单选题The role of the federal government in preventing adolescent drug use was a central issue of the 1996 presidential campaign. Bob Dole criticized the Clinton administration for reducing the staff of the Office of National Drug Control Policy while Clinton criticized attempts by the Republican majority in Congress to cut federal support of drug-prevention programs. It seemed as though everyone wanted to be seen as favoring federal spending on drug prevention, and in particular, drug education. Indeed, 65 percent of congressional candidates polled in 1996 by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America ranked prevention programs as the number one priority in reducing the country's drug problem, compared to just 9 percent for both prohibition and treatment. By the close of 1996, Republicans had abandoned their attempts to reduce the federal prevention budget and Clinton had secured extra funds for drug-education programs within the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. There is no mystery in the bi-partisan popularity of such education programs. Recently completed large-scale surveys have shown that illegal drug use among young people increased in the past three years, following more than a decade of steady decline. Advocates of drug education argue that federally funded initiatives of the past 10 years contributed, at least in part, to the decline in adolescent drug taking, and that cuts in federal spending led to the recent increased use. However, unlike other aspects of drug control policy, prevention or education has been hardly analyzed. Law enforcement and prohibition efforts have been the subject of debate in both the popular press and academic circles. In contrast, prevention is simply assumed to be a praiseworthy enterprise, and the claims of its advocates are uncritically accepted by the press and policy makers. Despite claims to the contrary, available data do not support the view that the decline in adolescent drug use that occurred between the early1980s and early 1990s was influenced by the level of federal spending on drug-education activities. Indeed, if one takes into account the fact that the effects of spending do not manifest themselves in actual behavior for at least three years, then increased spending coincided with increased drug use. The massive increase in federal spending that occurred in the mid-1980s drew a lot of people and programs into the drug-prevention arena in an indiscriminate manner. A good deal of this money went to people with limited experience and expertise in drug prevention. It is thus hardly surprising that we often get more, not less, drug use as a result of these activities.

单选题It can be inferred that the author assumes that commonsense knowledge of human relations is______.

单选题 Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following interview between a reporter and a Taxi company manager about mobile phone hails u taxi. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

单选题The passage suggests that as any individual home is just a fragment of a huge communal picture when you paint your house______.

单选题Text 1 Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics — the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come close. As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much hum an labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robo-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy—far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone. But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves — goals that pose a real challenge. "While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error," says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, "we can't yet give a robot enough 'commonsense' to reliably interact with a dynamic world." Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries. What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain's roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented — and human perception far more complicated—than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can't approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don't know quite how we do it.

单选题In their darker moments, climatologists talk about their own "nightmare scenario". This is one where global warming has caused such significant climatic changes that ocean currents change direction. One scene from tile nightmare has the Gulf Stream moving south or even going into reverse, making winter in London look and feel like a St Petersburg January. The ocean is a great moderating influence on the planet, soaking up heat around the tropics and depositing it in the cooler polar regions. Yet scientists know surprisingly little about how the sea does this— they estimate that the North Atlantic alone moves energy equivalent to the output of several hundred million power stations. Last year oceanographers began their biggest international research initiative to learn more about ocean circulation. The first results from the World Ocean Circulation Experiment demonstrate just how complex the movement of sea-water can be. They have also given scientists a glance of the amount of heat being exchanged between the oceans and the atmosphere. As part of the experiment, researchers are monitoring the speed and direction of ocean currents, water temperature and salinity. Research ships taking part will gather detailed measurements at 24,000 points or "stations" along carefully designated trans-ocean routes. This undertaking dwarfs the 8,000 hydrographic stations created in the past hundred years of ocean surveying, A fleet of ships, buoys, seabed sensors and satellites will collect so much data that Britain, one of the 40 countries taking part, has opened a research institute, the James Rennell Centre for Ocean Circulation in Southampton, to process them. One of the justifications for the experiment, says John Woods, director of marine and atmospheric sciences at the Natural Environment Research Council, is that the oceans hold the key to understanding long-term changes in the global climate. The Earth has two "envelopes"—the ocean, consisting of slowly circulating water, and the atmosphere, made of fast-moving air. Far from being independent, they interact, one modifying the other until a balance is reached between them. The present balance came about at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Scientists hope that knowing more about the ocean"s "weather patterns" will help them to predict climate changes further ahead. Knowing how heat is moving around the ocean is decisive to such long-term forecasting. The top three metres of the ocean store more heat than all of the atmosphere. Some of the heat can be transported downward between 30 metres and several thousand metres. The deeper it goes, the longer it stays out of the atmosphere. Water heated in the equatorial region flows in shallow currents north or south towards the poles, where it releases its heat to the air and, as it becomes colder and denser, sinks to the sea floor, where it forms deep, cold currents that back to the equator. John Gould, one of the British scientists taking part in the ocean circulation experiment, is discovering just how this occurs in the Noah Atlantic. Shallow currents, less than 500m deep, of warm water at about 8℃ flow from the Atlantic into the Norwegian Sea, mainly along a path that follows the point where the continental shelf ends and the deep mid-ocean valleys begin. Meanwhile, at depth down to 5,000m, deep currents of cold water at about minus 1℃ flow south into the Atlantic along the deep ocean valley. (Salt water at this depth does not freeze at 0℃) Sensors positioned on the seabed have given Dr Could and his researchers an accurate assessment of just how much cold water is flowing back into the North Atlantic and have given up its heat to the atmosphere over north-west Europe. In total, he estimates, about 5 million cubic metres of water per second flows in these deep currents between Greenland and the British Isles. This means the warm water of the North Atlantic must be giving up about 200 million megawatts of energy to the atmosphere over north-west Europe. Research at the other end of the world, in the seas around Antarctica, is also finding that sea-floor topography plays a crucial role in determining the direction of ocean currents. In the past, oceanographers have assumed, for instance, that surface currents such as the Gulf Stream do not extend much beyond a kilometre in depth. But an analysis of currents in Antarctic waters has shown that currents are. not concentrated in the top kilometre, but reach down to the submerged mountain ranges. Dr Woods believes such research will help to save lives. "More deaths can be prevented by ocean forecasting, than by weather forecasting and our economic and social well-being are more vulnerable to change in the ocean than in the atmosphere."

