单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on the second interview.6.

单选题 音频同上

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》PASSAGE ONE1 New calls for Australia to introduce a sugar-sweetened beverages tax have sparked an outcry from the food and beverage industry and provoked resistance from politicians. But why

单选题. SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are four passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE (1)St. Petersburg, the very name brings to mind some of Russia's greatest poets, writers and composers: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky. The 19th century was a golden age for St. Petersburg's wealthy classes. It was a world of ballets and balls, of art and literature, of tea and caviar. (2)The golden age ended with the advent of World War I. Working people were growing more and more discontented. In 1917, Communism came, promising peace and prosperity. (3)St. Petersburg had become Petrograd in 1914. People wanted a Russian name for their city. Ten years later, the city's name changed again, this time to Leningrad. Then in 1991, Leningraders voted to restore the city's original name. Some people opposed the name change altogether. Others thought it was just too soon. Old, run-down Soviet Leningrad, they said, was not the St. Petersburg of 19th-century literature. (4)What, then, is St. Petersburg? In the confusing post-Communist world, no one really knows. The quiet, if Soviet-style, dignity is gone. The Communist sayings are down and gaudy advertising up. Candy bars and cigarettes are sold from boxy, tasteless kiosks. And clothing? Well, anything goes. Everyone wants to be a little different. But many people do not know the true meaning of freedom. Personal crime has gone up, up, up in the past few years. (5)Yet in spite of this, you can still find some of the city's grand past. Stand at the western tip of Vasilievsky Island. To the right is the elegant Winter Palace, former home of the czars. Its light blue sides and white classical columns make it perhaps St. Petersburg's most graceful building. It houses one of the world's most famous art museums: the Hermitage. Inside, 20km of galleries house thousands of works of art. Look over your right shoulder. The massive golden dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral rises above the sky-line. You'll see, too, why St. Petersburg is called a "floating city." Standing there, nearly surrounded by water, you can see four of the city's 42 islands. (6)Cross the bridge and turn behind the Winter Palace. In the middle of the huge Palace Square stands the Alexander Column. It commemorates Russia's victory over Napoleon. The 650-ton granite column is not attached to the base in any way. Its own weight keeps it upright. Hoisted into place in 1832, it has stood there ever since. (7)Continue to Nevsky Prospekt, the heart of the old city. Let the crowds hurry by while you take your time. Admire the fine carving on bridges and columns, above doorways and windows. Cross over canals and pass by smaller palaces and other classical structures. Let your eyes drink in the light blues, greens, yellows and pinks. (8)Take time to wander among Kazan Cathedral's semi circle of enormous brown columns. Or, if you prefer Russian-style architecture, cross the street and follow the canal a short distance. The Church of the Resurrection occupies the site where Czar Alexander Ⅱ was assassinated in 1881. (9)Travel outside the city to Petrodvorets Palace for a taste of old imperial grandeur. After a visit to France in the late 17th century, Peter the Great decided to build a palace for himself better than Versailles. His dream never came true in his lifetime. It took almost two centuries to complete the palace and park complex. (10) Seldom does any city have the chance to reinvent itself. That chance has now come to St. Petersburg. A few people might hope to return to the glory of the past, but most know that is impossible. They want to preserve, the best of past eras and push ahead. You can bet the city won't be old St. Petersburg, but something altogether different. PASSAGE TWO (1)I was taken by a friend one afternoon to a theatre. When the curtain was raised, the stage was perfectly empty save for tall grey curtains which enclosed it on all sides, and presently through the thick folds of those curtains children came dancing in, singly, or in pairs, till a whole troop of ten or twelve were assembled. They were all girls; none, I think, more than fourteen years old, one or two certainly not more than eight. They wore but little clothing, their legs, feet and arms being quite bare. Their hair, too, was unbound; and their faces, grave and smiling, were so utterly dear and joyful, that in looking on them one felt transported to some Garden of Hesperides, a where self was not, and the spirit floated in pure ether. Some of these children were fair and rounded, others dark and elf-like; but one and all looked entirely happy, and quite unself-conscious, giving no impression of artifice, though they had evidently had the highest and most careful training. Each flight and whirling movement seemed conceived there and then out of the joy of being—dancing had surely never been a labour to them, either in rehearsal or performance. There was no tiptoeing and posturing, no hopeless muscular achievement; all was rhythm, music, light, air, and above all things, happiness. Smiles and love had gone to the fashioning of their performance; and smiles and love shone from every one of their faces and from the clever white turnings of their limbs. (2)Amongst them—though all were delightful—there were two who especially riveted my attention. The first of these two was the tallest of all the children, a dark thin girl, in whose every expression and movement there was a kind of grave, fiery love. (3)During one of the many dances, it fell to her to be the pursuer, of a fair child, whose movements had a very strange soft charm; and this chase, which was like the hovering of a dragonfly round some water lily, or the wooing of a moonbeam by the June night, had in it a most magical sweet passion. That dark, tender huntress, so hill of fire and yearning, had the queerest power of symbolising all longing, and moving one's heart. In her, pursuing her white love with such wistful fervour, and ever arrested at the very moment of conquest, one seemed to see the great secret force that hunts through the world, on and on, tragically unresting, immortally sweet. (4)The other child who particularly enhanced me was the smallest but one, a brown-haired fairy crowned with a half moon of white flowers, who wore a scanty little rose-petal-coloured shift that floated about her in the most delightful fashion. She danced as never child danced. Every inch of her small head and body was full of the sacred fire of motion; and in her little pas seul she seemed to be the very spirit of movement. One felt that Joy had flown down, and was inhabiting there; one heard the rippling of Joy's laughter. And, indeed, through all the theatre had risen a rustling and whispering; and sudden bursts of laughing rapture. (5)I looked at my friend; he was trying stealthily to remove something from his eyes with a finger. And to myself the stage seemed very misty, and all things in the world lovable; as though that dancing fairy had touched them with tender fire, and made them golden. (6)God knows where she got that power of bringing joy to our dry hearts: God knows how long she will keep it! But that little flying Love had in her the quality that lie deep in colour, in music, in