单选题There"s a new campaign for the under-30s called Undivided. It gathers suggestions about Brexit from across the spectrum: leavers and remainers, left and, presumably, right. Its aim is to "get the best possible deal for young people out of the Brexit negotiations" and it will present the chosen ten demands in January. Hafsah Dabiri, its co-leader, says that young people must have a voice, and "the only way to achieve this is for us to be undivided in our political demands". Ah, demands. When a news website published Undivided"s video of young people speaking to camera, a sort of digital Ed Stone in its vagueness, the D-word was central. "I demand that there will be structures in place that allow me to study and work in Europe"; "I demand better access to mental health services for young people and better sexual health services for young women"; "I demand maintenance of free travel and free trade following Brexit". They must call the shots because they "are going to live with the consequences of Brexit the longest". The presumption that anyone over 30 is going to die soon may be a bit wounding to some of us, but never mind. It goes on to demand that Islamophobia and racism are stamped out, and "young people are finally taken seriously". Friends, this is not the way to get taken seriously by us battered, moribund, doomed oldies. Scroll down and the first reactions are tart. "I demand they learn manners, and how to vote" and "Oh, piss off, you can demand nothing, go sit in the corner and learn some manners...try thanking the older generation who fought to give them freedom of speech". To be fair, regarding that last comment the generation who fought most relevantly are now gently passing into history. The legitimate generational quarrel is with us baby-boomers who surfed a wave of prosperity, let the European dream corrode into corrupt bureaucracy, and didn"t mend the roof while the sun shone. Undivided is welcome because the young should be idealistic and take an interest. But reflecting on that intensely annoying video it struck me that if they have learnt the language of entitlement and demand it was from the generation above. Active citizenship, constructive improvement and neighbourly grassroots organization have declined in status and esteem. The industrious wartime sense of a duty to save, firewatch and donate scrap iron to the common good is old hat. We have created a sense of the citizen as disgruntled recipient, not active contributor. Of course from ministries to minnows, active citizens still beaver away, keep the wheels turning and struggle to meet demands. But rarely does anybody say: "A good job done. Thank you!" Rather, the tone of public discourse is a passive and critical one: "Why-can"t-I"; "S-not fair"; "Bloody jobsworths". Hands up: this is led by media. A soggy stream of unconstructive passive discontent and crabby criticism rises constantly from interviews and polemics, comedians, columnists and Twitter. Excuse me here while I shoot myself in the foot and irritate the hell out of my colleagues, but if I read one more beautifully phrased think piece (even by me) about how "the government is doing Brexit all wrong, and, dammit, not even telling us what it is doing, but we assume it"s rubbish"—I shall scream. The same goes for the routine sneer of the newscast interviewer and the grunting outrage of the polemicist. It"s great entertainment, this universal barracking. But anyone who has ever sat around a committee table knows what a sweat it is to balance budgets, comply with laws, set priorities, delay cherished projects, cheesepare costs and—yes—worry about media reaction. Yet those who do this rarely get much credit. In an age when media and image are sublime, the most popular figures are deplorers and snarkers who mock and complain and "demand". The palm of public approval goes to comedians and commentators, interviewers and satirists and entertainers who publicly weep for their nation"s shame. Some people, of course, do both. Honour to fundraisers, charity stalwarts, aid workers, and honest souls who stir their stumps to man a food bank, create non-profit services, take clothes and food to the homeless or the Calais Jungle. They I admire. They can have a platform. Among the "Undivided" campaigners some of the young demanders probably are volunteering, or thinking of how to engage with Europe or whatever. Those are fully entitled to offer well-researched and detailed "demands" and also to inform us, the media, so we can admiringly report and support them. But let it always be clear, in everyone"s mind, that anyone who actually does things for the general good deserves a higher rank and esteem than anyone who just talks about it. Or mocks it. There"s a parallel in the principle, which all sensible critics admit, that any honest theatre-maker or writer or creative artist—even if unsuccessful—outranks any critic, however brilliant. Actions speak louder than words. Not the other way round.

