单选题According to the writer, eccentric people ______.

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单选题 Questions 6-10 It's 10 p. m. You may not know where your child is. But the chip does. The chip will also know if your child has fallen and needs immediate help. Once paramedics arrive, the chip will also be able to tell the rescue workers which drugs little Johnny or Janic is allergic to. At the hospital, the chip will tell doctors his or her complete medical history. And of course, when you arrive to pick up your child, settling the hospital bill with your health insurance policy will be a simple matter of waving your own chip--the one embedded in your hand. To some, this may sound far-fetched. But the technology for such chips is no longer the stuff of science fiction. And it may soon offer many other benefits besides locating lost children or elderly Alzheimer patients. "Down the line, it could be used as credit cards and such," says Chris Hables Gray, a professor of cultural studies of science and technology at the University of Great Falls in Montana, "A lot of people won't have to carry wallets anymore," he says, "what the implications are for this technology, in the long run, is profound. " Indeed, some are already wondering what this sort of technology may do to the sense of personal privacy and liberty. "Any technology of this kind is easily abusive of personal privacy. " says Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If a kid is trackable, do you want other people to be able to track your kid? It's a double-edged sword. " Tiny Chips That Know Your Name The research of embedding microchips isn't entirely new. Back in 1988, Brian Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University in London, implanted a chip into his arm as an experiment to see if Warwick's computer could wirelessly track his whereabouts with the university's building. But Applied Digital Solutions, Inc, in Palm Beach, Fla. is one of the latest to try and push the experiments beyond the realm of academic research and into the hands--and bodies--of ordinary humans. The company says it has recently applied to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin testing its VeriChip device in humans. About the size of a grain of rice, the microchip can be encoded with bits of information and implanted in humans under a layer of skin. When scanned by a nearby reader, the embedded chip yields the data--says an ID number that links to a computer database file containing more detailed information. Chipping Blocks Most embedded chip designs are so-called passive chip which yield information only when scanned by a nearby reader. But active chips--such as the proposed Digital Angel of the future--will need to beam out information all the time. And that means designers will have to develop some sort of power source that can provide a continuous source of energy, yet be small enough to be embedded with the chips. Another additional barrier, developing tiny GPS receiver chips that could be embedded yet still is sensitive enough to receive signals from thousands of miles out in space. In addition to technical hurdles, many suspect that all sorts of legal and privacy issues would have to be cleared as well.

单选题Despots and tyrants may have changed the course of human evolution by using their power to force hundreds of women to bear their children, says new research. It shows that the switch from hunter-gathering to farming about 8,000 - 9,000 years ago was closely followed by the emergence of emperors and elites who took control of all wealth, including access to young women. Such men set up systems to impregnate hundreds, or even thousands, of women while making sure other men were too poor or oppressed to have families. It means such men may now have hundreds of millions of descendants, a high proportion of whom may carry the genetic traits that drove their ancestors to seek power and oppress their fellow humans. "In evolutionary terms this period of human existence created an enormous selective pressure, with the guys at the top who had the least desirable traits passing on their genes to huge numbers of offspring," said Laura Betzig, an evolutionary anthropologist. She has studied the emergence of the world"s first six great civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico and Peru. In each she found that emperors created systems to "harvest" hundreds of the prettiest young women and then systematically impregnate them. Betzig has studied the records left by the six civilisations to work out how many children were born to emperors. "In China they had it down to a science. Yangdi, the 6th-century Sui dynasty emperor, was credited by an official historian with 100,000 women in his palace at Yangzhou alone," she said. "They even had sex handbooks describing how to work out when a woman was fertile. Then they would be taken to the emperor to be impregnated. It was all organised by the state so the emperor could impregnate as many women as possible. And they had rules, like all the women had to be under 30 and all had to be attractive and symmetrical. This was the system in China for more than 2,000 years." Others relied on violence. One genetic study showed that Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol warlord, who was renowned for sleeping with the most beautiful women in every territory he conquered, now has about 16m male descendants. This compares with the 800 people descended from the average man of that era. Betzig also studied primitive societies. She found that the small bands of hunter-gatherers were the most egalitarian, with men and women able to have the number of children they wanted. "This freedom is probably because they were so mobile. If their group got taken over by a big guy who tried to control resources, the others could simply leave and find somewhere else," she said. This system broke down when the world"s first civilisations emerged about 8,000 years ago based on farming. All began on fertile river plains surrounded by mountains or deserts that made it difficult to leave. Such situations were perfect for the emergence of elites and emperors. In a paper published recently, Betzig has catalogued the same trend in each of the great early civilisations. Such systems arose in Britain as well, especially in the feudal era. "Lords then had sexual access to hundreds of dependent serfs ... with up to a fifth of the population "in service"," Betzig said. She is to publish a book, The Badge of Lost Innocence , exploring why that era has ended. "The European discovery of the Americas changed everything," she said. "Along with the emergence of democracy it offered millions of people the chance to emigrate or get rid of despotic regimes. The literature of that time shows people wanted to have families of their own and for the first time in thousands of years they had that chance. "

