单选题Lexical changes CANNOT be identified in ______. A. lexical change proper B. phonological Change C. mopho-syntactical change D. syntactical change

单选题Just as each wedding creates potential business for divorce lawyers, so each engagement gives insurers a chance to drum up business. Future spouses, says Alan Tuvin of Travelers, an insurer, may wish to protect themselves against something going wrong on the wedding day. It is unlikely that your intended wife will leave on horseback, as Julia Roberts did in "Runaway Bride", and most insurers wouldn"t cover that anyway. But you never know what might happen. Mr. Tuvin launched the firm"s wedding-insurance business; he and his wife were its first clients. A typical American wedding costs 25,000 or so. This has fallen a bit over the past quarter-century but still seems lavish given how tight American belts are these days. Weddings are pricey because the rich are more likely to marry than the poor, and the average age of newlyweds has gone up, so couples are more prosperous when they eventually tie the knot. High prices, and the fact that many venues require couples to take out liability insurance, feed demand for wedding insurance. A fifth of couples buy it, says the Wedding Report , a trade publication. Wedding insurance began in Britain: Cornhill, an insurer, wrote its first policy in 1988. But there were few takers. The idea only took off once transplanted to America. In the early days, says Mr. Nuccio of Robert Nuccio of Wedsure, an surer, there were incidents of couples faking engagements to collect a payout. Since then, most policies have a clause that excludes "change of heart". Wedsure does insure against cold feet, but its policy will pay out only if the wedding is cancelled more than 12 months before it is due to take place, thereby guarding against fiancés phoning the broker once the relationship is already on the rocks. This does not mean policies are useless. Common causes of payouts include the venue or caterers going bust after having taken a big deposit. Extreme weather, a spouse being deployed by the armed forces and an absent priest can all trigger payouts. Most policies will pay to re-stage the photos if the photographer fails to turn up or disappears with the pictures. For some, even a small risk of something going wrong on a day that has been planned for months is worth paying to avoid. Who says romance is dead?

单选题The employees tried to settle the dispute by direct _____with the boss

单选题The decline in the price of biotech stocks has hurt many institutions that had invested heavily in biotech companies. Last year the state university added 200,000 shares of a biotech stock to its holdings. The stock in question has declined in value by more than 90 percent over the last 12 months. The college, however, did not purchase the stock, but received it as a gift. Therefore, the price decline will not harm the university's finances. Which of the following, if true, casts the most doubt on the conclusion that the price decline of biotech stocks will not harm the university's finances? A. The biotech sector is volatile; some stocks that lose 90 percent of their value in one year may regain all of their value and more in the following year. B. The university needs to pay capital gains taxes only on a stock sale that results in a gain; stocks sold at a loss will incur no tax penalty. C. Although the biotech sector is down, the overall health-care sector, in which the university has invested heavily, is up for the year. D. The biotech company in question has a promising new drug in development that could revolutionize the treatment of type Ⅱ diabetes. E. The university began construction of a new laboratory last year that the provost had expected to pay for with the proceeds from the sale of the biotech stock in question.

单选题Whoistheauthorofthework:"TheGrapesofWrath"?

单选题If a cube has a volume of 125, what is the surface area of one side? A. 5 B. 25 C. 50 D. 150 E. 625

