单选题 Questions 26 to 28 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 15 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.

单选题{{B}}TEXT D{{/B}} If life expectancy were a marathon, you could say that the United States is fading from the pack. Although everyone is living longer, the inhabitants of other industrialized nations have made more dramatic strides in life expectancy than Americans have. Australian men gained an extra six years between 1980 and 2001; Japanese women, 6.1% years. The result: Americans, once on a par with countries such as Italy and New Zealand—in the middle of the pack—now rank below Spain and Greece, near the end. On the face of it, this should not be happening. Healthier nations are usually wealthier nations. The United States is the third richest of the 30 developed nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), after Luxembourg and Norway. But it now ranks 22nd in life expectancy—down from 12th for women and 18th for men in 1980. Could the problem be inadequate healthcare spending? No. The US spends ＄1 of every ＄7 of its gross domestic product on healthcare—far more than any other OECD nation, which typically devotes less than ＄1 in $10 of GDP to the sector. Per person, that works out to an extra ＄1,800 compared with the Swiss or ＄2,300 compared with the Canadians, even though both those groups live longer than Americans. So what's at work? One factor could be diet, according to a new study on longevity by Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, and two students, Robert Hatch and James Lee①. Americans have been getting fatter, and physicians maintain that putting on weight often shrinks a person's life span. On the positive side, US alcohol and tobacco consumption is more moderate than th'e OECD average. Another factor holding back longevity: poverty. The quarter to a third of Americans with low incomes often have less money than the same low-income groups in several other rich countries, points out Mr. Burt-less. A third factor—inequality—worsens the problem. The most prosperous 10 percent of Americans receive 17 times as much income as those in the bottom 10 percent. In countries with high life expectancies among those at 65—such as Japan, Sweden, and Norway—the top 10 percent makes only five times as much income as those in the bottom, Professor Munnell says. The US also struggles with inequality in healthcare. While most rich nations have universal coverage, 45 million in the US did not have health insurance last year, according to census statistics—a rise of 5.2 million since the year of 2000②. Millions more have insurance only part of the year. Many of those without health insurance tend to postpone medical care for chronic problems, thoush they may go to hospital emergency facilities in a crisis. Thus, a better predicator of life expectancy than GDP may be the average GDP for the bottom 40 percent of the population, notes the Boston College study. Here the US falls in the middle of the pack of rich countries, rather than at the top.

单选题Tom asked that he ______ allowed to take the course this semester.A. could beB. beC. wasD. would be

单选题{{I}} Questions 29 to 30 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now listen to the news.{{/I}}

单选题At last she left her house and got to the airport, only ______ the plane flying away. A.having seen B.to have seen C.saw D.to see

单选题 Questions 25 and 26 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the news.

单选题Questions 7 to 10 are based on the following conversation. At the end of the conversation, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions. Now, listen to the conversation.

单选题All ______ is peace and progress. A. what is needed B. for our needs C. the thing needed D. that is needed

单选题Every man and every woman kidnapped three days ago in South Africa______。to being set free and to walking out of that room so eagerly that they start shouting now.[A] looking forward[B] look forward[C] looked forward[D] looks forward

单选题Which of the following sentences does NOT contain subjunctive mood?

