单选题Soon, people hope the rain will return and ease the hardship ______ the farmers.

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} As dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marilee Jones was responsible for ensuring that applicants represented their academic backgrounds honestly. So it was more than a shock when the 55-year-old resigned Thursday, admitting that she had misled school officials over a 28-year period into believing that she held three degrees from New York institutions. In fact, she had never received even an undergraduate degree from any school. While Jones's case is extreme, it points to a major concern for any corporation or institution that hires employees: embellishments and outright lies on resumes. But if an employer doesn't catch the falsehoods, how does an employee live with such a big lie in Jones's case, a falsehood that she maintained for 28 years? Psychologist Paul Ekman speculates that Jones's case is likely related to self-esteem. MIT officials noted that a college degree probably wasn't required for the entry-level position that Jones took on in 1979, and apparently no one checked her credentials with each successive promotion. Still, by all accounts, Jones was good at her job. "Even though the fake degrees didn't initially give her tangible benefits, she personally needed them in order to get people to respect her," Ekman says. "And in time it appears she did get a lot of respect, but by then she couldn't reveal she had lied without losing her position." Ekman says many people are tempted to exaggerate their credentials for the same reason a kid exaggerates his father's strength, but that most people resist. "They either know from past experience that they could never get away with it—perhaps because they are bad liars, they don't like taking risks—some people are risk takers so it attracts them to lying, or they are religiously observant," Ekman says. Early in her career, Jones didn't resist the temptation, and it may have become too difficult to rectify the situation as she climbed the workplace ladder. "My bet is that it was never out of her mind completely that she had taken such a risk, but I doubt she spent many nights worrying someone would catch her," Ekman says. "She had done such a great job and was so admired, that she probably became confident after all these years that no one was going to check." But the potential damages caused by hiring a poorly qualified employee are serious for companies. Depending on the position applied for, different background-information firms offer different service packages. For example, a credit check may not be necessary for a person applying for an administrative job; but an executive or financial position may call for a check of references, a credit check, a criminal-records check and even a check of driving records. With such diligence, it's much riskier for today's job hunters to lie than it was 30 years ago when Jones filled out her first application at MIT.

单选题Experts are trying hard to find out the ______ of the man killed in the traffic accident.

单选题Since Japan______importance to education and technological innovation, its economy has developed at a high speed.(2002年上海交通大学考博试题)

单选题You may have wondered why the supermarkets are all the same. It is not because the companies that operate them lack imagination. It is because they all aim at persuading people to buy things. In the supermarket, it takes a while for the mind to get into a shopping mode. This is why the area immediately inside the entrance is known as the " decompression zone". People need to slow down and look around, even if they are regulars. In sales terms this area is bit of a loss, so it tends to be used more for promotion. Immediately inside the first thing shoppers may come to is the fresh fruit and vegetables section. For shoppers, this makes no sense. Fruit and vegetables can be easily damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But what is at work here? It turns out that selecting good fresh food is a way to start shopping, and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the unhealthy stuff later on. Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed towards the back of a store to provide more opportunities to tempt customers. But supermarkets know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is to boost "dwell time" : the length of time people spend in a store. Traditionally retailers measure "football" , as the number of people entering a store is known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend there. But nowadays, a piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path Intelligence, a British company tracked people's phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large retailer centre in Portsmouth — not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time rose 1 $ sales rose 1. 3% . Such techniques are increasingly popular because of a deepening understanding about how shoppers make choices. People tell market researchers that they make rational decisions about what to buy, considering things like price, selection or convenience. But subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work.

