单选题Edgar Allan Poe is not only a poet, but also the founding father of ______in American literature.

单选题A stamp is just a piece with a picture and some words printed on one side and some glue on the other side. What makes one of these bits of paper worth any money at all? What makes a ten-fen stamp worth ten fen? When you buy a stamp, you also buy service from the post office. You get the letter sent by post. After the stamp has done its work, the post office says it is worthless. You must buy a new one for each letter you send. But people often pay money for stamps that have already been used. Stamp collectors have fun just trying to collect as many different kinds as possible. Certain kinds are hard to find. To get one of these uncommon stamps, some collectors are willing to pay a great deal of money. They think it is worth something, and that gives it value. If you collect stamps because they are especially beautiful or tell an interesting story or show all kinds of animals, then those are the ones that have value to you.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} As America's prison population has exploded, hard-pressed officials have relied on private prisons to house about 5 percent of the nation's 1.7 million prisoners. But a number of recent incidents have strengthened accusations that for-profit prisons do not always measure up on security and reliability. A judge ordered a Youngstown, Ohio, prison for criminals from Washington, D. C. to remove violent prisoners after 13 stabbings(刺伤案), two of them fatal. Colorado closed a center for teen lawbreakers after a suicide and evidence that prisoners had been abused. Tennessee legislators have now put on hold a plan to privatize most of that state's prison system. Last week, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees issued a report charging that private prisons save taxpayers little money and are full of waste and deception (欺骗). The union accused some firms of persuading public officials for profitable contracts and then running substandard facilities. Nashville-based Corrections Corp of America, a privatization leader, insists it can cut costs and operate high-quality prisons. A spokeswoman blanked some problems at its Youngstown unit on errors by Washington, D.C. officials and said the new report reflects union fears of "change and a loss of power". A new test is shaping up in the capital: Congress has voted to put 2 000 more local prisoners in private prisons by mid-1999.

单选题The mystery guest on the show is ______ other than the President. A. no B. none C. not D. nothing

单选题People, like most animals, are naturally lazy. So the ascent of mankind is something of a mystery. Humans who make their livings hunting and gathering in the traditional way do not have to put much effort into it. Farmers who rely on rain to water their crops work significantly harder, and lead unhealthier lives. But the real back-breaking is that carried out by farmers who use irrigation. Yet it was the invention of irrigation, at first sight so harmful to its practitioners that actually produced a sufficient surplus to feed the priests, scholars, artists and so on whose activities are collectively thought of as "civilization". In the past 10,000 years, the world's climate has become temporarily colder and drier on several occasions. The first of these, known as the Younger Dryas, after a tundra-loving plant that thrived during it, occurred at the same time as the beginning of agriculture in northern Mesopotamia. It is widely believed that this was not a coincidence. The drying and cooling of the Younger Dryas adversely affected the food supply of hunter-gatherers. That would have created an incentive for agriculture to spread once some bright spark invented it. Why farmers then moved on to irrigation is, however, far from clear. But Harvey Weiss, of Yale University, thinks he knows. Dr. Weiss observes that the development of irrigation coincides with a second cool, dry period, some 8,200 years ago. His analysis of rainfall patterns in the area suggests that rainfall in agriculture's upper-Mesopotamian heartland would, at this time, have fallen below the level needed to sustain farming reliably. Farmers would thus have been forced out of the area in search of other opportunities. Once again, an innovative spark was required. But it clearly occurred to some of these displaced farmers that the slow-moving waters of the lower Tigris and Euphrates, near sea level, could be diverted using canals and used to water crops. And the rest, as the cliche has it, is history. So climate change helped to intensify agriculture, and thus start civilization. But an equally intriguing idea is that the spread of agriculture caused climate change. In this case, the presumed criminal is forest clearance. Most of the land cultivated by early farmers in the Middle East would have been forested. When the trees that grew there were cleared, the carbon they contained ended up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Moreover, one form of farming—the cultivation of rice in waterlogged fields—generates methane, in large quantities. William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia, explained that, in combination, these two phenomena had warmed the atmosphere prior to the start of the industrial era. As environmentalists are wont to observe, mankind is part of nature. These studies show just how intimate the relationship is.

单选题______ my surprise, I got a high grade in this test. A. For B. To C. To be D. On

单选题A. receipt B. implication C. empty D. concept

单选题For each group of items in the following, point out which item does not fall under the same category as the rest and explain the reason in ONE sentence.

单选题Many experiments have shown that moderate exercises contribute______good health.

单选题Speaker A: I'd like to exchange these jeans please.Speaker B: ______

单选题(2010) To get the job started,____1 need is your permission.

