单选题
单选题
Questions 16～20
The striving of countries in Central Europe to enter the
European Union may offer an unprecedented chance to the continent's Gypsies (or
Roman) to be recognized as a nation, albeit one without a defined territory. And
if they were to achieve that they might even seek some kind of formal place—at
least a total population outnumbers that of many of the Union's present and
future countries. Some experts put the figure at 4m-plus; some proponents of
Gypsy rights go as high as 15m. Unlike Jews, Gypsies have had
no known ancestral land to hark back to. Though their language is related to
Hindi, their territorial origins are misty. Romanian peasants held them to be
born on the moon Other Europeans (wrongly) thought them migrant Egyptians, hence
the derivative Gypsy. Most probably they were itinerant metal workers and
entertainers who drifted west from India in the 7th century.
However, since communism in Central Europe collapsed a decade ago, the
notion of Romanestan as a landless nation founded on Gypsy culture has gained
ground. The International Romany Union, which says it stands for 10m Gypsies in
more than 30 countries, is fostering the idea of "self-rallying". It is trying
to promote a standard and written form of the language; it waves a Gypsy flag
(green with a wheel) when it lobbies in such places as the United Nations; and
in July it held a congress in Prague, The Czech capital, where President Vaclav
Havel said that Gypsies in his own country and elsewhere should have a better
deal. At the congress a Slovak-born lawyer, Emil Scuka, was
elected president of the International Romany Union. Later this month a group of
elected Gypsy politicians, including members of parliament, mayors and local
councilors from all over Europe (OSCE), to discuss how to persuade more Gypsies
to get involved in politics. The International Romany Union is
probably the most representative of the outfits that speak for Gypsies, but that
is not saying a lot. Of the several hundred delegates who gathered at its
congress, few were democratically elected; oddly, none came from Hungary, whose
Gypsies are perhaps the world's best organized, with some 450 Gypsy bodies
advising local councils there. The union did, however, announce its ambition to
set up a parliament, but 'how it would actually be elected was left undecided.
So far, the European Commission is wary of encouraging Gypsies
to present themselves as a nation. This might, it is feared, open a Pandora's
Box already containing Basques, Corsicans and other awkward peoples.
Besides, acknowledging Gypsies as a nation might backfire, just when
several countries, particularly Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, are
beginning to treat them better, in order to qualify for EU membership. "The EU's
whole premise is to overcome differences, not to highlight them," says a nervous
Eurocrat. But the idea that the Gypsies should win some kind of
special recognition as Europe's largest continent wide minority, and one with a
terrible history of persecution, is catching on. Gypsies have suffered many
pogroms over the centuries. In Romania, the country that still has the largest
number of them (more than 1m), in the 19th century they were actually enslaved.
Hitler tried to wipe them out, along with the Jews. "Gypsies
deserve some space within European structures," says Jan Marinus Wiersma, a
Dutchman in the European Parliament who suggests that one of the current
commissioners should be responsible for Gypsy affairs. Some prominent Gypsies
say they should be more directly represented, perhaps with a quota in the
European Parliament. That, they argue, might give them a boost. There are moves
afoot to help them to get money for, among other things, a Gypsy university.
One big snag is that Europe's Gypsies are, in fact, extremely
heterogeneous. They belong to many different, and often antagonistic, clans and
tribes, with no common language or religion, Their self-proclaimed leaders have
often proved quarrelsome and corrupt. Still, says, Dimitrina Petrova, head of
the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, Gypsies' shared experience of
suffering entitles them to talk of one nation; their potential unity, she says,
stems from "being regarded as sub-human by most majorities in Europe. "
And they have begun to be a bit more pragmatic. In Slovakia and
Bulgaria, for instance, Gypsy political parties are trying to form electoral
blocks that could win seats in parliament. In Macedonia, a Gypsy party already
has some—and even runs a municipality. Nicholas Gheorge, an expert on Gypsy
affairs at the OSCE, reckons that, spread over Central Europe, there are now
about 20 Gypsy MPS and mayors, 400-odd local councilors, and a growing number of
businessmen and intellectuals. That is far from saying that
they have the people or the cash to forge a nation. But, with the Gypsy question
on the EU's agenda in Central Europe, they are making ground.
单选题Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview.
单选题The Supreme Court"s decisions on physician-assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering.
Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect", a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action having two effects--a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen—is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect.
Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients" pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient.
Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient medication to control their pain if that might hasten death."