单选题This dictionary is for people who want to use modern English. It offers accurate and detailed information on the way modern English is used in all kinds of communication. It is a useful guide to writing and speaking English as well as an aid to reading and understanding. This dictionary looks rather like most others if you don"t look too closely. Actually it is quite new and different. The techniques used to compile it are new and use advanced computer technology. For the user, the kind of information is different, the quality of information is different, and the presentation of the information is different. For the first time, a dictionary has been compiled by the thorough examination of a representative group of English text, spoken and written, running to many millions of words. This means that in addition to all the tools of the conventional dictionary makers—wide reading and experience of English, other dictionaries and of course eyes and ears—this dictionary is based on hard, measurable evidence. No major uses are missed, and the number of times a use occurs has a strong influence on the way the entries are organized. Equally, the large group of texts, called the corpus, gives us reasonable grounds for omitting many uses and word-forms that do not occur in it. It is difficult for a conventional dictionary, in the absence of evidence, to decide what to leave out, and a lot of quite misleading information is thus preserved in the tradition of lexicography. This dictionary makes a break with such traditions. We have gone back to basics and collected many millions of words, and put them into a very large computer. The dictionary team has had daily access to about 20 million words, with many more in specialized stores. The words came from books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, conversation, radio and television broadcasts. The sources are gratefully acknowledged on page xxii. The aim was to provide a fair representation of contemporary English. No set of texts, however large, can be fully relied on; all the time the information from the texts has been analysed and appraised by a team of lexicographers, whose professional knowledge has also been used wherever there is only a small amount of evidence of the usage of a word or phrase. The quality of information in this dictionary is different from others. With our textural evidence it is possible to be precise about the shape of phrases and the extent of their variation; the relative importance of different senses of a word; and the typical environment in which a word or phrase is used. Even when statements like this are already familiar, they are made with a different kind of authority in this book.

单选题When Brad offered his old wooden desk at a garage sale, no one bought it, even though he offered it for only $10. When he offered it at the local auction house, however, someone bought it for $850. Which of the following, if true, best explains why Brad was able to sell the desk for a high price at the auction while he could not sell it for a much lower price at the garage sale? A. Brad advertised that the proceeds of the garage sale would benefit a local charity, while he made no such claims for the proceeds from the auction. B. One of the legs of the desk was shorter than the other three, producing an unbalanced writing surface. C. The auction house specializes in selling antique furniture, which is generally valued more highly than the discarded furniture sold at garage sales. D. Brad insisted that anyone who bought the desk had to use it as an actual workspace. E. Prospective buyers at auctions are often more interested in the auction process than in the items up for bid.

单选题Four broadcasting organizations were ordered by a judge yesterday to give the police the untransmitted film of a riot in Whitechapel, East London, last month. In a separate move, police have asked 25 print and broadcasting organizations to hand over all photographic and video material of violence at Welling, Kent, 10 days ago, and to provide a full list of reporters and photographers attending. Media lawyers believe it is the first time that police have demanded such a list. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said yesterday that the Metropolitan Police"s action endangered the safety of those reporting outbreaks of disorder. Judge Gerald Butler ruled in the Whitechapel case at Southwark crown court that public interest demanded the BBC, ITN, Sky News and London News Network should surrender footage of violence. Establishing the guilt or innocence of those involved "for outweighed perceived loss of integrity" of the TV companies. The violence on September 10 involved 300 mainly Asian demonstrators outside the Royal London Hospital where a man was in a coma following a racist attack. Thirty-one police officers and five members of the public were injured. Judge Butler said: "This material is crucial to these matters. I do not see how the integrity and impartiality of these involved should be affected when it is an order of the courts." A spokeswoman for ITN declined to comment on the Southwark case, but said the BBC, ITN and Sky and agreed common guidelines for dealing with police requests for film. Under the guidelines broadcasters would require a signed statement from police, giving precise details of an alleged offence and the location where it was supposed to have occurred. The guidelines are designed to prevent a general fishing expedition by the police. INT said: "We do not want to impede or obstruct the course of justice, but we have our impartial reporting and reputation to maintain." Forty-one demonstrators and 19 police officers were injured in violence at Welting, which erupted when Anti-Nazi League protesters were prevented from marching on a British National Party bookshop. A letter from Detective Inspector Brian George warns editors that failure to hand over material will result in a crown court application under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Tim Gopsill, spokesman for the NUJ, exposed surprise that the police were seeking material from Welling because they had used their own photographers and cameramen to record the march. He accused the police of carrying out a general trawl for material. At least five photographers had been attacked at Welling, Mr. Gopsill said. Photographers would be put in serious danger if demonstrators believed their pictures were going to be used to prosecute them. A number of demonstrators who took part in the Trafalgar Square toll tax riot of 1990 were jailed as a result of photographic evidence obtained by police form media organizations.

