单选题 Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview with a chief-editor. At the end of the interview you will be givenl O seconds to answer each of the following questions. Now listen to the interview.

单选题The federal courts are much better than the Senate Judicial or ethics committees in determining and assessing those violations because ______.

单选题{{B}}TEXT C{{/B}} {{B}}Goal Trimmer{{/B}} Utopias are supposed to be dreams of the future. But the American Utopia? Lately it's a dream that was, a twilit memory of the Golden Age between V-$ day and OPEC, when even a blue-collar paycheck bought a place in the middle class. The promise of paradise regained has become a key to the Democratic Party pitch; Mickey Kaus, a senior editor of the New Republic, says the Democrats are wasting their time. As the U. S. enters a world where only the highly skilled and well educated will make a decent living, the gap between rich and poor is going to keep growing. No fiddling with the tax code, retreat to protectionism or job training for jobs that aren't there is going to stop it. Income equality is a hopeless cause in the U. S. "Liberalism would be less depressing if it had a more attainable end" Kaus writes," a goal short of money equality." Liberal Democrats should embrace an aim he calls civic equality. If government can' t bring everyone into the middle class, let it expand the areas of life in which everyone, regardless of income, receives the same treatment. National health care, improved public schools. universal national service and government financing of nearly all election campaigns, which would freeze out special-interest money—there are the unobjectionable components of his enlarged public sphere. Kaus is right to fear the hardening of class lines, but wrong to think the stresses can be relieved without a continuing effort to boost income for the bottom half." No, we can't tell them they'll be rich," he admits." Or even comfortably well off. But we eau offer them at least material minimum and a good shot at climbing up, the ladder. And we can offer them respect." And what might they offer back? The Bronx had a rude cheer for it. A good chunk of the Democratic core constituency would probably peel off. At the center of Kaus' book is a thoughtful but no less risky proposal to dynamite welfare. He rightly understands how fear and loathing of the chronically unemployed underclass have encouraged middle income Americans to flee from everyone below them on the class gale. The only way to eliminate welfare dependency, Kaus maintains, is by cutting off checks for. all able-bodied recipients, including single mothers with children. He would have government provide them instead with jobs that pay slightly less than the minimum wage, earned-income tax credits to nudge them over the poverty line, drug counseling, job training and, if necessary, day care for their children. Kaus doesn't sell this as social policy on the cheap. He expects it would cost up to $ 59 billion a year more than the $ 23 billion already spent annually on welfare in the U. S. And he knows it would be politically perilous, because he suggests paying for the plan by raiding Social Security funds and trimming benefits for upper-income retirees, Yet he considers if money well spent it would undo the knot of chronic poverty and help foster class rapprochement. And it would be too. But one advantage of being an author is that you only ask people to listen to you, not to vote for you.

单选题Which of the following is NOT a distinctive feature of human language?

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following questions.

单选题Who raised the notion of "objective correlative"? A. Robert Penn Warren B. Flannery O'Conner C. William Faulkner D. TS. Eliot

单选题A study of the practices of financial institutions that revealed no discrimination against selfemployed women would tend to contradict______.

单选题In Nathaniel Hawthorne's opinion, romance should beA. full of excitement.B. a mixture of facts and fancy.C. a display of imagination.D. a true record of lif

单选题Among the many ways in which people communicate through speech, public speaking has probably received more study and attracted more attention than any other. Politicians campaigning for public office, sales-people presenting products, and preachers delivering sermons all depend upon this form of public communication. Even people who do not make speaking a part of their daily work are often asked to make public speeches: students at graduation, for instance, or members of churches, clubs, or other organizations. Nearly every-one speaks in public at some time or other, and those who perform the task well often become leaders. There are many masons for speaking in public. A public speaker may hope to teach an audience about new ideas, for example, or provide information about some topic. Creating a good feeling or entertaining an audience may be another purpose. Public speakers, however, most often seek to persuade an audience to adopt new opinions, to take certain actions, or to see the world in a new way. Public speakers usually know well in advance when they are scheduled to make an address. Consequent-ly, they are able to prepare their message before they deliver it. Sometimes, though, speakers must deliver the message unprepared, or off the cuff, such as when they are asked to offer a toast at a wedding reception or to participate in a televised debate or interview. When they do not have to speak unprepared, most speakers write their own speeches. Politicians and business executives sometimes employ professional writers who prepare their speeches for them. These professional writers may work alone or in small teams. Although the speaker may have some input into the contents of the speech, the writers sometimes have a great influence over the opinions expressed by their employers. Regardless of how a speech is prepared, the person who delivers it is given credit for its effect upon its hearers.

