单选题Whatcanbelearnedfromthetelephoneconversationyou'vejustheard?[A]MrAlexanderiswantedonthephonebutheisout.[B]MrJohnsoniswantedonthephonebutheisout.[C]MrAlexanderworksforABCImports.

单选题 Historically, TV's interest in "green" issues has been limited to the green that spends and makes the world go round. (That, and Martians.) As for environmentalism, TV is where people watch SUV ads on energy-sucking giant screens that are as thirsty as a Bavarian at Oktoberfest. But with the greening of politics and pop culture—from Al Gore to Leo DiCaprio to Homer and Marge in The Simpsons Movie—TV is jumping on the biodiesel-fueled band-wagon. In November, NBC (plus Bravo, Sci Fi and other sister channels) will run a week of green-themed episodes, from news to sitcoms. CBS has added a "Going Green" segment to The Early Show. And Fox says it will work climate change into the next season of 24. ("Dammit, Chloe, there's no time! The polar ice cap's going to melt in 15 minutes!") On HGTV's Living with Ed, actor Ed Begley Jr. offers tips for eco-living from his solar-powered house in Studio City, Calif.—see him energy-audit Cheryl Tiegs! —while Sundance airs its documentary block "The Green". MTV will set The Real World: Hollywood in a "green" house. Next year Discovery launches 24-hour eco-lifestyle channel Planet Green, a plan validated this spring when the eco-minded documentary Planet Earth became a huge hit for Discovery. "Green is part of [Discovery's] heritage," says Planet Green president Eileen O'Neill. "But as pop culture was starting to recognize it, we realized we could do a better job positioning ourselves. " Clearly this is not all pure altruism. Those popular, energy-stingy compact fluorescent bulbs? NBC's owner, General Electric, has managed to sell one or two. "When you have them being a market leader and saying this makes good business sense, people listen to that on [the TV] side," says Lauren Zalaznick, Bravo Media president, who is heading NBC's effort. And green pitches resonate with young and well-heeled viewers (the type who buy Priuses and $2-a-lb. organic apples), two groups the networks are fond of. NBC is confident enough in its green week's appeal to schedule it in sweeps. It's an unlikely marriage of motives. Ad-supported TV is a consumption medium: it persuades you to want and buy stuff. Traditional home shows about renovating and decorating are catnip for retailers like Lowe's and Home Depot. Of course, there are green alternatives to common purchases: renewable wood, Energy Star appliances, hybrid cars. But sometimes the greener choice is simply not to buy so much junk—not the friendliest sell to advertisers. The bigger hurdle, though, may be creative. How the NBC shows will work in the messages is still up in the air. (Will the Deal or No Deal babes wear hemp miniskirts? Will the Bionic Woman get wired for solar?) Interviewed after the 24 announcement, executive producer Howard Gordon hedged a bit on Fox's green promises. "It'll probably be more in the props. We might see somebody drive a hybrid." Will it work? Green is a natural fit on cable lifestyle shows or news programs—though enlisting a news division to do advocacy has its own issues. But commanding a sitcom like The Office to work in an earnest environmental theme sounds like the kind of high-handed p.r. directive that might be satirized on, well, The Office. Even Begley—formerly of St. Elsewhere—notes that the movie Chinatown worked because it kept the subplot about the water supply in Los Angeles well in the background: "It's a story about getting away with murder, and the water story is woven in." Of course, in an era of rampant product placement, there are worse things than persuading viewers to buy a less wasteful light bulb by hanging one over Jack Bauer as he tortures a terrorist. The greatest challenge—for viewers as well as programmers—is not letting entertainment become a substitute for action; making and watching right-minded shows isn't enough in itself. The 2007 Emmy Awards, for a start, aims to be carbon neutral, solar power, biodiesel generators, hybrids for the stars, bikes for production assistants—though the Academy cancelled Fox's idea to change the red carpet, no kidding, to green. The most potent message may be seeing Hollywood walk the walk, in a town in which people prefer to drive.

单选题Questions 11-14

单选题You ______be too tired-you've only been working for an hour. [A] must not [B] won't [C] can't [D] may not

单选题--Which will you have then, the white one or the blue one?--I'll take ______ to give myself a change sometimes. [A] one [B] two [C] either [D] both

