单选题Questions 11-14

单选题Beldon and Canfield are two seashore towns, not far apart. Both towns have many hotels, and in summer the hotels are full of holiday-makers and other tourists. Last August there was a fire at the Seabreeze Hotel in Beldon. The next day, this news appeared on page two of the town's newspaper. The Beldon Post:FIRE AT SEABREEZE Late last night firemen hurried to the Seabreeze Hotel and quickly put out a small fire in a bedroom. The hotel manager said that a cigarette started the fire. We say again to all our visitors: "Please don't smoke cigarettes in bed." This was Beldon's first hotel fire for five years. The Canfield Times gave the news in these words on page one:ANOTHER BELDON HOTEL CATCHES FIRE Last night Beldon firemen arrived just too late to save clothing, bedclothes and some furniture at the Seabreeze Hotel. An angry holiday-maker said, "An electric lamp probably started the fire. The bedroom lamps are very old at some of these hotels. When I put my bedside light on, I heard a funny noise from the lamp．" We are glad to tell our readers that this sort of adventure does not happen in Canfield. What are the facts, then? It is never easy to find out the exact truth about an accident. There was a fire at the Seabreeze Hotel last August: that is one fact. Do we know anything else? Yes, we know that firemen went to the hotel. Now what do you think of the rest of the "news"?

单选题A new catastrophe faces Afghanistan. The American bombing campaign is conspiring with years of civil conflict and drought to create an environmental crisis. Humanitarian and political concerns are dominating the headlines. But they are also masking the disappearance of the country"s once rich habitat and wildlife, which are quietly being crushed by war. The UN is dispatching a team of investigators to the region next month to evaluate the damage. "A healthy environment is a prerequisite for rehabilitation," says Klaus Topfer, head of the UN environment Programme. Much of south-east Afghanistan was once lush forest watered by monsoon rains. Forests now cover less than 2 per cent of the country. "The Worst deforestation occurred during Taliban rule, when its timber mafia denuded forests to sell to Pakistani markets," says Usman Qazi, an environmental consultant based in Quetta, Pakistan. And the intense bombing intended to flush out the last of the Taliban troops is destroying or burning much of what remains. The refugee crisis is also wrecking the environment, anti much damage may be irreversible. Forests and vegetation are being cleared for much-needed farming, but the gains are likely to be short-term. "Eventually the land will be unfit for even the most basic form of agriculture," warns Hammed Naqi of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Pakistan. Refugees—around 4 million as the last county—are also cutting into forests for firewood. The hail of bombs falling on Afghanistan is making life particularly bard for the country"s wildlife. Birds such as the pelican and endangered Siberian crane cross eastern Afghanistan as they follow one of the world"s great migratory thoroughfares from Siberia to Pakistan and India. But the number of the birds flying across the region has dropped by a staggering 85 per cent. "Cranes are very sensitive and they do not use file route if riley see any danger," says Ashiq Ahgmad, an environmental scientist for file WWF in Peshawar, Pakistan, who has tracked the collapse of the birds" migration this winter. The rugged mountains also usually provide a safe haven for mountain leopards, gazelles, bears and Marco Polo sheep—the world"s largest species. "The same terrain that allows fighters to strike and disappear back into the frills has also historically enabled wild life to survive," says Peter Zahler of the Wildlife Conservation society, based in New York. But he warns they are now under intense pressure from file bombing and invasions of refugees and fighters. For instance, some refugees are hunting rare snow leopards to buy a safe passage across the border, A single fur can fetch $2,000 on the black market, says Zahler. Only 5,000 or so snow leopards are thought to survive in central Asia, and less than 100 in Afghanistan, their numbers already decimated by extensive hunting, and smuggling into Pakistan before the conflict." Timber, falcons and medicinal plants are also being smuggled across the border. The Taliban once controlled much of this trade, but the recent power vacuum could exacerbate the problem. Bombing will also leave its mark beyond file obvious craters. Defence analysts say that while depleted uranium has been used less in Afghanistan than in file Kosovo conflict, conventional explosives will litter the country with pollutants. They contain toxic compounds such as cyclonite, a carcinogen, and rocket propellants contain perchlorates, which damage thyroid glands.