the wind, and the sun, and in certain great works of art—the power to see the heart free from every barrier, and flood it with delight. PASSAGE THREE (1)This has been quite a week for literary coups. In an almost entirely unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their decision to award this year's Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis. (2)The Academy, which has handed out the prize since 1901, described Pinter, whose works include The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and his breakthrough The Caretaker, as someone who restored the art form of theatre, in its citation, the Academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century," and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." (3)Until today's announcement, Pinter was barely thought to be in the running for the prize, one of the most prestigious and lucrative in the world. After Pamuk and Adonis, the writers believed to be under consideration by the Academy included Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth, and the Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer, with Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera and the South Korean poet Ko Un as long-range possibilities. Following on from last year's surprise decision to name the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek as laureate, however, the secretive Academy has once again confounded the bookies. (4)Pinter's victory means that the prize has been given to a British writer for the second time in under five years; it was awarded to VS Naipaul in 2001. European writers have won the prize in nine out of the last 10 years so it was widely assumed that this year's award would go to a writer from a different continent. (5)The son of immigrant Jewish parents, Pinter was born in Hackney, London on October 10, 1930. He himself has said that his youthful encounters with anti-semitism led him to become a dramatist. Without doubt one of Britain's greatest post-war playwrights, his long association with the theatre began when he worked as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first play, The Room, was performed at Bristol University in 1957; but it was in 1960 with his second full-length play, the absurdist masterpiece The Caretaker, that his reputation was established. Known for their menacing pauses, his dark, claustrophobic plays are notorious for their mesmerising ability to strip back the layers of the often banal lives of their characters to reveal the guilt and horror that lie beneath, a feature of his writing which has garnered him the adjective "Pinteresque." He has also written extensively for the cinema: his screenplays include The Servant (1963), and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). (6)Pinter's authorial stance, always radical, has become more and more political in recent years. An outspoken critic of the war in Iraq (he famously called President Bush a "mass murderer" and dubbed Tony Blair a "deluded idiot"), in 2003 he turned to poetry to castigate the leaders of the US and the UK for their decision to go to war (his collection, War, was awarded the Wilfred Owen award for poetry). Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry, declaring on BBC Radio 4 that. "I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?" (7)In 2002, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and underwent a course of chemotherapy, which he described as a "personal nightmare". "I've been through the valley of the shadow of death," he said afterwards. "While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very changed man." Earlier this week it was announced that he is to act in a production of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. (8)Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, said that Pinter was overwhelmed when told he had won the prize. "He did not say many words," he said. "He was very happy." PASSAGE FOUR (1)Frederic Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, Poland, on February 22, 1810, to a French rather and Polish mother. His father, Nicholas Chopin, was a French tutor to many aristocratic Polish families, later accepting a position as a French teacher at the Warsaw Lyceum. (2)Although Chopin later attended the Lyceum where his father taught, his early training began at home. This included receiving piano lessons from his mother. By the age of six, Chopin was creating original pieces, showing innate prodigious musical ability. His parents arranged for the young Chopin to take piano instruction from Wojciech Zywny. (3)When Chopin was sixteen, he attended the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, directed by composer Joseph Elsner. Eisner, like Zywny, insisted on the traditional training associated with Classical music but allowed his students to investigate the more original imaginations of the Romantic style as well. (4) As often happened with the young musicians of both the Classical and Romantic Periods, Chopin was sent to Vienna, the unquestioned center of music for that day. He gave piano concerts and then arranged to have his pieces published by a Viennese publishing house there. While Chopin was in Austria, Poland and Russia faced off in the apparent beginnings of war. He returned to Warsaw to get his things in preparation of a more permanent move. While there, his friends gave him a silver goblet filled with Polish soil. He kept it always, as he was never able to return to his beloved Poland. (5)French by heritage, and desirous of finding musical acceptance from a less traditional audience than that of Vienna, Chopin ventured to Paris. Interestingly, other young musicians had assembled in the city of fashion with the very same hope. Chopin joined Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Vincenzo Bellini, all proponents of the "new" Romantic style. (6)Although Chopin did play in the large concert halls on occasion, he felt most at home in private settings, enjoying the social milieu that accompanied concerts for the wealthy. He also enjoyed teaching, as this caused him less stress than performing. Chopin did not feel that his delicate technique and intricate melodies were as suited to the grandiose hall as they were to smaller environments and audiences. (7)News of the war in Poland inspired Chopin to write many sad musical pieces expressing his grief for "his" Poland. Among these was the famous "Revolutionary Etude." Plagued by poor health as well as his homesickness, Chopin found solace in summer visits to the country. Here, his most complex yet harmonic creations found their way to the brilliant composer's hand. The "Fantasia in F Minor," the "Barcarolle," the "Polonaise Fantasia," "Ballade in A Flat Major," "Ballade in F Minor," and "Sonata in B Minor" were all products of the relaxed time Chopin enjoyed in the country. (8)As the war continued in Warsaw and then reached Paris, Chopin retired to Scotland with friends. Although he was far beyond the reach of the revolution, his melancholy attitude did not improve and he sank deeper into a depression. Likewise, his health did not rejuvenate either. A window in the fighting made it possible for Chopin to return to Paris as his health deteriorated further. Surrounded by those that he loved, Frederic Francois Chopin died at the age of 39. He was buried in Paris. (9)Chopin's last request was that the Polish soil in the silver goblet be sprinkled over his grave.1. Which of the following is NOT inside the city, according to the passage? ______(PASSAGE ONE)

单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Part Two of the interview.6.