单选题When does history begin? It is tempting to reply "In the beginning", but like many obvious answers, this soon turns out to be unhelpful. As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning. If we want to, we can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of vertebrates, or even to the photosynthetic cells which lie at the start of life itself. We can go back further still, to almost unimaginable upheavals which formed this planet and even to the origins of the universe. Yet this is not "history". Commonsense helps here: history is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed. We all know that dogs and cats do not have histories, while human beings do. Even when historians write about a natural process beyond human control, such as the ups and downs of climate, or the spread of disease, they do so only because it helps us to understand why men and women have lived (and died) in some ways rather than others. This suggests that all we have to do is to identify the moment at which the first human beings step out from the shadows of the remote past. It is not quite as simple as that, though. We have to know what we are looking for first and "most attempts to define humanity on the basis of observable characteristics prove in the end arbitrary and cramping, as long arguments about "apemen" and "missing links" have shown. Physiological tests help us to classify data but do not identify what is or is not human. That is a matter of a definition about which disagreement is possible. Some people have suggested that human uniqueness lies in language, yet other primates possess vocal equipment similar to our own; when noises are made with it which are signals, at what point do they become speech? Another famous definition is that man is a tool-maker, but observation has cast doubt on our uniqueness in this respect, too, long after Dr. Johnson scoffed at Boswell for quoting it to him. What is surely and identifiably unique about the human species is not its possession of certain faculties or physical characteristics, but what it has done with them--its achievement, or history, in fact. Humanity's unique achievement is its remarkably intense level of activity and creativity, its cumulative capacity to create change. All animals have ways of living, some complex enough to be called cultures. Human culturealone is progressive: it has been increasingly built by conscious choice and selection within it as well as by accident and natural pressure, by the accumulation of a capital of experience and knowledge which man has exploited. Human history began when the inheritance of genetics and behavior which had until then provided the only way of dominating the environment was first broken through by conscious choice. Of course, human beings have always only been able to make their history within limits. These limits are now very wide indeed, but they were once so narrow that it is impossible to identify the first step which took human evolution away from the determination of nature. We have for a long time only a blurred story, obscure both because the evidence is poor and because we cannot be sure exactly what we are looking for.

单选题 {{I}} Questions 27 and 28 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer the questions. Now listen to the news.{{/I}}

单选题Last week the president of the company held a party, but people thought it a great pity ______ the most humorous, intelligent and beautiful woman in the company.[A] to invite[B] not to invite[C] to have invited[D] not to have invited

单选题 To live in the United States today is to gain an appreciation for Dahrendorf’s assertion that social change exists everywhere. Technology, the application of knowledge for practical ends, is a major source of social change. Yet we would do well to remind ourselves that technology is human creation; it does not exist naturally. A spear or a robot is as much a cultural as a physical object. Until humans use a spear to hunt game or a robot to produce machine parts, neither is much more than a solid mass of matter. For a bird looking for an object on which to rest, a spear or robot serves the purpose equally well. The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the Russian nuclear accident at Chemobyl drive home the human quality of technology; they provide cases in which well-planned systems suddenly went haywire and there was no ready hand to set them right. Since technology is a human creation, we are responsible for what is done with it. Pessimists worry that we will use our technology eventually to blow our world and ourselves to pieces. But they have been saying this for decades, and so far we have managed to survive and even flourish. Whether we will continue to do so in the years ahead remains uncertain. Clearly, the impact of technology on oar lives deserves a closer examination. Few technological developments have had a greater impact on our lives than the computer revolution. Scientists and engineers have designed specialized machines that can do the tasks that once only people could do. There are those who assert that the switch to an information-based economy is in the same camp as other great historical milestones, particularly the Industrial Revolution. Yet when we ask why the Industrial Revolution was a revolution, we find that it was not the machines. The primary reason why it was revolutionary is that it led to great social change. It gave rise to mass production and, through mass production, to a society in which wealth was not confined to the few. In somewhat similar fashion, computers promise to revolutionize the structure of American life particularly as they free the human mind and open new possibilities in knowledge and communication. The Industrial Revolution supplemented and replaced the muscles of humans and animals by mechanical methods. The computer extends this development to supplement and replace some aspects of the mind of human beings by electronic methods. It is the capacity of the computer for solving problems and making decisions that represents its greatest potential and that poses the greatest difficulties in predicting the impact on society.

单选题He ______ unwisely, but he was at least trying to do something helpful.

单选题What can we infer from Mr. Hun Sen’s words?

单选题In spring, traffic was often ______ along the roads to holiday places.A. added upB. built upC. held upD. pulled up

单选题What can be inferred from the news?

单选题The speaker attracted the audience at the very beginning of the lecture by giving a ______ description of his personal experience.