单选题Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Leibniz was a German philosopher who belonged to the Rationalist school of philosophers, to which also belonged Descartes and Spinoza. But Leibniz was not only a philosopher, he was also a considerable authority on law, a diplomat, a historian and an outstanding mathematician — as is proved by his discovery in 1676, independently of Newton, of the Differential Calculus. Leibniz was the son of a Professor of Philosophy of Leipzig University, who died when his son was only 6, but who left behind a fine collection of books which the young Leibniz read eagerly. Leibniz studied law at the University, and then, while in the service of the Elector of Mainz, he visited Paris and London and became acquainted with the learned men of his time. When he was 30 he became official librarian of the Brunswich family at Hanover, where he remained till he died. His philosophy is set out in a short paper, The Mondadology, which he wrote two years before his death. Otherwise, except for one or two famous essays, his philosophical and scientific ideas have had to be assembled from his various papers and letters which, fortunately, have survived. They show Leibniz''s brilliant intellect, especially in his attempt to relate mathematics and logic so that problems of philosophy could be exactly calculated and no longer be under dispute. He held that everything from a table to man''s soul, and even to God himself, is made up of "monads" atoms, each of which is a simple, indivisible, imperishable unit, different from every other monad and constantly changing. George Berkeley Berkeley was born of an aristocratic Irish family and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he remained as fellow and tutor. All his best work was written very early, and by the age of 27 he had made a reputation as a writer on philosophy. In 1712 Berkeley went to London and associated with the literary men of the day, among whom he was warmly welcomed. Berkeley travelled widely in Italy and France, and then spent a few years in the English colonies of North America and the West Indians, where he had hoped to found a missionary college. When his hope failed, he returned to Ireland, and in 1734 was appointed Bishop of Cloyne. He spent 18 years administrating his diocese, living a happy family life with his wife and children, and writing books on both philosophical and practical subject. In 1752 he retired to Oxford, where he died the next year at the age of 68. Berkeley''s claim to fame rests on his philosophy. His views are in contrast, deliberately, to those of John Locke. As an idealist he believes that mind comes before matter, while a Materialist holds everything depends upon matter. Beyond his strictly philosophical works, Berkeley was interested in natural science and mathematics. He wrote an Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he attempted to explain how we are able to judge the distance of objects from us. Though science has made great advances since Berkeley''s day, his essay is still of value. David Hume Hume is a celebrated Scottish philosopher and historian. In 1739, after a period of study in Paris, when he was only 28, he published one of the most influential books of English philosophy of modern times — the Treatise of Human Nature. It excited little interest, however, when it first, appeared, and Hume turned to writing admirable essays on a variety of topics. In 1752 he returned to Edinburgh as librarian of Advocates'' Library, and began to compose A History of England, the final volume of which was published in 1761. From 1761 to 1765, he was secretary to the British Embassy in Paris; where he was sought after by the cultured society. For the rest of his life he lived in his native Edinburgh, the central figure of a distinguished group of writers. Hume''s chief fame as a philosopher rests on the strict and logical way in which he applied the principle of John Locke, that all thought is built up from simple and separate elements, which Hume calls impressions. He believed that even a human being is a bundle of different perceptions, and has no permanent identity. His criticism of man''s belief that everything has a cause seemed to deny what we assume, not merely from ordinary experience, but from a scientific knowledge; and since he wrote, philosophers have been trying to find answers to his penetrating doubts. Indeed he has had more influence upon recent discussion in England about the principles of knowledge than any other philosopher of the past.

单选题{{I}}Questions 17～20 are based on the following talk. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17～20.{{/I}}

单选题In 1981 Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This astounding industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer. The laws appeared in I, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction, remain in the realm of fiction. With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. "Security, safety and sex are the big concerns," says Henrik Christensen, chairman of the European Robotics Network at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and one of the organisers of the new roboethics group. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Should robotic sex dolls resembling children be legally allowed? These questions may seem esoteric but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant, says Dr. Christensen. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. Japanese industrial firms are racing to build humanoid robots to act as domestic helpers for the elderly, and South Korea has set a goal that 100K of households should have domestic robots by 2020. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety and ethical guidelines now, says Dr. Christensen. So what exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical menaces? "Not enough," says Blay Whitby, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Sussex in England. This is hardly surprising given that the field of "safety-critical computing" is barely a decade old, he says. But things are changing, and researchers are increasingly taking an interest in trying to make robots safer. One approach, which sounds simple enough, is to try to program them to avoid contact with people altogether. But this is much harder than it sounds. Getting a robot to navigate across a cluttered room is difficult enough without having to take into account what its various limbs or appendages might bump into along the way. Regulating the behavior of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self-learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behavior will become impossible to predict fully, he says, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behavior as they go.

