单选题When varieties of language are classified in respect of their users, they are called registers.

单选题______ with the picture, Mary tore it to pieces.

单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} Feeling tired lately? Has the doctor said he cannot find anything wrong with you? Perhaps he sent you to a hospital, but all the advanced equipment there shows that there is nothing wrong. Then consider this, you might be in a state of subhealth. (亚健康) Subhealth, also called the third state or grey state, is explained as a borderline (临界)state between health and disease. According to an investigation by the National Health Organization, over 45 percent of subhealth people are middle-aged or elderly. The percentage is even higher among people who work in management positions as well as students around exam time. Symptoms (症状) include a lack of energy, depression, slow reactions, insomnia (失眠), agitation (焦虑)and poor memory. Other symptoms include shortness of breath, sweating and aching in the waist and legs. The key to preventing and recovering from suhhealth, according to some medical experts, is to form good living habits, alternate work with rest, exercise regularly, and take part in open-air activities. As for meals, people are advised to eat less salt and sugar. They should also eat more fresh vegetables, fruits, fish, because they are rich in nutritional (营养的)elements—vitamins, and trace elements(微量元素)—that are important to the body. Nutrition experts point out that it is not good to eat too much at one meal because it may cause unhealthy changes in the digestive tract(消化道). They also say that a balanced diet is very helpful in avoiding subhealth.

单选题The manager resigned yesterday, but his resignation hasn' t been officially announced ______.A. always B. yet C. already D. still

单选题Until recently, the main villains of the piece had seemed to be the teachers' unions, who have opposed any sort of reform or accountability. Now they face competition from an unexpectedly destructive force: the court. Fifty years ago, it was the judges who forced the schools to desegregate through Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Now the courts have moved from broad principles to micromanagement, telling schools how much money to spend and where - right down to the correct computer or textbook. Twenty four states are currently Stuck in various court cases to do with financing school systems, and another 21 have only recently settled various suits. Most will start again soon. Only five states have avoided litigation entirely. Nothing exemplifies the power of the courts better than an 11-year-old case that is due to be settled (sort of) in New York City, the home of America's biggest school system with 1. lm students and a budget nearing $13 billion. At the end of this month, three elderly members of the New York bar serving as judicial referees are due to rule in a case brought By the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a leftish advocacy group, against the state of New York: they will decide how much more must Be spent to provide every New York City pupil with a "sound basic" education. Rare is the politician willing to argue that more money for schools is a bad thing. But are the courts doing any good? Two suspicions arise. First, judges are making a lazy assumption that more money means better schools. As the international results show, the link between "inputs" and "outputs" is vague--something well documented by, among others, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Second, the courts are muddling an already muddled system. Over time, they have generally made it harder to get rid of disruptive pupils and bad teachers. The current case could be even worse. The courts have already said that, in order to determine the necessary spending, they may consider everything from class size to the availability of computers, textbooks and even pencils. This degree of intervention is all the more scandalous because the courts have weirdly decided to ignore another set of "inputs"--the archaic work practices of school teachers and janitors. David Schoenbrod and Ross Sandier of New York Law School reckon the demands of the court will simply undermine reform and transform an expensive failure into a more expensive one. And of course, the litigation never ends. Kentucky, for example, is still in court 16 years after the first decision. A lawsuit first filed against New Jersey for its funding of schools in 1981 was "decided" four years later--but it has returned to the court nine times since, including early this year, with each decision pushing the court deeper into the management of the state's schools. Bad iudges are even harder to boot out of school than bad pupils.

