单选题Why are horses used to catch the electric eels?

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 attempts 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 themselves. "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At 18, Ashanthi DeSilva of suburban Cleveland is a living symbol of one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century. Born with an extremely rare and usually fatal disorder that left her without a functioning immune system (the "bubble-boy disease", named after an earlier victim who was kept alive for years in a sterile plastic tent), she was treated beginning in 1990 with a revolutionary new therapy that sought to correct the defect at its very source, in the genes of her white blood cells. It worked. Although her last gene-therapy treatment was in 1992, she is completely healthy with normal immune function, according to one of the doctors who treated her, W. French Anderson of the University of Southern California. Researchers have long dreamed of treating diseases from hemophilia to cancer by replacing mutant genes with normal ones. And the dreaming may continue for decades more. "There will be a gene-based treatment for essentially every disease," Anderson says, "within 50 years." It's not entirely clear why medicine has been so slow to build on Anderson's early success. The National Institutes of Health budget office estimates it will spend $432 million on gene-therapy research in 2005, and there is no shortage of promising leads. The therapeutic genes are usually delivered through viruses that don't cause human disease. "The virus is sort of like a Trojan horse," says Ronald Crystal of New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College. "The cargo is the gene." At the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center, immunologist Carl June recently treated HIV patients with a gene intended to help their cells resist the infection. At Cornell University, researchers are pursuing gene-based therapies for Parkinson's disease and a rare hereditary disorder that destroys children's brain cells. At Stanford University and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers are trying to figure out how to help patients with hemophilia who today must inject themselves with expensive clotting drugs for life. Animal experiments have shown great promise. But somehow, things get lost in the translation from laboratory to patient. In human trials of the hemophilia treatment, patients show a response at first, but it fades over time. And the field has still not recovered from the setback it suffered in 1999, when Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old with a rare metabolic disorder, died after receiving an experimental gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. Some experts worry that the field will be tarnished further if the next people to benefit are not patients but athletes seeking an edge. This summer, researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego said they had created a "marathon mouse" by implanting a gene that enhances miming ability; already, officials at the World Anti-Doping Agency are preparing to test athletes for signs of "gene doping". But the principle is the same, whether you're trying to help a healthy runner run faster or allow a muscular-dystrophy patient to walk. "Everybody recognizes that gene therapy is a very good idea," says Crystal. "And eventually it's going to work./

单选题 Questions 17—20 are based on the following talk.

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Throughout history there have been many unusual taxes levied on such things as hats, beds, baths, marriages, and funerals. At one time England levied a tax on sunlight by collection from every household with six or more windows. And according to legend, there was a Turkish ruler who collected a tax each time he dined with one of his subjects. Why? To pay for the wear and tear on his teeth! Different kinds of taxes help to spread the tax burden. Anyone who pays a tax is said to "bear the burden" of the tax. The burden of a tax may fall more heavily on some persons than on others. That is why the three levels of government in this country use several kinds of taxes. This spreads the burden of taxes among more people. From the standpoint of their use, the most important taxes are income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and estate, inheritance, and gift taxes. Some are used by only one level of government; others by or even all three levels. Together these different taxes make up what is called our tax system. Income taxes are the main source of federal revenues. The federal government gets more than three-fourths of its revenue from income taxes. As its name indicated, an income tax is a tax on earnings. Both individuals and business corporations pay a federal income tax. The oldest tax in the United States today is the property tax. It provides most of the income for local governments. It provides at least a part of the income for all but a few states. It is not used by the federal government. A sales tax is a tax levied on purchases. Most people living in the United States know about sales taxes since they are used in all but four states. Actually there are several kinds of sales taxes, but only three of them are important. They are general sales taxes, excise taxes, and import taxes. Other three closely related taxes are estate, inheritance, and gift taxes. Everything a person owns, including both real and personal property, makes up his or her estate. When someone dies, ownership of his or her property or estate passes on to one or more individuals or organizations. Before the property is transferred, however, it is subject to an estate tax if its value exceeds a certain amount.

