单选题{{B}}11-15{{/B}} It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean's largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is now listed as an endangered species. Attaching radio devices to it is difficult, and visual sightings are too unreliable to give real insight into its behavior. So biologists were delighted early this year when with the help of the Navy they were able to track a particular blue whale for 33 days monitoring its sounds. This was possible because of the Navy's formerly top-secret system of underwater listening devices spanning the oceans. Tracking whales is but one example of an exciting new world just opening to civilian scientists after the cold war as the Navy starts to share and partly uncover its global network of underwater listening system built over the decades to track the ships of potential enemies. Earth scientists announced at a news conference recently that they had used the system for closely monitoring a deep-sea volcanic eruption (爆发) for the first time and that they plan similar studies. Other scientists have proposed to use the network for tracking ocean currents and measuring changes in ocean and global temperatures. The speed of sound in water is roughly one mile a second--slower than through land but faster than through air. What is most important, different layers of ocean water can act as channels for sounds, focusing them in the same way a stethoscope (听诊器)does when it carries faint noises from a patient's chest to a doctor's ear. This focusing is the main reason that even relatively weak sounds in the ocean, especially low-frequency ones, can often travel thousands of miles.

单选题 Regular child care provided outside home or by someone other than the mother does not in itself undermine healthy emotional connections between mothers and their 15-month-old infants, according to a long-term national study. The finding holds even if care begins during the first 3 months after birth and runs for 30 hours or more per week. Among infants who receive unkind and unresponsive care from their mothers, however, the mother-child relationship may be damaged. "This research helps us put apart complexities regarding child care that have not previously been studied in detail," contends Jay Belsky, a psychologist. The investigation consists of 1,153 children and their families living in or near Boston. The youngsters, no more than I month old when they entered the study in 1991, will be tracked until the age of 7. Experimenters administered questionnaires to mothers in their homes and videotaped baby caretakers interacting with the kids at ages 1,6, and 15 months. Independent observers rated the quality of each child care efforts and noted infant nervousness. Unlike most previous studies, this one allows researchers to observe each caretaker's personality at child nursing, and kids' emotional reaction by the equipment.

单选题Man: Does the rent include telephone bills? Landlady: ______

单选题Patient: I"d like to make an appointment with Dr. Brooks. Nurse: ______

单选题On average, American kids aged 3 to 12 spent 29 hours a week in school, eight hours more than they did in 1981. They also did more household work and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet (芭蕾舞). Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boys now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children"s leisure time dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25 %. "Children are affected by the same time crunch (危机) that affects their parents," says Sandra Hofferth, who headed the recent study of children"s timetable. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both double-income and "male breadwinner" households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with their parents, 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mothers. ) All work and no play could make for some very messed-up kids. "Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself," says T. Berry Brazel-ton, professor at Harvard Medical School. Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers, but kids aged 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it. The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly decreasing "free time" watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. If they"re spending less time in front of the TV set, however, kids aren"t replacing it with reading. Despite efforts to get kids more interested in books, the children spent just over an hour a week reading. Let"s face it, who"s got the time? (310 words)

单选题Minimum wage is the ______ amount of money per hour that an employer may legally pay a worker.

单选题The information was later admitted ______ obtained from unreliable sources. A. that it was B. that it has been C. to be D. to have been

单选题Even plants can run a fever, especially when they're under attack by insects or disease. But unlike humans, plants can have their temperature taken from 3,000 feet away-straight up. A decade ago, adapting the infrared scanning technology developed for military purposes and other satellites, physicist Stephen Paley came up with a quick way to take the temperature of crops to determine which ones are under stress. The goal was to let farmers precisely target pesticide (杀虫剂) spraying rather than rain poison on a whole field, which invariably includes plants that don't have pest (害虫) problems. Even better, Paley's Remote Scanning Services Company could detect crop problems before they became visible to the eye. Mounted on a plane flown at 3,000 feet at night, an infrared scanner measured the heat emitted by crops. The data were transformed into a color-coded map showing where plants were running "fevers". Farmers could then spot-spray, using 40 to 70 percent less pesticide than they otherwise would. The bad news is that Paley's company closed down in 1984, after only three years. Farmers resisted the new technology and long-term backers were hard to find. But with the renewed concern about pesticides on produce, and refinements in infrared scanning, Paley hopes to get back into operation. Agriculture experts have no doubt the technology works. "This technique can be used on 75 percent of agricultural land in the United States," says George Oerther of Texas A＆M. Ray Jackson, who recently retired from the Department of Agriculture, and thinks remote infrared crop scanning could be adopted by the end of the decade. But only if Paley finds the financial backing which he failed to obtain 10 years ago.

