单选题What the author mainly intends to say in the first paragraph is ______.

单选题It's obvious that humans are fundamentally different from other animal species. It's not so easy, though, to identify the traits that make human beings so special. Scientists realized long ago that other animals make tools, play jokes and even have a sense of justice and altruism—all things we once thought were unique to our species. Now a paper in the journal Current Biology has added another behavior to the list of what other animals share with us—and this one isn't quite so charming. After years of field observations in Uganda's Kibale National Park, John Mitani of the University of Michigan and several colleagues have concluded that chimps wage war to conquer new territory. "We already knew that chimps kill each other," says Mitani. "We've known this for a long time." What scientists didn't know for certain, at least in cases in which groups of chimps banded together to kill others, was why. One hypothesis, advanced more than a decade ago by anthropologist Richard Wrangham, was the idea of territorial conquest; circumstantial evidence from both Gombe and Mahale national parks in Tanzania bolstered the theory. In Mahale, for example, male members of one group mysteriously vanished, and another group then expanded into what had been their land. In Gombe, an existing group dissolved into civil war, resulting in killings and land takeovers. What's especially chilling about the observation is that the murder rate appears to be so high. The anthropologists couldn't be certain of how big a band the victims belonged to because they weren't used to a human presence and thus couldn't be accurately counted. But even a conservative estimate suggests that the death rate is significantly higher than you would see in war between human hunter-gatherer groups. Mitani isn't oblivious to the lesson some people might draw from the study. "Invariably, some will take this as evidence that the roots of aggression run very deep," he says, and therefore conclude that war is our evolutionary destiny. "Even if that were true," says Mitani, "we operate by a moral code that chimps don't have." Apart from that, he points out, the Pan troglodytes chimps he studies are one of two subspecies. The other is called Pan paniscus, also known as bonobos, and, says Mitani, "the latter, as far as we know, aren't nearly as aggressive with respect to intergroup relations. Yet they're equally close to us." That means that if we're wired for warfare, we're wired for peace too. Ultimately, the route we choose is still up to us.

单选题Tomcoulddosomebrilliant_______ofourEnglishteacher.

单选题Cartons are comparatively light, ______ and more ______ . A．inconvenient, impact B．convenient, compact C．compact, convenient D．impact, inconvenient

单选题{{B}}Passage Two{{/B}} Both civilization and culture are fairly modem words, having come into prominent use during the 19th century by anthropologists (人类学家), historians, and literary figures. There has been a strong tendency to use them interchangeably as though they mean the same thing, but they are not the same. Although modem in their usage, the two words derived from ancient Latin. The word civilization is based on the Latin civis, of a city. Thus civilization, in its most essential meaning, is the ability of people to live together harmoniously in cities, in social groupings. From this definition it would seem that certain insects, such as ants or bees, are also civilized. They live and work together in social groups. So do some microorganisms. But there is more to civilization, and that is what culture brings to it. So, civilization is inseparable from culture. The word culture is derived from the Latin verb colere, "to till the soil". But colere also has a wider range of meanings. It may, like civis, mean inhabiting a town or village. But most of its definitions suggest a process of starting and promoting growth and development. One may cultivate a garden; one may also cultivate one's interests, mind, and abilities. In its modern use the word culture refers to all the positive aspects and achievements of humanity that make mankind different from the rest of the animal world. Culture has grown out of creativity, a characteristic that seems to be unique to human beings. One of the basic and best-known features of civilization and culture is the presence of tools. But more important than their simple existence is that the tools are always being improved and enlarged upon, a result of creativity. It took thousands of years to get from the first wheel to the latest, most advanced model of automobile. It is the concept of humans as toolmakers and improvers that differentiates them from other animals. A monkey may use a stick to knock a banana from a tree, but that stick will never, through a monkey's cleverness, be modified into a hook or a ladder. Monkeys have never devised a spoken language, written a book, composed a melody, built a house, or painted a portrait. To say that birds build nests and beavers (海狸) their dens is to miss the point. People once lived in caves, but their cleverness, imagination, and creativity led them to progress beyond caves to buildings.

单选题A gloomy afternoon saw me taking my routine path through that construction site. For the walker's convenience, a set of stone steps had been built, which were fairly steep. That was the place I found myself behind a husband and wife climbing up the steps with each other's support. The couple seemed to be farmers in their forties. The wife in a red coat was walking with a stick, an empty trouser leg swaying below. With one hand on his shoulder, she leaned almost entirely on her husband, who carefully kept balance with her and carried her other stick. They limped (跛行) their way upward with great difficulty. My curiosity urged me to overtake them and look back over my shoulder secretly. The glance sent a shiver through me, which produced a sensation I had never experienced before. The husband himself was also disabled—blind in both eyes! What struck me even more was the smile they both wore on their faces, such a happy smile as could only be seen from brides and bridegrooms. With few words between them, they smilingly helped each other struggle upwards. Then I noticed there were patches on their clothes, and their cloth shoes were homemade, worn-out but tidy. How could such sweet smiles reconcile (使和谐) with the patched clothing or the physical handicap? I got quite puzzled. When they advanced far ahead I still couldn't tear my eyes away from them, I was moved and my heart filled with admiration. At that moment I suddenly realized how superficial my idea of happiness had been! To me it had always been associated with wealth, fame and power, the poor and the lowly having no share of it. However, happiness can be found in very ordinary life. I witnessed it on the weather-beaten faces of the husband and wife who had shared happiness and misfortune together. There is always happiness when there is an unfailing mutual support between two persons in love.