单选题The linear flight formations of migratory birds are called echelons. The V and the J structures are typical and are the most readily recognized flock echelons, but other variations also occur. Studies of several species have shown that a true V-shaped echelon is, in fact, less common than a J formation is. There are two well-supported and complementary explanations for why birds fly in formation. One is to conserve energy by taking advantage of the upward vortex fields created by the wings of the birds in front. The other is to facilitate orientation and communication among the birds. These explanations are not mutually exclusive, and both have been backed by a variety of studies. The relative importance of each undoubtedly shifts as various factors, such as the season of the year or the purpose of individual flights, change. During local feeding flights, for example, energy conservation is probably much less important than careful orientation and collision avoidance are. During long-distance migration, orientation and communication remain necessary, but there is also much to be gained for each bird in the flock by optimizing its position to conserve energy. Fluid dynamics and energy wave configuration calculations have been used to test predictions of where birds should position themselves in relation to others to conserve the most energy as they travel through the air. Analyses of flock formations using photography have measured bird positions and found them to almost always be located such that they gain some energetic advantage. The animals are not very often in the expected optimal location, however, indicating that other factors also influence position in the formation. Knowledge of birds' visual axes, "blind spots" and field of vision has allowed researchers to pinpoint the best locations for birds within a flock to maintain optimal visual positioning. Actual positions of the animals are usually positively related to these predictions but are, again, not always optimal. Studies have categorized the positions of birds and found that some individuals take positions that are most closely predicted to satisfy the energy conservation hypothesis; others are in better visual contact positions; and still others are not apparently responding to either benefit or are in a position that should gain some advantage from both benefits. The leaders of formations change from time to time, but the causes, frequency and characteristics of these changes have not yet been determined. Sustained observation from the ground of flocks covering great distances in the air is very difficult. There are plenty of intuitive predictions about leader choice that quickly come to mind relative to the age, experience, sex, condition and social status of the leaders, but researchers have not figured out how to overcome the prohibitive logistic issues to test them. Some scientists have trained birds to fly in formation with small aircraft; perhaps their experiences will yield opportunities to test these ideas.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} The award of the Nobel science prizes often brings blinking into the limelight people who have laboured unknown to the wider world. Seldom, though, is there such a compelling human story to go with the intellectual one as that of Mario Capecchi, one of the' winners of the medicine prize. His father was an airman who was killed in North Africa during the Second World War. His mother was sent to Dachau concentration camp. He survived more than three years as a street kid in Italy before migrating to America after the war was over—and yet he ended up helping to develop one of the most important tools of modern biology, the knockout mouse. It is not quite a rags-to-riches story. In truth, his family was well connected in a bohemian sort of way, and his mother (the daughter of a painter and an archaeologist) was an American. But it does make great copy for reporters covering an event that has the true characteristics of celebrity. For, like many of those who populate the pages of celebrity magazines, the Nobel prizewinners are most famous for being famous. In most years, the prize-winning work itself makes dull copy. This year, however, the prize committees of the Karolinska Institute (Sweden's main medical school) and the country's Royal Academy of Science seem to have taken some lessons in public relations. Not only have they picked a researcher with an interesting back-story, but they have also cunningly disguised a deserved but possibly contentious award by bundling it in with something else. On top of that, one of the topics chosen for a prize has an obvious resonance with the public. The bundling was done in the medicine prize. Dr Capecchi shares this with Oliver Smithies, another immigrant to America (he was born in Britain) and Sir Martin Evans, a Briton who stayed at home. Working independently, these three men provided the parts that, when put together, enable the elimination of one gene at a time from the genetic make-up of a mouse. That is of medical significance because it allows mouse "models" of human genetic diseases to be made--and most diseases have at least some genetic component. The physics prize, by contrast, has nothing but feel-good about it. It is for giant magnetoresistance—the basis of modern computer hard-drive memories. The phenomenon itself was discovered, independently, by Albert Fert, a Frenchman, and Peter Grunberg, a German, in 1988. Its significance is that a small magnetic field can induce a large change in the electrical conductivity of an appropriately designed material. The result has been that the amount of data computers can store has grown even faster than their ability to process it.