单选题Questions 8--12 Complete the following sentences with NO MORE THAN four words for each blank.

单选题 {{I}}Questions 11 to 13 are based on a talk on manga. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.{{/I}}

单选题For most of us, work is the central, dominating fact of life. We spend more than half our conscious hours at work, preparing for work, travelling to and from work. What we do there largely determines our standard of living and to a considerable extent the status we are accorded by our fellow citizens as well. It is sometimes said that because leisure has become more important the indignities and injustices of work can be pushed into a corner; that because most work is pretty intolerable, the people who do it should compensate for its boredoms, frustrations and humiliations by concentrating their hopes on the other parts of their lives. I reject that as a counsel of despair. For the forseeable future the material and psychological rewards which work can provide, and the conditions in which work is done, will continue to play a vital part in determining the satisfaction that life can offer. Yet only a small minority can control the pace at which they work or the conditions in which their work is done; only for a small minority does work offer scope for creativity, imagination, or initiative. Inequality al work and in work is still one of the cruelest and most glaring forms of inequality in our society. We cannot hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise directly or indirectly from the frustrations created by inequality at work, unless we tackle it head-on. Still less can we hope to create a decent and humane society. The most glaring inequality is that between managers and the rest. For most managers, work is an opportunity and a challenge. Their jobs engage their interest and allow them to develop their abilities. They are constantly learning; they are able to exercise responsibility; they have a considerable degree of control over their own and others' working lives. Most important of all, they have the opportunity to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, and for a growing number of white-collar workers, work is a boring, monotonous, even painful experience. They spend all their working lives in conditions which would be regarded as intolerable for themselves -- by those who take the decisions which let such conditions continue. The majority have little control over their work; it provides them with no opportunity for personal development. Often production is so designed that workers are simply part of the technology. In offices, many jobs are so routine that workers justifiably feel themselves to be mere cogs in the bureaucratic machine. As a direct consequence of their work experience, many workers feel alienated from their work and their firm, whether it is in public or in private ownership. Rising educational standards feed rising expectations, yet the amount of control which the worker has over his own work situation does not rise accordingly. In many cases his control has been reduced. Symptoms of protest increase -- rising sickness and absenteeism, high turnover of employees, restrictions on output, and strikes, both unofficial and official. There is not much escape out and upwards. As management becomes more professional -- in itself a good thing -- the opportunity for promotion from the shop floor becomes less. The only escape is to another equally frustrating manual job; tile only compensation is found not in the job but outside it, if there is a rising standard of living.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} It was late in the afternoon, and I was putting the final touch on a piece of writing that I was feeling pretty good about. I wanted to save it, but my cursor had frozen. I tried to shut the computer down, and it seized up altogether. Unsure of what else to do, I yanked (用力猛拉) the battery out. Unfortunately, Windows had been in the midst of a delicate and crucial undertaking. The next morning, when I turned my computer back on, it informed me that a file had been corrupted and Windows would not load. Then, it offered to repair itself by using the Windows Setup CD. I opened the special drawer where I keep CDs, but no Windows CD in there. I was forced to call the computer company's Global Support Centre. My call was answered by a woman in some unnamed, far-off land. I find it annoying to make small talk with someone when I don't know what continent they're standing on. Suppose I were to comment on the beautiful weather we've been having when there was a monsoon at the other end of the phone? So I got right to the point. "My computer is telling me a file is corrupted and it wants to fix itself, but I don't have the Windows Setup CD." "So you're having a problem with your Windows Setup CD." She has apparently been dozing and, having come to just as the sentence ended, was attempting to cover for her inattention. It quickly became clear that the woman was not a computer technician. Her job was to serve as a gatekeeper, a human shield for the technicians. Her sole duty, as far as I could tell, was to raise global stress levels. To make me disappear, the woman gave me the phone number for Windows' creator, Microsoft. This is like giving someone the phone number for, I don't know, North America. Besides, the CD worked; I just didn't have it. No matter how many times I repeated my story, we came back to the same place. She was calm and resolutely polite. When my voice hit a certain decibel (分贝), I was passed along, like a hot, irritable potato, to a technician. "You don't have the Windows Setup CD, ma'am, because you don't need it," he explained cheerfully. "Windows came preinstalled on your computer!" "But I do need it. " "Yes, but you don't have it." We went on like this for a while. Finally, he offered to walk me through the use of a different CD, one that would erase my entire system. "Of course, you' d lose all your e-mail, your documents, your photos." It was like offering to drop a safe on my head to cure my headache. "You might be able to recover them, but it would be expensive." He sounded delighted. "And it's not covered by the warranty (产品保证书)!" The safe began to seem like a good idea, provided it was full. I hung up the phone and drove my computer to a small, friendly repair place I'd heard about. A smart, helpful man dug out a Windows CD and told me it wouldn’t be a problem. An hour later, he called to let me know it was ready. I thanked him, and we chatted about the weather, which was the same outside my window as it was outside his.