单选题Locked in a vault within the North Carolina Department of Revenue is a bit of Kafka: a government-issued stamp that is expected to remain unpurchased, but which users of illegal goods must, by law, affix to substances they are not allowed to possess. North Carolina is one of about 20 states that tax illegal drugs. The cost varies by state and weight, as does the stamps' appearance (Nebraska's, with a skull surmounting a syringe and joint, looks like Grateful Dead tribute art). Penalties for non-payment also vary, from being classed as a misdemeanour in Georgia to 200% of the tax plus $10,000 or five years in prison in Louisiana. Few, if any, drug users actually buy the stamps. Most of those sold in Kansas, for instance, go to collectors. And according to a Mobile newspaper, the director of investigations for Alabama's revenue department said the state never expected actually to sell stamps to drug users. Instead, the tax exists to further punish those arrested for possession by making them liable to penalties for tax evasion if their drugs are stampless, as they almost invariably are. And those penalties can be lucrative: over the past decade Kansas has collected $10.3m. If legislators feel that drug users get off too lightly, they could simply increase the criminal penalties, rather than creating a new class of crime that requires the involvement of another government agency. As it is, these laws are not merely complicated, but have often been found unconstitutional. In 1994 the US Supreme Court ruled that because Montana's illegal-drug tax was a second punishment for a single crime it amounted to double jeopardy. Other states' drug-tax schemes have also been challenged on constitutional grounds. In response some states have abolished or modified their schemes, usually by allowing buyers of the stamps to remain anonymous or by forbidding revenue departments from telling law enforcement when someone buys the stamps. The concept of taxing illegal drugs punitively dates back to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. This did not ban the drug completely; it subjected anyone who dealt in it commercially to a nominal tax but a heavy array of regulations and criminal penalties for non-compliance. Bureaucracy lives on.

单选题Read the following passage carefully and then decide whether the statements which follow are true(T)or false(F). Do Cell Phones Cause Cancer? There are safety-warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol. Now some groups are advocating that similar cautions be printed on cell phones. Recently, a bill in the Maine state senate proposed a label warning users, especially children and pregnant women, of the risks of brain cancer from electromagnetic radiation emanating from the device. But the Maine legislature voted down the bill in March, stating that the scientific evidence does not indicate a public health risk. Yet, the debate rages on. Can cell phones really cause cancer? Supporters of the Maine legislation argued that uncertainty about the long-term effects of cell phone radiation warranted public safety notices. They also pointed to a handful of European studies that linked brain and auditory nerve tumors with using cell phones for more than 10 years and at younger ages. "I think my short answer is that the evidence isn"t 100 percent, but there"s a strong indication that, yes, cell phone use does cause cancer(over a long period of time), " said David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment at the University of Albany, and an advocate for the Maine bill on cell phone warnings. Carpenter points to a 2007 meta-analysis that associated ipsilateral auditory nerve tumors(acoustic neuromas)with people who had used cell phones for at least 10 years, as well as a 2009 Swedish study that found a heightened risk for brain tumors among people who had used cell phones for at least 10 years, especially for those under 20 years old. Not surprisingly, cell phone industry insiders disagree, " " The peer-reviewed scientific evidence has overwhelmingly indicated that wireless devices, within the(radiation)limits established by the FCC, do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects, " said John Walls, vice president of public affairs for CTIA—The Wireless Association, an international trade group that represents the wireless telecomm industry. For instance, 2001 Danish study and 2006 follow-up found no relationship between cancer risk and long-term cell phone use among more than 400, 000 users. In addition, a statistical review from the National Institutes of Cancer revealed no rise in cancer incidence rates from 1975 to 2005 in relation to the rise in cell phone usage. Joshua Muscat, a public health science professor at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the cancer-causing potential of cell phone radiation, also questions the connection. "There is no known mechanism by which radio frequency fields generated by cell phones can cause cancer because cell phone radiation is non-ionizing, " Muscat said. Nevertheless, when you press a cell phone against your ear while it"s in use, head and brain tissues can absorb that vibrating, low-frequency radiation and heat. Because of that radiation effect, the Federal Communications Commission(FCC)sets specific absorption rates(SARs)that dictate the maximum amount of radiation cell phones and mobile devices can give off. " The power output from these phones is extremely low, " Muscat told Discovery News. However, David Carpenter counters that the SARs don"t take into account the potential long-term damage of close-range exposure to heat-inducing radiation, especially in children. "Those(FCC)levels are set by engineers and physicists, and those aren"t the people who should be setting health-based standards, " he said. Carpenter thinks that the results from a large, 13-country study called Interphone, which consists of a series of 16 case-controlled studies conducted between 2000 and 2005, could finally settle the debate. Each of the Interphone studies recruited at least 100 people who had developed brain cancer or certain types of tumors, along with a healthy control group. But it"s been hampered by methodological shortcomings. In many cases, the group was asked to describe their cell phone habits, which critics contend led to recall bias. So far, it still hasn"t rendered a final verdict. For now, the National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, among other leading health agencies and organizations, aren"t ringing the alarm bells. For one thing, scientists have yet to pinpoint how the low-frequency cell phone radiation could cause cancer. "Cell phone radiation"s effect in the body appears to be insufficient to produce the genetic damage typically associated with developing cancer, " said Robert N. Hoover, director of epidemiology for the National Cancer Institute, in an official statement to Congress. " To date, no alternative mechanism about how this exposure might result in cancer has been vetted adequately. " Until scientists can unmask that " mechanism, " Carpenter urges consumers to play it safe and text message or hold cell phones away from their ears to limit radiation exposure. Even Muscat from Penn State leaves a space—albeit a narrow one—for caution. "It is a legitimate concern in the sense that there may be some unknown, undiscovered mechanism that could be promoting the development of cancer, " Muscat said. "This seems unlikely, but if one looks at other scientific disciplines such as cosmology or particle physics, there are often paradigm shifts that occur with new discoveries. "