George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It"s like surgery," he says. "We don"t call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn"t intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you"re a physician, you can risk your patient"s suicide as long as you don"t intend their suicide."
On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modem medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying.
Just three weeks before the Court"s ruling on physician-assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two-volume report, Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life. It identifies the undertreatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end-of-life care.
The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospices, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a Medicare billing code for hospital-based care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life.
Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well-meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse". He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear... that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension."
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单选题The plane ______ a few minutes after it took off and most of the passengers died. A. collided B. crushed C. crashed D. smashed
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In his classic novel, "The Pioneers",
James Fenimore Cooper has his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour
of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a
teeming metropolis. But his cousin looks around bewildered. All she sees is a
stubby forest. "Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show
me?" she asks. He's astonished she can't see them." Where! Why everywhere," he
replies. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his
mind, and they are as concrete to him as if they were already constructed and
finished. Cooper was illustrating a distinctly American trait,
future-mindedness: the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the
future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally
attached to things to come. "America is therefore the land of the future," the
German philosopher Hegel wrote. "The American lives even more for his goals, for
the future, than the European," Albert Einstein concurred. "Life for him
is always becoming, never being." In 2012, America will still be
the place where the future happens first, for that is the nation's oldest
tradition. The early Puritans lived in almost Stone Age conditions, but they
were inspired by visions of future glories, God's kingdom on earth. The early
pioneers would sometimes travel past perfectly good farmland, because they were
convinced that even more amazing land could be found over the next ridge. The
founding Fathers took 13 scraggly colonies and believed they were creating a new
nation on earth. The railroad speculators envisioned magnificent fortunes built
on bands of iron. It's now fashionable to ridicule the visions of dot-com
entrepreneurs of the 1990s, but they had inherited the urge to leap for the
horizon. "The Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in
anticipation," Herman Melville wrote. "The Future is the Bible of the
Free." This future-mindedness explains many modern features of
American life. It explains workaholism: the average American works 350 hours a
year more than the average European. Americans move more, in search of that
brighter tomorrow, than people in other land. They also, sadly, divorce more,
for the same reason. Americans adopt new technologies such as online shopping
and credit cards much more quickly than people in other countries. Forty-five
percent of world Internet use takes place in the United States. Even today,
after the bursting of the stock-market bubble, American venture-capital
firms—which are in the business of betting on the future—dwarf the firms from
all other nations. Future-mindedness contributes to the disorder
in American life, the obliviousness to history, the high rates of family
breakdown, the frenzied waste of natural resources. It also leads to incredible
innovations. According to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, 75 percent of the
Nobel laureates in economies and the sciences over recent decades have lived or
worked in the United States. The country remains a magnet for the future-minded
from other nations. One in twelve Americans has enjoyed the thrill and challenge
of starting his own business. A study published in the Journal of International
Business Studies in 2000 showed that innovative people are spread pretty evenly
throughout the globe, but Americans are most comfortable with risk.
Entrepreneurs in the U. S. are more likely to believe that they possess the
ability to shape their own future than people in, say, Britain, Australia or
Singapore. If the 1990s were a great decade of
future-mindedness, we are now in the midst of a season of experience. It seems
cooler to be skeptical, to pooh-pooh all those IPO suckers who lost their money
betting on the telecom future. But the world is not becoming more French. By
2012, this period of chastisement will likely have run its course, and
future-mindedness will be back in vogue, for better or worse. We
don't know exactly what the next future-mindedness frenzy will look like. We do
know where it will take place: the American suburb. In 1979, three quarters of
American office space were located in central cities. The new companies,
research centers and entrepreneurs are flocking to these low buildings near
airports, highways and the Wal-Mart malls, and they are creating a new kind of
suburban life. There are entirely new metropolises rising-boom suburbs like
Mesa, Arizona, that already have more people than Minneapolis or St. Louis. We
are now approaching a moment in which the majority of American office space, and
the hub of American entrepreneurship, will be found in quiet office parks in
places like Rockville, Maryland, and in the sprawling suburbosphere around
Atlanta. We also know that future-mindedness itself will become
the object of greater study. We are discovering that there are many things that
human beings do easily that computers can do only with great difficulty, if at
all. Cognitive scientists are now trying to decode the human imagination, to
understand how the brain visualizes, dreams and creates. And we know, too, that
where there is future-mindedness, there is hope.
