单选题Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions. We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing. Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly unpleasant, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television shot, their decisions tallied well with judgments made after a longer period of examination. In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice." Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors," Lindgaard warns. For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user's first impression even more critical. The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the "halo effect": if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content more favorably. This is because of "cognitive bias". People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to "prove" to themselves that they made a good initial decision. "It's awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize". These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach. It's about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that's where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right. Of course, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. "That can be the difference between big business and no business".

单选题A. kilom_eterB. pr_ettyC. compl_eteD. sc_ene

单选题Pigeons are thought universally as ______ a of peace.

单选题The blue, mystic Lake Ellsinore lies in an inland California valley, which is teeming and steaming with hot springs. Rimmed by shaggy mountains whose forested crests are reflected in its clear waters, Lake Ellsinore is the very personification of peace—but on it rests the curse of Tondo. The lake had a colorful history. Much of it lies buried in legend, and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. There have been stories of underground volcanoes on the lake bottom, erupting, killing fish and discoloring the water. There have been stories of a playful sea serpent that lived in its depths. Long noted for its scenic beauty and health-giving waters, the lake was a famous resort in the Nineties. But long before the first white man had set foot along the shore of the lake, this part of California had been the home of the Soboba Indians. Their chief was Ton-do, a stern and unforgiving man. He had a daughter, Morning Star, who was in love with Palo, son of the chief the Pales, a neighboring tribe. The Sobobas and Pales were sworn enemies. For a time the lovers met secretly. Then one day they were discovered by Tondo. His rage was terrible to behold. He forbade the lovers ever to meet again. Morning Star tried in every way to appease her father's anger, to soften his heart toward Palo. But in time she saw that it was useless; that he would never give his consent to their marriage. Vowing that they would never be separated, the Indian maid and her lover walked hand in hand into the lake, as the dreary November sun cast long shadows on the land. They were followed by a group of orphan children whom Morning Star had befriended. All walked into the lake, singing the mournful death song of their people, while Ton-do stood on the shore and cursed the lovers, cursed the blue water into which they all walked to their death. Ever since that day it would see that a jinx has been laid over Lake Ellsinore. Old-timers tell of a great upheaval in the lake which caused water to spout into the air like a geyser and turn blood-red. Later, it became known that three hundred springs of boiling mud and water were born in the valley during that upheaval. The springs reeked with sulphur. For many years after this phenomenon the lake remained peaceful. Then boats were overturned for an apparent reason, and few of their occupants ever returned to tell the story. This continued for several years. At the same time, strong swimmers dived into the lake never to reappear. In 1833 and again in 1846, fish in the lake suddenly died. In the spring of 1850 came the Battle of the Gnats. They bred in the water of the lake and swarmed over the land. They invaded the countryside until the harassed inhabitants called for help. And in July 1951, the sky-blue waters of the lake vanished like mist before a noonday sun. When the bottom was laid bare there was no trace of a volcano, the bottomless pits, or the other disturbances of legend or fact. The copious winter rains of 1951—1952 have replenished the lake. But what menace does its haunting beauty hold today? For tomorrow? The once mighty Sobobas are few now. But the old men swear that their ancestors still haunt the lake. They nod grizzled head and murmur that the Great Tondo's curse will forever remain upon the lake. Only Time, the wise and silent one, can tell.

单选题Experts advise that parents should develop a sense of______in their children.

单选题______ I'm very much mistaken, that's my watch you're wearing! A. If B. Unless C. Since D. Because

单选题It was a type of urban story that continues to ______ big-city dwellers forward each day, a tale of hard work and self-starting initiative, of taking matters into one's own hands to make dreams come true.(2004年四川大学考博试题)

