单选题

单选题

单选题Whatdidthemandoabouthisoldcar?[A]Hesoldit.[B]Herepairedtheengine.[C]Hegaveittohisfriendasapresent.

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单选题

单选题 Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear several short talks and conversations. After each of these, you will hear a few questions. Listen carefully because you will hear the talk or conversation and questions ONLY ONCE. When you hear a question read the four answer choices and choose the best answer to that question. Then write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. {{B}}Questions 11-14{{/B}}

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单选题Why does the author mention that Japan "ranks only 30th in the world as a tourist destination— about the same as Tunisia and Croatia" in Paragraph 8?

单选题 {{B}}Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.{{/B}}

单选题 It is Monday morning, and you are having trouble waking your teenagers. You are not alone. Indeed, each morning, few of the country's 17 million high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts before 8 am. Sure, many of them stayed up too late the night before, but not because they wanted to. Research shows that teenagers' body clocks are set to as schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 pm, when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 am when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep; according to a National Sleep foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they do not even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates. Here is an idea: stop focusing on testing and instead support changing the hours of the school day, starting it later for teenagers and ending it later for all children. Indeed, no one does well when they are sleep-deprived, but insufficient sleep among children has been linked to obesity and to learning issues like attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. You would think this would spur educators to take action, and a few have. In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 am, from 7:30 am. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minnesota, which instituted high school start times of 8:40 am and 8:30 am respectively in 1997, students' grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreases. Later is also safer. When high schools in Fayette County in Kentucky delayed their start times to 8:30 am, the number of teenagers involved in car crashes dropped, even as they rose in the state. So why has not every school board moved back that first bell? Well, it seems that improving teenagers' performance takes a back seat to more pressing concerns: the cost of additional bus service, the difficulty of adjusting after school activity schedules and the inconvenience to teachers and parents. But few of these problems actually come to pass, according to the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota. In Kentucky and Minnesota, simply flipping the starting times for the elementary and high schools meant no extra cost for buses. There are other reasons to start and end school at a later time. According to Paul Reville, a professor of education policy at Harvard and chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education, "trying to cram everything out 21th-century students need into a 19th-century six-and-a-half-hour day just isn't working". He said that children learn more at a less frantic pace, and that lengthening the school day would help "close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers".

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Military victories, trade, missionary zeal, racial arrogance and a genius for bureaucracy all played well-documented roles in making the British Empire the largest the world has known. Rather less well understood was the importance of the moustache. A monumental new history, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire by Piers Brendon, promises to restore this neglected narrative to its rightful place in the national story. Dr. Brendon, a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, argues that colonial moustaches had a clear practical purpose: to demonstrate virility and intimidate the Empire's subject peoples. The waxing and waning of the British moustache precisely mirrored the fortunes of the Empire-blooming beneath the noses of the East India Company's officers, finding full expression in Lord Kitchener's bushy appendage and fading out with the Suez crisis in Anthony Eden's apologetic wisps. This analysis of the growth of the stiff upper lip is an essential strand of Dr. Brendon's epic 650-page political, cultural, economic and social history of the Empire, which is published on October 18. "It is a running gag in a serious book, but it does give one a point of reference," he said yesterday. In the 18th and early 19th century, sophisticated Britons wore wigs but spurned facial hair. The exception was the King, George III, whose unshaven appearance was mocked as a sign of his madness. However, by the 1830s the "moustache movement" was in the ascendancy. British officers, copying the impressive moustaches that they encountered on French and Spanish soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars, started the craze, but the real impetus came form India. Just as British troops in Afghanistan today are encouraged to grow beards to ease their dealings with local tribesmen, so the attitudes of Indian troops under the command of East India Company officers in the first half of the 19th century altered the appearance of the British soldier. "For the Indian sepoy the moustache was a symbol of virility. They laughed at the unshaven British officers," Dr. Brendon said. In 1854 moustaches were made compulsory for the company's Bombay regiment. The fashion took Britain by storm as civilians imitated their heroes. Dr. Brendon writes. "During and after the Crimean War, barbers advertised different patterns in their windows such as the 'Raglan' and the Cardigan'." Moustaches were clipped, trimmed and waxed "until they curved like sabres and bristled like bayonets". After 1918 moustaches became thinner and humbler as the Empire began to gasp for breath, even as it continued to expand territorially. It had been fatally wounded, Dr. Brendon suggests, by the very belief in the freedom that it had preached. After the victory over Germany and Japan in 1945, independence movements across the red-painted sections of the world map, and Britain's own urgent domestic priorities, meant that the Empire was doomed. The moustache too was in terminal decline. "It had become a joke thanks to Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx. It had become an international symbol of 'villainy' thanks to Hitler's toothbrush," writes Dr. Brendon. In Britain it was also synonymous with the "Colonel Blimps"o clinging to an outmoded idea of colonial greatness. In Eden's faint moustache Britain's diminished international status found a fitting symbol. It all but disappeared on TV and, moments before his broadcast on the eve of the fateful occupation of the Suez Canal in 1956, his wife had to blacken the bristles with mascara. His successor, Harold Macmillan, was the last British Prime Minister to furnish his upper lip. Harold Wilson, the self-styled man of the people, had been clean shaven since the 1940s, Dr. Brendon notes. "He obviously believed that the white hot technological revolution was not to be operated with a moustache./

