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

单选题 A meager diet may give you health and long life, but it's not much fun—and it might not even be necessary. We may be able to hang on to most of that youthful vigor even if we don't start to diet until old age. Stephen Spindler and his colleagues from the University of California at Riverside have found that some of an elderly mouse's liver genes can be made to behave as they did when the mouse was young simply by limiting its food for four weeks. The genetic rejuvenation won't reverse other damage caused by time for the mouse, but could help its liver metabolize drugs or get rid of toxins. Spindler's team fed three mice a normal diet for their whole lives, and fed another three on half-rations. Three more mice were switched from the normal diet to half-feed for a month when they were 34 months old—equivalent to about 70 human years. The researchers checked the activity of 11,000 genes from the mouse livers, and found that 46 changed with age in the normally fed mice. The changes were associated with things like inflammation and free radical production—probably bad news for mouse health. In the mice that had dieted all their lives, 27 of those 46 genes continued to behave like young genes. But the most surprising finding was that the mice that only started dieting in old age also benefited from 70 percent of these gene changes. "This is the first indication that these effects kick in pretty quickly," says Huber Warner from the National Institute on Aging near Washington, D.C.. No one yet knows if calorie restriction works in people as it does in mice, but Spindler is hopeful. "There's attracting and tempting evidence out there that it will work," he says. If it does work in people, there might be good reasons for rejuvenating the liver. As we get older, our bodies are less efficient at metabolizing drugs, for example. A brief period of time of dieting, says Spindler, could be enough to make sure a drug is effective. But Spindler isn't sure the trade-off is worth it. "The mice get less disease, they live longer, but they're hungry," he says. "Even seeing what a diet does, it's still hard to go to a restaurant and say: 'I can only eat half of that'." Spindler hopes we soon won't need to diet at all. His company, Life Span Genetics in California, is looking for drugs that have the effects of calorie restriction.

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单选题A.Theygetclosetonature.B.Theyareusuallyhealthierthancitypeople.C.Theygetbetterandcheaperfarmproducts.D.Theyaremorepolitethancitypeople.

单选题The traditional two-parent family is fast giving way in the America of the 1980s to households in which one adult must juggle the often enormous demands of making a living and raising children. For many, single parenthood is synonymous with economic need. More than 3 million single-parent families live in poverty, according to The Census Bureau, and joblessness, plus cuts in public assistance, has helped drive up the number of poor children in such families by about 20 percent in Just three years. The biggest burden falls on households that are headed by single mothers. Nearly half of these families are below the poverty "as" the most compelling social fact "of the last 10 years". This deprivation is not only hard on its victims but expensive for taxpayers since single women and their offspring receives 40 to 80 percent of the benefits in various welfare programs that cost the government a total of 40 billion dollars a year. Despite cuts in benefits averaging 10 percent, rising number of eligible women are likely to keep the overall cost up, according to economist Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. Fanning the single-parent spiral are two dramatic offshoots of the sexual revolution: divorce and unwed motherhood. The divorce rate has doubled in the last 15 years, and the number of illegitimate births has more than doubled to 700,000 annually. One tenth of white children and more than one half of black children are now born out of wedlock. What's more, there is a strong tendency now for women and teenagers who have illegitimate children to keep them rather than put them up for adoption. Typical is Rufina Nera of Los Angles. When she became pregnant at 15, abortion was never mentioned in her home. Instead, her mother encouraged her to have the child, says Nera, adding: "She even gave a baby shower for me." Now, Nera shares a crowded bedroom with her 2-year-old daughter as well as her sister. She holds no hope of help from the father, although she remarked during the only time he saw the child that she was prettier than his other illegitimate baby. Even so, Nera tries to keep her attention on two goals: Moving into her own apartment and getting enough education to become a secretary or a nurse. Her first step along that path is attending Ramona High School, an "opportunity school" where she and 110 other girls study while their babies are cared for in a nursery.

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单选题The discussion in Para. 3 ("When Anne America") implies that Anne Bradstreet's garden poetry ______.

