单选题 If our solar system has a Hell, it's Venus. The air is choked with foul and corrosive sulfur, heaved from ancient volcanoes and feeding acid clouds above. Although the second planet is a step farther from the sun than Mercury, a runaway greenhouse effect makes it hotter indeed. It's the hottest of the nine plants, a toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit of baking rocky flats from equator to poles. All this under a crushing atmospheric pressure 90 times that of where you're sitting now. From the earthly perspective, a dead end. It must be lifeless. 'Venus has nothing,' is the blunt word from planetologist Kevin Zahnle of NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. 'We've written it off.' Yet a small group of advanced life-forms on Earth begs to differ, and theorizes that bizarre microbial ecosystems might have once populated Veuns and, in fact, may be there still. Members of this loose band of researchers suggest that their colleagues have water too much on the brain, and are, in a sense, H2O chauvinists (盲目的爱国者). 'Astrobiologists are neglecting Venus due more to narrow thinking than actual knowledge of the environment, or environments, where life can thrive,' says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a geobiologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who recently co-authored a Venus-boosting paper in Astrobiology with colleague Louis Irwin. The bias against life on Venus is partly rooted in our own biology. Human experience instructs that liquid water, preferably lot of it, is essential for life. In search for extraterrestrial life, we obsess over small rivers in Mars' surface apparently carved by ancient gushes of water, and delight in hints of permafrost (永久冻结带) just underneath its surface. (By comparison, Venus isn't even that interesting to look at: A boring cue ball (台球的白色母球) for backyard astronomers, its clouds reflects 75% of visible light.) Attention and then funding follow the water: Three more landers will depart for Mars this spring, and serious plans for sample-return missions hover in the midterm future. 'If you have limited resources, you base exploration on what you know,' says Arizona State University planetary geologist Ronal Greeley. It's like losing your keys on the way home at night: The first place you look is under the streetlights not because they're more likely to be there, but because if they are, you'll spot them. For astrobiologists, the streetlights are the spectral (光谱的) lines for water, and they've spotted that potential on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, even Neptune's moon Triton. Not on the baking rocky flats of Venus.

单选题 Which of the following sentences expresses a future action?

单选题What happened in last December?

单选题She began to ______ something but stopped when she heard the teacher ______.

单选题I"m sorry to tell you that the materials you wanted are ______.

单选题Keep your dictionaries ______ as you write your composition.

单选题Ann never dreams of ______ for her to be sent abroad very soon.

单选题It is suggested in the third paragraph that ______.

单选题 A. abolish B. accelerate C. ambiguity D. bring E. dispense F. evidence G. expenditure H. inquiry I. irrational J. lead K. outpace L. shift M. simply N. striking O. unanimously For the past four decades that basic tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation (增加)—A.I. versus I.A. —has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies. Now, as the pace of technological change continues to 42 , it has become increasingly possible to design computing systems that enhance the human experience, or now—in a growing number of cases—completely 43 with it. Watson is an effort by IBM researchers to advance a set of techniques used to process human language. It provides 44 evidence that computing systems will no longer be limited to responding to simple commands. Machines will increasingly be able to pick out jargon (行话) and even riddles. In attacking the problem of the 45 of human language, computer science is now closing in on what researchers refer to as the 'Paris Hilton problem' —the ability, for example, to determine whether an 46 is being made by someone who is trying to reserve a hotel in France, or 47 to pass time surfing the Internet. Traditionally, economists have argued that while new forms of automation may displace jobs in the short run, over longer periods of time economic growth and job creation have continued to 48 any job-killing technology. Over the past century and a half the 49 from being a largely agrarian (农业的) society to one in which less than 1 percent of the United States labor force is in agriculture is frequently cited as 50 of the economy's ability to reinvent itself. Rapid progress in natural language processing is beginning to 51 to a new wave of automation that promises to transform areas of the economy that have until now been untouched by technological change.

单选题When John left the office, Amy __ at her desk.

单选题Please do not be ______ by his had manners since he is merely trying to attract attention.

单选题A: I'm exhausted. I had to work until 2 o'clock this morning.B: ______.

单选题Several of the washing machines are out of order and they______

单选题The crowd ______ into the hall and some had to stand outside.

