单选题The insurance company paid him $10,000 in ______ after his accident. A. compensation B. installment C. substitution D. commission

单选题The United States Food and Drag Administration has shown itself to be particularly wary with regard to alleged "miracle" drugs in recent times. A. bellicose B. exhausted C. cautious D. strange

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Michael Porter, who has made his name throughout the business community by advocating his theories of competitive advantages, is now swimming into even more shark-infested waters, arguing that competition can save even America's troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. Mr. Porter argues in "Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector. That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America's health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, he shows in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The system, wastes huge resources on paperwork, ignores preventive care and, above all, has perverse incentives that encourage shifting costs rather than cutting them outright. He concludes that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care." Many observers would agree with this diagnosis, but many would undoubtedly disagree with this advocacy of more market forces. Doctors have an intuitive distrust of competition, which they often equate with greed, while many public-policy thinkers argue that the only way to fix America's problem is to quash the private sector's role altogether and instead set up a government monopoly like Britain's National Health Service. Mr. Porter strongly disagrees. He starts by acknowledging that competition, as it has been introduced to America's health system, has in fact done more harm than good. But he argues that competition has been introduced piecemeal, in incoherent and counter-productive ways that lead to perverse incentives and worse outcomes:" health-care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients," he says. Mr. Porter offers a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious (but as yet unrealized) goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health sector should be how well a patient with a given health condition fares over the entire cycle of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. That rightly emphasizes the role of early detection and preventive care over techno-fixes, pricey pills and the other fallings of today's system. If there is a failing in this argument, it is that he sometimes strays toward naive optimism. Mr. Porter argues, for example, that his solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now. In the same vein, if Mr. Porter's prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already? One reason may be that they can make more money in the current sub-optimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market—which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of Mr. Porter's powerful vision.

单选题The charitable acts of their boss used to be greatly praised by the people. However, ruthless company downsizing drives and continued layoffs, coupled with rising pay for top managers, have made him look a good deal less______.

单选题He is the author of this novel with high ______ in the country.

单选题To have true disciples, a thinker must not be too______: any effective intellectual leader depends on the ability of other people to______ thought processes that did not originate with them.

单选题All human beings have a comfortable zone regulating the ______ they keep from someone they talk with. A) distance B) scope C) range D) boundary

单选题Although solutions to a problem are often the. fruit of direct investments in targeted research, the most revolutionary solutions tend to emerge from cross-pollination with other disciplines. Medical investigators might never have known of X rays, since they do not naturally occur in biological systems. It took a physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, to discover them--light rays that could probe the body's interior with nary a cut from a surgeon. Here's a more recent example of cross-pollination. Soon after the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in April 1990, NASA engineers realized that the telescope's primary mirror--which gathers and reflects the light from celestial objects into its cameras and spectrographs-had been ground to an incorrect shape. In other words, the billion-and-a-half-dollar telescope was producing fuzzy images. As if to make lemonade out of lemons, though, computer algorithms came to the rescue. Investigators developed a range of clever and innovative image-processing techniques to compensate for some of Hubble's shortcomings. Tums out, maximizing the amount of information that could be extracted from a blurry astronomical image is technically identical to maximizing the amount of information that can be extracted from a mammogram. Soon the new techniques came into common use for detecting early signs of breast cancer. In 1997, for Hubble's second servicing mission, shuttle astronauts swapped in a brand-new, high-resolution digital detector-designed to the demanding specs of astronomers whose careers are based on being able to see small, dim things in the cosmos. That technology is now incorporated in a minimally invasive, low-cost system for doing breast biopsies, the next stage after mammograms in the early diagnosis of cancer. Today, cross-pollination between science and society comes about when you have ample funding for ambitious, long-term projects. America has profited immensely from a generation of scientists and engineers who, instead of becoming lawyers or investment bankers, responded to a challenging vision posed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. "We intend to land a man on the Moon," proclaimed Kennedy, welcoming the citizenry to aid in the effort. That generation, and the one that followed, was the same generation of technologists who invented the personal computer. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was thirteen years old when the U. S. landed an astronaut on the Moon; Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, was fourteen. The PC did not arise from the mind of a banker or artist or professional athlete. It was invented and developed by a technically trained workforce, who had responded to the dream unfurled before them, and were thrilled to become scientists and engineers.

