填空题______ vary widely among income levels and household types.

填空题When a consumer finds that an item she or he bought is faulty or does not live up to the manufacturer's (36) for it, the first step is to present the guarantee at the store of purchase. In most cases, this action will (37) results. However, if it does not, there are various means the consumer may use to gain satisfaction. A simple and common method used by many consumers is to complain directly to the store manager. In general, the "higher up" the consumer takes his or her (38) , the faster he or she can expect it to be settled. In such a case, it is usually settled in the consumer's favor, (39) he or she has a just claim. Consumers should complain in (40) whenever possible, but if they cannot get to the place of purchase, it is (41) to phone or write the complaint in a letter. Complaining is usually most effective when it is done politely but (42) , and especially when the consumer can demonstrate what is wrong with the item in (43) If this cannot be done, (44) rather than make general statements. The store manager may advise the consumer to write to the manufacturer. If so, (45) . But if a polite complaint does not achieve the desired result, the consumer can go a step further. (46) .

填空题According to the passage, what is the main function of TV commercials?

填空题How did the early people do their counting? At first, they did all their counting with small stones. Later, they learned to use their fingers in counting. Since man has ten fingers, the number ten became the (1) of all counting in many parts of the world. In 1946 the first electronic computers went into (2) . Since its invention the computer has changed greatly, and it has more and more uses. It can (3) people from difficult measurement and computation. There are (4) computations in science and engineering. Scientists are unable to make them, but the computer can do them quickly and (5) . For instance, a spaceship cannot leave the earth and go to the moon without computers. What must the spaceship be like? When can it leave? Will it be on the right (6) ? The computer must answer all these questions. In recent years more and more people have used computers not only in production and technology, but also in everyday life, for the simple reason that they are far more (7) than man. They have much better memories and can (8) large amounts of information. No man (9) can do 500,000 sums in one second, but a computer can. In fact, computers can do many of the things we do, but faster and better. They can (10) machines in factories, work out tomorrow's weather, and even do translation work. In the future we are going to use computers for almost everything almost every day. A. control B. alive C. operation D. reproduce E. correctly F. efficient G. free H. omit I. complex J. foundation K. discipline L. store M. living N. naturally O. course

填空题All flights ______________________ (因暴风雪而取消), we decided to take the train.

填空题Because of the high cost of private country clubs, many American families join their neighbors in building a community or______.

填空题On June 11, 1960 buses replaced all rail operations.

填空题According to the passage, architects can be considered as heroes.