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单选题According to the passage, all of the following statements are true except ______.

单选题 Ordinarily, I'm hardly what you'd call a nosy neighbor—each to his own is my credo. Yet, without moving from my desk, I've learned what my neighbors paid for their houses, whether they*ye refinanced, how many bathrooms they have, and what their median income is. I know their birth dates, social security numbers, and driving records. And with a bit more digging I could unearth many of their legal and business dealing. Do you find this unsettling? You might. But consider this: None of this information is considered private. All of it, and much more, is available online to anyone with a computer and a modem. What does the online world know about you? Plenty—whether you're online or not. Using a pseudonym (handsome@service.com) won't help, either. That's because most of the information about you isn't coming from you, at least not directly. It's coming from myriad government records and business transactions, which are being digitized, linked, packaged, sold, and re-sold. All of this is legal, or at least it is not clearly illegal. In one sense, the availability of "public records" online is merely an electronic extension of how things have always worked. With a few dollars and a trip to the right city, county, or state agency, you can get copies of many publicly filed records, such as real estate transactions or birth certificates. But a funny thing happened on the way to city hall in the 1990s. Actually, it's a confluence of four factors: PCs are everywhere, the Internet is connecting millions of them, business and government records are now routinely stored on computers, and government agencies (especially at the state and local levels) are desperately seeking new sources of revenue. In short, the market-place for online information, and the ability or desire to deliver it, are gelling at roughly the same moment in time. Who wants this personal information? Private investigators performing background checks or searching for deadbeat parents want it. Lawyers want it to track down court records and personal assets. So do prospective employers and landlords, to give you an electronic once-over before rolling out the welcome mat. And before you feel too affronted, it's to find a missing branch in the family tree or to check out a child-care worker. Naturally, marketers want it as well—preferably in large quantities—to try to do what they always do. sell you stuff. They are using cyberspace to snap up e-mail lists and demographics databases to send solicitations to your onscreen in-box, as well as your postal mailbox. And as shopping by computer takes off, they'll want to know more about your online buying habits as well. One compromise in the works: commerce Net and the Electronic Frontier foundation are testing a system called eTrust that displays standard symbols informing you prior to buying anything online whether information about the transaction will be anonymous, customer-to-merchant only, or shared with other. To be sure, the online arena is not the only place where your personal information is being collected and passed along. Smart cards and codes are being used to learn more about you in places as diverse as your state government and your local supermarket. Often, they will share the knowledge they gather with others. But nothing is spreading the information, or fueling the demand for it, faster than online connections. The demand, coupled with a delivery vehicle of unprecedented efficiency and reach called the Internet, had spawned a booming market for services offering to help you find out more about other people (or them about you). Demand has also spawned a number of new privacy groups bent on curbing, or at least keeping close tabs on the inline information-for-sale industry. Many of these groups are themselves rooted online, and somewhat ironically, are populated by the same brand of free thinkers who routinely oppose any attempts to regulate cyberspace or censor the electronic exchange of information. But for many, the sale of personal information hits a little too close to home.