单选题The Archbishop of Canterbury"s story seemed rather extraordinary. Here was a deeply moral, responsible, successful family man whose whisky salesman father had been an alcoholic with few scruples and little sense of discipline. He forced his presumed son into midnight flits from creditors and couldn"t even be honest about his real name: Weiler. Justin Welby, it seemed, was saved by a loving grandmother, caring mother and a great education at Eton. Nurture had won. The Most Rev Justin Welby had obviously inherited few of his father"s predispositions. Only now we learn that his real father was Sir Anthony Browne, a member of the establishment and private secretary to Winston Churchill. So maybe it was all in the genes after all. The nature v nurture discussion is becoming increasingly heated. On the one hand there is the clinical psychologist Oliver James who recently published his book Not in Your Genes. He is convinced that when it comes to conditions such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, genes play little or no part, "there is just a mass of evidence that something has gone horribly wrong in the family". James is adamant that children are a product of the state of their parents" marriage, their birth order and gender, the amount of love they receive and the hopes and fears their parents project on them. No one is made bright or dim by their genes, he insists; parenting is everything. So if you have a schizophrenic child it"s all your fault. This is a depressing point of view to say the least. On the other hand there is the opinion of some geneticists. They are so determined that it is only our genes that shape our lives that they believe parents will one day have to choose their babies" attributes: not just eye colour but mental disposition. Through IVF parents can already screen for inherited diseases. Hank Greely, a Stanford professor in law and biosciences, writes in his new book The End of Sex that there will soon be a brave new world where mothers can choose an embryo based on certain genetic characteristics. That would help us to engineer genes we pass down to our descendants. This is equally worrying. It is a form of eugenics. The Francis Crick Institute says its gene-editing research has nothing to do with eugenics; and British law prohibits pregnancies from gene-edited embryos. Others, though, may not be as scrupulous. Neurobiology lecturer Adam Perkins has pondered whether there is a group of people more likely to live on welfare as a result of genetic predispositions. Perhaps as parents we will soon feel an obligation only to produce children who will be naturally thin, clever, hard-working and mentally stable. From the point of view of a mother, both the "nurture" view and the "nature" one are deeply demoralising. The assumption is that unless you give your child the right genes and bring them up perfectly, you will have failed. From a child"s viewpoint these two arguments are also devastating. Both assume that children have no control over their own fate and destroy a child"s hope that ultimately what matters is not their genetic make-up or their upbringing but what they decide to do with their life. If parents cannot help, schools must show children how to take responsibility for shaping their own future rather than allowing them to feel victimised by their history and family circumstances. Most successful people have overcome a series of genetic or environmental obstacles. David Blunkett showed you can beat both. Born blind, he was sent by the council to a boarding school at four and his father died when he was 12. He still regularly gets his face smashed when people in front of him go too fast through revolving doors but he never complains. He has been an impressive politician and a wonderful father. Oliver James will keep writing books suggesting that it is your parents who bring you up; and gene research will keep edging towards designer babies. Yet as the archbishop says, it doesn"t actually matter what he inherited from his father and there is no point in blaming his childhood. As adults we can and must choose how to shape our lives

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单选题MANKIND"S progress in developing new gizmos is often referred to as the "march of technology". That conjures up images of constant and relentless forward movement orchestrated with military precision. In reality, technological progress is rather less orderly. Some technologies do indeed improve at such a predictable pace that they obey simple formulae such as Moore"s law, which acts as a battle plan for the semiconductor industry. Other technologies proceed by painful lurches—think of third-generation mobile phones, or new versions of Microsoft Windows. There are even the occasional backward steps: you can skip over the trailers when watching a film on video, but for some reason you are not allowed to do so when watching a DVD. And there are some cases, particularly in the developing world, when technological progress takes the form of a leapfrog. Such leapfrogging involves adopting a new technology directly, and skipping over the earlier, inferior versions of it that came before. By far the best-known example is that of mobile phones in the developing world. Fixed-line networks are poor or non-existent in many developing countries, so people have leapfrogged straight to mobile phones instead. The number of mobile phones now far outstrips the number of fixed-line telephones in China, India and sub-Saharan Africa. By their very nature, mobile networks are far easier, faster and cheaper to deploy than fixed-line networks. There are other examples. Incandescent light bulbs, introduced in the late 1870s, are slowly being displaced in the developed world by more energy-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs), in applications from traffic lights to domestic lighting. LEDs could, however, have an even greater impact in parts of the developing world that lack mains power and electric lighting altogether. LEDs" greater energy efficiency makes it possible to run them from batteries charged by solar panels during the day. So there is the prospect of another leapfrog, as the rural poor skip over centralised electric grids and straight to a world of energy-efficient appliances run using local "micropower" energy sources. Other leapfrogs include the embrace by China and Brazil of open source software, and China"s plan to build a series of "eco-cities" from scratch based on new green technologies. Being behind the "bleeding edge" of technological development can sometimes be a good thing, in short. It means that early versions of a technology, which may be buggy, unreliable or otherwise inferior, can be avoided. America, for example, was the first country to adopt colour television, which explains why American television still looks so bad today: other countries came to the technology later and adopted technically superior standards. Leapfrog technologies can also spread faster, because they do not face competition from entrenched earlier systems. And leapfrogging straight to a green technology means there is no need to dispose of the old, dirty one. By the time Chinese consumers started buying fridges in large numbers, for example, refrigeration technology no longer depended on ozone-destroying CFCs. The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that it is wrong to assume that developing countries will follow the same technological course as developed nations. Having skipped fixed-line telephones, some parts of the world may well skip desktop computers in favour of portable devices, for example. Entire economies may even leapfrog from agriculture straight to high-tech industries. That is what happened in Israel, which went from citrus farming to microchips; India, similarly, is doing its best to jump straight to a high-tech service economy. Rwanda even hopes to turn itself into an African tech hub. Those who anticipate and facilitate leapfrogging can prosper as a result. Those who fail to see it coming risk being jumped over. Kodak, for example, hit by the sudden rise of digital cameras in the developed world, wrongly assumed that it would still be able to sell old-fashioned film and film cameras in China instead. But the emerging Chinese middle classes leapfrogged straight to digital cameras—and even those are now outnumbered by camera-phones.