单选题Jamie Stephenson has seen firsthand what modem genetic science can do for a family. When her son David was 2 years old, a pediatrician noticed developmental delays and suspected fragile syndrome, a hereditary form of mental retardation. A lab test confirmed the diagnosis, and the Stephensons spent several years learning to live with it. When David was 6, he visited a neurologist, who scribbled "fragile X" on an insurance-company claim form. The company responded promptly—by canceling coverage for the entire family of six. There is no medical treatment for fragile X, and none of David"s siblings had been diagnosed with the condition. "The company didn"t care," Stephenson says. "They just saw a positive genetic test and said, "You"re out". " From the dawn of the DNA era, critics have worried that genetic testing would create a "biological underclass"—a population of people whose genes brand them as poor risks for employment, insurance, even marriage. The future is arriving fast. Medical labs can now test human cells for hundreds of anomalous genes. Besides tracking rare conditions, some firms now gauge people"s susceptibility to more common scourges. By unmasking inherited mutations in p53 ( main story) and other, genes, the new tests can signal increased risk of everything from breast, colon and prostate tumors to leukemia. Many of the tests are still too costly for mass marketing, but that will change. And as the Stephensons" story suggests, the consequences won"t all be benign. "This is bigger than race or sexual orientation," says Martha Volner, health-policy director for the Alliance of Genetic Support Groups. "Genetic discrimination is the civil-rights issue of the 21st century." No one would argue that genetic tests are worthless. Used properly, they can give people unprecedented power over their lives. Prospective parents who discover they"re silent carriers of the gene for a disease can make better-in formed decisions about whether and how to have kids. Some genetic maladies can be managed through medication and lifestyle changes once they"re identified. And while knowing that you"re at special risk for cancer may be an emotional burden, it can also alert you to the need for intensive monitoring. Jane Gorrell knows her family is prone to colon cancer. Her father developed hundreds of precancerous polyps back in the 1960s, and both she and her sister had the same experience during the "70s. Their condition, has since been linked to a mutation in the p53 gene—and Gorrell has learned, that one of her two children inherited it. Though the child has suffered no symptoms, she gets frequent colon exams and is helping researchers test a drug that could help save lives. The catch is that no one can guarantee the privacy of genetic information. Outside of large group plans, insurance companies often scour people"s medical records before extending coverage. And though employers face some restriction, virtually any company with a benefits program can get access to workers" health data. So can schools, adoption agencies and the military. Employees of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL), a large research institution owned by the Department of Energy and operated by the University of California, recently discovered that the organization had for three decades been quietly testing new hires blood and urine samples for evidence of various conditions. "I can"t say the information was put to some incredibly harmful use, because we don"t know what happened," says Vicki Laden, a San Francisco lawyer who has tried unsuccessfully to sue the lab for civil fights violations. LBL recently stopped the testing.

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

单选题 Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick Ⅱ in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected. Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed. Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar. Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways. But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the signals in the child's babbling, grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child's non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

