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单选题Though pundits were quick to declare that the election of Barack Obama represented the emergence of a "post- racial" America, the macroeconomy has provided a corrective. During the American economy"s last deep recession, in the early 1980s, black unemployment soared to twice the level among whites, passing 21% in 1983. And according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, time has changed little. The current unemployment rate among black Americans is almost 16%; among whites the figure is under 10%. The yawning gap between blacks and whites persists across demographic lines. The current "mancession" has hit male-dominated professions hardest. But white men face a relatively mild unemployment rate of just over 10% compared with over 18% among black men. For the worst-off, the data are catastrophic. Among young black men without a high-school diploma, nearly half have no jobs. These rates are based on a labour-force number which excludes those in prison; if there were not five times as many blacks behind bars as whites, the figures would look even worse. There is no shortage of explanations for the gap. States with weaker labour markets, like South Carolina and Michigan, also tend to have larger black populations than low-unemployment states like Iowa and Montana. Predominantly black neighbourhoods are often a long way from where jobs are concentrated, in largely white suburbs, so those without cars cannot get to them. Blacks are also at a disadvantage when it comes to relying on friends and family connections to find jobs; there is not the same network of family businesses that whites and Latinos have. Some studies have found that this factor may explain as much as 70% of the difference in black and white unemployment rates, and may also explain the difference between black and Latino jobless rates. Among young men, for instance, the near-20% Hispanic unemployment rate is much closer to that for whites (17%) than blacks (30%). And discrimination, too, plays a part. What is clear is that the unemployment problem in black communities will not end with the recession. The employment-to-population ratio among black adults is only just above 50%, and it is closer to a shocking 40% for young black men; for adult whites it is 59%. Black workers are also unemployed for about five weeks longer, on average, than the rest of the population. Some 45% of unemployed blacks have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, compared with just 36% of unemployed whites. That means continued loss of skills, and a longer and harder road back into the workforce.
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单选题There is scientific evidence to support our ______ that being surrounded by plants is good for health.
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单选题______ she couldnt understand was ______ fewer and fewer students showed interest in her lessons A.What; why B.That; what C.What; because D.Why; that
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单选题And you find that you're not to be ______ with a position of real responsibility. A. offered B. trusted C. furnished D. equipped
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单选题Many of the nation's top-ranked medical centers employ some of the same advertising techniques doctors often criticize drug companies for—concealing risks and playing on fear, vanity and other emotions to attract patients, a study found. The study of newspaper ads by 17 top-rated university medical centers highlights the conflict between serving public health and making money. Some ads, especially those bragging specific services, might create a sense of need in otherwise healthy patients and "seem to put the financial interests of the academic medical center ahead of the best interests of the patients. " Hospital officials defended their ads as fair, ethically sound and necessary in a competitive market. The centers studied were on U. S. News & World Report's 2002 honor roll of the nation's best hospitals. Of 122 ads designed to attract patients and published in newspapers in 2002, 21 promoted specific services, including Botox anti-wrinkle injections and laser eye surgery. Only one of the 21 ads mentioned the risks. Most of the 122 ads—62 percent—used an emotional appeal to attract patients. One third used slogans focusing on technology, fostering a misperception that high-tech medicine is always better. "As a result, patients may be given false hopes and unrealistic expectations," the researchers said. As leading sources for specialized medical care, training and innovation, academic medical centers were selected "because we thought they would be the best-case scenario," said lead author Dr. Robin Larson, a researcher at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt. "We thought if we find problems there, we would assume that they're only worse" at community hospitals. University medical centers generally are not-for-profit but still face financial pressures to attract patients and stay afloat. Hospital advertising began about 20 years ago and grew as managed care increased competition among hospitals. The authors said it has risen among academic medical centers in the past decade. Johns Hopkins spokeswoman Elaine Freeman said the study highlights an important point—that academic medical centers need to be sensitive to conflicts between money and altruism. But Freeman said that advertising helps educate the public and that Hopkins has a review process to make sure its ads are fair and balanced. Vanderbilt spokesman Joel Lee also said his hospital's ads are ethical, including the one featuring spilled coffee. He said that the ad was intended to create awareness about women's heart attack symptoms differing from men's. University of Chicago Hospitals' spokeswoman Catherine Gianaro said: "If any institution or company didn't remain economically viable, they wouldn't be able to serve the public health. " American Hospital Association spokesman Rick Wade said that advertising is a necessity for hospitals, and that appealing to emotion is inherent in advertising. According to AHA guidelines, emotion-evoking ads are acceptable if they maintain "a proper sensitivity" toward vulnerable patients, and are fair and accurate. The guidelines also frown on ads for risky procedures that do not disclose the risks.