单选题 {{B}}Questions 15—18{{/B}}

单选题Questions 16～20 Brian Harper knows from personal experience how curious people are about priests and nuns. He began training to be a priest 20 years ago, straight from school, and although he left after two years he has never quite escaped the legacy. Whenever he tells people about that period in his life they fire him with questions about what prompted him to consider that route in the first place. There are the usual questions about coping with celibacy and the restrictions that this puts on personal relationships. But there is real curiosity, too, about why an "otherwise normal" person would take on such a life. "There is a genuine interest in the whole area of spirituality and the spiritual life," Harper says, "The contrast has never been greater than it is now between the religious and secular paths. " Many young people head for a life in the church, he says, after attending Catholic schools where the emphasis is placed on religious observance, ritual and the importance of obedience and personal humility. But in today"s world it is becoming increasingly difficult for such young people to ignore what is happening in the secular world behind the church. Many priests and nuns have left the safety of the ordered religious life in the past couple of decades. But they have not done so without a struggle. Harper can identify with the experience of those who leave. "It is so much easier to join up than it is to quit," he says, "It"s like in personal relationships, they"re easy enough to get into, but extricating yourself from one that"s not working or that you"re not happy with can be very difficult indeed. " Steven Mc Callanan, a parish priest, is frank about his life in church. He sums it up: "If you are prepared to see life in all its color then go ahead, take orders. But don"t think it will be easy. I face problems every day. " Harper believes the religious life attracts a true cross-section of people, from the extrovert to the shy and retiring, although many are drawn by the church"s emphasis on ritual and performance. If one were to generalize, though, most priests have the kind of artistic temperaments that would "I know some brilliant men and women in the church, then I know some tried and disillusioned ones and some who are struggling with their own kind of personal demons," says Harper. He says it is a shame that the Catholic community has traditionally put priests on a pedestal, "up there with God", whereas in fact they are just like everyone else: flawed and vulnerable, make them good actors or performance poets-and social drinkers. "Being a priest just happens to be a career, admittedly a specialized one and one that demands a certain range of qualities. But priests are just as frail and weak as the rest of us." Harper has made a television programme about priests, monks and nuns in the Catholic Church. The message he gave to those who took part in his documentary was: "We are not trying to trip you up or make you appear strange or foolish. We are just trying to answer what we think are some generally asked questions about your attitudes, your dilemmas, and the kinds of lives you lead. "It makes fascinating viewing.

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单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.

单选题Good teachers matter. This may seem obvious to anyone who has a child in school or, for that matter, to anyone who has been a child in school. For a long time, though, researchers couldn't actually prove that teaching talent was important. But new research finally shows that teacher quality is a close cousin to student achievement. A great teacher can cram one-and-a-half grades' worth of learning into a single year, while laggards are lucky to accomplish half that much. Parents and kids, it seems, have been right all along to care whether they were assigned to Mrs. Smith or Mr. Brown. Yet, while we know now that better teachers are critical, flaws in the way that administrators select and retain them mean that schools don't always hire the best. Many ingredients for good teaching are difficult to ascertain in advance—charisma and diligence come to mind—but research shows a teacher's own ability on standardized tests reliably predicts good performance in the classroom. You would think, then, that top— scoring teachers would be swimming in job offers, right? Not so, says Vanderbilt University professor Dale Ballou. High-scoring teaching applicants "do not fare better than others in the job market," he writes. "Indeed, remarkably they do somewhat worse. " Even more surprising, given the national shortage of highly skilled math and science teachers, school administrators are more keen to hire education majors than applicants who have math or science degrees. No one knows for sure why those who hire teachers routinely overlook top talent. Perhaps they wrongly think that the qualifications they shun make little difference for students. Also, administrators are probably naturally drawn to teachers who remind them of themselves. But failing to recognize the qualities that make teachers truly effective (and to construct incentives to attract and retain more of these top performers) has serious consequences. For example, because schools don't always hire the best applicants, across-the-board salary increases cannot improve teacher quality much, and may even worsen it. That's because higher salaries draw more weak as well as strong applicants into teaching-applicants the current hiring system can't adequately screen. Unless administrators have incentives to hire the best teachers available, it's pointless to give them a larger group to choose from. If public school hiring processes are bad, their compensation policies are worse. Most districts pay solely based on years of experience and the presence of a master's degree, a formula that makes the Federal General Schedule—which governs pay for U. S. bureaucrats—look flexible. Study after study has shown that teachers with master's degrees are no better than those without. Job experience does matter, but only for the first few years, according to research by Hoover Institution's Eric A. Hanushek. A teacher with 15 years of experience is no more effective, on average, than a teacher with five years of experience, but which one do you think is paid more? This toxic combination of rigid pay and steep rewards for seniority causes average quality to decline rather than increase as teacher groups get older. Top performers often leave the field early for industries that reward their excellence. Mediocre teachers, on the other hand, are soon overcompensated by seniority pay. And because they are paid more than their skills command elsewhere, these less-capable pedagogues settle in to provide many years of ineffectual instruction. So how can we separate the wheat from the chaff in the teaching profession? To make American schools competitive, we must rethink seniority pay, the value of master's degrees, and the notion that a teacher can teach everything equally well-especially math and science- without appropriate preparation in the subject. Our current education system is unlikely to accomplish this dramatic rethinking. Imagine, for a moment, that American cars had been free in recent decades, while Toyotas and Hondas sold at full price. We'd probably be driving Falcons and Corvairs today. Free public education suffers from a lack of competition in just this way. So while industries from aerospace to drugs have transformed themselves in order to compete, public schooling has stagnated. School choice could spark the kind of reformation this industry needs by motivating administrators to hire the best and adopt new strategies to keep top teachers in the classroom. The lesson that good teachers matter should be taught, not as a theory, but as a practice.

