单选题 In general, our society is becoming one of giant enterprises directed by a bureaucratic management in which man becomes a small, well-oiled cog (齿轮) in the machinery. The oiling is done with higher wages, well-ventilated factories and piped music, and by psychologists and 'human-relations' experts; yet all this oiling does not alter the fact that man has become powerless, that he does not wholeheartedly participate in his work and that he is bored with it. In fact, the blue and the white collar workers have become economic puppets (木偶) who dance to the tune of automated machines and bureaucratic management. The worker and employee are anxious, not only because they might find themselves out of a job; they are anxious also because they are unable to acquire any real satisfaction or interest in life. They live and die without ever having confronted the fundamental realities of human existence as emotionally and intellectually independent and productive human beings. Those higher up on the social ladder are no less anxious. Their lives are no less empty than those of their subordinates. They are even more insecure in some respects. They are in a highly competitive race. To be promoted or to fall behind is not a matter of salary but even more a matter of self-respect. When they apply for their first job, they are tested for intelligence as well as for the right mixture of submissiveness and independence. From that moment on they are tested again and again by the psychologists, for whom testing is a big business, and by their superiors, who judge their behavior, sociability, capacity to get along, etc. This constant need to prove that one is as good as or better than one's fellow-competitor creates constant anxiety and stress, the very causes of unhappiness and illness. Am I suggesting that we should return to the pre-industrial mode of production or to nineteenth-century 'free enterprise' capitalism (资本主义)? Certainly not. Problems are not solved by returning to a stage which one has already outgrown. I suggest transforming our social system from a bureaucratically managed industrialism in which maximal production and consumption are ends in themselves into a humanist industrialism (工业制度) in which man and full development of his potentialities—those of love and of reason—are the aims of social arrangements. Production and consumption should serve only as means to this end, and should be prevented from ruling man.

单选题 Five Problems Financial Reform Doesn't Fix A. The legislation concerning financial reform focuses on helping regulators detect and defuse (减少……的危险性) the next crisis. But it doesn't address many of the underlying conditions that can cause problems. B. The legislation gives regulators the power to oversee shadow banks and take failing firms apart, convenes a council of superregulators to watch the megafirms that pose a risk to the full financial system, and much else. C. But the bill does more to help regulators detect the next financial crisis than to actually stop it from happening. In that way, it's like the difference between improving public health and improving medicine: The bill focuses on helping the doctors who figure out when you're sick and how to get you better rather than on the conditions (sewer systems and air quality and hygiene standards and so on) that contribute to whether you get sick in the first place. D. That is to say, many of the weaknesses and imbalances that led to the financial crisis will survive our regulatory response, and it's important to keep that in mind. So here are five we still have to watch out for:1. The Global Glut (过于求) of Savings E. 'One of the leading indicators of a financial crisis is when you have a sustained surge in money flowing into the country which makes borrowing cheaper and easier,' says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. Our crisis was no different: Between 1987 and 1999, our current account deficit—the measure of how much money is coming in versus going out—fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of gross domestic product. By 2006, it had hit 6 percent. F. The sharp rise was driven by emerging economies with lots of growth and few investment opportunities—think China—funneling their money to developed economies with less growth and lots of investment opportunities. But we've gotten out of the crisis without fixing it. China is still growing fast, exporting faster, and sending the money over to US.2. Household Debt—and Why We Need It G. The fact that money is available to borrow doesn't explain why Americans borrowed so much of it. Household debt as a percentage of GDP went from a bit less than 60 percent at the beginning of the 1990s to a bit less than 100 percent in 2006. 'This is where I come to income inequality,' says Raghuram Rajah, an economist at the University of Chicago. 'A large part of the population saw relatively stagnant incomes over the 1980s and 1990s. Credit was so welcome because it kept people who were failing behind reasonably happy. You were keeping up, even if your income wasn't.' H. Incomes, of course, are even more stagnant now that unemployment is at 9 percent. And that pain isn't being shared equally: inequality has actually risen since before the recession, as joblessness is proving sticky among the poor, but recovery has been swift for the rich. Household borrowing is still more than 90 percent of GDP, and the conditions that drove it up there are, if anything, worse.3. The 'Shadow Banking' Market I. The financial crisis started out similarly severe, but it wasn't, at first, a crisis of consumers. It was a crisis of banks. It never became a crisis of consumers because consumer deposits are insured. But large investors—pension funds, banks, corporations, and others—aren't insured. But when they hear that their collateral (附属担保品) is dropping in value, they demand their money back. And when everyone does that at once, it's like an old-fashioned bank run: The banks can't pay everyone off at once, so they unload all their assets to get capital, the assets become worthless because everyone is trying to unload them, and the banks collapse. J. 'This is an inherent problem of privately created money,' says Gary Gorton, an economist at Princeton University. 'It is vulnerable to these kinds of runs.' This year, we're bringing this shadow banking system under the control of regulators and giving them all sorts of information on it and power over it, but we're not doing anything like deposit insurance, where we simply make the deposits safe so runs become an anachronism.4. Rich Banks K. In the 1980s, the financial sector's share of total corporate profits ranged from about 10 to 20 percent. By 2004, it was about 35 percent. Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT, recalls a conversation he had with a fund manager. 'The guy said to me, 'Simon, it's so little money! You can sway senators for $10 million!?'' Johnson laughs ruefully (后悔地) . 'These guys [big investors] don't even think in millions. They think in billions.' L. What you get for that money is favors. The last financial crisis fades from memory and the public begins to focus on other things. Then the finance guys begin nudging (旅说). They hold some fundraisers for politicians, make some friends, explain how the regulations they're under are onerous and unfair. And slowly, surely, those regulations come undone. This financial crisis will stick in our minds for a while, but not forever. And after briefly dropping to less than 15 percent of corporate profits, the financial sector has rebounded to more than 30 percent. They'll have plenty of money with which to help their friends forget this whole nasty affair.5. Lax (不严格的) Regulators M. The most troubling prospect is the chance that this bill, if we'd passed it in 2000, wouldn't even have prevented this financial crisis. That's not to undersell it: It would've given regulators more information with which to predict the crisis. But they had enough information, and they ignored it. They get caught up in boom times just like everyone else. A bubble, almost by definition, affects the regulators with the power to pop it. N. In 2005, with housing prices running far, far ahead of the historical trend, Bernanke said a housing bubble was 'a pretty unlikely possibility'. In 2007, he said Fed officials 'do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy.' Alan Greenspan, looking back at the financial crisis, admitted in April that regulators 'have had a woeful record of chronic failure. History tells us they cannot identify the timing of a crisis, or anticipate exactly where it will be located or how large the losses and spillovers will be.'

