单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} There are 4 reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, and D. You should decide on the best choice and mark your answer on the ANSWER SHEET by blackening the corresponding letter in the brackets.{{B}}Passage 1{{/B}} The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty odd years of eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a satisfying life. His one concern, which gave to his ramblings in Concord fields a value of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning of wealth. As he understood the problems of economics, there were three possible solutions open to him, to exploit himself, to exploit his fellows, or to reduce the problem to its lowest denominator. The first was quite impossible——to imprison oneself in a treadmill when the morning called to great adventure. To exploit one's fellows seemed to Thoreau's sensitive social conscience an even greater infidelity. Freedom with abstinence seemed to him better than serfdom with material well-being, and he was content to move to Walden Pond and set about the high business of living, "to front only the essential facts of life and to see what it had to teach." He did not advocate that other men should build cabins and live isolated. He had no wish to dogmatize concernig the best mode of living——each must settle that for himself. But that a satisfying life should be lived, he was virtually concerned. The story of his emancipation from the lower economics is the one romance of his life, and Walden is his great book. It is a book in praise of life rather than of Nature, a record of calculating economies that studied saving in order to spend more largely. But it is a book of social criticism as well, in spite of its explicit denial of such a purpose. In considering the true nature of economy he concluded, with Ruskin, that the cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required in exchange for it, immediatey or in the long run. In Walden Thoreau elaborated the text: "The only wealth is life."

单选题(There) is an unresolved controversy as to (whom) (is) the real author of the Elizabethan plays (commonly) credited to William Shakespeare.

单选题 People kill each other over diamonds; countries go to war over oil. But the world's most expensive commodities are worth nothing in the absence of water. Fresh water is essential for life, with no substitute. Although mostly unpriced, it is the most valuable stuff in the world. Nature has decided that the supply of water is fixed. Meanwhile demand rises as the world's populati on increases and enriches itself. Homes, factories and offices are sucking up ever more. But it is the planet's growing need for food that matters most. Farming accounts for 70% of withdrawals. Few of the world's great rivers that run through grain-growing areas now reach the sea all the year round or, if they do, they do so as a trickle. Less obvious, though even more serious, are the withdrawals from underground, which are hidden from sight but big enough to produce changes in the Earth's gravitational field that can be monitored by NASA's satellites in space. Water tables are now failing in many parts of the world, including America, India and China. So far {{U}}the world has been spared a true water war{{/U}}, and competition for water can sometimes bring rivals together as well as drive them apart. But since over 60% of the world's population lives in a river basin shared by two or more countries, the scope for squabbles is plain. Even if acute water shortages were to become widespread in just one country—India, say, or China—they could lead to mass migration and fighting. Although the supply of water cannot be increased, mankind can use what there is better—in four ways. One is through the improvement of storage and delivery, by creating underground reservoirs, replacing leaking pipes, lining earth-bottomed canals, irrigating plants at their roots with just the right amount of water, and so on. A second route focuses on making farming less thirsty—for instance by growing newly bred, perhaps genetically modified, crops that are drought-resistant or higher-yielding. A third way is to invest in technologies to take the salt out of sea water and thus increase supply of the fresh stuff. The fourth is of a different kind: release the market on water-users and let the price mechanism bring supply and demand into balance. And once water is properly priced, trade will encourage well-watered countries to make water-intensive goods, and arid ones to make those that are water-light.

单选题A: Excuse me, is there a parking lot anywhere around here?B: ______. A. Sorry, there is no park around here. B. Yes, you've asked the right person. I'm very familiar with this place. C. No problem. I know where it is. D. Yes, there's one near the end of the street. It's behind the church.

单选题Many instructors believe that an informal, relaxed classroom environment is 1 to learning and innovation. It is not uncommon for students to have 2 and friendly relationships with their professors. The 3 professor is not necessarily a poor one and is still 4 by students. Although students may be in a(n) 5 position, some professors treat them as 6 . However, no matter how 7 professors would like to be, they still are in a position of 8 . Professors may 9 social relationships with students outside of the classroom, but in the classroom they 10 the instructor"s role. A professor may have coffee with students 11 the next day expect them to 12 a deadline for the 13 of a paper or to be prepared 14 a discussion or an exam. The professor may give 15 attention outside of class to a student in 16 of help but probably will not treat him or her differently when it 17 evaluating school work. Professors have several roles 18 students; they may be counselors and friends as well as teachers. Students must 19 that when a teacher"s role changes, they must appropriately 20 their behavior and attitudes.

单选题Speaker A: I just can"t stand this class any more! Speaker B: ______It"s required, and you have to sit in it in order to graduate.

