单选题Questions 26～30 All her life, Mrs Foster had had an almost pathological fear of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theater curtain. In other respects, she was not a particularly nervous woman, but the mere thought of being late on occasions like these would throw her into such a state of nerves that she would begin to twitch. It was nothing much—just a tiny vellicating muscle in the corner of the left eye, like a secret wink—hut the annoying thing was that it refused to disappear until an hour or so after the train or plane or whatever it was had been safely caught. It was really extraordinary how in certain people a simple apprehension about a thing like catching a train can grow into a serious obsession. At least half an hour before it was time to leave the house for the station, Mrs Foster would step out of the elevator all ready to go, with hat and coat and gloves, and then, being quite unable to sit down, she would flutter and fidget about from room to room until her husband, who must have been well aware of her state, finally emerged from his privacy and suggested in a cool dry voice that perhaps they had better get going now, had they not? Mr Foster may possibly have had a right to be irritated by this foolishness of his wife' s, but he could have had no excuse for increasing her misery by keeping her waiting unnecessarily. Mind you, it is by no means certain that this is what he did, yet whenever they were to go somewhere, his timing was so accurate—just a minute or two late, you understand—and his manner so bland that it was hard to believe he wasn't purposely inflicting a nasty private little torture of his own on the unhappy lady. And one thing he must have known—that she would never dare to call out and tell him to hurry. He has disciplined her too well for that. He must also have known that if he was prepared to wait even beyond the last moment of safety, he could drive her nearly into hysterics. On one or two special occasions in the later years of their married life, it seemed almost as though he had wanted to miss the train simply in order to intensify the poor woman's suffering. Assuming (though one cannot be sure) that the husband was guilty, what made his attitude doubly unreasonable was the fact that, with the exception of this one small irrepressible foible, Mrs Foster was and always had been a good and loving wife. For over thirty years, she had served him loyally and well. There was no doubt about this. Even she, a very modest woman, was aware of it, and although she had for years refused to let herself believe that Mr Foster would ever consciously torment her, there had been times recently when she had caught herself beginning to wonder.

单选题 Reading the papers and looking at television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise, we are placing ourselves in harm's way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment around us. As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness: ff we take up the wrong kind of personality, we nm the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, breathed or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks. The truth is something different, in my view. There has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now living in the industrial societies of the Western world. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today's figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our 80s and 90s. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen, it is usually caused by trauma. Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the 17th century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people's resistance to infection. In short we have come a long way--the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn't worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control. Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learned about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learned about the ailments of our middle years and old age—cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago. Today's powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine's hardest problems is something new. It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings, in industrialized society, can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.

单选题 Questions 26-30 Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly. This vision of intelligence asserts formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual prejudice that has brought with it some discouraging results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is very good at some form of school discipline is "intelligent. " Yet mental hospitals are filled with patients who have all of the properly lettered certificates. A truer indicator of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day. If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it's worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N. B.D. --Nervous Break Down. "Intelligent" people do not have N. B. D. 's because they are in charge of themselves. They know how to choose happiness over depression, because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives. You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human. Similarly, money, growing old, sickness, deaths, natural disasters and accidents are all events which present problems to virtually all human beings. But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have an N, B. D. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don't measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

