单选题{{B}}Passage Three{{/B}} In The Birth Order Book Why You Are the Way You Are (2004), Dr. Kevin Leman notes that 21 of the first 23 Americans in space were first-born males or only children. More than half of United States presidents have been first-borns or first-born boys. It's a pretty significant finding historically, because families used to be bigger than they are today. In addition to being high achievers, older children also generally have higher IQs (智商) than younger ones. Researchers have noted that the more kids a family has, the lower each child's individual IQ tends to be. They give a few reasons for this. Parents only have so much time, attention, and money. The more kids they have, the more these things are divided. First-borns initially get the entire parental-time pie. What's more, the ratio of grown-ups to kids decreases with each new baby. {{U}}So the younger ones are surrounded by more children's language on average than the older kids{{/U}}. Some researchers think parental attention is the key to personality birth-order differences. In his book Born to Rebel, psychologist Frank Sulloway says competition for Mom and Dad's attention is the thing that really shapes our personalities and, in fact has shaped history. He argues that we adapt our personalities as part of our strategy to seek favor from Mom and Dad. Younger siblings (兄弟姐妹) tend to become rebels. Sulloway studied political activists and found that later-born activists were more radical than their first-born peers. The conclusion of his book is that sibling competition for parental attention can affect society as a whole in times of revolution. Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and Fidel Castro were all younger siblings, for example. As compelling as this all is, it's also something we should probably take with caution, there are other things that happen to us in life besides the addition of siblings to our families. A parent can die; a hurricane can leave us homeless; we can catch a life-threatening disease. Any one of these things will probably have more of an effect on our personalities than the presence of siblings. A 2002 study bore this out. After interviewing 535 undergraduates, researchers concluded that personality differences related to birth order were "folklore", although IQ and achievement differences were widely supported by research.

单选题His desire to ______ other people has caused trouble in his family. A. please B. dominate C. force D. urge

单选题Your explanation is clear and ______ under discussion.

单选题Man: How well are you prepared for your presentation? Your turn comes next Wednesday. Woman: I spent a whole week searching on the net, but came up with nothing valuable. Question: What did the woman say about her presentation? A. It has nothing to do with the Internet. B. She needs another week to get it ready. C. It contains some valuable ideas. D. It's far from being ready yet.

单选题During the summer session there will be a revised schedule of services for the university community. Specific changes for intercampus bus services, summer hours for the cafeteria, the infirmary (校医院) and recreational and athletic facilities will be posted on the bulletin board outside of the cafeteria. Weekly movie and concert schedules which are in the process of being arranged will be posted each Wednesday outside of the cafeteria. Intercampus buses will leave the main hall every hour on the half hour and make all of the regular stops on their route around campus. The cafeteria will serve breakfast, lunch, and early dinner from 7 a. m. to 7 p. m. during the week and from noon to 7 p.m. on weekends. The library will maintain regular hours during the week, but shorter hours on Saturdays and Sundays. The weekend hours are from noon to 7 p. m. All students who want to use the library borrowing services and recreational athletic, and entertainment facilities must have a valid summer identification card. This announcement will also appear in the next issue of the student newspaper.

单选题If Sustainable competitive advantage depends on work force skills, American firms have a problem. Human management is not traditionally seen as a central to the competitive survival of the firm in the United States. Skill Acquisition is considered as individual responsibility. Labor is simply another force of production to be hired/rented at the lowest possible cost, which is a must as one buys raw material or equipment. The lack of importance attached to human resource management can be seen in the corporate pecking order. In an American firm the chief financial officer is almost always second in command. The post of head of human resource management is usually a specialized job, off at the edge of the corporate hierarchy. The executive who holds it is never consulted on major strategic decisions and has no chance to move up to Chief Executive Officer. By way of contrast, in Japan the head of human resource management is central-usually the second most important executive, after the CEO, in the firm's hierarchy. While American firms often talk about the vast amounts spent on training their work force, in fact, they invest less in the skills of their employees than do either Japanese or German firms. The money they do invest is also more highly concentrated on professional or managerial employees. And the limited investments that made in training workers are also much more narrowly focused on the specific skills necessary to do the next job rather than on the basic background skills that make it possible to absorb new technologies. As a result, problems emerge when new breakthrough technologies arrive. If American workers, for example take much longer to learn how to operate new flexible manufacturing stations than workers in Germany (as they do), the effective cost of those stations is lower in Germany than it is in the United States. More time is required before equipment is up and running at the speed with which new equipment is up and running at capacity, and the need for extensive retraining generates costs and creates bottlenecks that limit the speed with which new equipment can be employed. The result is a slower pace of technological change. And in the end the skills of the bottom half of the population affect the wages of the top half. If the bottom half can't effectively staff the processes that have to be operated, the management and professional jobs that go with these processes will disappear.

单选题Usually Susan spends ______ time doing her given job than other girls do in her office. A. less B. little C. few D. fewer

单选题Early (experiences) are (too) powerful that they can (completely) change the way a person (turns) out.A. experiencesB. tooC. completelyD. turns

单选题Since the 15th century, animals have been used as______for people in experiments to assess the effects of therapeutic and other agents that might later be used in humans.