单选题Nationally, an ageing population is a problem. But locally it can be a boon. The over-50s control 80% of Britain"s wealth, and like to spend it on houses and high-street shopping. The young "generation rent", by contrast, is poor, distractible and liable to shop online. People aged between 50 and 74 spend twice as much as the under-30s on cinema tickets. Between 2000 and 2010 restaurant spending by those aged 65-74 increased by 33%, while the un- der-30s spent 18% less. And while the young still struggle to find work, older people are retiring later. During the financial crisis full-time employment fell for every age group but the over-65s, and there has been a rash of older entrepreneurs. Pensioners also support the working population by volunteering: some 100 retirees in Christchurch help out as business mentors. Even if they wanted to, most small towns and cities could not capture the cool kids. Mobile young professionals cluster, and greatly prefer to cluster in London. Even supposed meccas like Manchester are ageing: clubs in that city are becoming members-only. Towns that aim too young, like Bracknell and Chippenham, can find their high streets full of closed La Senzas (a lingerie chain) and struggling tattoo parlours. Companies often lag behind local authorities in working this out. They are London-obsessed, and have been slow to appreciate the growing economic heft of the old—who are assumed, often wrongly, to stick with products they learned to love in their youth. But Caroyln Freeman of Revelation Marketing reckons Britain could be on the verge of a marketing surge directed at the grey pound, "similar to what we saw with the pink". The window will not remain open forever: soon the baby boomers will start to ail, and no one else alive today is likely to have such a rich retirement. Meanwhile, with the over-50s holding the purse strings, the towns that draw them are likely to grow more and more pleasant. Decent restaurants and nice shops spring up in the favoured haunts of the old, just as they do in the trendy, revamped boroughs of London. Latimer House, a Christchurch furniture store full of retro clothing and 1940s music, would not look out of place in Hackney. Improved high streets then entice customers of all ages. Indeed, gentrification and gentrification can look remarkably similar. Old folk and young hipsters are similarly fond of vinyl and typewriters, and wander about in outsized spectacles. Some people never lose their edge.

单选题Had Julie been more careful on the maths exam, she ______ much better results now.

单选题We are obliged ______ you ______ your early reply. A．to, for B．to, to C．for, to D．for, for

单选题 Without fanfare or legislation, the government is orchestrating a quiet revolution in how it regulates new medicines. The revolution is based on the idea that the sicker people are, the more freedom they should have to try drugs that are not yet fully tested. For fifty years government policy has been driven by another idea: the fear that insufficiently tested medicines could cause deaths and injuries. The urgent needs of people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, and the possibility of meeting them with new drugs have created a compelling countervailing force to the continuing concern with safety. As a result, government rules and practices have begun to change. Each step is controversial. But the shift has already gone far beyond AIDS. New ways are emerging for very sick people to try some experimental drugs before they are marketed. People with the most serious forms of heart disease, cancer, emphysema, Alzheimer' s or Parkinson' s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, diabetes, or other grave illnesses can request such drugs through their doctors and are likelier to get them than they would have been four years ago. "We've been too rigid in not making lifesaving drugs available to people who otherwise face certain death," says Representative Henry Waxman, of California, who heads the subcommittee that considers changes in drug-approval policies. "It's true of AIDS, but it's also true of cancer and other life- threatening diseases." For the first time, desperate patients have become a potent political force for making new medicines available quickly. People with AIDS and their advocates, younger and angrier than most heart-disease or cancer patients, are drawing on two decades of gay activists' success in organizing to get what they want from politicians. At times they found themselves allied with Reagan Administration deregulators, scientists, industry representatives, FDA staff members, and sympathetic members of Congress. They organized their own clinical trials and searched out promising drugs here and abroad. The result is a familiar Washington story: a crisis—AIDS—helped crystallize an informal coalition for reform. AIDS gave new power to old complaints. As early as the 1970s the drug industry and some independent authorities worried that the Food and Do, g Administration' s testing requirements were so demanding that new drugs were being unreasonably delayed. Beginning in 1972, several studies indicated that the United States had lost its lead in marketing new medicines and that breakthrough drugs—those that show new promise in treating serious or life-threatening diseases— had come to be available much sooner in other countries. Two high-level commissions urged the early release of breakthrough drugs. So did the Carter Administration, but the legislation it pro- posed died in Congress. Complaints were compounded by growing concern that "if we didn't streamline policies, red tape wot, Id be an obstacle to the development of the biotechnology revolution," as Frank E. Young, who was the head of the FDA from 1984 to 1989, put it in an interview with me. Young was a key figure in the overhaul of the FDA's policies. A pioneer in biotechnology and a former dean of the University of Rochester's medical school, he came to Washington with an agenda and headed the agency for five and a half years—longer than anyone else has since the 1960s. Young took the FDA job to help introduce new medicines created by biotechnology-- whose promise he had seen in his own gene-cloning lab--and to get experimental medicines to desperately iii people more quickly. He had seen people die waiting for new medicines because "they were in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. That is now changing.

单选题A little girl was given so many picture books on her seventh birthday that her father thought his daughter should give one or two of her new books to a little neighbor boy named Robert. Now, taking books, or anything else, from a little girl is like taking candy from a baby, but the father of the little girl had his way and Robert got two of her books. "After all, that leaves you with nine," said the father, who thought he was a philosopher and a child psychologist (心理学家), and couldn't shut his big stupid mouth on the subject. A few weeks later, the father went to his library to look up "father" in the Oxford English Dictionary, to feast his eyes on (一饱眼福) the praise of fatherhood through the centuries, but he couldn't find volume F-G and then he discovered that three others were missing, too--A-B. L-M, V-Z. He began to search his household, and learned what had happened to the four missing volumes. "A man came to the door this morning," said his little daughter, "and he didn't know how to get from here to Torrington, or from Torrington to Winsted, and he was a nice man, much nicer than Robert, and so I gave him four of your books. After all, there are thirteen volumes in the Oxford English Dictionary, and that leaves you with nine. /

单选题Teachers always tell their students that it is no good ______ today's work for tomorrow.

