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单选题 Questions 16-20 If the old maxim that the customer is always right still has meaning, then the airlines that ply the world's busiest air route between London and Paris have a fight on their hands. The Eurostar train service linking the UK and French capitals via the Channel Tunnel is winning customers in increasing numbers. In late May, it carried its one millionth passengers, having run only a limited service between London, Paris and Brussels since November 1994, starting with two trains a day in each direction to Paris and Brussels. By 1997, the company believes that it will be carrying ten million passengers a year, and continue to grow from there. From July, Eurostar steps its service to nine trains each way between London and Paris, and five between London and Brussels. Each train carries almost 800 passengers, 210 of them in first class. The airlines estimate that they will initially lose around 15%- 20% of their London-Paris traffic to the railways once Eurostar starts a full service later this year (1995), with 15 trains a day each way. A similar service will start to Brussels. The damage will be limited, however, the airlines believe, with passenger numbers returning to previous levels within two to three years. In the short term, the damage caused by the 1 million people-levels traveling between London and Paris and Brussels on Eurostar trains means that some air services are already suffering. Some of the major carriers say that their passenger numbers are down by less than 5% and point to their rivals--Particularly Air France--as having suffered the problems. On the Brussels route, the railway company had less success, and the airlines report anything from around a 5% drop to no visible decline in traffic. The airlines' optimism on returning traffic levels is based on historical precedent. British Midland, for example, points to its experience on Heathrow Leeds Bradford service which saw passenger numbers decrease by 15% when British Rail electrified and modernized the railway line between London and Yorkshire. Two years later, travel had risen between the two destinations to the point where the airline was carrying record numbers of passengers.

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单选题Which of the following is NOT true about inflation?

单选题Every summer, the peacocks that roam free within Whipsnade Wild Animal Park in Bedfordshire expose their magnificent trains to the critical and often disdainful gaze of the hens. They re-enact the mystery that tormented Charles Darwin to his dying day. how in this competitive world, where nature—as Tennyson said—is red in tooth and claw, could birds have evolved such an obvious extravagance? How do they get away with it? The zoologist Marion Petrie and her colleagues of the Open University are now exploiting the quasi-wild conditions of Whipsnade to try, a century after Darwin"s death, to settle the matter. Darwin argued that living creatures came to be the way they are by evolution, rather than by special creation; and that the principal mechanism of evolution was natural selection. That is, in a crowded and hence competitive world, the individuals best suited to the circumstances—the "fittest"—are the most likely to survive and have offspring. But the implication is that fittest would generally mean toughest, swiftest, cleverest, most alert. The peacock"s tail, by contrast, was at best a waste of space and in practice a severe encumbrance; and Darwin felt obliged to invoke what he felt was a separate mechanism of evolution, which he called "sexual selection". The driving mechanism was simply that females liked in his words—"beauty for beauty"s sake". But Darwin"s friend and collaborator, Alfred Russel Wallace, though in many ways more "romantic" than Darwin, was in others even more Darwinian. "Beauty for beauty"s sake" he wanted nothing of. If peahens chose cocks with the showiest trains, he felt, then it must be that they knew what they were about. The cocks must have some other quality, which was not necessarily obvious to the human observer, but which the hens themselves could appreciate. According to Wallace, then, the train was not an end in itself, but an advertisement for some genuine contribution to survival. Now, 100 years later, the wrangle is still unresolved, for the natural behavior of peafowl is much harder to study than might be imagined. But 200 birds at Whipsnade, which live like wild birds yet are used to human beings, offer unique opportunities for study. Marion Petrie and her colleagues at Whipsnade have identified two main questions. First, is the premise correct—do peahens really choose the males with the showiest trains? And, secondly, do the peacocks with the showiest trains have some extra, genuinely advantageous quality, as Wallace supposed, or is it really all show, as Darwin felt? In practice, the mature cocks display in groups at a number of sites around Whipsnade, and the hens judge one against the other. Long observation from hides, backed up by photographs, suggests that the hens really do like the showiest males. What seems to count is the number of eye, spots on the train, which is related to its length; the cocks with the most eye-spots do indeed attract the most mates. But whether the males with the best trains are also "better" in other ways remains to be pinned down. William Hamilton of Oxford University has put forward the hypothesis that showy male birds in general, of whatever species, are the most parasite free, and that their plumage advertises their disease-free state. There is evidence that this is so in other birds. But Dr. Petrie and her colleagues have not been able to assess the internal parasites in the Whipsnade peacocks to test this hypothesis. This year, however, she is comparing the offspring of cocks that have in the past proved attractive to hens with the offspring of cocks that hens find unattractive. Do the children of the attractive cocks grow faster? Are they more healthy? If so, then the females" choice will be seen to be utilitarian after all, just as Wallace predicted. There is a final twist to this continuing story. The great mathematician and biologist R.A. Fisher in the thirties proposed what has become known as "Fisher"s Runaway". Just suppose, for example, that for whatever reason—perhaps for a sound "Wallacian" reason—a female first picks a male with a slightly better tail than the rest. The sons of that mating will inherit their father"s tail, and the daughters will inherit their mother"s predilection for long tails. This is how the runaway begins. Within each generation, the males with the longest tails will get most mates and leave most offspring; and the females" predilection for long tails will increase commensurately. Modern computer models show that such a feedback mechanism would alone be enough to produce a peacock"s tail. Oddly, too, this would vindicate Darwin"s apparently fanciful notion—once the process gets going, the females would indeed be selecting "beauty for beauty"s sake".

