单选题. Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.1.

单选题. When I re-entered the full-time workforce a few years ago after a decade of solitary self-employment, there was one thing I was looking forward to the most: the opportunity to have work friends once again. It wasn't until I entered the corporate world that I realized, for me at least, being friends with colleagues didn't emerge as a priority at all. This is surprising when you consider the prevailing emphasis by scholars and trainers and managers on the importance of cultivating close interpersonal relationships at work. So much research has explored the way in which collegial (同事的) ties can help overcome a range of workplace issues affecting productivity and the quality of work output such as team-based conflict, jealousy, undermining, anger, and more. Perhaps my expectations of lunches, water-cooler gossip and caring, deep-and-meaningful conversations were a legacy of the last time I was in that kind of office environment. Whereas now, as I near the end of my fourth decade, I realize work can be fully functional and entirely fulfilling without needing to be best mates with the people sitting next to you. In an academic analysis just published in the profoundly-respected Journal of Management, researchers have looked at the concept of "indifferent relationships". It's a simple term that encapsulates (概括) the fact that relationships at work can reasonably be non-intimate, inconsequential, unimportant and even, dare I say it, disposable or substitutable. Indifferent relationships are neither positive nor negative. The limited research conducted thus far indicates they're especially dominant among those who value independence over cooperation, and harmony over confrontation. Indifference is also the preferred option among those who are socially lazy. Maintaining relationships over the long term takes effort. For some of us, too much effort. As noted above, indifferent relationships may not always be the most helpful approach in resolving some of the issues that pop up at work. But there are nonetheless several empirically proven benefits. One of those is efficiency. Less time chatting and socializing means more time working and churning (产出). The other is self-esteem. As human beings, we're primed to compare ourselves to each other in what is an anxiety-inducing phenomenon. Apparently, we look down on acquaintances more so than friends. Since the former is most common among those inclined towards indifferent relationships, their predominance can bolster individuals' sense of self-worth. Ego aside, a third advantage is that the emotional neutrality of indifferent relationships has been found to enhance critical evaluation, to strengthen one's focus on task resolution, and to gain greater access to valuable information. None of that might be as fun as after-work socializing but, hey, I'll take it anyway.1. What did the author realize when he re-entered the corporate world?______

单选题 Forget the widely unloved redesign

单选题Is There Anybody out There?AThis is the biggest question in the universe: are we alone? Philosophers have debated the ques-tion for millennium.When 16th-century Italian astronomer and Dominican friar

单选题. At the heart of the debate over illegal immigration lies one key question: are immigrants good or bad for the economy? The American public overwhelmingly thinks they're bad. Yet the consensus among most economists is that immigration, both legal and illegal, provides a small net boost to the economy. Immigrants provide cheap labor, lower the prices of everything from farm produce to new homes, and leave consumers with a little more money in their pockets. So why is there such a discrepancy between the perception of immigrants' impact on the economy and the reality? There are a number of familiar theories. Some argue that people are anxious and feel threatened by an inflow of new workers. Others highlight the strain that undocumented immigrants place on public services, like schools, hospitals, and jails. Still others emphasize the role of race, arguing that foreigners add to the nation's fears and insecurities. There's some truth to all these explanations, but they aren't quite sufficient. To get a better understanding of what's going on, consider the way immigration's impact is felt. Though its overall effect may be positive, its costs and benefits are distributed unevenly. David Card, an economist at UC Berkeley, notes that the ones who profit most directly from immigrants' low-cost labor are businesses and employers—meatpacking plants in Nebraska, for instance, or agricultural businesses in California. Granted, these producers' savings probably translate into lower prices at the grocery store, but how many consumers make that mental connection at the checkout counter? As for the drawbacks of illegal immigration, these, too, are concentrated. Native low-skilled workers suffer most from the competition of foreign labor. According to a study by George Borjas, a Harvard economist, immigration reduced the wages of American high-school dropouts by 9% between 1980-2000. Among high-skilled, better-educated employees, however, opposition was strongest in states with both high numbers of immigrants and relatively generous social services. What worried them most, in other words, was the fiscal (财政的) burden of immigration. That conclusion was reinforced by another finding: that their opposition appeared to soften when that fiscal burden decreased, as occurred with welfare reform in the 1990s, which curbed immigrants' access to certain benefits. The irony is that for all the overexcited debate, the net effect of immigration is minimal. Even for those most acutely affected—say, low-skilled workers, or California residents—the impact isn't all that dramatic. "The unpleasant voices have tended to dominate our perceptions, " says Daniel Tichenor, a political science professor at the University of Oregon. "But when all those factors are put together and the economists calculate the numbers, it ends up being a net positive, but a small one." Too bad most people don't, realize it.1. What can we learn from the first paragraph? ______

