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单选题 In its everyday life, Italy is very much the man's world. However, because of the Italian's understanding of foreigners, the woman tourist is able to invade many of the male places that are prohibited to Italian women. These places include the caffe and the wine shop. In the large cities the caffe is a combination of club and office. Here, for the price of a coffee, an Italian can read all the newspapers brought to him. And he can transact business, with the waiter producing pen, ink, and stamps as needed. Or if he wants, he can sit outside under a canvas covering before the door and enjoy the sight of beautiful women passing by. The wine shop, as a rule, is a more vigorous place than the caffe, and is filled almost exclusively with men. Wandering singers, generally in groups of two or three, add to the noise of these places with their songs and music. Many of the songs are of a political character and make fun of the leading statesmen of Italy, America, England, France, and Russia. But the songs are generally showing off a spirit of mischief. And when the criticism is about America, the American tourists find themselves laughing as much as anyone else. The Italian is a master at making fun of you and making you like it. The Italian men are deep-rooted gamblers. They have been brought up to it as children, but they are cautious gamblers and never go too much in it. The national lottery used to be one of the most popular forms of gambling. But later a football stake had taken away much of the interest in the lottery. But here the important thing is that gambling, the same as drinking, seldom goes to an Italian's head and his bets are not really dangerous risks. Even at cards the Italian plays for low stakes, generally for a cup of coffee or wine. In this world of the Italian male it would be careless if the romanticism of the Italian were neglected. The Italian might well be described as the world's greatest romanticist. From any boat in Venice to any member of the government in Rome, the Italian is always aware of romance, of love and of the importance of being a good lover. On the beaches of Italy, the visitor is aware that the Italian really lives for romance. His manners, his compliments, his charm and his general way of behaving are those of a romanticist. Almost every Italian you meet is convinced that he is another Casanova. Romance is as much a part of Italy as its art and its history. Perhaps the feeling of romance that wells up in you when you come to Italy is one of the greatest things that Italy has to offer a world that is tired of war and political intrigue. It is the ideal place for a honeymoon because hotel managers and waiters make you conscious of your own love and stress it in such a way that you feel more in love in this country than in any other.

单选题Questions 6～10 If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in 2006"s World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this strange phenomenon to be even more pronounced. What might account for this strange phenomenon? Here are a few guesses:a. certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills;b. winter born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina;c. soccer mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania;d.none of the above. Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." Ericsson grew up in Sweden, and studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers. " This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever inborn differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers. Their work makes a rather startling assertion, the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers—whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming--are nearly always made, not born.

单选题Which of the following is NOT implied in the statement "Google provides the front door to the Internet."?

单选题Questions 23-26

单选题Questions 19-22

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

单选题Whichuniversitydoesthemangraduatefrom?[A]TheUniversityofAmerica.[B]GeorgianUniversity.[C]OhioUniversity.

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.

单选题 Professional language translators labor in a business that is unorganized and haphazard. Most are freelancers, contracting with book publishers, marketing companies, product document producers, or anyone else requiring language translation. While many large cities boast resources for translation, like the German cultural center Goethe Institute, corporations looking for professional translators usually hire locally, especially for the more obscure languages. The result is that language translation remains one of the few services in the globalized economy not networked in a significant way. World Point, a management-software developer, wants to change that by consolidating the language-translation business. Deploying its network of 6,000 independent translators from around the world, the company can translate a corporate Web site into potentially 75 languages and then provide software to manage the resulting multilingual site. Word Point's Passport software works like other Web-site management packages, offering webmasters a way to centrally administer Web development, such as iteration controls, HTML authoring, reporting, cookie manipulation, and a built-in database-scripting language. Where the software distinguishes itself is in its ability to support multiple languages. The multilingual-content management tool has such innovations as single-click language addition, easy localization to target languages using the company's translation service, speedy language importation, and an automatic language search engine and site map generation. "Before the Internet, translators were limited to their local translation shops," said Michael Demetrios, chief architect at World Point. "Our system is designed to facilitate collaboration. You can use someone locally, but you really don't want someone who left, say, Germany, 15 years ago and isn't current on the latest words. Especially on the Web, new words are coming into languages at a very fast rate." The translation business is set to boom, according to researchers. The market for text-based language translation is predicted to climb from US$10.4 billion in 1998 to $17.2 billion in 2003, according to a report recently released by Allied Business Intelligence, an analyst group in Oyster Bay, New York. The Internet has spurred the explosive growth of translation, according to the report, calling it the "single most significant future market" for translation. World Point, whose customers include Kodak and Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, plans to capture part of that growth by offering the largest network of independent translators. World Point pays its translators by the word. Asian languages cost more than European, and the average cost to establish a multilingual Web site usually runs from $20,000 to $1 million. The company's translators are proficient in everything from Spanish to dead languages like Old English. World Point guarantees the sites will read fluently and be culturally sensitive. World Point's software leverages economies of scale by allowing translators to work as a team, with each translator converting about 2,000 to 3,000 words a day into another language. Despite the logic of networking, translators remain wary of affiliating their services with centralized companies, according to Demetrios. "A lot of them are watching us to see how it goes," he says. If the Internet is responsible for translators finding more business at their doorsteps, computers also provide a cautionary flip side: speeding the day in which consolidation and specialization will be necessary. Automation in particular may play a role in the conversion of the translation business from mom-and-pop operators to an organized industry. While Demetrios dismisses the near-term impact of computer-translation software, the European Union reports that machine translation of documents rose from 2,000 pages in 1988 to 250,000 pages last year.