单选题 BQuestions 14 ～ 16 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to rend Questions 14 ～ 16./B

单选题 Stockbrokers are agents who buy and sell stocks, shares and other securities for their clients. They are paid commission. Jobbers, on the other hand, buy and sell securities in large quantities. They are the wholesalers. The jobbers are always to be found in the same spot in the London Stock Exchange. They congregate according to the type of security they specialize in. So you can find all the jobbers dealing with rubber shares in one place, those interested in shipping another, those concerned with mining in another, and so on. Jobbers make a profit like any other dealer. They usually quote two prices; they are prepared to buy any reasonable quantity of that share at the lower price, and to sell at the higher price. These prices vary, of course, from day to day and even hour to hour, according to the demand. Perhaps a broke wants to sell five hundred shares in XYZ Pharmaceuticals for a client. He looks for the jobbers who deal in pharmaceutical shares. He asks the price of XYZ Pharmaceuticals, without saying whether he wishes to buy or sell. The jobber quotes him two prices—perhaps 75/79. This means that he will buy quantities of that share at 75 pence each, and sell them at 79 pence each. The broker then goes on to other jobbers and asks them the same question. Eventually he chooses the best offer. The two men make a verbal agreement (nothing is written at this stage) and from that moment the broker's client is the owner of those shares. When he goes back to his office, the broker has to write out a "contract note", which he sends to his client. This records the price, his commission, the tax on the transaction, and so on. For payment, both the buyer and the seller must sign transfer forms; these are sent to XYZ Pharmaceuticals for registration. Later, the buyer gets a certificate of the shares. The deal is now complete. The London Stock Exchange has always been famous as a place for men. only, and women used to be strictly forbidden to enter. But the world is changing day by day, and even the Stock Exchange, which seemed to be a man's castle, is gradually opening its doors to the other sex. On 16th November, 1971, a great decision was taken. The Stock Exchange Council (the body of men that administers the Stock Exchange) decided that Women should be allowed on to the new trading floor when it opened in 1973. But the "castle" had not been completely conquered. The first girls to work in "The House" were not brokers or jobbers. They were neither allowed to become partners in stockbroking firms, nor to be authorized dealers in stocks and shares. They were simply junior clerks and telephone operators. Women have been trying to get into the Stock Exchange for many years. Several votes have been taken in "The House" to see whether the members would be willing to allow women to become members, but the answer has always been "NO". There have been three refusals of this kind since 1967. Now women are admitted, although in a very junior capacity. Two firms of jobbers made an application to the Stock Exchange Council to be allowed to employ girl clerks. Permission was finally given. A member of the Stock Exchange explained, after this news had been given, "The new floor is going to be different from the old one. All the jobbers will have their own stands, with space for a telephone and typewriters. Therefore there will have to be typists and telephone operators. So women must be allowed in." This decision did not mean a very great victory in the war for equal rights for women. However, it was a step in the right direction. The Chairman of the Stock Exchange said, "I think that the opening of the new building will eventually lead to women being allowed to have full membership of the Stock Exchange. It is only a matter of time; it must happen".

单选题The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may not seem harmful—so much so that many consumers do it with no questions asked. Yet that one action can set in motion a cascade of silent events, as that data point is acquired, analyzed, categorized, stored and sold over and over again. Future attacks on your privacy may come from anywhere, from anyone with money to purchase that phone number you surrendered. If you doubt the multiplier effect, consider your e-mail inbox. If it"s loaded with spam, it"s undoubtedly because at some point you unknowingly surrendered your e-mail to the wrong website. Do you think your telephone number or address is handled differently? A cottage industry of small companies with names you"ve probably never heard of—like Acxiom or Merlin—buy and sell your personal information the way other commodities like corn or cattle futures are bartered. You may think your ceil phone is unlisted, but if you"ve ever ordered a pizza, it might not be. Merlin is one of many commercial data brokers that advertises sale of unlisted phone numbers compiled from various sources—including pizza delivery companies. These unintended, unpredictable consequences that flow from simple actions make privacy issues difficult to grasp, and grapple with. In a larger sense, privacy also is often cast as a tale of "Big Brother" —the government is watching you or an big corporation is watching you. But privacy issues don"t necessarily involve large faceless institutions.. A spouse takes a casual glance at her husband"s Blackberry, a co-worker looks at e-mail over your shoulder or a friend glances at a cell phone text message from the next seat on the bus. While very little of this is new to anyone—people are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere— there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring, assuming a mythical level of privacy. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department"s antitrust case against Microsoft. And polls and studies have repeatedly shown that Americans are indifferent to privacy concerns. The general defense for such indifference is summed up as a single phrase. "I have nothing to hide. " If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn"t the government be able to peek at your phone records, your wife see your e-mail or a company send you junk mail? It"s a powerful argument, one that privacy advocates spend considerable time discussing and strategizing over. It is hard to deny, however, that people behave different when they"re being watched. And it is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history.