单选题German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck may be most famous for his military and diplomatic talent, but his legacy includes many of today''s social insurance programs. During the middle of the 19th century, Germany, along with other European nations, experienced an unprecedented rash of workplace deaths and accidents as a result of growing industrialization. Motivated in part by Christian compassion for the helpless as well as a practical political impulse to undercut the support of the socialist labor movement, Chancellor Bismarck created the world''s first workers'' compensation law in 1884. By 1908, the United States was the only industrial nation in the world that lacked workers'' compensation insurance. America''s injured workers could sue for damages in a court of law, but they still faced a number of tough legal barriers. For example, employees had to prove that their injuries directly resulted from employer negligence and that they themselves were ignorant about potential hazards in the workplace. The first state workers'' compensation law in this country passed in 1911, and the program soon spread throughout the nation. After World War II, benefit payments to American workers did not keep up with the cost of living. In fact, real benefit levels were lower in the 1970s than they were in the 1940s, and in most states the maximum benefit was below the poverty level for a family of four. In 1970, President Richard Nixon set up a national commission to study the problems of workers'' compensation. Two years later, the commission issued 19 key recommendations, including one that called for increasing compensation benefit levels to 100% of the states'' average weekly wages. In fact, the average compensation benefit in America has climbed from 55% of the states'' average weekly wages in 1972 to 97% today. But as most studies show, every 10% increase in compensation benefits results in a 5% increase in the numbers of workers who file for claims. And with so much more money floating in the workers'' compensation system, it''s not surprising that doctors and lawyers have helped themselves to a large slice of the growing pie.

单选题Questions 14～16 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14～16.

单选题Professor Meredith Thring, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Queen Mary College, London showed off his latest invention to the Press yesterday. It is a mechanical coal miner which, he claims, could solve Britain''s energy problems within ten years. Not that he thinks the National Coal Board will be at all interested. " I have taken my previous ideas of mechanical mining to previous Chairmen of the Board but each time nothing has happened," he said. "The Board are not thinking enough about the future. My latest idea would put the cost of coal down and produce twice as much with the same labour force. " Professor Thring finished making his mechanical coal miner only on Sunday night. He showed the wooden model yesterday at Queen Mary College. It is rather like a giant ant, with a headlight, two TV camera "eyes" , and arms the same size and strength as human arms. This particular coal miner, however, would only be eighteen inches tall, which would enable it to mine much smaller areas of coal than those that can be mined by human beings. It would open up rich areas of coal in the Durham coal fields which have not been workable since the last century. " I would have thought the unions would be delighted with the mechanical coal miners," said Professor Thring. " We would be employing as many miners as at present, with all their skills, but they would all be working on the surface. " The human miner would in fact sit at the controls above ground. He would put his hands into "gloves" and work the metal hands of the coal miner as if they were his own. The mechanical miner could go down as deep as 10,000 feet, and would cost ￡10,000. " It will put the cost of coal down because the cost of the machines is going to be very low in relation to the present cost of supplying fresh air to mines," said Professor Thring. " There need to be no oxygen present, and this would mean there would be no risk of explosions. " The Professor does his economic sums as follows. Britain needs each year as much energy as 350 million tons of coal would provide; and North Sea oil will only provide the same amount of energy as 150 million tons of coal for fifty years, while the cost of nuclear power is ten times greater than the cost of getting oil. " We can get ten times as much coal as North Sea oil. We could have 250 million tons a year — double the present amount — for 200 years at least, and solve the energy crisis. The mechanical coal miner could be developed and active within six or seven years. " Could be, certainly! But Professor Thring knows very well how much luck he will need to succeed, which is why he gave the public display of his latest invention yesterday, to try to get opinion-makers on his side.