单选题Poetry, said Robert Frost, is what gets lost in the translation, and in the week that the Turner prize was announced it is worth remembering that there are still people working at the sort of art which has something to be lost in the translation to fame. Hellen Gibart fell in love with oil painting when her sixth form teacher gave her a small canvas. "I"ve still got it upstairs. Oil painting has had a classic period and is being sidelined too much now, but I"m sure it will live through that. It can articulate things so specifically. I layer it, I build it, and I knock it or scrape it back. It"s like a sculpture, in a way: an attempt to get closer to the subject. "I found it very diffcult initially, because it has a life and a spirit of its own that it can lead you to if you allow it and I never wanted to do any other material." For the first part of her career she set herself to learn drawing as well. In the mornings she would teach English as a foreign language, and in the afternoons and evenings "just drawing, drawing, drawing. It wasn"t stuffy old evening classes: there was a lot of energy and it was very exciting. I knew I wanted to work and paint. I didn"t know anything about the art world." After about five years of this life, a gallery where she had been working was closed, and she got a grant to go to Cyprus for a year. It was the first time she had ever been able to work full time as an artist. And she loved it. She ended up living in the mountains. Nowadays she prefers Spain, because fewer people there speak English. On Cyprus, she say"s, everyone she knew spoke English so well that she could never break through into the Greek side of their lives, no matter how friendly they were. This urge to push through and find what is really there seems to be the same feeling she has in front of a canvas. It is extraordinary how often artists talk as if what they were doing were finding or releasing something already there, rather than creating things themselves. Sometimes she talks like a musician. "I don"t know if you ever, when you"re writing, feel what it is just not to be there: a blind wandering that isn"t a dead end, when you"re not hitting walls. I can spend weeks and weeks just mashing at canvas and then it will suddenly happen. Sometimes it"s an accident." Her most recent studies were of a local collection of fossils—she lives in Suffolk, near Aldeburgh—and in her studio they seemed as agelessly fresh as the rocks, two or three hundred million years old, from which they had come. They seemed to have nothing in common with the lemony heat and stillness of the painting of a church interior in Spain, which was propped against another wall. "I have never been able to support myself by selling paintings," she says, which has been the case for most artists this century. What changed for her generation (she is 44) was that the art schools started using specialist teachers rather than working artists. "It"s very sad. I think that practitioners teaching in the college are the only people who should be there. They understand the problems and—as a huge generalisation—educationalists don"t." Her views on the Turnerish stuff are discriminating. "I thought Carl Andre"s bricks were extremely beautiful." She admires Damien Hirst. She had been to see the Turner show at the Tate and even enjoyed one of the video installations there. "But with a lot of the art that is being promoted now it seems to me that what is being sold is an idea, a formula. It is the idea rather than the substantiation which matters. And this means there is a question of charlatanism, when a few people can ride on the back of the ones who are genuinely involved. "And then her politeness cracks for a second or three. "If I"m going to be radical or challenging it"s not acknowledged, because the form that I work in is old. That is very tiresome. Perhaps it"s the price that must be paid for the art that conceals artiness.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Injuries can happen at any time, any place. When they do occur everyone likes to get the best treatment to help them heal quickly and properly. For athletes, the need to receive proper medical care is crucial in order for them to continue their sports careers. Athletes depend on the knowledge of doctors who are specially trained in sports medicine, which is a field of medicine that has grown rapidly since 1950s. Sports medicine is more than just the treatment of injuries. It is also concerned with the prevention of injuries, the maintaining of a proper diet, the creation of individual exercise programs for an athlete and the mental preparation of the athlete. In general, sports medicine is relevant to all aspects of monitoring athletes while they are in training. The field of sports medicine includes nutrition, surgery, physical therapy, research, and orthopedics, which is the correction or cure of disease or deformities of bones, joints and muscles. The doctors who specialize in sports medicine are called sports traumatologists. These experts' specialize in the care of injuries to the musculoskeletal system. They do physical examination, diagnose injuries, and refer patients to surgeons if necessary. Although people have been interested in sports medicine for many years, it actually became more specialized after World War Ⅱ, with great developments in the 1960s and 1970s. The modem idea of complete care for the athlete emerged from the widespread surge in sports participation over this time period. The field of sports medicine is very broad because there are so many types of sports injuries and because each individual athlete's body is different-their make-up, build, immune system, etc. Because of this, virtually every injury is treated in a different way. As injuries continue to occur and the sports medicine field grows, recovery methods are becoming more advanced. Two of the more modern methods of treatment are the hyperbaric chamber and magnetic resonance imaging. A hyperbaric chamber is a cylindrical steel tube into which a person can enter. Inside the chamber, the athlete is exposed to high levels of oxygen. This promotes oxygenation of the blood and speeds recovery time. Use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in medicine began in the early 1980s. MRI presents a hazard-free way to get images of thin slices of the body and a reliable method of detecting injuries. It is a superior imaging technique because it doesn't use radiation or need any special dyes. MRI uses magnets to concentrate and focus on small areas of the body, which produces detailed images. Besides being used to diagnose sports injuries, MRI is capable of producing high-contrast pictures of the brain, heart, liver, kidneys and can detect things such as tumors. It is quite possible that with the increased interest in sports, the field of sports medicine will become even more specialized. Sports medicine continues to grow and take care of the needs of athletes from the professional playing in front of a stadium full of people to the person working out at their local health club.