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》PASSAGE THREE1 It was delightful to be in such a place, after long weeks of daily and nightly familiarity with miners’ cabins—with all which this implies of dirt floor, never-made beds, tin

单选题. Section A In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One Social circumstances in Early Modern England mostly served to repress women's voices. Patriarchal culture and institutions constructed them as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate. At the beginning of the 17th century, the ideology of patriarchy, political absolutism, and gender hierarchy were reaffirmed powerfully by King James in The Trew Law of Free Monarchie and the Basilikon Doron; by that ideology the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch was seen to be imaged in the absolute monarch of the state and in the husband and father of a family. Accordingly, a woman's subjection, first to her father and then to her husband, imaged the subjection of English people to their monarch, and of all Christians to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist sermons, tracts, and plays, detailing women's physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrewishness, and natural inferiority to men. Yet some social and cultural conditions served to empower women. During the Elizabethan era (1558—1603) the culture was dominated by a powerful Queen, who provided an impressive female example though she left scant cultural space for other women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the 17th century, however, various circumstances enabled women to write original texts in some numbers. For one thing, some counterweight to patriarchy was provided by female communities—mothers and daughters, extended kinship networks, close female friends, the separate court of Queen Anne (King James' consort) and her often oppositional masques and political activities. For another, most of these women had a reasonably good education (modern languages, history, literature, religion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women's lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious female characters in literature and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any monolithic social construct of women's nature and role. Most important, perhaps, was the radical potential inherent in the Protestant insistence on every Christian's immediate relationship with God and primary responsibility to follow his or her individual conscience. There is plenty of support in St Paul's epistles and elsewhere in the Bible for patriarchy and a wife's subjection to her husband, but some texts (notably Galatians 3:28) inscribe a very different politics, promoting women's spiritual equality. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ. "Such texts encouraged some women to claim the support of God the supreme patriarch against the various earthly patriarchs who claimed to stand toward them in his stead. There is also the gap or slippage between ideology and common experience. English women throughout the 17th century exercised a good deal of accrual power: as managers of estates in their husbands' absences at court or on military and diplomatic missions; as members of guilds; as wives and mothers who apex during the English Civil War and Interregnum (1640—1660), as the execution of the King and the attendant disruption of social hierarchies led many women to seize new roles—as preachers, as prophetesses, as deputies for exiled royalist husbands, as writers of religious and political tracts. (此文选自 The Guardian) Passage Two Another milestone on the journey towards digital cash was passed on November 13th. That date marked the emergence from beta-testing in America of V. me, a "digital wallet" that holds multiple payment cards in a virtual repository. Instead of providing their personal details and card numbers to pay for stuff online, customers just enter a username and a password. The service is provided by Visa, a giant card-payment network whose headquarters is in the heart of Silicon Valley, close to a host of technology firms which would love to get their hands on a chunk of the global payments business. In the short term new technology is actually boosting usage of plastic. Smartphone apps often require users to enter their card details to pay for services. Firms such as Square and PayPal have developed tiny card readers that plug into smartphones and allow small traders using their software to accept payments cheaply. Ed McLaughlin, who oversees emerging payments technologies at MasterCard, reckons such developments have added 1.2m new businesses over the past 12 months to the card firms' list of merchants. But even if plastic cards eventually go the way of vinyl records, card networks should still prosper because they too are investing heavily in new technology and have several built-in advantages. Visa is betting its member banks can help it to narrow the gap with rivals like PayPal, for instance, which is part of eBay and has grown to 117m active users thanks in part to its use on the auction site. Over 50 financial institutions are supporting the launch of V. me, which accepts non-Visa cards in its wallet, too. MasterCard and others are also touting digital wallets, some of which can hold digital coupons and tickets as well as card details. Before long all of these wallets are likely to end up on mobile phones, which can be used to buy things in stores and other places. This is where firms such as Square, which has developed its own elegant and easy-to-use mobile wallet, and Google have been focusing plenty of energy. Jennifer Schulz, Visa's global head of e-commerce, predicts there will be a shake-out that leaves only a few wallet providers standing. Thanks to their trusted brands, big budgets and payments savvy, one or more card companies will be among them. Card networks are also taking stakes in innovative firms to keep an eye on potentially disruptive technologies. Visa owns part of Square, which recently struck a deal with Starbucks to make its mobile-payment service available in 7,000 of the coffee chain's outlets in America. Visa has also invested in Monitise, a mobile-banking specialist. American Express, for its part, has set up a $ 100m digital-commerce fund, one of whose investments is in iZettle, a Square-like firm based in Sweden. So far few have tried to create new payments systems from scratch. Those that have toyed with the idea, such as ISIS, a consortium of telecoms companies in America, have concluded it is far too costly and painful to deal with regulators, set up anti-fraud systems and so forth. Fears