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

单选题

单选题 In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences, that it is not even questioned. There are countries where the white man imposes his rule by brute force; there are countries where the black man protests by setting fire to cities and by looting and pillaging. Important people on both sides, who would in other respects appear to be reasonable men, get up and calmly argue in favor of violence-as if it were a legitimate solution, like any other. What is really frightening, what really fills you with despair, is the realization that when it comes to the crunch, we have made no actual progress at all. We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged. The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed, the suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us. The truly reasonable men who know where the solutions lie are finding it harder and harder to get a hearing. They are despised, mistrusted and even persecuted by their own kind because they advocate such apparently outrageous things as law enforcement. If half the energy that goes into violent acts were put to good use, if our efforts were directed at cleaning up the slums and ghettos, at improving living-standards and providing education and employment for all, we would have gone a long way to arriving at a solution. Our strength is sapped by having to mop up the mess that violence leaves in its wake. In a well-directed effort, it would not be impossible to fulfill the ideals of a stable social program. The benefits that can be derived from constructive solutions are everywhere apparent in the world around us. Genuine and lasting solutions are always possible, providing we work within the framework of the law. Before we can even begin to contemplate peaceful co-existence between the races, we must appreciate each other's problems. And to do this, we must learn about them., it is a simple exercise in communication, in exchanging information. "Talk, talk, talk," the advocates of violence say, "all you ever do is talk, and we are none the wiser. " It's rather like the story of the famous barrister who painstakingly explained his case to the judge. After listening to a lengthy argument the judge complained that after all this talk, he was none the wiser. "Possible, my lord," the barrister replied, "none the wiser, but surely far better informed. " Knowledge is the necessary prerequisite to wisdom, the knowledge that violence creates the evils it pretends to solve.

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.

单选题BRITAIN locks up more of its people than any other country in western Europe: 145 out of every 100,000 compared with France"s 88 (though a fraction of America"s 738). Sentences have got tougher, with longer stints in prison for pettier offences. Crime is, broadly, falling. Yet the British have less confidence in their government"s ability to crack down on violence and crime than the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish or Americans, an Ipsos-MORl poll revealed last week. For that, thank a run of bad news which has Britons reeling from headline to headline. If one were to believe the tabloids, pedophiles are rampaging through the schools and unreported foreign felons through the countryside. A string of crimes by convicts on early release culminated in a particularly sad and nasty sexual assault on a three-year-old girl, which came before the courts this month. Carefully stoked by the press, popular passions are running high against everyone involved with the administration of justice. One home secretary (the minister in charge of prisons, the police and immigration) got the boot in May. His successor, John Reid, is busily putting the boot into everyone else, lambasting judges for being soft on crime and scaring the daylights out of his department. The Tories are demanding more prisons. Meanwhile, Tony Blair was due on June 23rd to urge a new balance between the rights of offenders and those of victims in favour of the latter. Mr. Blair is right to ask whether society"s interests are best served by the status quo. The criminal justice system requires a degree of public trust that at the moment is lacking. This is a chance not for lock-"emup posturing, but for a dispassionate look at how to make the administration of justice more effective. Start with one simple fact behind most of the headlines: Britain"s prisons are bursting at the seams. At current rates of sentencing, the inspector of prisons warns, jails will be full by September. This matters: the shunting of prisoners from pillar to post by harried staff is undermining efforts to return offenders to society in a state fit to stay there. They lose touch with their families; they leave courses and drug-detox programmes; wardens they knew lose track of them. Two out of three re offend within two years of release. If politicians and judges, egged on by the press, insist on locking people up for longer, it will get worse. How to fix things? Building more prisons is the obvious answer. Labour has already added thousands of new places, and both main parties talk of adding more. But Britain"s jails always fill up, no matter how many there are. And new cells cost about ￡100,000 ($184,000) apiece. A better answer than banging more people up inside is to strengthen facilities to deal with them outside. Society is protected in the short run when offenders are locked up, and in the long run when they are reformed. Violent and dangerous criminals belong behind bars. But many others end up in prison for want of anywhere else to go. What about them? Many mentally ill criminals would be more easily reclaimed in facilities other than catch-all prisons, though prison drug programmes are in fact quite successful. So would many women prisoners, who tend to show violence only to themselves and elsewhere thrive in smaller detention centres close to home. Halfway houses are a plausible place for non-violent offenders of both sexes on short sentences or nearing the end of their time. Those in touch with their families are less likely to re-offend, and so are those who have jobs to go to when they leave. Non-custodial community sentences have yet to prove their worth; the rate of recidivism seems disappointingly close to that of people who serve prison terms. But those figures may change as the approach becomes more common and new cohorts of offenders affect the statistics. These suggestions are not new. The Home Office itself has espoused many of them, only to drag feet in their implementation or be swamped by sheer numbers. Of course there are risks in diverting offenders to less secure facilities; some will run off and make headlines. But the risk of keeping increasing numbers under lock and key, to emerge later skilled only in tougher sorts of crime, is greater. It was a Tory home secretary who said, a decade and a half ago, that "prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse". Not much has changed.