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单选题We can know from the information given in the passage that the moon must be about ______.
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单选题In the summer of 999, Leif Erikson voyaged to Norway and spent the following winter with King Olaf Tryggvason. Substantially the same account is given by both the Saga of Eric the Red and the Flat Island Book. The latter says nothing about Leif's return voyage to Greenland, but according to the former it was during this return voyage that Leif discovered America. The Flat Island Book, however, tells of another and earlier landfall by Biarni, the son of a prominent man named Heriulf, and makes that the inspiration for the voyage to the new land by Leif. In brief, like Leif, Biarni and his companion sight three countries in succession before reaching Greenland, and to come upon each new land takes 1 "doegr" more than the last until Biarni comes to land directly in front of his father's house in the last- mentioned country. This narrative has been rejected by most later writers, and they may be justified. Possibly, Biarni was a companion of Leif when he voyaged from Norway to Greenland via America, or it may he that the entire tale is But a garbled account of that voyage and Biarni another name for Leif. It should be noted, however, that the stories of Leif's visit to King Olaf and Biarni's to that king's predecessor are in the same narrative in the Flat Island Book, so there is less likelihood of duplication than if they were from different sources. Also, Biarni landed on none of the lands he passed, but Leif apparently landed on one, for he brought back specimens of wheat, vines, and timber. Nor is there any good reason to believe that the first land visited by Biarni was Wineland. The first land was "level and covered with woods", and "there were small hillocks upon it'. Of forests, later writers do not emphasize them particularly in connection with Wineland, though they are often noted incidentally. And of hills, the Saga says of Wineland only that "wherever there was hilly ground, there were vines". Additionally, if the two narratives were taken from the same source we should expect a closer resemblance of Helluland. The Saga says of it: "They found there hellus (large flat stones)." According to the Biarni narrative, however, "this land was high and mountainous." The intervals of 1, 2, 3, and 4 "doegr" in both narratives are suggestive, but mythic formulas of this kind may be introduced into narratives without altogether destroying their historicity. It is also held against the Biarni narrative that its hero is made to come upon the coast of Greenland exactly in front of his father's home. But it should be recalled that Heriufsness lay below two high mountains which served as landmarks for navigators. I would give up Biarni more readily were it not that the story of Leif's voyage contained in the supposedly more reliable Saga is almost as amazing. But Leif's voyage across the entire width of the North Atlantic is said to be "probable" because it is incorporated into the narrative of a preferred authority, while Biarni's is "improbable" or even "impossible" because the document containing it has been condemned.
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单选题After a run of several thousand years, it is entirely fitting that 2000 will be marked as the year the tide turned against taxation. Clay tablets recall the taxes of Hammurabi in the Babylon of 2000BC, but the practice is certainly older. People in power have always tried to divert some of the proceeds of economic activity in their own direction. Lords took feudal dues from their vassals; landowners took tolls from merchants; gangsters took protection money from small businesses; governments took taxes from their citizens. Despite the different names, the principle has remained constant: those who do not produce take resources from those who do, and spend it on altogether different things. The tide is turning because of the convergence of several factors, in the first place, taxes are becoming harder to collect. Capital is more mobile than ever, and inclined to fly from places that tax to places that do not. Governments do not move their boundaries and jurisdictions as rapidly as companies can change locations. Attempts to establish trans-national tax powers are almost certainly, ably doomed by international competition to attract economic activity. Many businesses will choose to stay out of reach. The global economy and the Internet mean that purchases can now cross frontiers. People buy books, clothes, and cars from abroad, and any finance minister who likes to tax these items find his tax base diminishing. It is not only capital and goods which are harder to pin down. Even wages are crossing frontiers. The rise of the service sector means that many income-generating activities can take place across frontiers, causing yet more headaches for overstretched public treasuries. Furthermore, the pace of electronic, hard-to-trace activity is accelerating. No less important has been the rise of political resistance. The past quarter-century has been marked by a movement led in Britain and America itself in California's famous tax-cutting referendum Proposition 13, but saw its fullest expression in the Thatcher and Reagan tax cuts of the 1980's. Britain's Tories entered office in 1979 with the top rate of income tax at 98%, and left office 18 years later with a top rate of 40%. Indeed, their Labour opponents became electable only after a firm promise not to raise it again. The plain fact is that electorates these days will not stand for it. They recognize, correctly, that governments spend their money less carefully and less efficiently than they can spend it themselves. One of the greatest uses of tax money is to provide pensions. And here a revolution--as important and pervasive as privatization--is sweeping the world. Fully-funded personal pension plans, based on individual savings, are sweeping away the poorly funded public pensions promised by governments. The latter take taxes from the young to support the old. The former invest savings from the young to support themselves when old.
