of a rising politician. Her husband, a serial adulterer whose many mistresses included; Queen Isabella II of Spain and the madamof an industrialized New York whorehouse, refused to be seen in her company. Laura, the Sickles's daughter, was an innocent victim of her father's vindictiveness and eventually died of drink in the Bowery district of New York. Sickles's bold actions at Gettysburg are, in their own way, just as controversial. Argument continues to rage among scholars, as to whether he helped the Union to victory or nearly caused its defeat when he moved his forces out of line to occupy what he thought was better ground. James Longstreet, the Confederate general who led the attack against the new position, was in no doubt about the brilliance of the move. Mr Keneally is better known as a novelist. Here he shows himself just as adept at biography, and achieves both his main aims. He restores the reputation of Teresa Sickles, "this beautiful, pleasant and intelligent girl", and breathes full and controversial life into a famous military engagement.
单选题Green plants take in carbon dioxide and
give off
oxygen in a food-making process called photosynthesis.
单选题Our mutual understanding and cooperation will certainly result ______ important business. A.in B.on C.of D.from
单选题{{B}}Passage 5{{/B}}
Tests conducted at the University of
Pennsylvania's Psychological Laboratory showed that anger is one of the most
difficult emotions to detect from facial expression. Professor Dallas E. Buzby
confronted 716 students with pictures of extremely angry persons, and asked them
to identify the emotion from facial expression. Only 2 percent made correct
judgments. Anger was most frequently judged as "pleased." And a typical reaction
of a student with the picture of a man who was hopping mad was to classify his
expression as either "bewildered", "quizzical", or simply "amazed". Other
students showed that it is extremely difficult to tell whether a man is angry or
not just by looking at his face. The investigators found further that women are
better at detecting anger from facial expression than men are. Paradoxically,
they found that psychological training does not sharpen one's ability to judge a
man's emotions by his expressions but appears actually to hinder it. For in the
university tests, the more courses the subjects had taken in psychology, the
poorer judgment scores he turned in.
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单选题The bird flu virus is mutating and becoming more dangerous to mammals, according to researchers. The discovery reinforces fears that a human pandemic of the disease could yet occur. Avian flu hit the headlines in 1997 when a strain called H5N1 jumped from chickens to people, killing 6 people in Hong Kong. Within 3 days, the country"s entire chicken population was slaughtered and the outbreak was controlled. Since then new strains of virus have emerged, killing a further 14 people. As yet, no strain has been able to jump routinely from person to person. But if a more virulent strain evolves, the fear is that it could trigger widespread outbreaks, potentially affecting millions of people.
Now, genetic and animal studies show that the virus is becoming more menacing to mammals. Immediate action is needed to stem the virus"s transmission, says Hualan Chen from Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, China, who was involved in the research. Chen and colleagues studied 21 H5N1 flu virus samples taken from apparently healthy ducks, which act as a natural reservoir for the disease, in southern China between 1999 and 2002. The researchers inoculated groups of chickens, mice and ducks with virus samples taken from different years and waited to see which animals became ill. Their results are presented this week in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
.
As expected, ducks were immune to the virus"s effects and the chickens fell sick. However, the mice also became ill, losing weight and the use of their limbs. Crucially, the severity of their illness was linked with the year from which the virus sample was taken. Viruses isolated in 2001 and 2002 made the animals more ill than those isolated earlier on.
The findings hint that some time around 2001, the virus became adept at infecting mammals. Genetic analysis of the same samples reveals that the virus"s DNA changed over that time, suggesting that accumulated mutations may have contributed to the increased virulence.
Researchers are concerned that a virus that has acquired the ability to infect mice could also infect humans. "The disease could resurge at any time," warns virologist Marion Koopmans from the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. The findings highlight the need for improved surveillance to ensure that any future outbreaks are curtailed, she says. Although domestic poultry are easily culled, wild animals are more difficult to contain. "It is impossible to eradicate the natural reservoir," says Koopmans, "so we need to learn to live with it."