单选题Questions 16-20 Chinese Americans today have higher incomes than Americans in general and higher occupational status. The Chinese have risen to this position despite some of the harshest discrimination and violence faced by any immigrants to the United States in the history of this country. Long confined to a narrow range of occupations, they succeeded in those occupations and then spread out into other areas in later years, when opportunities finally opened up for them. Today much of the Chinese prosperity is due to the simple fact that they work more and have more (usually better) education than others. Almost one out of five Chinese families has three or more income earners compared to one out of thirteen for Puerto Ricans, one out of ten among American Indians, and one out of eight among Whites. When the Chinese advantages in working and educational are held constant, they have no advantage over other Americans. That is in a Chinese Family with a given number of people working and with a given amount of education by the head of the family; the income is not only about average for such families, but offer a little less than average. While Chinese Americans as a group are prosperous and well-educated Chinatowns are pockets of poverty, and illiteracy is much higher among the Chinese than among Americans in general. Those paradoxes are due to sharp internal differences. Descendants of the Chinese Americans who emigrated long ago from Toishan Province have maintained Chinese values and have added acculturation to American society with remarkable success. More recent Hong Kong Chinese are from more diverse cultural origins, and acquired western values and styles in Hong Kong, without having acquired the skills to proper and support those aspirations in the American economy. Foreign- born Chinese men in the United States earn one-fourth lower incomes than native-born Chinese even though the foreign-born have been in the United States an average of seventeen years. While the older Hong Kong Chinese work tenaciously to sustain and advance themselves, the Hong Kong Chinese youths often react with resentment and antisocial behavior, including terrorism and murder. The need to maintain tourism in Chinatown causes the Chinese leaders to mute or downplay these problems as much as possible.

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单选题New York, London, Paris and other big cities are exciting places to live in. There are many interesting things to see and to do. You can go to different kinds of museums, plays and films. You can also go shopping to buy things from all over the world. But there are serious problems in big cities too. The cost of living is high, and there are too many people in some of big cities. Every year many people move to the cities because there are some chances to find jobs, to study at good schools, and to receive good medical care. But sometimes these people cannot find work or a good place to live in. Also, too many people in a small space make it hard to keep the cities safe and clean. Some people enjoy living in big cities. Others do not. Before people move to big cities, they should think about the problems of living there.

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单选题I once attended a Downing Street reception where Tony Blair invited questions from leading magazine editors. One woman, from a big consumer title, asked if New Labour had plans to tax one-use plastic bags that were destroying the environment. Blair pulled a mock-baffled "Hey, guys, I"m busy running the country here" face and answered in a tone of purest condescension. This was around 2005, a few years after Ireland, with little fuss at all, had introduced a small charge for plastic bags. Within a year, everyone had learnt to keep a jute sack or string shopper under their desk, and this young, adaptable, upbeat nation had cut the number of bags cluttering Irish hedgerows by 94%. It is such an easy, clever bit of nudge politics, which has already worked right across northern Europe. (Is it not strange that we each use 158 plastic bags a year but a Dane only four?) And yet here we are in England—four years after Wales, two after Northern Ireland, a year after Scotland—bringing it in at last on Monday. And unlike the devolved nations, England can"t just keep it simple and charge 5p for bags in all stores, but only those with more than 250 employees. Corner shops in Aberdeen have coped, yet those in London can"t. The light from an explosion in deep space can take billions of years to be seen on Earth. And the gap between a social ill being identified, backed by irrefutable scientific evidence, and parliament changing the law, is often almost as long. That cigarettes are poisonous and young lungs fragile have been beyond doubt since the 1950s, yet it only became illegal for smokers to inflict their fumes upon children in cars this week. Even now, some libertarians grumble that enjoying an après school pick-up fag is every parent"s right and, besides, haven"t the police got better things to do? Yes, they have. But, still, progress is worth defending. And improvements in our lives are rarely brought about by vast, sweeping changes but by small, incremental shifts. Those simple life-savers, the Clean Air Acts, seatbelt and motorcycle helmet legislation: all regarded as quirky and inconvenient in their time. Every generation looks upon the unthinking habits of its parents and asks: why the hell did you do that? In Mad Men Don Draper is shown taking a last swig of his beer in a picnic, then lobbing the bottle deep into the forest. According to creator Matthew Weiner this was the show"s most controversial scene., horrified young people would ask him if their grandparents were really so crass? But in early-1960s America there was little stigma in dumping your trash. Back in the 1970s being capable of driving when lashed was a prized adult skill, we let our dogs defile parks and would have thought anyone who scooped up still-warm poop in little bags totally mad. And maybe we will look back at the plastic bag era in similar terms. How could these people use up all the oil, choke turtles and block flood defences, just to make carrying shopping home easier? A non-brand plastic bag flapping about on a tree, too high up to reach, is the ensign of our age. It is the saddest, most hopeless manifestation of a disposable age built upon laziness and greed. In the film American Beauty the misfit Ricky videos a bag dancing in the wind. the peculiar poignancy comes from seeing the most unloved, worthless object on Earth appearing to express joy. "Do you need a bag?" I"ve come to resent that question. Because I don"t want to say "yes". But my handbag is small. I don"t want to crease this book I"ve bought as a present. And sometimes a purchase without nice packaging feels less of a treat. But usually I say "no". Ten virtue points for that. Twenty for remembering to carry my bags-for-life from the car. It is irksome to forget, then watch the checkout lady unfurl dozens from the roll, pull each one open with a flourish: all that waste just to get my shopping home. Really this is just pretence of virtue. The 5p charge may reduce bags, and in Scotland usage has declined by 80% in a year: that"s 147 million fewer. But the oceans are already clogged with every other type of plastic: vast islands of detritus, micro-particles of broken-up Evian bottles and biscuit wrappers absorbed by sea life and then, in due course, us. But sometimes laws are there as much for society to declare intent as to have an effect. With smoking in cars I wonder if it is not a proxy for more sweeping legislation that would forbid low-life mums in supermarkets screaming swear words at their sobbing toddlers or pouring Coke in a baby"s tippy cup. It is a way of saying, we are watching, we have standards: your parenting is being judged. We"d like to police your home; but we can"t, so let"s start with your car. Likewise, the plastic bag law is a displacement activity for the bigger, dreary, ecological changes that are too daunting for us to make. Those five pences are tithes to the Church of Green. And dragging home our hessian totes of virtue we can feel less hopeless. The world is broken: but don"t blame me.