单选题{{B}}Passage 2{{/B}} However important we may regard school life to be, there is no gain saying the fact that children spend more time at home than in the classroom. Therefore, the great influence of parents cannot be ignored or discounted by the teacher. They can become strong allies of tile school personnel or they can consciously or unconsciously hinder and thwart curricular objectives. Administrators have been aware of the need to keep parents apprised of the newer methods used in schools. Many principals have conducted workshops explaining such matters as the reading readiness program, manuscript writing and developmental mathematics. Moreover, the classroom teacher, with the permission of the supervisors, can also play an important role in enlightening parents. The informal tea and the many interviews carried on during the year, as well as new ways of reporting pupils' progress, can significantly aid in achieving a harmonious interplay between school and home. To illustrate, suppose that a father has been drilling Junior in arithmetic processes night after night. In a friendly interview, the teacher can help the parent sublimate his natural paternal interest into productive channels. He might be persuaded to let Junior participate in discussing the family budget, buying the food, using a yardstick or measuring cup at home, setting the clock, calculating mileage on a trip and engaging in scores of other activities that have a mathematical basis. If the father follows the advice, it is reasonable to assume that he will soon realize his son is making satisfactory progress in mathematics, and at the same time, enjoying the work. Too often, however, teachers' conferences with parents are devoted to petty accounts of children's misdemeanors, complaints about laziness and poor work habits, and suggestion for penalties and rewards at home. What is needed is a more creative approach in which the teacher, as a professional adviser, plants ideas in parents' minds for the best utilization of the many hours that the child spends out of the classroom.

单选题The screen in the living room has been______in the family. It was my grandmother"s originally.

单选题 No one disagrees with the economic necessity of geographically extending a product. Not only does it increase turnover but also it makes economies of scale possible, thus giving companies a competitive advantage in local markets. But how far do we push the global idea? Should we globalize all aspects of a brand: its name, its creative concept and the product itself? Global branding implies the wish to extend all three aspects throughout the world. Rarely, though, is it realistic and profitable to extend all of Ihem? The Mars brand, for instance, is not absolutely global. The Mars chocolate bar is sold as an all-round nutritious snack in the UK and as an energizer in Europe. Nestle adapts the taste of its worldwide brands to local markets. The Nescafe formulas vary worldwide. Nowhere is globalization more desirable than in sectors that revolve around mobility, such as the car rental and airline industries. When a brand in these sectors is seen as being international, its authority and expertise are automatically accepted. Companies such as Hertz, Avis and Europcar globalized their advertising campaigns by portraying typical images such as the busy executive. An Italian businessman will identify more with a hurried businessman who is not Italian than with an Italian who is not a businessman. The main aim of such global marketing campaigns is not to increase sales but to maximize profitability. For example, instead of bringing out different TV advertisements for each country, a firm can use a single film for one region. The McCann-Erikson agency is proud of the fact that it has saved Coca-Cola $ 90m over the past 20 years by producing commercials with global appeal. Social and cultural developments provide a favorable platform for globalization. When young people no longer identify with long-established local values, they seek new models on which to build their identity. They are then open to influence from abroad. When drinking Coca-Cola, we all drink the American myth--fresh, young, dynamic, powerful, all American images. Nike tells young people everywhere to surpass themselves, to transcend the confines of their race and culture. Globalization is also made easier when a brand is built around a cultural stereotype. AEG, BOSCH, Siemens, Mercedes and BMW rest secure on the "Made in Germany" model, which opens up the global market since the stereotype goes beyond national boundaries. People every'- where associate the stereotype with robust performance. Barilla is another example: it is built on the classic Italian image of tomato sauce, pasta, a carefree way of life, songs and sun. IKEA furniture epitomizes Sweden. Laneome expresses the sophistication of the French woman. Certain organizational factors ease the shift to a global brand. American firms, for instance, are naturally geared towards globalization because marketing in their huge domestic market already treats America as a single entity despite its social and cultural differences. Another organizational factor concerns the way US companies first expanded in Europe. Many set up European headquarters, usually based in Brussels or London. From early on Europe was considered a single and homogeneous area. Finally, a single center of production is also a great advantage. Procter & Gamble centralizes European production of detergents in its Amiens factory. This maximizes product standardization and enables innovations to spread to all countries at once, thus giving the company a competitive advantage over local rivals and ensuring the continued growth and success of the brand.

单选题I managed to ______ myself to the habits and customs in the United States.