单选题[此试题无题干]

单选题There are hundreds of TV channels in the United States. Americans get a lot of entertainment and information from TV. Most people probably watch it for entertainment only. For some people, however, TV is where they get the news of the day. But some new TV programs or shows put entertainment and news together. This new kind of program in the United States is called "infotainment", which means information (info-) and entertainment (-tainment). These kinds of programs use actors to act out news stories, making the news of the flay more interesting and exciting to people. The shows also use special effects. An example of infotainment is the show "America's Most Wanted". The producers of this pro- gram get stories from real cases that the police have dealt with. In most of these cases, the; police never found the person who committed the crime. Sometimes they caught the criminal, but he or she ran away again. The people who make "America' s Most Wanted" film it in the city where the crime happened. They use actors to play the parts of all the people in the case. At the end of the story, however, they always show "mug shots" of the real criminals, or police photographs.

单选题In the immediate post-war years, the city of Birmingham scheduled some 50,000 small working class cottages as slums due for demolition. Today that process is nearly complete Yet it is dear that, quite apart from any question of race, an environmental problem remains. The expectation built into the planning policies of 1945 was that in the foreseeable future the city would be a better place to live in. But now that slum clearance has run its course, there seems to be universal agreement that the total environment where the slums once stood is more depressing than ever. For the past ten years the slum clearance areas have looked like bomb sites. The buildings and places which survive do so on islands in a sea of rubble and ash. When the slums were there they supported an organic community life and each building, each activity, fitted in as part of the whole. But now that they have been destroyed, nothing meaningful appears to remain, or rather those activities which do go on do not seem to have any meaningful relation to the place. They happen there because it is an empty stage which no-one is using any more. Typical of the inner city in this sense is the Birmingham City Football Ground. Standing in un-splendid isolation on what is now wasteland on the edge of Small Heath, it brings into the area a stage army on twenty or so Saturdays a year who come and cheer and then go away again with little concern any more for the place where they have done their cheering. Even they, however, have revolted recently. "The ground," says the leader of the revolt, "is a slum", thus putting his finger on the fact that the demolition of houses creates rather than solves problems of the inner city. A new element has now come upon the scene in the inner-city in the form of the tower block. Somehow it doesn"t seem to be what Le Corbusier and the planners who wrote those post war Pelicans intended. The public spaces either haven"t yet been developed or are more meanly conceived, and the corridors and lifts are places of horror. In fact these places were always suspect. They had no legitimacy in the minds of the public as suburban family housing had, and those who were placed there felt that they had been cheated. Along with the decaying elements, therefore, that which had been conceived as part of the brave new world was part of the problem.

单选题 I am afraid to sleep. I have been afraid to sleep for the last few weeks. I am so tired that, finally, I do sleep, but only for a few minutes. It is not a bad dream that wakes me; it is the reality I took with me into sleep. I try to think of something else. Immediately the woman in the marketplace comes into my mind. I was on my way to dinner last night when I saw her. She was selling skirts. She moved with the same ease and loveliness I often saw in the women of Laos. Her long black hair was as shiny as the black silk of the skirts she was selling. In her hair, she wore three silk ribbons, blue, green, and white. They reminded me of my childhood and how my girlfriends and I used to spend hours braiding ribbons into our hair. I don't know the word for "ribbons", so I put my hand to my own hair and , with three fingers against my head , I looked at her ribbons and said "Beautiful. " She lowered her eyes and said nothing. I wasn't sure if she understood me (I don't speak Laotian very well). I looked back down at the skirts. They had designs on them: squares and triangles and circles of pink and green silk. They were very pretty. I decided to buy one of those skirts, and I began to bargain with her over the price. It is the custom to bargain in Asia. In Laos bargaining is done in soft voices and easy moves with the sort of quiet peacefulness. She smiled, more with her eyes than with her lips. She was pleased by the few words I was able to say in her language, although they were mostly numbers, and she saw that I understood something about the soft playfulness of bargaining. We shook our heads in disagreement over the price; then, immediately, we made another offer and then another shake of the head. She was so pleased that unexpectedly, she accepted the last offer I made. But it was too soon. The price was too low. She was being too generous and wouldn't make enough money. I moved quickly and picked up two more skirts and paid for all three at the price set; that way I was able to pay her three times as much before she had a chance to lower the price for the larger purchase. She smiled openly then, and, for the first time in months, my spirit lifted. I almost felt happy. The feeling stayed with me while she wrapped the skirts in a newspaper and handed them to me. When I left, though, the feeling left, too. It was as though it stayed behind in marketplace. I left tears in my throat. I wanted to cry. I didn't, of course. I have learned to defend myself against what is hard; without knowing it, I have also learned to defend myself against what is soft and what should be easy. I get up, light a candle and want to look at the skirts. They are still in the newspaper that the woman wrapped them in. I remove the paper, and raise the skirts up to look at them again before I pack them. Something falls to the floor. I reach down and feel something cool in my hand. I move close to the candlelight to see what I have. There are five long silk ribbons in my hand, all different colors. The woman in the marketplace! She has given these ribbons to me! There is no defense against a generous spirit, and this time I cry, and very hard, as if I could make up for all the months that I didn't cry.