about the security of new-fangled payment systems also play into the hands of established card firms. Still, they cannot relax. Bryan Keane, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, points out that rival digital wallets could promote alternatives to credit and debit cards, including stored-value cards and direct bank-account-to-bank-account payments. Big retailers in America have clubbed together to create their own digital wallet and are likely to prompt users to choose the payment options that are cheapest for the chains, by offering them incentives like coupons. Jack Dorsey, the boss of Square and a co-founder of Twitter, agrees that digital wallets will make the trade-offs between various payment options clearer to consumers and reckons this will force card networks to up their game. "They had a major innovation 60 years ago" he says, "and there have been very, very few innovations since." Some in the payments world might quibble with that but one thing they can all agree on is that the spread of mobile payments will bring many more customers. MasterCard's Mr. McLaughlin claims that 85% of commerce still involves cash and cheques. As mobile purchases take off, more of this activity will move online. The biggest prize of all lies in emerging markets, where a lack of financial infrastructure is hastening the rise of phone-based payments systems such as M-Pesa, which serves Kenya and several other markets. Visa has snapped up Fundamo, which specialises in payment services for the unbanked and underbanked in emerging markets; MasterCard has set up a joint venture called Wanda with Telefónica, a Spanish telecoms firm, which aims to boost mobile payments across Latin America. The payments world is changing fast but the card firms are not about to let rivals swipe their business. (此文选自 The Economist) Passage Three My car's gear lever does more than dispense transmission rations. It panders to me. It cajoles and beckons. It wears out its chrome heart to make my life easier, for—as its manufacturers are quick to claim—the company devotes hundreds of man-hours to testing and retesting each possible design and configuration to see which does the job best. Which shape fits most naturally into a human hand? Which covering is most pleasing? And which overall look makes your fingers tremble with anticipation? This curious pursuit, reputedly espoused by and entrenched within all of today's major manufacturing firms, is called ergonomics, defined as "the degree to which the system has been developed with the human user in mind". Personally, I like the sound of the word. I wish only that the results lived up to the hype. Recently, for example, I purchased a rowing machine for home exercise. Within minutes of unwrapping my booty, I realized the unit I was so cautiously dissecting did not in any way match the color picture on the box. The assembly instructions hinted darkly that putting the contraption together would be only slightly less complex than building a nuclear reactor. Perseverance paid off, however. After applying equal amounts of time and luck, I was finally able to make my rower. But the only cogent ergonomic thought that went into the design of this product was the shape of the cardboard container it was packed in. That's ergonomics in the real world. Take videocassette recorders: VCRs are like snowflakes—no two are quite alike. While all are intended to do more or less the same things—play, record now, record later—the actual designs are about as consistent and predictable as a roulette wheel. If you lose or misplace the manual, you end up with little more than a digital clock. And then there is the ubiquitous microwave oven. What do those "low" , "medium" and "high" settings really hint at? Show me a consumer sufficiently schooled in the effect of microwave transmissions on food molecules to properly—and intuitively—select the optimal setting! Only small children, bless then, seem to know how to make these machines bend to their wills. "Put it on high and blast it," says my nine-year-old niece. I do. It works. Can anyone truly say the modern car is designed with the human user in mind? Recall the last time you plopped behind the wheel of your neighbor's new vehicle. How quickly did you find the knob that popped open the bonnet or the hood? Were you able to adjust the left-side mirror without adjusting the right-side mirror, activating the headlight washers or wipers, or possibly lowering the convertible top? Did you know which lever to push or pull to slide the seat forward without simultaneously upsetting the angle of the seat back or exploding the pneumatically pressured backsupport? As with most of today's products, the only thing we really know about car seats is that, given the correct incentive, they will move. Beyond that, you—and your ergonomically inspired intuition— are completely on your own. (此文选自 The Economist) Passage Four To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind is prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error. If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them. Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants. A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I was young, I lived much outside my own country—in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution. For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject to the same limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi deplored railways and steamboats and machinery; he would have liked to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting any one who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people take the advantages of modern technique for granted. But if you want to make sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find it a good plan to test the arguments that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might have said in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue, and, short of this, I have frequently found myself growing less dogmatic and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent. Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a women, you can retort that so are most criminals. We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial. Here, again, the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer. It is more difficult to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some non-human mind. The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourselves as we are to jellyfish. (此文选自 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)1. All of the following are characteristics of Early Modern England EXCEPT that ______.(Passage One)

