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. Answer all the questions following each passage on the basis of what is stated or implied in that passage and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Questions 1～5 It was a day that Michael Eisner would undoubtedly like to forget. Sitting in a Los Angeles witness box for four hours last week, the usually unflappable chairman of the Walt Disney Co. struggled to maintain his composure. Eisner's protēgē turned nemesis. Jeffrey Katzenberg, his former employee, was seeking $ 500 million in his breach-of-contract suit against Disney, and Eisner was trying to defend his, and his company's integrity. At one point Eisner became flustered when Katzenberg's attorney, Bertram Fields, asked if he recalled telling his biographer, Tony Schwartz, "I think I hate the little midget." Later Eisner recalled that the same day, he had received a fax from Katzenberg meant for Fields, thanking the lawyer for "managing" a magazine story that praised Katzenberg at Eisner's expense: "I said to Schwartz, 'Screw that. If he is going to play this disingenuous game, I simply was not going to pay him his money.'" Last week's revelations were the latest twist in a dispute that has entertained Hollywood and tarnished Disney's corporate image. The dash began five years ago, when Katzenberg quit Disney after a 10-year reign as studio chief, during which he oversaw production of such animated blockbusters as The Lion King. Disney's attorneys said that Katzenberg forfeited his bonus—2 percent of profits in perpetuity from all Disney movies, TV shows and stage productions from 1984 to 1994, as well as their sequels and tie-ins—when he left. The company ultimately paid Katzenberg a partial settlement of nearly $ 117 million, sources say. But talks broke down over how much Disney owed, and the dispute landed in court. Industry insiders never expected that Disney would push it this far. The last Hollywood accounting dispute that aired in public was Art Buchwalds's lawsuit against Paramount for profits he claimed to be owed from the 1988 Eddie Murphy hit Coming to America. Paramount chose to fight Buchwald in court—only to wind up paying him $1 million after embarrassing revelations about its business practices. After that, studios made a practice of quietly settling such claims. But Disney under Eisner would rather fight than settle. And he and Katzenberg are both proud, combative types whose business disagreement deepened into personal animus. So far, Disney's image—as well as Eisner's—has taken a beating. In his testimony last week Eisner repeatedly responded to questions by saying "I don't recall" or "I don't know". Katzenberg, by contrast, offered a stack of notes and memos that appeared to bolster his claim. (The Disney executive who negotiated Katzenberg's deal, Frank Wells, died in a helicopter crash five years ago. ) The trial has also offered a devastating glimpse into the Magic Kingdom's business dealings. Internal documents detail sensitive Disney financial information. One Hollywood lawyer calls a memo sent to Katzenberg from a former Disney top accountant "a road map to riches" for writers, directors and producers eager to press cases against Disney. The company declined requests to comment on the case. The next phase of the trial could be even more embarrassing. As Katzenberg's profit participation is calculated, Eisner will have to argue that his animated treasures are far less valuable than Katzenberg claims. No matter how the judge rules, Disney will look like a loser.

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单选题 Questions 16～20 The miserable fate of Enron's employees will be a landmark in business history, one of those awful events that everyone agrees must never be allowed to happen again. This urge is understandable and noble: thousands have lost virtually all their retirement savings with the demise of Enron stock. But making sure it never happens again may not be possible, because the sudden impoverishment of those Enron workers represents something even larger than it seems. It's the latest turn in the unwinding of one of the most audacious promise of the 20th century. The promise was assured economic security—even comfort—for essentially everyone in the developed world. With the explosion of wealth, that began in the 19th century it became possible to think about a possibility no one had dared to dream before. The fear at the center of daily living since caveman days—lack of food, warmth, and shelter—would at last lose its power to terrify. That remarkable promise became reality in many ways. Governments created welfare systems for anyone in need and separate programs for the elderly (Social Security in the U. S.). Labor unions promised not only better pay for workers but also pensions for retirees. Giant corporations came into being and offered the possibility—in some cases the promise—of lifetime employment plus guaranteed pensions. The cumulative effect was a fundamental change in how millions of people approached life itself, a reversal of attitude that most rank as one of the largest in human history. For millennia the average person's stance toward providing for himself had been. Ultimately I'm on my own. Now it became, ultimately I'll be taken care of. The early hints that this promise might be broken on a large scale came in the 1980s. U.S. business had become uncompetitive globally and began restructuring massively, with huge layoffs. The trend accelerated in the 1990s as the bastions of corporate welfare faced reality. IBM ended it's no-layoff policy. AT ＆ T fired thousands, many of whom found such a thing simply incomprehensible, and a few of whom killed themselves. The other supposed guarantors of our economic security were also in decline. Labor-union membership and power fell to their lowest levels in decades. President Clinton signed a historic bill scaling back welfare. Americans realized that Social Security won't provide social security for any of us. A less visible but equally significant trend affected pensions. To make costs easier to control, companies moved away from defined-benefit pension plans, which obligate them to pay out specified amounts years in the future, to defined contribution plans, which specify only how much goes into the play today. The most common type of defined-contribution plan is the 401(k). The significance of the 401(k) is that it puts most of the responsibility for a person's economic fate back on the employee. Within limits the employee must decide how much goes into the plan each year and how it gets invested—the two factors that will determine how much it's worth when the employee retires. Which brings us back to Enron? Those billions of dollars in vaporized retirement savings went in employees' 401(k) accounts. That is, the employees chose how much money to put into those accounts and then chose how to invest it. Enron matched a certain proportion of each employees 401 (k) contribution with company stock, so everyone was going to end up with some Enron in his or her portfolio; but that could be regarded as a freebie, since nothing compels a company to match employee contributions at all. At least two special features complicate the Enron case. First, some shareholders charge top management with illegally covering up the company's problems, prompting investors to hang on when they should have sold. Second, Enron's 401(k) accounts were locked while the company changed plan administrators in October, when the stock was falling, so employees could not have closed their accounts if they wanted to. But by far the largest cause of this human tragedy is that thousands of employees were heavily overweighed in Enron stock. Many had placed 100% of their 401(k) assets in the stock rather than in the 18 other investment options they were offered. Of course that wasn't prudent, but it's what some of them did. The Enron employees' retirement disaster is part of the larger trend away from guaranteed economic security. That's why preventing such a thing from ever happening again may be impossible. The huge attitudinal shift to I'll-be-taken-care-of took at least a generation. The shift back may take just as long. It won't be complete until a new generation of employees see assured economic comfort as a 20th century quirk, and understand not just intellectually but in their bones that, like most people in most times and places, they're on their own.

