单选题The biggest danger facing the global airline industry is not the effects of terrorism, war, SARS and economic downturn. It is that these blows, which have helped ground three national flag carriers and force two American airlines into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, will divert attention from the inherent weaknesses of aviation, which they have worsened. As in the crisis that attended the first Gulf war, many airlines hope that traffic will soon bounce back, and a few terrible years will be followed by fuller planes, happier passengers and a return to profitability. Yet the industry"s problems are deeper—and older—than the pain of the past two years implies. As the 100 th anniversary of the first powered flight approaches in December, the industry it launched is still remarkably primitive. The car industry, created not long after the Wright Brothers made history, is now a global industry dominated by a dozen firms, at least half of which make good profits. Yet commercial aviation consists of 267 international carriers and another 500-plus domestic ones. The world"s biggest carrier, American Airlines, has barely 7% of the global market, whereas the world"s biggest carmaker, General Motors, has (with its associated firms) about a quarter of the world"s automobile market. Aviation has been incompletely deregulated, and in only two markets: America and Europe. Everywhere else deals between governments direction who flies under what roles. These aim to preserve state-owned national flag-carriers, run for prestige rather than profit. And numerous restrictions on foreign ownership make cross-border airline mergers impossible. In America, the big network carriers face barriers to exit, which have kept their route networks too large. Trade unions resisting job cuts and Congressmen opposing route closures in their territory conspire to block change. In Europe, liberalization is limited by bilateral deals that prevent, for instance, British Airways (BA) flying to America from Frankfurt or Pads, or Lufthansa offering transatlantic flights from London"s Heathrow. To use the car industry analogy, it is as if only Renaults were allowed to drive on French motorways. In airlines, the optimists are those who think that things are now so bad that the industry has no option but to evolve. Frederick Reid, president of Delta Airlines, said earlier this year that events since the 911 attacks are the equivalent of a meteor strike, changing the climate, creating a sort of nuclear winter and leading to a "compressed evolutionary cycle". So how, looking on the bright side, might the industry look after five years of accelerated development?

单选题We live in an age when everyone is a critic. "Criticism" is all over the Internet, in blogs and chat rooms, for everyone to access and add his two cents' worth on any subject, high or low. But if everyone is a critic, is that still criticism? Or are we heading toward the end of criticism? If all opinions are equally valid, there is no need for experts. Democracy works in life, but art is undemocratic. The result of this ultimately meaningless barrage is that more and more we are living in a profoundly-or shallowly-uncritical age. A critic, as T. S. Eliot famously observed, must be very intelligent. Now, can anybody assume that the invasion of cyberspace by opinion upon opinion is proof of great intelligence and constitutes informed criticism rather than uninformed artistic chaos? Of course, like any self-respecting critic, I have always encouraged my readers to think for themselves. They were to consider my positive or negative assessments, which I always tried to explain, a challenge to think along with me: here is my reasoning, follow it, then agree or disagree as you see fit. In an uncritical age, every pseudonymous chat-room chatterbox provides a snappy, self-confident judgment, without the process of arriving at it becoming clear to anyone, including the chatterer. Blogs, too, tend to be invitations to leap before a second look. Do the impassioned ramblings fed into a hungry blogosphere represent responses from anyone other than long-heads? How has it come to this? We have all been bitten by television sound bites that transmute into Internet sound bytes, proving that brevity can also be the soul of witlessness. So thoughtlessness multiplies. Do not, however, think I advocate censorship, an altogether unacceptable form of criticism. What we need in this age of rampant uncritical criticism is the simplest and hardest thing to come by.. a critical attitude. How could it be fostered? For starters, with the very thing discouraged by our print media: reading beyond the hectoring headlines and bold-type boxes embedded in reviews, providing a one-sentence summary that makes further reading unnecessary. With only slight exaggeration, we may say that words have been superseded by upward or downward pointing thumbs, self-destructively indulging a society used to instant self-gratification. Criticism is inevitably constricted by our multinational culture and by political correctness. As society grows more diverse, there are fewer and fewer universal points of reference between a critic and his or her readers. As for freedom of expression. Arthur Miller long ago complained about protests and pressures making the only safe subjects for a dramatist babies and the unemployed. My own experience is that over the years, print space for my reviews kept steadily shrinking, and the layouts themselves toadied to the whims of the graphic designer. In a jungle of oddball visuals, readers had difficulties finding my reviews. Simultaneously, our vocabulary went on a starvation diet. Where readers used to thank me for enlarging their vocabularies, more and more complaints were lodged about unwelcome trips to the dictionary, as if comparable to having to keep running to the toilet. Even my computer keeps questioning words I use, words that can be found in medium-size dictionaries. Can one give language lessons to a computer? What may be imperiled, more than criticism, is the word. I keep encountering people who think "critical" means carping or fault-finding, and nothing more. So it would seem that the critic's pen, once mightier than the sword, has been supplanted by the ax. Yet I have always maintained that the critic has three duties: to write as well as a novelist or playwright; to be a teacher, taking off from where the classroom, always prematurely, has stopped, and to be a thinker, looking beyond his specific subject at society, history, philosophy. Reduce him to a consumer guide, run his reviews on a Web site mixed in with the next-door neighbor's pontifications, and you condemn criticism to obsolescence. Still, one would like to think that the blog is not the enemy, and that readers seeking enlightenment could find it on the right blog just as in the past one went looking through diverse publications for the congenial critic. But it remains up to the readers to learn how to discriminate.