单选题The idea that some groups of people may be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran is【C1】______to say it anyway. He is that【C2】______bird, a scientist who works independently【C3】______any institution. He helped popularize the idea that some diseases not【C4】______thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which aroused much controversy when it was first suggested. 【C5】______he, however, might tremble at the【C6】______of what he is about to do. Together with another two scientists, he is publishing a paper which not only【C7】______that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in【C8】______is a particular people originated from central Europe. The process is natural selection. This group generally does well in IQ test, 【C9】______12-15 points above the【C10】______value of 100, and have contributed【C11】______to the intellectual and cultural life of the West, as the【C12】______of their elites, including several world-renowned scientists, 【C13】______They also suffer more often than most people from a number of nasty genetic diseases, such as breast cancer. These facts, 【C14】______, have previously been thought unrelated. The former has been【C15】______to social effects, such as a strong tradition of【C16】______education. The latter was seen as a(an) 【C17】______of genetic isolation. Dr. Cochran suggests that the intelligence and diseases are intimately【C18】______. His argument is that the unusual history of these people has【C19】______them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this【C20】______state of affairs.

单选题You can’t be _______ careful when you are handling such a large order.

单选题The tendency of the human body to reject foreign matter is the main Uobstacle/U to successful organ transplantation.

单选题The great ballplayer and civil rights leader Jackie Robinson was the______of both physical and moral strength.

单选题The author introduces Abstract Expressionist painters in order to ______.

单选题Onomatopoeic words can show the arbitrary nature of language. (清华2000研)

单选题______ she was living in New York that she met her husband Tom.

单选题What can we infer from the fact that the world was perceived as flat?

单选题A nine-year-old schoolgirl single-handedly cooks up a science-fair experiment that ends up debunking (揭穿……的真相) a widely practiced medical treatment. Emily Rosa's target was a practice known as therapeutic (治疗的) touch (TT for short), whose advocates manipulate patients' "energy field" to make them feel better and even, say some, to cure them of various illness. Yet Emily's test shows that these energy fields can't be detected, even by trained TT practitioners (行医者). Obviously mindful of the publicity value of the situation, journal editor George Lundberg appeared on TV to declare, "Age doesn't matter. It's good science that matters, and this is good science." Emily's mother Linda Rosa, a registered nurse, has been campaigning against TT for nearly a decade. Linda first thought about TT in the late 1980s, when she learned it was on the approved list for continuing nursing education in Colorado. Its 100,000 trained practitioners (48,000 in the U.S. ) don't even touch their patients. Instead, they waved their hands a few inches from the patient's body, pushing energy fields around until they're in "balance." TT advocates say these manipulations can help heal wounds, relieve pain and reduce fever. The claims are taken seriously enough that TT therapists are frequently hired by leading hospitals, at up to ＄70 an hour, to smooth patients' energy, sometimes during surgery. Yet Rosa could not find any evidence that it works. To provide such proof, TT therapists would have to sit down for independent testing—something they haven't been eager to do, even though James Randi has offered more than ＄1 million to anyone who can demonstrate the existence of a human energy field. (He's had one taker so far. She failed.) A skeptic might conclude that TT practitioners are afraid to lay their beliefs on the line. But who could turn down an innocent fourth-grader? Says Emily, "I think they didn't take me very seriously because I'm a kid." The experiment was straightforward: 21 TT therapists stuck their hands, palms up, through a screen. Emily held her own hand over one of theirs—left or right—and the practitioners had to say which hand it was. When the results were recorded, they'd done no better than they would have by simply guessing. If there was an energy field, they couldn't feel it.

