单选题Skeptical of advertisers" sales pitches, shoppers are putting more trust in online consumer reviews of products from electronics to pet food. With rising trust, however, has come corruption. On Amazon. com, for instance, a suspiciously high 80 percent of reviews give four stars or higher, says Bing Liu, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies the inauthentic-review problem. Since most consumers don"t write reviews unless they have criticisms to share, "who on earth are these people who are so happy?" he asks. He estimates that about 30 percent of Web reviews are fraudulent. One example. Staffers at Reverb Communications, a Twain Harte, Calif., public relations firm, posed as consumers and praised clients" products at the iTunes store before settling Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges of deception in 2010. Now, organizations are battling back with new technologies to detect fake reviews. "It"s basically an arms race," says Mr. Liu, whose university team is building software to catch fake reviewers. "We have algorithms [to identify false reviews], and then these guys are inventing ways to avoid these things." At stake is the integrity of a 21st century confidant. 70 percent of global consumers trust online consumer reviews, up from 55 percent four years ago, according to a Nielsen survey released earlier this year. Meanwhile, the fraction that says it trusts paid television, radio, and newspaper ads has shrunk to just 47 percent. Spotting fake reviews means discerning signs of a faker. One who"s gushed about multiple refrigerator models at various websites probably hasn"t bought and tested them all, Liu explains, but is instead being paid to praise. Likewise, when hotel reviews come from guests who received discounts in exchange, their "Love! Love! Love!" should be taken with a grain of salt, salt, salt. But researching each reviewer"s background would require more time and patience than most readers have. Even the FTC, with some 60 staffers who police advertising, lacks resources to enforce rules governing online reviews. The agency instead focuses on educating businesses about legal boundaries. "We"re never going to be able to stop all false advertising," including false consumer reviews, says Mary Engle, the FTC"s associate director for advertising practices. "It would be great if there were some technological innovation that would help solve the problem, or at least put a dent in it." Faced with human limitations, pioneers are betting technology can fix what it helped create (or at least exacerbate). Consider Yelp. com, a site where readers find more than 30 million consumer reviews of everything from restaurants to doctors. Reviewers must register, which helps weed out robots, according to Yelp. It discards apparent shills and malicious attacks on competitors, as well as reviews that seem to have been solicited by business owners. Some legitimate reviews may be tossed out in the process, since the filter isn"t perfect, Yelp says. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers are targeting reviewers rather than reviews. Programs in development track a reviewer"s Internet Protocol address to see what else he or she has been reviewing. Is that person generating dozens of reviews on various sites every week? Does every review from this particular source crow—or pan? Programs sniff out suspicious patterns by sifting through data so voluminous that only a computer could do it. Until tech solutions arrive, consumers need strategies for finding trustworthy reviews. Try relying on large samples, says Linda Sherry, director of national priorities for Consumer Action, a San Francisco-based nonprofit advocacy group. If dozens or hundreds of reviewers are raving, then the consensus might be more trustworthy than a small handful of glowing options. And don"t worry too much, she adds, because the market has ways of weeding out troublemakers. "You can"t lie forever" without being found out, Ms. Sherry says. "We"re all the cops on the Internet in a way. It"s our eyes that really keep it honest—if it can be. "

