单选题Questions 27-30

单选题Questions 16～20 Marjorie McMillan, head of radiology at a veterinary hospital, found out by reading a letter to the editor in her local newspaper. Pamela Goodwin, a labor-relations expert at General Motors, happened to see a computer printout. Stephanie Odle, an assistant manager at a Sam"s Club store, was slipped a co-worker"s tax form Purely by accident, these women learned they were making less than their male or, in Goodwin"s case, white colleagues at work. Each sued for pay discrimination under federal law, lucky enough to discover what typically stays a secret. "People don"t just stand around the watercooler to talk about how much they make," says McMillan. This, as they say, is the real world, one in which people would rather discuss their sex lives than salaries. And about a third of private employers actually prohibit employees from sharing pay information. It is also a world that the U. S. Supreme Court seems unfamiliar with. The Justices recently decided 5 to 4 that workers are out of luck if they file a complaint under Title Ⅶ—the main federal antidiscrimination law—more than 180 days after their salary is set. That"s six measly months to find out what your co-workers are making so that you can tell whether you"re getting chiseled because of your sex, race, religion or national origin. How many of the roughly 2,800 such complaints pending before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will fizzle because of this new rule is hard to say. Less of a mystery, though just as troubling, is how the court reached its decision. Lilly Ledbetter filed the case against Goodyear Tire ＆ Rubber Co. because at the end of a 19-year career, she was making far less than any of 15 men at her level She argued that Goodyear violated Title Ⅶ every time it gave her a smaller paycheck. Her complaint was timely, she said, because she filed it within 180 days of her last check. But the court majority read the statute to mean that only an actual decision to pay Ledbetter less could be illegal, and that happened well outside the 180-day period. A statute"s ambiguous wording is fair game, but why read it to frustrate Title Ⅶ"s purpose: to ease pay discrimination in a nation where women make only 77￠ on average for every $1 that men earn? And while employers might like this decision, they could end up choking on the torrent of lawsuits that might now come their way. "The real message is that if you have any inkling that you are being paid differently, you need to file now, before the 180 days are up," says Michael Foreman of the Lawyers" Committee for Civil Rights. All this sounds familiar. In June 1989, the Supreme Court issued three decisions that sharply limited the right to sue over employment discrimination. A day after the most prominent ruling, in Wards Cove v. Atonio, Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D., Ohio) declared that he would introduce a bill to overturn the decisions. It took civil rights advocates and their congressional allies eight months to introduce legislation. President George H. W. Bush vetoed the first version, arguing that it would encourage hiring quotas. Finally, in late 1991, the Democratic Congress and the Republican President reached a compromise fashioned by Senators John Danforth (R., Mo.) and Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.). It became the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturned parts of eight high-court decisions. Now, Foreman and others are working on a bill to overturn the Ledbetter case, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have expressed interest. A Democratic Congress may well cooperate, though with a Republican again in the White House, final legislation before next year"s elections isn"t guaranteed. In any event, we probably won"t see the kind of groundswell that shifted the law toward workers in 1991 because civil rights advocates aren"t sure these Justices are a threat to workers" rights. Last June, for example, they made it harder for employers to retaliate against employees who complain of discrimination. That left the Ledbetter ruling looking particularly clueless. "I heard the decision and thought, what is wrong with this court?" says McMillan. "It just doesn"t live in the real world. "

单选题Psychological testing is a measurement of some aspect of human behavior by procedures consisting of carefully prescribed content, methods of administration, and interpretation. Test content may be addressed to almost any aspect of intellectual or emotional functioning, including personality traits, attitudes, intelligence, or emotional concerns. Tests usually are administered by a qualified clinical, school, or industrial psychologist, according to professional and ethical principles. Interpretation is based on a comparison of the individual"s responses with those previously obtained to establish appropriate standards for test scores. The usefulness of psychological tests depends on their accuracy in predicting behavior. By providing information about the probability of a person"s responses or performance, tests aid in making a variety of decisions. The primary impetus for the development of the major tests used today was the need for practical guidelines for solving social problems. The first useful intelligence test was prepared in 1905 by the French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1873-1961). The two developed a 30-item scale to ensure that no child could be denied instruction in the Paris school system without formal examination. In 1916 the American psychologist Lewis Terman produced the first Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon scale to provide comparison standards for Americans from age three to adulthood. The test was further revised in 1937 and 1960, and today the Stanford-Binet remains one of the most widely used intelligence tests. The need to classify soldiers during World War I resulted in the development of two group intelligence tests—Army Alpha and Army Beta. To help detect soldiers who might break down in combat, the American psychologist Robert Woodworth (1869—1962) designed the Personal Data Sheet, a forerunner of the modern personality inventory. During the 1930s controversies over the nature of intelligence led to the development of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, which not only provided an index of general mental ability but also revealed patterns of intellectual strengths and weaknesses. The Wechsler tests now extend from the preschool through the adult age range and are at least as prominent as the Stanford-Binet. As interest in the newly emerging field of psychoanalysis grew in the 1930s, two important projective techniques introduced systematic ways to study unconscious motivation: the Rorschach test—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884—1922)— using a series of inkblots on cards, and a story-telling procedure called the Thematic Apperception Test—developed by the American psychologists Henry A. Murray (1893— 1988) and C. D. Morgan. Both of these tests are frequently included in contemporary personality assessment. During World War II the need for improved methods of personnel selection led to the expansion of large-scale programs involving multiple methods of personality assessment. Following the war, training programs in clinical psychology were systematically supported by U.S. government funding, to ensure availability of mental-health services to returning war veterans. As part of these services, psychological testing flourished, reaching an estimated several million Americans each year. Since the late 1960s increased awareness and criticism from both the public and professional sectors have led to greater efforts to establish legal controls and more explicit safeguards against misuse of testing materials.

单选题A.Ispentanhoureachonpsychologyandliterature.B.ThenumberonetaskIfinishedlastnightwasliterature.C.Ishouldhavestudiesliteraturefirstlastnight.D.Ifinishedhalfofmyworkinmathematicslastnight.

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.

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

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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.