单选题{{B}}TEXT C{{/B}} The conflict between good and evil is a common theme running through the great literature and drama of the world, from the time of ancient Greeks to the present. The principle that conflict is the heart of dramatic action when illustrated by concrete examples, almost always turns up Some aspects of the struggle between good and evil. The idea that there is neither good nor evil--in any absolute moral or religious sense-is widespread in our times. There are various relativistic and behaviorist Standards of ethics. If these standards even admit the distinction between good and evil, it is as a relative matter and not is whirlwind of choices that lies at the center of living. In any such state of mind, conflict can at best, be only a petty matter, lacking true university. The acts of the evildoer and of the virtuous man alike become dramatically neutralized. Imagine the reduced effect of Crime and Punishment or the Brothers Karamazoc had Dostoevsky thought that good and evil, as portrayed in those books, were wholly relative, and that he had had no conviction about them. You can't have a vital literature if you ignore or shun evil. What you get then is the world of Pollyanna, goody-goody in place of the good Cry, The Beloved Country is a great and dramatic novel because Alan Paton, in addition to being a skilled workman, sees with clear eyes both good and evil, differentiates them, pitches them into conflict with each other, and takes sides. He sees that the native boy Absalom Kumal0, who has murdered, cannot be judged justly without taking into account the environment that has had a part in shaping him. But Paton sees, too, that Absalom the individual, not society the abstraction, committed the act and is responsible for it. Mr. Paton understands mercy. He knows that this precious thing is not Evoked by sentimental impulse, but by a searching examination of the realities of human action. Mercy follows a judgment; it does not precede it. One of the novels by the talented Paul Bowles, Let It Down is full of motion, full of Sensational depravities, and is a crashing bore. The book recognizes no good, admits no evil, and is coldly indifferent to the moral behavior of its characters. It is a long shrug. Such a view of life is non-dramatic and negates the vital essence of drama. (402)

单选题The rescue operation has stopped temporarily because

单选题{{B}}TEXT D{{/B}} Mesa Verde is the center of the prehistoric Anasazi culture. It is located in the high plateau lands near Four Corners, where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona come together. This high ground is majestic but not forbidding. The climate is dry, but tiny streams trickle at the bottom of deeply cut canyons, where seeps and springs provided water for the Anasazi to irrigate their crops. Rich red soil provided fertile ground for their crops of corn, beans, squash, tobacco, and cotton. The Anasazi domesticated the wild turkey and hunted deer, rabbits, and mountain sheep. For a thousand years the Anasazi lived around Mesa Verde. Although the Anasazi are not related to the Navajos, no one knows what these Indians called themselves, and so they are commonly referred to by their Navajo name, Anasazi, which means "ancient ones" in the Navajo language. Around 550 A. D. , early Anasazi--then a nomadic people archaeologists call the Basketmakers—began constructing permanent homes on mesa tops. In the next 300 years, the Anasazi made rapid technological advancements, including the refinement of not only basket-making but also pottery-making and weaving. This phase of development is referred to as the Early Pueblo Culture. By the Great Pueblo Period (1100 -1300 A. D. ), the Anasazi population swelled to over 5,000 and the architecturally ambitious cliff dwellings came into being. The Anasazi moved from the mesa tops onto ledges on the steep canyon walls, creating two-and three-story dwellings. They used sandstone blocks and mud mortar. There were no doors on the first floor and people used ladders to reach the first roof. All the villages had underground chambers called kivas. Men held tribal councils there and also used them for secret religious ceremonies and clan meetings. Winding paths, ladders, and steps cut into the stone led from the valleys below to the ledges on which the villages stood. The largest settlement contained 217 rooms. One might surmise that these dwellings were built for protection, but the Anasazi had no known enemies and there is no sign of conflict. But a bigger mystery is why the Anasazi occupied these structures such a short time. By 1500, Mesa Verde was deserted. It is conjectured that the Anasazi abandoned their settlements because of drought, overpopulation, crop failure, or some combination of these. They probably moved southward and were incorporated into the pueblo villages that the Spanish explorers encountered two hundred years later. Their descendants still live in the Southwest.

单选题In the 2nd paragraph, what is compared to a "black hole"?

