单选题Over the last decade, demand for the most common cosmetic surgery procedures, like breast enlargement and nose jobs, has increased by more than 400 per cent. According to Dr. Dai Davies, of the Plastic Surgery Partnership in Hammersmith, the majority of cosmetic surgery patients are not chasing physical perfection. Rather, they are driven to fantastic lengths to improve their appearance by a desire to look normal. "What we all crave is to look normal, and normal is what is prescribed by the advertising media and other external pressures. They give us a perception of what is physically acceptable and we feel we must look like that." In America, the debate is no longer about whether surgery is normal; rather, it centers on what age people should be before going under the knife. New York surgeon Dr. Gerard Imber recommends "maintenance" work for people in their thirties. "The idea if waiting until one need a heroic transformation is silly," he says. "By then, you"ve wasted 20 great years of your life and allowed things to get out of hand." Dr. Imber draws the line at operating on people who are under 18, however, "It seems that someone we don"t consider old enough to order a drink shouldn"t be considering plastic surgery." In the UK cosmetic surgery has long been seen as the exclusive domain of the very rich and famous. But the proportionate cost of treatment has fallen substantially, bringing all but the most advanced laser technology within the reach of most people. Dr. Davie, who claims to "cater for the average person", agrees. He says: "I treat a few of the rich and famous and an awful lot of secretaries. Of course, ￡3,000 for an operation is a lot of money. But it is also an investment for life which costs about half the price of a good family holiday." Dr. Davies suspects that the increasing sophistication of the fat injecting and removal techniques that allow patients to be treated with a local anaesthetic in an afternoon has also helped promote the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Yet, as one woman who recently paid ￡2,500 for liposuction to remove cellulite from her thighs admitted, the slope to becoming a cosmetic surgery veteran is a deceptively gentle one. "I had my legs done because they"d been bugging me for years. But going into the clinic was so low key and effective that it whetted my appetite. Now I don"t think there"s any operation that I would rule out having if I could afford it."

单选题 The farmers and bad debts have become synonymous. Little wonder then that a bank that carries a third of all loans to America's farmers is in trouble. But when that bank's total debt is $ 60 billion, more than half the size of Brazil's, and its losses over the past two years, at $ 4.8 billion, exceed anything in American banking history, the problem becomes political as well as financial. Congress began this week to discuss a bill to rescue the Farm Credit System. The Farm Credit System is not strictly a bank. It is a peculiar animal, a federation of 37 banks (three in each of 12 regions and one to sell bonds to Wall Street) containing 387 lending associations, owned by the farmers who borrow from them. It was set up by the federal government in the early years of the century to give farmers an alternative source of credit to the banks, but has long ago paid off any federal debts and so, in theory, is now independent. The system got into trouble by lending too readily in farming's good times, the 1970s, as land prices rose and farm profits grew. Total farm debt quadrupled between 1970 and 1984. Farmers flocked to the Farm Credit System because its interest rates, based on a moving average, lagged behind those of the market. But the falling profits and falling land prices of the early 1980s coincided with raising interest rates, putting many farmers in difficulty. When interest rates began to fall, the moving average responded slowly, so many farmers found themselves paying well above market rates for their loans. They promptly refinanced them with other banks. Even as its bad debts grew (they are now $ 7 billion), the Farm Credit System's loans shrank, from over $ 80 billion to about $ 50 billion today. In May the system went to Congress and asked for $ 6 billion to see it through its present crisis. Although the worst losses are past, at least two of the banks in the system will have run out of capital altogether by the end of the year. Congress has reacted some impatience, for this was the third request for help in three years, though admittedly the first two had not been for money. In 1985 the Farm Credit System was allowed to share a capital between its banks, so that its rich members could bail out its poor ones. In 1986 it asked to be allowed to fiddle its accounts so as to defer losses. Congress, to its shame, agreed. The first measure helped little, because the shareholders of the richer banks sued to stop their money being used to help the poorer. The second measure simply stored up trouble for the future. Now the system needs dollars soon. This time, however, Congress has demanded changes in the way the system is run. Mr. Charles Stenholm, a Democrat from Texas, wants to fuse the 37 banks into seven and devolve the lending and rate-setting powers to the 387 local lending associations, thus cutting out some of the bureaucratic overlaps (accounts are audited three times, for example). The shareholders would almost certainly sue. But the threat has concentrated the minds of the system's directors, who have produced a plan for cutting the system's 12 districts to six with one bank in each. The bill before the House of Representatives (the Senate is still working on its version) would, in return for such changes, put in place a federally controlled organization that would seek money to stave off bankruptcy, as necessary. It would also throw commercial banks a present by creating a secondary market in farm mortgages, nicknamed Farmer Mac; this would, in effect, pass on some of the benefits of a bail-out to the private banks. Representative John Dingell of Michigan threatened to fight this on the floor of the House and rolled out some big guns, including the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Alan Greenspan, and his predecessor, Mr. Paul Volcker, to try to stop it. The secondary market would enable the banks to take away the system's best loans, they said, leaving it shakier than before. To avoid a fight, House leaders postponed a discussion of this clause until October 6th. In fact, it is farm creditors rather than farmers who are more in trouble. Net farm income has risen from $12. 7 billion in 1983 to over $ 44 billion this year; farm debt has fallen from $ 202 billion to $163 billion. Land values have steadied, as has the suicide rate among farmers. Subsidies are flowing strongly, at a rate of $ 26 billion a year.