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

单选题The Microsoft antitrust trial inched close to a final ruling from U. S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Tuesday, as the software vendor fried a brief refuting his contention that the company has a monopoly in PC operating systems. Microsoft also claimed that U. S. government prosecutors have not satisfied the burden of proof for any of their antitrust claims. Microsoft made the arguments in its proposed conclusions of law—a document of more than 100 pages—fried with the court Tuesday stating the company"s interpretation of how antitrust law should be applied to Jackson"s findings of fact. The software giant said having an extremely popular product—Windows—does not make it a monopolist. In his findings of fact issued November 5, 1999, Jackson said Microsoft "enjoys a monopoly" in the personal computer market. A month later the government and 19 U. S. states alleged in their proposed conclusions of law that Microsoft engaged in illegal "monopoly maintenance" to protect and extend Windows" dominance and then tried to monopolize the Internet browser market. Microsoft refuted all those claims in its brief Tuesday, citing numerous cases and court findings over the past 30 years. The company said the case law demonstrates that it did not engage in anticompetitive conduct that contributed significantly to the maintenance of a monopoly. Microsoft also cited the June 1998 Appeals Court ruling that called the union of Windows and Internet Explorer "a genuine integration" The brief comes one week after reports began circulating that the government is preparing to propose the breakup of Microsoft into two or three parts. It restates many of Microsoft"s defenses, claiming that the integration of Web browsing software into Windows benefited millions of consumers and that the software vendor did not prevent users from obtaining Netscape Navigator. Jackson"s findings of fact expressly found that "many—if not most—consumers can be said to benefit from Microsoft"s provisions of Web browsing functionality with its Windows operating system at no additional charge," the document says. The brief further states that the findings of fact did not say that Microsoft acted with a specific intent to obtain monopoly power in the market for Web browsers. "The Court instead found that Microsoft attempted to increase Internet Explorer"s usage share to such a level as would prevent Netscape Navigator… from becoming the "standard" Web browsing software," the Microsoft brief said. While the government argues that Microsoft"s actions may have made it more difficult for Netscape to use certain channels of distribution, Microsoft"s filing cites numerous cases that demonstrate that its actions were within the bounds of competition defined by the law. Microsoft also rejects the government"s claim that its licensing agreements illegally prevent computer manufacturers from modifying the first screen that a user sees when Windows launches, saying the license merely restate rights that Microsoft enjoys under federal copyright law. The two sides in the trial, which began in October 1998, can now submit rebuttals to each other"s conclusions of law. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 22, and a ruling is expected in the spring.

单选题

单选题 Questions 27-30

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

单选题 So you've got an invention — you and around 39,000 others each year, according to 2002 statistics! The 64,000-dollar question, if you have come up with a device which you believe to be the answer to the energy crisis or you've invented a lawnmower which cuts grass with a jet of water (not so daft, someone has invented one), is how to ensure you're the one to reap the rewards of your ingenuity. How will all you garden shed boffins out there keep others from capitalizing on your ideas and lining their pockets at your expense? One of the first steps to protect your interest is to patent your invention. That can keep it out of the grasp of the pirates for at least the next 20 years. And for this reason inventors in their droves beat a constant trail from all over the country to the doors of an anonymous grey-fronted building just behind London's Holborn to try and patent their devices. The building houses the Patent Office. It's an ant heap of corridors, offices and filing rooms—a sorting house and storage depot for one of the world's biggest and most varied collections of technical data. Some ten million patents — English and foreign — are listed there. File after file, catalogue after catalogue detail the brain-children of inventors down the centuries, from a 1600's machine gun designed to fire square bullets at infidels and round ones at Christians, to present-day laser, nuclear and computer technology. The first letters' patent were granted as long ago as 1449 to a Flemish craftsman by the name of John Utynam. The letters, written in Latin, are still on file at the office. They were granted by King Henry Ⅵ and entitled Utynam to import into this country his knowledge of making stained glass windows in order to install such windows at Eton College. Present-day patents procedure is a more sophisticated affair than getting a go-ahead note from the monarch. These days the strict procedures governing whether you get a patent for your revolutionary mouse-trap or solar-powered back-scratcher have been reduced to a pretty exact science. From start to finish it will take around two and a half years and cost ￡ 165 for the inventor to gain patent protection for his brainchild. That's if he's lucky. By no means all who apply to the Patent Office, which is a branch of the Department of Trade, get a patent. A key man at the Patent Office is Bernard Partridge, Principal Examiner (Administration), who boils down to one word the vital ingredient any inventor needs before he can hope to overcome the many hurdles in the complex procedure of obtaining a patent — "ingenuity".