单选题 音频同上

单选题. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Part One of the interview.1.

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》　　1 Like many historical films, Amadeus is far from a faithful account of what is known about the period and the people that it portrays. Events are exaggerated, condensed and simplified, an

单选题. SECTION A MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple choice questions. For each multiple choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE (1)On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. (2)New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader, and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only 112 blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without. (3)New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn't attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn't even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this air shaft to fly over. The biggest oceangoing ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn't notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with 650 miles of waterfront, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I've happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. (4)I mention these events merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions. The Lions are overwhelming; the event is unavoidable. (5)Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city's tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation—a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless. I think that although many persons are here from some excess of spirit (which caused them to break away from their small town), some, too, are here from a deficiency of spirit, who find in New York a protection, or an easy substitution. PASSAGE TWO (1)As a child, I loved Charlie Chaplin films. I would put on my father's shoes and wander about with a trampish gait. Luckily, I never boiled and ate the shoes—I would not see Chaplin do that (in The Gold Rush) for a few years yet. I am from the last generation that found it quite normal to watch silent films on television. There was nothing arcane or archaic about it. It was an everyday part of BBC 2 programming. (2)As I grew older, my love of Laurel and Hardy remained, but Chaplin went out of favour. The received wisdom that he was overly sentimental meant that it became unfashionable to like him. Keaton was the one to revere; he was considered a more serious clown, with a stone face of existential angst and boasting a collaboration with Samuel Beckett. (3)Why it might be necessary to make a choice between Keaton and Chaplin I have no idea—there is time enough to celebrate both. But I find a surprising number of people who say: "I never really got Chaplin." Each time I return to Chaplin, I find it harder to understand how anyone can dismiss him. He wrote, produced, directed, starred in and composed the music for a series of powerful, funny, philosophical and moving films. Even the first cinematic outing of the tramp, Kid Auto Races at Venice, can make me laugh 100 years on, as Chaplin repeatedly gets in the way of the news cameras and racing cars with such brazen cheek. (4)Or there is the ludicrous image of Chaplin becoming a wooden hedgehog as he hurls 11 chairs on his back in Behind the Screen, as fresh as any visual comedy being made now. (5)Though the bread-roll dance from The Gold Rush has been so often imitated that it may seem to have lost some of its wonder, watch the sequence again and you will see how intricate something of seeming simplicity is. Johnny Depp spoke of having to imitate it in Benny and Joon and said it took days to get everything just right. It is so much more than it at first seems. (6)That is what makes Chaplin live on—the depth of thought behind each seemingly simple routine. It is never just falling over with a bang, it is acrobatics with aplomb, it is the grace of the chaos. As his biographer Richard Schickel noted, with Chaplin, all that seems solid melts into something else. (7)For those who ask, "But is Chaplin really still funny?" I can promise you that a new generation of children do laugh at Chaplin attempting a tightrope walk while distracted by monkeys in The Circus. There may be many banana-skin routines, but I am pretty sure Chaplin was the first to attempt the banana skin on the tightrope. (8)The Rink is my earliest memory of watching Chaplin. Here he is, a waiter, his face showing no servile deference as he works out a bill based on the remnants of food spattered over the diner, the furious and luxuriantly eyebrowed Eric Campbell, before pocketing an unoffered tip. He is lovable, rebellious, coquettish, both worldly and otherworldly. As for the roller-rink routine in that film, I would watch Dancing on Ice if only it were that good. (9)Eric Campbell was also the monstrous street-fighting adversary in Easy Street. Unable to floor him, or even move him with fisticuffs, Chaplin eventually overcomes him by pulling his head into the lamp of a street light and gassing him. Woody Allen declared that Easy Street would be funny in a thousand years from now. The potency of the ridiculousness has made it last nearly a century already. (10)Neil Brand, a fine pianist who frequently accompanies silent film performances, acknowledges that today's audiences have to overcome the mores and attitudes of a bygone age, but says that once that is done, we can still empathize with Chaplin as he responds to overwhelming forces. (11)City Lights, Chaplin's most revered film and highest on the American Film Institute's 100 greatest films list, opens on a scene of accidental rebellion. The grand unveiling of an epic statue is ruined when the drape comes off to reveal the tramp asleep in the arms of the granite god. As the US national anthem plays, the tramp attempts to stand to attention while dangling by the butt of his trousers from the sword of a carved figure. (12)There is set piece after set piece and, though my twentysomething self probably sneered at the innocent love story of tramp and blind girl, the fortysomething me is more romantic and easily moved by this tale of a tramp who will do anything for the love of a woman. It also has the best joke with an elephant in any movie I can think of. (13)As for The Great Dictator, amid the drama, social commentary and vivid portrayal of the rising oppression of the Jewish people in Germany, there are moments of superb broad comedy. Adenoid Hynkel, a petty, preposterous dictator with delusions of monstrous grandeur, is ripe for having his pretensions punctured. (14)The scenes of desperation as he attempts to show that he is a great dictator to rival Napaloni, played with oomph and chutzpah by Jack Oakie, continue to make me laugh. And it contains undoubtedly my favourite choking-on-hot-mustard scene. There are few greater joys than seeing those of high status fall flat on their face. (15)And then there is Limelight. The music hall may be