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

单选题What is the general attitude of the OECD towards GDP?

单选题Which of the following best explains the sentence "France has more to fear from globalization, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain." in Paragraph 6?

单选题 Quick quiz: Who has a more vitriolic relationship with the U.S.? The French or the British. If you guessed the French, consider this: Paris newspaper polls show that 72 percent of the French hold a favorable impression of the United States. Yet U.K. polls over the past decade show a lower percentage of the British have a favorable impression of the United States. Britain's highbrow newspaper, The Guardian, sets the U.K.'s intellectual tone. On any given day you can easily read a handful of stories sniping at the U.S. and things American. The BBC's Radio 4, which is a domestic news and talk radio station, regularly laments Britain's social warts and follows them up with something that has become the national mantra, "Well, at least we're not as bad as the Americans." This isn't a new trend: British abhorrence of America antedates George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq. On 9/11 as the second plane was slamming into the World Trade Center towers my wife was on the phone with an English friend of many years. In the background she heard her friend's teenage son shout in front of the TV, "Yeah! The Americans are finally getting theirs." The animosity may be unfathomable to those raised to think of Britain as "the mother country" for whom we fought two world wars and with whom we won the cold war. So what's it all about? I often asked that during the years I lived in London. One of the best answers came from an Englishwoman with whom I shared a table for coffee. She said, "It's because we used to be big and important and we aren't any more. Now it's America that's big and important and we can never forgive you for that." A detestation of things American has become as dependable as the tides on the Thames rising and falling four times a day. It feeds a flagging British sense of national self-importance. A new book documenting the virulence of more than 30 years of corrosive British animosity reveals how deeply rooted it has become in the U.K.'s national psyche. "[T] here is no reasoning with people who have come to believe America is now a 'police state' and the USA is a 'disgrace across most of the world'," writes Carol Gould, an American expatriate novelist and journalist, in her book Don't Tread on Me. A brief experience shortly after George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq illustrates that. An American I know was speaking on the street in London one morning. Upon hearing his accent, a British man yelled, "Take your tanks and bombers and go back to America." Then the British thug punched him repeatedly. No wonder other American friends of mine took to telling locals they were from Canada. The local police recommended prosecution. But upon learning the victim was an American, crown prosecutors dropped the case even though the perpetrator had a history of assaulting foreigners. The examples of this bitterness continue: I recall my wife and I having coffee with a member of our church. The woman, who worked at Buckingham Palace, launched a conversation with, "Have you heard the latest dumb American joke?" which incidentally turned out to be a racial slur against blacks. It's common to hear Brits routinely dismiss Americans as racists (even with an African-American president), religious nuts, global polluters, warmongers, cultural philistines, and as intellectual Untermenschen. The United Kingdom's counterintelligence and security agency has identified some 5,000 Muslim extremists in the U.K. but not even they are denounced with the venom directed at Americans. A British office manager at CNN once informed me that any English high school diploma was equal to an American university degree. This predilection for seeing evil in all things American defies intellect and reason. By themselves, these instances might be able to be brushed off, but combined they amount to British bigotry. Oscar Wilde once wrote, "The English mind is always in a rage." But the energy required to maintain that British rage might be better channeled into paring back what The Economist (a British news magazine) calls "an overreaching, and inefficient state with unaffordable aspirations around the world." The biggest problem is that, as with all hatred, it tends to be self-destructive. The danger is that as such, it perverts future generations. The U.K. public's animosity doesn't hurt the United States if Americans don't react in kind. This bigotry does hurt the United Kingdom, however, because there is something sad about a society that must denigrate and malign others to feed its own self-esteem. What Britain needs to understand is that this ill will has poisoned the enormous reservoir of good will Britain used to enjoy in America. And unless the British tweak their attitude, they stand to become increasingly irrelevant to the American people.

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