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单选题Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.

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单选题Questions 23-26

单选题 Recruiters say that candidates who can give examples of work they have done as members of a successful team are in as strong a position as those who can point to significant individual achievement. Indeed, too much of the latter may suggest that the person concerned is not a "team player"—one of the more serious failings in the book of management. The importance of being a team player is a side effect of the increasing interaction across departments and functional divides. Instead of pushing reports, paperwork and decisions around the organisation, "teams provide a dynamic meeting place where ideas can be shared and expertise more carefully targeted at important business issues", says Steve Gardner, in his book Key Management Concepts. He adds, "Globalization has added a further dimension to teamwork. Multinational teams now study policy decisions in the light of their impact on the local market." But is teamworking being overdone? "Some managers are on as many as seven or eight different teams", says Dr. Cathy Bandy, a psychologist who recently ran a conference on the subject, "They take up so much time that managers can't get on with core tasks". Forming teams and having meetings have, she says, become an end in itself, almost regardless of purpose. There is also the danger of an unhealthy desire to keep the team going after the work has been done. "People feel the need to belong, and team membership can provide a kind of psychological support." The idea behind teamworking is that, when the right group of people is brought together, a "force" develops which is greater than the sum of their individual talents. This is often true in sport, where good players can reach unexpected heights as members of an international team. However, few business situations have as clear a set of objectives, or as clear criteria of success or failure, as winning a match. "In business, everyone needs to be clear about what the challenge is and whether a team is the right way of approaching it', says Steve Gardner." Unfortunately, people focus instead on who the members of the team should be and what roles they are to play" Dr. Bandy agrees. "There is always a danger that teams can turn into committees," she says. "In a lot of situations, one or two individuals would be much more effective." So what makes a successful team? There are some general qualities that have been identified. Steve Gardner recommends that in every team there should be someone who is good at researching ideas and another who is good at shooting down impractical ones. There should be those who can resolve the tensions that naturally occur in a team and others who are focused on getting the job done. Also, providing a clear and achievable target at the outset is the best way of ensuring that the team will move on to greater things.

