单选题Questions 21-25 Once it was possible to define male and female roles easily by the division of labor. Men worked outside the home and earned the income to support their families, while women cooked the meals and took care of the home and the children. These roles were firmly fixed for most people, and there was not much opportunity for women to exchange their roles. But by the middle of this century, men's and women's roles were becoming less firmly fixed. In the 1950s, economic and social success was the goal of the typical American. But in the 1960s a new force developed called the counterculture. The people involved in this movement did not value the middle-class American goals. The counterculture presented men and women with new role choices. Taking more interest in childcare, men began to share child-raising tasks with their wives. In fact, some young men and women moved to communal homes or farms where the economic and childcare responsibilities were shared equally by both sexes. In addition, many Americans did not value the traditional male role of soldier. Some young men refused to be drafted as soldiers to fight in the war in Vietnam. In terms of numbers, the counterculture was not a very large group of people. But its influence spread to many parts of American society. Working men of all classes began to change their economic and social patterns. Industrial workers and business executives alike cut down on "overtime" work so that they could spend more leisure time with their families. Some doctors, lawyers, and teachers turned away from high paying situations to practice their professions in poorer neighborhoods. In the 1970s, the feminist movement, or women's liberation, produced additional economic and social changes. Women of all ages and at all levels of society were entering the work force in greater numbers. Most of them still took traditional women's jobs as public school teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. But some women began to enter traditionally male occupations: police work, banking, dentistry, and construction work. Women were asking for equal work, and equal opportunities for promotion. Today the experts generally agree that important changes are taking place in the roles of men and women. Naturally, there are difficulties in adjusting to these transformations.

单选题Which of the following can NOT be concluded from Hughes' comment "It's a for-profit product that allows you to exercise your conscience." (Para. 2) ______.

单选题Whenistheconversationtakingplace?A.Atten.B.Atten-thirty.C.Nearlyatmidnight.

单选题Laura Holshouser"s favorite video games include Halo, Tetris, and an online training game developed by her employer. A training game? That"s right. The 24-year-old graduate student, who manages a Cold Stone Creamery ice-cream store in Riverside, Calif. , stumbled across the game on the corporate Web site in October. It teaches portion control and customer service in a cartoon-like simulation of a Cold Stone store. Players scoop cones against the clock and try to avoid serving too much ice cream. The company says more than 8,000 employees, or about 30% of the total, voluntarily downloaded the game in the first week. "It"s so much fun," says Holshouser. "I e-mailed it to everyone at work." The military has used video games as a training tool since the 1980s. Now the practice is catching on with companies, too, ranging from Cold Stone to Cisco Systems Inc. to Canon Inc. Corporate trainers are betting that games" interactivity and fun will hook young, media-savvy employees like Holshouser and help them grasp and retain sales, technical, and management skills. "Video games teach resource management, collaboration, critical thinking, and tolerance for failure," says Ben Sawyer, who runs Digitalmill Inc. , a game consultancy in Portland, Me. The market for corporate training games is small but it"s growing fast. Sawyer estimates that such games make up 15% of the "serious," or nonentertainment market, which also includes educational and medical training products. Over the next five years, Sawyer sees the serious-games market more than doubling, to $100 million, with trainers accounting for nearly a third of that. It"s numbers like those that prompted Cyberlore Studios Inc. , maker of Playboy: The Mansion, to refocus on training games—albeit based on its Playboy title. And training games will be top of mind at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. , this month. Companies like video games because they are cost-effective. Why pay for someone to fly to a central training campus when you can just plunk them down in front of a computer? Even better, employees often play the games at home on their own time. Besides, by industry standards, training games are cheap to make. A typical military game costs up to $10 million, while sophisticated entertainment games can cost twice that. Since the corporate variety don"t require dramatic, warlike explosions or complex 3D graphics, they cost a lot less. BreakAway Games Ltd., which designs simulation games for the military, is finishing its first corporate product, V-bank, to train bank auditors. Its budget? Just $500,000. Games are especially well-suited to training technicians. In one used by Canon, repairmen must drag and drop parts into the right spot on a copier. As in the board game Operation, a light flashes and a buzzer sounds if the repairman gets it wrong. Workers who played the game showed a 5% to 8% improvement in their training scores compared with older training techniques such as manuals, says Chuck Reinders, who trains technical support staff at Canon. This spring, the company will unveil 11 new training games. Games are also being developed to help teach customer service workers to be more empathetic. Cyberlore, now rechristened Minerva Software Inc. , is developing a training tool for a retailer by rejiggering its Playboy Mansion game. In the original, guests had to persuade models to pose topless. The new game requires players to use the art of persuasion to sell products, and simulates a store, down to the carpet and point-of-purchase display details. Don Field, director of certifications at Cisco, says games won"t entirely replace traditional training methods such as videos and classes. But he says they should be part of the toolbox. Last year, Cisco rolled out six new training games—some of them designed to teach technicians how to build a computer network. It"s hard to imagine a drier subject. Not so in the virtual world. In one Cisco game, players must put the network together on Mars. In a sandstorm. "Our employees learn without realizing they are learning," says Field. Sounds suspiciously like fun.

