单选题As the American workforce gets grayer, age discrimination will likely become a more prominent issue in the courts. It is, of course, illegal to discriminate against an employee because of his or her age, and yet it is not illegal to dismiss a worker because he has a high salary and expensive health care. This apparent contradiction is at the heart of a raft of cases now making their way through the courts. The outcome of these cases will have broad implications for the workplace in the coming years. By 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that more than half of all workers will be over 40—many of whom, by dint of seniority and promotions, will be earning higher than median salaries, eligible for more stock options, and carrying higher health care costs as a result of a larger number of dependents and the increased cost of health care for older workers. Is it any wonder that a bottom-line oriented business might want to shed these workers, whose productivity is likely to plummet in the next few years, even as they become more expensive employees? Still, the legal challenges of implementing this policy are daunting. Businesses have the right to rate workers on their productivity and to rank them against their peers. But they are not allowed to prejudge individuals based on their sex, race or age. Each worker must be treated on his or her own merits, rather than by how they fit into a lager profile of the group they belong to. For companies looking to lay off these workers, the cost of making a mistake is high: while only one in three age discrimination suits are won by the plaintiff, the awards tend to be steep and the political fall-out harsh.

单选题The "explosive conflict" in the first paragraph refers to

单选题Girl：Are you ready to order? Man：______ Girl：Sure．I’ll be back in a moment． A．Do you think I’m ready? B．Yes，I’m ready． C．Are you sure you’ll be back? D．Can I have one more minute?

单选题You needn't worry about your lunch. At the party there will be______ food and drink in.(2006年中国矿业大学考博试题)

单选题 When Thomas Keller, one of America's foremost chefs, announced that on Sept. 1 he would abolish the practice of tipping at Per Se, his luxury restaurant in New York City, and replace it with a European--style service charge, I knew three groups would be opposed: customers, servers and restaurant owners. These three groups are all committed to tipping—as they quickly made clear on Web sites. To oppose tipping, it seems, is to be anticapitalist, and maybe even a little French. But Mr. Keller is right to move away from tipping—and it's worth exploring why just about everyone else in the restaurant world is wrong to stick with the practice. Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. "Waiters know that they won't get paid if they don't do a good job" is how most advocates of the system would put it. To be sure, this is a tempting, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants. Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, has conducted dozens of studies of tipping and has concluded that consumers' assessments of the quality of service correlate weakly to the amount they tip. Rather, customers are likely to tip more in response to servers touching them lightly and leaning forward next to the table to make conversation than to how often their water glass is refilled—in other words, customers tip more when they like the server, not when the service is good. Mr. Lynn's studies also indicate that male customers increase their tips for female servers while female customers increase their tips for male servers. What's more, consumers seem to forget that the tip increases as the bill increases. Thus, the tipping system is an open invitation to what restaurant professionals call "upselling": every bottle of imported water, every espresso and every cocktail is extra money in the server's pocket. Aggressive upselling for tips is often rewarded while low-key, quality service often goes unrecognized. In addition, the practice of tip pooling, which is the norm in fine-dining restaurants and is becoming more common in every kind of restaurant above the level of a greasy spoon, has ruined whatever effect voting with your tip might have had on an individual waiter. In an unreasonable outcome, you are punishing the good waiters in the restaurant by not tipping the bad one. Indeed, there appears to be little connection between tipping and good service.

单选题He left Manchester with the______of finding a job in London when he was 25.

单选题W: Did you attend Alice's presentation last night? It was the first time for her to give a speech to a large audience.M: How she could be so calm in front of so many people is really beyond me!Q: What do we learn from the conversation? A. Alice didn't seem to be nervous during her speech. B. Alice needs more training in making public speeches. C. The man can hardly understand Alice's presentation. D. The man didn't think highly of Alice's presentation.

