单选题The passage tells us______

单选题We ______ down when a waitress ______ plates of food for us. A) had hardly sat / had brought B) hardly sat / brought C) hardly sat / had brought D) had hardly sat / brought

单选题Forget Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? The theme song of this recession might well be "Mother, Can You Write a Check?" The distressing economy has resulted in increasing numbers of parents and grandparents helping out their strapped adult children and grandkids with home down payments, credit-card bailouts (紧急财政援助), and spare cash—often at the same time as parents are trying to confront new retirement budgets. "We are seeing a ton of this," says Ross Levin, in Edina, Minn. , a financial adviser. "Sometimes it"s a great idea and sometimes it is not. You have to make sure you put on your own oxygen mask first." Some 62 percent of visitors to Grandparents. com have helped their kids financially in the past year, with 70 percent of that group handing over cash to help their adult children and grandchildren with daily expenses, says the site"s CEO, Jerry Shereshewsky. Another popular category is housing; in the last year many parents have coughed up down payments to help their kids get into homes while the 8,000 first-time home buyer"s credit was in effect. Then there"s the debt-bailout situation. A survey recently conducted by Creditcards. com for Newsweek found that 42 percent of folks with adult children have helped them pay off car loans, credit cards, medical bills, and more. None of this is surprising to Shereshewsky, who sees the trend as a natural result of changing families and the distribution of wealth. "This is where all the money is—and it"s where the money is, despite the fact that we"ve had this meltdown." In general, the baby-boom generation is far wealthier than their children are, and has a lower unemployment rate than 20-something"s. He says that the vast majority of multi-generation households now involve adult children (and sometimes their children) moving in with aging parents. Baby-boom parents generally aspire to help their kids and their grandchildren and don"t want to wait until they are dead to do it. "You should give while you"re young enough to enjoy the fruits of what you"re doing," says Shereshewsky, who is personally considering getting a reverse mortgage on his home when it comes time to help his 20-something kids with home purchases.

单选题The way people shop ______

单选题_____to the left, and you will find the path reaching to the top of the hill.

单选题 Austin had made no grammar mistakes in his thesis paper, but ______ had he well prepared for it.

单选题 The medical world is gradually realizing that the quality of the environment in hospitals may play a significant role in the process of recovery from illness. As part of a nationwide effort in Britain to bring art out of the galleries and into public places, some of the country's most talented artists have been called in to transform older hospitals and to soften the hard edges of modern buildings. Of the 2,500 National Health Service hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have significant collections of contemporary art in corridors, waiting areas and treatment rooms. These recent initiatives owe a great deal to one artist, Peter Senior, who set up his studio at a Manchester hospital in northeastern England during the early 1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and that art should be enjoyed by a wider audience. A typical hospital waiting room might have as many as 500 visitors each week. What better place to hold regular exhibitions of art? Senior held the first exhibition of his own paintings in the out-patients waiting area of the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to be Britain's first hospital artist, Senior was so much in demand that he was soon joined by a team of six young art school graduates. The effect is striking. Now in the corridors and waiting rooms the visitor experiences a full view of fresh colors, playful images and restful courtyards. The quality of the environment may reduce the need for expensive drugs when a patient is recovering from an illness. A study has shown that patients who had a view onto a garden needed half the number of strong pain killers compared with patients who had no view at all or only a brick wall to look at.

单选题The coming of automation is ______ to have important social consequences.