Birds may not be the only villains in this story, however. Chen believes that pigs may also play a part. In Asia, chickens and pigs are often kept in close proximity, so the virus may have shuffled back and forth between the 2 species, picking up mutations and becoming better at infecting mammalian hosts. Humans may then have caught the disease from swine.
单选题The price of facial tissues goes down when ______.
单选题By far the most common snake in Britain is the adder. In Scotland, in fact, there are no other snakes at all. The adder is also the only British snake with a poisonous bite. It can be found almost anywhere,but prefers sunny hillsides and rough open country, including high ground. In Ireland there are no snakes at all.
Most people regard snake bites as a fatal misfortune, but not all bites are serious and very few are fatal. Sometimes attempts at emergency treatment turn out to be more dangerous than the bite itself, with amateurs heroically, but mistakenly, trying do-it-yourself surgery and other unnecessary measures.
All snakes have small teeth, so it follows that all snakes can bite, but only the bite of the adder presents any danger. British snakes are shy animals and are far more frightened of you than you could possibly be of them. The adder will attack only if it feels threatened, as can happen if you take it by surprise and step on it accidentally or if you try to catch it or pick it up, which it dislikes intensely. If it hears you coming, it will normally get out of the way as quickly as it can, but adders cannot move very rapidly and may attack before moving if you are very close.
The effect of a bite varies considerably. It depends upon several things, one of which is the body-weight of the person bitten. The bigger the person is, the less harmful the bite is likely to be, which is why children suffer far more seriously from snake bites than adults. A healthy person will also have better resistance against the poison.
Very few people actually die from snake bites in Britain, and though these bites can make some people very ill, there are probably just as many cases of bites having little or no effect, as there are of serious illness.
单选题When traveling
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单选题Bill got up and made a motion that the meeting______.
单选题When the Zodiac killed, he got ______.
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单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}}
A friend of mine had a grandfather who
supervised the payroll at a large company long ago. People who knew him say this
man was a paragon of virtue when it came to making sure the employees were
treated fair and square on every payday. But he also believed that once wages
were disbursed, workers should take full responsibility for their financial
security. In his view, honest labor and thrifty habits were basic elements of
the free-enterprise system. Nobody should expect any money unless they earned
it. He opposed company pension plans, and was thoroughly dismayed by the fiscal
structure and benefits of Social Security. I wonder how many
people hold the same views now. The debate about changing Social Security is
part of a larger question: What obligation, if any, do Americans feel toward
fellow citizens who need help? Note, I didn't say "less fortunate,"
"disadvantaged," or some other term that might be construed as evidence I'm
promoting my own brand of social engineering. I just want to know how much
concern people have for what happens outside their own households.
Critics of government assistance programs often say they do more harm than
good by creating a cycle of dependency for recipients and a gigantic bureaucracy
that demoralizes the rest of society by taking money away from us and creating a
welfare state of slackers. The term I prefer to describe our
current situation is "safety-net culture." It has lots of problems, but I also
know what life was like before safety nets, because my dad gave me abundant
testimony from his 1920s boyhood near San Francisco—it was no Norman Rockwell
painting. His father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, so they
did have a house. But one neighbor lived in a tent on a vacant lot and another
was known for owning only one pair of overalls, which his wife laundered in a
tub on the stove on Saturdays while he sat by, wrapped in a blanket. My dad's
family often ate boiled rice for breakfast. The beverage of choice was tea, but
if that ran out they made "silver tea"— hot water with milk and sugar. Money for
college wasn't in the family budget. My dad got his degree thanks to the GI
Bill. Decades of safety-net culture have removed a lot of
anxiety from our lives but we're still not dose to Utopia. Amid all the Social
Security debate about aging baby boomers and shrinking worker contributions, I'm
most compelled by this statistic: Close to 20 percent of retirees get all of
their income from Social Security. Should that number be a source of national
pride or embarrassment? Or perhaps a better question: How do you honestly feel
about drinking silver tea during your golden
years?