单选题Directions: In this section you will read several passages. Each one is followed by several questions about it. You are to choose ONE best answer, A. B. C. or D. to each question. When Harvey Ball took a black felt-tip pen to a piece of yellow paper in 1963, he never could have realized that he was drafting the face that would launch 50 million buttons and an eventual war over copyright. Mr. Ball, a commercial artist, was simply filling a request from Joy Young of the Worcester Mutual Insurance Company to create an image for their "smile campaign" to coach employees to be more congenial in their customer relations. It seems there was a hunger for a bright grin—the original order of 100 smiley-face buttons were snatched up and an order for 10,000 more was placed at once. The Worcester Historical Museum takes this founding moment seriously. "Just as you'd want to know the biography of General Washington, we realized we didn't know the comprehensive history of the Smiley Face," says Bill Wallace, the executive director of the historical museum where the exhibit "Smiley—An American Icon" opens to the public Oct. 6 in Worcester, Mass. Worcester, often referred to by neighboring Bostonians as "that manufacturing town off Route 90," lays claim to several other famous commercial firsts, the monkey wrench and shredded wheat among them. Smiley Face is a particularly warm spot in the city's history. Through a careful historical analysis, Mr. Wallace says that while the Smiley Face birthplace is undisputed, it took several phases of distribution before the distinctive rounded-tipped smile with one eye slightly larger than the other proliferated in the mainstream. As the original buttons spread like drifting pollen with no copyright attached, a bank in Seattle next realized its commercial potential. Under the guidance of advertising executive David Stern, the University Federal Savings & Loan launched a very public marketing campaign in 1967 centered on the Smiley Face. It eventually distributed 150,000 buttons along with piggy banks and coin purses. Old photos of the bank show giant Smiley Face wallpaper. By 1970, Murray and Bernard Spain, brothers who owned a card shop in Philadelphia, were affixing the yellow grin to everything from key chains to cookie jars along with "Have a happy day". "In the 1970s, there was a trend toward happiness," says Wallace. "We had assassinated a president, we were in a war with Vietnam, and people were looking for [tokens of] happiness. [The Spain brothers] ran with it." The Smiley Face resurged in the 1990s. This time it was fanned by a legal dispute between Wal-Mart, who uses it to promote its low prices, and Franklin Loufrani, a Frenchman who owns a company called SmileyWorld. Mr. Loufrani says he created the Smiley Face and has trademarked it around the world. He has been distributing its image in 80 countries since 1971. Loufrani's actions irked Ball, who felt that such a universal symbol should remain in the public domain in perpetuity. So in a pleasant proactive move, Ball declared in 1999 that the first Friday in October would be "World Smile Day" to promote general kindness and charity toward children in need. Ball died in 2001. The Worcester exhibit opens on "World Smile Day", Oct. 6. It features a plethora of Smiley Face merchandise—from the original Ball buttons to plastic purses and a toilet seat and contemporary interpretations by local artists. The exhibit is scheduled to run through Feb. 11.

单选题 Questions 21～25 Any request in the United Kingdom to remove a disabled person's ability to reproduce should be treated with great caution. The news that 15-year-old Katie Thorpe, who has severe cerebral palsy, may have a womb removal operation at her mother's request should be a cause of great concern for disabled people. This case raises profound legal and ethical dilemmas. Legally Katie should be assumed to be capable of making a decision and, if necessary, supported to do so before anyone else can decide what is or is not in her "best interests". Ethically we have to remember that right through the 20th century many countries in Europe and beyond legislated positively in favor of sterilising disabled people, often without their knowledge—let alone their consent. As Judge Holmes famously put it in a landmark case in the United States less than a century ago, "three generations of imbeciles are enough". With the shadow of this recent history still over us, we should exercise utmost caution before sanctioning decisions to remove any disabled woman's reproductive right. The most effective path through both the legal and ethical dilemmas has to be to encourage self-determination on the part of disabled people such as Katie. Of course, the rights and needs of careers need to be taken into account as well, but it is imperative that this is never at the expense of the disabled person's own views. The reason that this case has caused so much controversy is that, on initial inspection, it appears that an assumption is being made about what is best for a disabled person without attempting to understand the desires of the individual who will be ultimately affected by the decision. Unfortunately, assumptions that limit disabled people's lives are prevalent in our society, and the medical profession is not immune. I have come across cases where disabled people who personally believe they enjoy a good quality of life, have been told by doctors that they assume they would not want to be resuscitated in the event of respiratory failure. When the individuals tell the doctors that they would, of course, want to be resuscitated, they have been met with nothing but a puzzled look. Not only does the UK disability network Radar advocate that all disabled people should be the authors of their own destiny, but that they should have the appropriate support in place to enable them to achieve their hopes and ambitions. This does not just mean going to the shops, or having a rewarding job, but it also means a right to relationships and to family life, which means ensuring self-determination is a key aspect of everyone's existence. These are the rights that non-disabled people take for granted, and they must be afforded to all if we are to live in an equal society. We know that with the right support in place, true independent living is not only possible, but desirable both from a social and an economic perspective. Once we can live the lives that we want to live, we can encourage other disabled people to do the same. We all have ambitions, and we should all be enabled to fulfill them and inspire others. Before we can achieve this, we must have the mechanisms in place to ensure that people like Katie, and all others who cannot easily express their needs and desires, are fully represented in the legal system and our society as a whole. Life can be very difficult for parents who are also careers for their severely disabled children. But that does not mean that they always know what is in the best interests of their children. For all children, independence from their parents can be a hard-won right. For disabled young people, they may need support throughout their lives to achieve this.