单选题According to the author, studying the elites also sheds light on poverty research because ______.

单选题Many problems have______as a result of the change over to a new type of fuel.

单选题Neuroscientists now understand at least some of the physiology behind a wide range of unconscious states, from deep sleep to coma, from partially conscious conditions to a persistent vegetative state, the condition diagnosed in Ms. Schiavo. New research, by laboratories in New York and Europe, has allowed for much clearer distinctions to be made between the uncounted number of people who at some time become comatose, the 10,000 to 15,000 Americans who subsist in vegetative states and the estimated 100,000 or more who exist in states of partial consciousness. This emerging picture should make it easier for doctors to judge which brain-damaged patients have some hope of recovering awareness, experts say, and already it is providing clues to the specific brain processes that sustain conscious awareness. "Understanding what these processes are will give us a better sense of how to help the whole range of people living with brain injuries," said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, an assistant professor of neurology and neuroscience at New York-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell hospital. "That is where this field is ultimately headed: toward a better understanding of what consciousness is." The most familiar unconscious state is sleep, which in its deepest phases is characterized by little electrical activity in the brain and almost complete unresponsiveness. Coma, the most widely known state of impaired unconsciousness, is in fact a continuum. Doctors rate the extent to which a comatose person shows pain responses and reactions to verbal sounds on a scale from 3, for no response, to 13, for consistent responses. As in sleep, people in comas may move or make sounds and typically have no memory of either. But they almost always emerge from this state in two to three weeks, doctors say, when the eyes open spontaneously. What follows is critical for the person"s recovery. Those who are lucky, or who have less severe injuries, gradually awaken. "The first thing I remember was telling my ex-boyfriend, who was at the foot of the bed, to shut up," said Trisha Meili, who fell into a coma after being beaten and raped in 1990, and wrote about the experience in the book, I Am the Central Park Jogger. In the days after this memory, Ms. Meili said, she slipped in and out of conscious awareness, "as if my body was taking care of the most important things first, and leaving my moment to moment awareness for last." In fact, researchers say, this is precisely what happens. The primitive brain stem, which controls sleep-wake cycles as well as reflexes, asserts itself first, as the eyes open. Ideally, areas of the cerebral cortex, the seat of conscious thought, soon follow, like lights flicking on in the upper rooms of a darkened house. But in some cases—Ms. Schiavo"s was one of them—the cortical areas fail to engage, and the patient"s prognosis becomes dire. Neurologists were all but unanimous in diagnosing the condition of Ms. Schiavo, whose heart stopped temporarily in 1990, depriving her brain of oxygen. Brain cells and neural connections wither and die without oxygen, like marine life in a drained lake, leaving virtually nothing unharmed. People with these kinds of injuries—Nancy Cruzan, whose case reached the Supreme Court in 1990 is an example—almost always remain unresponsive if they have not regained awareness in the first months after the injury. In medical terms, they become persistently vegetative, a diagnosis first described in 1972 by Dr. Fred Plum of Cornell University and Dr. Bryan Jennett, a neurosurgeon at Glasgow University in Scotland. In a sense, the description of the diagnosis began the modern study of disorders of consciousness. "Before 1972 people talked about permanent comas, or irrecoverable comas, but we defined a different state altogether, with the eyes open, some reflex activity, but no sign of meaningful psychological responsiveness," Dr. Jennett, now a professor emeritus, said in an interview. In an exhaustive review of the medical histories of more than 700 persistently vegetative patients, a team of doctors in 1994 reported that about 15 percent of those who suffered brain damage from oxygen deprivation, like Ms. Schiavo, recovered some awareness within three months. After that, however, very few recovered and none did so after two years. About 52 percent of people with traumatic wounds to the head, often from car accidents, recovered some awareness in the first year after the injury, the study found; very few recovered after that. "It"s the difference between taking a blow to the brain, which affects a local area—and taking this global, whole-brain hit," said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell hospital. Yet these statistics cannot explain the stories of remarkable recovery that surfaced during the debate over Ms. Schiavo"s fate. There was Terry Wallis, a mechanic in Arkansas who regained awareness in 2003, more than 18 years after he fell into unconsciousness from a car accident; Sarah Scantlin, a Kansas woman who, also a victim of a car accident, emerged from a similar state after 19 years; and several others, whose collective human spirit seemed to defy the experts, and trump science. Researchers say these cases can be accounted for by recent studies that indicate the existence of yet another state of subdued responsiveness, one that represents a clear break from the vegetative.