单选题{{B}}TEXT B{{/B}} The 10th launch of the space shuttle Challenger was scheduled as the 25th space shuttle mission. Francis R. (Dick) Scobee was the mission commander. The crew included Christa McAuliffe, a high-school teacher from New Hampshire. The five other crew members were Gregory B. Jarvis, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, and Michael J. Smith. After several launch delays, NASA officials overruled the concerns of engineers and ordered a liftoff on a cold morning, Jan. 28, 1986. The mission ended in tragedy. Challenger disintegrated into a ball of fire. The accident occurred 73 seconds into flight, at an altitude of 14020 meters and at about twice the speed of sound. Strictly speaking, Challenger did not explode. Instead, various structural failures caused the spacecraft to break apart. Although Challenger disintegrated almost without warning, the crew may have briefly been aware that something was wrong. The crew cabin tore loose from the rest of the shuttle and soared through the air. It took almost three minutes for the cabin to fall to the Atlantic Ocean, where it smashed on impact, killing the seven crew members. All shuttle missions were halted while a special commission appointed by President Reagan determined the cause of the accident and what could be done to prevent such disasters from happening again. In June I986, the commission reported that the accident was caused by a failure of O rings in the shuttle's right solid rocket booster. These rubber rings sealed the joint between the two lower segments of the booster. Design flaws in the joint and unusually cold weather during launch caused the O rings to allow hot gases to leak out of the booster through the joint. Flames from within the booster streamed past the failed seal and quickly expanded the small hole. The flaming gases then burned a hole in the shuttle's external fuel tank. The flames also cut away one of the supporting beams that held the booster to the side of the external tank. The booster tore loose and ruptured the tank. The propellants (火箭燃料) from the tank formed a giant fireball as structural failures tore the vehicle apart. The commission said NASA's decision to launch the shuttle was flawed. Top-level decision makers had not been informed of problems with the joints and O rings or of the possible damaging effects of cold weather. Shuttle designers made several technical modifications, including an improved O-ring design and the addition of a crew bail-out system. Although such a system would not work in all cases, it could save the lives of shuttle crew members in some situations. Procedural changes included stricter safety reviews and more restrictive launching conditions. The space shuttle resumed flying on Sept.29, 1988, with the launch of the redesigned shuttle Discovery. (465 words)

单选题According to the passage, which of the following is NOT role?

单选题Thousands of teachers at the elementary, secondary, and college levels can testify that their students' writing exhibits a tendency toward a superficiality that wasn't seen, say 10 or 15 years ago. It shows up not only in their lack of analytical skills, but in poor command of grammar and rhetoric. I' ye been asked by a graduate student what a semicolon is. The mechanics of the English language have been tortured to pieces by' TV. Visual, moving images—which are the venue of television—can't be held in the net of careful language. They want to break out. They really have nothing to do with language, grammar, and rhetoric, and they have become fractured. Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also suggest that up to 40% of the American public is functionally illiterate. That is, our citizens' reading and writing abilities, if they have any, are impaired so seriously as to render them, in that handy jargon of our times, dysfunctional. The reading is taught - TV teaches people not to read. It renders them incapable of engaging in an activity that now is perceived as strenuous, because it is not a passive hypnotized state. Passive as it is, television has invaded our culture so completely that the medium's effects are evident in every quarter, even the literary world. It shows up in supermarket paperbacks, from Stephen King (who has a certain clever skill) to pulp fiction. These really are forms of verbal TV-literature that is so superficial that those who read it can revel in the same sensations they experience when watching television. Even more importantly, the growing influence of television, Kernan says, has changed people's habits and values and affected their assumptions about the world. The sort of reflective, critical, and value laden thinking encouraged by books has been rendered obsolete. In this context, we would do well to recall the Cyclops— the race of giants that, according to Greek myth, predated man. Quite literally, TV affects the way people think. In Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander quotes from the Emery Report, prepared by the Center for Continuing Education at the Australian National University, Canberra, that, when we watch television, "our usual processes of thinking and discern ment are semi-functional at best." The study also argues that, "while television appears to have the potential to provide useful information to viewers—and is celebrated for its educational function—the technology of television and the inherent nature of the viewing experience actually inhibit learning as we usually think of it./

单选题 Questions 9 and 10 are based on the following news. At the end of the news item, you will be given 20 seconds to answer the questions. Now listen to the news.