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

单选题A.Itworksfasterthanthehumanbrain.B.Itseldommakeserrors.C.Itcansolvecomplicatedproblems.D.Itcan"think"withoutinformationfedintoit.

单选题It can be inferred form the passage that ______.

单选题 Most big corporations were once run by individual capitalists: by one shareholder with enough stock to dominate the board of directors and to dictate policy, a shareholder who was usually also the chief executive officer. Owning a majority or controlling interest, these capitalists did not have to concentrate on reshuffling assets to fight off raids from financial vikings. They were free to make a living by producing new products or by producing old products more cheaply. Just as important, they were locked into their roles. They could not very well sell out for a quick profit—dumping large stock holdings on the market would have simply depressed the stock's price and cost them their jobs as captains of industry. So instead they sought to enhance their personal wealth by investing—by improving the long-run efficiency and productivity of the company. Today, with very few exceptions, the stock of large U. S. corporations is held by financial institutions such as pension funds, foundations, or mutual funds—not by individual shareholders. And these financial institutions cannot legally become real capitalists who control what they own. How much they can invest in any one company is limited by law, as is how actively they can intervene in company decision making. These shareholders and corporate managers have a very different agenda than dominant capitalists do, and therein lies the problem. They do not have the clout to change business decisions, corporate strategy, or incumbent managers with their voting power. They can enhance their wealth only by buying and selling shares based on what they think is going to happen to short-term profits. Minority shareholders have no choice but to be short-term traders. And since shareholders are by necessity interested only in short-term trading, it is not surprising that managers' compensation is based not on long-term performance, but on current profits or sales. Managerial compensation packages are completely congruent with the short-run perspective of short run shareholders. Neither the manager nor the shareholder expects to be around very long. And neither has an incentive to watch out for the long term growth of the company. We need to give managers and shareholders an incentive to nurture long-term corporate growth—in other words, to work as hard at enhancing productivity and output as they now work at improving short-term profitability.

单选题 {{B}}Questions 15-18{{/B}}

单选题Ifthewomanhastoaskforasickleave,whoshouldsheturnto?[A]Herdepartmentmanager.[B]Thepersonneldepartment.[C]Thedirectoroftheworkshop.

单选题Sometime soon, according to animal-rights activists, a great ape will testify in an American courtroom. Speaking through a voice synthesizer, or perhaps in sign language, the lucky ape will argue that it has a fundamental right to liberty. "This is going to be a very important case." Duke University law Prof. William ReppyJr. told the New York Times. Reppy concedes that apes can talk only at the level of a human 4-year-old, so they may not be ready to discuss abstractions like oppression and freedom. Just last month, one ape did manage to say through a synthesizer, "Please buy me a hamburger." That may not sound like crucial testimony, but lawyers think that the spectacle of an ape saying anything at all in court may change a lot of minds about the status of animals as property. One problem is that apes probably won"t be able to convince judges that they know right from wrong, or that they intend to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Since they are not persons, they don"t even have legal standing to sue. No problem, says Steven Wise, who taught animal law for 10 years at Vermont Law School and is now teaching Harvard Law School"s first course in the subject. He says lawyers should be able to use slavery-era statues that authorized legal nonpersons (slaves) to bring lawsuits. Gary Francione, who teaches animal law at Rutgers University, says that gorillas "should be declared to be persons under the constitution. " Unlike mainstream animal-welfare activists, radical animal-rights activists think that all animals are morally equal and have rights, though not necessarily the same rights as humans. So the law"s denial of rights to animals is simply a matter of bias-speciesism. It"s even an expression of bias to talk about protecting wildlife, since this assumes that human control and domination of other species is acceptable. These are surely far-out ideas. "Would even bacteria have rights ?" asks one exasperated law professor, Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School. For the moment, the radicals want to confine the rights discussion to apes and chimps, mostly to avoid the obvious mockery about litigious lemmings, cockroach liberation, and the issue of whether a hyena eating an antelope is committing a fights violation that should be brought before the world court in the Hague. One wag wrote a poem containing the line, "Every beast within his paws/Will clutch an order to show cause. " The news is that law schools are increasingly involved in animal issues. Any radical notion that vastly inflates the concept of rights and requires a lot more litigation is apt to take root in the law schools. ("Some lawyers say they are in the field to advance their ideology, but some note that it is an area of legal practice that could be profitable," reports the New York Times.) A dozen law schools now feature courses on animal law, and in some cases, at least, the teaching seems to be a simple extension of radical activism. The course description of next spring"s "Animal Law Seminar" at Georgetown University Law Center, for instance, makes clear to students which opinions are the correct ones to have. It talks about the plight of "rightless plaintiffs" and promises to examine how and why laws "purporting to protect" animals have failed. Ideas about humane treatment of animals are indeed changing. Many of us have changed our minds about furs, zoos, slaughterhouse techniques, and at least some forms of animal experimentation. The debate about greater concern for the animal world continues. But the alliance between the radicals and the lawyers means that, once again, an issue that ought to be taken to the people and resolved by democratic means will most likely be pre-empted by judges and lawyers. Steven Wise talks of using the courts to knock down the wall between humans and apes. Once apes have rights, he says, the status of other animals can be decided by other courts and other litigation. The advantage of the litigation strategy is that there"s no need to sell radical ideas to the American people. There are almost no takers for the concept of "nonhuman personhood," the view of pets as slaves, or the notion that meat eating is part of "a specter of oppression" that equally afflicts minorities, women, and animals in America. You can supersede open debate by convincing a few judges to detect a "fights" issue that functions as a political trump card. The rhetoric is high-minded, but the strategy is to force change without gaining the consent of the public. Converting every controversy into a "rights" issue is by now a knee-jerk response. Harvard Law Prof. Mary Ann Glendon, author of Rights Talk, writes about our legal culture"s "lost language of obligation." Instead of casting arguments in terms of human responsibility for the natural world, rights talkers automatically spin out tortured arguments about "rights" of animals and even about the "rights" of trees and mountains. This is how "rights talk" becomes a parody of itself. Let"s hope the lawyers and the law schools eventually get the joke.