单选题Perhaps all criminals should be required to carry cards which read: Fragile; Handle with Care. It will never do, these days, to go around referring to criminals as violent thugs. You must refer to them politely as "social misfits". The professional killer who wouldn"t think twice about using his club or knife to batter some harmless old lady to death in order to rob her of her meager life-savings must never be given a dose of his own medicine. He is in need of "hospital treatment". According to his misguided defenders, society is to blame. A wicked society breeds evil—or so the argument goes. When you listen to this kind of talk, it makes you wonder why we aren"t all criminals. We have done away with the absurdly harsh laws of the nineteenth century and this is only right. But surely enough is enough. The most senseless piece of criminal legislation in Britain and a number of other countries has been the suspension of capital punishment. The violent criminal has become a kind of hero-figure in our time. He is glorified on the screen; he is pursued by the press and paid vast sums of money for his "memoirs". Newspapers which specialize in crime reporting enjoy enormous circulations and the publishers of trashy cops and robbers stories or "murder mysteries" have never had it so good. When you read about the achievements of the great train robbers, it makes you wonder whether you are reading about the some glorious resistance movement. The hardened criminal is cuddled and cosseted by the sociologists on the one hand and adored as a hero by the masses on the other. It"s no wonder he is a privileged person who expects and receives VIP treatment wherever he goes. Capital punishment used to be a major deterrent. It made the violent robber think twice before pulling the trigger. It gave the cold-blooded prisoner something to ponder about while he was shaking up or serving his arsenic cocktail. It prevented unarmed policemen from being killed while pursuing their duty by killers armed with automatic weapons. Above all, it protected the most vulnerable members of society, young children, from brutal violence. It is horrifying to think that the criminal can literally get away with murder. We all know that "life sentence" does not mean what it says. After ten years or so of good conduct, the most desperate villain is free to return to society where he will live very comfortably, thank you, on the proceeds of his crime, or he will go on committing offences until he is caught again. People are always willing to hold liberal views at the expense of others. It"s always fashionable to pose as the defender of under-dog, so long as you, personally, remain unaffected. Did the defenders of crime, one wonders, in their desire for fair-play, consult the victims before they suspended capital punishment? Hardly. You see, they couldn"t, because all the victims were dead.

单选题What will make one man happy may not make another man happy. This sentence means ______.

单选题The obese body shook in an appreciative chuckle. A. synecdoche B. transferred epithet

单选题What ______ you do if you were me? A. do B. did C. would D. can

单选题The story of Peter Pan is so Ufascinating/U that all the children like it.

单选题Text 1 It's hard to say for sure what the next big thing will be, but these items made the list of 10 emerging technology trends that will change the world, according to the January issue of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Magazine Technology Review. "We were looking for things that were just emerging now and over the next five years would begin to have a major impact", David Rotman, the magazine's deputy editor, said Thursday. Some of the items have been on the verge of widespread use for quite some time, such as biometrics and speech recognition. Others chosen by the MIT magazine editors are topics that most people have never heard of, such as microphotonics and microfluidics. The magazine focused on developments in three areas: information technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology. One significant area in biotechnology, the magazine highlights, is work on brain-machine interfaces that could someday allow people to control artificial devices that replace lost functions. Today, research is more limited, with scientists able to take signals from individual neurons in an animal's brain and send them to a robot that can turn the signals into motion. But the potential is huge, according to Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis. "Imagine if someone could do for the brain what the pacemaker did for the heart." Nicolelis told the MIT journal. In the purely digital realm, the magazine suggests that the field of robotics could be poised to move beyond the restricted market of Performing simple, highly repetitive tasks. "Robot builders make a convincing case that in 2001, robots are where personal computers were in 1980", writes Technology Review senior editor David Talbot, "poised to break into the marketplace as common corporate tools and routine consumer products performing life's tedious chores." Until now the problem has been that robots have been costly and difficult to design. One approach that the magazine highlights is the work of Brandeis University researcher Jordan Pollack, who builds robots that can build other robots.