单选题A：Boston Hotel．May I help you? B：______

单选题Text 4 For about three centuries we have been doing science, trying science out, using science for the construction of what we call modern civilization. Every indispensable item of contemporary technology, from canal locks to dial telephone-to penicillin, was pieced together to form the analysis of data provided by one or another series of scientific experiments. Three hundred years seems a long time for testing a new approach to human inter-living, long enough to settle back for critical appraisal of the scientific method, maybe even long enough to vote on whether to go no with it or not. There is an argument. Voices have been raised in protest since the beginning, rising in pitch and violence in the nineteenth century during the early stages of the industrial revolutions, summoning urgent crowds into the streets any day on the issue of nuclear energy. Give it back, say some of the voices, it doesn't really work, we've tried it and it doesn't work, go back three hundred years and start again on something else less chancy for the race of man. The principal discoveries in this century, taking all in all, are the glimpses of the depth of our ignorance about nature. Things that used to seem clear and rational, matters of absolute certainty—Newtonian mechanics, for example—have slipped through our fingers, and we are left with a new set of gigantic puzzles, cosmic uncertainties, ambiguities. Some of the laws of physics are amended every few years, some are canceled outright, and some undergo revised versions of legislative intent as if they were acts of Congress. Just thirty year ago we call it a biological revolution when the fantastic geometry of the DNA molecule was exposed to public view and the linear language of genetics was decoded. For a while, things seemed simple and clear, the cell was a neat little machine, a mechanical device ready for taking to pieces and reassembling, like a tiny watch. But just in the last few years it has become almost unbelievably complex, filled with strange parts whose functions are beyond today's imagining. It is not just that there is more to do; there is everything to do. What lies ahead, or what can lie ahead if the efforts in basic research are continued, is much more than the conquest of human disease or the improvement of agricultural technology of the cultivation of nutrients in the sea. As we learn more about fundamental processes of living things in general we will learn more about ourselves.

单选题The road is wet, it ______ rained last night.

单选题Swimmers can drown in busy swimming pools when lifeguards fail to notice that they are in trouble. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says that on average 15 people drown in British pools each year, but many more suffer major injury after getting into difficulties. Now a French company has developed an artificial intelligence system called Poseidon that sounds the alarm when it sees someone in danger of drowning. When a swimmer sinks towards the bottom of the pool, the new system sends an alarm signal to a poolside monitoring station and a lifeguard's pager. In trials at a pool in Ancenis, near Nantes, it saved a life within just a few months, says Alistair McQuade, a spokesman for its manufacturer, Poseidon Technologies. Poseidon keeps watch through a network of underwater and overhead video cameras. AI software analyses the images to work out swimmers, trajectories. To do this reliably, it has to tell the difference between a swimmer and the shadow of someone being cast onto the bottom or side of the pool. "The underwater environment is a very dynamic one, with many shadows and reflections dancing around." Says McQuade. The software does this by "projecting" a shape in its field of view onto an image on the far wall of the pool. It does the same with an image from another camera viewing the shape from a different angle. If the two projections are in the same position, the shape is identified as a shadow and is ignored. But if they are different, the shape is a swimmer and so the system follows its trajectory. To pick out potential drowning victims, anyone in the water who starts to descend slowly is added to the software's "pre-alert" list, says McQuade. Swimmers who then stay immobile on the pool bottom for 5 seconds or more are considered in danger of drowning. Poseidon double-checks that the image really is of a swimmer, not a shadow, by seeing whether it obscures the pool's floor texture when viewed from overhead. If so, it alerts the lifeguard, showing the swimmer's location on a poolside screen. The first full-scale Poseid6n system will be officially opened next week at a pool in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. One man who is impressed with the idea is Travor Baylis, inventor of the clockwork radio. Baylis runs a company that installs swimming pools—and he was once an underwater escapologist with a circus. "I say full marks to them if this works and can save lives," he says. But he adds that any local authority spending ￡30,000— plus on a Poseidon system ought to be investing similar amounts in teaching children to swim.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} The provision of positive incentives to work in the new society will not be an easy task. But the most difficult task of all is to devise the ultimate and final sanction to replace the ultimate sanction of hunger--the economic whip of the old dispensation. Moreover, in a society which rightly rejects the pretence of separating economies from politics and denies the autonomy of the economic order, that sanction can be found only in some conscious act of society. We can no longer ask the invisible hand to do our dirty work for us. I confess that I am less horror-struck than some people at the prospect, which seems to me unavoidable, of an ultimate power of what is called direction of labor resting in some arm of society, whether in an organ of state or of trade unions. I should indeed be horrified if I identified this prospect with a return to the conditions of the pre-capitalist era. The economic whip of laissea-faire undoubtedly represented an advance on the serf-like conditions of that period: in that relative sense, the claim of capitalism to have established for the first time a system of "free" labour deserves respect But the direction of labour as exercised in Great Britain in the Second World War seems to me to represent as great an advance over the economic whip of the heyday of capitalist private enterprise as the economic whip represented over pre-capitalist serfdom, Much depends on the effectiveness of the positive incentives, much, too, on the solidarity and self-discipline of the community. After all, under the system of laissea-faire capitalism the fear of hunger remained an ultimate sanction rather than a continuously operative force. It would have been intolerable if the worker had been normally driven to work by conscious fear of hunger; nor, except in the early and worst days of the Industrial Revolution, did that normally happen. Similarly in the society of the future the power of direction should be regarded not so much as an instrument of daily used but rather as an ultimate sanction held in reserve where voluntary methods fail It is inconceivable that, in any period or in any conditions that can now be foreseen, any organ of state in Great Britain would be in a position, even if it had the will, to marshal and deploy the labour force over the whole economy by military discipline like an army in the field. This, like other nightmares of a totally planned economy, can be left to those who like to frighten themselves and others with scarecrows.