单选题Microsoft and Apple in a Tough New World There is a smug maxim in Silicon Valley arid the places that imitate it: "To survive, you must destroy your company every x years" (where x varies according to how much the speaker wants to stress the pace of technological change). Sometimes attributed to Intel"s former chief executive Andy Grove, it is a maxim more often repeated than observed. But it can be a lovely and startling thing when a large, publicly traded company takes a big bet by replacing its core product. Microsoft"s new Windows 8 operating system, which went on sale last Friday, is the most dramatic gamble by a technology company since Intel abandoned the memory market to make semiconductors in the 1980s. Windows is a civilisational tool; there are more than 1bn Windows users around the world but when, after being given a new personal computer by their IT manager or buying a new device for themselves, those users boot up the new OS, they will recognise nothing. Gone is the familiar "Start" button and user interface Microsoft has used since it launched Windows 95, 17 years ago. In its place, users will find a screen of shifting colourful tiles. If they have set up a Microsoft account with Outlook, their email, calendar and contacts will appear automatically; if their Microsoft account is linked to Facebook, the faces of their Facebook friends will begin blinking in a People tile and the photos they have posted will float into a Live tile. To its new users, Windows 8 will seem as personal—and as non-corporate—as their smartphone or tablet computers. That is the whole idea. Windows 8 can be used with a conventional personal computer with a mouse or touchpad, but doing so is confusing. The operating system works best with a touch screen, where users can swipe tiles and icons. To show off the new functionality, Microsoft is selling its first computer, the Surface—a $499 touch screen tablet whose cover is a small keyboard, so that the device can also function as a small laptop. Windows 8 and Surface are elegant and innovative, not qualities one associates with Microsoft"s products. They are mostly the work of Steven Sinofsky, president of the company"s Windows division, who keeps a much-read blog at MSDN, the Microsoft developer network. There, defending the radical change in the design, he wrote: "The new Windows 8 user experience is no less than a bet on the future of computing, and stakes a claim to Windows" role in that future. " Last week the crush at Microsoft"s Times Square store reminded some of the crowds at the launch of an Apple product—which must have been Microsoft"s hope. But Mr. Sinofsky"s bet also has the logic of desperation. A decade ago there were no competitors to Microsoft"s core business of developing and selling "platforms", the software upon which other developers" software must run and with which hardware must work. Today, the web is the platform for most computing and Apple"s iOS (the operating system of the iPhone and iPad) and Google"s Android are the platforms for mobile devices. The sharp edges between business and consumer computing have melted. Microsoft had no choice but to try something new. It is instructive to compare the launch of Windows 8 and Surface with Apple"s most recent release, the iPad mini. There"s nothing wrong with the mini : for Tim Cook, Apple"s chief executive, it must seem to fill an important niche—the market for tablets that can be held comfortably in one hand, where Amazon"s Kindle and devices based on Android now dominate. But there"s nothing innovative about Apple"s small tablet. It"s just more of the same. One cannot imagine the late Steve Jobs, Apple"s departed CEO, taking any pride in the thing. It is an interesting historical moment for the two founding companies of the personal computing revolution. Microsoft knows it is slowly dying but declines to accept its fate. Apple, flush with cash, does not yet have to admit that with the death of its tutelary genius, it has lost its way. But secretly, its executives, designers and developers must fear that something is badly wrong. Jobs always said that technology companies began to die when salespeople and bean counters started making the decisions.

单选题A. anyB. appleC. blackD. thank

单选题Commerce has long been at the mercy of the elements. The British East India Company was almost strangled at birth when it lost several of its ships in a storm. But the toll is rising. The world has been so preoccupied with the man-made catastrophes of subprime mortgages and sovereign debt that it may not have noticed how much economic chaos nature has wreaked. With earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, floods in Thailand and Australia and tornadoes in America, last year was the costliest on record for natural disasters. This trend is not, as is often thought, a result of climate change. There is little evidence that big hurricanes come ashore any more often than, say, a century ago. But disasters now extract a far higher price, for the simple reason that the world"s population and output are becoming concentrated in vulnerable cities near earthquake faults, on river deltas or along tropical coasts. Those risks will rise as the wealth of Shanghai and Kolkata comes to rival that of London and New York. Meanwhile, interconnected supply chains guarantee that when one region is knocked out by an earthquake or flood, the reverberations are global. This may sound grim, but the truth is more encouraging. Richer societies may lose more property to disaster but they are also better able to protect their people. Indeed, although the economic toll from disasters has risen, the death toll has not, despite the world"s growing population. The right role for government, then, is not to resist urbanization but to minimize the consequences when disaster strikes. This means, first, getting priorities right. At present, too large a slice of disaster budgets goes on rescue and repair after a tragedy, and not enough on consolidating defenses beforehand. Cyclone shelters are useless if they fall into disrepair. Second, government should be fiercer when private individuals and firms, left to pursue their own self-interest, put all of society at risk. For example, in their quest for growth, developers and local governments have eradicated sand dunes, mangrove swamps, reefs and flood plains that formed natural buffers between people and nature. Preserving or restoring more of this natural capital would make cities more resilient, much as increased financial capital does for the banking system. Third, governments must eliminate the perverse incentives their own policies produce. Politicians are often under pressure to limit the premiums insurance companies can charge. The result is to underprice the risk of living in dangerous areas—which is one reason that so many expensive homes await the next hurricane on Florida"s coast. When governments rebuild homes repeatedly struck by floods and wildfires, they are subsidizing people to live in hazardous places. For their part companies need to operate on the assumption that a disaster will strike at some point. This means preparing contingency plans, reinforcing supply chains and even, costly though this might be, having reserve suppliers lined up: there is no point in having a perfectly efficient supply chain if it can be snapped whenever nature takes a turn for the worst. Disasters are inevitable; their consequences need not be.