单选题 Don't Fear the Male Babysitter For decades, boys, not girls, were seen as the ideal people to take care of children. Why did that change? A. The very thought of a male babysitter (保姆) is enough to make some parents anxious. Every online parenting forum seems to have a thread on the issue of male babysitters, such as 'Hiring a Male Babysitter (or Manny)' on the site Park Slope Parents. In a satire (讽刺作品) on The Onion titled 'Desperate Morn Okays Male Babysitter,' the morn normally wouldn't hire a male babysitter and knew it wasn't ideal, but she really needed the night off. B. In an article for the Washington Post earlier this year, author Petula Dvorak hires a male babysitter and realizes it 'is apparently something few parents would do.' She said she received raised eyebrows from other parents at the playground when she introduced the new sitter and felt compelled to explain how long she's known him and how much she likes him to anyone who would listen. 'When it comes to kids, we are pretty close to being a society that has demonized (妖魔化) men,' Dvorak writes, noting that a government study found that in 96 percent of sexual assaults on children the offenders were male. C. This anxiety about male babysitters is remarkable when you look at the history of babysitting. Throughout the twentieth century, boys were not only as accepted as babysitters, they were often preferred over girls. The reason is twofold: Teenage girls were dismissed as flighty (轻浮的) and selfish; and young boys needed male role models as their fathers were unemployed during the Great Depression or gone all week at work in the latter half of the century. D. According to Miriam Forman-Brunell, a history professor and the author of Babysitter: An American History., babysitting in its modern incarnation (化身) came about in the 1920s, with 'the expansion of suburbs for the first time.' Parents were more likely to be separated from extended family members that once were relied on to watch children. Coincidentally, the 1920s also gave rise to the notion of a modem teenage girl who cared more about boys, movies and makeup than taking care of kids. To adults, the rise of the teenage girl signaled disorder and fueled anxieties. E. As Forman-Brunell writes, because adolescent girls 'attended sports events and flirted with men on the street comers, especially in front of the innocent babies they took care of,' the authors of a popular mid-1920s child-rearing manual criticized adolescent girls and dismissed them as acceptable child-care providers. F. Although babysitting first appeared in the 1920s, it didn't flourish as a cultural phenomenon until after World War Ⅱ. The baby boom created plentiful jobs for babysitters. Still, though women had enjoyed greater employment opportunities during World War Ⅱ, parents were hesitant to use a female babysitter. During this period, 'parents were very anxious about hiring the girl next door, as has always been the case. It just has so much to do with their perception of teenage girls,' says Forman-Brunell. G. Even as teenage girls were provoking anxiety in parents, male babysitters were idealized as the perfect solution. During the Great Depression, Forman-Brunell says, unemployed adolescent boys became 'saviours (救星) to upset mothers and tired housewives unsatisfied with neighborhood girls.' H. In glowing descriptions in Parents Magazine from the 1930s, it seemed as if there was nothing boy helpers couldn't do. Some child-rearing experts during the Great Depression believed that male babysitters could go so far as to 'restore boyhood' for their young charges. While husbands became depressed due to unemployment or deserted their families, Parents Magazine reassured readers that boys were up to the task of babysitting. I. 'It's surprising that you would find the entrepreneurial, perfect male babysitter in popular culture, but he's everywhere,' says Forman-Brunell, 'and he's not burdened by the same expectations that girls are.' Being smart, competitive, and business-oriented were all considered positive characteristics of a male babysitter. J. By the late 1940s, some Ivy-League schools institutionalized babysitting for male college students. For example, Forman-Brunell writes, male undergraduates at Princeton organized the 'Tiger Tot Tending Agency' where, beginning in 1946, 'college boys babysat for the children of faculty members and married students for thirty-five cents an hour.' One mother who hired male babysitters through the Tiger Tot agency told Princeton Alumni Weekly, 'I loved the idea of four tall and strong young men watching over my baby daughter. Diapers (尿布) were changed with efficiency and calmness.' Four men came for the price of one babysitter so they could have enough people for a bridge game. K. A 1940s New Yorker article reported that the Columbia University football coach—a former babysitter himself—created a sitting service for his players and was just as proud of their babysitting accomplishments as their hard work on the football field. The strong babysitters were able to maintain their manliness while caring for children. While tales of hellish babysitter experiences with teenage girls who racked up phone bills and ignored screaming children in order to be with their boyfriends continued to populate the media, so did accounts of capable, responsible male babysitters. L. When fathers were away at work in the 1950s, it was up to male sitters to instill manliness in young boys and turn boys into hardy men. A Life Magazine cover story reported that 23 percent of the 7.9 million boys in the United States worked as babysitters in 1957, collectively earning an estimated $319 million. M. Even as gender differences began to blur in the 1970s, male babysitters were still seen as an ideal, as is apparent in the children's book George the Babysitter (1977). Long-haired George would cook and clean each day for the kids he babysat, and at the end of the day liked to sit and read a football magazine. The book made teenage boy babysitters seem both domestic and masculine. Up until the end of the 20th century, popular culture and children's books such as Arthur Babysits (1992) and Jerome the Babysitter (1995) boosted the reputation of teenage boys as smart, dependable babysitters. N. But today babysitting is most commonly viewed as a woman's domain. A Red Cross Babysitter Training Course video shows two women, one white and one black, babysitting. But there are no male sitters in the video. According to a Wall Street Journal article published earlier this year, Sittercity.com, an online marketplace for babysitting, has 94 percent female sitters, while SmartSitting.com, an agency that matches highly educated sitters with New York families reports that 87 percent of its sitters are female. O. Men have been so erased from the history of babysitting that the same Wall Street Journal article wrongly compares babysitting with cooking, saying, 'Could childcare someday go the way of cooking? In the 1950s everyone assumed that women were better in the kitchen...these days, of course, cooking is gender neutral.' The writer imagines a time in the future when babysitting 'is no longer considered a girl's job.' Little does she know that up until about 20 years ago, it wasn't a girl's job.

单选题The leaders of the two countries feel it desirable to______funds from armaments to health and education.

单选题According to the last paragraph, the service quality of American service personnel may depend on ______

单选题Mr. White brought a countercharge against you because you had______ him for smuggling several pieces of antiques and cultural relics.

单选题Before the age of the Internet, we used to ________ our holidays through travel agents.

单选题 Professor Smith and Professor Brown will ______ in presenting the series of lectures on American literature.

单选题Scientists generally hold that language has been so long in use that the length of time writing is known to cover is ______in Comparison.

单选题此题为音频题

单选题It is the third time that I ______ here.

单选题Susan made careful ______as to the kinds of cake and candy needed for her party.