单选题Questions 23—26

单选题 Meteors are ephemeral. They will usually vanish before you have a chance to point them out to somebody else. This makes them suitable for starry-eyed lovers to wish upon, but modern technology can put shooting stars to more profitable use. Next time you see one, bear in mind that a dispatcher may be using it to help him marshal a fleet of long-distance lorries. To human eyes, a meteor is beautiful. To a radio wave, it is just another thing to bounce off, and bouncing radio waves off the sky is not new. Left to themselves radio waves travel in straight lines, which limits their range. To get them round corners, and over the horizon, they need something to bounce off. In the ionosphere—the uppermost level of the atmosphere—the sun's rays break down molecules into positively charged ions and free electrons. These can reflect (and refract) radiation. The ionosphere let Marconi and his contemporaries send radio messages over long distances. When a pebble falls from space into the atmosphere, moving at tens of kilometers a second, it gets rid of a lot of energy. Like the energy from the sun's rays, this ionizes the molecules of the atmosphere. The meteor's 10—20km path is densely packed with ions. By the 1930s, radio waves bounced off meteor trails had been used by scientists to determine the speed, height and direction of meteors. The obvious disadvantage of meteors—the fact that they are so transient—might suggest that bouncing radio waves off their trails would remain the preserve of scientists. In overall quantity, though, meteors bid fair to make up what they lack in constancy. On an average day there are a million reasonable-sized ones (one gram), 400 million smaller ones (one-hundredth of a gram), and 160 billion even tinier ones (one ten-thousandth of a gram). Meteors also have advantage. The greater density of ions in a meteor trail makes it less susceptible to the many things which perturb the ionosphere, and hence the quality of radio signals that bounce off it—such as time of day, weather conditions, sun spots or indeed intrusive meteors. This immunity from "noise" matters to people who want to send digital data. Radio hams may enjoy the tribulations of chit-chat through adversity and static, but such a noisy medium is not good for transmitting error-free sequences of 0s and 1s. That is why meteor-burst communication (MBC) comes into its own when small amounts of data need to be gathered from many places fairly quickly. A system under construction to monitor the flow of the Nile provides an example. A master transmitter sends a radio "probe" into the sky in roughly the direction of the target. When a conveniently aligned meteor materializes, the probe bounces off it and reaches the receiver. When the receiver hears its master's voice it responds along the same path, spurting out data about the river's recent behavior. The master station acknowledges receipt, gives any further instructions and signs off. It then directs its probe towards the next of the 250 outstations. Depending on the system's sensitivity, the wait between suitably aligned meteors varies between four seconds and ten minutes. The bursts of communication between master and out-stations may take as little as tenth of a second. It must be completed in the second it takes for the meteor's trail to dissipate. In America, Meteor Communications of Kent, Washington, is the biggest and oldest of the MBC companies. It has provided meteor-burst equipment for 14 years. Its devices have been planted along the Chinese-Russian border to send short encoded messages back to Beijing. Other systems in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, South Africa and Europe have been set up to monitor a variety of things, solar radiation, tides, water supplies, motorway fog, snow conditions and the like. The military applications are clear, remote unmanned stations could sense approaching enemy ships, aircraft, or troops and warn headquarters. The American military's 25-year interest in MBC is also fueled by its survivability in time of war. Meteors, unlike satellites, cannot be jammed or knocked down. Indeed, knock down a lot of satellites and you will, briefly, increase the number of meteors. Advances in electronics, allowing systems to respond faster, mean that MBC is no longer limited to communication with fixed out-stations. Transtrack of Marion, Massachusetts, was granted the first American commercial business radio license for MBC in 1988. It uses MBC to keep track of lorries that crisscross the country, often far from populated areas. Anyone who wants continuous transmission, not bursts, or wants to send a lot of data, is better advised to stick with satellites, cables, fiber-optics or conventional radio. But MBC is cheap to buy and run, and provides reliable long-range communications. Interest has grown recently, and there is plenty of scope for making the equipment faster and smaller.