单选题For years, studies have found that first-generation college students—those who do not have a parent with a college degree—lag other students on a range of education achievement factors. Their grades are lower and their dropout rates are higher. But since such students are most likely to advance economically if they succeed in higher education, colleges and universities have pushed for decades to recruit more of them. This has created "a paradox" in that recruiting first-generation students, but then watching many of them fail, means that higher education has "continued to reproduce and widen, rather than close" an achievement gap based on social class, according to the depressing beginning of a paper forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. But the article is actually quite optimistic, as it outlines a potential solution to this problem, suggesting that an approach (which involves a one-hour, next-to-no-cost program) can close 63 percent of the achievement gap (measured by such factors as grades) between first-generation and other students. The authors of the paper are from different universities, and their findings are based on a study involving 147 students (who completed the project) at an unnamed private university. First generation was defined as not having a parent with a four-year college degree. Most of the first-generation students (59.1 percent) were recipients of Pell Grants, a federal grant for undergraduates with financial need, while this was true only for 8.6 percent of the students with at least one parent with a four-year degree. Their thesis—that a relatively modest intervention could have a big impact—was based on the view that first-generation students may be most lacking not in potential but in practical knowledge about how to deal with the issues that face most college students. They cite past research by several authors to show that this is the gap that must be narrowed to close the achievement gap. Many first-generation students "struggle to navigate the middle-class culture of higher education, learn the "rules of the game," and take advantage of college resources," they write. And this becomes more of a problem when collages don"t talk about the class advantage and disadvantages of different groups of students. Because US colleges and universities seldom acknowledge how social class can affect students" educational experience, many first-generation students lack sight about why they are struggling and do not understand how students like them can improve.

单选题The giant Moby Dick may symbolize all EXCEPT _________.

单选题The size of a flat-screen television is given as the length of the screen's diagonal. How many square inches greater is the screen of a square 34-inch flat-screen television than a square 27-inch fiat-screen television? A. 106.75 B. 213.5 C. 427 D. 729 E. 1,156

单选题"A writer"s job is to tell the truth," said Hemingway in 1942. No other writer of our time had so fiercely asserted, so pugnaciously defended or so consistently exemplified the writer"s obligation to speak truly. His standard of truth-telling remained, moreover, so high and so rigorous that he was ordinarily unwilling to admit secondary evidence, whether literary evidence or evidence picked up from other sources than his own experience. "I only know what I have seen," was a statement which came often to his lips and pen. What he had personally done, or what he knew unforgettably by having gone through one version of it, was what he was interested in telling about. This is not to say that he refused to invent freely. But he always made it a sacrosanct point to invent in terms of what he actually knew from having been there. The primary intent of his writing, from first to last, was to seize and project for the reader what he often called "the way it was". This is a characteristically simple phrase for a concept of extraordinary complexity, and Hemingway"s conception of its meaning subtly changed several times in the course of his career—always in the direction of greater complexity. At the core of the concept, however, one can invariably discern the operation of three aesthetic instruments: the sense of place the sense of fact and the sense of scene. The first of these, obviously a strong passion with Hemingway, is the sense of place. "Unless you have geography, background," he once told George Antheil, "You have nothing." You have, that is to say, a dramatic vacuum. Few writers have been more place-conscious. Few have so carefully charted out the geographical ground work of their novels while managing to keep background so conspicuously unobtrusive. Few, accordingly, have been able to record more economically and graphically the way it is when you walk through the streets of Paris in search of breakfast at a corner café... Or when, at around six o"clock of a Spanish dawn, you watch the bulls running from the corrals at the Puerta Rochapea through the streets of Pamplona towards the bullring. "When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up street toward the bullring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls, galloping, tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter, and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together." This landscape is as morning-fresh as a design in India ink on clean white paper. First is the bare white street, seem from above, quiet and empty. Then one sees the first packed clot of runners. Behind these are the thinner ranks of those who move faster because they are closer to bulls. Then the almost comic stragglers, who are "really running". Brilliantly behind these shines the "little bare space", a desperate margin for error. Then the clot of running bulls—closing the design, except of course for the man in the gutter making himself, like the designer"s initials, as inconspicuous as possible.