单选题It was a cold, rainy and wholly miserable afternoon in Washington, and a hot muggy night in Miami. It was Sunday, and three games were played in the two cities. The people playing them and the people watching them tell us much about the ever-changing ethnic structure of the United States. Professional football in the United States is almost wholly played by native-born American citizens, mostly very large and very strong, many of them black. It is a game of physical strength. Linemen routinely weigh more than 300 pounds. Players are valued for their weigh and muscles, for how fast they can run, and how hard they can hit each other. Football draws the biggest crowds, but the teams play only once a week, because they get so battered. The 67,204 fans were in Miami for the final game of the baseball World Series. Baseball was once America"s favorite game, but has lost that claim to basketball. Baseball is a game that requires strength, but not hugeness. Agility, quickness, perfect vision and quick reaction are more important than pure strength. Baseball was once a purely American game, but has spread around much of the New World. In that Sunday"s final, the final hit of the extra inning game was delivered by a native of Columbia. The Most Valuable Player in the game was a native of Columbia. The rosters of both teams were awash with Hispanic names, as is Miami, which now claims the World Championship is a game that may be losing popularity in America, but has gained it in much of the rest of the world. Baseball in America has taken on a strong Hispanic flavor, with a dash of Japanese added for seasoning. Soccer, which many countries just call football, is the most widely enjoyed sport in the world. In soccer, which many countries just call football, the ethnic tide has been the reverse of baseball. Until recently, professional soccer in the United States has largely been an import, played by South Americans and Europeans. Now, American citizens in large numbers are finally taking up the most popular game in the world. Basketball, an American invention increasingly played around the world, these days draws large crowds back home. Likewise, hockey, a game largely imported to the United States from neighboring Canada. Lacrosse, a version of which was played by Native Americans before the Europeans arrived, is also gaining a keen national following. Sports of all kinds are winning support from American armchair enthusiasts from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

单选题We have all heard of counterfeiting before. Usually it refers to people making money— printing it instead of earning it. But counterfeiting also can involve all sorts of consumer goods and manufactured products. From well-known brand names such as Calvin Klein jeans to auto parts, counterfeiters have found ways to produce goods that look authentic. In some instances, counterfeit products look better than the original! The demand of brand-name products has helped counterfeiting grow into a very profitable business throughout the world and into a serious problem for legitimate manufacturers and consumers alike. Faulty counterfeit parts have caused more than two dozen plane crashes. Most counterfeit auto parts do not meet federal safety standards. Counterfeiting hurts manufacturers in many ways. Analysts estimate that, in the United States alone, annual revenue lost runs from $6 billion to $8 billion perhaps even worse, consumers blame the innocent manufacturer when they unknowingly buy a counterfeit product and find it doesn't perform as expected. Sometimes entire economies can suffer. For instance, when farmers in Kenya and Zaire used counterfeit fertilizers, both countries lost most of their crops. In 1984 the U.S. government enacted the Trademark Counterfeiting Act and made counterfeiting of products a criminal offense punishable by fines and stiff jail terms. Unfortunately counterfeiting does not receive top priority from law enforcement officers and prosecutors. Legitimate firms therefore have the burden of finding their own raids and to fight the problem. IBM, with a court order, conducted its own raids and found' keyboards, displays, and boxes with its logo. The fake parts were used to create counterfeits of IBM's personal computer "XT". Some companies have developed secret product codes to identify the genuine article. They must change the codes periodically because counterfeiters learn the codes and duplicate them. Perhaps the most effective way for manufacturers to fight counterfeiting is to monitor the distribution network and make sure counterfeit products are not getting into the network. Some companies even hire investigators to track counterfeit products. By copying other firms' products, counterfeiters avoid research and development costs and most marketing costs. High-tech products such as computers and their software products are especially vulnerable. As long as counterfeiting is profitable, an abundance of products are available to copy, and the laws are difficult to enforce, counterfeiters can be expected to prosper for a long time.

