单选题What"s your attitude ______ his criticism?

单选题The courage (we desire) and (praise) is not the courage to die (decently) but to live (manly).

单选题A doctor, together with two nurses, ______ sent to the mountain village.

单选题In 1844, Charles Stun. a British soldier and colonial administrator, made an expedition ______ a supposed inland sea; his party penetrated more than 1000 miles northward, almost to the center of Australi

单选题 Reform and Medical Costs A. Americans are deeply concerned about the relentless rise in health care costs and health insurance premiums. They need to know if reform will help solve the problem. The answer is that no one has an easy fix for rising medical costs. The fundamental fix—reshaping how care is delivered and how doctors are paid in a wasteful, abnormal system—is likely to be achieved only through trial and error and incremental (渐进的) gains. B. The good news is that a bill just approved by the House and a bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee would implement or test many reforms that should help slow the rise in medical costs over the long term. As a report in The New England Journal of Medicine concluded, 'Pretty much every proposed innovation found in the health policy literature these days is contained in these measures.' C. Medical spending, which typically rises faster than wages and the overall economy, is propelled by two things: the high prices charged for medical services in this country and the volume of unnecessary care delivered by doctors and hospitals, which often perform a lot more tests and treatments than a patient really needs. D. Here are some of the important proposals in the House and Senate bills to try to address those problems, and why it is hard to know how well they will work. E. Both bills would reduce the rate of growth in annual Medicare payments to hospitals, nursing homes and other providers by amounts comparable to the productivity savings routinely made in other industries with the help of new technologies and new ways to organize work. This proposal could save Medicare more than $100 billion over the next decade. If private plans demanded similar productivity savings from providers, and refused to let providers shift additional costs to them, the savings could be much larger. Critics say Congress will give in to lobbyists and let inefficient providers off the hook (放过). That is far less likely to happen if Congress also adopts strong 'pay-go' roles requiring that any increase in payments to providers be offset by new taxes or budget cuts. F. The Senate Finance bill would impose an excise tax (消费税) on health insurance plans that cost more than $8,000 for an individual or $21,000 for a family. It would most likely cause insurers to redesign plans to fall beneath the threshold. Enrollees would have to pay more money for many services out of their own pockets, and that would encourage them to think twice about whether an expensive or redundant test was worth it. Economists project that most employers would shift money from expensive health benefits into wages. The House bill has no similar tax. The final legislation should. G. Any doctor who has wrestled with multiple forms from different insurers, or patients who have tried to understand their own parade of statements, know that simplification ought to save money. When the health insurance industry was still cooperating in reform efforts, its trade group offered to provide standardized forms for automated processing. It estimated that step would save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. The bills would lock that pledge into law. H. The stimulus package provided money to convert the inefficient, paper-driven medical system to electronic records that can be easily viewed and transmitted. This requires open investments to help doctors convert. In time it should help restrain costs by eliminating redundant tests, preventing drug interactions, and helping doctors find the best treatments. I. Virtually all experts agree that the fee-for-service system—doctors are rewarded for the quantity of care rather than its quality or effectiveness—is a primary reason that the cost of care is so high. Most agree that the solution is to push doctors to accept fixed payments to care for a particular illness or for a patient's needs over a year. No one knows how to make that happen quickly. The bills in both houses would start pilot projects within Medicare. They include such measures as accountable care organizations to take charge of a patient's needs with an eye on both cost and quality, and chronic disease management to make sure the seriously ill, who are responsible for the bulk of all health care costs, are treated properly. For the most part, these experiments rely on incentive payments to get doctors to try them. J. Testing innovations do no good unless the good experiments are identified and expanded and the bad ones are dropped. The Senate bill would create an independent commission to monitor the pilot programs and recommend changes in Medicare's payment policies to urge providers to adopt reforms that work. The changes would have to be approved or rejected as a whole by Congress, making it hard for narrow-interest lobbies to bend lawmakers to their will. K. The bills in both chambers would create health insurance exchanges on which small businesses and individuals could choose from an array of private plans and possibly a public option. All the plans would have to provide standard benefit packages that would be easy to compare. To get access to millions of new customers, insurers would have a strong incentive to lower their prices, perhaps by accepting slimmer profit margins or demanding better deals from providers. L. The final legislation might throw a public plan into the competition, but thanks to the fierce opposition of the insurance industry and Republican critics, it might not save much money. The one in the House bill would have to negotiate rates with providers, rather than using Medicare rates, as many reformers wanted. M. The president's stimulus package is pumping money into research to compare how well various treatments work. Is surgery, radiation or careful monitoring best for prostate (前列腺) cancer? Is the latest and most expensive cholesterol-lowering drug any better than its common competitors? The pending bills would spend additional money to accelerate this effort. N. Critics have charged that this sensible idea would lead to rationing of care. (That would be true only if you believed that patients should have an unrestrained right to treatments proven to be inferior.) As a result, the bills do not require, as they should, that the results of these studies be used to set payment rates in Medicare. O. Congress needs to find the courage to allow Medicare to pay preferentially for treatments proven to be superior. Sometimes the best treatment might be the most expensive. But overall, we suspect that spending would come down through elimination of a lot of unnecessary or even dangerous tests and treatments. P. The House bill would authorize the secretary of health and human services to negotiate drug prices in Medicare and Medicaid. Some authoritative analysts doubt that the secretary would get better deals than private insurers already get. We believe negotiation could work. It does in other countries. Q. Missing from these bills is any serious attempt to rein in malpractice costs. Malpractice awards do drive up insurance premiums for doctors in high-risk specialties, and there is some evidence that doctors engage in 'defensive medicine' by performing tests and treatments primarily to prove they are not negligent should they get sued.