单选题 Wild Bill Donovan would have loved the Internet. The American spymaster who built the Office of Strategic Services in the World War II and later laid the roots for the CIA was fascinated with information. Donovan believed in using whatever tools came to hand in the "great game" of espionage—spying as a "profession". These days the Net, which has already re-made pastimes as buying books and sending mail, is reshaping Donovan's vocation as well. The last revolution isn't simply a matter of gentlemen reading other gentlemen's e-mail. That kind of electronic spying has been going on for decades. In the past three or four years, the World Wide Web has given birth to a whole industry of point-and-click spying. The technical talents call it "open source intelligence", and as the Net grows, it is becoming increasingly influential. In 1995 the CIA held a contest to see who could compile the most data about Burundi. The winner, by a large margin, was a tiny Virginia company called Open-Source Solutions, whose clear advantage was its mastery of the electronic world. Among the firms making the biggest splash in the new world is Straitford Inc., a private intelligence-analysis firm based in Austin, Texas. Straitford makes money by selling the results of spying (covering nations from Chile to Russia) to corporations like energy-services firm McDermott International. Many of its predictions are available online at www. straitford, com. Straitford president George Friedman says he sees the online world as a kind of mutually reinforcing tool for both information collection and distribution, a spymaster's dream. Last week his firm was busy vacuuming up data bits from the far comers of the world and predicting a crisis in Ukraine. "As soon as that report nms, we'll suddenly get 500 new Internet sign-ups from Ukraine," says Friedman, a former political science professor. "And we'll hear back from some of them." Open-source spying does have its risks, of course, since it can be difficult to tell good information from bad. That's where Straitford earns its keep. Friedman relies on a lean staff in Austin. Several of his staff members have military-intelligence backgrounds. He sees the firm's outsider status as the key to its success. Straitford's briefs don't sound like the usual Washington back-and-forthing, whereby agencies avoid dramatic declarations on the chance they might be wrong. Straitford, says Friedman, takes pride in its independent voice.

单选题 What, can rigid, cold calculating mathematics possibly have in common with subtle, creative, lofty, imaginative art? This question faithfully mirrors the state of mind of most people, even of most educated people, when they regard the numbers and symbols that populate the world of mathematics. But the great leaders of mathematics thought have frequently and repeatedly asserted that the object of their pursuit is just as much an art as it is a science, and perhaps even a fine art. Maxime Bocher, an eminent mathematician living at the beginning of this century, wrote: "I like to look at mathematics almost more as an art than as a science; for the activity of the mathematician, constantly creating as he is, guided although not controlled by the external world of the senses, bears a resemblance, not fanciful, I believe, but real, to the activities of the artist—of a painter, let us say." Rigorous deductive reasoning on the part of the mathematician may be likened here to the technical skill in drawing on the part of the painter. Just as one cannot become a painter without a certain amount of skill, so no one can become a mathematician without the power to reason accurately up to a certain point. "Yet these qualities, fundamental though they are, do not make a painter or a mathematician worthy of the name, nor indeed are they the most important factors in the case. Other qualities of a far more subtle sort, chief among which in both cases is imagination, go into the making of a good artist or a good mathematician." If mathematics wants to lay claim to being an art, however, it most shows that it possesses and makes use of at least some of the elements that go to make up the things of beauty. Is not imagination, creative imagination, the most essential element of an art? Let us take a geometric object, such as the circle. To the ordinary man, this is the rim of a wheel, perhaps with spokes in it. Elementary geometry has crowded this simple figure with radii, chords, sectors, tangents, diameters, inscribed and circumscribed polygons, and so on. Here you have already an entire geometrical world created from a very rudimentary beginning. These and other miracles are undeniable proof of the creative power of the mathematieian; and, as if this were not enough, the mathematician allows the whole circle to "vanish", declares it to be imaginary, then keeps on toying with his new creation in much the same way and with much the same gusto as he did with the innocent little thing you allowed him to start out with. And all this, remember please, is just elementary plane geometry. Truly, the creative imagination displayed by the mathematician has nowhere been exceeded, not even paralleled, and, I would make bold to say, now even closely approached anywhere else. In many ways mathematics exhibits the same elements of beauty that are generally acknowledged to be the essence of poetry. First let us consider a minor point: the poet arranges his writings on the page in verses. His poem first appeals to the eye before it reaches the ear or the mind; and similarly, the mathematician lines up his 'formulas and equations so that their form may make an aesthetic impression. Some mathematicians are given to this love of arranging and exhibiting their equations to a degree that borders on a fault. Trigonometry, a branch of elementary mathematics particularly rich in formulas, offers some curious groups of them, curious in their symmetry and their arrangement. The superiority of poetry over other forms of verbal expression lies first in the symbolism used in poetry, and secondly in its extreme condensation and economy of words. Take a poem of universally acknowledged merit, say, Shelley's poem "To Night". Here is the second stanza: Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, star-in wrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out; Then wander oer city, and sea, and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand—Come, long-sought ! Taken literally, all this is, of course, sheer nonsense and nothing else. Night has no hair, night does not wear any clothes, and night is not an illicit peddler of narcotics. But is there anybody balmy enough to take the words of the poet literally? The words here are only comparisons, only symbols. For the sake of condensation the poet doesn't bother stating that his symbols mean such and such, but goes on to treat them as if they were realities. The mathematician does these things precisely as the poet does. Take numbers, for example, the very idea of which is an abstraction, or symbol. When you write the figure 3, you have created a symbol for a symbol, and when you say in algebra that is a number, you have condensed all the symbols for all the numbers into one all-embracing symbol. These, like other mathematical symbols, and like the poets symbols, are a condensed, concentrated way of stating a long and rather complicated chain of simple geometrical, algebraic, or numerical relations.