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 What is the place of art in a culture of inattention? Recent visitors to the Louvre report that tourists can now spend only a minute in front of the Mona Lisa before being asked to move on.

单选题. University of York biologist Peter Mayhew recently found that global warming might actually increase the number of species on the planet, contrary to a previous report that higher temperatures meant fewer life forms—a report that was his own. In Mayhew's initial 2008 study, low biodiversity among marine invertebrates (无脊椎动物) appeared to coincide with warmer temperatures on Earth over the last 520 million years. But Mayhew and his colleagues decided to reexamine their hypothesis, this time using data that were "a fairer sample of the history of life". With this new collection of material, they found a complete reversal of the relationship between species richness and temperature from what their previous paper argued: The number of different groups present in the fossil record was higher, rather than lower, during "greenhouse phases". Their previous findings rested on an assumption that fossil records can be taken to represent biodiversity changes throughout history. This isn't necessarily the case, because there are certain periods with higher-quality fossil samples, and some that are much more difficult to sample well. Aware of this bias, Mayhew's team used data that standardized the number of fossils examined throughout history and accounted for other variables like sea level changes that might influence biodiversity in their new study to see if their old results would hold up. Two years later, the results did not. But then why doesn't life increasingly emerge on Earth as our temperatures get warmer? While the switch may prompt some to assert that climate change is not hazardous to living creatures, Mayhew explained that the timescales in his team's study are huge—over 500 million years—and therefore inappropriate for the shorter periods that we might look at as humans concerned about global warming. Many global warming concerns are focused on the next century, he said—and the lifetime of a species is typically one to 10 million years. "I do worry that these findings will be used by the climate skeptic community to say 'Look, climate warming is fine'," he said. Not to mention the numerous other things we seem to do to create a storm of threats to biodiversity—think of what habitat (栖息地) destruction, overfishing, and pollution can do for a species' viability (生存能力). Those things, Mayhew explained, give the organisms a far greater challenge in coping with climate change than they would have had in the absence of humans. "If we were to relax all these pressures on biodiversity and allow the world to recover over millions of years in a warmer climate, then my prediction is it would be an improvement in biodiversity," he said. So it looks like we need to curb our reckless treatment of the planet first, if we want to eventually see a surge in the number of species on the planet as temperatures get warmer. We don't have 500 million years to wait.1. What is the finding of Peter Mayhew's recent study?

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage.Old stereotypes die hard.Picture a video-game player and you will likely imagine a teenage boy, by himself, compulsively hammering away at a game in

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage.Old stereotypes die hard.Picture a video-game player and you will likely imagine a teenage boy, by himself, compulsively hammering away at a game in

单选题. Questions 23 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.8.

单选题. Questions 13 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard.5.

单选题 When he tried to make a ______

单选题 The plane ______

单选题21. Care of the soul is a gradual process ______ even the small details of life should be considered.

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage.Once it was possible to define male and female roles easily by the division of labour.Men worked outside the home and earned the income to support t

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following passage.By education, I mean the influence of the environment upon the individual to produce a perma-nent change in the habits of behaviour, of thought and

单选题23. While a full understanding of what causes the disease may be several years away, ______ leading to a successful treatment could come much sooner.

单选题14. The world's governments have done ______ nothing to combat the threat of nuclear accidents.