单选题

单选题What does the author say about the ordinary people in the Third World countries?

单选题On the 36th day after they had voted, Americans finally learned Wednesday who would be their next president: Governor George W. Bush of Texas. Vice President A1 Gore, his last realistic avenue for legal challenge closed by a U. S. Supreme Court decision late Tuesday, planned to end the contest formally in a televised evening speech of perhaps 10 minutes, advisers said. They said that Senator Joseph Lieberman, his vice presidential running mate, would first make brief comments. The men would speak from a ceremonial chamber of the Old Executive office Building, to the west of the White House. The dozens of political workers and lawyers who had helped lead Mr. Gore's unprecedented fight to claw a come-from-behind electoral victory in the pivotal state of Florida were thanked Wednesday and asked to stand down. "The vice president has directed the recount committee to suspend activities," William Daley, the Gore campaign chairman, said in a written statement. Mr. Gore authorized that statement after meeting with his wife, Tipper, and with top advisers including Mr. Daley. He was expected to telephone Mr. Bush during the day. The Bush campaign kept a low profile and moved gingerly, as if to leave space for Mr. Gore to contemplate his next steps. Yet, at the end of a trying and tumultuous process that had focused world attention on sleepless vote counters across Florida, and on courtrooms from Miami to Tallahassee to Atlanta to Washington the Texas governor was set to become the 43rd U.S. president. The news of Mr. Gore's plans followed the longest and most rancorous dispute over a U.S. presidential election in more than a century, one certain to leave scars in a badly divided country. It was a bitter ending for Mr. Gore, who had outpolled Mr. Bush nationwide by some 300,000 votes, but, without Florida, fell short in the Electoral College by 271 votes to 267—the narrowest Electoral College victory since the turbulent election of 1876. Mr. Gore was said to be distressed by what he and many Democratic activists felt was a partisan decision from the nation's highest court. But at the end of five seemingly endless weeks, during which the physical, legal and constitutional machines of the U. S. election were pressed and sorely tested in ways unseen in more than a century, the system finally produced a result, and one most Americans appeared to be willing at lease provisionally to support. The Bush team welcomed the news with an outward show of restraint and aplomb. The governor's hopes had risen and fallen so many times since Election night, and the legal warriors of each side suffered through so many dramatic reversals, that there was little energy left for celebration.

单选题When the lions go out hunting for food, the males usually______ .

单选题In January 1995, the world witnessed the emergence of a new international economic order with the launching of the World Trade Organization. The WTO, which succeeds the GATT, is expected to strengthen the world trading system and to be more effective than the GATT in governing international trade in goods and services in many aspects. First, trade liberalization all over the world is expected to increase via the dramatic reductions in trade barriers to which the members of the WTO are committed. Under the WTO, members are required to reduce their tariff and non-tariffs on manufacturing goods. In addition, protecting domestic agricultural sectors from foreign competition will become awfully difficult in the" new WTO system. Second, rules and regulations governing international trade will be more strongly enforced. Under the old system of the GATT, there were many cases where trade measures, such as anti-dumping and countervailing duties, were intentionally used solely for protectionist reasons. The WTO's strengthened rules and regulations will significantly reduce the abusing of such trade measures by its member countries. The WTO is also equipped with an improved dispute settlement mechanism. Accordingly, we expect to see a more effective resolution of trade disputes among the member countries in this new trade environment. Third, new multilateral rules have been established to cover areas which the GATT did not address, such as international trade in services and the protection of intellectual property rights. There still remain a number of problems that need to be resolved before international trade in services can be completely liberalized, and newly-developed ideas or technologies are fairly compensated. However, just the establishment of multilateral rules in these new areas is a distinguished contribution to the progress toward a global tree trade system. Along with the launching of the WTO, this new era in world trade is characterized by a change in the structure of the world economy. Today, a world-wide market for goods and services is rapidly replacing a world economy composed of relatively isolated national markets. Domestic financial markets have been integrated into a truly global system, and the multinational corporation is becoming a principal mechanism for allocating investment capital and determining the location of production sites throughout much of the world.

单选题Most people are right-handed and children usually have the same handedness as their parents. This suggests that genes are at work. But identical twins have identical genes, so genes cannot be the whole story. Cultural attitudes seem to have played an important part in the development of hand preferences. In the past, left-handers have suffered anything from teasing to flogging. Even today in some countries enforced right-handedness, particularly for writing and eating, is still common. To explain the observed patterns of handedness, researchers have devised what is known as a 'gene-culture coevolution' model. The initial assumption of the model-drawn from observation of non-human primates and other mammals such as mice is that early on in human evolution, the genetic make-up of individuals inclined them to prefer one hand or the other, but that the population was equally divided between right- and left-handed people. Over time, according to the model, the interaction of genes and culture has produced a state where everyone has identical genes for handedness. This would happen if, for whatever reason, right-handers were more likely to survive and reproduce. The idea may not be that far-fetched. Many biologists believe that handedness is related to brain structure--say for example, early right-handers may have been better at language. The model predicts that today everyone has genes which confer a basic predisposition of 78% to be right-handed. How children actually turn out, however, can be influenced by whether their parents are dextral or sinistral. For example, children may mimic their parents. Or parents may influence the handedness of their children in the way that they hand them toys or food. The researchers reckon that a child with two right-handed parents has a 91% probability of being right-handed; a child with two left-handed parents has a probability of only 63% of being right-handed. But parental influence does not account for everything. Random events during a child's development can also have a small effect on handedness. Even if identical twins have parents who are both dextral, factors such as their position in the womb may result in the twins not preferring the same hands. The model seems plausible. It accurately predicts the results of 13 studies of the handedness of twins as well as the proportion of left-handers found in the population at large (roughly 12%, a figure that seems to be quite stable). Asymmetries in early tools, and in the way in which prey were clubbed, suggest that hominids as early as the Australopithecines may have preferred their right hands. Whatever the origin of this dextrous preference, though, left-handers remain at large. Some people are just sinister.