long dead, but Limelight still conveys what it is to be a clown, the desperation and fear of losing your audience, what it is to age and rail against age and loss. (16)If you want to sample his magnificence with a brief scene, just look at the delicacy with which he plays drunk in Limelight, the subtlety with which he conveys an inebriate attempting to find the keyhole in a door. If that doesn't work for you, then watch him dressed as a chicken in The Gold Rush or with his face manically covered in soup by a malfunctioning machine that is meant to be a sign of a bright new future in Modern Times. (17)There is beauty, humour and humanity to be found here. Chaplin was and is, a cinematic clown genius. PASSAGE THREE (1)The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often you face gray-area problems. These are situations where usually you have done a lot of hard work, on your own and often with other people, to understand a problem or a situation. You've assembled all the data, information, and expert advice you can reasonably get. You've analyzed everything carefully. But critical facts are still missing, and people you know and trust disagree about what to do. And, in your own mind, you keep going back and forth about what is really going on and about the right next steps. These problems come in all shapes and sizes. What they all have in common, whether they are major or minor, is how we experience them. But how do we resolve them? (2)Gray areas are particularly risky today because of the seductive power of analytical technique. Many of the hard problems now facing managers and companies require sophisticated techniques for analyzing vast amounts of information. It is tempting to think that if you can just get the right information and use the right analytics, you can make the right decision. It can also be tempting to hide out from tough decisions or disguise the exercise of power by telling other people that the numbers tell the whole story and there is no choice about what to think or do. But serious problems are usually gray. By themselves, tools and techniques won't give you answers. You have to use your judgment and make hard choices. (3)These choices often come with serious emotional and psychological risks. When you face really hard decisions, there is no way to escape the personal responsibility of choosing, committing, acting, and living with the consequences. An MBA student presciently described this challenge by saying, "I don't want to be a businessman claiming to be a decent human being. I want to be a decent human being claiming to be a businessman." (4)So how do you deal with these choices and risks if you are facing a hard gray-area decision and don't want to bypass your basic human obligations? The challenge is to see yourself as "the other", as one of the outsiders or victims, and not as the insider, the decision maker, the dominant party. And the harder challenge is to grasp and feel the experience of the other in a way that vividly highlights your core obligations as a human being. (5)A practical way to do this is to spend a few moments trying to answer a very old question. It was articulated by Hillel the Elder, the ancient Hebrew philosopher and theologian. He spoke with a man who was willing to convert to Judaism but only on one condition: that Hillel explain the entire Torah to him during the time that he could stand on one foot. Hillel met the challenge easily. He simply said, "That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it." (6)The striking word here is "hateful". Hillel is asking us to pay attention to what we would really care about, deeply and urgently, if we were in another person's situation. In practice, this means finding ways to ask yourself and others what you would be thinking and feeling if you were among the people hit hardest by the decision you might make. Try to imagine how you would react if your parents or children or some other loved ones were in this vulnerable position. (7)The familiar version of Hillel's guidance is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." In the West, most people view this precept as a teaching of Christian religion, which relegates it to occasional sermons in certain houses of worship. But that view misses the full force of the question Hillel wants us to ask. The Golden Rule isn't simply a precept of Christianity. Versions of it appear in almost every major religion. Some philosophers have argued that the Golden Rule is part of the foundation of important moral theories. And it is easy to hear it echoed in everyday, practical moral guidance, such as the Native American recommendation to "walk a mile in the other person's shoes". (8)Dismissing the Golden Rule as Sunday sermonizing, rather than seeing it as an almost universal humanist insight, is a serious mistake. The moral imagination is basically a secular version of it. And Hillel's version—which asks what we would find hateful—has a sharp edge. This question has endured for two millennia because it prods our dormant moral imaginations. It pushes us to think imaginatively and sympathetically about the experiences of others as a way of understanding what our core human obligations require in a particular situation. (9)Asking the question is valuable, but awakening your moral imagination on your own is hard. This is another reason why process—working with and through others in the right ways—is so important. That's why it is particularly valuable for managers and teams working on gray-area problems to find ways to escape their organizational bubbles and hear directly from people whose livelihoods and lives will be affected by their decision or from people who can represent their experience in direct, concrete, forceful ways. Unless you find a way to do this, you may unwittingly buy into Joseph Stalin's observation that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic," and harden yourself to individual hardships and tragedies by focusing on statistical aggregates. (10)Another approach is to ask someone to play the role of the outsider and victim and to do so as vividly and persuasively as they can, so everyone else hears at least some version of the urgent, basic needs of the people a gray-area decision will affect. This approach is sometimes described as making sure there is a "barbarian" at every meeting—someone who will speak awkward truths clearly and urgently. (11)All these tactics are ways of working hard to awaken your moral imagination. They remind us, in effect: Don't think your position in society or in an organization exempts you from basic human duties. Don't get trapped in your own interests, experiences, judgments, and ways of seeing the world. Do everything you can to escape from your egocentric prison. Try hard, on your own and with others, to imagine how you would feel and what you would really want and need if you were actually that person.1. According to Para. 1, the author seems to believe that ______. (PASSAGE ONE)