单选题Questions 11-15 Recent research has claimed that an excess of positive ions in the air can have an ill effect on people"s physical or psychological health. What are positive ions? Well, the air is full of ions, electrically charged particles, and generally there is a rough balance between the positive and the negative charged. But sometimes this balance becomes disturbed and a larger proportion of positive ions are found. This happens naturally before thunderstorm, earthquakes when winds such as the Mistral, Hamsin or Sharav are blowing in certain countries. Or it can be caused by a build-up of static electricity indoors from carpets or clothing made of man-made fibres, or from TV sets, duplicators or computer display screens. When a large number of positive ions are present in the air many people experience unpleasant effects such as headaches, fatigue, irritability, and some particularly sensitive people suffer nausea or even mental disturbance. Animals are also affected, particularly before earthquakes, snakes have been observed to come out of hibernation, rats to flee from their burrows, dogs howl and cats jump about unaccountably. This has led the U. S. Geographical Survey to fund a network of volunteers to watch animals in an effort to foresee such disasters before they hit vulnerable areas such as California. Conversely, when large numbers of negative ions are present, then people have a feeling of well-being. Natural conditions that produce these large amounts are near the sea, close to waterfalls or fountains, or in any place where water is sprayed, or forms a spray. This probably accounts for the beneficial effect of a holiday by the sea, or in the mountains with tumbling streams or waterfalls. To increase the supply of negative ions indoors, some scientists recommend the use of ionisers: small portable machines, which generate negative ions. They claim that ionisers not only clean and refresh the air but also improve the health of people sensitive to excess positive ions. Of course, there are the detractors, other scientists, who dismiss such claims and are skeptical about negative/ positive ion research. Therefore people can only make up their own minds by observing the effects on themselves, or on others, of a negative rich or poor environment. After all it is debatable whether depending on seismic readings to anticipate earthquakes is more effective than watching the cat.

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

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 BQuestions 27-30/B

单选题For computer-savvy kids, sites like YouTube are just another means of communication. The Internet is organic to their lives. They"ve used it forever, they get all their info on it, and it feels like a very friendly medium. Yet easy access—and the illusion of instant intimacy that it creates—is what generates one of the downsides of online communities. "Instead of going to school and making friends by talking to someone," says Roni Cohen-Sandier, author of Stressed-Out Girls , "kids swap MySpace profiles and amass as many "friends" as they can as a way of assuring themselves and the world that they"re popular." You, like Paris Hilton, are now famous for being famous, albeit on a much smaller scale. The inherent desire for attention gets pushed to the max when options for exposure are so easily available—and so far-reaching. "At one time you"d have to stand up on the cafeteria table to make a scene," says Halpern. "Now you just click a mouse." For kids who believe that the achievement bar has been raised too high, an easy alternative to being a winner is to aim for notoriety. Kids who didn"t make the team, earn an A, or score a lead in the play can instead get their share of accolades by being bad. The payoff is real: Cheerleaders and jocks who used to ignore you now stop to ask, "Was that your video I saw?" Even embarrassing another person is a way to get yourself noticed. "A key component of humiliating others—looking powerful in front of someone you want to impress—has gotten infinitely easier," says Ron Zodkevitch, MD, a member of Family Circle"s Health Advisory Board. "You no longer have to confront the other person face-to-face to do it." Teens have always been thrill-seekers, hut now their risk-taking is egged on by endless new videos and blogs of peers doing foolish or dangerous things. The sheer number of these peer insanities makes those activities seem normal and okay to kids. Typical kid-think can go like this: I see online brag photos of my friend drunk at a party. So next weekend I have to top that. Our society"s obsession with 24—7 celebrity coverage pushes the notion that living your life in full view of others is a good idea. "If celebrities, who seem to be most kids" role models nowadays, don"t seem to care about privacy, why should they?" asks Michele Borba, PhD, author of 12 Simple Secrets Moms Know. Interestingly, the relaxed feelings about privacy seem to go hand in hand with a new toughness. Asked whether critical comments about photos and videos posted online would be worrisome, 14-year-old Kendall Toole of Santa Clarita, California, responds, "People are entitled to their opinion. If you don"t want to hear what they think, you can just disable their comments."