单选题Ads are everywhere. They are on our trains, they are on our planes, they are wrapped around our automobiles. They are even on the homeless. Yes, really; homeless people have been used as media space by marketers thinking outside the box; charmingly, it"s called "bumvertising". Still, despite the constant creep of commercialism there is one final frontier that has, as yet, remained blissfully ad-free: the graveyard. This isn"t to say that death doesn"t sell. On the contrary, posthumous fame is often the most lucrative. In Mark Twain"s play Is He Dead?, an artist fakes his death to increase the value of his work. As one of the characters explains: "A painter has so much more talent when he"s dead. Indeed, the deader he is, the better he is." However, death normally doesn"t sell consumer brands. Nobody wants to see ads for burgers at a crematorium. Or be reminded that the unstoppable march of time means we are all going to die. Death is not aspirational and exploiting loss for money is inappropriate. Well, perhaps it"s not quite clear to everyone that it is. Last week, McDonald"s got a lot of grief for a TV advert that seemingly exploited bereaved children to flog fish sandwiches. More than 150 people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the dead dad ad and it has now been pulled with the usual PR fauxpology. "We respect our customers and their money very much and regret implying that a fried fish fillet could replace a father"s love etc etc." McDonald"s execs can take some solace in the fact that they aren"t the only marketing minds to have inexplicably decided that invoking family tragedy would be a winning strategy. In 2015 Nationwide aired an ad featuring a drowned child during the Super Bowl. The camera cuts abruptly away to an ominously overflowing bath before reminding you that Nationwide can "make safe happen". And, hey, if safe doesn"t happen then at least you"ll get some life insurance money. Now, to be clear, I don"t think that the McDonald"s or Nationwide ads were made by Machiavellian monsters, cynically mining pain for profit. They were just bad ads created by an industry so high on its own puffery that it truly believes fast food brands have important things to say about bereavement. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a growing trend of brands engaging in griefsploitation. For instance, every time a celebrity dies, there follows a flurry of very bad tweets by companies trying to muscle their brand into the conversation. When Prince died last year, for example, Cheerios tweeted "Rest in peace" on a purple background—with a cheerio replacing the dot above the i. Fans were not impressed and Cheerios quickly deleted the tweet. But Homebase didn"t even bother making it look as if they cared about anything other than promoting themselves. Brands aren"t just leveraging celebrity deaths for product placement; national tragedies also make great content opportunities. Who could forget AT&T"s twin towers tweets? In 2013, the telecommunications company posted a tweet on 11 September that showed someone holding a phone up over the Tribute in Light memorial in New York City with the caption "Never Forget". And, after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, the food website Epicurious tweeted: "In honor of Boston......may we suggest: wholegrain cranberry scones!" Shoehorning your brand into a social media conversation about a tragedy may be tasteless but it is a fairly rudimentary form of griefsploitation. Far more insidious is the way in which brands are now using our personal data to target us at the moments when we"re feeling most vulnerable. Facebook has told advertisers it can identify when teenagers are feeling "stressed", "defeated", "overwhelmed", "anxious" and "useless", for example. It has also explicitly furnished advertisers with advice on how best to exploit—sorry, I mean "help"—people dealing with the grief of a breakup. Facebook"s research explains that heartbreak is the ideal marketing opportunity for those in the travel business: in the month after a newly single Facebook user has announced their breakup, there is an "increase of 25% more travel-related purchases". Apparently "travel therapy has replaced retail therapy": 55% of people surveyed by Facebook said that travelling after their breakup helped them move on, while only 8% of people said that shoes helped them move on. To be honest, some of these people probably just aren"t buying the right shoes. I mean, if you get boots that are made for walking, then that"s just what they"ll do. Anyway, if you break up with someone and find yourself suddenly bombarded with online ads for Virgin Holidays, this is probably why. Facebook is trying to help you heal. They care. They don"t want grief to consume you, they want you to consume your way out of grief. It"s really very sweet of them. At the very least, it"s better than a slap in the face with a wet filet of fish.