单选题

单选题Why does the author mention his father Jim Alter in the passage?

单选题

单选题 American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English. But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper. Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.

单选题In the shifting relationship between the press and the presidency over nearly two centuries, there has remained one primary constant--the dissatisfaction of one with the other. No president has escaped press criticism, and no president has considered himself fairly treated. The record of every administration has been the same, beginning with mutual protestations of goodwill, ending with recriminations and mistrust. This is the best proof we could have that the American concept of a free press in a free society is a viable idea, whatever defects the media may have. While the Founding Fathers and their constituencies did not always agree on the role the press should play, there was a basic consensus that the newspaper (the only medium of consequence at the time) should be the buffer state between the rulers and the ruled. The press could be expected to behave like a watchdog, and government at every level, dependent for its existence on the opinions of those it governed, could expect to resent being watched and having its shortcomings, real or imaginary, exposed to the public view. Reduced to such simple terms, the relationship of the presidents to the press since George Washington"s first term is understandable only as an underlying principle. But this basic concept has been increasingly complicated by the changing nature of the presidency, by the individual nature of presidents, by the rise of other media, especially television, and by the growing complexity of beliefs about the function of both press and government. In surveying nearly two centuries of this relationship, it is wise to keep in mind an axiom of professional historians—that we should be careful not to view the past in terms of our own times, and make judgments accordingly. Certain parallels often become obvious, to be sure, but to assert what an individual president should or should not have done, by present standards, is to violate historical context. Historians occasionally castigate each other for this failing, and in the case of press and government, the danger becomes particularly great because the words them selves— "press" and "government," even "presidency"—have changed in meaning so much during the past two hundred years. Recent scholarship, for example, has emphasized that colonial Americans believed in a free press, but not at all in the sense that we understand it today. Basic to their belief was the understanding, which had prevailed since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, that whosever controlled the printing press was in the best position to control the minds of men. The press was seen at once as an unprecedented instrument of power, and the struggle to control it began almost as soon as the Gutenberg (or Mazarin) Bible appeared at Mainz in 1456, an event which meant that, for tile first time, books could be reproduced exactly and, more important, that they could be printed in quantity. Two primary centers of social and political power—the state and the church—stood to benefit most from the invention of the printing press. In the beginning it was mutually advantageous for them to work together, consequently it was no accident that the first printing press on the North American continent was set up in Mexico City in 1539 by Fray Juan Zumarrage, first Catholic bishop of that country. It gave the church an unprecedented means of advancing conversion, along with the possibility of consolidating and extending its power, thus providing Catholic Spain with the same territorial advantages that would soon be extended elsewhere in the Americas. When British colonies were established in North America during the early part of the seventeenth century, it was once again a religious faith, this time Protestant, that brought the first printing press to what is now the United States. But while colonial printing in Central and south America remained the province of the Catholics for some time and was used primarily for religious purposes, in North America secular publishing became an adjunct of a church-dominated press almost at once and was soon dominant. It is part of American mythology that the nation was "cradled in liberty" and that the colonists, seeking religious freedom, immediately established a free society, but the facts are quite different. The danger of an uncontrolled press to those in power was well expressed by Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, when he wrote home to his superiors in 1671: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government, God keep us from both." There are those in twentieth-century America who would say "Amen" to Berkeley"s view of printing and "libels against the best government."