单选题In Krashen's monitor theory, "i" in "i + 1" hypothesis of second language acquisition refers to ______. (对外经贸2006研)

单选题Among the more colorful characters of Leadville"s golden age were H.A.W.Tabor and his second wife, Elizabeth McCourt, better known as "Baby Doe". Their history is fast becoming one of the legends of the Old West. Horace Austin Warner Tabor was a school teacher in Vermont. With his first wife and two children he left Vermont by covered wagon in 1855 to homes tread in Kansas. Perhaps he did not find farming to his liking, or perhaps he was lured by rumors of fortunes to be made in Colorado mines. At any rate, a few years later he moved west to the small Colorado mining camp known as California Gulch, which he later renamed Leadville when he became its leading citizen. "Great deposits of lead are sure to be found here." he said. As it turned out, it was silver, not lead, that was to make Leadville"s fortune and wealth. Tabor knew little about mining himself, so he opened a general store, which sold everything from boots to salt, flour, and tobacco. It was his custom to "grubstake" prospective miners, in other words, to supply them with food and supplies, or "grub", while they looked for ore, in return for which he would get a share in the mine if one was discovered. He did this for a number of years, but no one that he aided ever found anything of value. Finally one day in the year 1878, so the story goes, two miners came in and asked for "grub". Tabor had decided to quit supplying it because he had lost too much money that way. These were persistent, however, and Tabor was too busy to argue with them. "Oh help yourself. One more time wont"s make any difference," he said and went on selling shoes and hats to other customers. The two miners took $17 worth of supplies, in return for which they gave Tabor a one-third interest in their findings. They picked a barren place on the mountainside and began to dig. After nine days they struck a rich vein of silver. Tabor bought the shares of the other two men, and so the mine belonged to him alone. This mine, known as the "Pittsburgh Mine," made 1,300,000 for Tabor in return for his $17 investment. Later Tabor bought the Matchless Mine on another barren hillside just outside the town for $17,000. This turned out to be even more fabulous than the Pittsburgh, yielding $35,000 worth of silver per day at one time. Leadville grew. Tabor became its first mayor, and later became lieutenant governor of the state.