单选题Questions 6～10 Despite Denmark"s manifest virtues, Danes never talk about how proud they are to be Danes. This would sound weird in Danish. When Danes talk to foreigners about Denmark, they always begin by commenting on its tininess, its unimportance, the difficulty of its language, the general small-mindedness and self-indulgence of their countrymen and the high taxes. No Dane would look you in the eye and say "Denmark is a great country". You are supposed to figure this out for yourself. It is the land of the silk safety net, where almost half the national budget goes toward smoothing out life"s inequalities, and there is plenty of money for schools, day care, retraining programs, job seminars—Danes love seminar, three days at a study center hearing about waste management is almost as good as a ski trip. It is a culture bombarded by English, in advertising, pop music, the Internet, and despite all the English that Danish absorbs—there is no Danish Academy to defend against it—old dialects persist in Jutland that can barely be understood by Copenhageners. It is the land where, as the saying goes, "Few have too much and fewer have too little", and a foreigner is struck by the sweet egalitarianism that prevails, where the lowliest clerk gives you a level gaze, where Sir and Madame have disappeared from common usage, even Mr. and Mrs. It"s a nation of recyclers—bout 55% of Danish garbage gets made into something new—and no nuclear power plants. It"s a nation of tireless planners. Trains run on time. Things operate well in general. Such a nation of overachievers—a brochure from the Ministry of Business and Industry says, "Denmark is one of the world"s cleanest and most organized countries, with virtually no pollution, crime, or poverty. Denmark is the most corruption-free society in the Northern Hemisphere." So, of course, one"s heart lifts at any sighting of Danish sleaze, skinhead graffiti on buildings ("Foreigners out of Denmark!"), broken beer bottles in the gutters, drunken teenagers slumped in the park. Nonetheless, it is an orderly land. You drive through a Danish town, it comes to an end at a stone wall, and on the other side is a field of barley, a nice clean line. town here, country there. It is not a nation of jaywalkers. People stand on the curb and wait for the red light to change, even if it"s 2 a.m. and there"s not a car in sight. However, Danes don"t think of themselves as a waiting-at-2-a, m. -for-the-green-light people-that is how they see Swedes and Germans. Danes see themselves as jazzy people, improvisers, more free spirited than Swedes, but the truth is (though one should not say it) that Danes are very much like Germans and Swedes. Orderliness is a main selling point. Denmark has few natural resources, limited manufacturing capability; its future in Europe will be as a broker, banker, and distributor of goods. You send your goods by container ship to Copenhagen, and these bright, young, English-speaking, utterly honest, highly disciplined people will get your goods around to Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Russia. Airports, seaport, highways, and rail lines are ultramodern and well-maintained. The orderliness of the society doesn"t mean that Danish lives are less messy or lonely than yours or mine, and no Dane would tell you so. You can hear plenty about bitter family feuds and the sorrows of alcoholism and about perfectly sensible people who went off one day and killed themselves. An orderly society can not exempt its members from the hazards of life. But there is a sense of entitlement and security that Danes grow up with. Certain things are yours by virtue of citizenship, and you shouldn"t feel bad for taking what you have entitled to, you are as good as anyone else. The rules of the welfare system are clear to everyone, the benefits you get if you lose your job, the steps you take to get a new one; and the orderliness of the system makes it possible for the country to weather high unemployment and social unrest without a sense of crisis.

单选题Which of the following is closest in meaning to the word "remyelinate" in Paragraph 5?

单选题A.Cigaretteswerenotconsideredveryharmfultopeople'shealth.B.Ordinarypeoplecouldnotaffordcigarettes.C.Cigarettesmokingwasforbiddeninmanypartsoftheworld.D.Peoplewerenotsatisfiedwithcigarettesmoking.

单选题 Directions: In this section, you will read several passages. Each passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to choose ONE best answer, (A), (B), (C) or (D), to each question. Answer all the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Questions 1-5 Each summer, no matter how pressing my work schedule, I take off one day exclusively for my son. We call it dad-son day. This year our third stop was the amusement park, where he discovered that he was tall enough to ride one of the fastest roller coasters in the world. We blasted through face-stretching turns and loops for ninety seconds. Then, as we stepped off the ride, he shrugged and, in a distressingly calm voice, remarked that it was not as exciting as other rides he'd been on. As I listened, I began to sense something seriously out of balance. Throughout the season, I noticed similar events all around me. Parents seemed hard pressed to find new thrills for indifferent kids. Surrounded by ever-greater stimulation, their young faces were looking disappointed and bored. Facing their children's complaints of "nothing to do". Parents were shelling out large numbers of dollars for various forms of entertainment. In many cases the money seemed to do little more than buy transient relief from the terrible moans of their bored children. This set me pondering the obvious question. "How can it be so hard for kids to find something to do when there's never been such a range of stimulating entertainment available to them?" Why do children immersed in this much excitement seem starved for more? That was, I realized, the point. I discovered during my own reckless adolescence that what creates excitement is not going fast, but going faster. Thrills have less to do with speed than changes in speed. I'm concerned about the cumulative effect of years at these levels of feverish activity. It is no mystery to me why many teenagers appear apathetic and burned out, with a "been there, done that" air of indifference toward much of life. As increasing numbers of friends' children are prescribed medications-stimulants to deal with inattentiveness at school or anti-depressants to help with the loss of interest and joy in their lives, I question the role of kids' boredom in some of the diagnoses. My own work is focused on the chemical imbalances and biological factors related to behavioral and emotional disorders. These are complex problems. Yet I've been reflecting more and more on how the pace of life and the intensity of stimulation may be contributing to the rising rates of psychiatric problems among children and adolescents in our society.