单选题They got there without any difficulty with the guide ______ the way.

单选题Just because you" re better educated doesn" t mean that you" re any more rational than everyone else, no matter how hard you may try to give that impression. Take the selection of lottery numbers. A survey in Florida described at this year" s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows that better educated people try to use random number systems to pick their lottery numbers. Despite the apparent logic of choosing random numbers, however, their chances of winning are no better than those of ordinary folk who use birthdays, anniversaries and other "lucky" dates. Nor are they better off than those who draw on omens and intuitions, picking numbers seen on car number-plates and in dreams. But no doubt they feel a lot more rational. That appearance of "rationality" may be a dangerous thing. Scientists are not immune to subtle and subjective influences on their judgements. Take the data from a survey of the public and member of the British Society of Toxicology discussed at the same meeting. The survey showed that most people agree with the view that animals can be used to help predict how human will react to chemicals, and that if a chemical causes cancer in an animal, we can be "reasonably sure" it will cause cancer in humans. The toxicologists, however, are more circumspect. They accept the fast statement but less likely to agree that if a chemical causes cancer in an animal, it will do so in a human. Can this difference be attributed to their expertise? Perhaps. But consider the considerable variation among toxicologists: those who were young, female, working in academia rather than industry or who felt that technology is not always used for the good of all, were more likely to agree that what causes cancer in an animal will cause cancer in a human. Maybe we need to think more about how who we are affects our "rational" decisions.

单选题Man: Jenny, why do you often watch talk shows? Woman: They make me laugh and sometimes crack me up, and I have learned a lot from their talks. Question: Why does the woman like watching talk shows?

单选题______ a young woman, the office was empty.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} Like all quintessentially British things, gardening is a pastime that has long been in decline. From a high point of ￡5 billion in 2001, spending on plants, tools and garden furniture has fallen every year since then, to around ~3 billion in 2008．The arrival of economic recession only deepened the gloom: to credit-crunched consumers, shrubs and hanging baskets seemed obvious candidates for cuts. Yet the latest figures from the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) suggest a bumper year for garden-related expenditure is in the making. Sales volumes were up by 21% in March and 28% in April compared with the same months a year earlier. This was not the result of deep discounting, a strategy that many other retailers have been adopting. The value of garden goods sold was 37% higher in March and 42% higher in April than a year earlier, whereas the value of all sales had increased by just 3% in April. Datamonitor, a market-research firm, reckons that gardening will continue to outperform the rest of retailing for at least the next two years. Much of the good news is due to the weather, admits Tim Briercliffe, the HTA's director of business development. Last year the vital spring months were damp and miserable; this year sunshine (and weathermen's prediction of a hot summer) has boosted custom. But the economic downturn itself has turned out to be as much a blessing as a curse. Gardening may be a luxury, argues Mr. Briercliffe, but it competes with other, more expensive luxuries. "People who might have otherwise booked a city break to Prague are staying at home and making the best of what they have," he maintains. According to Ipsos MORI, a pollster, three-quarters of people plan to spend at least as much on their garden this year as last. Economic hardship has created a new breed of gardener too. Partly, that reflects people making the most of their enforced leisure: "We get some unemployed city types who are just filling time while looking for another job," admits a garden-centre worker near the London commuter town of Guilford. But there are more positive developments. Much of the growth in garden spending has come from the under-35s, not traditionally a green-fingered demographic. One explanation is that environmentalism and thriftiness have made growing vegetables trendy, an idea that is supported by growing shortage of allotments. But there is more to it than pleasant weather and belt-tightening. The HTA detects deeper, and darker, changes in the national psyche. Citing research from the Future Foundation, a prognosticatory consultancy, it reckons that people are spending more time in their homes, fortifying them into havens from an unwelcoming world haunted by crime, bureaucracy and rising unemployment. The longer the downturn persists, the greener the grass may grow.