单选题For admissions officers reviewing applications is like final-exam week for students--except it lasts for months. Great applications tell us we've done our job well, by attracting top-caliber students. But it's challenging to maintain the frenetic pace without forgetting these are all real people with real aspirations--people whose life stories we are here to unravel, if they will let us. The essay is a key piece of learning those life stories. I live near Los Angeles, where every day screenplays are read without regard for human context. The writer's life and dreams don't matter--all that mat ters is the writing, the ideas, the end product. On the other hand, in reading essays, context does matter: who wrote this? We are driven to put the jigsaw puzzle together because we think we are building a community, not just choosing neat stories. When I pick up a file, I want to know whether the student has siblings or not, who his parents are, where he went to high school. Then I want the essay to help the rest of the application make sense, to humanize all the numbers that flow past. I am looking for insight. A brilliantly written essay may compel me to look beyond superficial shortcomings in an application. But if no recommendation or grade or test score hints at such writing talent, I may succumb to cynicism and assume the writer had help--maybe too much. In the worst cases, I may find that I have read it before--with name and place changed--on the Internet, in an essay-editing service or a "best essays" hook. The most appealing essays take the opportunity to show a voice not rendered homogeneous and pasteurized. But sometimes the essays tell us too much. Pomona offers this instruction with one essay option: "We realize that not everything done in life is about getting into college. Tell us about something you did that was just plain fun." One student grimly reported that nothing was fun because in his family everything was about getting into college. Every activity, course choice and spare moment. It did spark our sympathy, but it almost led to a call to Child Protective Services as well. Perfection isn't required. We have seen phenomenal errors in essays that haven't damaged a student at all. I recall a student who wrote of the July 1969 lunar landing of--I kid you not--Louis Armstrong. I read on, shaking my head. This student was great--a jazz trumpeter who longed to study astronomy. It was a classic slip and perhaps a hurried merging of two personal heroes. He was offered admission, graduated and went on for a PhD in astrophysics. He may not have been as memorable if he had named "Nell" instead of "Louis" in his essay's opening line. Hey, we're human, too. An essay that is rough around the edges may still be compelling. Good ideas make an impression, even when expressed with bad punctuation and spelling errors. Energy and excitement can be communicated. I'm not suggesting the "I came, I saw, I conquered" approach to essay writing, nor the "I saved the world" angle taken by some students who write about community-service projects. I'm talking about smaller moments that are well captured. Essays don't require the life tragedy that so many seem to think is necessary. Not all admission offers come out of sympathy! Admissions officers, even at the most selective institutions, really aren't looking for perfection in 17-and 18-year-olds. We are looking for the human being behind the roster of activities and grades. We are looking for those who can let down their guard just a bit to allow others in. We are looking for people whose egos won't get in the way of learning, students whose investment in ideas and words tells us--in the con-text of their records--that they are aware of a world beyond their own homes, schools, grades and scores. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. To us, an essay that reveals a student's unaltered voice is worth much, much more.

单选题We see distant galaxies as they were long ,long ago because

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单选题Whendidthewomangiveupsmoking?[A]Tendaysago.[B]Justthismorning.[C]Aweekago.[D]Justyesterday.

单选题Who is the speaker?