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

单选题 Civil-liberties advocates reeling from the recent revelations on surveillance had something else to worry about last week: the privacy of the billions of search queries made on sites like Google, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft. As part of a long-running court case, the government has asked those companies to turn over information on its users' search behavior. All but Google have handed over data, and now the Department of Justice has moved to compel the search giant to turn over the goods. What makes this case different is that the intended use of the information is not related to national security, but the government's continuing attempt to police Internet pornography. In 1998, Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), but courts have blocked its implementation due to First Amendment concerns. In its appeal, the DOJ wants to prove how easy it is to inadvertently stumble upon porn. In order to conduct a controlled experiment—to be performed by a UC Berkeley professor of statistics—the DOJ wants to use a large sample of actual search terms from the different search engines. It would then use those terms to do its own searches, employing the different kinds of filters each search engine offers, in an attempt to quantify how often "material that is harmful to minors" might appear. Google contends that since it is not a party to the case, the government has no right to demand its proprietary information to perform its test. "We intend to resist their motion vigorously," said Google attorney Nicole Wong. DOJ spokesperson Charles Miller says that the government is requesting only the actual search terms, and not anything that would link the queries to those who made them. (The DOJ is also demanding a list of a million Web sites that Google indexes to determine the degree to which objectionable sites are searched.) Originally, the government asked for a treasure trove of all searches made in June and July 2005; the request has been scaled back to one week's worth of search queries. One oddity about the DOJ's strategy is that the experiment could conceivably sink its own case. If the built-in filters that each search engine provides are effective in blocking porn sites, the government will have wound up proving what the opposition has said all along—you don't need to suppress speech to protect minors on the Net. "We think that our filtering technology does a good job protecting minors from inadvertently seeing adult content," says Ramez Naam, group program manager of MSN Search. Though the government intends to use these data specifically for its COPA-related test, it's possible that the information could lead to further investigations and, perhaps, subpoenas to find out who was doing the searching. What if certain search terms indicated that people were contemplating terrorist actions or other criminal activities? Says the DOJ's Miller, "I'm assuming that if something raised alarms, we would hand it over to the proper [authorities]." Privacy advocates fear that if the government request is upheld, it will open the door to further government examination of search behavior. One solution would be for Google to stop storing the information, but the company hopes to eventually use the personal information of consenting customers to improve search performance. "Search is a window into people's personalities," says Kurt Opsahl, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. "They should be able to take advantage of the Internet without worrying about Big Brother looking over their shoulders. "