单选题Patents, said Thomas Jefferson, should draw "a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not". As the value that society places on intellectual property has increased, that line has become murkier-and the cause of some embarrassment, too. Around the world, patent offices are being inundated with applications. In many cases, this represents the extraordinary inventiveness that is occurring in new fields such as the internet, genomics and nanotechnology. But another, less-acceptable reason for the flood is that patent offices have been too lax in granting patents, encouraging many firms to rush to patent as many, often dubious, ideas as possible in an effort to erect legal obstacles to competitors. The result has been a series of messy and expensive court battles, and growing doubts about the effectiveness of patent systems as a spur to innovation, just as their importance should be getting bigger. In 1998 America introduced so-called "business-method" patents, granting for the first time patent monopolies simply for new ways of doing business, many of which were not so new. This was a mistake. It not only ushered in a wave of new applications, but it is probably inhibiting, rather than encouraging, commercial innovation, which had never received, or needed, legal protection in the past. Europe has not, so far, made the same blunder, but the European Parliament is considering the easing of rules for innovations incorporated in software. This might have a similarly deleterious effect as business-method patents, because many of these have been simply the application of computers to long-established practices. In Japan, firms are winning large numbers of patents with extremely narrow claims, mostly to obfuscate what is new and so to ward off rivals. As more innovation happens in China and India, these problems are likely to spread there as well. There is an urgent need for patent offices to return to first principles. A patent is a government-granted temporary monopoly (patents in most countries are given about 20 years' protection) intended to reward innovators in exchange for a disclosure by the patent holder of how his invention works, thereby encouraging others to further innovation. The qualifying tests for patents are straightforward--that an idea be useful, novel and not obvious. Unfortunately most patent offices, swamped by applications that can run to thousands of pages and confronted by companies wielding teams of lawyers, are no longer applying these tests strictly or reliably. For example, in America, many experts believe that dubious patents abound, such as the notorious one for a "sealed crustless sandwich". Of the few patents that are re-examined by the Patent and Trademark Office itself, often after complaints from others, most are invalidated or their claims clipped down. The number of duplicate claims among patents is far too high. What happens in America matters globally, since it is the world's leading patent office, approving about 170,000 patents each year, half of which are granted to foreign applicants. Europe's patent system is also in a mess in another regard: the quilt of national patent offices and languages means that the cost of obtaining a patent for the entire European Union is too high, a burden in particular on smaller firms and individual inventors. The European Patent Office may award a patent, but the patent holder must then file certified translations at national patent offices to receive protection. Negotiations to simplify this have gone on for over a decade without success. As a start, patent applications should be made public. In most countries they are, but in America this is the case only under certain circumstances, and after 18 months. More openness would encourage rivals to offer the overworked patent office evidence with which to judge whether an application is truly novel and non-obvious. Patent offices also need to collect and publish data about what happens once patents are granted--the rate at which they are challenged and how many are struck down. This would help to measure the quality of the patent system itself, and offer some way of evaluating whether it is working to promote innovation, or to impede it. But most of all, patent offices need to find ways of applying standards more strictly. This would make patents more difficult to obtain. But that is only right. Patents are, after all, government-enforced monopolies and so, as Jefferson had it, there should be some "embarrassment" (and hesitation in granting them.

单选题One of the most interesting paradoxes in America today is that Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, is now engaged in a serious debate about what a university should be, and whether it is measuring up. Like the Roman Catholic church and other ancient institutions, it is asking-still in private rather than in public whether its past assumptions about faculty, authority, admission, courses of study, are really relevant to the problems of the 1990' s. Should Harvard--or any other university--be an intellectual sanctuary, apart from the political and social revolution of the age, or should it be a laboratory for experimentation with these political and social revolutions; or even an engine of the revolution? This is what is being discussed privately in the big clapboard houses of faculty members around the Harvard Yard. Walter Lip Mann, a distinguished Harvard graduate, defined the issue several years ago. "If the universities axe to do their work." he said," they must be independent and they must be disinterested... They are places to which men can turn for judgments which are unbiased by partisanship and special interest. Obviously, the moment the universities fall under political control, or under the control of private interest, or the moment they themselves take a hand in politics and the leadership of government, their value as independent and disinterested sources of judgment is impaired ..." This is part of the argument that is going on at Harvard today. Another part is the argument of the militant and even many moderate students: that a university is the keeper of our ideals and morals, and should not be "disinterested" but activist in bringing the nation' s ideals and actions together. Harvard' s men of today seem more trebled and less sure about personal, political and academic purpose than they did at the beginning. They are not even clear about how they should debate and resolve their problems but they are struggling with privately, and how they come out is bound to influence American university and political life in the 1990' s.

单选题The author mentions the two high mountains in order to show that it is ______.