单选题The consequences of heavy drinking are well documented: failing health, broken marriages, regrettable late-night phone calls. But according to Gregory Luzaich's calculations, there can be a downside to modest drinking, too—though one that damages the wallet, not the liver. The Pek Wine Steward prevents wine from spoiling by injecting argon, an inert gas, into the bottle before sealing it airtight with silicon. Mr. Luzaich. a mechanical engineer in Windsor, Calif.—in the Sonoma County wine country—first tallied the costs of his reasonable consumption in October 2001. "I'd like to come home in the evening and have a glass of wine with dinner," he said. "My wife doesn't drink very much. so the bottle wouldn't get consumed. And maybe I would forget about it the next day, and I'd check back a day or two later, and the wine would be spoiled." That meant he was wasting most of a $15 to $20 bottle of wine. dozens of times a year. A cheek of the wine-preservation gadgets on the market left Mr. Luzaich dissatisfied High-end wine cabinets cost thousands of dollars—a huge investment for a glass-a-day drinker. Affordable preservers, meanwhile, didn't quite perform to Mr. Luzaich's liking; be thought they allowed too much oxidation, which degrades the taste of a wine. The solution, he decided, was a better gas. Many preservers pumped nitrogen into an opened bottle to slow a wine's decline, even though oenological literature suggested that argon was more effective. So when he began designing the Pek Wine Steward. a metal cone into which a wine bottle is inserted, Mr. Luzaich found that his main challenge was to figure out how best to introduce the argon. He spent months fine-tuning a gas injection system. "We used computational fluid dynamics to model the gas flow," Mr. Luzaich said. referring to a computer-analysis technique that measures how smoothly particles are flowing. The goal was to create an injector that could swap a bottle's oxygen atoms for argon atoms; argon is an inert gas, and thus unlikely to harm a nice Chianti. Mr. Luzaich, who had previously designed medical and telecommunications products, also worked on creating an airtight seal, to secure the bottle after the argon was injected. He experimented with several substances, from neoprene to a visco-elastic polymer (which he dismissed as "too gooey"), before settling on a food-grade silicon. To save wine, a bottle is placed inside the Pek Wine Steward, the top is closed, and a trigger is pulled for 5 to 10 seconds, depending on how much wine remains. When the trigger is released, the bottle is sealed automatically, preserving the wine for a week or more. the company says. "We wanted to make it very easy for the consumer," Mr. Luzaich said. "It's basically mindless." The device, which resembles a high-tech thermos, first became available to consumers in March 2004, and 8,000 to 10.000 have been sold, primarily through catalogs like those of The Wine Enthusiast and Hammacher Schlemmer The base model sells for $99; a deluxe model, which also includes a thermoelectric cooler, is $199

单选题Their watch is______to all the other watches on the market.

单选题It would be enormously convenient to have a single, generally accepted index of the economic and social welfare of the people of the United States. A glance at it would tell us how much better or worse off we had become each year, and we would judge the desirability of any proposed action by asking whether it would raise or lower this index. Some recent discussion implies that such an index could be constructed. Articles in the popular press even criticize the Gross National Production because it is not such a complete index of welfare, ignoring, on the one hand, that it was never intended to be, and suggesting, on the other, that with appropriate changes it could be converted into one. The output available to satisfy our wants and needs is one important determinant of welfare. Whatever want, need, or social problem engages our attention, we ordinarily can more easily find resources to deal with it when output is large and growing than when it is not. GNP measures output fairly well, but to evaluate welfare we would need additional measures which would be far more difficult to construct. We would need an index of real costs incurred in production, because we are better off if we get the same output at less cost. Use of just man-hours for welfare evaluation would unreasonably imply that to increase total hours by raising the hours of eight women from 60 to 65 a week imposes no more burden than raising the hours of eight men from 40 to 45 a week, or even than hiring one involuntarily unemployed person for 40 hours a week. A measure of real costs of labor would also have to consider working conditions. Most of us spend almost half our waking hours on the job and our welfare is vitally affected by the circumstances in which we spend those hours. To measure welfare we would need a measure of changes in the need our output must satisfy. One aspect, population change, is now handled by converting output to a per capita basis on the assumption that, other things equal, twice as many people need twice as many goods and services to be equally well off. But an index of needs would also account for differences in the requirements for living as the population becomes more urbanized and suburbanized; for the changes in national defense requirements; and for changes in the effect of weather on our needs. The index would have to tell us the cost of meeting our needs in a base year compared with the cost of meeting them equally well under the circumstances prevailing in every other year. Measures of "needs" shade into measure of the human and physical environment in which we live. We all are enormously affected by the people around us. Can we go where we like without fear of attack? We are also affected by the physical environment—purity of water and air, accessibility of park land and other conditions. To measure this requires accurate data, but such data are generally deficient. Moreover, weighting is required, to combine robberies and murders in a crime index; to combine pollution of the Potamac and pollution of Lake Erie into a water pollution index; and then to combine crime and water pollution into some general index. But there is no basis for weighting these beyond individual preference. There are further problems. To measure welfare we would need an index of the "goodness" of the distribution of income. There is surely consensus that given the same total income and output, a distribution with fewer families in poverty would be the better, but what is the ideal distribution? Even if we could construct indexes of output, real costs, needs, state of the environment, we could not compute a welfare index because we have no system of weights to combine them.

单选题Was ______ that I saw last night at the concert?A．it youB．not youC．youD．that you