单选题Cancer has always been with us, but not always in the same way. Its care and management have differed over time, of course, but so, too, have its identity, visibility, and meanings. Pick up the thread of history at its most distant end and you have cancer the crab—so named either because of the ramifying venous processes spreading out from a tumor or because its pain is like the pinch of a crab"s claw. Premodern cancer is a lump, a swelling that sometimes breaks through the skin in ulcerations producing foul-smelling discharges. The ancient Egyptians knew about many tumors that had a bad outcome, and the Greeks made a distinction between benign tumors (oncos) and malignant ones (carcinos). In the second century A.D., Galen reckoned that the cause was systemic, an excess of melancholy or black bile, one of the body"s four "humors," brought on by bad diet and environmental circumstances. Ancient medical practitioners sometimes cut tumors out, but the prognosis was known to be grim. Describing tumors of the breast, an Egyptian papyrus from about 1600 B.C. concluded: "There is no treatment." The experience of cancer has always been terrible, but, until modern times, its mark on the culture has been light. In the past, fear coagulated around other ways of dying: infectious and epidemic diseases (plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, typhoid fever); "apoplexies" (what we now call strokes and heart attacks); and, most notably in the nineteenth century, "consumption" (tuberculosis). The agonizing manner of cancer death was dreaded, but that fear was not centrally situated in the public mind—as it now is. This is one reason that the medical historian Roy Porter wrote that cancer is "the modern disease par excellence," and that Mukherjee calls it "the quintessential product of modernity." At one time, it was thought that cancer was a "disease of civilization," belonging to much the same causal domain as "neurasthenia" and diabetes, the former a nervous weakness believed to be brought about by the stress of modern life and the latter a condition produced by bad diet and indolence. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some physicians attributed cancer—notably of the breast and the ovaries—to psychological and behavioral causes. William Buchan"s wildly popular eighteenth-century text "Domestic Medicine" judged that cancers might be caused by "excessive fear, grief, religious melancholy." In the nineteenth century, reference was repeatedly made to a "cancer personality," and, in some versions, specifically to sexual repression. As Susan Sontag observed, cancer was considered shameful, not to be mentioned, even obscene. Among the Romantics and the Victorians, suffering and dying from tuberculosis might be considered a badge of refinement; cancer death was nothing of the sort. "It seems unimaginable," Sontag wrote, "to aestheticism" cancer.

单选题Most American magazines and newspapers reserve 60 percent of their pages for ads. The New York Times Sunday edition (1) may contain 350 pages of advertisements. Some radio stations devote 40 minutes of every hour to (2) . Then there is television. According to one estimate, American youngsters sit (3) three hours of television commercials each week. By the time they graduate from high school, they will have been (4) 360,000 TV ads. Televisions advertise in airports, hospital waiting rooms, and schools. Major sporting (5) are now major advertising events. Racing cars serve as high speed (6) Some athletes receive most of their money from advertisers. One (7) basketball player earned $ 3.9 million by playing ball. Advertisers paid him nine times that much to (8) their products. There is no escape. Commercial ads are displayed on wails, buses, and trucks. They decorate the inside of taxis and subways—even the doors of public toilets. (9) messages call to us in supermarkets, stores, elevators—and (10) we. are on hold on the telephone. In some countries so much advertising comes through the mail that many recipients proceed directly from the mailbox to the nearest wastebasket to (11) the junk mail. (12) Insider's Report, published by McCann-Erickson, a global advertising agency, the estimated (13) of money spent on advertising worldwide in 1990 was $275.5 billion. Since then, the figures have (14) to $ 411.6 billion for 1997 and a projected $434.4 billion for 1998. Big money ! What is the effect of all of this? One analyst (15) it this way: "Advertising is one of the most powerful socializing forces in the culture. Ads sell more than products. They sell images, values, goals, concepts of who we are and who we should be. They shape our attitudes and our attitudes shape our behavior. /

单选题Speaker A: Could you break a 100-dollar bill for me? Speaker B: ______

单选题The work has ______ the status of a classic among the composer's admirers.