单选题It was ______ for him to wear a T-shirt at the reception. A. out of place B. out of question C. out of order D. out of practice

单选题Tuning in round the clock, via satellite or internet blog, to any bout of mayhem anywhere, you might not think the world was becoming a more peaceable place. But in some ways it is, and measurably so. A recent Human Security Report released by the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia registers a 40% drop in the number of armed conflicts between 1992 and 2003, with the worst wars, those claiming more than a thousand lives in battle, down by 80%. While 28 armed struggles for self-determination ignited or reignited between 1991 and 2004, an encouraging 43 others were contained or doused. Yet measured in a different way, from the point of view of the half of the world's population that is female, argues the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, the world is an awfully violent place, and not just in its war zones. Men still fill most of the body bags in wartime, including in civil wars, even on DCAF's figures, but their sisters, mothers, wives and daughters, it argues in a new report entitled "Women in an Insecure World", face nothing short of a "hidden gendercide". Violence against women is nothing new. DCAF's contribution is to collate the many figures and estimates—not all of them easily verifiable, it has to be said—on everything from infanticide to rape (in both war and peace), dowry deaths, sex trafficking and domestic violence (in richer countries as well as poorer ones). According to one UN estimate cited by DCAF, between 113m and 200m women are now demographically "missing". This gender gap is a result of the aborting of girl foetuses and infanticide in countries where boys are preferred; lack of food and medical attention that goes instead to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons; so-called "honour killings" and dowry deaths; and other sorts of domestic violence. It implies that each year between 1.5m and 3m women and girls are lost to gender-based violence. In other words, every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler's Holocaust. Women between the ages of 15 and 44 are more likely to be maimed or die from violence inflicted one way or another by their menfolk than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined. Poor health care means that 600,000 women are lost each year to childbirth (a toll roughly equal annually to that of the Rwandan genocide). The World Health Organisation estimates that 6,000 girls a day (more than 2m a year), mostly in the poor world, undergo genital mutilation. Other WHO figures suggest that, around the world, one woman in five is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

单选题We will find a lot of time and ways to go over your reading in class before the ______ time.

单选题We're ______ 50 new staff this year as business grows.

单选题In the first semester, I asked my teacher __________.

单选题 A good teacher must be_________too stricttoo weak.

单选题 Housing officials say that lately they are noticing something different: students seem to lack the will, and skill, to address these ordinary conflicts. 'We have students who are mad at each other and they text each other in the same room,' says a teacher. 'So, many of our roommate conflicts are because kids don't know how to negotiate a problem.' And as any pop psychologist will tell you, bottled emotions lead to silent seething (不满) that can boil over into frustration and anger. At the University of Florida, emotional outbursts occur about once a week, the university's director of housing and residence education says. 'It used to be: 'Let's sit down and talk about it,'' he says. 'Over the past five years, roommate conflicts have intensified. The students don't have the person-to-person discussions and they don't know how to handle them.' The problem is most dramatic among freshmen; housing professionals say they see improvement as students move toward graduation, but some never seem to catch on, and they worry about how such students will deal with conflicts after college. Administrators speculate that reliance on cell phones and the Internet may have made it easier for young people to avoid uncomfortable encounters. Why express anger in person when you can vent in a text? Facebook creates even more friction as complaints go public. 'Things are posted on someone's wall on Facebook: 'Oh, my roommate kept me up all night studying,'' says Dana Pysz, an assistant director in the office of residential life at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'It's a different way to express their conflict to each other.' In recent focus groups at North Carolina State University, dorm residents said they would not even confront noisy neighbors on their floor. Administrators point to parents who have fixed their children's problems their entire lives. Now in college, the children lack the skills to attend to even modest conflicts. Some parents continue to intervene on campus.

单选题Calvin had long been known for his mendacity, but even those who knew him well were surprised at the ______ explanation he gave for the shortage of funds.

单选题Mary______all foolish comments and kept on working.

单选题请选出下面划线部分读音不同的选项

单选题The coat I"m wearing now cost about ______ of that one hung over there.

单选题Which of the following isn't mentioned in the three advertisements?

单选题Her successful jump brought a______cheer from the crowd. A. spontaneous B. homogenous C. simultaneous D. instantaneous

单选题The manager threw a party ______ the group of computer experts from the United States. A. in honor of B. in favor of C. in welcome of D. in celebration of