单选题The concept of man versus machine is at least as old as the industrial revolution, but this phenomenon tends to be most acutely felt during economic downturns and fragile recoveries. And yet, it would be a mistake to think we are right now simply experiencing the painful side of a boom and bust cycle. Certain jobs have gone away for good, outmoded by machines. Since technology has such an insatiable appetite for eating up human jobs, this phenomenon will continue to restructure our economy in ways we can"t immediately foresee. When there is rapid improvement in the price and performance of technology, jobs that were once thought to be immune from automation suddenly become threatened. This argument has attracted a lot of attention, via the success of the book Race Against the Machine, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who both hail from MIT"s Center for Digital Business. This is a powerful argument, and a scary one. And yet, John Hagel, author of The Power of Pull and other books, says Brynjolfsson and McAfee miss the reason why these jobs are so vulnerable to technology in the first place. Hagel says we have designed jobs in the U.S. that tend to be "tightly scripted" and "highly standardized" ones that leave no room for "individual initiative or creativity." In short, these are the types of jobs that machines can perform much better at than human beings. That is how we have put a giant target sign on the backs of American workers, Hagel says. It"s time to reinvent the formula for how work is conducted, since we are still relying on a very 20th century notion of work, Hagel says. In our rapidly changing economy, we more than ever need people in the workplace who can take initiative and exercise their imagination "to respond to unexpected events." That is not something machines are good at. They are designed to perform very predictable activities. As Hagel notes, Brynjolfsson and McAfee indeed touched on this point in their book. We need to reframe race against the machine as race with the machine. In other words, we need to look at the ways in which machines can augment human labor rather than replace it. So then the problem is not really about technology, but rather, "how do we innovate our institutions and our work practices?"

单选题Though many scientific breakthroughs have resulted from Umishaps/U, it has taken brilliant thinkers to recognize their potential.

单选题Before whenever we had wealth, we started discussing poverty. Why not now? Why is the current politics of wealth and poverty seemingly about wealth alone? Eight years ago, when Bill Clinton first ran for president, the Dow Jones average was under 3,500, yearly federal budget deficits were projected at hundreds of billions of dollars forever and beyond, and no one talked about the "permanent boom" or the "new economy". Yet in that more straitened time, Clinton made much of the importance of "not leaving a single person behind". It is possible that similar "compassionate" rhetoric might yet play a role in the general election. But it is striking how much less talk there is about the poor than there was eight years ago, when the country was economically uncertain, or in previous eras, when the country felt flush . Even last summer, when Clinton spent several days on a remarkable, Bobby Kennedy-like pilgrimage through impoverished areas from Indian reservations in South Dakota to ghetto neighborhoods in East St. Louis, the administration decided to refer to the effort not as a poverty tour but as a "new markets initiative". What is happening is partly a logical, policy-driven reaction. Poverty really is lower than it has been in decades, especially for minority groups. The most attractive solution to it—a growing economy—is being applied. The people who have been totally left out of this boom often have medical, mental or other problems for which no one has an immediate solution, "The economy has sucked in anyone who has any preparation, any ability to cope with modem life." Says Franklin D. Raines, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget who is now head of Fannie Mae. When he and other people who specialize in the issue talk about solutions, they talk analytically and long-term: education. Development of work skills, shifts in the labor market, adjustments in welfare reform. But I think there is another force that has made this a rich era with barely visible poor people. It is the unusual social and imaginative separation between prosperous America and those still left out... It"s simple invisibility, because of increasing geographic, occupational, and social barriers that block one group from the other"s view.

单选题Idon'tremember___________totheairportthatyear.