单选题Opinion polls are now beginning to show an unwilling general agreement that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household and the neighbourhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centres of production and work? The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people' s work has taken the form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought about may have to be reversed. This seems a discouraging thought. But, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future for work. Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom. Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people's homes, Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people travelled longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and places in which they lived. Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. It became customary for the husband to go out paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the impractical goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full-time jobs.

单选题The bus moved slowly in the thick fog. We arrived at our______almost two hours later.

单选题"Wife", which used to refer to any woman, stands for "a married woman" in modern English. This phenomenon is known as______. (西安交大2008研)

单选题Tomorrow Japan and South Korea will celebrate White Day, an annual event when men are expected to buy a gift for the adored women in their lives. It is a relatively new (21) that was commercially created as payback for Valentine's Day. That's (22) in both countries, 14 February is all about the man. On Valentine's Day, women are expected to buy all the important male (23) in their lives a token gift= not just their partners, (24) their bosses or older relatives too. This seems (25) enough. Surely it's reasonable for men to be indulged on one day of the year, (26) the number of times they're expected to produce bouquets of flowers and (27) their woman with perfume or pearls. But the idea of a woman (28) a man didn't sit easily with people. In 1978, the National Confectionery Industry Association (糖果业协会) (29) an idea to solve this problem. They started to market white chocolate that men could give to women on 14 March, as (30) for the male-oriented Valentine's Day. It started with a handful of sweet makers' producing candy (31) a simple gift idea. The day (32) the public imagination, and is now a nationally (33) date in the diary— and one where men are (34) to whip out their credit cards. In fact, men are now expected to give gifts worth (35) the value of those they received. What a complication: not only do men have to remember who bought them what, they have to estimate the value and multiply it by three.

单选题For multinational corporations, tax planning has become extremely complex affairs. It has been stated that no multinational corporation possesses the ultimate tax expertise. Therefore, in addition to having their own experts, MNCs rely on heavily on local tax experts and legal counsel. Taxes have a very important impact on foreign direct investment decisions. Taxes will determine the financial structure of subsidiary, and they will influence pricing decisions. They may also lead to the formation of holding companies. An MNC may decide to establish a branch rather than a subsidiary because of a given tax situation. The absence of a tax treaty between the country of a would-be investor and the nation where a foreign investment is to take place might lead to cancellation of investment plans. An unfavorable depreciation allowance may keep the foreign investor out. This unit will deal with the different tax systems in the world and their impact on an MNC's global strategy. Basically, any tax system can be divided into direct and indirect taxes. Corporate and individual income taxes are direct, value-added taxes, sales taxes, and import duties are indirect taxes. Corporate income taxes (taxes levied on earning) vary among the industrialized nations. France, the United States, Holland, Canada, and Germany have rates of around 50 percent; Italy, the United Kingdom and Japan have rates of between 36 and 40 percent. Less developed countries usually have lower corporate tax rates in order to attract foreign investment. Thus, Brazil has a rate of 30 percent, and Indonesia has a 40 percent tax rate. A corporate tax is levied on taxable earnings. Taxable earnings are more significant than the tax rate itself. They determine what can be deducted before the tax is computed; in other words, these items are tax deductible. Countries differ greatly in determining taxable earnings. Some allow accelerated depreciation, whereby the asset (usually the plant or equipment) is written off at a substantially higher rate during the first years than in the later years. This allows for smaller taxable earnings in the early years. Other countries allow tax-free investment reserves. These are used at a later stage for investment in undeveloped areas of countries or are sent when countries are in a recession. A recent type of tax that has won recognition in the European Common Market is value-added tax (VAT). This is a national sales tax levied at each stage of production or at the sale of consumer goods. The tax is assessed in proportion to the value added during that stage. Generally, manufacturing goods, such as plant and equipment, have been exempted from this tax. In most cases, food items also have been exempted. Here is an example of how VAT works. A tree owner who sells part of a tree to a lumber mill for $1 must set aside ten cents VAT to pay to the government. The lumber mill processes the tree into building material and sells the wood for $3 to a lumber wholesaler. The mill adds $2 in value, and thus sets aside 10 percent of the added value, or twenty cents, to pay to the government. And so the VAT continues until the final sale. The VAT system offers advantages, such as rebates on exports. Profitable and unprofitable firms are taxed alike, as there is no possibility of tax deductions to determine taxable income. A badly run company is, therefore, forced to improve or go out of business. Further, VAT is easy to calculate and collect. But VAT is often accused of having contributed to serious inflation in countries where it was introduced, notably in Western Europe.