单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.

单选题 The Welsh language has always been the ultimate marker of Welsh identity, but a generation ago it looked as if Welsh would go the way of Manx once widely spoken on the isle of Man but now extinct. Government financing and central planning, however, has helped reverse the decline of Welsh. Road signs and official public documents are written in both Welsh and English, and schoolchildren are required to learn both languages. Welsh is now one of the most successful of Europe's regional languages, spoken by more than a half million of the country's three million people. The revival of the language, particularly among young people, is part of a resurgence of national identity sweeping through this small, proud nation. Last month Wales marked the second anniversary of the opening of the National Assembly, the first parliament to be convened here since 1404. The idea behind devolution was to restore the balance within the union of nations making up the United Kingdom. With most of the people and wealth, England has always had bragging rights. The partial transfer of legislative powers from Westminster, implemented by Tony Blair, was designed to give the other members of the club-Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—a bigger say and to counter centrifugal forces that seemed to threaten the very idea of the union. The Welsh showed little enthusiasm for devolution. Whereas the Scots voted overwhelmingly for a parliament, the vote for a Welsh assembly scraped through by less than one percent on a turnout of less than 25 percent. Its powers were proportionately limited. The Assembly can decide how money from Westminster or the European Union is spent. It cannot, unlike its counterpart in Edinburgh, enact laws. But now that it is here, the Welsh are growing to like their Assembly. Many people would like it to have more powers. Its importance as figurehead will grow with the opening in 2003, of a new debating chamber, one of many new buildings that are transforming Cardiff from a decaying seaport into a Baltimore-style waterfront city. Meanwhile a grant of nearly two million dollars from the European Union will tackle poverty. Wales is one of the poorest regions in Western Europe-only Spain, Portugal, and Greece have a lower standard of living. Newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about great Welsh men and women, boosting self-esteem. To familiar faces such as Dylan Thomas and Richard Burton have been added new icons such as Catherine Zeta-Jones, the movie star, and Bryn Terfel, the opera singer. Indigenous foods like salt marsh lamb are in vogue. And Wales now boasts a national airline. Awyr Cymru. Cymru, which means "land of compatriots", is the Welsh name for Wales. The red dragon, the nation's symbol since the time of King Arthur, is everywhere-on T-shirts, rugby jerseys and even cell phone covers. "Until very recent times most Welsh people had this feeling of being second-class citizens," said Dyfan Jones, an 18-year-old student. It was a warm summer night, and I was sitting on the grass with a group of young people in Llanelli, an industrial town in the south, outside the rock music venue of the National Eisteddfod, Wales's annual cultural festival. The disused factory in front of us echoed to the sounds of new Welsh bands. "There was almost a genetic tendency for lack of confidence", Dyfan continued. Equally comfortable in his Welshness as in his membership in the English-speaking, global youth culture and the new federal Europe, Dyfan, like the rest of his generation, is growing up with a sense of possibility unimaginable ten years ago. "We used to think. We can't do anything, we're only Welsh. Now I think that's changing."

单选题[此试题无题干]

单选题 {{B}}Questions 15-18{{/B}}

单选题American no longer expect public figures, whether in speech or in writing, to command the English language with skill and gift. Nor do they aspire to such command themselves. In his latest book, Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of language and Music and why we should like, care, John McWhorter, a linguist and controversialist of mixed liberal and conservative views, sees the triumph of 1960s counter-culture as responsible for the decline of formal English. But the cult of the authentic and the personal, "doing our own thing", has spelt the death of formal speech, writing, poetry and music. While even the modestly educated sought an elevated tone when they put pen to paper before the 1960s, even the most well regarded writing since then has sought to capture spoken English on the page. Equally, in poetry, the highly personal, performative genre is the only form that could claim real liveliness. In both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft. Illustrated with an entertaining array of examples from both high and low culture, the trend that Mr. McWhorter documents is unmistakable. But it is less clear, to take the question of his subtitle, why we should, like care. As a linguist, he acknowledges that all varieties of human language, including non-standard ones like Black English, can be powerfully expressive-there exists no language or dialect in the world that cannot convey complex ideas. He is not arguing, as many do, that we can no longer think straight because we do not talk proper. Russians have a deep love for their own language and carry large chunks of memorized poetry in their heads, while Italian politicians tend to elaborate speech that would seem old-fashioned to most English-speakers. Mr. McWhorter acknowledges that formal language is not strictly necessary, and proposes no radical education reforms-he is really grieving over the loss of something beautiful more than useful. We now take our English "on paper plates instead of china". A shame, perhaps, but probably an inevitable one.