单选题The Greening of America —How America is likely to take over leadership of the light against climate change; and how it can, get it right. A country with a presidential system tends to get identified with its leader. So, for the rest of the world, America is George Bush"s America right now. It is the country that has mismanaged the Iraq war; holds prisoners without trial at Guantanamo Bay; restricts funding for stem-cell research because fundamentalist religious beliefs; and destroyed the chance of a global climate-change deal based on the Kyoto Protocol. But to simplify this is to misunderstand especially in the case of the huge, federal America. One of its great strengths is the diversity of its political, economic and cultural life. While the White House dug its heels in on global warming, much of the rest of the country was moving. That"s what forced the president"s concession to greens in the state-of-the-union address. His poll ratings sinking under the weight of Iraq, President Bush is grasping for popular issues to keep him afloat; and global warming has evidently become such an issue. Albeit in the context of energy security, a now familiar concern of his, President Bush spoke for the first time to Congress of "the serious challenge of global climate change" and proposed measures designed, in part, to combat it. It"s the weather, appropriately, that has turned public opinion—starting with Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had been warming Americans for years that the risk of "extreme weather events" would probably increase as a result of climate change. But scientific papers do not drive messages home as convincingly as the destruction of a city. And the heat wave that torched America"s west coast last year, accompanied by a constant drip of new research on melting glaciers and dying polar bears, has only strengthened the belief that something must be done. Business is changing its mind too. Five years ago corporate America was solidly against carbon controls. But the threat of a patchwork of state regulations, combined with the opportunity to profit from new technologies, began to shift business attitudes. And that movement has gained momentum, because companies that saw their competitors espouse carbon controls began to fear that, once the government got down to designing regulations, they would be left out of the discussion if they did not jump on the band wagon. So now the loudest voices are not resisting change but arguing for it. Support for carbon controls has also grown among some unlikely groups: security hawks (who want to reduce America"s dependence on Middle Eastern oil); farmers (who like subsidies for growing the raw material for ethanol); and evangelicals (who worry that man should looking after the Earth God gave him a little better). This alliance has helped persuade politicians to move. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California"s Republican governor, has led the advance, with muscular measures legislating Kyoto-style curbs in his state. His popularity has rebounded as a result. And now there is movement too at the federal level, which is where it really matters. Bills to tackle climate change have proliferated. And three of the serious candidates for the presidency in 2008—John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—are all pushing for federal measures. Unfortunately, President Bush"s newfound interest in climate change is coupled with, and distorted by, his focus on energy security. Reducing America"s petrol consumption by 20% in 2017, a target he announced in the state-of-the-union address, would certainly diminish the country"s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, but the way he plans to go about it may not be either efficient or clean. Increasing fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks will go part of the way, but for most of the switch America will have to rely on a greater use of alternative fuels. That means ethanol (inefficient because of heavy subsidies and high tariffs on imports of foreign ethanol) or liquefied coal (filthy because of high car- bon emissions). The measure of President Bush"s failure to tackle this issue seriously is his continued rejection of the only two clean and efficient solutions to climate change. One is a carbon tax, which this paper has long advocated. The second is a cap-and-trade system of the sort Europe introduced to meet the Kyoto targets. It would limit companies" emissions while allowing them to buy and sell permits to pollute. Either system should, by setting a price on carbon, discourage emission; and, in doing so, encourage the development and use of cleaner-energy technologies. Just as America"s adoption of catalytic converters led eventually to the world"s conversion to lead-free petrol, so its drive to clean-energy technologies will ensure that these too spread. A tax is unlikely because of America"s aversion to that three-letter word. Given that, it should go for a tough cap-and-trade system. In doing so, it can usefully learn from Europe"s experience. First, get good data. Europe failed to do so: companies were given too many permits, and emissions have there-fore not fallen. Second, auction permits (which are, in effect, money) rather than giving them away free. Europe gave them away, which allowed polluters to make windfall profits . This will be a huge fight; for, if the federal government did what the Europeans did, it would hand out $40 billion to $50 billion in permits. Third, set a long time-horizon. Europeans do not know whether carbon emissions will still be constrained after 2012, when Kyoto runs out. Since most clean-energy projects have a payback period of more than five years, the system thus fails to encourage green investment. One of America"s most admirable characteristics is its belief that it has a duty of moral leader- ship. At present, however, it"s not doing too well on that score. Global warming could change that. By tackling the issue now it could regain the high moral ground (at the same time forging ahead in the clean-energy business, which Europe might otherwise dominate). And it looks as though it will; for even if the Toxic Texan continues to evade the issue, his successor will grasp it.

单选题A real estate developer has bought 1,872 acres of land on which to build a new neighborhood. He plans to zone the area for roads, common area, and housing plots on a ratio of 2:3:8, respectively. If a planned lake will take up 16 acres of the common area, how many acres of the common area will be left over for the clubhouse and golf course? A. 128 B. 144 C. 416 D. 432 E. 450