单选题
Questions 16～20
Stratford-on-Avon, as we all know, has only one
industry—William Shakespeare—but there are two distinctly separate and
increasingly hostile branches. There is the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC),
which presents superb productions of the plays at the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre on the Avon. And there are the townsfolk who largely live off the
tourists who come, not to see the plays, but to look at Anne Hathaway's Cottage,
Shakespeare's birthplace and the other sights. The worthy residents of Stratford
doubt that the theatre adds a penny to their revenue. They frankly dislike the
RSC's actors, them with their long hair and beards and sandals and noisiness.
It's all deliciously ironic when you consider that Shakespeare, who earns their
living, was himself an actor (with a beard) and did his share of noise-making.
The tourist streams are not entirely separate. The sightseers
who come by bus—and often take in Warwick Castle and Blenheim Palace on the
side—don't usually see the plays, and some of them are even surprised to find a
theatre in Stratford. However, the playgoers do manage a little sight- seeing
along with their play going. It is the playgoers, the RSC contends, who bring in
much of the town's revenue because they spend the night (some of them four or
five nights) pouring cash into the hotels and restaurants. The sightseers can
take in everything and get out of town by nightfall. The townsfolk don't see it
this way and local council does not contribute directly to the subsidy of the
Royal Shakespeare Company. Stratford cries poor traditionally. Nevertheless
every hotel in town seems to be adding a new wing or cocktail lounge. Hilton is
building its own hotel there, which you may be sure will be decorated with
Hamlet Hamburger Bars, the Lear Lounge, the Banquo Banqueting Room, and so
forth, and will be very expensive. Anyway, the townsfolk can't
understand why the Royal Shakespeare Company needs a subsidy. (The theatre has
broken attendance records for three years in a row. Last year its 1,431 seats
were 94 percent occupied all year long and this year they'll do better.) The
reason, of course, is that costs have rocketed and ticket prices have stayed
low. It would be a shame to raise prices too much because it
would drive away the young people who are Stratford's most attractive clientele.
They come entirely for the plays, not the sights. They all seem to look alike
(though they come from all over)—lean, pointed, dedicated faces, wearing jeans
and sandals, eating their buns and bedding down for the night on the flagstones
outside the theatre to buy the 20 seats and 80 standing-room tickets held for
the sleepers and sold to them when the box office opens at 10:30 a. m.
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单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} In this section, you will read several passages. Each
passage is followed by several questions based on its content. You are to choose
{{B}}ONE{{/B}} best answer 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
{{B}}ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}}
Coca-Cola has been operating
internationally for most of its 100 year history. Today the company has
operations in 160 countries and employs over 400,000 people. The firm's human
resource management (HRM) strategy helps to explain a great deal of its success.
In one recent year Coca-Cola transferred more than 300 professional and
managerial staff from one country to another under its leadership development
program, and the number of international transferees is increasing annually. One
senior-level HRM manager explained the company strategy by noting: We recently
concluded that our talent base has to be multilingual and multicultural…. To use
a sports analogy, you want to be sure that you have a lot of capable and
competent bench strength, ready to assume broader responsibilities as they
present themselves. In preparing for the future, Coca-Cola
includes a human resources recruitment forecast in its annual and long-term
business strategies. The firm also has selection standards on which management
can focus when recruiting and hiring. For example, the company likes applicants
who are fluent in more than one language because they can be transferred to
other geographic areas where their fluency will help them be part of Coca-Cola's
operation. This multilingual multicultural emphasis starts at the top with the
president, Roberto Goizueta, a Cuban-born American who has been chairman for
over a decade, and with the 21 members of the board of whom only four are
American. The firm also has a recruitment program that helps it
to identify candidates at the college level. More than just seeking students
abroad, Coca-Cola looks for foreign students who are studying in the United
States at domestic universities. The students are recruited stateside and then
provided with a year's training before they go back to their home country.
Coca-cola also has an internship program for foreign students who are interested
in working for the company during school break, either in the United States or
back home. These interns are put into groups and assigned a project that
requires them to make a presentation to the operations personnel on their
project. This presentation must include a discussion of what worked and what did
not work. Each individual intern is then evaluated, and management decides the
person's future potential with the company. Coca-Cola believes
that these approaches are extremely useful in helping the firm to find talent on
a global basis. Not only is the company able to develop internal sources, but
also the intern program provides a large number of additional individuals who
would otherwise end in with other companies. Coca-Cola earns a greater portion
of its income and profit overseas than it does in the United States. The
company's human resource management strategy helps to explain how Coke is able
to achieve this feat.