单选题 In America and Europe magazine publishers have a common headache: total circulation is either flat or declining slightly as people devote more time to the internet, and an ever greater share of advertising spending is going online. Magazine units are mostly a drag on growth for their parents. Time Inc, the world's biggest magazine company, has to fend off rumours that its parent, Time Warner, will sell it. People in the industry expect that Time Warner will soon sell IPC Media, its British magazine subsidiary. The business model for consumer magazines is under pressure from several directions at once, both online and off. Magazines have become more expensive to launch, and the cost of attracting and keeping new subscribers has risen. In America newsstand sales have been worryingly weak, partly because supermarkets dominate distribution and shelf-space is in short supply. The internet's popularity has hit men's titles the hardest. FHM, the flagship "lads" magazine of Emap— a British media firm, for instance, lost a quarter of its circulation in the year to June. Not long ago consumer magazines were Emap's prize asset, but slowing growth from the division contributed to the company's decision to put itself up for sale. Men's magazines are in trouble in most developed-world markets as people have quickly switched from magazines to online services. There are good reasons why magazine owners should not feel pessimistic, however. For readers, many of the pleasing characteristics of magazines—their portability and glossiness, for instance—cannot be matched online. And magazines are not losing younger readers in the way that newspapers are. According to a study by the digital arm of Ogilvy Group, appetite for magazines is largely unchanged between older "baby boomers" and young "millennials" . On the advertising side, magazines are fearing much better than newspapers, which are losing big chunks of revenue as classified advertising shifts online. Advertisers like the fact that in many genres, such as fashion, readers accept and value magazine ads and even consider them part of the product. Unfortunately, magazine publishers have been slow to get onto the internet. "Eighteen months ago the internet was something they worried about after 4pm on Friday, " says Peter Kreisky, a consultant to the media industry, "but now it's at the heart of their business model. " To their credit, however, big magazine firms are doing far more than reproducing their print products online. They offer people useful, fun services online— Lagardère's Car and Driver website, for instance, offers virtual test drives, and Better Homes and Gardens online has a 3D planning tool to help people redesign their homes.

单选题Statuses are marvelous human inventions that enable us to get along with one another and to determine where we "fit" in society. As we go about our everyday lives, we mentally attempt to place people in terms of their statuses. For example, we must judge whether the person in the library is a reader or a librarian, whether the telephone caller is a friend or a salesman, whether the unfamiliar person on our property is a thief or a meter reader, and so on. The statuses we assume often vary with the people we encounter, and change throughout life. Most of us can, at very high speed, assume the statuses that various situations require. Much of social interaction consists of identifying and selecting among appropriate statuses and allowing other people to assume their statuses in relation to us. This means that we fit our actions to those of other people based on a constant mental process of appraisal and interpretation. Although some of us find the task more difficult than others, most of us perform it rather effortlessly. A status has been compared to ready-made clothes. Within certain limits, the buyer can choose style and fabric. But an American is not free to choose the costume of a Chinese peasant or that of a Hindu prince. We must choose from among the clothing presented by our society. Furthermore, our choice is limited to a size that will fit, as well as by our pocketbook. Having made a choice within these limits we can have certain alterations made, hut apart from minor adjustments, we tend to be limited to what the stores have on their racks. Statuses too come ready made, and the range of choice among them is limited.