单选题Mass transportation revised the social and economic fabric of the American city in three fundamental ways. It catalyzed physical expansion, it sorted out people and land uses, and it accelerated the inherent instability of urban life, By opening vast areas of unoccupied land for residential expansion, the omnibuses, horse railways, commuter trains, and electric trolleys pulled settled regions outward two to four times more distant from city centers than they were in the pre-modern era. In 1850, for example, the borders of Boston lay scarcely two miles from the old business district; by the end of the century the radius extended ten miles. Now those who could afford it could live far removed from the old city center and still commute there for work, shopping, and entertainment. The new accessibility of land around the periphery of almost every major city sparked an explosion of real estate development and fueled what we now know as urban sprawl. Between 1890 and 1920, for example, some 250, 000 new residential lots were recorded within the borders of Chicago, most of them located in outlying areas. Over the same period, another 550,000 were plotted outside the City limits but within the metropolitan area. Anxious to take advantage of the possibilities of commuting, real estate developers added 800, 000 potential building sites to the Chicago region in just thirty years—lots that could have housed five to six million people. Of course, many were never occupied: there was always a huge surplus of subdivided but vacant land around Chicago and other cities. These excesses underscore a feature of residential expansion related to the growth of mass transportation: urban sprawl was essentially unplanned. It was carded out by thousands of small investors who paid little heed to coordinated land use or to future land users. Those who purchased and prepared land for residential purposes, particularly land near or outside city borders where transit lines and middle-class inhabitants were anticipated, did so to create demand as much as to respond to it. Chicago is a prime example of this process. Real estate subdivision there proceeded much faster than population growth.

单选题 Questions 14—17 are based on the following talk.

单选题Fish farming in the desert may at first sound like an anomaly, but in Israel over the last decade a scientific hunch has turned into a bustling business. Scientists here say they realized they were no to something when they found that brackish water drilled from underground desert aquifers (含土水层) hundreds of feet deep could be used to raise warm-water fish. The geothermal water, less than one-tenth as saline as sea water, free of pollutants and a toasty 98 degrees on average, proved an ideal match. "It was not simple to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense," said Samuel Appelbaum, a professor and fish biologist at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at the Sede Boqer campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. "It is important to stop with the reputation that arid land is nonfertile, useless land," said Professor Appelbaum, who pioneered the concept of desert aquaculture in Israel in the late 1980s. "We should consider arid land where subsurface water exists as land that has great opportunities, especially in food production because of the low level of competition on the land itself and because it gives opportunities to its inhabitants." The next step in this country, where water is scarce and expensive, was to show farmers that they could later use the water in which the fish are raised to irrigate their crops in a system called double usage. The organic waste produced by the cultured fish makes the water especially useful, because it acts as fertilizer for the crops. Fields watered by brackish water dot Israel's Negev and Arava Deserts in the south of the country, where they spread out like green blankets against a landscape of sand dunes and rocky outcrops. At Kibbutz Mashabbe Sade in the Negev, the recycled water from the fish ponds is used to irrigate acres of olive and jojoba groves. Elsewhere it is also used for irrigating date palms and alfalfa. The chain of multiple users for the water is potentially a model that can be copied, especially in arid third world countries where farmers struggle to produce crops, and Israeli scientists have recently been peddling their ideas abroad. Dry lands cover about 40 percent of the planet, and the people who live on them are often among the poorest in the world. Scientists are working to share the desert aquaculture technology they fine-turned here with Tanzania, India, Australia and China, among others. (Similar methods offish farming are being used in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.) "Each farm could run itself, which is important in the developing world," said Alon Tal, a leading Israeli environmental activist who recently organized a conference on desertification, with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and Ben-Gurion University, that brought policy makers and scientists from 30 countries to Israel. "A whole village could adopt such a system," Dr. Tal added. At the conference, Gregoire de Kalbermatten, deputy secretary general of the antidesertification group at the United Nations, said, "We need to learn from the resilience of Israel in developing dry lands." Israel, long heralded for its agricultural success in the desert through innovative technologies like drip irrigation, has found ways to use low-quality water and what is considered terrible soil to grow produce like sweet cherry tomatoes, people, asparagus and melon, marketing much of it abroad to Europe, especially during winter. The history of fish-farming in nondesert areas here, mostly in the Galilee region near the sea, dates back to the late 1920s, before Israel was established as a state. At the time, the country was extremely poor and meat was considered a luxury. But fish was a cheap food source, so fish farms were set up on several kibbutzim in the Galilee. The early Jewish farmers were mostly Eastern Europeans, and Professor Safriel said, "they only knew gefilte fish, so they grew carp." Eventually they expanded to other varieties of fish including tilapia, striped bass and mullet, as well as ornamental fish. The past decade has seen the establishment of about 15 fish farms producing both edible and ornamental fish in the Negev and Arava Deserts. Fish farming, meanwhile, has became more lucrative worldwide as people seek more fish in their diet for better health, and ocean fisheries increasingly are being depleted. The practice is not without critics, who say it can harm the environment and the fish. In Israel there was a decision by the government to stop fish fanning in the Red Sea near the southern city of Eilat by 2008 because it was deemed damaging to nearby coral reefs. Some also argue that the industry is not sustainable in the long term because most of the fish that are fanned are carnivorous and must be fed a protein-rich diet of other fish, usually caught in the wild. Another criticism is that large numbers of fish are kept in relatively small areas, leading to a higher risk of disease. Professor Appelbaum said the controversy surrounding fish farming in ocean areas does not apply to desert aquaculture, which is in an isolated, controlled area, with much less competition for resources.