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单选题The author cites Alexis de Tocqueville's words at the beginning of the passage to show that ______.

单选题 Every day of our lives we are in danger of instant death from small high-speed missiles from space—the lumps of rocky or metallic debris which continuously bombard the Earth. The chances of anyone actually being hit, however, are very low, although there are recorded instances of "stones from the sky" hurting people, and numerous accounts of damage to buildings and other objects. At night this extraterrestrial material can be seen as "fireballs" or "shooting stars", burning their way through our atmosphere. Most, on reaching our atmosphere, become completely vaporised. The height above ground at which these objects become sufficiently heated to be visible is estimated to be about 60-100 miles. Meteorites that have fallen on buildings have sometimes ended their long lonely space voyage incongruously under beds, inside flower pots or even, in the case of one that landed on a hotel in North Wales, within a chamber pot. Before the era of space exploration it was confidently predicted that neither men nor space vehicles would survive for long outside the protective blanket of the Earth's atmosphere. It was, thought that once in space they would be seriously damaged as a result of the incessant downpour of meteorites falling towards our planet at the rate of many millions every day. Even the first satellites showed that the danger from meteorites had been greatly overestimated by the pessimists, but although it has not happened yet, it is certain that one day a spacecraft will be badly damaged by a meteorite. The greatest single potential danger to life on Earth undoubtedly comes from outside our planet. Collision with another astronomical body of any size or with a "black hole" could completely destroy the Earth almost instantly. Near misses of bodies larger than or comparable in size to our own planet could be equally disastrous to mankind as they might still result in total or partial disruption. If the velocity of impact were high, collision with even quite small extraterrestrial bodies might cause catastrophic damage to the Earth's atmosphere, oceans and outer crust and thus produce results inimical to life as we know it. The probability of collision with a large astronomical body from outside our Solar System is extremely low, possibly less than once in the lifetime of an average star. We know, however, that our galaxy contains great interstellar dust clouds and some astronomers have suggested that there might also be immense streams of meteorite matter in space that the Solar system may occasionally encounter. Even if we disregard this possibility, our own Solar system itself contains a great number of small astronomical bodies, such as the minor planets or asteroids and the comets, some with eccentric orbits that occasionally bring them close to the Earth's path.

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单选题Which conclusion concerning the term "caucus" is most directly supported by the passage?

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

单选题 {{B}}Questions 15-18{{/B}}

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单选题Questions 11—14

单选题 Questions 16～20 The law firm Patrick worked for before he died filed for bankruptcy protection a year after his funeral. After his death, the firm's letterhead properly included him- Patrick S. Lanigan, 1954～1992. He was listed up in the right-hand corner, just above the paralegals. Then the rumors got started and wouldn't stop. Before long, everyone believed he had taken the money and disappeared. After three months, no one on the Gulf Coast believed that he was dead. His name came off the letterhead as the debts piled up. The remaining partners in the law firm were still together, attached unwillingly at the hip by the bondage of mortgages and the bank notes, back when they were rolling and on the verge of serious wealth. They had been joint defendants in several unwinnable lawsuits; thus the bankruptcy. Since Patrick's departure, they had tried every possible way to divorce one another, but nothing would work. Two were raging alcoholics who drank at the office behind locked doors, but never together. The other two were in recovery, still teetering on the brink of sobriety. He took their money. Their millions money. They had already spent long before it arrived, as only lawyers can do, money for their richly renovated office building in downtown Biloxi, money for new homes, yachts, condos in the Caribbean. The money was on the way, approved, the papers signed, orders entered; they could see it, almost touch it when their dead partner—Patrick—snatched it at the last possible second. He was dead. They buried him on February 11, 1992. They had consoled the widow and put his rotten name on their handsome letterhead. Yet six weeks later, he somehow stole their money. So Bogan took his share of the blame. At forty-nine, he was the oldest of the four, and, at the moment, the most stable. He was also responsible for hiring Patrick nine years earlier, and they had brawled over who was to blame. Charles Bogan, the firm's senior partner and its iron hand, had insisted the money be wired from its source into a new account offshore, and this made sense after some discussion. It was ninety million bucks, a third of which the firm would keep, and it would be impossible to hide that kind of money in Biloxi, population fifty thousand. Someone at the bank would talk. Soon everyone would know. All four vowed secrecy, even as they made plans to display as much of their new wealth as possible. There had even been talk of a firm jet, a six-seater, and for this he had received no small amount of grief. Doug Vitrano, the litigator, had made the fateful decision to recommend Patrick as the fifth partner. The other three had agreed, and when Patrick Lanigan was added to the firm name, he had access to virtually every file in the office—Bogan, Rapley, Vitrano, Havarac, and Lanigan, Attorneys and Counselors-at-Law. A large ad in the yellow pages claimed "Specialists in Offshore Injuries." Specialists or not, like most firms they would take almost anything if the fees were lucrative. Lots of secretaries and paralegals, big overhead, and the strongest political connections on the Coast, they were all in their mid-to-late forties. Havarac had been raised by his father on a shrimp boat. His hands were still proudly calloused, and he dreamed of choking Patrick until his neck snapped. Rapley was severely depressed and seldom left his home, where he wrote briefs in a dark office in the attic.