单选题 {{B}}Questions 11-14{{/B}}

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

单选题Concrete is probably used more widely than any other substance except water, yet it remains largely unappreciated. "Some people view the 20th century as the atomic age, the space age, the computer age—but an argument can be made that it was the concrete age," says cement specialist Hendrik van Oss. "It"s a miracle material." Indeed, more than a ton of concrete is produced each year for every man, woman and child on Earth. Yet concrete is generally ignored outside the engineering world, a victim of its own ubiquity and the industry"s conservative pace of development. Now, thanks to environmental pressures and entrepreneurial innovation, a new generation of concretes is emerging. This high-tech assortment of concrete confections promises to be stronger, lighter, and more environmentally friendly than ever before. The concretes they will replace are, for the most part, strong and durable, but with limitations. Concrete is sound under compression but weak under tension. Steel rebars are used as reinforcement, but make recycling difficult when concrete breaks down—and break down it inevitably will. Cracks caused by stress grow larger over time, with water forcing them open and corroding the rebars within. "When you put enough stress on it, concrete doesn"t work like we want it to. We"re asking too much of it now," says Mr. van Oss. Concrete is also a climate-change villain. It is made by mixing water with an aggregate, such as sand or gravel, and cement. Cement is usually made by heating limestone and clay to over 2,500 degrees F. The resulting chemical reaction, along with fuel burned to heat the kiln, produces between 7 and 10 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions. "When we have to repeatedly regenerate these materials because they"re not durable, we release more emissions," says Victor Li, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Michigan. Dr. Li has created a concrete suffused by synthetic fibers that make it stronger, more durable, and able to bend like a metal. Li"s creation does not require reinforcement, a property shared by other concretes that use chemical additives called plasticizers to reduce the amount of water in their composition. Using less water makes concrete stronger, but until the development of plasticizers, it also made concrete sticky, dry, and hard to handle, says Christian Meyer, a civil engineering professor at Columbia University. "The engineer would specify a certain strength, a certain amount of water—and as soon as a supervisor turned his back, in would go a bucket of water," says Dr. Meyer of the time before plasticizers. Making stronger concretes, says Li, allows less to be used, reducing waste and giving architects more freedom. "You can have such futuristic designs if you don"t have to put rebar in there, or structural beams," says van Oss. "You can have things shooting off into space at odd angles. Many possibilities are opened up." A more directly "green" concrete has been developed by the Australian company TecEco. They add magnesium to their cement, forming a porous concrete that actually scrubs carbon dioxide from the air. "The planet"s been through several episodes of global warming before, and nature put carbon away as coal, petroleum, and carbonate sediments," says TecEco manager John Harrison. "Now we"re in charge, and we need to do the same. We can literally "put away" carbon in our own built environment." Another modification to the built environment is the carbon fiber-reinforced concrete of Deborah Chung, a materials scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo. By running an electrical current through concrete, Dr. Chung says, tiny deformations caused by minute pressures can be detected. "You can monitor room occupancy in real-time, controlling lighting, ventilation, and cooling in relation to how many people are there," says Chung. While experts agree that these new concretes will someday be widely used, the timetable is uncertain. Concrete companies are responsive to environmental concerns and are always looking to stretch the utility of their product, but the construction industry is slow to change. "When you start monkeying around with materials, the governing bodies, the building departments, are very cautions before they let you use an unproven material," Meyer says. In the next few decades, says van Oss, building codes will change, opening the way for innovative materials. But while new concretes may be stronger and more durable, they are also more expensive—and whether the tendency of developers and the public to focus on short-term rather than long-term costs will also change is another matter.

单选题In what sense was the concept of the impossible an "affront"?

单选题According to Paragraph 4, some forgers reveal themselves in order to ______.

单选题A.Internationalinvestors.B.Americaninvestors.C.Americanfederalauthorities.D.Americantransportationdepartment.