填空题Keep Our Seas Clean A. By the year 2050 it is estimated that the world"s population could have increased to around 12 billion. Of these, some 60 percent will live within 60 km of the sea. The agricultural and industrial activities required to support this population will increase the already significant pressures on fertile coastal areas. Death and disease caused by polluted coastal waters costs the global economy US $12.8 billion a year. Plastic waste kills up to 1 million sea birds, 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish each year. B. One significant impact of human activity is marine pollution. The most visible and familiar is oil pollution caused by tanker accidents and tank washing at sea, and in addition to the gross visible short-term impacts, severe long-term problems can also result. In the case of the Exxon Valdez which ran onto a shore in Alaska in 1989, biological impacts from the oil spill can still be identified 15 years after the event. The Prestige which sank off the Spanish coast late in 2002, resulted in huge economic losses as it polluted more than 100 beaches in France and Spain and effectively destroyed the local fishing industry. C. Despite the scale and visibility of such impacts, the total quantities of pollutants entering the sea from the long line of catastrophic oil spills appeared small compared with those of pollutants introduced directly and indirectly from other sources, including domestic sewage, industrial discharges, leakages from waste tips, urban and industrial run-off, accidents, spillages, explosions, sea dumping operations, oil production, mining, agriculture nutrients and pesticides, waste heat sources, and radioactive discharges. Land based sources are estimated to account for around 44 percent of the pollutants entering the sea and atmospheric inputs account for an estimated 33 percent. By contrast, transport on the sea accounts for 12 percent. D. The impacts of pollution vary. Nutrient pollution from sewage discharges and agriculture can result in unsightly and possibly dangerous "blooms" of algae (藻类) in coastal waters. As these blooms die and decay they use up the oxygen in the water. This has led, in some areas, to "creeping dead zones" (CDZ), where oxygen dissolved in the water falls to levels unable to sustain marine life. Industrial pollution also contributes to these dead zones. E. Radioactive (放射性的) pollution has many causes, including the normal operation of nuclear power stations, but by far the single biggest sources of man-made radioactive elements in the sea are the nuclear fuel reprocessing plants at La Hague in France and at Sellafield in the UK. Waste released from them has resulted in the widespread pollution of living marine resources over a wide area; radioactive elements traceable to reprocessing can be found in seaweeds as far away as the West Greenland Coast. F. Trace metal pollution from metal mining, production and processing industries can damage the health of marine plants and animals and render some seafoods unfit for human consumption. The contribution of human activities can be very significant: the amount of mercury introduced to the environment by industrial activities is around four times the amount released through natural processes such as weathering and erosion (腐蚀). G. The input of man-made chemicals to the oceans potentially involves an overwhelming number of different substances. 63,000 different chemicals are thought to be in use worldwide with 3,000 accounting for 90 percent of the total production amount. Each year, anywhere up to 1,000 new synthetic chemicals may be brought onto the market. Of all these chemicals some 4,500 fall into the most serious category. These are known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). They"re resistant to breakdown and have the potential to accumulate in the tissues of living organisms (all marine life), causing hormone disruption which can, in turn, cause reproductive problems, induce cancer, suppress the immune system and interfere with normal mental development in children. H. POPs can also be transported long distances in the atmosphere and deposited in cold regions. As a result, Inuit populations who live in the Arctic a long distance from the sources of these pollutants are among the most severely influenced people on the planet, since they rely on fat-rich marine food sources such as fish and seals. POPs are also thought to be responsible for some polar bear populations failing to reproduce normally. Scarily, seafoods consumed by people living in warm and mild regions are also affected by POPs. Oily fish tend to accumulate POPs in their bodies and these can be passed to human consumers. When oily fish are rendered down into fish meal and fish oils and subsequently used to feed other animals, then this too can act as a pathway to humans. Farmed fish and shellfish, dairy cattle, poultry and pigs are all fed fish meal in certain countries, and so meat and dairy products as well as farmed and wild fish can act as further sources of these chemicals to humans. I. The North and Baltic Seas also contain some of the world"s busiest shipping lanes. 200,000 ships cross the North Sea every year. Many goods transported by ships are hazardous (half the goods carried at sea can be described as dangerous) and loss of dangerous cargoes can result in damage to the marine environment. Chemical tank washings, discharge of oily wastes and wash waters are all significant sources of marine pollution. J. In addition there is always the risk of a major oil spill, a risk made worse by the fact that some of the tankers that routinely travel through still have only one body-frame or have other technical defects and crews who are poorly educated. In November 2002, the Prestige oil tanker went down off the coast of Spain with 70,000 tons of oil on board which polluted 2,890 km of coastline. A few days earlier it had been crossing the Baltic. K. Some sources of pollution have been brought under control by International legislation. Countries which signed the London Convention have agreed to stop the dumping of radioactive and industrial waste at sea. The OSPAR Convention regulates marine pollution in the North East Atlantic Region while countries which signed the Stockholm Convention have committed themselves to the phase out of a number of persistent organic pollutants. Within the European Community, the Water Framework Directive may be expected to bring further reductions in polluting Inputs, although it will be over a very long time frame. The additional benefit of the new EU REACH (Registration Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) initiative, which aims to regulate the production and use of dangerous chemicals at source, remains to be seen.