单选题In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees—each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow its leaders to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism. And, while we"re at it, let"s just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to reduce global warming? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation? Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining harness over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict. As the UNDP emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the "two parties with little or no political voice". Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment or the transformation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened "solidarity" without precedent in history. From a rational perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential "exit" option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas reduction could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living--none of which seems highly likely. And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of stimulating heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drives elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global intervention, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be silently abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth"s first-class passengers. We"re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet. Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps, the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low-, or zero-emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the combined impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the plane may begin to seriously threaten growth.

单选题{{I}} Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following talk on printing. You now have I5 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.{{/I}}

单选题We gather from the passage that his main purpose in travelling was to ______.

单选题Why will the Japanese reduce the price at 5 per cent？ Because ______. 　　（1）the Japanese producer holds a large quantity of stores and can't sell them out 　　（2）the Japanese have improved their production means and can turn out more products 　　（3）they expect to go on dealing with the Irish in the coming year 　　（4）the Irish think the prices in the past are unfair 　　（5）they try to sell more products in the past are unfair 　　（6）they want to appreciate the Irish's co-operation

单选题Does caffeine affect the heart? In 1972 and 1973 Dr. Hershel Jick and fellow researchers at the Boston University Medical Center published two studies on coffee and myocardial infarction, the most common type of heart attack. They concluded that people who drank one to five cups of coffee daily ran a 50-percent greater risk of heart attack than those who drank no coffee, and that those who drank six or more cups daily were at ll0-percent greater risk. On the surface this made sense, for coffee can influence pulse rate and blood pressure. But other scientists criticized Jick and questioned his methods of selecting subjects for the study. They noted that Jick had found no link between myocardial infarction and the drinking of tea, which also contains caffeine. And they asked why he had overlooked the possibility that heavy coffee drinking and heart problems might both be results of certain personality traits. Other major studies contradicted Jick's findings. In the Framingham heart-disease epidemiology study, researchers began in 1949 to monitor more than 5 100 citizens of the Massachusetts town. They found no link between coffee consumption sumption and heart problems. A similar study on 2 500 Georgia residents and another on 1 700 men in Chicago also failed to connect heart disease and coffee drinking. Dr. Jick's studies have been interpreted by other scientists to show that coffee drinkers are more likely to survive a heart attack than are non-drinkers, because caffeine acts as a mild stimulant. For people with arrhythmia(irregularity of heartbeat), coffee drinking should be approved by a physician, because heavy doses of caffeine can alter heart rhythms. Those with high blood pressure should also consult their doctors because caffeine might raise that pressure. Several studies on laboratory animals have found evidence that caffeine can elevate the level of free fatty acids, lipids and cholesterol in the blood. But most of the major studies find little or no link between heart disease and coffee drinking.

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

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} 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 Questions 11 to 13 are based on a talk about one of the World Wonders, the legendary Hanging Gardens. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.

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

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Ours is a world in which no individual, and no country, exits in isolation. All of us live simultaneously in our own communities and in the world at large. The same icons, whether on a movie screen or computer screen, are recognizable from Berlin to Bangalore. We are all influenced by the same tides of political, social and technological change. Pollution, organized crime and tile proliferation of deadly weapons likewise show little regard for the niceties of borders; they are "problems without passports". We are connected, wired, interdependent. Much of this is nothing new — human beings have interacted across the planet for centuries. But today's "globalization" is different. It is happening more rapidly. And it is governed by different rules or, in some cases, by no rules at all. Globalization is bringing us new choices and opportunities. It is making us more familiar with global diversity. Yet, millions of people experience it not as an agent of progress, but as a disruptive force that can destroy lives, jobs and traditions. Faced with the potential good of globalization as well as its risks, faced with the persistence of deadly conflicts in which civilians are the primary targets, faced with the pervasiveness of poverty and injustice, we must be able to identify the areas where collective action is needed to safeguard global interests. Local communities have their fire departments and town councils. Nations have their courts and legislatures. But in today's globalized world, the mechanisms available for global action are hardly more than {{U}}embryonic{{/U}}. It is high time we gave more concrete meaning to the idea of the "international community". What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defense of an idea, such as democracy. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents. Specifically, what binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people, as set out, for example, in the founding Charter of the United Nations. There is our sense of common vulnerability in the face of global warming and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. There is the framework of international law, treaties and human-rights conventions. There is equally our sense of shared opportunity, which is why we build common markets and joint institutions such as the United Nations. Together, we are stronger.

单选题WhatisADD?A.Overlyactiveandunabletocontroltheirbehavior.B.Forgeteasilyandneverseemtofinishtask.C.Achemicalimbalanceinthebrain.D.Learningdisabilities.

单选题{{I}} Questions 11 to 13 are based on the following talk on the world's changing climate. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11 to 13.{{/I}}

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

单选题Which of the following factors did not contribute to the London dialect becoming Standard English?