单选题The reference to Mount Everest in Para. 9 differs from that in para. 10 in that the first reference is an example of ______.

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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 J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults, which treads on very different ground to her bestselling Harry Potter series, is set to become a publishing sensation when it hits bookshelves next week. Waterstones, the country's biggest book-chain store, revealed that the comic novel, The Casual Vacancy, has received the largest number of pre-order sales this year. This number is believed to be five figured, although online pre-orders have reportedly reached well over a million already. The RRP for the paperback is ￡20 but many outlets are reducing this considerably with Waterstones pricing it at ￡10. The secrecy, as well as the excitement, around Rowling's latest offering, has guaranteed its status as the biggest publishing event of the year. Waterstones is opening its doors an hour earlier than usual, at 8 a.m., on its official publication date next Thursday. Until then, Rowling's publisher Little, Brown has stipulated that the books should not even appear on display. Staff will come in early to put out display copies and prepare for the crowds. Jon Howells, a spokesman for Waterstones, described it as one of the first "Super Thursdays" leading up to Christmas, not least because Jamie Oliver was also publishing his book, 15-Minute Meals, on the same day. Mr. Howells said that while he anticipated a big rush at the outset, the book would, in all likelihood, not inspire the equivalent of Pottermania. "Certainly, the anticipation for J.K. Rowling's book has been great because it's the first non-Harry Potter book and it is for a purely adult audience. I think it will see a fantastic level of first day and first weekend sales and after that people will come to it more steadily." "We are treating it as a very different thing from the Harry Potter books. The way readers will approach this will be different. A lot of the readers will be curious and interested in what this book can do for them. There was a huge sense of urgency with the Harry Potter books, and people wanted to read them quickly so that they would not find out the plot through other mediums, while this is a standalone story," he said. A spokeswoman for Tesco, which will also be stocking the book, said: "If the hits on the Tesco Books blog are anything to go by, we think it could be one of our bestselling books in the run-up to Christmas." The plot of the book, which revolves around the inhabitants of a small English town, has been fiercely guarded, and newspaper reviewers have been asked to sign the kind of long and stiffly worded pre-publication confidentiality contracts that a celebrity footballer might use to protect his darkest secrets. A limited number of copies will be delivered by hand to reviewers' homes today. Rowling is due to attend her only question-and-answer session in front of a live audience in London on the day of publication. The event, at the 900-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall in the Southbank Centre, sold out within 48 hours and will also be attended by the world's media. The Southbank Centre condemned the selling of single ￡12 tickets on eBay for ￡85 each. The event, which will last just under two hours including a 30-minute Q & A with the audience, will be transmitted in a live feed on YouTube. Rowling will sign books afterwards, and audience members are limited to one copy per person. Next month she will appear at the Cheltenham Literary Festival and sign copies there. Little, Brown refused to reveal the numbers of copies that have been printed so far—but the book is expected to sell millions.

