单选题Smoking is so harmful to personal health that it kills people each year ______ than automobile accidents. A. seven more times B. seven times more C. over seven times D. seven times

单选题Over the last decade, demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like breast enlargements and nose jobs, has increased by more than 400 percent. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal. "What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures. They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that." In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centers on what age people should be before going under the knife. New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Imber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea of waiting until one needs a heroic transformation is silly," he says. "By then, you've wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand." Dr. Imber draws the line at operating on people who are under 18, however, "It seems that someone we don't consider old enough to order a drink shouldn't be considering plastic surgery. ' In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous. But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people, Dr. Davies, who claims to "cater for the average person", agrees. He says: "I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, 3, 000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday." Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anaesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Yet, as one woman who recently paid ￡2,500 for liposuction to remove fat from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery Veteran is a deceptively gentle one. "I had my legs done because they'd been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective it whetted my appetite. Now I don't think there's any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it./

单选题According to this passage, which one of the following spellings would Webster have approved in his dictionaries?

单选题Pundits who want to sound judicious are fond of warning against generalizing. Each country is different, they say, and no one story fits all of Asia. This is, of course, silly, all of these economies plunged into economic crisis within a few months of each other, so they must have had something in common. In fact, the logic of catastrophe was pretty much the same in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea. (Japan is a very different story. ) In each case investors—mainly, but not entirely, foreign banks who had made short-term loans—all tried to pull their money out at the same time. The result was a combined banking and currency crisis, a banking crisis because no bank can convert all its assets into cash on short notice; a currency crisis because panicked investors were trying not only to convert long-term assets into cash, but to convert baht or rupiah into dollars. In the face of the stampede, governments had no good options. If they let their currencies plunge, inflation would soar and companies that had borrowed in dollars would go bankrupt; if they tried to support their currencies by pushing up interest rates, the same firms would probably go bust from the combination of debt burden and recession. In practice, countries split the difference and paid a heavy price regardless. Was the crisis a punishment for bad economic management? Like most cliches, the catchphrase "crony capitalism" has prospered because it gets at something real; excessively cozy relationships between government and business really did lead to a lot of bad investments. The still primitive financial structure of Asian business also made the economies peculiarly vulnerable to a loss of confidence. But the punishment was surely disproportionate to the crime, and many investments that look foolish in retrospect seemed sensible at the time. Given that there were no good policy options, was the policy response mainly on the right track? There was frantic blame-shifting when everything in Asia seemed to be going wrong; now there is a race to claim credit when some things have started to go right. The International Monetary Fund points to Korea's recovery—and more generally to the fact that the sky didn't fall after all—as proof that its policy recommendations were right, never mind that other IMF clients have done far worse, and that the economy of Malaysia—which refused IMF help, and horrified respectable opinion by imposing capital controls—also seems to be on the mend. Malaysia's Prime Minister, by contrast, claims full credit for any good news—even though neighboring economies also seem to have bottomed out. The truth is that an observer without any ax to grind would probably conclude that none of the polices adopted either on or in defiance of the IMF's advice made much difference either way. Budget polices, interest rate policies, banking reform— whatever countries tried, just about all the capital that could flee, did. And when there was no more money to run, the natural recuperative powers of the economies finally began to prevail. At best, the money doctors who purported to offer cures provided a helpful bedside manner; at worse, they were like medieval physicians who prescribed bleeding as a remedy for all ills. Will the patients stage a full recovery? It depends on exactly what you mean by "full". South Korea's industrial production is already above its pre-crisis level, but in the spring of 1997 anyone who had predicted zero growth in Korean industry over the next two years would have been regarded as a reckless doomsayer. So if by recovery you mean not just a return to growth, but one that brings the region's performance back to something like what people used to regard as the Asian norm, they have a long way to go.

单选题A Never the world has seen so many nations B cooperating C in such a D friendly way .

单选题The building is so well constructed that it will survive even the strongest earthquake.

单选题You must try your best to ______ to the new environment.(2003年西南财经大学考博试题)

单选题Recent border confrontations between the two countries lead credence to tile rumors of an impending war.

单选题I will not attend my roommate Xiao Wangs wedding ______ to invite me himself. A．unless he comes B．except he doesnt come C．provided that he came D．unless he will come

单选题The house was sold for $ 60, 000, which was over its real______.

单选题A: ______ B: No. I"m trying to find a green sweater in extra large.

单选题You need to rewrite this sentence because it is ______; the readers will have difficulty in understanding it. A. comprehensive B. alternative C. deliberate D. ambiguous

单选题According to the instructor, students who are absent from, lectures more than three times will be ______ in the end of the semester assessment.

单选题The investigation into the food safety incident over dairy products tainted with melamine is______.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Passage 1{{/B}} Cities develop as a result of functions that they can perform, some functions result directly from the ingenuity of the citizenry, but most functions result from the needs of the local area and of the surrounding hinterland (the region that supplies goods to the city and to which the city furnishes services and other goods). Geographers often make a distinction between the situation and the site of a city. Situation refers to the general position in relation to the surrounding region, whereas site involves physical characteristics of the specific location. Situation is normally much more important to the continuing prosperity of a city. If a city is well situated in regard to its hinterland, its development is much more likely to continue. Chicago, for example, possesses an almost unparalleled situation, it is located at the southern end of a huge lake that forces east-west transportation lines to be compressed into its vicinity, and at a meeting of significant land and water transport routes. It also overlooks what is one of the world's finest large farming regions. These factors ensured that Chicago would become a great city regardless of the disadvantageous characteristics of the available site, such as being prone to flooding during thunderstorm activity. Similarly, it can be argued that much of New York City's importance stems from its early and continuing advantage of situation. Philadelphia and Boston both originated at about the same time as New York and shared New York's location at the western end of one of the world's most important oceanic trade routes, but only New York possesses an easy-access functional connection (the Hudson-Mohawk lowland) to the vast Midwestern hinterland. This account does not alone explain New York's primacy, but it does include several important factors. Among the many aspects of situation that help to explain why some cities grow and others do not, original location on a navigable waterway seems particularly applicable. Of course, such characteristic as slope, drainage, power resources, river crossings, coastal shapes, and other physical characteristics help to determine city location, but such factors are normally more significant in early stages of city development than later.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Many of the problems we face today are not so new as we think they are. And some of our modern solutions are not so new, either. The problem of energy shortages and the solution of using solar energy go back at least to early Greek cultures. The climate in the coastal areas of Greece 2,500 years ago was characterized by cool winters, much as it is today. At that time, the Greeks heated their homes with small, charcoal-burning heaters. In other words, wood (which is used to make charcoal) was their primary source of energy. However, by the fifth century B C fuel shortages had become common be- cause, in many parts of Greece, the firewood in the forests had been depleted. Once the supply of fire- wood from the local forests ran out, people began to use the wood from olive groves as fuel. But this solution had its own problem. It reduced the olive crop, a valuable resource to the Greeks. By the fourth century B C, the city of Athens banned the use of olive wood for fuel. Wood had to be imported from farther and farther away, making it more difficult to obtain and more expensive to use. About this time the Greeks began to build their houses facing south, so that the low sun in winter could penetrate and help heat the interiors. Excavations of ancient Greek cities suggest that large areas were planned so that individual homes could take maximum advantage of passive solar energy.