单选题The United States has benefited immensely from its role as a magnet for the best and brightest workers from around the world, especially in innovative fields like high technology. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, sounded precisely that theme in senate testimony last month when asked about the visa program for skilled workers, the H-1B. Mr. Gates said that these workers are "uniquely talented" and highly paid—taking jobs that pay over $100,000 a year—and that America should "welcome as many of those people as we can get." But that is not how the H-1B visa program as a whole is working these days, according to an analysis by Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The median salary for new H-1B holders in the information technology industry is actually about $50,000, based on the most recent data filed by companies with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. That wage level, Mr. Hira says, is the same as starting salaries for graduating computer science majors with bachelor"s degrees. Yet salaries, according to Mr. Hira, are only part of the story. He says that while Microsoft may be paying its H-1B visa holders well and recruiting people with hard-to-find talents, other companies have a different agenda. The H-1B visa program, Mr. Hira asserts, has become a vehicle for accelerating the pace of offshore outsourcing of computing work, sending more jobs abroad. Holders of H-1B visas, he says, do the on-site work of understanding a client"s needs and specifications—and then most of the software coding is done back in India. "Information technology offshore outsourcing has just swamped the H-1B program in recent years, he said." The list of the top 10 companies requesting H-1B visas in fiscal 2006, the most recent government data available, was dominated by Indian-based technology outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, and a few other companies that offer outsourced services and have sizable operations in India like Cognizant Technology Solutions, Accenture and Deloitte & Touche," according to a paper last month by Mr. Hira, which was published by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Over the years, the H-1B visa, which allows a person to work in the United States for three years and can be renewed for an additional three, has been used by many people as a stepping-stone to becoming a permanent resident. "Traditionally, about half of all H-1B holders eventually get green cards," immigration experts say.

单选题Do you wake up every day feeling too tired, or even upset? If so, then a new alarm clock could be just for you. The clock, called SleepSmart, measures your sleep cycle, and waits (1) you to be in your lightest phase of sleep (2) rousing you. Its makers say that should (3) you wake up feeling refreshed every morning. As you sleep you pass (4) a sequence of sleep states—light sleep, deep sleep and REM(rapid eye movement) sleep—that (5)f approximately every 90 minutes. The point in that cycle at which you wake can (6) how you feel later, and may (7) have a greater impact than how much or little you have slept. Being roused during a light phase (8) you are more likely to wake up energetic. SleepSmart (9) the distinct pattern of brain waves (10) during each phase of sleep, via a headband equipped (11) electrodes (电极)and a microprocessor. This measures the electrical activity of the wearer's brain, in much the (12) way as some machines used for medical and research (13) , and communicates wirelessly with a clock unit near the bed. You (14) the clock with the latest time at (15) you want to be wakened, and it (16) duly(适时地)wakes you during the last light sleep phase before that. The (17) was invented by a group of students at Brown University in Rhode Island (18) a friend complained of waking up tired and performing poorly on a test. " (19) sleep-deprived people ourselves, we started thinking of (20) to do about it," says Eric Shashoua, a recent college graduate and now chief executive officer of Axon Sleep Research Laboratories, a company created by the students to develop their idea.

单选题The performance of the English team was very ______. They played much worse than expeeted. A. disappointing B. disappointed C. depressed D. depressing

单选题Our lives are not only dominated by the inanities of our contemporaries but also by those of men who have been dead for generations. This is important to stress because it shows us that even in the areas where society apparently allows us some choice the powerful hand of the past narrows down this choice even further. Let us take for example, a scene in which a pair of lovers are silting in the moonlight. Let us further imagine that this moonlight session turns out to be the decisive one, in which a proposal of marriage is made and accepted. They who are dead have long ago written the script for almost every move that is made. The notion that sexual attraction can be translated into romantic emotion was cooked up by misty-voiced minstrels titillating the imagination of aristocratic ladies about the 12th century or thereabouts. The idea that a man should fixate his sexual drive permanently and exclusively on one single woman, with whom he is to share a bed, bathroom and the boredom of a thousand bleary-eyed breakfasts, was produced by misanthropic theologians some time before that. And the assumption that the initiative in the establishment of this wondrous arrangement should be in the hands of the male, with the female graciously succumbing to the impetuous onslaught of his wooing, goes back right to prehistoric times when savage warriors first descended on some peaceful matriarchal hamlet and dragged away its screaming daughters to their marital cots. Just as all these hoary ancients have decided the basic framework within which the passions of our exemplary couple will develop, so each step in their courtship has been predefined, prefabricated—if you like, "fixed". It is not only that they are supposed to fall in love and to enter into a monogamous marriage in which she gives up her name and he his solvency, but this love must be manufactured at all cost or the marriage will seem insincere to all concerned. Each step in their courtship is laid down in social ritual also, and, although there is always some leeway for improvisations, too much ad-libbing is likely to risk the success of the whole operation. In this way, our couple progresses predictably from movie dates to church dates to meeting-the-family dates, from holding hands to tentative explorations to what they originally planned to save for afterwards, from planning their evening to planning their suburban ranch house—with the scene in the moonlight put in its proper place in this ceremonial sequence. Neither of them has invented this game or any part of it. They have only decided that it is with each other, rather than with other possible partners, that they will play it. Family, friends, clergy, salesmen of jewelry and of life insuranee, florists and interior decorators ensure that the remainder of the game will also be played by the established rules. Nor, indeed, do all these guardians of tradition have to exert much pressure on the principal players, since the expectations of their social world have long ago been built into their own projections of the future—they want precisely that which society expects of them.

单选题The days when the only fender a businessman needed to Ustave off/U a midlife crisis was on the end of a Ferrari are gone.