单选题Your phone number again? I ______ quite catch it. A．cant B．couldnt C．dont D．didnt

单选题Last week 29 earnest American high school students were invited to an evening of receiving good words, small talk, warm toasts and fancy silverware. "Find out something about the person sitting next to you," advised former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. "Eventually, you"ll discover they always have something interesting to say. And you should always use the proper silverware in the proper order. " Albright was the guest of honor at the imitated Official Dinner, which was a lot like a real official dinner in Washington minus the soft money. The evening was sponsored by the St. Albans School of Public Services to introduce its first class to the fine art of social survival. More than 84 guests, including students, teachers, school donors and speakers, gathered to replicate the lifestyle of the rich and political. The idea was to teach the social graces that will help students survive any social situation. Anyway, the whole proper fork thing is overrated. Former White House official C. Boyden Gray shared his top tips for surviving dinner parties: "Drink as little as possible until you get to dinner. " "Don"t be the first person there or the last person to leave. " "Try to get more out of your dinner partners than they get out of you." Every Official Dinner has a greater reason for being. State dinners, for example, are either an opportunity to reward emerging democracies or strengthen old friendships. The Official Dinner was intended to show the students an elegant evening in Washington—part of the four-week intensive summer program to encourage public service. The students are from 13 states and two foreign countries. The program includes classes on the presidency, the courts, the media and international affairs. The students also debated public policy issues. "They"re still at it at 10 o"clock at night," said director Mary Waikart. "That"s good practice for Washington, isn"t it?" Since there was no band, Albright offered herself up as the night"s entertainer. No singing, but stories about her life in diplomacy. "Being secretary of state is the best job in the world," she said. " Better than being president, because you don"t have to deal with the elections."

单选题Passage 2 With human footprints on the moon, radio telescopes listening for messages from alien creatures who may or may not exist, technicians looking for celestial and planetary sources of energy to support our civilization, orbiting telescopes' data hinting at planetary systems around other stars, and political groups trying to figure our how to save humanity from nuclear warfare that would damage life and eliminate on a planet-wide scale, an astronomy book published today enters a world different from the one that greeted books a generation age. Astronomy has broadened to involve our basic circumstances and our mysterious future in the universe. With eclipses and space missions broadcast live, and with NASA, Europe, and Russia planning and building permanent space stations, astronomy offers adventure for all people, an outward exploratory thrust may one day be seen as an alternative to mindless consumerism, ideological bickering, and wars to control dwindling resources on a closed, finite Earth. Today's astronomy students not only seek an up-to-date summary of astronomical facts: they ask, as people have asked for ages, about our basic relations to the rest of the universe. They may study astronomy partly to seek points of contact between science and other human endeavors, philosophy, history, politics, environmental action, even the arts and religion. Science fiction writers and special effect artists on recent films help today's students realize that unseen worlds of space are real places--not abstract concepts. Today's students are citizens of a more real, more vast cosmos than conceptualized by students of a decade age. In designing this edition, the Wadsworh editors and I have tried to respond to these developments. Rather than jumping at the start into murky waters of cosmology, I have begun with the viewpoint of ancient people on Earth and worked outward across the universe. This method of organization automatically (if loosely) reflects the order of humanity's discoveries about astronomy and provides a unifying theme of increasing distance and scale.

单选题Roosevelt's comparison of investigative reporters to "muckrakers” shows his view that these reporters ______.