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单选题Questions 23—26

单选题To most people the human face is a compelling object fraught with meaning. But for autistic children, who can"t get a read on other people"s emotions, eye contact is terrifying. When they do look at faces, they tend to stare at the mouth. Fortunately, researchers now think that technology can help overcome the barrier that isolates these kinds. Software that enables robots to respond to a child"s feelings a little bit—but not too much—can help train him or her to interact more freely with people. "The beauty of a robot or software is that it"s not human," and therefore not as intimidating, says Stephen Porges, an autism expert at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Computer-generated faces are already having an impact in the classroom. Psychologist Dominic Massaro at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has created Baldi, a lively computer character, as a stand-in for human teachers. For three years, Baldi and his female counterpart, Baldette, have been giving autistic kids in the Bay School in Santa Cruz lessons in vocabulary and in understanding facial expressions. The character has been so successful that he"s spawned imitators—Baldini in Italian, Baldir in Arabic and Bao in Chinese. Porges thinks that the real role of cartoon personas is not so much to teach patients as to calm them. Autistic kids live in a state of hyperalertness, as if they were constantly suffering stage fright. If technology can put them at ease, Porges argues, social skills will develop naturally. In a recent study, Porges exposed 20 autistic people, ranging from 10 to 21 years old, to engineered speech and music. He removed low frequency sounds, which the body tends to interpret as indicating danger, and exaggerated vocal intonations, much as people dramatize emotions when speaking to infants. After 45 minutes, all but one of the subjects began looking at the eyes of a person on a video screen just as a normal viewer would. The improvement persisted at least a week, but had faded after six months. Porges is now developing headphones that reduce low frequencies. He also hopes to test whether ongoing exposure to the engineered sounds can lead to long-term improvement. Other technology may be effective for less severely autistic children. Whereas normal babies learn from caretakers to mirror emotions—smile at a smile, frown at a frown—autistic children often lack this basic skill. Cognitive scientists Javier Movellan and Marian Stewart Bartlett at the University of California, San Diego, have built a robot that can "read" faces. They hope that playing with the robot and watching it interact with others will inspire autistic children to return the smiles of humans. Commercial emotion-reading software about to hit the market could be a boon for some high functioning autistic and Asperger"s patients in dealing with social situations. Affective Media, a firm near Edinburgh, Scotland, has created a prototype phone that "hears" the emotion in voice messages and conveys it explicitly to the owner. A person checking messages would hear something like this: "You have two bored calls, one surprised call, and one angry call." "Three years ago this was science fiction," says Christian Jones, co-founder of Affective Media. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have built a similar voicemail system, called Emotive Alert, that evaluates a caller"s intonation, speed and volume. It identifies whether a call sounds urgent, informal or formal, and whether the speaker was happy or sad. Emotion-reading software might improve the way we all interact with machines. Computers at call centers may soon be able to alert employees to an irate caller who might need special handling. Scientists at Affective Media, Stanford and Toyota are developing a system for cars that responds to cues in the driver"s voice and face, perhaps turning on appropriate music if a driver seems sad. It"s another barrier emotionally adept software might help overcome.

单选题A.I'dliketomakeanappointmentMondaymorning.B.Imustfinishtypingbeforegoingtobed.C.Ihavetoworkovertimethisweekend.D.Idecidetosleepthisweekendaway.

单选题Why did holidays abroad become a common prize after the war?