单选题Questions 19-22

单选题 Questions 23-26

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

单选题A.TheGovernment'swelfare-to-workpolicyisnotrunninggood.B.TheGovernment'swelfare-to-workpolicyispracticalandeffective.C.TheGovernment'swelfare-to-workpolicyistargetingpoverty.D.TheGovernment'swelfare-to-workpolicyisverypositive.

单选题The latest figures for employment are as good as they are bad—and as intriguing. Unemployment continues to fall, now below 5%, a level not seen since before the 1970s recession. The Office for National Statistics has announced that average pay rose last year by 2.4%. Even the pay gap fell. "Income for the poorest fifth was up 5% and for the richest fifth was down." Only the top 1% continued to soar away from the rest. But the reason appears to be that poorer men, in particular, are being driven out of disappearing, once-secure full-time jobs into? booming, insecure, part-time ones. The much-vaunted "change in the nature of work" is happening fast, and hitting the poorest. Twenty years ago, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, only one man in 20 was in low-paid, part-time work. Now it is one in five, and worse in depressed parts of the country. Employment figures are notoriously vulnerable to spin. Clearly the British figures are showing the benefits of a more deregulated, disruptive economy-compared with elsewhere in the EU. Weaker labour laws have flooded its dominant service economy with "McJobs", "gig" labour and zero-hours contracts. This has driven down unemployment, but it has clearly affected the working lives of poorer people. There is no going back on the economy. The hollowing out of the labour market is a widely accepted feature of the digital revolution. The decline in unionised jobs in fixed places of work is being replaced by a rising demand for personal services such as education and health, catering, leisure and tourism. Legal victories—as over holiday pay for "gig" workers—can promote fairness. But the flexible subcontract has replaced the job for life—unless Britain wants to strive after French or Italian levels of unemployment. So where stands Theresa May"s "shared society" and her "just-about-managing" families? The answer must be that a disruptive economy requires a smarter welfare safety net. Minimum wages, once economic anathema, are now entrenched, and there is talk of a basic universal income, at least in concept a sensible Keynesian way of regulating demand. More critical is the geographical imbalance revealed in the low-pay figures. For a decade every item of government policy—including state investment—has tipped growth into the south-east. This harms national productivity and wastes public investment as it clearly does human resources. The British economy cannot ride for ever on the prosperity of one region. Employment policy has been a success, but it is not yet smart.