单选题Biologists estimate that as many as 2 million lesser prairie chickens—a kind of bird living on stretching grasslands—once lent red to the often grey landscape of the midwestern and southwestern United States. But just some 22,000 birds remain today, occupying about 16% of the species" historic range. The crash was a major reason the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) decided to formally list the bird as threatened. "The lesser prairie chicken is in a desperate situation," said USFWS Director Daniel Ashe. Some environmentalists, however, were disappointed. They had pushed the agency to designate the bird as "endangered", a status that gives federal officials greater regulatory power to crack down on threats. But Ashe and others argued that the "threatened" tag gave the federal government flexibility to try out new, potentially less confrontational conservations approaches. In particular, they called for forging closer collaborations with western state governments, which are often uneasy with federal action, and with the private landowners who control an estimated 95% of the prairie chicken"s habitat. Under the plan, for example, the agency said it would not prosecute landowner or businesses that unintentionally kill, harm, or disturb the bird, as long as they had signed a range-wide management plan to restore prairie chicken habitat. Negotiated by USFWS and the states, the plan requires individuals and businesses that damage habitat as part of their operations to pay into a fund to replace every acre destroyed with 2 new acres of suitable habitat. The fund will also be used to compensate landowners who set aside habitat. USFWS also set an interim goal of restoring prairie chicken populations to an annual average of 67,000 birds over the next 10 years. And it gives the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA), a coalition of state agencies, the job of monitoring progress. Overall, the idea is to let "states remain in the driver"s seat for managing the species," Ashe said. Not everyone buys the win-win rhetoric. Some Congress members are trying to block the plan, and at least a dozen industry groups, four states, and three environmental groups are challenging it in federal court. Not surprisingly, industry groups and states generally argue it goes too far, environmentalists say it doesn"t go far enough. "The federal government is giving responsibility for managing the bird to the same industries that are pushing it to extinction." says biologist Jay Lininger.

单选题His eighth book came out earlier this year and was a(n)______bestseller.(四川大学2010年试题)

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} In old days, when a glimpse of stocking was looked upon as something far too shocking to distract the serious work of an office, secretaries were men. Then came the first World War and the male secretaries were replaced by women. A man's secretary became his personal servant, charged with remembering his wife's birthday and buying her presents; taking his suits to the dry cleaners; telling lies on the telephone to keep people he did not wish to speak to at bay and, of course, typing and filing and taking shorthand. Now all this may be changing again. The microchip and high technology is sweeping the British office, taking with it much of the routine clerical work that secretaries did. "Once office technology takes over generally, the status of the job will rise again because it will involve only the high-powered work-and then men will want to do it again." That was said by one of the executives(male) of one of the biggest secretarial agencies in this country. What he has predicted is already under way in the US. One girl described to me a recent temporary job placing men in secretarial jobs in San Francisco. She noted that all the men she dealt with appeared to be gay so possibly that is just a new twist to the old story. Over here, though, there are men coming onto the job market as secretaries. Classically, girls have learned shorthand and typing and gone into a company to seek their fortune from the bottom——and that's what happened to John Bowman. Although he joined a national grocery chain as secretary to its first woman senior manager, he has since been promoted to an administration job. "I filled in the application form and said I could do audio/typing, and in fact I was the only applicant. The girls were reluctant to work for this young, glamorous new woman with all this power in the firm. " "I did typing at school, and then a commercial course. I just thought it would be useful finding a job. I never got any funny treatment from the girls, though I admit I've never met another male secretary. But then I joined the Post Office as a clerk and carelessly played with the typewriter, and wrote letters, and thought that after all secretaries were getting a good ￡1,000 a year more than clerks like me. There was a shortage at that time, you see. " "It was simpler working for a woman than for a man. I found she made decisions, she told everybody what she thought, and there was none of that stuff' ring this number for me dear, which men go in for." "Don't forget, we were a team—that's how I about it—not boss and servant but two people doing different things for the same purpose." Once high technology has made the job of secretary less routine, will there be male takeover? Men should beware of thinking that they can walk right into the better jobs. There are a lot of women secretaries who will do the job as well as they because they are as efficient and well trained to cope with word processors and computers, and men.

单选题______ "hello", he reached out his hand.

单选题Which one is the most suitable title for this small piece of article?

单选题This passage is probably taken from a book on ______.