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单选题On a hot Friday afternoon in the last week of August, cars, pickup trucks, campers, and school buses slowly pull into a park on the edge of Fargo, North Dakota. Families carve out small pieces of territory around their vehicles, making the park into a series of encampments. As they have done for generations, American Indians of the Great Plains gather once again for an annual powwow. Donning their traditional clothing, Ojibwa, Lakota, and Dakota people assemble for several days of celebration and ceremony. To an outside observer attending for the first time, this year"s powwow may appear chaotic. Even though posted signs promise that dances will begin at four o"clock, there is still no dancing at five-thirty, and the scheduled drummers never arrive. No one is in charge; the announcer acts as a facilitator of ceremonies, but no chief rises to demand anything of anyone. Everyone shows great respect for the elders and for the dancers, who are repeatedly singled out for recognition, but at the same time children receive attention for dancing, as does the audience for watching. Eventually the program grows in an organic fashion as dancers slowly become activated by drums and singing. Each participant responds to the mood of the whole group but not to a single, directing voice, and the event flows in an orderly fashion like hundreds of powwows before it. This apparent penchant for respectful individualism and equality within an American Indian group seems as strong today to a non-Indian observer in Fargo as it did five centuries ago to early European explorers. Much to the shock of the first European observers and to the dismay of bureaucratic individuals, American Indian societies have traditionally operated without strong positions of leadership or coercive political institutions. Adventure novels and Hollywood films set in the past often portray strong chiefs commanding their tribes. More often, however, as in the case of the Iroquois people, a council of sachems, or legislators, ruled, and any person called the "head" of file tribe usually occupied a largely honorary position of respect rather than power. Chiefs mostly played ceremonial and religious roles rather than political or economic ones. Unlike the familiar words "caucus" and "powwow," which are Indian-derived and indicative of American Indian political traditions, the word "chief" is an English word of French origin that British officials tried to force onto American Indian tribes in order that they might have someone with whom to trade and sign treaties. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts the British tried to make one leader, Metacom of the Wampanoag people, into King Philip, thereby, imputing monarchy to the American Indian system when no such institution existed. Thus while certain English settlers learned from groups like the Iroquois people how to speak and act in group councils, others simultaneously tried to push American Indians toward a monarchical and therefore less democratic system. By the late 1600"s the Huron people of Canada had already interacted for decades with European explorers and traders and were thus able to compare their own way of life with that of the Europeans. The Hurons particularly decried the European obsession with money. By contrast, the Hurons lived a life of liberty and equality and believed that the Europeans lost their freedom in their incessant use of "thine" and "mine." One Huron explained to the French adventurer and writer Baron de La Hontan, who lived among the Hurons for eleven years, that his people were born free and united, each as great as the other, while Europeans were all the slaves of one sole person. "I am the master of my body," he said, "... I am the first and the last of my nation... subject only to the great Spirit." These words recorded by La Hontan may have reflected the Frenchman"s own philosophical bias, but his book rested on a solid factual base: the Huron people lived without social classes, without a government separate from their kinship system, and without private property. To describe this situation, La Hontan revived the Greek-derived word "anarchy," using it in the literal sense to mean "no ruler." La Hontan found an orderly society, but one lacking a formal government that compelled such order. The descriptions by La Hontan and other European travelers of the so-called anarchy among the American Indians contributed to several different brands of anarchistic theory in the nineteenth century. Today, anarchism is often equated with terrorism and nihilism (denial of values), but early anarchism lacked those characteristics. Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), the author of modern anarchistic theory stressed the notion of "mutualism" in a society based on cooperation without the use of coercion from any quarter. Like certain American plants that were introduced throughout the world and that found new surroundings in which to flourish, the examples of liberty and individuality in American Indian societies spread and survived in other surroundings. Today, in the ordered anarchy of a powwow in North Dakota, these same values are articulated more eloquently than in the writings of most political theorists.