单选题 The basic story is very old indeed and familiar to most of us. The heroine, Cinderella, is treated cruelly by her stepmother and mocked by her two ugly stepsisters. And even though her father loves her, she can't tell him how unhappy she is because her stepmother has bewitched him. One day Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters are invited to a ball at the royal palace. Cinderella is told she cannot go and is understandably very unhappy. However, her fairy godmother comes to the rescue and, waving her magic wand, produces some beautiful clothes for Cinderella as well as a carriage to convey her to the ball. There, she dances with the handsome prince, who falls in love with her… Just a sweet, pretty tale? Not in the view of Ellen Macintosh, who has written extensively about fairy tales. "This story features the stock, two-dimensional characters of most fairy tales, and little character development is attempted," she says. Indeed, although her comment does make one wonder why simplicity of this sort should be out of place in a story for children. Be that as it may, Ellen's main problem is with what the story implies. "Instead of standing up to her cruel stepmother and absurd stepsisters, Cinderella just waits for a fairy godmother to appear and solve her problem. But wouldn't you want a daughter of yours to show more spirit?" The story is enduring, whatever its shortcomings, and it doesn't take much in the way of analytical skills to see its influence on a number of recent Hollywood productions, all aimed at girls aged five to fifteen. In these versions for the silver screen, the Cinderella character no longer has to clean the house and has no siblings to make her life a misery, though she persists in not showing much backbone. The character of the rich and handsome stranger, however, is retained, and in some cases really is a prince. The role of the fairy godmother is often played by coincidence or sheer luck; we live in an enlightened age when even very young children might reject the notion of fairies. The wicked stepmother may be transformed into a villain of some sort. In the majority of film versions, the heroine has a profession and is even permitted to continue working after marrying her prince — this is the twenty — first century, after all. Doesn't the success of these films indicate that the story has relevance to children even today? "Yes," admits Ellen, who sees its message as being rooted in a fundamental childhood desire for love and attention. "Most children experience a sense of inner loneliness as they are growing up and empathies with the protagonist who faces some sort of test or challenge. This can be seen in the original story of Cinderella, where the fairy godmother tells the heroine that she must learn to be gracious and confident if she is to go to the ball. She has to grow spiritually, and by maturing, she becomes attractive to the prince, thus ensuring that the ending of the story will be happy." "In the later versions, this element is missing," says Ellen, "and the theme of the story is simply that a girl's role in life is to be more beautiful than other little girls so that she can carry off the prize: the handsome prince. Is this really what we want girls to grow up believing?"

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

单选题 {{B}}Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.{{/B}}

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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. Audiences from minority ethnic groups complained about tokenism, negative stereotyping and simplistic portrayal of their communities on television in a report published yesterday. But programmes such as the comedy shows Goodness Gracious Me and Ali G and the long-running soap Coronation Street were praised as being steps in the right direction. The report, Multicultural Broadcasting: Concept and Reality, was released by the BBC, the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission and the Radio Authority. It explores attitudes towards multicultural broadcasting from the perspective of the audience and from within the television, radio and advertising industries. All those questioned from minority ethnic groups said their country of origin was not represented at all or was negatively portrayed on television. There was also a sense of insufficient coverage of events concerning their countries of origin. The perspectives of ethnic and racial minorities were not featured sufficiently on terrestrial television, according to 69% of those working in television. Of the radio sample, 45% agreed. There was concern about stereotypical portrayal of certain issues. Groups from the Asian subcontinent spoke of the way in which arranged marriages were presented on television. They felt treatment of the issue was neither accurate nor reflective of the way in which the system had changed. The issue of tokenism was also significant—some people felt characters from minority ethnic groups were included in programmes because it was expected they should be, resulting in characters who were ill-drawn and unimportant. Audiences felt broadcasters had a social duty to include authentic and fair representations of minorities as it would foster understanding of different cultures and allow children to see themselves represented positively. It was seen as important that minority groups should be included in soap operas or game shows, as they have high viewing figures. They should also be more represented as presenters in news and documentary programming. Audiences from the subcontinent said they did not want to be labelled Asian and called for their distinctive cultural identities to be acknowledged. Similarly, those within mixed-race black groups said their issues were rarely represented. Throughout the audience research was an underlying feeling that as all people paid a licence fee for the BBC, it had a greater obligation to cater to minority tastes. Younger white participants tended to find it divisive to have programmes aimed at particular groups, and thought it better to concentrate on achieving fairer representation in the mainstream. Both audience and industry groups agreed that although progress had been made in the past five years, there still needed to be better representation of minorities on screen and behind the scenes. It is apparent in the report that ethnic minority groups are still under-represented in employment. Only 32% of people in radio and 22% of those in TV agreed that numbers of people from minorities in decision-making roles had increased in the last five years. But the overwhelming feeling among those working in the advertising industry was that commercial objectives should take priority. Paul Bolt, director of the BSC, said: "The report shows where things are now and what can be done in developing future policies." Weakness in numbers ● The number of people from minority ethnic groups on air has increased. ● Only 32% of the TV industry sample thought there had been a growth in programming relevant to the groups. In radio the figure was 63%. ● Only 32% of those working in radio and 22% in television agreed the number of ethnic minority staff in decision-making roles had increased in the last five years. ● The perspectives of ethnic and racial minorities were not featured sufficiently on terrestrial TV, according to 69% of those in television. Of the radio sample, 45% agreed this was true.