单选题 Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.

单选题 {{B}}Questions 27-30{{/B}}

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单选题 The farm is a major marketplace for millions of tons of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and for advanced machinery and the fuel required to run it. The modern superfarm, large and highly capitalized, is resource dependent compared with the diversified small farms that were once dominant. On diversified farms, major energy needs may be supplied by resident humans and animals. Soil fertility may be maintained by alternating cash crops and restorative crops, and also by returning animal manure to the soil. This fanning model of relatively self-sufficient agriculture, and the way of life associated with it, are still economically viable, as demonstrated by prosperous Amish farmers and other practitioners of "alternative" agriculture. Particularly relevant to today's mainstream agriculture are the energy-saving practices on large "organic" farms, which are thoroughly mechanized but which minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. By comparison, mainstream American agriculture has until lately been careless in its use of energy, water, and land. When fossil energy was cheap, applications of fertilizers and pesticides paid large dividends, so farmers were encouraged to use these products. Soon most farmers used too much fertilizer and pesticide. Farmers in dry regions enjoyed an era of cheap water, obtained from publicly subsidized irrigation systems or from pumping groundwater using inexpensive energy. The soil too was expendable as demand grew for U.S. agricultural products. The period of extraordinary profligacy in the use of soil, water, and fossil fuels may well be at an end. The new structure of large farms is quite sensitive to cost factors. These adaptive farms, whose development was assisted by public tax, subsidy and research policies, have access to capital, technologies, and management skills, enabling them to switch relatively quickly to resource-conserving practices—for example, to low-tillage system that requires less fuel, that shepherds soil moisture, and that may reduce soil erosion. It seems likely that federal programs that have enlarged our farms, therefore, have had a further result of creating the potential for a more conserving agriculture. With respect to energy use. for example, energy costs per unit of output are lower for large farms, mainly because these farms quickly economized on energy as costs rose. In the future, according to one authoritative assessment, "agricultural production is likely to use capital and land more intensively but energy, fertilizer and labor less intensively".

单选题Meteors are ephemeral. They will usually vanish before you have a chance to point them out to somebody else. This makes them suitable for starry-eyed lovers to wish upon, but modern technology can put shooting stars to more profitable use. Next time you see one, bear in mind that a dispatcher may be using it to help him marshal a fleet of long-distance lorries. To human eyes, a meteor is beautiful. To a radio wave, it is just another thing to bounce off, and bouncing radio waves off the sky is not new. Left to themselves radio waves travel in straight lines, which limits their range. To get them round corners, and over the horizon, they need something to bounce off. In the ionosphere—the uppermost level of the atmosphere—the sun"s rays break down molecules into positively charged ions and free electrons. These can reflect (and refract) radiation. The ionosphere let Marconi and his contemporaries send radio messages over long distances. When a pebble falls from space into the atmosphere, moving at tens of kilometers a second, it gets rid of a lot of energy. Like the energy from the sun"s rays, this ionizes the molecules of the atmosphere. The meteor"s 10—20km path is densely packed with ions. By the 1930s, radio waves bounced off meteor trails had been used by scientists to determine the speed, height and direction of meteors. The obvious disadvantage of meteors—the fact that they are so transient—might suggest that bouncing radio waves off their trails would remain the preserve of scientists. In overall quantity, though, meteors bid fair to make up what they lack in constancy. On an average day there are a million reasonable-sized ones (one gram), 400 million smaller ones (one-hundredth of a gram), and 160 billion even tinier ones (one ten-thousandth of a gram). Meteors also have advantage. The greater density of ions in a meteor trail makes it less susceptible to the many things which perturb the ionosphere, and hence the quality of radio signals that bounce off it—such as time of day, weather conditions, sun spots or indeed intrusive meteors. This immunity from "noise" matters to people who want to send digital data. Radio hams may enjoy the tribulations of chit-chat through adversity and static, but such a noisy medium is not good for transmitting error-free sequences of 0s and 1s. That is why meteor-burst communication (MBC) comes into its own when small amounts of data need to be gathered from many places fairly quickly. A system under construction to monitor the flow of the Nile provides an example. A master transmitter sends a radio "probe" into the sky in roughly the direction of the target. When a conveniently aligned meteor materializes, the probe bounces off it and reaches the receiver. When the receiver hears its master"s voice it responds along the same path, spurting out data about the river"s recent behavior. The master station acknowledges receipt, gives any further instructions and signs off. It then directs its probe towards the next of the 250 outstations. Depending on the system"s sensitivity, the wait between suitably aligned meteors varies between four seconds and ten minutes. The bursts of communication between master and out-stations may take as little as tenth of a second. It must be completed in the second it takes for the meteor"s trail to dissipate. In America, Meteor Communications of Kent, Washington, is the biggest and oldest of the MBC companies. It has provided meteor-burst equipment for 14 years. Its devices have been planted along the Chinese-Russian border to send short encoded messages back to Beijing. Other systems in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, South Africa and Europe have been set up to monitor a variety of things, solar radiation, tides, water supplies, motorway fog, snow conditions and the like. The military applications are clear, remote unmanned stations could sense approaching enemy ships, aircraft, or troops and warn headquarters. The American military"s 25-year interest in MBC is also fueled by its survivability in time of war. Meteors, unlike satellites, cannot be jammed or knocked down. Indeed, knock down a lot of satellites and you will, briefly, increase the number of meteors. Advances in electronics, allowing systems to respond faster, mean that MBC is no longer limited to communication with fixed out-stations. Transtrack of Marion, Massachusetts, was granted the first American commercial business radio license for MBC in 1988. It uses MBC to keep track of lorries that crisscross the country, often far from populated areas. Anyone who wants continuous transmission, not bursts, or wants to send a lot of data, is better advised to stick with satellites, cables, fiber-optics or conventional radio. But MBC is cheap to buy and run, and provides reliable long-range communications. Interest has grown recently, and there is plenty of scope for making the equipment faster and smaller.