单选题
单选题
Questions 16 to 20 are based on
the following talk.
单选题Questions 6-10
Most of us are taught to pay attention to what is said—the words. Words do provide us with some information, but meanings are derived from so many other sources that it would hinder our effectiveness as a partner to a relationship to rely too heavily on words alone. Words are used to describe only a small part of the many ideas we associate with any given message. Sometimes we can gain insight into some of those associations if we listen for more than words. We don"t always say what we mean or mean what we say. Sometimes our words don"t mean anything except " I"m letting off some steam. I don"t really want you to pay close attention to what I"m saying. Just pay attention to what I"m feeling. " Mostly we mean several things at once. A person wanting to purchase a house says to the current owner, "This step has to be fixed before I"ll buy. " The owner says, " It"s been like that for years." Actually, the step hasn"t been like that for years, but the unspoken message is.. " I don"t want to fix it. We put up with it. Why can"t you?" The search for a more expansive view of meaning can be developed of examining a message in terms of who said it, when it occurred, the related conditions or situations, and how it was said.
When a message occurs can also reveal associated meaning. Let us assume two couples do exactly the same amount of kissing and arguing. But one couple always kisses after an argument and the other couple always argues after a kiss. The ordering of the behaviors may mean a great deal more than the frequency of the behavior. A friend"s unusually docile behavior may only be understood by noting that it was preceded by situations that required an abnormal amount of assertiveness. Some responses may be directly linked to a developing pattern of responses and defy logic. For example, a person who says "No!" to a series of charges like "You"re dumb," "You"re lazy," and "You"re dishonest," may also say "No!" and try to justify his or her response if the next statement is "And you"re good looking. "
We would do well to listen for how messages are presented. The words, "It sure has been nice to have you over," can be said with emphasis and excitement or ritualistically. The phrase can be said once or repeated several times. And the meanings we associate with the phrase will change accordingly. Sometimes if we say something infrequently it assumes more importance; sometimes the more we say something, the less importance it assumes.
单选题
单选题Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.
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单选题
We are moving inexorably into the age
of automation. Our aim is not to devise a mechanism which can perform a thousand
different actions of any individual man but, on the contrary, one which could by
a single action replace a thousand men. Industrial automation
has moved along three lines. First there is the conveyor belt system of
continuous production whereby separate operations are linked into a single
sequence. The goods produced by this well-established method are untouched by
the worker, and the machine replaces both unskilled and semiskilled. Secondly,
there is automation with feedback control of the quality of the product: here
mechanisms are built into the system which can compare the output with a norm,
that is, the actual product with what it is supposed to be, output with a norm,
and then correct any shortcomings. The entire cycle of operations dispenses with
human control except in so far as monitors are concerned. One or two examples of
this type of automation will illustrate its immense possibilities.
There is a factory in the U.S.A. which makes 1,000 million electric light
bulbs a year, and the factory employs three hundred people. If the preautomation
techniques were to be employed, the labour force required would leap to 25,000.
A motor manufacturing company with 45,000 spare parts regulates their entire
supply entirely by computer. Computers can be entrusted with most of the
supervision of industrial installations, such as chemical plants or oil
refineries. Thirdly, there is computer automation, for banks, accounting
departments, insurance companies and the like. Here the essential features are
the recording, storing, sorting and retrieval of information.
The principal merit of modern computing machines is the achievement of
their vastly greater speed of operation by comparison with unaided human effort:
a task which otherwise might take years, if attempted at all, now takes days or
hours. One of the most urgent problems of industrial societies
rapidly introducing automation is how to fill the time that will be made free by
the machines which will take over the tasks of the workers. The question is not
simply of filling empty time but also of utilizing the surplus human energy that
will be released. We are already seeing straws in the wind: destructive
outbursts on the part of youth whose work no longer demands muscular strength.
While automation will undoubtedly do away with a large number of tedious jobs,
are we sure that it will not put others which are equally tedious in their
place? For an enormous amount of sheer monitoring will be required. A man in an
automated plant may have to sit for hours on and watching dials and taking
decisive action when some signal informs him that all is not well. What meaning
will his occupation bear for the worker? How will he devote his free time after
a four or five hour stint of labour? Moreover, what, indeed, will be the
significance for him of his leisure? If industry of the future could be purged
of its monotony and meaninglessness, man would then be better equipped to use
his leisure time constructively.
单选题The fire spread through the hotel very quickly but everyone ______ get out. [A] had to [B] would [C] could [D] was able to
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