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1Once across the river and into the wholesale district, she glanced about her for some likely door at which to apply. As she contemplated the wide windows and imposing signs, she became con

单选题. Questions 1 to 5 are based on Part One of the interview.1.

单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Part Two of the interview.6.

单选题. Section A In this section there are several passages followed by fourteen multiple-choice questions. For each multiple-choice question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. Passage One Letty the old lady lived in a "Single Room Occupancy" hotel approved by the New York City welfare department and occupied by old losers, junkies, cockroaches and rats. Whenever she left her room—a tiny cubicle with a cot, a chair, a seven-year-old calendar and a window so filthy it blended with the unspeakable walls—she would pack all her valuables in two large shopping bags and carry them with her. If she didn't, everything would disappear when she left the hotel. Her "things" were also a burden. Everything she managed to possess was portable and had multiple uses. A shawl is more versatile than a sweater, and hats are no good at all, although she used to have lots of nice hats, she told me. The first day I saw Letty I had left my apartment in search of a "bag lady". I had seen these women round the city frequently, had spoken to a few. Sitting around the parks had taught me more about these city vagabonds. As a group, few were eligible for social security. They had always been flotsam and jetsam, floating from place to place and from job to job—waitress, short order cook, sales clerk, stock boy, maid, mechanic, porter—all those jobs held by faceless people. The "bag ladies" were a special breed. They looked and acted and dressed strangely in some of the most determinedly conformist areas of the city. They frequented Fourteen Street downtown, and the fancy shopping districts. They seemed to like crowds but remained alone. They held long conversations with themselves, with telephone poles, with unexpected cracks in the sidewalk. They hung around lunch counters and cafeterias, and could remain impervious to the rudeness of a determined waitress and sit for hours clutching a coffee cup full of cold memories. Letty was my representative bag lady. I picked her up on the corner of Fourteenth and Third Avenue. She had the most suspicious face I had encountered; her entire body, in fact, was pulled forward in one large question mark. She was carrying a double plain brown shopping bag and a larger white bag ordering you to vote for some obscure man for some obscure office and we began talking about whether or not she was an unpaid advertisement. I asked her if she would have lunch with me, and let me treat, as a matter of fact. After some hesitation and a few sharp glances over the top of her glasses, Letty the Bag Lady let me come into her life. We had lunch that day, the next, and later the next week. Being a bag lady was a full-time job. Take the problem of the hotels. You can't stay to long in any one of those welfare hotels, Letty told me, because the junkies figure out your routine, and when you get your checks, and you'll be robbed, even killed. So you have to move a lot. And every time you move, you have to make three trips to the welfare office to get them to approve the new place, even if it's just another cockroach-filled, rat-infested hole in the wall. During the last five years, Letty tried to move every two or three months. Most of our conversations took place standing in line. New York State had just changed the regulations governing Medicaid cards and Letty had to get a new card. That took two hours in line, one hour sitting in a large dank-smelling room, and two minutes with a social worker who never once looked up. Another time, her case worker at the welfare office sent Letty to try and get food stamps, and after standing in line for three hours she found out she didn't qualify because she didn't have cooking facilities in her room. "This is my social life," she said. "I run around the city and stand in line. You stand in line to see one of them fancy movies and calling it art; I stand in line for medicine, for food, for glasses, for the cards to get pills, for the pills; I stand in line to see people who never see who I am; at the hotel, sometimes I even have to stand in line to go to the john. When I die there'll probably be a line to get through the gate, and when I get up to the front of the line, somebody will push it closed and say, 'Sorry. Come back after lunch.' These agencies, I figure they have to make it as hard for you to get help as they can, so only really strong people or really stubborn people like me can survive." Letty would talk and talk; sometimes, she didn't seem to know I was even there. She never remembered my name, and would give a little start of surprise whenever I said hers, as if it had been a long time since anyone had said "Letty." I don't think she thought of herself as a person, anymore; I think she had accepted the view that she was a welfare case, a Mediaid card, a nuisance in the bus depot in the winter time, a victim to any petty criminal, existing on about the same level as cockroaches. (此文选自 The New York Times) Passage Two About two-thirds of the world's population is expected to live in cities by the year 2020 and, according to the United Nations, approximately 3.7 billion people will inhabit urban areas some ten years later. As cities grow, so do the number of buildings that characterize them: office towers, factories, shopping malls and high-rise apartment buildings. These structures depend on artificial ventilation systems to keep clean and cool air flowing to the people inside. We know these systems by the term "air-conditioning". Although many of us may feel air-conditioners bring relief from hot, humid or polluted outside air, they pose many potential health hazards. Much research has looked at how the circulation of air inside a closed environment—such as an office building—can spread disease or expose occupants to harmful chemicals. One of the more widely publicised dangers is that of Legionnaire's disease, which was first recognised in the 1970s. This was found to have affected people in buildings with air-conditioning systems in which warm air pumped out of the system's cooling towers was somehow sucked back into the air intake, in most cases due to poor design. This warm air was, needless to say, the perfect environment for the rapid growth of disease-carrying bacteria originating from outside the building, where it existed in harmless quantities. The warm, bacteria-laden air was combined with cooled, conditioned air and was then circulated around various parts of the building. Studies showed that even people outside such buildings were at risk if they walked past air exhaust ducts. Cases of Legionnaire's disease are becoming fewer with newer system designs and modifications to older systems, but many older buildings, particularly in developing countries, require constant monitoring. The ways in which air-conditioners work to "clean" the air can inadvertently cause health problems, too. One such way is with the use of an electrostatic precipitator, which removes dust and smoke particles from the air. What precipitators also do, however, is to emit large quantities of positive air ions into the ventilation system. A growing number of studies show that overexposure to positive air ions can result in headaches, fatigue and feelings of irritation. Large air-conditioning systems add water to the air they circulate by means of humidifiers. In older systems, the water used for this process is kept in special reservoirs, the bottoms of which provide breeding grounds for bacteria and fungi which can find their way into the ventilation system. The risk to human health from this situation has been highlighted by the fact that the immune systems of approximately half of workers in air-conditioned office buildings have developed antibodies to fight off the organisms found at the bottom of system reservoirs. Chemical disinfectants, called "biocides", that are added to reservoirs to make them germ-free, are dangerous in their own right in sufficient quantities, as they often contain compounds such as pentachlorophenol, which is strongly linked to abdominal cancers. Finally, it should be pointed out that the artificial climatic environment created by airconditioners can also adversely affect us. In a natural environment, whether indoor or outdoor, there are small variations in temperature and humidity. Indeed, the human body has long been accustomed to these normal changes. In an air-conditioned living or work environment, however, body temperatures remain well under 37℃, our normal temperature. This leads to a weakened immune system and thus greater susceptibility to diseases such as colds and flu. (此文选自 Science) Passage Three The other day, I walked into an airport men's room, which was empty except for one man, who appeared to be having a loud, animated conversation with a urinal. Ten years ago, I would have turned right around and walked briskly