单选题 Up-Minneapolis, MN—A father was recently arrested by the police for spanking his child, starting a debate among the American public about spanking. Is spanking, or other types of corporal punishment, an acceptable form of discipline for children? Or is it a form of child abuse? The case that everyone has talking is the arrest of Dale Clover, a thirty-six-year-old father of three, at a shopping mall in St. Louis, Missouri. He was arrested after an employee at the mall saw him spanking his five-year-old son, Donny, and called the police. The father was arrested for child abuse. Mr. Clover admits that he hit his son but says that it wasn't child abuse. He says it was discipline. Across the country, parents disagree on this issue: What is the difference between loving discipline and child abuse? Some parents like Rhonda Moore see a clear difference between spanking and child abuse. Rhonda Moore believes a little bit of pain is necessary to teach a child what is right and wrong. "It's like burning your hand when you touch a hot stove. Pain is nature's way of teaching us." Moore believes that spanking is done out of love, but child abuse is done out of anger, when the parent loses control. "When I spank my children, I always talk to them before and afterward, and explain why they are being spanked. I explain what they did wrong, and they remember not to do it again." Moore says that her children respect her as a parent and understand that she is spanking them for their own good. In contrast, Taylor Robinson, father of four, feels that parents should never hit their children for any reason. Robinson wants his children to learn right and wrong, but not because they are afraid of being hit. "Spanking teaches children to fear their parents, not respect them. When a parent spanks a child, what the child learns is that problems should be solved with violence." Robinson believes that children learn that it is acceptable for parents to hurt their children. "None of these are lessons that I want to teach my children. I want my children to learn to talk about their problems and solve them without violence, but spanking doesn't teach that." Parents are split about corporal punishment, and doctors also disagree about the issue. Dr. John Oparah thinks our child abuse laws sometimes go too far; that is, they make it difficult for parents to discipline their children. Oparah says that today many children do not respect their parents. "Children need strong, loving discipline. Sometimes spanking is the best way to get a child's attention, to make sure the child listens to the parent." Most doctors, however, say that there are many harmful effects of spanking. Dr. Beverly Lau is opposed to spanking. Lau argues that spanking can lead to more violent behavior in children. She points to research shows that children who are spanked are more violent when they grow up. "A child may stop misbehaving for the moment, but over time, children who are spanked actually misbehave more than children who are not spanked." Lau adds that research shows that, if you want a peaceful family, parents should not spank their children. The issue of spanking and corporal punishment will continue to be debated among parents and in the courts. In the meantime, if he is convicted of child abuse, Dale Clover could get up to five years in prison.

单选题What might be the best title for this passage?

单选题 Questions 27-30

单选题 The purpose of the American court system is to protect the rights of the people. According to American law, if someone is accused of a crime, he or she is considered innocent until the court proves that the person is guilty. In other words, it is the responsibility of the court to prove that a person is guilty. It is not the responsibility of the person to prove that he or she is innocent. In order to arrest a person, the police have to be reasonably sure that a crime has been committed. The police must give the suspect the reasons why they are arresting him and tell him his rights under the law. Then the police take the suspect to the police station to "book" him. "Booking" means that the name of the person and the charges against him are formally listed at the police station. The next step is for the suspect to go before a judge. The judge decides whether the suspect should be kept in jail or released. If the suspect has no previous criminal record and the judge feels that he will return to court rather than run away — for example, because he owns a house and has a family — he can go free. Otherwise, the suspect must put up bail. At this time, too, the judge will appoint a court layer to defend the suspect if he can't afford one. The suspect returns to court a week or two later. A lawyer from the district attorney's office presents a case against the suspect. This is called a hearing. The attorney may present evidence as well as witnesses. The judge at the hearing then decides whether there is enough reason to hold a trial. If the judge decides that there is sufficient evidence to call for a trial, he or she sets a date for the suspect to appear in court to formally plead guilty or not guilty. At the trial, a jury of 12 people listens to the evidence from both attorneys and hears the testimony of the witnesses. Then the jury goes into a private room to consider the evidence and decide whether the defendant is guilty of the crime. If the jury decides that the defendant is innocent, he goes free. However, if he is convicted, the judge sets a dale for the defendant to appear in court again for sentencing. At this time, the judge tells the convicted person what his punishment will be. The judge may sentence him to prison, order him to pay a fine, or place him on probation. The American justice system is very complex and sometimes operates slowly. However, every step is designed to protect the rights of the people. These individual rights are the basis, or foundation, of the American government.