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单选题 The Microsoft antitrust trial inched close to a final ruling from U. S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Tuesday, as the software vendor fried a brief refuting his contention that the company has a monopoly in PC operating systems. Microsoft also claimed that U. S. government prosecutors have not satisfied the burden of proof for any of their antitrust claims. Microsoft made the arguments in its proposed conclusions of law—a document of more than 100 pages—fried with the court Tuesday stating the company's interpretation of how antitrust law should be applied to Jackson's findings of fact. The software giant said having an extremely popular product—Windows—does not make it a monopolist. In his findings of fact issued November 5, 1999, Jackson said Microsoft "enjoys a monopoly" in the personal computer market. A month later the government and 19 U. S. states alleged in their proposed conclusions of law that Microsoft engaged in illegal "monopoly maintenance" to protect and extend Windows' dominance and then tried to monopolize the Internet browser market. Microsoft refuted all those claims in its brief Tuesday, citing numerous cases and court findings over the past 30 years. The company said the case law demonstrates that it did not engage in anticompetitive conduct that contributed significantly to the maintenance of a monopoly. Microsoft also cited the June 1998 Appeals Court ruling that called the union of Windows and Internet Explorer "a genuine integration" The brief comes one week after reports began circulating that the government is preparing to propose the breakup of Microsoft into two or three parts. It restates many of Microsoft's defenses, claiming that the integration of Web browsing software into Windows benefited millions of consumers and that the software vendor did not prevent users from obtaining Netscape Navigator. Jackson's findings of fact expressly found that "many—if not most—consumers can be said to benefit from Microsoft's provisions of Web browsing functionality with its Windows operating system at no additional charge," the document says. The brief further states that the findings of fact did not say that Microsoft acted with a specific intent to obtain monopoly power in the market for Web browsers. "The Court instead found that Microsoft attempted to increase Internet Explorer's usage share to such a level as would prevent Netscape Navigator… from becoming the 'standard' Web browsing software," the Microsoft brief said. While the government argues that Microsoft's actions may have made it more difficult for Netscape to use certain channels of distribution, Microsoft's filing cites numerous cases that demonstrate that its actions were within the bounds of competition defined by the law. Microsoft also rejects the government's claim that its licensing agreements illegally prevent computer manufacturers from modifying the first screen that a user sees when Windows launches, saying the license merely restate rights that Microsoft enjoys under federal copyright law. The two sides in the trial, which began in October 1998, can now submit rebuttals to each other's conclusions of law. Oral arguments are scheduled for February 22, and a ruling is expected in the spring.

单选题I dislike going to the dentist as he uses the ______on my teeth. A. pick B. probe C. bore D. drill