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

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单选题Questions 15-18

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单选题 Directions: In this part of the test there will be some short talks and conversations. After each one, you will be asked some questions. The talks, conversations and questions will be spoken ONLY ONCE. Now listen carefully and choose the right answer to each question you have heard and write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your ANSWER BOOKLET. Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.

单选题The prospects for finding life beyond Earth may be brightening. Today, scientists are reporting evidence for yet another potential habitat in our solar system: Saturn's moon Enceladus. Scientists mining new data from the Cassini spacecraft say they may have found evidence that Enceladus—the planet's fourth-largest moon—hosts liquid water. If the results hold up, this would bring to four the number of bodies in the solar system—including Earth—that display active volcanism. And since life as biologists know it requires liquid water and a source of energy, Enceladus would join Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Titan, as well as Mars, as possible spots beyond Earth where simple forms of life may have gained or still maintain a foothold. The discovery, however, is bittersweet for many scientists. NASA's proposed budget for fiscal 2007 calls for a 50 percent cut in its astrobiology program. Although the program is a tiny piece of the agency's overall spending plan for science, it's a significant source of money for probing fundamental questions of how and why life emerged on Earth and whether life arose elsewhere in the universe. A 50-percent cut "is almost a going-out-of-business-level cut" in a vibrant line of research that stands as one pillar supporting President Bush's vision for space exploration, says planetary scientist Sean Solomon, who heads the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Nevertheless, the research in today's issue of the journal Science is the sort of thing that continues to light a fire under the field. Its report about liquid water under the icy surface of Enceladus is a "radical conclusion," acknowledges Carolyn Porco, who leads the imaging team working with data from the Cassini orbiter. But if the team is right, "we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar-system environments" that might have rolled out the welcome mat "for living organisms," she concludes. Images released last fall show the moon ejecting vast plumes of material near its unexpectedly warm south pole. As the team pondered the evidence, they nixed several explanations, including the idea that the particles in the plumes were driven by vapor billowing out as ice reached the surface and immediately turned into a gas. The last idea standing: Liquid water was venting from reservoirs near the surface, perhaps only tens of meters below the frigid crust. This explanation also helped solve the riddle of puzzlingly high levels of oxygen atoms found in Saturn's neighborhood. Confirmation could come with additional flybys. If water—and perhaps life—is present, it wouldn't be "luxuriant," notes Jeffrey Kargel, a researcher at the University of Arizona at Tucson. It likely would face tough conditions—nasty chemicals, very low temperatures, and little energy to drive it. still, he adds, it's premature to cross the moon off the list of possible "outposts" for life beyond Earth. Yet the prospect of building on these results could be dimmer with the threat of budget cuts. The proposed reductions post several challenges, researchers say. One is the loss of important financial leverage. While money for experiments and other research related to astrobiology can come from other funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or even the National Institutes of Health, NASA's program often provides the crucial missing piece that turns demanding and sometimes dangerous fieldwork into exciting results. One of the biggest successes over the program's 10-year history has been to help revolutionize the way science is done. Answering questions about the origins of life on Earth and the prospects for life elsewhere require strong collaborations. From radio astronomers to biologists and geologists studying the evolution of Earth, groups are working together in ways they never thought of a decade ago, adds Edward Young, a geochemist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "NASA's made a lot of progress by making a relatively small investment in a way that has brought disparate experts together from the whole spectrum of physical and biological sciences. It's a wonderful lesson on how to make progress by crossing these boundaries," Dr. Solomon says. "It would be regrettable to stop that experiment. /