单选题 {{B}}Questions 11-14{{/B}}

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单选题Civil-liberties advocates reeling from the recent revelations on surveillance had something else to worry about last week: the privacy of the billions of search queries made on sites like Google, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft. As part of a long-running court case, the government has asked those companies to turn over information on its users' search behavior. All but Google have handed over data, and now the Department of Justice has moved to compel the search giant to turn over the goods. What makes this case different is that the intended use of the information is not related to national security, but the government's continuing attempt to police Internet pornography. In 1998, Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), but courts have blocked its implementation due to First Amendment concerns. In its appeal, the DOJ wants to prove how easy it is to inadvertently stumble upon porn. In order to conduct a controlled experiment—to be performed by a UC Berkeley professor of statistics—the DOJ wants to use a large sample of actual search terms from the different search engines. It would then use those terms to do its own searches, employing the different kinds of filters each search engine offers, in an attempt to quantify how often "material that is harmful to minors" might appear. Google contends that since it is not a party to the case, the government has not right to demand its proprietary information to perform its test. "We intend to resist their motion vigorously," said Google attorney Nicole Wong. DOJ spokesperson Charles Miller says that the government is requesting only the actual search terms, and not anything that would link the queries to those who made them. (The DOJ is also demanding a list of a million Web sites that Google indexes to determine the degree to which objectionable sites are searched.) Originally, the government asked for a treasure trove of all searches made in June and July 2005 ; the request has been scaled back to one week's worth of search queries. One oddity about the DOJ's strategy is that the experiment could conceivably sink its own case. If the built-in filters that each search engine provides are effective in blocking porn sites, the government will have wound up proving what the opposition has said all along—you don't need to suppress speech to protect minors on the Net. "We think that our filtering technology does a good job protecting minors from inadvertently seeing adult content," says Ramez Naam, group program manager of MSN Search. Though the government intends to use these data specifically for its COPA-related test, it's possible that the information could lead to further investigations and, perhaps, subpoenas to find out who was doing the searching. What if certain search terms indicated that people were contemplating terrorist actions or other criminal activities? Says the DOJ's Miller, "I'm assuming that if something raised alarms, we would hand it over to the proper [authorities]." Privacy advocates fear that if the government request is upheld, it will open the door to further government examination of search behavior. One solution would be for Google to stop storing the information, but the company hopes to eventually use the personal information of consenting customers to improve search performance. "Search is a window into people's personalities," says Kurt Opsahl, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. "They should be able to take advantage of the Internet without worrying about Big Brother looking over their shoulders. /

单选题Which of the following is LEAST likely to be a statement of pro-oil commentators?

单选题Questions 1-5 Feminist sociolinguists, over the course of the last few decades, have conducted studies that they believe support the conclusion that women are routinely discriminated against in English- speaking society. They point to the words used to describe women, as well as the words used to describe society as a whole, as indications that the English language and therefore the English- speaking culture, is slanted towards the advantage of males. The words used to describe women are used as an instrument by feminist sociolinguists to denote an inherent sexism in the English language. Word pairs such as master and mistress and sir and madam, they claim, epitomize such sexism. All of the words in question once held positive connotations but, while the masculine forms have retained their respectable associations, the feminine forms have undergone pejoration and now imply sexual promiscuity and other negative characteristics. Feminist researchers assume that such pejoration indicate that the status of women in English-speaking society is relatively low. These researchers also find fault with the use of masculine words to describe unisex entities. For example, they feel that there is nothing inherently manly about mankind, the best man for the job, or the common man. Similarly, the use of such constructions as the "the average student is worried about his grades" indicate to these researchers an inherent sexism in English that is reflective of the cultures in which they are produced. Carolyn Jacobson, author of Non-sexist Language has proposed a solution to this conundrum. She advocates the elimination of all sexed words in favor of gender-neutral terms. No longer should we refer to actors and actresses or waiters and waitresses, as such dichotomies allow for the possibility of negative connotations being associated with the feminine designation. Likewise, she believes that phrases such as mankind should give way to human kind and that the use of the masculine pronoun as the default should be abandoned in favor of neutral constructions. Thus, when sexism is eliminated from the English language, the culture will be more amenable to the deliverance of women as well.

单选题In the context of the passage, the statement "I am the master of my body. I am the first and the last of my nation subject only to the great spirit." (Para. 6) implies that the person being quoted ______.

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单选题 Question 23-26

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