单选题"Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant ( in Greek) anything consecrated to the Muses: a hill, a shrine, a garden, a festival or even a textbook. Both Plato"s Academy and Aristotle"s Lyceum had a mouseion, a muses" shrine. Although the Greeks already collected detached works of art, many temples--notably that of Hera at Olympia (before which the Olympic flame is still lit)--had collections of objects, some of which were works of art by well-known masters, while paintings and sculptures in the Alexandrian Museum were incidental to its main purpose. The Romans also collected and exhibited art from disbanded temples, as well as mineral specimens, exotic plants, animals; and they plundered sculptures and paintings (mostly Greek) for exhibition. Meanwhile, the Greek word had slipped into Latin by transliteration (though not to signify picture galleries, which were called pinacothecae) and museum still more or less meant "Muses" shrine". The inspirational collections of precious and semi-precious objects were kept in larger churches and monasteries--which focused on the gold-enshrined, bejewelled relics of saints and martyrs. Princes, and later merchants, had similar collections, which became the deposits of natural curiosities: large lumps of amber or coral, irregular pearls, unicorn horns, ostrich eggs, fossil bones and so on. They also included coins and gems-- often antique engraved ones--as well as, increasingly, paintings and sculptures. As they multiplied and expanded, to supplement them, the skill of the fakers grew increasingly refined. At the same time, the 15th century, visitors could admire the very grandest paintings and sculptures in the churches, palaces and castles; they were not "collected" either, but "site-specific", and were considered an integral part both of the fabric of the buildings and of the way of life which went on inside them--and most of the buildings were public ones. In the 17th century, scientific and prestige collecting became so widespread that three or four collectors independently published directories to museums all over the known world. But it was the age of revolutions and industry which produced the next sharp shift in the way the institution was perceived: the fury against royal and church monuments prompted antiquarians to shelter them in asylum-galleries, of which the Musee des Monuments Francais was the most famous. Then, in the first half of the 19th century, museum funding took off, allied to the rise of new wealth: London acquired the National Gallery and the British Museum, the Louvre was organized, the Museum-Insel was begun in Berlin, and the Munich galleries were built. In Vienna, the huge Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums took over much of the imperial treasure. Meanwhile, the decline of craftsmanship (and of public taste with it) inspired the creation of "improving" collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was the most famous, as well as perhaps the largest of them.

单选题 In the art of the Middle Ages, we never encounter the personality of the artist as an individual; rather it is diffused through the artistic genius of centuries embodied in the rules of religious art. Art of the Middle Ages is first a sacred script, the symbols and meanings of which were well settled. The circular halo placed vertically behind the head signifies sainthood, while the halo impressed with a cross signifies divinity. By bare feet, we recognize God, the angels, Jesus Christ and the apostles, but for an artist to have depicted the Virgin Mary with bare feet would have been tantamount to heresy. Several concentric, wavy lines represent the sky, while parallel lines water or the sea. A tree, which is to say a single stalk with two or three stylized leaves, informs us that the scene is laid on earth. A tower with a window indicates a village, and, should an angel be watching from depicted with curly hair, a short beard, and a tonsure, while Saint Paul has always a bald head and a long beard. A second characteristic of this iconography is obedience to a sacred mathematics. "The Divine Wisdom," wrote Saint Augustine, "reveals itself everywhere in numbers", a doctrine attributable to the neo—Platonists who revived the genius of Pythagoras. Twelve is the master number of the Church and is the product of three, the number of the Trinity, and four, the number of material elements. The number seven, the most mysterious of all numbers, is the sum of four and three. There are the seven ages of man, seven virtues, seven planets. In the final analysis, the seven-tone scale of Gregorian music is the sensible embodiment of the order of the universe. Numbers require also symmetry. At Charters, a stained glass window shows the four prophets, Isaac, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Jeremiah, carrying on their shoulders the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. A third characteristic of art is to be a symbolic language, showing us one thing and inviting us to see another. In this respect, the artist was called upon to imitate God, who had hidden a profound meaning behind the literal and wished nature itself to be a moral lesson to man. Thus, every painting is an allegory. In a scene of the final judgment, we can see the foolish virgins at the left hand of Jesus and the wise at his right, and we understand that this symbolizes those who are lost and those who are saved. Even seemingly insignificant details carry hidden meaning. The lion in a stained glass window is the figure of the Resurrection. These, then, are the defining characteristics of art of the Middle Ages, a system within which even the most mediocre talent was elevated by the genius of the centuries. The artists of the early Renaissance broke with traditional at their own peril. When they are not outstanding, they are scarcely able to avoid insignificance and banality in their religious works, and, even when they are great, they are no more than the equals of the old masters who passively followed the sacred rules.