单选题Questions 1～3 are based on the following passage, listen and choose the best answer.

单选题 {{I}}Questions 14 to 16 are based on an introduction to a video phone. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.{{/I}}

单选题Professor Thring expects that the Coal Board will ______.

单选题The Village Green in New Milford, Connecticut, is a snapshot of New England charm: a carefully manicured lawn flanked by scrupulously maintained colonial homes. Babysitters dandle kids in the wooden gazebo, waiting for commuter parents to return from New York. On a lazy afternoon last week Caroline Nicholas, 16, had nothing more pressing to do than drink in the early-summer sunshine and discuss the recent events in town. " I don"t think a lot of older people knew there were unhappy kids in New Milford," she said, "I could see it coming. " In a five-day period in early June eight girls were brought to New Milford Hospital after what hospital officials call suicidal gestures. The girls, all between 12 and 17, tried a variety of measures, including heavy doses of alcohol, over-the-counter medicines and cuts or scratches to their wrists. None was successful, and most didn"t require hospitalization ; but at least two attempts, according to the hospital, could have been vital. Their reasons seemed as mundane as the other happen-stances of suburban life. "I was just sick of it all," one told a reporter, "Everything in life." Most alarming, emergency-room doctor Frederick Lohse told a local reporter that several girls said they were part of a suicide pact. The hospital later backed away from this remark. But coming in the wake of at least sixteen suicide at- tempts over the previous few months, this sudden cluster—along with the influx of media—has set this well-groomed suburb of 23, 000 on edge. At a town meeting last Wednesday night, Dr Simon Sobo, chief of psychiatry at the hospital, told more than 200 parents and kids, "We"re talking about a crisis that has really gotten out of hand." Later he added, "There have been more suicide attempts this spring than I have seen in the 13 years I have been here. " Sobo said that the girls he treated didn"t have serious problems at home or school. "Many of these were popular kids," he said, "They got plenty of love, but beneath the reassuring signs, a swath of teens here are not making it." Some say that drugs, Both pot and "real drugs", are commonplace. Kids have shown up with LIFE SUCKS and LONG LIVE DEATH penned on their arms. A few girls casually display scars on their arms where they cut them- selves. "You"d be surprised how many kids try suicide," said one girl, 17. "You don"t want to put pain on other people; you put it on yourself." She said she used to cut herself "just to release the pain". Emily, 15, a friend of three of the girls treated in June, said one was having family problems, one was "upset that day" and the third was "just upset with everything else going on". She said they weren"t really trying to kill themselves—they just needed concern. As Sobo noted, "What"s going on in New Milford is not unique to New Milford. " The same underlying culture of despair could be found in any town. But teen suicide, he added, can be a "contagion". Right now New Milford has the bug—and has it bad.

单选题Earth scientists have come to understand that climate ______.