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单选题Despite their many differences of temperament and of literary perspective, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman share certain beliefs. Common to all these writers is their humanistic perspective. Its basic premises are that humans are the spiritual center of the universe and that in them alone is the clue to nature, history, and ultimately the cosmos itself. Without completely denying the existence either of a deity (the God) or of irrational matter, this perspective nevertheless rejects them as exclusive principles of interpretation and prefers to explain humans and the world in terms of humanity itself. This preference is expressed most clearly in the Transcendentalist principle that the structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self; therefore, all knowledge begins with self-knowledge. This common perspective is almost always universalized. Its emphasis is not upon the individual as a particular European or American, but upon the human as universal, freed from the accidents of time, space, birth, and talent. Thus, for Emerson, the "American Scholar" turns out to be simply "Man Thinking"; while, for Whitman, the "Song of Myself" merges imperceptibly into a song of all the '"children of Adam", where "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Also common to all five writers is the belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization, which, in turn, depends upon the harmonious reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies: first, the self-asserting impulse of the individual to withdraw, to remain unique and separate, and to be responsible only to himself or herself- and second, the self-transcending impulse of the individual to embrace the whole world in the experience of a single moment and to know and become one with that world. These conflicting impulses can be seen in the democratic ethic. Democracy advocates individualism, the preservation of the individual's freedom and self-expression. But the democratic self is torn between the duty to self, which is implied by the concept of liberty, and the duty to society, which is implied by the concepts of equality and fraternity. A third assumption common to the five writers is that intuition and imagination offer a surer road to truth than does abstract logic or scientific method. It is illustrated by their emphasis upon introspection—their belief that the clue to external nature is to be found in the inner world of individual psychology—and by their interpretation of experience as. in essence, symbolic. Both these stresses presume an organic relationship between the self and the cosmos, of which only intuition and imagination can properly take account. These writers' faith in the imagination and in themselves as practitioners of imagination led them to conceive of the writer as a seer and enabled them to achieve supreme confidence in their own moral and metaphysical insights. Notes: Transcendentalist 先验论的。self-transcending 超越自我的。ethic 伦理标准,道德规范。be torn between 在...之间左右为难。fraternity博爱。introspection 反省。seer 预言家,先知。metaphysical 形而上学的。
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单选题Shelley's famous poem “To a Skylark” praises the birds for its carefree spirit.
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单选题For over 30 years, Donald Kroodsma has worked to disclose such mysteries of bird communication. Through field studies and laboratory experiments, he's studied the ecological and social forces that may have contributed to the evolution of vocal learning. Kroodsma has paid particular attention to local variation in song types, known as dialects. The Black-capped Chickadees (Parus atricapillus)on Martha's Vineyard, for example, have an entirely different song than their counterparts on the Massachusetts mainland, he says. Birds that live on the boundary between two dialects or that spend time in different areas can become "bilingual," learning the; songs of more than one group of neighbors. Recently, Kroodsma discovered that the Three-wattled Bellbird (Procnias tricarunculata) is constantly changing its song, creating what he calls a "rapid cultural evolution within each generation. "This kind of song evolution is found in whales but, up until now, rarely in birds.A professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Kroodsma is also co-editor of the book Ecology and Evolution of Acoustic Communication in Birds (Cornell University Press, 1996). Though he plans to continue his field studies, he says that one of his most important goals now is to help people understand how to listen to birdsong. "Many people can identify a Wood Thrush(Hylocichla mustelina)when they hear it. It's one of the most beautiful songs in the world, "he says. "Little do they realize they could hear the things that Wood Thrush is communicating if they just knew how to listen." Next is an interview made between an amateur of bird songs(SA)and Donald Kroodsma.SA: Can you make any comparison between how a baby bird learns to sing and how a young human learns to speak?DK: On the surface, it's remarkably similar. I often play a tape of my daughter, recorded when she was about a year and a half old. She is taking all the sounds she knows, "bow-wow, kitty, no, down” and randomly piecing them together in a nonsensical babbling sequence. Then I play a tape of a young bird and dissect what it's doing in what we call its "subsong," and it's exactly the same thing.It's taking all the sounds it has memorized, all the sounds it has been exposed to, and singing them in a random sequence. It looks like what the baby human and the baby bird are doing is identical. Some might say that's a crass comparison, but it's very intriguing. SA: Why do the song repertoires(全部技能)and dialects of some birds vary from place to place?DK: For the species of birds that do not learn their songs, I like to think of it simplistically as the song being encoded right in their DNA. With these birds, if we find differences in their songs from place to place, it means that the DNA has changed too, that the populations are genetically different.But there are species in which the songs are not encoded in the DNA. Then we have something very similar to humans, in which speech is learned and varies from place to place. If you were raised in Germany, for example, you'd be speaking German rather than English with no change in your genes. So with the birds that learn their songs, you get these striking differences from place to place because the birds have learned the local dialect.SA: How is this affected by whether a bird is nomadic? DK: If you know the rest of your life you're going to be speaking English, you work hard at learning English. But what if you know that you'll be repeatedly thrown in with people speaking different languages from all over the world? You start to see the enormous challenge it would be to learn the language or dialect of all these different locations. So I think for nomadic birds like Sedge Wrens [Cistothorus platensis], because they are thrown together with different birds every few months from all over the geographic range, they don't bother to imitate the songs of their immediate neighbors. They make up some kind of generalized song, or rather the instructions in their DNA allow them to improvise this very Sedge Wren-y song. Why should they imitate each other and all have the same songs? I wish I knew the answer to that.