back out of there. One rule my parents stressed when I was a child was: "Never stay in a restroom with a man who talks to the plumbing." But, of course, as a modern human, I knew that this man was talking on his cell phone, using one of those earpiece thingies, with the little microphone on the wire, the kind that people feel they must shout at, to make sure their vital messages are getting through. It's not clear to me why so many people in airports use the earpiece thingies. Why do they need to keep their hands free? Do they expect some emergency to suddenly arise that will require them to have both hands free while talking? Or maybe they're afraid that if they hold the phone next to their head, the radiation will give them brain cancer. If so, an option they might consider is wrapping their heads in aluminum foil. Granted, this would make them look stupid. But not nearly as stupid as they look shouting into their earpiece wires. So anyway, there I was, in this restroom, standing maybe six feet from this guy, both of us facing the wall, him shouting at his urinal about some business thing involving specifications, and at some point he said "I swear this is a direct quote—I am handling it." This caused me to emit an involuntary snorting sound (not loud; certainly nowhere near as loud as this guy was talking; just a little snortlet), which caused the guy to stop talking and—violating the No.1 Guy Rule of Restroom Etiquette? —turn his head and look directly at me, so I could see (using peripheral vision) that he was irritated by my rude interruption of his conversation. Then he went back to shouting at the urinal. The point is that every key element of this scenario—the cell phone, the airplane, the zipper— is made possible by technology. We know that technology is a wonderful thing. But at what point does technology go too far? Is it fair to say that cell phones, if used thoughtfully and politely, are OK, but that if a person attaches an earpiece thingy and walks around shouting in public, bystanders should be allowed to snatch the wire and sprint off down the airport concourse, with the shouter's earphone, and possibly even the shouter's detached ear, bouncing gaily behind on the floor? I think we all agree that the answer is: Yes. When technology goes too far, ordinary citizens must take action. But the question is: How do we define "too far"? I will tell you. We define "too far" as "when scientists start putting weapons on cockroaches." This is actually happening, according to an article in the Sept. 6 issue of Science magazine, brought to my attention by alert reader Richard Sweetman. This article states that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have been "mounting tiny cannons on the backs of cockroaches." That is correct: These researchers have been outfitting live cockroaches with backpacks containing "plastic tubes filled with explosives." Of course, the researchers have a scientific reason for doing this: They are on LSD. No, really, it has something to do with figuring out how cockroaches have such good balance (You almost never see a cockroach fall off a bicycle.). The researchers have used their findings to construct a working robot roach that is, according to Science, the size of a breadbox. Swell! If there's anything this world needs more than armed cockroaches, it's giant, mechanized cockroaches! Newspaper story from the year 2010: "A homeowner in Santa Rosa, California, was found shot to death in his kitchen Friday. Police said the man apparently was felled by 500 rounds of small-bore cannon fire, mostly in his ankles, indicating that this was the work of the gang of armed research cockroaches that escaped from a Berkeley lab. Police said the motive in the slaying was apparently a Ring Ding. In a related development, an escaped robot cockroach broke into an Oakland Wal-Mart and made off with an estimated 17,000 AA batteries." Ask yourself: Is that the kind of story you want to read in your newspaper? No, seriously, this is bad. We need somebody in authority to look into this right away. Maybe Dick Cheney could handle it. (此文选自 The Baltimore Sun) Passage Four In the go-go years of the late 1990s, no economic theorist looked better than Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian champion of capitalism who died in 1950. His distnction? A theory he called "creative destruction". The idea was straight-forward: in with the new, out with the old. Companies had life cycles, just as people do. They were born, they grew up. And when a better competitor came along, they died due to capital starvation. It was the way things were, and the way they should be. The markets had no sentiment. Capitalism was relentless, unforgiving. In their book Creative Destruction (367 pages. Doubleday. $ 27.50), Richard N. Foster and Sarah Kaplan of the consulting firm McKinsey Co. apply Schumpeter's logic in the context of a technology-driven economy. They want their corporate readers to understand the implications of one basic idea: there is an inescapable conflict between the internal needs of a corporation and the total indifference capital markets have for those needs. Managers care desperately about the survival of their companies. Investors don't give a hoot. This was always true, the authors say, but until recently nobody really noticed because of the relatively languid pace of economic change. No more. In the 1920s, when the first Standard Poor's index was compiled, a listed company had a life expectancy of more than 65 years. In 1998 the annual turnover rate of SP firms was nearly 10 percent, implying a corporate lifetime of only 10 years. How does anyone manage in this environment? Foster and Kaplan argue that companies today must embrace "discontinuity", the idea that everything they have always done is now irrelevant. Consider Intel: by its top executives' own accounts, the company had to kill its ground-breaking memory-chip business once it became clear that Japanese companies could deliver essentially the same product at a lower price. Intel then moved into the much more lucrative microprocessor business. It was an obvious decision, but one that was hard to make. Memory chips were Intel's core competence. They were at the heart of the company's self-image. The transition was wrenching, said Intel chief Andrew Grove. But as a result, the company survived and prospered. From now forgotten automobile companies like Studebaker to early technology leaders like Wang, the corporate landscape is littered with the bones of companies that couldn't adapt to change. At bottom, say Foster and Kaplan, corporations are managed for survival. "They presume continuity in the business environment. They fail to introduce new products for fear of cannibalizing current product lines. They turn down acquisition opportunities to keep from diluting earnings. They prize rational decision making and internal control systems. They resist contrary information, and often punish managers who voice it. And all the while, capital markets are dedicated to finding and funding new competitors. Incumbents ignore this fact to their peril, if they don't cannibalize their product lines, someone else will do it for them. Even the greatest of brand names are not immune." As the authors ask rhetorically, would IBM even exist today had it stuck to its core business in mainframe computers? "Unless the corporation can learn to overcome the natural bias for denial," they write, "it will, in the long term, fail, or at best underperform." The successful company, Foster and Kaplan conclude, is one that manages for discontinuity. It presumes change. It is comfortable with fluid and even vague decision making. It has relatively flat hierarchies. In short, it adopts the fearlessness of capital markets themselves. And it doesn't have to be a start-up, or even a young company. Typical success stories include Coming, which shifted its business from glass to optical fiber just in time to capture a growing market, and General Electric, which dumped one fifth of its asset base in the first four years of Jack Welch's tenure as CEO. Not long ago, it was fashionable to liken business to warfare. Executives were reading Sun-tm, Machiavelli and Clausewitz for guidance on how to overcome the competition. But business differs from war in one vital respect. In war the advantage lies with the defense. In the New Economy, as Foster and Kaplan make clear, it belongs to the attacker. (此文选自 The Economist)1. Which of the following is closest in meaning to "flotsam and jetsam" in the second paragraph?(Passage One)

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单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1Once across the river and into the wholesale district, she glanced about her for some likely door at which to apply. As she contemplated the wide windows and imposing signs, she became con

单选题. Questions 6 to 10 are based on Part Two of the interview.6.

单选题《复合题被拆开情况》 1"Britain’s best export," I was told by the head of the Department of Immigration in Canberra ,"is people. " Close on 100,000 people have applied for assisted passages in the first five mon

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