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Today cognitive theorists empirically
study the impact of feelings on cognitive processes such as memory and judgment
and also the reciprocal influence of cognition on emotion. However, evolutionary
theorists view emotion as a powerful source of motivation—an internal
communication that something must be done. For example, when people are
threatened, they fed fear, which in turn leads them to deal with the threatening
situation through either fight or flight. Emotions and drives may also operate
in tandem to motivate action, as when excitement accompanies sexual arousal.
From an evolutionary perspective, different emotions serve different functions.
Fear facilitates flight in the face of danger; disgust prevents ingestion me
potentially toxic substances such as rotting meat. An emotion
that is less well understood is jealousy. Why do people become jealous in
intimate sexual relationships? One series of studies tested evolutionary
hypotheses about differences in the concerns men and women have about their
partners' fidelity. Since females can have only a limited number of children
during their lifetimes, to maximize their reproductive success they should be
motivated to form relationships with males who have resources and will
contribute them to their offspring. Indeed, cross-cultural evidence demonstrates
that one of the main mate selection criteria used by females around the world is
male resources. From a female's point of view, then, infidelity accompanied by,
emotional commitment to the other woman is a major threat to resources. A man
unlikely to divert resources from his mate and her offspring to a casualling,
but the risk increases dramatically if he becomes emotionally involved and
perhaps considers switching long-term partners. Hence, a woman's jealousy would
be expected to focus on her mate's emotional commitment to another
female. For males, the situation is different. If a male commits
himself to an exclusive relationship with a female, he must be certain that the
offspring in whom he is investing are his own. Since he cannot be sure of
paternity, the best he can do is to prevent his mate from copulating with any
other males. In males, then, jealousy would be expected to focus less on the
female's emotional commitment or resources and more on her tendency to give
other males sexual access. Indeed, in species 'ranging from insects to humans,
males take extreme measures to prevent other males from inseminating their
mates. In humans, male sexual jealousy is the leading cause of homicides and of
spouse battering cross - culturally.
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单选题"Aesthetic surgery" is mentioned to show that
单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}}
Short of money? Need an instant loan?
Since the early 1990s your best bet has been to go to the low-rent end of town
and find an appointed loan-shop. There you can borrow money in small amounts,
generally not much more than $500, against your post-dated pay-cheque. You will
be charged around $15 interest for every $100 you borrow--and that is per
month. For many people, there is no alternative. Banks refuse to
make small loans because there is no money in it, and completely unregulated
lending, via the internet or loan sharks, is too alarming. According to the
Community Financial Services Association, an advocacy group for the industry,
most borrowers are responsible and pay off their loans in a timely manner. But
some don't. The Centre for Responsible Lending, a consumer
group, says that many borrowers routinely roll over their loans. This quickly
brings them into debt traps. A typical borrower may end up paying $793 for a
$325 loan. The centre estimates that payday loans cost Americans $4.2 billion a
year in interest and fees. The industry thrives, in large part,
because it operates mostly outside state usury laws that prohibit excessive
interest rates. Its spokesmen say lenders need such exemptions to make a profit
on their basic service, small loans. Lenders say that their returns would amount
to pennies on the dollar if interest rates were capped. In fact, they say, such
restrictions would put them out of business. And that is exactly
what many of their opponents would like to see--particularly when it comes to
loans made to the families of soldiers. In one of the last acts of the
Republican Congress, payday lenders were restricted to interest rates of 36% on
loans to military personnel and their spouses. The Pentagon is worried that
uniformed personnel, especially those serving in Iraq, have been losing their
security clearances because of excessive debt at home. This, among other things,
was leading to the costly reassignment of highly trained troops, such as
communications experts, to ordinary low-skill jobs. Robert
Frank, an economist at Cornell University, wrote recently in the New York Times
that the industry -- not unlike the sub-prime mortgage sector -- is a
beneficiary of the sweeping deregulation of the financial-services industry that
has made credit more accessible. Its adverse consequences, he says, were"
completely predictable". Once poor people get in over their heads, they will
borrow themselves into bankruptcy if the law permits; and" if we are unhappy
about that, the only solution is to change the
rules."