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单选题There is no more fashionable answer to woes of the global recession than "green jobs. " Some state leaders are pinning their hopes for future growth and new jobs on creating clean-technology industries, like wind and solar power, or recycling saw grass as fuel. It all sounds like the ultimate win-win deal: beat the worst recession in decades and save the planet from global warming, all in one spending plan. So who cares how much it costs? And since the financial crisis and recession began, governments, environmental nonprofits, and even labor unions have been busy spinning out reports on just how many new jobs might be created from these new industries--estimates that range from the thousands to the millions. The problem is that history doesn't bear out the optimism. As a new study from McKinsey consulting points out, clean energy is less like old manufacturing industries that required a lot of workers than it is like new manufacturing and service industries that don't. The best parallel is the semiconductor industry, which was expected to create a boom in high-paid high-tech jobs but today employs mainly robots. Clean-technology workers now make up only 0. 6 percent of the American workforce. The McKinsey study, which examined how countries should compete in the post-crisis world, figures that clean energy won't command much more of the total job market in the years ahead. "The bottom line is that these 'clean' industries are too small to create the millions of jobs that are needed right away," says James Manylka, a director at the McKinsey Global Institute. They might not create those jobs--hut they could help other industries do just that. Here, too, the story of the computer chip is instructive. Today the big chip makers employ only 0.4 percent of the total American workforce, down from a peak of 0.6 percent in 2000. But they did create a lot of jobs, indirectly, by making other industries more efficient: throughout the 1990s, American companies saw massive gains in labor productivity and efficiency from new technologies incorporating the semiconductor. Companies in retail, manufacturing, and many other areas got faster and stronger, and millions of new jobs were created. McKinsey and others say that the same could be true today if governments focus not on building a "green economy," but on greening every part of the economy using cutting-edge green products and services. That's where policies like U. S. efforts to promote corn-based ethanol, and giant German subsidies for the solar industry fall down. In both cases the state is creating bloated, unproductive sectors, with jobs that are not likely to last. A better start would be encouraging business and consumers to do the basics, such is improve building insulation and replace obsolete heating and cooling equipment. In places like California, 30 percent of the summer energy load comes from air conditioning, which has prompted government to offer low-interest loans to consumers to replace old units with more efficient ones. The energy efficiency is an indirect job creator, just as IT productivity had been, not only because of the cost savings but also because of the new disposable income that is created. The stimulus effect of not driving is particularly impressive. "If you can get people out of cars, or at least get them to drive less, you can typically save between $1,000 and $ 8,000 per household per year," says Lisa Margonelli at the New America Foundation. Indeed, energy and efficiency savings have been behind the major green efforts of the world's biggest corporations, like Walmart, which remains the world's biggest retailer and added 22,000 jobs in the U.S. alone in 2009. In 2008, when oil hit $148 a barrel, Walmart insisted that its top 1,000 suppliers in China retool their factories and their products, cutting back on excess packaging to make shipping cheaper. It's no accident that Walmart, a company that looks for savings wherever it can find them, is one of the only American firms that continued growing robustly throughout the recession. The policy implications of it all are clear: stop betting government money on particular green technologies that may or may not pan out, and start thinking more broadly. As McKinsey makes clear, countries don't become more competitive by tweaking their "mix" of industries but by outperforming in each individual sector. Green thinking can be a part of that. The U. S. could conceivably export much more to Europe, for example, if America's environmental standards for products were higher. Taking care of the environment at the broadest levels is often portrayed as a political red herring that will undercut competitiveness in the global economy. In fact, the future of growth and job creation may depend on it.

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单选题According to the author, what is the main problem with TV programs in America?

单选题According to Paragraph 2, a good kind of job to have is in: ______.