单选题In writing the last paragraph, the author ______.

单选题{{B}}Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.{{/B}}

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单选题 Every generation has its emblematic boy's toy. Once upon a time there was the golf cart: a little toy car specifically designed for middle-aged men too rich to care about looking ridiculous. Later came the beach buggy, a briefly fashionable, wildly impractical, single-terrain vehicle. One might include the motorcycle or the snowmobile on this list, were they not, in certain contexts, quite useful, but there is no doubt which pointless recreational vehicle has captured the imagination of the landed, middle-aged celebrity: it's the quad bike. What is it about this squat, ungainly, easy-to-flip machine that celebrities love so much? As recreational vehicles go, the quad bike is hardly sophisticated. They are to the countryside what the jet-ski is to Lake Windermere. "There's nothing cool about a quad", says Simon Tiffin, editor of a well-known magazine. "It's a strange thing to want to hare round beautiful bits of the country in a petrol-guzzling machine." But celebrities love quad bikes. Musicians, comedians, DJs, actors and sportsmen have all been photographed aboard quads. "They're the latest rich person's toy", says Tiffin. "Spoilt children get them for Christmas." Provided you~ ye got a large estate to go with it, however, the quad bike can remain a secret indulgence. You can go out and tear up your own piece of countryside without anyone knowing you're doing it. The quad bike's nonsensical name—"quad" means four, but "bike" is an abbreviation of "bicycle", which means two—that comes to six—hints at its odd history. Originally the ATV, or all-terrain vehicle, as quads are sometimes known, was developed in Japan as a three-wheeled farm vehicle, an inexpensive mini-tractor that could go just about anywhere. In the 1980s the more stable four-wheeled quad was officially introduced—enthusiasts had been converting their trikes for some time—again primarily for farming, but its recreational appeal soon became apparent. At the same time a market for racing models was developing. Paul Anderson, a former British quad racing champion, says the quad's recreational appeal lies in its potential to deliver a safe thrill. It's a mix between a motorbike and driving a car; when you turn a corner, you've got to lean into the corner, and then if the ground's greasy, the rear end slides out, he says. "Plus they're much easier to ride than a two-wheeled motorcycle." The quad bike, in short, provides middle-aged excitement for men who think a Harley might be a bit dangerous. Anderson is keen to point out that quad bikes are, in his experience, much safer than motorcycles. "With quad racing it's very rare that we see anybody having an accident and getting injured," he says. "In the right hands, personally, I think a quad bike is a very safe recreational vehicle", he adds. Outside of racing, quad bikes are growing in popularity and injuries have trebled in the last five years. Although retailers offer would-be purchasers basic safety instructions and recommend that riders wear gloves, helmets, goggles, boots and elbow pads, there is no licence required to drive a quad bike and few ways to encourage people to ride them wisely. Employers are required to provide training to workers who use quad bikes, but there is nothing to stop other buyers hurting themselves. For the rest of the world, quad bikes are here to stay. They feature heavily in the programmes of holiday activity centres, they have all but replaced the tractor as the all-purpose agricultural workhorse and now police constables ride them while patrolling the Merseyside coastline. It has more or less usurped the beach buggy, the dirt bike and the snowmobile, anywhere they can go the quad bike can. They even race them on ice. You can't drive round Lake Windermere on one, or at least nobody's tried it yet. Just wait.

单选题Which of the following best explains the sentence "Increasingly, size is a matter of vanity not of measurement" in Paragraph 2?

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单选题 {{B}}Questions 11-14{{/B}}