单选题—How kind of you to come round, but why? —______that all is right. [A] See [B] To see [C] Seeing [D] For seeing

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

单选题

单选题Questions 23—26

单选题

单选题Senator Barbara Boxer of California announced this month she intends to move ahead with legislation designed to lower the emission of greenhouse gases that are linked by many scientists to climate change. But the approach she's taking is flawed, and the current financial crisis can help us understand why. The centerpiece of this approach is the creation of a market for trading carbon emission credits. These credits would be either distributed free of charge or auctioned to major emitters of greenhouse gases. The firms could then buy and sell permits under federally mandated emissions caps. If a company is able to cut emissions, it can sell excess credits for a profit. If it needs to emit more, it can buy permits on the market from other firms. "Cap and trade," as it is called, is advocated by several policymakers, industry leaders, and activists who want to fight global warming. But it's based on the trade of highly volatile financial instruments.- risky at best. The better approach to climate change? A direct tax placed on emissions of greenhouse gases. The tax would create a market price for carbon emissions and lead to emissions reductions or new technologies that cut greenhouse gases. This is an approach favored by many economists as the financially sensible way to go. And it is getting a closer look by some industry professionals and lawmakers. At first blush, it might seem crazy to advocate a tax increase during a major recession. But there are several virtues of a tax on carbon emissions relative to a cap-and-trade program. For starters, the country already has a mechanism in place to deal with taxes. Tax collection is something the government has abundant experience with. A carbon trading scheme, on the other hand, requires the creation of elaborate new markets, institutions, and regulations to oversee and enforce it. Another relative advantage of the tax is its flexibility. It is easier to adjust the tax to adapt to changing economic, scientific, or other circumstances. If the tax is too low to be effective, it can be raised easily. If it is too burdensome it can be relaxed temporarily. In contrast, a cap-and-trade program creates emissions permits that provide substantial economic value to firms and industries. These assets limit the program's flexibility once under way, since market actors then have an interest in maintaining the status quo to preserve the value of the assets. What's more, they can be a recipe for trouble. As my American Enterprise Institute colleagues Ken Green, Steve Hayward, and Kevin Hassett pointed out two years ago, "sudden changes in economic conditions could lead to significant price volatility in a cap-and-trade program that would be less likely under a carbon-tax regime. " Recent experience bears this out. Europe has in place a cap-and-trade program that today looks a little like the American mortgage-backed securities market--it's a total mess. The price of carbon recently fell--plummeting from over $ 30 to around $12 per ton--as European firms unloaded their permits on the market in an effort to shore up deteriorating balance sheets during the credit crunch. It is this shaky experience with cap-and-trade that might explain an unlikely advocate of a carbon tax. Earlier this year, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson pointed in a speech to the problems with Europe's cap-and-trade program--such as the program's volatility and lack of transparency--as reasons he prefers a carbon tax. That said, new taxes are a tough sell in Washington, which helps explain the current preference for a cap-and-trade scheme. Despite this, there are ways to make a carbon tax more politically appealing. The first is to insist that it be "revenue neutral. " This means that any revenues collected from the tax are used to reduce taxes elsewhere, such as payroll taxes. The advantage of this approach is that it places a burden on something that is believed by many to be undesirable (greenhouse-gas emissions) while relieving a burden on something that is desirable (work). Another selling point is that the tax can justify the removal of an assortment of burdensome and costly regulations such as CAF? standards for car. These regulations become largely redundant in an era of carbon taxes. But it may be that a carbon tax doesn't need an elaborate sales pitch today when the alternative is trading carbon permits. The nation's recent experience with Fannie Mac, Freddie Mac, and the mortgage-backed securities market should prompt Congress to think twice when a member proposes the creation of a highly politicized market for innovative financial instruments, no matter how well intentioned the program may be.