单选题Questions 1～5 There has been an ecological triumph in the province of Sweden where I've spent the past three weeks. The wolf and the lynx have both returned to the forests. The naturalists have been rejoicing. There's been a TV documentary. Meanwhile the local farmers and hunters have disappeared into the forests with their rifles. Jan and Lennart, the sons of the farmer at the end of the lake, were particularly aggrieved that the lynx (that's a wild cat to you townies) was killing "their" deer, and the urban bureaucrats who had decided to protect it only increased their rage. They vowed to track the animal down. "Did they kill it?" I asked one local man. "They didn't say", he replied with a hint of a wink. What does the word "rural" mean to you? Organic, perhaps. Wholesome. Gemeinschaft (or do I mean Gesellschaft?). Conservative. Marx's "rural idiocy" maybe. To me the countryside is about paranoia. It breeds independence and idiosyncrasy and other nice things but also the sort of people who wander onto Capitol Hill in order to kill some senators or declare war on the FBI for being an essentially socialist organization. For people who live in and off the countryside, there always seems to be the idea that "they"—the bureaucrats, the government, the city folk—are out to get them. What they despise almost as much as city folk themselves are the sort of things that city folk like about the countryside, footpaths, beauty spots, old buildings, rare flora and fauna, ancient sites of historical interest. To select from my experience of the past few weeks, the land that was once owned by my late grandparents contained a meadow that was famous across Sweden (well, it was once featured on the front page of the local newspaper) for its rare plants. A couple of weeks ago my cousin—an engineer and part-time farmer with a flock of four sheep and one ram—fenced the meadow off, set the sheep loose into it and within two days it duly looked like a bit of scrub in a corner of a derelict industrial estate. Incidentally, when your correspondent went to investigate this vandalism, the said ram pursued him across the field in a way that was later said to be hilarious to onlookers. Another local man carries around a special bullet in case he should ever get on the trail of a wolf. The normal bullets used for hunting deer and elk have soft tips so that they spread out on contact and cause devastating fatal wounds. But this special wolf bullet has a hard tip so that it will pass right through the animal, leaving a relatively small (though almost certainly fatal) wound. The dying wolf will then probably walk tens of miles before it dies, thus preventing "them" from identifying the slayers of this absurdly protected predator. And this happens in a province which has a wolf as its official symbol. There's more. A neighboring lake has become home to what I was informed is an exceedingly rare kind of hawk. But the local people who have spotted it have kept its presence a closely guarded secret. If they told ornithologists about it, then the next thing that would happen is that they would probably want to come into the area and start to look at the bloody thing, and once these bureaucrats and scientists get their claws into an area, who knows where it will end? Much of this is probably true of rural areas everywhere, but in Sweden it has been exacerbated by the Byzantine bureaucracy that was generated by 40 years of social democracy, a system that led both to some of the finest public services and to the situation in which the country's greatest living artist, Ingmar Bergman, under suspicion of a minor tax transgression, was publicly arrested and interrogated in a manner that might have been thought excessive by Beria. One of the fundamental Swedish rights is entitled allamansrdtt, which permits anybody to walk, pick berries or mushrooms virtually anywhere. Some local businessmen have hired Polish workers to come up to Sweden and pick mushrooms but they haven't been to our area more than once. When they emerged from this forest they found that the tyres in their bikes and cars were mysteriously flat. It's somehow a typically Swedish paradox: you have the legal right to go where you like, hut don't let that give you the idea that you can just go anywhere.

单选题Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following talk.

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

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单选题Questions 11～14

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