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单选题Questions 15—18

单选题 {{B}}Questions 18 to 20 are based on the following talk.{{/B}}

单选题Extract 1 A stylish dining room with cream walls and curtains and black carpet as perfect foil to an eclectic array of furniture. Many of the pieces are classics of their particular era, and demonstrate how old and new designs can be happily mixed together. The prototype chair in the foreground has yet to prove its staying power and was thought up by the flat"s occupant. He is pictured in his living room which has the same decorative theme and is linked to the dining room by a high Medieval-styled archway where was once a redundant and uninspiring fireplace. Extract 2 Old bathrooms often contain a great deal of ugly pipework in need of disguising. This can either be done by boxing in the exposed pipes, or by fitting wood paneling over them. As wood paneling can be secured over almost anything — including old ceramic tiles and chipped walls — is an effective way of disguising pipework as well as being an attractive form of decoration. The paneling can be vertical, horizontal or diagonal. An alternative way to approach the problem of exposed pipes is to actually make them a feature of the room by picking the pipework out in bright strong colours. Extract 3 Cooking takes second place in this charming room which; with its deep armchairs, is more of a sitting room than a kitchen, and the new Rayburn stove as a good Choice, as it blends in well with the old brick and beamed fireplace. There are no fitted units or built-in appliances, so all food preparation is done at the big farmhouse table in the foreground; and the china, pots and pans have been deliberately left on show to make an attractive display, What about the kitchen sink? It"s hidden away behind an archway which leads into a small scullery. Here there"s a second cooker and — in the best farmhouse tradition — a huge walk-in larder for all food storage.

单选题Questions 6～10 Lighting up a cigarette at home could bring a visit from Honduran police if a family member or even a visitor complains about secondhand smoke. A new law that took effect on Monday banning smoking in most public and private spaces doesn't actually outlaw cigarettes inside homes, but it does have a provision allowing people to file complaints about secondhand smoke in homes. Violations would bring a verbal warning on the first offense. After that could come arrest and a $311 fine—the equivalent of the monthly minimum wage in this Central American country. Even some anti-smoking advocates suspect that part of the law may not work. "It seems its intention is to educate by way of complaints, a move that I do not find very feasible," said Armando Peruga, a program manager at the World Health Organization's Tobacco-Free Initiative. He did praise Honduras for adopting a broad anti-smoking law, noting it is only the 29th nation to adopt such a law out of WHO's 193 member states. But Peruga said the clause allowing family members to call police on their smoker relatives is confusing. The clause "does not make much sense since the law clearly does not prohibit smoking at homes". The law bans smoking in most closed public or private spaces and orders smokers to stand at least 1.8 meters away from nonsmokers in any open space. The law explicitly bans smoking in schools, gas stations, nightclubs, restaurants, bars, buses, taxis, stadiums and cultural centers hut it doesn't clearly ban smoking at home. Still, one clause says that "families or individuals may complain to law enforcement authorities when smokers expose them to secondhand smoke in private places and family homes". "The law is clear and we will comply with it," said Rony Portillo, director of the Institute to Prevent Alcoholism and Drug Addiction. "Authorities will intervene (at a home) when someone makes a complaint. " Some say the law will be almost impossible to enforce in a country of 8 million people with a rampant crime problem and only 12,000 police officers. "Police won't be able to enforce it because they can barely keep up with the crime wave that has been overwhelming us to be able to go after those who are smoking at home," said Jose Martinez, a 38-year-old computer engineer who has smoked for 20 years. The law also outlaws all advertising for tobacco products and requires photos of lungs affected by cancer to be placed on cigarette packs. Tobacco and cigarette companies have 60 days to comply with both requirements. In Honduras, 30 percent of the people smoke, and nine out of 10 Hondurans suffering from acute bronchitis live in homes where there is a smoker, according to Honduran health authorities.