单选题 Questions10-12 are based on the passage you have just heard.

单选题 Officials at the White House announced a new space policy focused on managing the increasing number of satellites that companies and governments arc launching into space. Space Policy Directive-3 lays out general guidelines for the United States to mitigate (缓解) the effects of space debris and track and manage traffic in space. This policy sets the stage for the Department of Commerce to take over the management of traffic in space. The department will make sure that newly launched satellites don't use radio frequencies that would interfere with existing satellites, and schedule when such new satellites can be launched. This only applies to American space activities, but the hope is that it will help standardize a set of norms in the dawning commercial spaceflight industry throughout the world. Space, especially the space directly around our planet, is getting more crowded as more governments and companies launch satellites. One impetus for the policy is that companies are already starting to build massive constellations (星座), comprising hundreds or thousands of satellites with many moving parts among them. With so much stuff in space, and a limited area around our planet, the government wants to reduce the chances of a collision. Two or more satellites slamming into each other could create many more out-of-control bits that would pose even more hazards to the growing collection of satellites in space. And it's not like this hasn't happened before. In 2009 an old Russian craft slammed into a communications satellite, creating a cloud of hundreds of pieces of debris and putting other hardware at risk. Journalist Sarah Scoles reports that NASA currently tracks about 24,000 objects in space, and in 2016 the Air Force had to issue 3,995,874 warnings to satellite owners alerting them to a potential nearby threat from another satellite or bit of debris. That's why this new policy also includes directions to update the current U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices, which already require any entity that launches a satellite or spacecraft to vigorously analyze the likelihood that any of their actions, from an unexpected failure or normal operations, will create more space debris. It includes accounting for any piece of debris they plan to release over 5mm that might stay in orbit for 25 years or more. It might seem surprising to think about an item staying in space for that long, but the oldest satellite still in orbit—Vanguard 1—turned 60 in 2018. Agencies and companies throughout the world are working on developing technology that would dispose of or capture space debris before it causes serious damage. But for now, the U.S. government is more focused on preventing new debris from forming than taking the trash out of orbit.

单选题 电子出版(electronic publishing)原本只在科学领域较为普遍，但如今它有了更为丰富的内涵(connotation)。电子出版包括电子书、数字报纸、数字期刊、数字图书馆等等。目前大部分的电子出版都是通过互联网实现的，但也有一小部分电子出版物并不依赖互联网进行传播。速度是电子出版一项最突出的优势，同时，由于制作这些出版物无需印刷，可以节约大量的资源。一项市场调查显示，到2015年底，世界上近一半的期刊和报纸的出版将实现数字化。

单选题 Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a short essay entitled On Carpooling. You should write at least 150 words but no more than 200 words following the outline given below. 1．目前社会上拼车现象越来越普遍 2．对于这种做法人们看法不一 3．在我看来……