单选题A businesswoman got into a taxi in midtown. Because it was the rush hour and she was in a hurry to catch a{{U}} (38) {{/U}}, she suggested a quick way to{{U}} (39) {{/U}}it. "I've been a taxi driver for 15 years!" the driver said{{U}} (40) {{/U}}. "You don't think I know the best way to go?" The woman tried to explain that she hadn't{{U}} (41) {{/U}}to annoy him, but the driver kept{{U}} (42) {{/U}}She finally realized he was too annoyed to be{{U}} (43) {{/U}}. So she did the{{U}} (44) {{/U}}, "You know, you're{{U}} (45) {{/U}}"she told him. "It must seem{{U}} (46) {{/U}}for me not to think you know the best way through the city." {{U}} (47) {{/U}}, the driver glanced at his rider in the rearview mirror (后视镜), turned down the street she{{U}} (48) {{/U}}and got her to the train on time. "He didn't say another word the rest of the ride," she said,"{{U}} (49) {{/U}}I got out and paid him. Then he thanked me." When you find yourself{{U}} (50) {{/U}}with people like this taxi driver, you will always try to{{U}} (51) {{/U}}your idea. This can lead to longer arguments, lost job chances and{{U}} (52) {{/U}}marriages. I've discovered one simple{{U}} (53) {{/U}}extremely unlikely method that can prevent the disagreement or{{U}} (54) {{/U}}difficult situation from resulting in a disaster. The{{U}} (55) {{/U}}is to put yourself in the other person's shoes and look for the{{U}} (56) {{/U}}in what that person is saying. Find a way to{{U}} (57) {{/U}}. The result may surprise you.

单选题Wheredoesthisconversationtakeplace?[A]Inalibrary.[B]Inabookstore.[C]Onasportsfield.

单选题 The discovery of the Antarctic not only proved one of the most interesting of all geographical adventures, but created what might be called "the heroic age of Antarctic exploration". By their tremendous heroism, men such as Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, caused a new continent to emerge from the shadows, and yet that heroic age, little more than a century old, is already passing. Modem science and inventions are revolutionizing the techniques of former explorers, and, although still calling for courage and feats of endurance, future journeys into these icy wastes will probably depend on motor vehicles equipped with caterpillar traction rather than on the dogs that earlier discoverers found so invaluable. Few realize that this Antarctic continent is almost equal in size to South America, and an enormous field of work awaits geographers and prospectors. The coasts of this continent remain to be accurately charted, and the mapping of the whole of the interior presents a formidable task to the cartographers who undertake the Work. Once their labours are completed, it will be possible to prospect the vast natural resources which scientists believe will furnish one of the largest treasure hoards of metals and minerals the world has yet known, and almost inexhaustible sources of copper, coal, uranium, and many other ores will become available to man. Such discoveries will usher in an era of practical exploitation of the Antarctic wastes. The polar darkness which hides this continent for the six winter months will be defeated by huge batteries of light, and make possible the establishing of air-fields for the future inter-continental air services by making these areas as light as day, Present flying mutes will be completely changed, for the Antarctic refueling bases will make flights from Australia to South America comparatively easy over the 5,000 miles journey. The climate is not likely to offer an insuperable problem, for the explorer Admiral Byrd has shown that the climate is possible even for men completely untrained for expeditions into those frozen wastes. Some of his party were men who had never seen snow before, and yet he records that they survived the rigours of the Antarctic climate comfortably, so that, provided that the appropriate installations are made, we may assume that human beings from all countries could live there safely. Byrd even affirms that it is probably the most healthy climate in the world, for the intense cold of thousands of years has sterilized this continent, and rendered it absolutely germfree, with the consequences that ordinary and extraordinary sicknesses and diseases from which man suffers in other zones with different climates are here utterly unknown. There exist no problems of conservation and preservation of food supplies, for the later keep indefinitely without any signs of deterioration; it may even be that later generations will come to regard the Antarctic as the natural storehouse for the whole world. Plans are already on foot to set up permanent bases on the shores of this continent, and what so few yearn ago was regarded as a "dead continent" now promises to be a most active center of human life and endeavour.