单选题 Richard, King of England from 1189 to 1199, with all his characteristic virtues and faults cast in a heroic mould, is one of the most fascinating medieval figures. He has been described as the creature and embodiment of the age of chivalry, In those days the lion was much admired in heraldry, and more than one king sought to link himself with its repute. When Richard's contemporaries called him "Coeur de Lion"(The Lion heart), they paid a lasting compliment to the king of beasts. Little did the English people owe him for his services, and heavily did they pay for his adventures. He was in England only twice for a few short months in his ten years' reign; yet his memory has always English hearts, and seems to present throughout the centuries the pattern of the fighting man. In all deeds of prowess as well as in large schemes of war Richard shone. He was tall and delicately shaped strong in nerve and sinew, and most dexterous in arms. He rejoiced in personal combat, and regarded his opponents without malice as necessary agents in his fame. He loved war, not so much for the sake of glory or political ends, but as other men love science or poetry, for the excitement of the struggle and the glow of victory. By this his whole temperament was toned; and united with the highest qualities of the military commander, love of war called forth all the powers of his mind and body. Although a man of blood and violence, Richard was too impetuous to be either treacherous on habitually cruel. He was as ready to forgive as he was hasty to offend; he was open-handed and munificent to profusion in war circumspect in design and skilful in execution; in political a child, lacking in subtlety and experience. His political alliances were formed upon his likes and dislikes; his political schemes had neither unity nor clearness of purpose. The advantages gained for him by military geoids were flung away through diplomatic ineptitude. When, on the journey to the East, Messina in Sicily was won by his arms he was easily persuaded to share with his polished, faithless ally, Philip Augustus, fruits of a victory which more wisely used might have foiled the French King's artful schemes. The rich and tenable acquisition of Cyprus was cast away even more easily than it was won. His life was one magnificent parade, which, when ended, left only an empty plain. In 1199, when the difficulties of raising revenue for the endless war were at their height, good news was brought to King Richard. It was said there had been dug up near the castle of Chaluz, on the lands of one of his French vassals, a treasure of wonderful quality; a group of golden images of an emperor, his wife, sons and daughters, seated round a table, also of gold, had been unearthed. The King claimed this treasure as lord paramount. The lord of Chaluz resisted the demand, and the King laid siege to his small, weak castle. On the third day, as he rode daringly, near the wall, confident in his hard-tried luck, a bolt from a crossbow struck him in the left shoulder by the neck. The wound, already deep, was aggravated by the necessary cutting out of the arrow-head. Gangrene set in, and Coeur de Lion knew that he must pay a soldier's debt. He prepared for death with fortitude and calm, and in accordance with the principles he had followed. He arranged his affairs; he divided his personal belongings among his friends or bequeathed them to charity. He declared John to be his heir, and made all present swear fealty to him. He ordered the archer who had shot the fatal bolt, and who was now a prisoner, to be brought before him. He pardoned him, and made him a gift of money. For seven years he had not confessed for fear of being compelled to be reconciled to Philip, but now he received the offices of the Church with sincere and exemplary piety, and died in the forty-second year of his age on April 6,1199, worthy, by the consent of all men, to sit with King Arthur and Roland and other heroes of martial romance at some eternal round table, which we trust the Creator of the Universe in his comprehension will not have forgotten to provide. The archer was flayed alive.

单选题Questions 11-14

单选题Which of the following is implied in the sentence "That conjures up images of constant and relentless forward movement orchestrated with military precision."

单选题Questions 19-22

单选题Questions 11-14

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.