单选题Researchers have known that secondhand smoke can be just as dangerous for nonsmokers as smoking is for smokers, but now there"s fresh evidence quantifying just how hazardous the after-burn from cigarettes can be, and how quickly it affects your body. Scientists at the Oregon Department of Health documented for the first time an hourly buildup of a cancer- causing compound from cigarette smoke in the blood of nonsmokers working in bars and restaurants in the state. Reporting in the American Journal of Public Health, the researchers found that waitstaff and bartenders working a typical night shift gradually accumulated higher levels of NNK, a carcinogen in cigarette smoke, at the rate of 6% each hour they worked. NNK is known to be involved in inducing lung cancer in both lab rats and smokers. "We were somewhat surprised by the immediacy of the effect and the fact that we could measure the average hourly increase," says Michael Stark, the lead author of the study and a principal investigator at the Mulmomah County Health Department in Oregon. The authors are confident that the increases in NNK in the workers they tested most likely came from their exposure to smoke—the study included a control group of similar subjects in restaurants where no smoking was allowed. "There is experimental evidence from studies where you put nonsmokers in a room, blow smoke into the room and measure their artery function, that you see the platelets get sticky, which can cause clots and lead to a heart attack, and the ability of the arteries to dilate decreases very rapidly," says Dr. Matthew McKenna, director of the office on smoking and public health for the Centers for Disease Control. All of which could mean more time loitering outside buildings and in alleyways for smokers intent on grabbing a puff. Thirteen states now prohibit smoking in restaurants altogether (most of these include bars as well), and while 11 states still put no restrictions on lighting up, individual cities within those states—such as Austin in Texas, for example have passed legislation banning smoking in eating establishments and other public areas. It"s just getting harder to refute the scientific evidence; in a study done in Scotland several months after that nation instituted a ban on smoking in public places, researchers found that following the ban, bar patrons showed stronger lung capacity and reduced levels of inflammation (a red flag for a number of chronic diseases, including heart disease and asthma). "We made it pretty clear that the science on this is pretty irrefutable," says McKenna. And if smokers have fewer places to smoke, that message may finally get heard.

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单选题Why did the author mention Gandhi and Martin Luther King?

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单选题Questions 19-22

单选题The majority of successful senior managers do not closely follow the classical rational model of first clarifying goals, assessing the problem, formulating options, estimating likelihood's of success, making a decision, and only then taking action to implement the decision. Rather, in their day-by-day tactical maneuvers, these senior executives rely on what is vaguely termed "intuition" to manage a network of interrelated problems that require them to deal with ambiguity, inconsistency, novelty, and surprise; and to integrate action into the process of thinking. Generations of writers on management have recognized that some practicing managers rely heavily on intuition. In general, however, such writers display a poor grasp of what intuition is. Some see it as the opposite of rationality; others view it as an excuse for capriciousness. Isenberg's recent research on the cognitive processes of senior managers reveals that managers' intuition is neither of these. Rather, senior managers use intuition in at least five distinct ways. First, they intuitively sense when a problem exists. Second, managers rely on intuition to perform well-learned behavior patterns rapidly. This intuition is not arbitrary or irrational, but is based on years of painstaking practice and hands-on experience that build skills. A third function of intuition is to synthesize isolated bits of data and practice into an integrated picture, often in an "Aha!" experience. Fourth, some managers use intuition as a check on the results of more rational analysis. Most senior executives are familiar with the formal decision analysis models and tools, and those who use such systematic methods for reaching decisions are occasionally leery of solutions suggested by these methods which run counter to their sense of the correct course of action. Finally, managers can use intuition to bypass in-depth analysis and move rapidly to engender a plausible solution. Used in this way, intuition is an almost instantaneous cognitive process in which a manager recognizes familiar patterns. One of the implications of the intuitive style of executive management is that "thinking" is inseparable from acting. Since managers often "know" what is right before they can analyze and explain it, they frequently act first and explain later. Analysis is inextricably tied to action in thinking/acting cycles, in which managers develop thoughts about their companies and organizations not by analyzing a problematic situation and then acting, but by acting and analyzing in close concert. Given the great uncertainty of many of the management issues that they face, senior managers often instigate a course of action simply to learn more about an issue. They then use the results of the action to develop a more complete understanding of the issue. One implication of thinking/acting cycles is that action is often part of defining the problem, not just of implementing the solution.