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

单选题We might marvel at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a person"s knowledge and ability remain as primitive as ever they were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious claim that examinations test what you know, it is common knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person"s true ability and aptitude. As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided in one fateful day. It doesn"t matter that you weren"t feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don"t count: the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror, or after a sleepless night, yet this is precisely what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of "drop-outs": young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked on a career? Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students? A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly laid down by a syllabus, so the student is encouraged to memorize. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedoms. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. The most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress. The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. After a judge"s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner"s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person"s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that mn them? This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: "I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire."

单选题 The United States has moved beyond the industrial economy stage to the point where it has become the world's first service economy. Almost three-fourths of the nonfarm labor force is employed in service industries, and over two-thirds of the nation's gross national product is accounted for by services. Also, service jobs typically hold up better during a recession than do jobs in industries producing tangible goods. During the 20-year period of 1966 to 1986, about 36 million new jobs were created in the United States—far more than in Japan and Western Europe combined. About 90 percent of these jobs were in service industries. During this same time span, some 22 million women joined the labor force—and 97 percent of these women went to work in the service sector. These employment trends are expected to continue at least until the year 2010. For the period 1986—2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that over 21 million new jobs were created and 93 percent of them were in service industries. Moreover, most of this explosive growth in services employment is not in low-paying jobs, contrary to the beliefs of many economists, business and labor leaders, and politicians. These people argue that manufacturing jobs, which have been the economic foundation of America's middle class, are vanishing. They claim that factory workers are being replaced with a host of low-wage earners. It is true that manufacturing jobs have declined, with many of them going to foreign countries. It is also true that there has been growth in some low- paying service jobs. Yet cooks and counter people still represent only 1 percent of the U.S. labor force today. Furthermore, for many years the fastest-growing occupational category has been "professional, technical, and related work." These jobs pay well above the average, and most are in service industries. About one-half of consumer expenditures are for the purchase of services. Projections to the year 2010 indicate that services will attract an even larger share of consumer spending. A drawback of the service economy boom is that the prices of most services have been going up at a considerably faster rate than the prices of most tangible products. You are undoubtedly aware of this if you have had your car or TV set repaired, had your shoes half-soled, or paid a medical bill in recent years. When we say that services account for close to one-half of consumer expenditures, we still grossly understate the economic importance of services. These figures do not include the vast amounts spent for business services. By all indications, spending for business services has increased even more rapidly than spending for consumer services.

单选题 Questions 15-18

单选题Questions 11-14