单选题Questions 11-14

单选题In even the bleakest climate change scenarios for the end of this century, science has offered hope that global warming would eventually slow down. But a new study published Monday snuffs out such hope, projecting temperatures that rise with carbon emissions until the last drops of oil and lumps of coal are used up. Global temperatures will increase on average by 8℃ (14.4℉) over pre-industrial levels by 2300 if aI1 of Earth"s fossil fuel resources are burned, adding five trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere, according to the research by Canadian scientists published in Nature Climate Change. In the Arctic, average temperatures would rise by 17℃ (30.6℉). Those conclusions are several degrees warmer than previous studies have projected. If these temperatures do become reality, greenhouse gases would transform Earth into a place where food is scarce, parts of the world are uninhabitable for humans, and many species of animals and plants are wiped out, experts say. "It would be as unrecognizable to us as a fully glaciated world," says Myles Allen, head of a climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Allen was not involved in the new study, but his research has focused on carbon"s cumulative impacts on climate. Noting that it took less warming, 6℃ (10.8℉), to lift the world out of the Ice Age, Allen said, "That"s the profundity of the change we"re talking about." The 8-degree rise in global temperatures would blast past the 2℃ (3.8℉) limit that nations agreed upon last year in the Paris talks. It also would heat the world to a level approaching that of the early Eocene Period, 52 million to 56 million years ago, when palm trees grew as far north as Alaska? and crocodiles swam in the Arctic. Mammals survived Eocene temperatures; this is when early primates appeared. Some horses, however, shrank to the size of house cats, adjusting through evolution to a diet altered either by heat or carbon. Today"s organisms and ecosystems may not be able to adapt to warming over the next 200 to 300 years—an instant on the geological time scale, says Scott Wing, the Smithsonian Institution"s curator of fossil plants. Also, Wing notes that when the Eocene heat began, the Earth"s poles weren"t covered with ice as they are today. "In the future, warming will melt ice caps, which will expose bare ground, increase heat absorption at high latitudes, and cause more warming," Wing says. The study predicts that precipitation would quadruple in the tropical Pacific, while it would be reduced by up to third in the Americas and a factor of two over parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and the Amazon. Allen says not only could tropical rain forest systems collapse, but drought in southern Europe and the United States would be "completely catastrophic for agriculture." Wealthy nations might maintain food supply, but not places like southern Africa. "A lot of people would have to leave, or a lot of people would die," Allen says.

单选题Directions: Directions: In this part of the test, you will hear several short statements. These statements will be spoken ONLY ONCE, and you will not find them written on the paper ; so you must listen carefully. When you hear a statement, read the answer choices and decide which one is closest in meaning to the statement you have heard. Then write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET.

单选题

单选题

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

单选题

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}}

单选题

单选题

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./

单选题

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