单选题 Passage 8 In the modern world, it is important to be well-informed. Success in many fields {{U}}(1) {{/U}} on getting the latest information. There are many means of obtaining information which enable us to {{U}}(2) {{/U}} what is going on in the world. And we are so accustomed to reading almost every week newspaper reports about new discoveries being made by man that we tend to {{U}}(3) {{/U}} the progress and benefit of scientific research for granted. We {{U}}(4) {{/U}} that science must continue to achieve its many miracles which become merely commonplace as soon as they are replaced by greater ones. Astronauts have made journeys through space, a {{U}}(5) {{/U}} that once upon a time would have been considered as unbelievable. Yet there are few people today who feel anything but a mild interest in the discoveries that are being made by scientists. Industrialists and engineers are busy taking {{U}}(6) {{/U}} of the mineral deposits available, regardless of the fact that this ruthless exploitation is harmful. Nature is {{U}}(7) {{/U}} their descendants altogether of these resources {{U}}(8) {{/U}} we so carelessly squander on providing ourselves with the luxuries and not merely the necessities of life. We {{U}}(9) {{/U}} to realize that we are {{U}}(10) {{/U}} for the generations after ourselves, and even those who are aware of this rarely take these responsibilities seriously enough.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} While still catching up to men in some spheres of modern life, women appear to be way ahead in at least one undesirable category. "Women are particularly susceptible to developing depression and anxiety disorders in response to stress compared to men," according to Dr. Yehuda, chief psychiatrist at New York's Veteran's Administration Hospital. Studies of both animals and humans have shown that sex hormones somehow affect the stress response, causing females under stress to produce more of the trigger chemicals than do males under the same conditions. In several of the studies, when stressed-out female rats had their ovaries (the female reproductive organs) removed, their chemical responses became equal to those of the males. Adding to a woman's increased dose of stress chemicals, are her increased "opportunities" for stress. "It's not necessarily that women don't cope as well. It's just that they have so much more to cope with," says Dr. Yehuda. "Their capacity for tolerating stress may even be greater than men's," she observes," it's just .that they're dealing with so many more things that they become worn out from it more visibly and sooner." Dr. Yehuda notes another difference between the sexes. "I think that the kinds of things that women are exposed to tend to be in more of a chronic or repeated nature. Men go to war and are ex- posed to combat stress. Men are exposed lo more acts of random physical violence. The kinds of interpersonal violence that women are exposed to tend to be in domestic situations, by, unfortunately, parents or other family members, and they tend not to be one-shot deals. The wear-and-tear that comes from these longer relationships can be quite devastating." Adeline Alvarez married at 18 and gave birth to a son, but was determined to finish college. "I struggled a lot to get the college degree. I was living in so much frustration that that was my escape, to go to school, and get ahead and do better." Later, her marriage ended and she became a single mother. "It's the hardest thing to take care of a teenager, have a job, pay the rent, pay the car payment, and pay the debt. I lived from paycheck to paycheck." Not everyone experiences the kinds of severe chronic stresses Alvarez describes. But most women today are coping with a lot of obligations, with few breaks, and feeling the strain. Alvarez 's experience demonstrates the importance of finding ways to diffuse stress before it threatens your health and your ability to function.

单选题______ of our personal rhythms, most of us have a productive period between 10

单选题 Americans no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should Like, Care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English. Blaming the permissive 1960s is nothing new, but this is not yet another criticism against the decline in education. Mr. McWhorter's academic specialty is language history and change, and he sees the gradual disappearance of "whom", for example, to be natural and no more regreuable than the loss of the case-endings of Old English. But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, per- formative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the quietist of his subtitle, Why We Should, Like, Care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive—there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey comp]ex ideas, lie is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk properly. Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms—he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.

单选题Young people are not ______ to stand and look at works of art; they want art they can participate in. A) conservative B) content C) confident D) generous

单选题Many a boy and many a girl ______ it since then.

单选题If you want stay young, sit down and have a good think. This is the research finding of a team of Japanese doctors, who say that most our brains are not getting enough exercises—and as a result, we are ageing unnecessarily soon. Professor Taiju Matsuzawa wanted to find out why otherwise healthy farmers in northern Japan appeared to be losing their ability to think and reason at a relatively early age, and how the process of ageing could be slowed down. With a team a colleague (同事) at Tokyo National University, he set about measuring brain volumes of a thousand people of different ages and varying occupations. " Computer technology enabled the researchers to obtain precise (精确的) measurements of the volume of the front and side sections of the brain, which relate to intellect (智能) and emotion, and determine the human character. " The rear section of the brain, which controls functions like eating and breathing, does not contract with age, and one can continue living without intellectual or emotional facilities. Contraction of front and side parts—as cells die off—was observed in some subjects in their thirties, but it was still not evident in some sixty- and seventy-year-olds. Matsuzawa concluded from his tests that there is a simple remedy to the contraction normally associated with age—using the head. The findings show in general terms that contraction of the brain begins sooner in people in the country than in the towns. Those least at risk, says Matsuzawa, are lawyers, followed by university professors and doctors. White collar workers doing routine work in government offices are, however, as likely to have shrinking brains as the farm workers, bus drivers and shop assistants. Matsuzawa's findings show that thinking can prevent the brain from shrinking. Blood must circulate properly in the head to supply the fresh oxygen the brain cells need. "The best way to maintain good blood circulation is through using the brain, " he says, "Think hard and engage in conversation. Don't rely on pocket calculators.

单选题Speaker A:We're having a few people over for dinner Saturday._______ Speaker B: Oh. Thank you. That would be great.