单选题Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy-sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they"re turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get it touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, saying, "Our computer was in error, and adjustment is being made in your account." I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computer is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe. A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even been programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides. It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and stand listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking, and dreaming, are other matters. On the other hand, the evidences of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities. Mistakes are at very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We built to make mistakes, coded for error. A good laboratory, like a good bank or a corporation or government, has to run like a computer. Almost everything is done flawlessly, by the book, and all the numbers add up to the predicted sums. The days go by. And then, if it is a lucky day, and a lucky laboratory, somebody makes a mistake: the wrong buffer, something in one of the blanks, a decimal misplaced in reading counts, the warm room off by a degree and a half, a mouse out of his box, or just misreading of the day"s protocol. Whatever, when the results come in, something is obviously screwed up, and then the action can begin.The misreading is not the important error; it opens the way. The next step is the crucial one. If the investigator can bring himself to say, "But even so, look at that!" then the new finding, whatever it is, is ready for snatching. What is needed, for progress to be made, is the base on the error. Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand. With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing, there is an amiable understanding that One is right and the other wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides, and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments. It may be that this is a uniquely human gift, perhaps even stipulated in our genetic instructions. Other creatures do not seem to have DNA sequences for making mistakes as a routine part of daily living, certainly not for programmed error as a guide for action. We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground. This process is called exploration and is based on human fallibility. If we had only a single center in our brain, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made, instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurons that provide for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we could only stay the way we are today, struck fast. The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all their good side, never make mistake charming minor mistakes, but they get this way by trying to mimic their masters. Fish are flawless in everything they do. Individual cells in a tissue are mindless machines, perfect in their performance, as absolutely inhuman as bees. We should have this in mind as we become dependent on more complex computers for the arrangement of our affairs. Give the computers their heads, I say; let them go their way. If we learn to do this, turning our heads to one side and wincing while the work proceeds, the possibilities for the future of mankind, and computer kind, are limitless. Your average good computer can make calculations in all instant, which would take a lifetime of slide rules or any of us. Think of what we could gain from the near infinity of precise, machine-made miscomputation which is now so easily within our grasp. We could begin the solving of some of our hardest problems. How, for instance, should we go about organizing ourselves for social living on a planetary scale, now that we have become, as a plain fact of life, a single community? We can assume, as a working hypothesis, that all the right ways of doing this are unworkable. What we need, then, for moving ahead, is a set of wrong alternatives much longer and more interesting than the short list of mistaken courses that any of us can think up right now. We need, in fact, an infinite list, and when it is printed out we need the computer to turn on itself and select at random the next way to go. If it is a big enough mistake, we could find ourselves on a new level, stunned, out in the clear, ready to move again.

单选题______that even the great fortune he inherited from his father could not sustain his life.

单选题The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,is a vast huddle with many units saying:"I earn my living.I make enough to get byand it takes all my time.If I had more timeI could do more for myselfand maybe for others.I could read and studyand talk things overand find out about things.It takes time.I wish I had the time. "The following lines are taken from______.

单选题Minimizing the environmental damage that new roads cause is generally regarded as a good thing. But to do that, it helps to understand just how new roads cause the damage of which they are accused. Recently, a group of researchers led by Dr Gonzalez conducted an experiment which shows what ecologists have long suspected, but never been able to prove: that immigration is good for the health of animal populations. A road destroys only a small part of the habitat it traverses, and thus annihilates just a few local populations of creatures. So the argument that road-building itself is bad for biodiversity is not self-evidently correct. Those who nevertheless hold this view usually point to a piece of ecological theory called "meta-population dynamics". This says that apparently separate local populations of animals are, in fact, parts of much larger populations connected via migration. According to this theory, when a local population flounders—because of an epidemic, for example—individuals from neighboring communities can fill the gaps. So the more such communities there are, the better the chance of given local population remaining healthy. The implications of the theory for conservation are straightforward. Cut local populations off from each other and each is more likely to disappear. And roads are good at doing just that. Testing the theory with experimental roads, however, would be expensive. Dr Gonzalez's brainwave was to do the whole thing on a much smaller scale. Instead of studying, say, a forest, the team looked at moss-covered rocks. These support diverse population of tiny arthropods(insects, mites and so on). On some rocks the researchers left the moss untouched; on others they scraped "roadways" across to leave "isolated". After waiting six months, they found that in the disturbed habitats nearly all the bug population had declined compared with the undisturbed moss, and 40% of the species had become extinct. The real test of the meta-population hypothesis came in the second part of the experiment. In this, the researchers scraped away moss much as before, but they left narrow moss paths to bridge the no-bug's-land between islands. These connected patches were still not as healthy after six months as the unsullied moss, but they did far better than isolated islands—a result that supports the notion that population exchange is necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy. Whether these results can be translated to large-scale ecosystems remains uncertain. But if they can, they would cause more, not less, concern about the ecological effects of road-building. On the other hand, they also suggest a way out. In Britain, tunnels are often built under roads for animals of regular habits, such as badgers, to be able to travel their traditional routes without having to tangle with traffic. Extending that principle, perhaps with special bridges that can support local vegetation and thus allow animals the illusion of an uninterrupted habitat, might be a cheap way of letting man and nature rub along a bit better.