单选题The world seems to be going diet crazy, and yet our nation"s obesity rate has shot up year after year. And, it"s not only the over 20 population that has to worry about their weight anymore. Children from kindergarten to twelfth grade are also experiencing the problems of an overweight lifestyle. According to the website cosmiverse.com, 11% of adolescents are categorized as being over-weight, and another 16% are in danger of becoming overweight. This is a 60% jump from the 1980"s. Some of the blame is being put on schools wanting to fit more academic classes into the children"s schedule rather than waste time on physical education. This new take on education has left us with physical activity at an all-time national low, resulting in obesity and poor physical conditioning at an all-time national high. The schools have tried a few solutions; the most recent in the news has been taking soda out of schools and increasing the required time children must be active during school. Will those methods help at all? Education is important at school, but starts at home. I believe students are getting their bad habits from watching their parents and how they eat and exercise. The school system only helps to hinder the child"s dietary eating. I know there are studies showing genes that determine how a child will be built. That does not explain however, why the rate continues to increase at such a rapid rate each year. It seems more likely that more and more families have both parents working, leaving their children to their own means for a meal. "Nintendo, TV, Playstation and the like," are what Physical Education teacher, Sue Arostegui, attributes the inactiveness to. "Parents are either gone or too scared with today"s society to let them out and play." Classes on health need to become more regular and sports need to be encouraged. At Live Oak High School the staff does a good job of teaching how to eat and exercise to stay healthy. The freshmen study health every Wednesday in RE., and Para James teaches healthy eating and food preparation in Home Economics for the first few weeks of every school year. "Kids have no idea how many calories they are eating," said James of the overweight problems facing students. "Fast food is becoming more popular, it"s easier and parents are busy. They are only setting their kids up to gain weight with that diet however." School cafeterias are also getting blamed for the students" eating habits. "Healthy eating should start at home," said L.O.H.S. cafeteria cool Brenda Myers. "Too many kids are being raised on fast food. After eating so much fast food they don"t have any tastes for real home cooked food. I always have healthy foods for students, but they are less likely to eat them." Other schools do not even have the type of programs Live Oak offers and are suffering even worse consequences. Sports keep students fit and healthy. There need to be more readily available sports programs for anyone who would like to join. Many students when they feel they do not meet the standards for a team will admit defeat and drop off the team: There needs to be a program that all students will be interested in and continue through for the entire season. Schools can only do and be blamed for so much however, and it will be up to the parents to become more aware of what activities their children are participating in and how healthy they are eating. Until that happens, I foresee the obesity rate continuing on its uphill curve.