单选题 Nothing succeeds in business books like the study of success. The current business-book boom was launched in 1982 by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman with In Search of Excellence. The trend has continued with a succession of experts and would-be experts who promise to distil the essence of excellence into three(or five or seven)simple rules. The Three Rules is a self-conscious contribution to this type of writing; it even includes a bibliography of 'success studies'. Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed work for a consultancy, Deloitte, that is determined to turn itself into more of a thought-leader and less a corporate repairman. They employ all the tricks of the success books. They insist that their conclusions are 'measurable and actionable'—guides to behaviour rather than analysis for its own sake. Success authors usually serve up vivid stories about how exceptional businesspeople stamped their personalities on a company or rescued it from a life-threatening crisis. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed are happier chewing the numbers: they provide detailed appendices on 'calculating the elements of advantage' and 'detailed analysis'. The authors spent five years studying the behaviour of their 344 'exceptional companies', only to come up at first with nothing. Every hunch(直觉)led to a blind alley and every hypothesis to a dead end. It was only when they shifted their attention from how companies behave to how they think that they began to make sense of their voluminous material. Management is all about making difficult tradeoffs in conditions that are always uncertain and often fast-changing. But exceptional companies approach these tradeoffs with two simple rules in mind, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. First: better before cheaper. Companies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they compete on quality or performance than on price. Second: revenue before cost. Companies have more to gain in the long run from driving up revenue than by driving down costs. Most success studies suffer from two faults. There is 'the halo(光环)effect', whereby good performance leads commentators to attribute all manner of virtues to anything and everything the company does. These virtues then suddenly become vices when the company fails. Messrs Raynor and Ahmed work hard to avoid these mistakes by studying large bodies of data over several decades. But they end up embracing a different error: stating the obvious. Most businesspeople will not be surprised to learn that it is better to find a profitable niche (隙缝市场) and focus on boosting your revenues than to compete on price and cut your way to success. The difficult question is how to find that profitable niche and protect it. There, The Three Rules is less useful.

单选题 Questions6-9 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

单选题It is a treasure hunt with a difference: conducted not with metal detectors, but by negotiation. Italy is at last reaping the benefits of a two-year campaign to regain smuggled antiquities. Five American museums have been talked into returning works that they claim to have acquired in good faith. Almost 70 of the finest are now on display in Rome—and they have just been joined by the only known intact work by Euphronios, an Athenian vase-painter. New ground is also being broken with the return of nine items from the private collection of a New York philanthropist, Shelby White. This is the first pact negotiated with an individual. Francesco Rutelli, the culture minister, met Ms White twice in America before the deal was done. She has always maintained that she and her late husband had no idea that the pieces were suspect. A tenth item from their collection, also by Euphronios, is being sent back to Italy in 2010. Under Italian law, any classical artefacts found on Italian soil belong to the state, even if (like Euphronios" vases) they originated in Greece. A former head of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and an American art dealer have been on trial for almost three years in Rome, charged with trafficking in illegally excavated objects. Both deny wrongdoing. Their charge was followed by a deal that officials say is crucial for efforts to curb the traffic in smuggled antiquities. Switzerland has undertaken to require importers of classical artifacts to produce proofs of origin and of legal export. The deals with the museums have all involved give-and-take. In exchange for works claimed by Italy, the museums have been given others on long-term loan. "Italian lovers of art and archaeology will get back what has been stolen, while others abroad will profit from the exhibition of sometimes even more beautiful works," says Mr Rutelli. The deal with the Getty museum was the hardest to do but also the most productive. 40 of the works on show in Rome come from there. But they do not include the "Getty bronze", which the Italians had hoped to retrieve. This third-century BC statue, attributed to Lysippos, Greek sculptor, was caught by Italian fishermen in 1964. The Getty insists that it was found in international waters. The Italians say it was still illegally exported.

单选题An employer has several choices he can consider when he wants to hire a new employee. First, he may look within his own company. But if none of the present employees are suitable for the position, he will have to look outside the company. If his company has a personnel office, he can ask them to help find qualified applicants. There are other valuable sources the employer can use, such as employment agencies, professional societies and so on. He can also advertise in the newspapers and magazines and ask prospective candidates to send in resumes. The employer has two kinds of qualifications to consider when he wants to choose from among applicants. He must consider both professional qualifications and personal characteristics. A candidate's professional qualifications include his education, experience and skills. These can be listed on a resume. Personal characteristics must be evaluated through interviews.

单选题If you don't ______ the children properly, Mr. Chiver, they'll just run riot.

单选题Up until the age of 18, I read very little. I 1 myself to what was necessary for a secondary-school 2 . I was always busy either playing soccer or falling in love. Then came the day when, as a young columnist, my main 3 was to read. And I got to like it. My head spun! An unknown passion took 4 of me. What happened? For me, it was the 5 of a new state of being in love. I began to take possession of books and to annotate them. 6 I would tell them, in an only slightly 7 way, how much I liked them or didn"t. Today, 25 years later, I 8 through my books from those days and it"s magic, finding myself face to face with the young man I once was. Sometimes I 9 him. Other times I find him 10 Certain remarks seem 11 to me now. Others make me happy. I was right about that, I sometimes say to myself. Twenty-five years later I find the 12 trace of my thoughts, my 13 of that time. That"s why I never lend out my books. I give 14 the ones of which I have two 15 and the ones I"ve never read. But the ones I"ve 16 up cannot 17 : they have become my journals, my 18 . To let someone read them would be 19 myself up to scrutiny. I would be allowing others to break into me like a 20 breaks into a house.