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单选题Like all other mothers who have small children, 1, too, have to steal time--from my own children at home and from the children who know me as their teacher---just to put a few words down on paper. Many times I've wanted to write for myself, for other women, for my parents, for my husband, and especially for my children. I would have liked to leave a legacy (遗产) of words explaining what it has meant to have twins. One reason there is not a great deal written about being a mother of a new baby is that there is seldom a moment to think of anything else but the baby's needs. With twins, I did not have a spare hand to write with. Before my twins were born, my days were long but I had nothing to write about. After the twins' birth I did have something to write about, but I found myself facing not a pen or paper but milk bottles. During some nights, friends would visit. They would leave at 11 pm, heading for bed, and for us the night was only just beginning. With twins, there was really no night. Each feeding lasted a long time. At 1:00 am, each of them would begin crying with hunger. At 4:00 am, when I finally put them down, I headed for the kitchen and lighted a cigarette. I hadn't smoked for almost a year, but I felt I'd never needed it more. I was so sleepy and so tired that I didn't care. Two years have passed since then and we've managed to live through it all. My days are still very full and even now there isn't one evening when I put the twins down for the night that I don't breathe a sigh of relief. At last a little time for myself.

单选题An industrial society, especially one as centralized and concentrated as that of Britain, is heavily dependent on certain essential services: for instance, electricity supply, water, rail and road transport, the harbours. The area of dependency has widened to include removing rubbish, hospital and ambulance services, and, as the economy develops, central computer and information services as well. If any of these services ceases to operate, the whole economic system is in danger. It is this interdependency of the economic system which makes the power of trade unions such an important issue. Single trade unions have the ability to cut off many countries' economic blood supply. This can happen more easily in Britain than in some other countries, in part because the labour force is highly organized. About 55 per cent of British workers belong to unions, compared to under a quarter in the United States. For historical reasons, Britain's unions have tended to develop along trade and occupational lines, rather than on an industry-by-industry basis, which makes a wages policy, democracy in industry and the improvement of procedures for fixing wage levels difficult to achieve. There are considerable strains and tensions in the trade union movement, some of them arising from their outdated and inefficient structure. Some unions have lost many members because of industrial changes. Others are involved in arguments about who should represent workers in new trades. Unions for skilled trades are separate from general unions, which means that different levels of wages for certain jobs are often a source of bad feeling between unions. In traditional trades which are being pushed out of existence by advancing technologies, unions can fight for their members' disappearing jobs to the point where the jobs of other unions' members are threatened or destroyed. The printing of newspapers both in the United States and in Britain has Frequently been halted by the efforts of printers to hold onto their traditional highly-paid jobs. Trade unions have problems of internal communication just as managers in companies do, problems which multiply in very large unions or in those which bring workers in very different industries together into a single general union. Some trade union officials have to be re-elected regularly; others are elected, or even appointed, for life. Trade union officials have to work with a system of "shop stewards" in many unions, "shop stewards" being workers elected by other workers as their representatives at factory or works level.

单选题Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as a benefit of tourism?