单选题In addition to urge to conform which we generate ourselves, there is the external pressure of the various formal and informal groups we belong to, the pressure to back their ideas and attitudes and to imitate their actions. Thus our urge to conform receives continuing, even daily reinforcement. To be sure, the intensity of the reinforcement, like the strength of urge and the ability and inclination to withstand it, differs widely among individuals. Yet some pressure is present for everyone. And in one way or another, to some extent, everyone yields to it. It is possible that a new member of a temperance group might object to the group"s rigid insistence that all drinking of alcoholic beverages is wrong. He might even speak out, reminding them that occasional, moderate drinking is not harmful, that even the Bible speaks approvingly of it. But the group may quickly let him know that such ideas are unwelcome in their presence. Every time he forgets this, he will be made to feel uncomfortable. In time if he values their companionship he will avoid expressing that point of view. He may even keep himself from thinking. This kind of pressure, whether spoken or unspoken, can be generated by any group, regardless of how liberal or conservative, formal or casual it may be. Friday night poker clubs, churches, political parties, committees, fraternities, unions. The teenage gang that steals automobile accessories may seem to have to taboos. But let one uneasy member remark that he is beginning to feel guilty about his crimes and their wrath will descend on him. Similarly, in high school and college, the crowd a student travels with has certain(usually unstated)expectations for its members. If they drink or smoke, they will often make the member who does not do so feel that he doesn"t fully belong. If a member does not share their views on sex, drugs, studying, cheating, or any other subject of importance to them, they will communicate their displeasure. The way they communicate, of course, may be more or less direct. They may tell him he"d better conform "or else". They may launch a teasing campaign against him. Or they may be even less obvious and leave him out of their activities for a few days until he asks what is wrong or decides for himself and resolves to behave more like them. The urge to conform on occasion conflicts with the tendency to resist change. If group we are in advocates an idea or action that is new and strange to us, we can be torn between seeking their acceptance and maintaining the security of familiar ideas and behavior. In such cases, the way we turn will depend on which tendency is stronger in us or which value we are more committed to. More often, however, the two tendencies do not conflict but reinforce each other. For we tend to associate with those whose attitudes and actions are similar to our own.

单选题For three quarters of its span on Earth, life evolved almost ______ as microorganisms.

单选题The reason A for all B the changes C being made D has not explained to us yet.

单选题Corpus linguistics deals with the principles and practice of using corpora in language study. It is a collection of linguistic data, either compiled as written texts or as a transcription of recorded speech.

单选题The last sound of "sit" can be articulated as an unreleased or released plosive. These different realizations of the same phoneme are not in complementary distribution. (北二外2009研)

单选题The Minister"s ______ answer let to an outcry from the Opposition.

单选题The sense relation which holds the pair of words richer—poorer is ______.

单选题______is one of the suprasegmental features.

单选题The functions of language do NOT include______. (大连外国语学院2008研)

单选题When I was told I had won first prize in the speech contest, I had to______myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming.

单选题He kept the portrait ______he could see it every day, as it always reminded him of his early school days.

单选题Because the Romantic Period is a period of the great flowering American literature, it is also called______.

单选题Two words, or two expressions, which have the same semantic components, will be synonymous to each other.

单选题______is often the case with a new idea, much preliminary activity and optimistic discussion produced no concrete proposals.

单选题Questions 52 -54 are based on the following lines.

单选题We are entering a period in which rapid population growth, the presence of deadly weapons, and dwindling resources will bring international tensions to dangerous levels for an extended period. Indeed, 1 seems no reason for these levels of danger to subside unless population equilibrium is 2 and some rough measure of fairness reached in the distribution of wealth among nations. 3 of adequate magnitude imply a willingness to redistribute income internationally on a more generous 4 than the advanced nations have evidenced within their own domains. The required increases in 5 in the backward regions would necessitate gigantic applications of energy merely to extract the 6 resources. It is uncertain whether the requisite energy-producing technology exists, and more serious, 7 that its application would bring us to the threshold of an irreversible change in climate 8 a consequence of the enormous addition of manmade heat to the atmosphere. It is this 9 problem that poses the most demanding and difficult of the challenges. The existing 10 of industrial growth, with no allowance for increased industrialization to repair global poverty, hold 11 the risk of entering the danger zone of climatic change in as 12 as three or four generations. If the trajectory is in fact pursued, industrial growth will 13 have to come to an immediate halt, for another generation or two along that 14 would literally consume human, perhaps all life. The terrifying outcome can be postponed only to the extent that the wastage of heat can be reduced, 15 that technologies that do not add to the atmospheric heat burden—for example, the use of solar energy—can be utilized. (1996)