单选题Working an eight-hour day is a luxury for most professional people. Nowadays, the only way to guarantee an eight-hour working day is to have the kind of job where you clock on and off. Those professionals who have managed to limit their hours to what was, 20 years ago, the average do not wish to identify themselves. "I can quite easily achieve my work within a normal day, but I don"t like to draw attention to it," says one sales manager. "People looked at me when I left at 5 o"clock. Now, I put paperwork in my bag. People assume I"m doing extra hours at home." But more typical is Mark, who works as an account manager. He says, "My contract says I work from 9 until 5 with extra hours as necessary. It sounds as if the extra hours are exceptional. In fact, my job would be enough not only for me, but also for someone else part-time. The idea of an eight-hour day makes me laugh!" He says he has thought about going freelance but realises that this doesn"t guarantee better working hours. Professor Caw Cooper, occupational psychologist at the University of Manchester, is the author of the annual Quality of Working Life survey. The most recent survey found that 77% of managers in Britain work more than their contracted hours, and that this is having a damaging effect on their health, relationships and productivity. Professor Cooper is critical of the long-hours culture. He says that while bosses believe long hours lead to greater efficiency, there is no evidence to support this. "In fact, the evidence shows that long hours make you ill." There are, he says, steps that can be taken. One is to accept that the in-tray will never be empty. "There are always things to do. You just have to make the rule that on certain days you go home early." Prioritising work and doing essential tasks first helps, he says. He also thinks it"s time to criticize bad employers and unreasonable terms of employment. "By all means, show commitment where necessary but when expectations are too high, people have to begin saying openly that they have a life outside of work." Personal development coach Mo Shapiro agrees that communication is important. Staff need to talk to managers about the working practices within a company. Both parties should feel that the expectations are realistic and allow them to have responsibilities and interests outside work. She recognises, however, that in many organizations the response might well be, "If you want more interests outside work, then find another job." She believes that senior staff have a duty to set an example. "I recently worked for a firm of solicitors where the partners started at 7:30 am. What kind of message is that to send to the staff?" She believes there is no shame in working sensible hours—in fact quite the reverse. "Some people might be in at 7:30 am but will be doing very little. You can work really hard from 9 to 5 and achieve the same. If you find it difficult to achieve an eight-hour day, there is, as a last resort, the old trick of leaving your jacket on your chair and your computers switched on, even after you have left the building."

单选题A.Evidenceshowsthatwildanimalscantransmitvirustoman.B.ScientistsreporttheextinctionofsomeendangeredwildanimalsC.Menandwomencannotprotectthemselvesfromtheattackofvirus.D.Huntingoreatinganimalswillnotbringtheriskofbeinginfectedbyvirus.

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单选题 Questions 6-10 It was the worst tragedy in maritime history, six times more deadly than the Titanic. When the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff was hit by torpedoes fired from a Russian submarine in the final winter of World War Ⅱ, more than 10,000 people--mostly women, children and old people fleeing the final Red Army push into Nazi Germany--were packed aboard. An ice storm had turned the decks into frozen sheets that sent hundreds of families sliding into the sea as the ship tilted and began to go down. Others desperately tried to put lifeboats down. Some who succeeded fought off those in the water who had the strength to try to claw their way aboard. Most people froze immediately. "I'll never forget the screams," says Christa Ntitzmann, 87, one of the 1,200 survivors. She recalls watching the ship, brightly lit, slipping into its dark grave—and into seeming nothingness, rarely mentioned for more than half a century. Now Germany's Nobel Prize-winning author Guenter Grass has revived the memory of the 9,000 dead, including more than 4,000 children--with his latest novel Crab Walk, published last month. The book, which will be out in English next year, doesn't dwell on the sinking; its heroine is a pregnant young woman who survives the catastrophe only to say later. "Nobody wanted to hear about it, not here in the West (of Germany) and not at all in the East. " The reason was obvious. As Grass put it in a recent interview with the weekly Die Woche: "Because the crimes we Germans are responsible for were and are so dominant, we didn't have the energy left to tell of our own sufferings. " The long silence about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was probably unavoidable--and necessary. By unreservedly owning up to their country's monstrous crimes in the Second World War, Germans have managed to win acceptance abroad, marginalize the neo-Nazis at home and make peace with their neighbors. Today's unified Germany is more prosperous and stable than at any time in its long, troubled history. For that, a half century of willful forgetting about painful memories like the German Titanic was perhaps a reasonable price to pay. But even the most politically correct Germans believe that they've now earned the right to discuss the full historical record. Not to equate German suffering with that of its victims, but simply to acknowledge a terrible tragedy.

单选题 {{B}}Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following interview.{{/B}}