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单选题 Questions 11～15 Something about Naples just seems to be made for comedy. The name alone conjures up pizza, and lovable, incorrigible innocents warbling "O Sole Mio"; a nutty little corner of the world where the id runs wild and the only answer to the question "Why?" appears to be "Why not?" Naples: the butter-side-down of Italian cities, where even the truth has a strangely fictitious tinge. One day a car rear-ended one of the city's minibuses. The bus driver got out to investigate. While he stood there talking, his only passenger took the wheel and drove off. Neither passenger nor bus was ever seen again. Then there was that busy lunch hour in the central post office when a crack in the ceiling opened and postal workers were overwhelmed by an avalanche of stale croissants. As the cleaners hauled away garbage bags of moldy breakfast rolls, the questions remained: Who? Why? And what else could still be up there? But Naples actually isn't so funny. Italy's third largest city, with 1.1 million people, has a much darker side, where chaos reigns, bag snatching and mugging, clogged streets of stupefying confusion, where traffic moves to mysterious laws of its own through multiple intersections whose traffic lights haven't functioned for months, maybe years—if they have lights at all. Packs of wild dogs roam the city's main park. Nineteen policemen on the anti-narcotics squad are arrested for accepting payoffs from the Camorra, the local Mafia. To many Italians, particularly those in the wealthy, industrialized north, none of this is surprising. To them Naples means political corruption, wasted federal subsidies, rampant organized crime, appallingly large families, and cunning, lazy people who prefer to do something shady rather than honest work... Nepolitans know their reputation. "People think nothing ever gets done here," said a young professional woman. "Sometimes they say, 'Surely you come from Milan. You come from Naples? Naples?'" Giovanni del Forno, an insurance executive, told me about his flight home from a northern Italian city, the plane waited on the tarmac for half an hour for a gate to become available. "And I began to hear the comments around me. 'Well, here we are in Naples,'" he said with a wince. "These comments make me suffer." Neapolitans may complain, but most can't conceive of living anywhere else. The city has the intimacy, tension, and craziness of a large but intensely devoted family. The people have the same perverse pride as New Yorkers. They love even the things that don't work, and they love being Neapolitans. They know outsiders don't get it, and they don't care. "Even if you go away", one woman said, "you remain a prisoner of this city. My city has many problems, but away from it I feel bad. " This is a city in which living on the brink of collapse is normal. Naples has survived wars, revolutions, floods, earthquakes, and eruptions of nearby Vesuvius. First a wealthy colony founded by the Greeks (who called it Neapolis, or "new city"), then a flourishing Roman resort, it lived through various incarnations under dynasties of Normans, Swabians, Austrians, Spanish, and French, not to mention a glorious period as the resplendent capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was a brilliant, cultivated city that once ranked with London and Paris. The Nunziatella, the oldest military school in Italy, still basks in its two centuries of historic glory; the Teatro San Carlo remains one of the greatest opera houses in the world. The treasures of Pompeii grace the National Museum. Stretched luxuriantly between mountains and sea along the curving coast of the Bay of Naples, full of ornate palaces, gardens, churches, and works of art, with its mild climate and rich folklore, Naples in the last century was beloved by artists and writers. The most famous response to this magnificence was the comment by an unknown admirer, "See Naples and die." Today that remark carries less poetic connotations. The bombardments of World War II were followed by the depredations of profiteers and politicians-for-rent who reduced the city to a demoralized shadow of itself, surviving on government handouts. Until five years ago city governments were cobbled together by warring political factions; some mayors lasted only a few months. A cholera outbreak in 1973 was followed in 1980 by a major earthquake. Its famous port has withered (though the U. S. Sixth Fleet command is still based just up the coast), industries have failed, tourists have fled, natives have moved out—it seems that only drug trafficking is booming. "Unlivable," the Neapolitans say. "Incomprehensible". "Martyred".

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单选题Questions 19—22

单选题A.Heartdisease.B.Cancer.C.Accidents.D.MedicalAccidents.

单选题 The miserable fate of Enron's employees will be a landmark in business history, one of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again. This urge is understandable and noble, thousands have lost virtually all their retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron workers represents something even larger than it seems. It's the latest turn in the unwinding of one of the most audacious promise of the 20th century. The promise was assured economic security--even comfort--for essentially everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the 19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days-- lack of food, warmth, shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in need and separate programmes for the elderly (Social Security in the U.S.). Labour unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions? The cumulative effect was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the average person's stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I'm on my own. Now it became, ultimately I'll be taken care of. The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the 1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring massively, with huge layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended it's no-layoff policy. AT＆T fired thousands, many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also in decline. Labor union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans realized that Social Security won't provide social security for any of us. A less visible but equally significant trend is affected pensions. To make costs easier to control, companies moved away from defined benefit pension plans, which obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). The significance of the 401(k) is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person's economic fate back on the employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it's worth when the employee retires. Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement savings went in employees' 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron matched a certain proportion of each employee's 401(k) contribution with company stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the company's problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold. Second, Enron's 401 (k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have closed their accounts if they wanted to. But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their 401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were offered. Of course that wasn't prudent, but it's what some of them did. The Enron employees' retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from guaranteed economic security. That's why preventing such a thing from ever happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I'll-be-taken-care-of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won't be complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a 20m-century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like most people in most times and places, they' re on their own.