单选题With multimedia, ______. A．digital information can be centrally stored, yet available at many places at the same time physicians can meet regularly B．experts can see the data and images clearly C．physicians can consult experts at any time D．teachers can send emails to the students

单选题Because I have been very busy these days, I'll have to ______ my former classmates' invitation to a re-union party.

单选题The price of beer ______ from 50 cents to 4 dollars per liter during the summer season. A) altered B) ranged C) separated D) different

单选题The day was star-crossed: Friday the 13th in the month of October, on the eve of the second looming anniversary of a devastating market crash. "I'm telling you, psychology is really funny. People get crazy in situations like that," said portfolio strategist Elaine Garzarelli. Last week Friday the 13th lived up to its frightful reputation. After drifting lower at a sleepy pace for most of the day, the Dow Jones industrial average abruptly lurched into a hair-raising sky dive in the final hour of trading. The Bush Administration moved swiftly to avert any sense of crisis after the market closed. Declared Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady: "It's important to recognize that today's stock market decline doesn't signal any fundamental change in the condition of the economy. The economy remains well balanced, and the outlook is for continued moderate growth." But Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey, who chairs a House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, vowed to hold hearings this week on the stock market slide. Said he: "This is the second heart attack. My hope is that before we have the inevitable third heart attack, we pay attention to these problems." Experts found no shortage of culprits to blame for the latest shipwreck. A series of downbeat realizations converged on Friday, ranging from signs of a new burst of inflation to sagging corporate profits to troubles in the junk-bond market that has fueled major takeovers. The singular event that shook investors was the faltering of a $6.75 billion labor management buyout of UAL, the parent company of United Airlines, the second largest U. S. carrier. On one point most thoughtful Wall Streeters agreed: the market had reached such dizzying heights that a correction of some sort seemed almost inevitable. Propelled by favorable economic news and a wave of multibillion-dollar takeovers, stocks had soared more than 1,000 points since the 1987 crash. But by last August some Wall streeters were clearly worried. The heaviest blow to the market came Friday afternoon. In a three-paragraph statement, UAL said a labor-management group headed by Chairman Stephen Wolf had failed to get enough financing to acquire United. Several banks had apparently balked at the deal, which was to be partly financed through junk bonds. The take-over group said it would submit a revised bid "in the near term,' but the announcement stunned investors who had come to view the United deal as the latest sure thing in the 1980s buyout binge. Said John Downey, a trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange: "The airline stocks have looked like attractive takeover targets. But with the United deal in trouble, everyone started to wonder what other deals might not go through./

单选题It is better for parents ______.

单选题When a Scottish research team startled the world by revealing 3 months ago that it had cloned an adult sheep, President Clinton moved swiftly. Declaring that he was opposed to using this unusual animal husbandry technique to clone humans, he ordered that federal funds not be used for such an experiment—although no one had proposed to do so—and asked an independent panel of experts chaired by Princeton President Harold Shapiro to report back to the White House in 90 days with recommendations for a national policy on human cloning. That group—the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC)—has been working feverishly to put its wisdom on paper, and at a meeting on 17 May, members agreed on a near-final draft of their recommendations. NBAC will ask that Clinton"s 90-day ban on federal funds for human cloning be extended indefinitely, and possibly that it be made law. But NBAC members are planning to word the recommendation narrowly to avoid new restrictions on research that involves the cloning of human DNA or cells—routine in molecular biology. The panel has not yet reached agreement on a crucial question, however, whether to recommend legislation that would make it a crime for private funding to be used for human cloning. In a draft preface to the recommendations, discussed at the 17 May meeting, Shapiro suggested that the panel had found a broad consensus that it would be "morally unacceptable to attempt to create a human child by adult nuclear cloning." Shapiro explained during the meeting that the moral doubt stems mainly from fears about the risk to the health of the child. The panel then informally accepted several general conclusions, although some details have not been settled. NBAC plans to call for a continued ban on federal government funding for any attempt to clone body cell nuclei to create a child because current federal law already forbids the use of federal funds to create embryos (the earliest stage of human offspring before birth) for research or to knowingly endanger an embryo"s life, NBAC will remain silent on embryo research. NBAC members also indicated that they will appeal to privately funded researchers and clinics not to try to clone humans by body cell nuclear transfer. But they were divided on whether to go further by calling for a federal law that would impose a complete ban on human cloning. Shapiro and most members favored an appeal for such legislation, but in a phone interview, he said this issue was still "up in the air".

单选题A: May I make a recommendation, sir? The lobsters are very fresh today. B: ______