单选题Cheerleaders for renewable energy are fond of pointing out that patches of desert receive enough energy each year from sunlight to power the entire world. But few could explain how the construction of the millions of solar cells required to convert that energy into electricity would be financed. Public utility bosses and policymakers tend to dismiss wind and solar power as noble but expensive distractions, sustainable only through huge subsidies. But new studies suggest that renewables might not be as dear as skeptics suspect. In a report that was due out on July 6th, Greenpeace, an environmental group, argues that public utilities would save money by investing in renewables. Windmills may cost more to build, the logic runs, but they do not require the purchase of fuel, unlike coal or gas-fired power plants. Those future fuel costs, Greenpeace says, massively outweigh the extra investment costs of renewables. If nuclear power were phased out and renewables' share of electricity generation rose dramatically, it calculates the average annual savings between 2004 and 2030 would be $180 billion. These figures, of course, rely on all sorts of questionable assumptions. In Greenpeace's picture, the prices of gas and coal will rise, despite stagnating consumption of the former, and a steep drop in demand for the latter. It also helps that the future as Greenpeace sees it includes a big dose of energy efficiency, although its business-as-usual projections do not. Public utilities, at any rate, must not be making the same assumptions, since they continue to invest in power plants run on fossil fuels. Other studies make a slightly less sweeping claim: that adding wind power to the electricity network can reduce the overall cost of electricity. The cost of producing wind power is almost nothing, since the fuel—wind—is free. So on a windy day, the cheapest power comes from wind turbines. That power, in turn, displaces electricity generation from sources with higher fuel costs, such as gas-fired plants. So power prices tend to fall when the wind is blowing. Nuon, a Dutch utility, calculates that in 2005 the average power price on the local spot market was over Euro 45 per megawatt hour when there was no wind, but under Euro 30 when the average wind-speed topped 13 metres per second. Researchers in Denmark have gone a step further and put a value on this effect. They believe that wind power saved 1 billion kroner ($ 167m) off Danish electricity bills in 2005. On the other hand, Danish consumers also paid 1.4 billion kroner in subsidies for wind power. But this year, reckons Rune Moesgaard of the Danish Wind Industry Association, wind power will actually save consumers' money for the first time, as the benefits resulting from lower power prices outweigh the falling cost of the subsidy.

单选题Without fanfare or legislation, the government is orchestrating a quiet revolution in how it regulates new medicines. The revolution is based on the idea that the sicker people are, the more freedom they should have to try drugs that are not yet fully tested. For fifty years government policy has been driven by another idea; the fear that insufficiently tested medicines could cause deaths and injuries. The urgent needs of people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, and the possibility of meeting them with new drugs have created a compelling countervailing force to the continuing concern with safety. As a result, government rules and practices have begun to change. Each step is controversial. But the shift has already gone far beyond AIDS. New ways are emerging for very sick people to try some experimental drugs before they are marketed. People with the most serious forms of heart disease, cancer, emphysema, Alzheimer" s or Parkinson" s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy , diabetes, or other grave illnesses can request such drugs through their doctors and are likelier to get them than they would have been four years ago. " We" ve been too rigid in not making life-saving drugs available to people who otherwise face certain death," says Representative Henry Wax-man, of California, who heads the subcommittee that considers changes in drug-approval policies. "It" s true of AIDS, but it" s also true of cancer and other life-threatening diseases. " For the first time, desperate patients have become a potent political force for making new medicines available quickly. People with AIDS and their advocates, younger and angrier than most heart-disease or cancer patients, are drawing on two decades of gay activists" success in organizing to get what they want from politicians. At times they found themselves allied with Reagan Administration deregulators, scientists, industry representatives, FDA staff members, and sympathetic members of Congress. They organized their own clinical trials and searched out promising drugs here and abroad. The result is a familiar Washington story; a crisis—AIDS—helped crystallize an informal coalition for reform. AIDS gave new power to old complaints. As early as the 1970s the drug industry and some independent authorities worried that the Food and Drug Administration" s testing requirements were so demanding that new drugs were being unreasonably delayed. Beginning in 1972, several studies indicated that the United States had lost its lead in marketing new medicines and that breakthrough drugs, those that show new promise in treating serious or life—threatening diseases—had come to be available much sooner in other countries. Two high-level commissions urged the early release of breakthrough drugs. So did the Carter Administration, but the legislation it proposed died in Congress. Complaints were compounded by growing concern that "if we didn" t streamline policies, red tape would be an obstacle to the development of the biotechnology revolution," as Frank E. Young, who was the head of the FDA from 1984 to 1989, put it in an interview with me. Young was a key figure in the overhaul of the FDA" s policies. A pioneer in biotechnology and a former dean of the University of Rochester" s medical school, he came to Washington with an agenda and headed the agency for five and a half years—longer than anyone else has since the 1960s. Young took the FDA job to help introduce new medicines created by biotechnology—whose promise he had seen in his own gene-cloning lab and to get experimental medicines to desperately ill people more quickly. He had seen people die waiting for new medicines because " they were in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. That is now changing.