单选题 Bust a myth, get a benefit Few subjects harbor more myths and misconceptions than nutrition. Some of the most common: "Low-fat" means "healthy". Low-fat foods can be healthy, but not always. The problem? Many processed foods that are low in fat are high in sugar, which gives you extra calories and may cause wide swings in your blood sugar levels. This makes you gain weight and lose energy, and may raise your risk of several diseases. Some people believe "low-fat" means "Eat all you want. " I remember a dieting patient who was puzzled because he was gaining weight. He mentioned he was eating a low-fat cake. When I asked him bow much, he replied, "Oh, one or two. " "One or two pieces? No, one or two cakes!" An ideal diet is low in fat and low in sugar. Most people can enjoy high-sugar, high-fat treats on occasion, but if you indulge one day, be sure to eat healthier the next. Canned fruits and vegetables aren't nutritious. They can be. A recent review of studies found that nutrients are generally similar in comparable fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables. Many parents have told me that, knowing this, they might be more likely to cook at home rather than eat less nutritious meals at restaurants. Red wine, not white, prevents heart disease. Yes, drinking red wine may significantly decrease the risk of heart disease, but white wine may be just as protective, at least in rats. Resveratrol is a healthy substance found in the skin of red grapes. It's higher in concentration in red wine than white because red wine is fermented with the skins, allowing it to absorb the resveratrol. American and Italian researchers recently found that grape pulp extract (white wine) was equally effective in protecting rats from a heart attack as grape skin extract (red wine). Also, most of the antioxidant benefits of wine come from the grape itself, not the fact that it's fermented. Studies show that spending time with friends and family may reduce the risk of many illnesses. People who imbibe moderately often do so in the company of others, and these psychosocial factors may be as powerful as the drink itself. I neither prescribe nor proscribe alcohol, but if you're going to drink, have no more than one or two four-ounce glasses of wine, one or two beers, or one or two ounces of liquor. More than that and the toxicities of alcohol begin to outweigh any of its potential benefits. Juice is less healthy than whole fruits. Not always. "The view that pure fruit and vegetable juices are nutritionally inferior to fruits and vegetables, in relation to chronic-disease risk reduction, is unjustified," concluded a recent review of studies. The impact of antioxidants on disease risk may be more important than the amount of fiber. Whole fruits and vegetables do have more fiber than most juices, and fiber has many benefits. It fills you up before you get too many calories, and it helps regulate blood sugar. Some juice companies are preserving the pulp (which adds to the fiber) or are even putting it back in. Summer Diet Traps. It's the season for travel, day trips and meals on the run, and it's easier than ever to eat healthy on the road. At airports, look for fresh fruit and packaged salads. Dip your fork in the dressing instead of pouring it on. Amusement parks are providing healthier choices. Disney will eliminate added trans fats from its parks by the end of this year, and kids'meals will include sides like applesauce and carrots—not fries. Some fast-food places offer better choices, too, so you can eat well just about anywhere.

单选题 {{B}}Questions 23—26{{/B}}

单选题Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview.

单选题 {{B}}Questions 19-22{{/B}}

单选题What is the writer's main purpose in the article?