单选题In the former Soviet Union several cases have been reported recently ______ people who can read and detect colors with their fingers, and even see through solid doors and walls. A. of B. on C. about D. with

单选题Anthropologists commonly distinguish three forms of marriage: monogamy, the marriage of one man to one woman, polygyny, the marriage of one man to two or more women, and polyandry, the marriage of one woman to two or more men. Polygyny and polyandry are often linked under the single term "polygamy" , a marriage of one individual to two or more spouses. Though there are many societies which permit, or even encourage, polygamous marriages, it does not follow, in such societies,that every married individual, or even that a majority of them, has more than one spouse, Quite the contrary is true, for in most, if not all, of so called polygamous societies monogamy is statistically the prevailing form. The reason for this is clear: the proportion of male to female births in any human society is roughly the same, and if this proportion is maintained among the sexually mature, a preponderance of plural marriages means that a considerable number of either men or women must remain unmarried. No society can maintain itself under such conditions; the emotional stresses would be too great to be survived. Accordingly, even where the cultural ideals do not prohibit plural marriages, these may occur on any notable scale only societies where for one reason or another, one sex markedly outnumbers the other. In short, monogamy not only prevails in most of the world"s societies, either as the only approved form of marriage or as the only feasible form, but it may also prevail within a polygamous society where, very often, only a minority of the population can actually secure more than one spouse. In a polygynous household the husband must supply a house and garden for each of his wives. The wives live with him in turn, cooking and serving fur him during the period of his visit. The first wife takes precedence over the others. Polyandry is much rarer than polygyny. It is often the result of a disproportion in the ratio of men to women. In sum, polygamy is not, as so frequently indicated, universally a result of human immorality. It is simply not true, in this aspect of euhure as in many others, that people who follow patterns of culture deemed immoral in our society are thereby lacking in morality. Our ideal and compulsory pattern of marriage, which holds that monogamy is the only appropriate form of marriage, is not shared by all peoples, even by some of those who regularly practice monogamy. In a great many societies, monogamy is only one possible form of marriage, with polygyny or polyandry as perfectly possible, though less frequent, alternatives.

单选题(Like expected), experimental (studies) show that we should neither run nor scream when (encountering) a fierce animal (like) a lion.

单选题It's true that the old road is less direct and a bit longer. We won't take the new one,______, because we don't feel as safe on it.

单选题______ you fulfill the terms of the credit we will accept and pay on maturity the draft presented to us under this credit and if required, ______ discounting facilities at current rates. A．Provided, provide B．Provided, providing C．Provide, providing D．Provide, provide

单选题 Man's first real invention, and one of the most important inventions in history, was the wheel. All transportation and every machine in the world depend on it. The wheel is the simplest yet perhaps the most remarkable of all inventions, because there are no wheels in nature-no living thing was ever created with wheels. How, then, did man come to invent the wheel? Perhaps some early hunters found that they could roll the carcass of a heavy animal through the forest on logs more easily than they could carry it. However, the logs themselves weighed a lot. It must have taken a great prehistoric thinker to imagine two thin slices of log connected, at their centers by a string stick. This would roll along just as the logs did, yet be much lighter and easier to handle. Thus the wheel and axle came into being and with them the first carts.

单选题The charges of trade against the corporation proved to be without______.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday. "We found again and again that people who perform poorly relative to their peers(同等人) tended to think that they did rather well," Justin Kruger, co-author of a study on the subject, said in a telephone interview. Kruger and co-author David Dunning found that when it came to a variety of skills-logical reasoning, grammar, even sense of humor-people who essentially were inept (无能的；愚蠢的) never realized it, while those who had some ability were self-critical. It had little to do with innate modesty, Kruger said, but rather with a central paradox: Incompetents lack the basic skills to evaluate their performance realistically. Once they get those skills, they know where they stand, even if that is at the bottom. Americans and Western Europeans especially had an unrealistically sunny assessment of their own capabilities, Dunning said by telephone in a separate interview, while Japanese and Koreans tended to give a reasonable assessment of their performance. In certain areas, such as athletic performance, which can be easily quantified, there is less self-delusion (欺骗), the researchers said. But even in some cases in which the failure should seem obvious, the perpetrator is blithely(愉快地；快活地) unaware of the problem. This was especially true in the area of logical reasoning, where research subjects + students at Cornell University, where the two researchers were based + often rated themselves highly even when they flubbed(搞得一团糟) all questions in a reasoning test. Later, when the students were instructed in logical reasoning, they scored better on a test but rated themselves lower, having learned what constituted competence in this area. Grammar was another area in which objective knowledge was helpful in determining competence, but the more subjective area of humor posed different challenges, the researchers said. Participants were asked to rate how funny certain jokes were, and compare their responses with what an expert panel of comedians thought. On average, participants overestimated their sense of humor by about 16 percentage points. This might be thought of as the "above-average effect", the notion that most Americans would rate themselves as above average, a statistical impossibility. The researchers also conducted pilot studies of doctors and gun enthusiasts. The doctors overestimated how well they had performed on a test of medical diagnoses and the gun fanciers thought they knew more than they actually did about gun safety. So who should be trusted: The person who admits incompetence or the one who shows confidence? Neither, according to Dunning. "You can't take them at their word. You've got to take a look at their performance," Dunning added.

单选题In architecture(建筑学) ,a vault(拱顶) is a proof or ceiling in the ______ of an arch. A. form B. figure C. shape D. appearance

单选题A series of measures ______, people in that area managed to survive the sever famine.

单选题In swimming it is necessary to______the movement of the arms and legs.

单选题All the credit card organizations charge interest on a monthly basis which may______as 25 per cent a year, yet judicious purchasing using a card can mean that you obtain up to seven weeks interest-free credit.