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单选题According to the passage, we can say that anthropology ______.
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单选题The mayor together with his two brothers ______ going to be indicted for accepting bribes.
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单选题The first ancient Olympics were held in 776 B.C. The games got their name from Olympia, the Greek city where they took place. Like the summer Olympics of today, the ancient Olympics were held every four years. Thousands of people from all over the Greek world came to watch. The main stadium held about 45,000 people. "We have accounts of visitor and pilgrims setting up tents all around the site." Lisa Cerrato of Tufts University said. During the first Olympics, there was only one competition—a 200-meter race. But over time the games grew to include wrestling, chariot racing, boxing, and other sports. Women were not allowed to compete, but they had their own separate games. "The ancient athlete became celebrities(名人), just like today. They often lived the rest of their lives being treated to free dinners." Cerrato said, "City-states even tried to steal away each other"s athletes by offering them various awards." The ancient Olympics existed until A. D. 393. But the modern Olympics are still going strong.
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单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Directions:{{/B}}Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A. B, Cot D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Potential AIDS victims who refuse to be tested for the disease and then defend their right to remain ignorant about whether they carry the virus are entitled to that fight. But ignorance cannot be used to rationalize irresponsibility. Nowhere in their argument is their concern about how such ignorance might endanger public health by exposing others to the virus. All disease is an outrage, and disease that affects the young and healthy seems particularly outrageous. When a disease selectively attacks the socially disadvantaged, such as homosexuals and drug abusers, it seems an injustice beyond rationalization. Such is the case with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Decent people are offended by this unfairness and in the name of benevolence have been driven to do morally irresponsible things such as denying the unpleasant facts of the disease, out of compassion for the victims. We cannot distort the facts to comfort the afflicted when such confusion compounds the tragedy. Some crucial facts: AIDS is a communicable disease. The percentage of those infected with the AIDS virus who will eventually contract the disease is unknown, but that percentage rises with each new estimate. The disease so far has been 100 potential. The latency period between the time the virus is acquired and the disease develops is also unknown. We now have teats for the presence of the virus that is as efficient and reliable as almost any diagnostic test in medicine. An individual who tests positive can be presumed with near-certainty to carry the virus, whether he has the disease or not. To state that the test for AIDS is "ambiguous", as a clergyman recently in public, is a misstatement and an immoral act. To state that the test does not directly indicate the presence of the virus is a half-truth that misleads and an immoral act. The test correlates so consistently with the presence of the virus in bacteria cultures as to be considered I00 percent certain by experts. Everyone who tests positive must understand that he is a potential vector for the AIDS virus and has a moral duty and responsibility to prevent others from contamination. We are not just dealing with the protection of the innocent but with an essential step to contain the spread of an epidemic as horrible as any that has befallen modern man. We must do everything in our power to keep this still, untreatable disease from becoming pandemic. It may seem unfair to burden the tragic victims with concern for the welfare of others. But moral responsibility is not a luxury of the fortunate, and evil actions committed in despair cannot be condemned out of pity. It is morally wrong for a healthy individual who tests positive for AIDS to be involved with anyone except under the strict precautions now defined as safe sex. It is morally wrong for someone in a high-risk population who refuses to test himself to do other than to assume that he tests positive. It is morally wrong for those who, out of sympathy for the heartbreaking victims of this epidemic, as though well wishing and platitudes(老生常谈) about the ambiguities of the disease are necessary in order to comfort the victims while 'they contribute to enlarging the number of those victims. Moral responsibility is the burden of the sick as well as the healthy.
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