单选题Generations of Americans have been brought up to believe that a good breakfast is one of life"s essentials. Eating breakfast at the start of the day, we have all been told, is as necessary as putting gasoline in the family car before starting a trip. But for many people the thought of food first thing in the morning is by no means a pleasure. So despite all the efforts, they still take no breakfast. Between 1977 and 1983, the latest year for which figures are available, the number of people who didn"t have breakfast increased by 33 percent from 8. 8 million to 11. 7 million, according to the Chicago-based Market Research Corporation of America. For those who feel pain of guilt about not eating breakfast, however, there is some good news. Several studies in the last few years indicate that, for adults especially, there may be nothing wrong with omitting breakfast. "Going without breakfast does not affect performance. " said Arnold E. Bender, former professor of nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College in London, "nor does giving people breakfast improve performance. " Scientific evidence linking breakfast to better health or better performance is surprisingly inadequate, and most of the recent work involves children, not adults. "The literature ," says one researcher, Dr. Ernesto Pollitt at the University of Texas, "is poor. "

单选题 Certainly, the most popular method of traveling used by Americans is the privately-owned automobile. The vast majority of Americans have a car, and many families have two. {{U}}(31) {{/U}}during your visit to the United States, you may decide to rent a car to travel outside the city or to travel to other parts of the country. Car rental companies are {{U}}(32) {{/U}} in the telephone book and are located in most cities and towns. {{U}}(33) {{/U}}, there are usually rental cars at airports and train and bus stations. As is true everywhere in the world, you can rent a car {{U}}(34) {{/U}} the day, week, or month. Some companies {{U}}(35) {{/U}} have special weekend rates that you may find especially interesting if you have only a limited {{U}}(36) {{/U}} of time to travel around the area you are visiting. Since each company has its own rules and rates, it is a good idea to {{U}}(37) {{/U}} prices among companies to get the best rates to. suit your purposes. For example, most car rental costs {{U}}(38) {{/U}} how long you plan to keep the car and how far you travel. However, some companies may include gasoline in their rates, but {{U}}(39) {{/U}} do not. Some companies require that you {{U}}(40) {{/U}} the car to its starting point; others will permit you to leave the car in another city.

单选题Of all the soldiers they had the ______ of being the fiercest, the most patriotic and the toughest. A. recognition B. reservation C. reputation D. recreation

单选题Tina: Mmm.... This is the best pudding I"ve ever had! Lyle: ______? I know you"d like it.

单选题 {{B}}Directions: {{/B}} There are ten short incomplete dialogues between two speakers, each followed by four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the answer that appropriately suits the conversational context and best completes the dialogue. Mark your answer on the {{B}}ANSWER SHEET{{/B}} by drawing with a pencil a short bar across the corresponding letter in the brackets.

单选题Speaker A: Ten dollars for this brand? Speaker B:______I got it in a second hand store.

单选题(Despite of) (many) attempts (to introduce) a universal language, notably Esperanto and Idiom Neutral(世界语和人造语言), the effort has met with very (little) success.A. Despite ofB. manyC. to introduceD. little

单选题{{B}}16-20{{/B}} In the United States elementary education begins at the age of six. At this stage nearly all the teachers are women, mostly married. The atmosphere is usually very friendly, and the teachers have now accepted the idea that the important thing is to make the children happy and interested. The old authoritarian (要绝对服从的) methods of education were discredited (不被认可) rather a long time ago—so much so that many people now think that they have gone too far in the direction of trying to make children happy and interested rather than giving them actual instruction. The social education of young children tries to make them accept the idea that human beings in a society need to work together for their common good. So the emphasis is on cooperation rather than competition throughout most of this process. This may seem curious, in view of the fact that American society is highly competitive; however, the need for making people sociable in this sense has come to be regarded as one of the functions of education. Most Americans do grow up with competitive ideas, and obviously quite a few as criminals, but it is not fair to say that the educational system fails. It probably does succeed in making most people sociable and ready to help one another both in material ways and through kindness and friendliness.

单选题Most people who travel long distance complain of jetlag. Jetlag makes business travelers less productive and more prone (31) making mistakes. It is actually caused by (32) of your "body clock"—a small cluster of brain cells that controls the timing of biological (33) . The body clock is designed for a (34) rhythm of daylight and darkness, so that it is thrown out of balance when it (35) daylight and darkness at the "wrong" times in a new time zone. The (36) of jetlag persist for days (37) the internal body clock slowly adjusts to the new time zone. Now a new anti-jetlag system is (38) that is based on proven (39) .pioneering scientific research. Dr. Martin Mooreede had (40) a practical strategy to adjust the body clock much sooner to the new time zone through controlled exposure to bright light.

单选题Sporting activities are essentially modified forms of hunting behavior. Viewed biologically, the modem foot-bailer is in reality a member of a bunting group. His killing weapon has turned into a harmless football and his prey (猎物) into a goalmouth. If his aim is accurate and he scores a goal, be enjoys the hunter's triumph of killing his prey. To understand how this transformation has taken place we must briefly look back at our forefathers. They spent over a million years evolving as cooperative hunters. Their very survival depended on success in the hunting-field. Under this pressure their whole way of life, even their bodies, became greatly changed. They became chasers, runners, jumpers, aimers, throwers and prey-killers. They cooperated as skillful male-group attackers. Then about ten thousand years ago, after this immensely long period of hunting their food, they became farmers. Their improved intelligence, so vital to their old hunting life, was put to a new use—that of controlling and domesticating their prey. The hunt became suddenly out of date. The food was there on the farms, awaiting their needs. The risks and uncertainties of the hunt were no longer essential for survival.