单选题Financial consultants acknowledge that the value of common stock is inherently changeable.

单选题While traveling for various speaking engagements, I frequently stay overnight in the home of a family and am invited to one of the children's bedrooms. In it, I often find so many playthings that there's almost no room. And the closet is usually so tightly packed with clothes that I can barely squeeze in my jacket. I' m not complaining, only making a point. I think that the tendency to give children an overabundance (过多) of toys and clothes is quite common in American families, and I think that in far too many families not only do children come to take their parents' generosity for granted, but also the effects of this can actually be somewhat harmful to children. Of course, I' m not only thinking of the material possessions children are given. Children can also be overindulged (过分宠爱) with too many privileges—for example, when parents send a child to an expensive summer camp that the parents can't really afford. Why? One fairly common reason is that parents overindulge their children out of a sense of guilt. Parents who both hold down full-time jobs may feel guilty about the amount of time they spend away from their children and may attempt to compensate by showering them with material possessions. Overindulgence of a child also happens when parents are unable to stand up to their children's unreasonable demands. Such parents vacillate between saying no and giving in—but neither response seems satisfactory to them. If they refuse a request, they immediately feel a wave of remorse for having been so strict or ungenerous. If they give in, they feel regret and resentment over having been a pushover. This kind of vacillation not only impairs the parents' ability to set limits, it also sours the parent-child relationship to some degree, robbing parents and their children of some of the happiness and mutual respect that should be present in healthy families. But overindulging children with material things does little to lessen parental guilt (since parents never feel that they've given enough), nor does it make children feel more loved (for what children really crave is parents' time and attention). Instead, the effects of overindulgence can be harmful. Children may, to some degree become greedy, self-centered, ungrateful and insensitive to the needs and feelings of others, beginning with their parents. When children are given too much, their respect for their parents would be undermined.

单选题In new semester, there will be many activities ______ campus.

单选题Speaker A. Excuse me, Mr. Black, can you spare me a few minutes? There's something I'd like to speak to you about. I won't keep you long.Speaker B: ______

单选题Why! I have nothing to confess, ______ you want me to say?

单选题Like so many things of value, truth is not always easy to come by. What we regard as true shapes our beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Yet we can believe things that have no basis in fact. People are capable of embracing horrific precepts that seem incredible in retrospect. In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler had millions of followers who accepted his delusions about racial superiority. As Voltaire put it long before Hitler's time, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. " We are surrounded by illusions, some created deliberately. They may be subtle or may affect us profoundly. Some illusions, such as films and novels, we seek out and appreciate. Others can make us miserable and even kill us. We need to know if particular foods that taste perfectly fine can hurt us in the short term (as with Salmonella contamination) or in the long term (cholesterol), whether a prevalent virus is so dangerous that we should avoid public places, and what problems a political candidate may cause or resolve if elected. Gaining insights about the truth often is a challenge, and misconceptions can be difficult to recognize. We often believe stories because they are the ones available. Most people would identify Thomas Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb. Although Edison perfected a commercially successful design, he was preceded in the experimentation by British inventors Frederick de Moleyns and Joseph Swan, and by American J. W. Starr. The biggest enemies of truth are: people whose job is to sell us incomplete versions of the available facts, our willingness to believe what we want and the simple absence of accurate information. Companies advertising products on television do not describe the advantages of their competitors' products any more than a man asking a woman to marry him encourages her to date other men before making up her mind. It is a social reality that people encourage one another to make important decisions with limited facts. Technology has simplified and complicated the fact-gathering process. The Internet allows us to check facts more easily, but it also disburses misinformation. Similarly, a belief that videos and photos necessarily represent reality ignores how easily they can be digitally altered. Unquestioning reliance on such forms of media makes us more susceptible to manipulators: those who want to deceive can dazzle us with a modern version of smoke and mirrors.