单选题 {{B}}Questions 11-14{{/B}}

单选题 {{B}}Questions 27—30{{/B}}

单选题 The Panorama is not the first model of New York. In 1845 E. Porter Belden, a savvy local who had written the best city guide of its day, set 150 artists, craftsmen, and sculptors to work on what an advertisement in his guide described as "a perfect facsimile of New York, representing every street, lane, building, shed, park, fence, bee, and every other object in the city." This "Great w0rk of art," Belden said, distilled "over 200, 000 buildings, including Houses, Stores and Rear-Buildings" and two and a half million windows and doors into a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot miniature that encompassed the metropolis below Thirty-second Street and parts of Brooklyn and Governors Island, all basking under a nearly fifteen-foot-high Gothic canopy decorated with 0il paintings of "the leading business establishments and places of note in the city." Alas, every trace of it has vanished. Of course Belden's prodigy was far from the first display of model buildings. Since antiquity architects and builders have used miniatures m solve design problems and win support from patrons and public. A recent show at die National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured fourteen models created by Renaissance architects, including the six-ton, fifteen-foot-high model of St. Peter's that Antonio da Sangallo the Younger built for the pope. Beyond their uses as design tools and propaganda, models have always possessed a curious power to enchant and excite. The sculptor Teremy Lebensohn was describing architectural models but could have been characterizing all miniatures when he wrote, "The model offers us a Gulliver's view of a Lilliputian world, its seduction of scale reinforcing the sense of our powers to control the environment, whether it be unbroken countryside, a city block or the interior of a room." A model 0fthe 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition presented to the city in 1889 is unique in that some of the buildings and details are made of brass and that it is still on display in the basement of what was the Liberal Arts Building at the fair in Philadelphia's Fairmont Park. The San Francisco World's Fair of 1915 featured another New York City model, 550 feet square and complete with a lighting system that highlighted the city's major features. City models have also miniaturized Denver, San Diego, and San Francisco, the Denver one built during the 1930s with WPA funding. A re-creation of the city as it appeared in 1860, it includes figures of men, women, and children in period costumes, along with animals and assorted wagons, and is now on display at the Colorado History Museum in Denver. San Diego's model, in Old Town State Historic Park, was built by Jo Toigo and completed in the 1970s and depicts that city's Old Town section as it looked a century earlier. Like the Denver model, it includes people, animals and vehicles. A model of San Francisco is in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Not a realistic model in the true sense of the word, it represents the buildings and land contours of the city and has been used to study patterns of sunlight and shadow and the flower of wind caused by San Francisco's many hills. The computer's ability to simulate the same effects has diminished the model's importance, and its future is uncertain. New materials and techniques have now brought the craft of architectural models to an impressive level. Computer-controlled lasers and photo-etching (the process invented to create the Panorama's bridges) allow model makers to create presentations pieces of astonishing realism.

单选题 I watched as Dr. Ian Stead, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation, began carefully removing the peat with a clay modelling tool. X-rays taken through the box while it was at the hospital revealed ribs, backbone, arm bones and a skull (apparently with fractures). However, the bones showed up only faintly because acid in the peat had removed minerals from them. Using the X-rays, Stead started on what he thought might be a leg. By his side was Professor Frank Oldfield, of Liverpool University, an expert on peat who could identify vegetation from stems only a fraction of an inch long. "Similar bodies found in bogs in Denmark show signs of a violent death," Stead said. "It is essential for us to be able to distinguish between the plant fibres in peat and clothing or a piece of rope which might have been used to hang him." As Stead continued his gentle probing, a brown leathery limb began to materialize amidst the peat; but not until most of it was exposed could he and Robert Connolly, a physical anthropologist at Liverpool University, decide that it was an arm. Beside it was a small piece of animal fur — perhaps the remains of clothing. Following the forearm down into the peat, Stead found a brown shiny object and then, close by, two more. Seen under a magnifying glass, he suddenly realized they were fingernails— "beautifully manicured and without a scratch on them," he said. "Most people at this time in the Iron Age were farmers; but with fingernails like that, this person can't have been. He might have been a priest or an aristocrat." Especially delicate work was required to reveal the head. On the third day, curly sideburns appeared and, shortly afterwards, a moustache. At first it seemed that the man had been balding but gradually he was seen to have close-cropped hair, about an inch or two long. "This information about his hairstyle is unique. We have no other information about what Britons looked like before the Roman invasion except for three small plaques showing Celts with drooping moustaches and shaven chins." The crucial clue showing how the man died had already been revealed, close to his neck, but it looked just like another innocent heather root. It was not recognized until two days later, when Margaret McCord, a senior conservation officer, found the same root at the back of his neck and, cleaning it carefully, saw its twisted texture. "He's been garr0tted." She declared. The root was a length of twisted sinew, the thickness of a strong string. A slip knot at the back shows how it was tightened round the neck. "A large discoloration on the left shoulder suggests a bruise and possibly a violent struggle," Stead said.