填空题Designing for sustainability: what are the challenges behind green materials? A. Learning to surf in California"s icy breakers, Todd Copeland, a design master at the Patagonia clothing company, concluded that wetsuits (潜水服) weren"t cutting it. Sure, a traditional Neoprene (氯丁橡胶) suit could keep him warm, but the suit"s material could be synthesised only from non-renewable, energy-intensive resources such as petroleum. B. In spring .2008, Copeland blogged about the need for a truly green alternative. And, later that summer, his cry found its way to Yulex, an Arizona-based company working to bring back a low-energy, low-poison recipe for rubber from guayule (银胶菊), a desert bush native to North America. Research on the plant peaked during the Second World War but was then shelved. Yulex had restarted the work around 2000 and was making hypo-allergenic (低过敏的) surgical gloves, but was seeking a new market. It saw Copeland"s post, and soon its representatives came knocking. C. Yulex"s efforts are set to pay off later this fall, when Patagonia releases a full wetsuit made from a 60:40 blend of guayule and conventional Neoprene, five years after Copeland initiated the search. "We hope to get that to 100% guayule, but it takes time to learn a new material," says Copeland, now Patagonia"s environmental product specialist. D. This lucky match between designer and material maker is, unfortunately, a rare exception. The tale of Patagonia"s eco-wetsuit offers a lesson of the larger challenge facing green materials on the path from lab to market. The process remains a complex web that few materials survive. But a recent survey of design leaders reveals that while eco-materials still face a tougher journey than their conventional peers, the process of green technology transfer "is malting progress. E. Though spotty, statistics on green materials markets are all pointing up. The building industry is one of the largest shifting towards lower-impact practices. In the US, the green construction market is worth roughly $100bn, a ten-fold rise since 2006, according to the 2013 Dodge Construction Green Outlook. As a share, green construction now accounts for 44% of total US commercial and institutional construction, up from near zero a decade ago. F. Evidence suggests that big corporations are deepening their commitment to these priorities, as well. For example, Green adoption has also been accelerating at Ford. A decade ago, engineers at the No. 2 US automaker were distrustful of the cost and performance benefits of alternatives. Today, following a storm of successful material substitutions, design engineers are required to evaluate and pick green candidates where they equal or exceed conventional materials. G. Ford"s shift didn"t come quickly. "We were kicked out of conference rooms," laughs Debbie Mielewski, technical leader for Plastics Research at Ford Motor Co, recalling her efforts in the early 2000s to pitch bio-based plastics to the car maker"s internal development engineers. "They saw only risk and additional cost," she says. But thanks to the protection of Bill Ford Jr, the company"s then CEO, Ford"s bio-plastics R&D program had the time and funding to mature new offerings to the point where today soy-based polyurethane foams (大豆聚氨酯泡沫塑料) are used in the seat cushions, backs, and headrests of all vehicles built in North America. A focus on value and performance has helped reverse early disbelief. "Our goal has always been to match the price and performance of any material we"re hoping to replace," she says. H. As its commitment to recover and re-use waste carpet materials started to take root in the 1990s, Atlanta-based Interface, a $1bn-per-year manufacturer of carpet used primarily in commercial spaces, recognised it could push this goal only as quickly as a key fibre supplier, Italy"s Aquafil, was able to develop and scale-up processes to harvest fibers from recovered carpets and to then re-melt them for use in new carpeting. "This was more of us pushing recycled materials," by Interface, "rather than a pull" from the market, says Nigel Stansfield, Interface"s vice president and chief innovations officer. "We had to overcome a perception that recycled was more costly, or performed less well." I. Interface also faced a reverse logistics (物流) challenge: it had to work with existing and new partners to learn how to capture and truck tons of carpet back to its partner plants. "To make this work, we"ve had to focus on all parts of the product"s life cycle at once," Stansfield says. At the installation phase, for example, this has meant educating flooring installers to abandon long-standing practices of gluing carpets down, which damages the material at the later recovery stage. Interface instead relies on gravity and strong gluey patches to link its carpet tile and keep carpets locked down. And at the end-of-use stage, the move has meant developing reverse logistics flows, to steer carpet waste away from landfills, and back to re-processors such as Aquafil. J. Designers are widely frustrated by a lack of consistent, reliable services that can verify green materials" virtues. The industry needs a " greenwash monitor (漂绿监控)," Patagonia"s Copeland says. There has been some movement toward this goal, with efforts including Nike"s MAKING app, Material ConneXion, and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. Green materials can fail an evaluation for many reasons. A few years ago, Patagonia became interested in bamboo-based fabrics. The cultivation of fast-growing bamboo was appealing as a sustainable raw material. But on deeper investigation, Patagonia passed on the new fabrics because the process to convert bamboo into fibres proved just as poisonous as the standard method. K. "Most clients think that sustainable design is simply a case of switching existing material for a greener option," says Chris Sherwin, head of sustainability at Seymourpowell, a London-based design advisor. "Same product, new material: that"s wrong on many grounds." Sherwin argues that it"s critical to understand that the staff from which a product is made often accounts for only a tiny fraction of the impact of the use-phase of a product"s lifetime. Hence, it"s smarter for laundry soap makers to improve the performance of their cleansers in cold water rather than focus solely on revising packaging. "We should start with more fundamental product redesign," Sherwin says. "We must start by asking, how will the consumers" needs best be satisfied, and design accordingly."

填空题Those welfare families moved to Charlotte's neighborhood, which makes situation even worse.

填空题 It is often through good dinners that one makes friends. In Japan, there are{{U}} (36) {{/U}} "Dining Groups" or "Wine Groups", formed by people of different{{U}} (37) {{/U}}of life but of more or less{{U}} (38) {{/U}}standing; having as their common object, good living and the{{U}} (39) {{/U}} of friendship. They meet weekly or{{U}} (40) {{/U}}or on the birthday of one of the members, who play host in turn. As a rule, the dinner is held in one's own home, unless for some reasons this is{{U}} (41) {{/U}}, in which case it can be held in a{{U}} (42) {{/U}}restaurant. On each occasion, the host may include a couple of guests{{U}} (43) {{/U}}to the others, Thus one makes new friends and keeps old friendship in constant repair. Sometimes, similar feasts are held for the sake of art and literature.{{U}} (44) {{/U}} As to the part that delicious food can play in smoothing negotiation, this must be a common experience of every man of affairs. {{U}}(45) {{/U}} "Will you lunch with me?" is a familiar phrase in the business world either in prefacing a successful deal or in celebrating one. {{U}}(46) {{/U}}