单选题{{B}}Part B{{/B}} In the following article some paragraphs have been removed. For Questions 66～70, choose the most suitable paragraph from the list A~F to fit into each of the numbered gaps. There is one paragraph which does not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. The press is constantly reminding us that the dramatic increase in the age of our population over the next 30 or so years will cause national healthcare systems to collapse, economies to crumple under the strain of pension demands and disintegrating families to buckle under increasing care commitments. Yet research at Oxford is beginning to expose some of the widespread myths that underlie this rhetoric. Demographic ageing is undoubtedly a reality. Life expectancy in developed countries has risen continuously over the past century, increasing the percentage of those over the age of 60 relative to those under the age of 15. By 2030 half the population of Western Europe will be over the age of 50, with a predicted average life expectancy of a further 40 years. By then, a quarter of the population will be over 65 and by 2050 the UK's current number of 10,000 centenarians are predicted to have reached a quarter of a million. Some demographers have even suggested that half of all baby girls born in the West today will live to see the next century. 66.______ Indeed, if this could be achieved throughout the world, it would surely count as the success of civilization, for then we would also have conquered the killers of poverty, disease, famine and war. Decreasing mortality rates, increasing longevity and declining fertility mean smaller percentages of young people within populations. Over the past 20 years life expectancy at birth in the UK has risen by four years for men (to75) and three years for women (to 80). Meanwhile fertility rates across Europe have declined more or less continuously over the past 40 years and remain well below the levels required for European populations to be able to replace themselves without substantive immigration. But again, rather than seeing this as a doom and gloom scenario, we need to explore the positive aspects of these demographics. The next 50 years should provide us with an opportunity to enjoy the many advantages of a society with a mature population structure. 67.______ The first of these is the current political rhetoric which claims that health services across the Western world are collapsing under the strain of demographic ageing. 68.______ The second myth is the view that the ratio of workers to non-workers will become so acute that Western economies will collapse, compounded by a massive growth in pension debt. While there are undoubted concerns over current pension shortfalls, it is aiso clear that working lives will themselves change over the next few decades, with a predicted increase in flexible and part-time work and the probable extension of working life until the age of 70. Indeed, we have to recognize that we cannot expect to retire at the age of 50 and then be able to support ourselves for another 40 or so years. Neither a solid pension scheme nor savings can carry people that long. 69.______ A further myth is that we will all live in loose, multigenerational families, experiencing increased emotional distancing from our kin. Evidence from a variety of studies across the developed world suggests that, if anything, the modem family is actually becoming more close-knit. Work carded out by the Oxford Institute in Scandinavia and in a Pan-European Family Care Study, for example, shows that despite the influence of the welfare state, over the past 10 years, people have come to value family relationships more than previously. 70.______ In the developed world, therefore, we can see actual benefits from population ageing: a better balance between age groups, mature and less volatile societies, with an emphasis on age integration. The issues will be very different in other parts of the world. Herein lies another myth: that the less developed world will escape from demographic ageing. Instead, the massive increase in the age of populations facing these countries-predicted to be up to one billion older people within 30 years--is potentially devastating. The problem is not only that demographic ageing is occurring at a far greater pace than we have seen'in Western nations, but also that few if any developing countries have the economic development and infrastructure necessary to provide widespread public pensions and healthcare to these growing elderly populations. As a result, older people are among the poorest in every developing country. They have the lowest levels of income, education and literacy, they lack savings and assets, have only limited access to work, and even in times of crisis are usually the last to be cared for under emergency aid programmes. Perhaps of most concern is healthcare, for as we conquer acute diseases, we are going to see a rapid increase in levels of chronic illness and disability, but no long-term care programmes or facilities to tackle this. A. Since it is likely that a longer active working life will coincide with a predicted labor shortage resulting from a lack of younger workers, we need to provide the opportunities and training to encourage older men and women to remain economically productive. Our studies show that there are benefits from having an age-in-tegrated workforce. It is another myth that older workers are less productive than younger ones. In fact, the combined energy of younger workers with the experience of older ones can lead to increased productivity—something from which young and old alike will benefit. B. In 2001, in recognition of the significance of these demographic changes and the global challenges and opportunities that will accompany them, the Oxford Institute of Ageing was established at the University. It is made up of researchers in demography, sociology, economics, social anthropology, philosophy and psychology, with links to other specialists in medicine, biology, law and policy in research units across the University. This cross-disciplinary approach has made it possible to challenge some of the most pervasive myths about ageing societies. C. As Institute healthcare ethicist Kenneth Howse points out, family obligations towards older relatives may change over the next 20 years, but current indications are that families are retaining a strong responsibility to care. Furthermore, as societies age, the contributory role of older people as grandparents becomes more important. Work by Institute researchers on another European Union study on multi-generational families has highlighted the role that grandparents play by freeing up the responsibilities of the younger reproductive population. D. It is clear that the changing demographic landscape poses challenges for the future. The necessity now is to develop appropriate economic, social and political structures to take advantage of the opportunities that mature societies will bring, while ensuring that there are appropriate safety nets for those left vulnerable within these populations—which will include both young and old alike. E. Rather than fearing such a future, however, we should see this trend as a great success. It must undoubtedly be a major achievement of civilization that most individuals within a society can expect to enjoy a long and healthy lifespan. F. George Leeson, a demographer at the Institute, points out that while a number of cross-national studies have considered the determinants of spiraling healthcare costs, only one has found the explanatory factor to be the proportion of the population aged 65 and over. Rather, it is growth in income, lifestyle characteristics and environmental factors such as technology and drugs that are driving up healthcare costs. In addition, the costs are shifting between population groups. The key here, he adds, is to develop sufficiently flexible health service structures to shift not only economic resources but also personnel.