单选题

单选题From the passage we can guess that peso is _________.

单选题{{B}}TEXT 3{{/B}} Many things make people think artists are weird-the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. But the weirdest may be this: artists' only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. Art today can give you anomie, no problem. Bittersweetness? You got it. Tristesse? What size you want that in? But great art, as defined by those in the great-art-defining business, is almost never about simple, unironic happiness. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring-in Tolstoy's words, "All happy families are alike." We went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Artists who focused on making their audiences feel good, from Usher to Thomas Kinkade, were labeled "pop." Sure, there have been exceptions (say, Matisse's The Dance), but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at wm' with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy." In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultraviolent antihero. If someone rifles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be, as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was, about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising, the rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology. People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked gruelingly, lived with few protections and died Young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. On top of all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. There are fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling, smiling, except for that guy who keeps losing loans to Ditech. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. (Tolstoy clearly never edited a shelter mag.) And since these messages have an agenda, to pry our wallets from our pockets, they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.

单选题Wheredidclassicalmusicoriginate?A.InAsia.B.InAfrica.C.InEurope.D.InAustralia.

单选题Accordingtothewoman,whatgovernstheclotheswewear?A.Adesiretoexpressoneselfandshowone'swealth.B.Individualtasteandloveforbeauty.C.Loveforbeautyandadesiretoimpressotherpeople.D.Individualtasteandadesiretoexpressoneself.

单选题 Questions 14 to 16 are based on the conversation between a couple talking about computer. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.

单选题 Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following narration on study about eccentricity. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

单选题Whatarethespeakersdoing?A.Visitingthenewrestaurant.B.Watchingaparade.C.Havingapicnic.D.Goingtothebeach.

单选题Schools used to be considered places to prepare young people for life. After their education was finished, they were supposed to get ready to go out into the real world. But many adults these days are coming back to "schools of continuing education" and "centers of lifelong learning". They feel that one's education is never really ended, because one is never too old to learn. A fast-growing number of older students are helping schools that once ignored their needs. Filling empty seats in classrooms from Maine to Hawaii, students who are 25 and older are having a great effect on all fields of higher education. In all, there are 17 million of them. Programs include courses offered by high schools, local governments, federal agencies, and private groups. But it is at the college level where effects are the greatest. Educators say the registration of older students is caused by a growing feeling of Americans that education is a life-long effort. It has provided new variety as well as needed dollars to schools, traditionally intended for students in their teens anti early twenties. According to Census Bureau estimates, Olin Cook, Director of Higher Education for the state of Arkansas, says: "Adult education will keep the classes filled and the bills paid." Teachers say that there has been a definite effect on classrooms and course work. Older students are described as more serious and mature, frequently more demanding of instructors, and more willing to contribute personal experiences to discussions. "They realize that they are here to do X, Y, Z, and they want the professor to teach them that. They are very attentive and concerned. " A Michigan educator, Elinor P. Waters says that the presence of older students on campus "will take us a step closer to the real world; there will he fewer irrelevant courses and more practical ones". Why do adults want to re-enter academic life? School administrators say high unemployment is one of the biggest reasons, forcing many Americans to develop new skills. In addition, a large number of women who left school to raise families or who want jobs that require a college diploma are going back to school. College graduates are returning for second degrees to start new careers. And there are thousands of retired persons who are seeking good use of their free time. Many students feel that they are better prepared for learning than they were when they were younger. For example, Jane Pirozzolo, who will soon receive a degree in English from Boston University, graduated from junior college in 1967 and has worked as a secretary since then Explaining her decision to return to school, she says: "I felt overqualified for the jobs I was doing, and they were becoming increasingly boring. Now I feel I can understand what the professor wants, and I can study and read better than I could ten years ago. I feel like I'm one step ahead of the young students." Most educators are convinced that the growth of adult learning is an important change in American education. Proof of the great interest in adult education is the action being taken to attract adult students.