单选题{{I}} Questions 18 to 20 are based on the following talk between two students about campus life. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 18 to 20.{{/I}}

单选题Why does the Western movie especially have such a hold on our imagination? Chiefly, I think, because it offers serious insights into the problem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere in our culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence. This refusal is virtue, but like many virtues it involves a certain willful blindness and it encourages hypocrisy. We train ourselves to be shocked or bored by cultural images of violence, and our very concept of heroism tends to be a passive one: we are less drawn to the brave young men who kill large numbers of our enemies than to the heroic prisoners who endure torture without capitulating. And in the criticism of popular culture, the presence of images of violence is often assumed to be in itself a sufficient ground for condemnation. These attitudes, however, have not reduced the element of violence in our culture but have helped to free it from moral control by letting it take on the aura of " emancipation". The celebration of acts of violence is left more and more to the irresponsible. The gangster movie, with its numerous variations, belongs to a cultural "underground" which glamorizes violence and sets it against all our higher social attitudes. It is more "modern" genre than the Western movie, perhaps even more profound, because it confronts industrial society on its own ground — the city — and because, like much of our advanced art, it gains its effects by a gross insistence on its own narrow logic. But it is anti-social, resting on fantasies of irresponsible freedom. If we are brought finally to ''acquiesce'' in the denial of these fantasies, it is only because they have been shown to be dangerous, not because they have given way to higher values of behaviour. In war movies, to be sure, it is possible to present violence within a framework of responsibility. But there is the disadvantage that modern war is a co-operative enterprise in which violence is largely impersonal and heroism belongs to the group more than to the individual. The hero of a war movie is most often simply a leader, and his superiority is likely to be expressed in a denial of the heroic: you are not supposed to be brave, you are supposed to get the job done and stay alive (this too, of course, is a kind of heroic posture, but a new — and "practical"— one). At its best, the war movie may represent a more civilized point of view than the Western, and if it, were not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we might hope to find it developing into a higher form of drama. But it cannot supply values we seek in the Western movies. These values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on his thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and even that he "believes in violence". But the drama is one of self-restraint: the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to its special laws, or else it is valueless. He is there to remind us of the possibility of style in an age which has put on itself the burden of pretending that style has no meaning, and, in the midst of our anxieties over the problem of violence, to suggest that even in killing or being killed we are not freed from the necessity of establishing satisfactory models of behaviour.

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单选题 In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Mark the correct answer to each question on your answer sheet.

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单选题 Questions 14 to 16 are based on a talk on pruritus, so called "severe itching"—why and how body parts itch. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.

单选题______ is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. [A] Linguistics [B] Language [C] Psycholinguistics [D] Applied linguistics