单选题All of the following works are written by James Joyce EXCEPT[A] Ulysses.[B] Dubliners.[C] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[D] The Waves.

单选题Which name is NOT related to Britain?

单选题In this passage, the author is intended to______.

单选题{{B}}TEXT E{{/B}} Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi) The word 'blue' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term' the blues,' as it is now defined, in 1807. The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair... They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death. Alan Lore, ax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by 'lady' blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs. Following the Civil War (according to Rolling Stone), the blues arose as "a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it." By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. And by 1910, the word 'blues' as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use. Some 'bluesologists' claim (rather dubiously) that the first blues song that was ever written down was 'Dallas Blues,' published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. The blues form was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy (1873-1958). However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handy's "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "St. Louis Blues" (1914). Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mantle Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the "initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music." American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers.

单选题[此试题无题干]

单选题Which two speeches made Emerson famous?

单选题The popular version of the lone wagon train, forging its way west, in constant danger of losing the faintly marked trail, its occupants trembling in fear of imminent Indian massacre, is just a Hollywood concoction, says historian Sandra Myres, who has been researching the role of women in settling the American west. She has unearthed vivid accounts of the trail west and of homesteading at the journey's end. The journals, diaries and letters she has read help dispel some long cherished myths about the American frontier. Forget the image of the lone wagon train silhouetted against the horizon. The fact was that after the California Gold Rush in 1849, isolated travel was not even a possibility. "You couldn't get lost if you wanted to, because you couldn't get out of sight of another wagon train," explains Myres, professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington. "The country was so level that we could see the long trains of white-topped wagons for many miles," observed a pioneer woman, Margaret Frink. "It appeared to me that none of the population had been left behind," she wrote in her Journal of the Adventures of a Party of California Gold Seekers, published in 1897: It seemed to me that I have never seen so many human beings in all my life before. And, when we drew nearer to the vast multitude, and saw them in all manner of vehicles and conveyances, on horseback and on foot... I thought, in my excitement, if one-tenth of these teams and these people get ahead of us, there would be nothing left for us in California worth picking up. Another favorite Hollywood image--the wagon train forming a circle at dusk--bears little resemblance to reality. The wagons might have made a circle, but if so it was to enclose livestock which might otherwise wander off and become fair game for rustlers. So the protective stockade of wagons was for the benefit of cows, horses and pigs. Men, women and children naturally preferred to sleep in tents well outside the circle. In the movies, we know the Indians are going to descend on the settlers as soon as the sun goes down. Hollywood was only preserving misconceptions of the American Indian that had long-flourished in popular literature and imagination. The 19th century pioneers themselves were steeped in simplistic views--many of which still persist today. Nineteenth-century fiction depicted either the good Indian-the noble savage of James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales--or the bad Indian. In Robert Bird's Neck of the Wood, for in- stance, Indians are bloodthirsty and treacherous; the heroic settlers ultimately vanquish them. Settlers on their way west, however, were more likely to meet Indians who descended on the wagons in order to exploit the possibilities for trade the transcontinental travelers offered. Pioneer women found the Indians extremely helpful in identifying and preparing indigenous food and herbs. "You can't find an Indian attack for anything," says Myres ruefully after reading more than 500 women's journals. Marauding Indians did occasionally harass the rare party of isolated travelers, but whites and Indians generally regarded each other with a curiosity tinged with mutual apprehension. Pioneer women were keen observers of Indian customs and ceremonies, often recording them in minute detail, very much as a modern anthropologist would. Indian women too were watching their counterparts; some of these accounts have also been pre served in English transcriptions made by interpreters, at times via sign language. "The 19th century tended to be an age of journals, thank God," says Myres, The virtues of keeping a journal were instilled in young women by their teachers and the flood of ladies' magazines that kept them up-to-date on the latest eastern styles. It was one's duty to keep up a journal which could be read by friends and relations back home who might never be seen again. Journals were a popular literary genre. Many of the diaries and journals Myres has seen are conscious "literary" efforts, written for a family audience and with an eye to eventual publication. Women responded to the frontier in many ways. Some shrank from the rigors of the migration west and never adjusted to the upheaval in their lives. Once settled, these women were quick to reaffirm traditional female values and roles and new opportunities for women. The Western territories, eager to attract hard working women to their embryonic settlements, granted them economic rights far more extensive than those women trod known in the east and south. In the Oregon territory women were allowed to homestead in their own names and the practice spread rapidly across the west. A woman's right to own property was unequivocal. Women generally had equal, and sometimes slightly preferential, access to credit. In many western communities it was not unusual for women property holders to control a significant proportion of the wealth. Within a few decades of the settling of the territories an entrepreneurial class of women appeared. In examining the Ale of women in the economic life of the west, Myres was directed to a major lode of source material at the Baker Library of the Harvard School of Business: the records of R. G. Dunn they sent hack fascinating snippets of gossip as well. A typical item reveals the "well-known fact in the community that the wife wears the unmentionables in the family and runs the business." The Durra records constitute "a major source of socio-economic information about 19th century America," according to Myres. Myres believes that the scope of economic opportunity open to women on the western frontier led in turn to demands for social and political power to match. She points out that eastern and southern women who wielded economic power "tended to use that power silently and through intermediaries throughout the 19th century. Was it the frontier that made the difference?" Myres isn't sure yet, but hopes to have some answers at the conclusion of her research. (1017)

单选题The 18th century England is known as the ______ in history. A. Romanticism B. Classicism C. Renaissance D. Enlightenment

单选题According to the passage, which has NOT begun to fix their computers for the year 2000?

单选题______ is the author of the first dictionary by an Englishman -Dictionary of the English Language, which has become the foundation of all subsequent English dictionaries. A. Samuel Johnson B. Laurence Sterne C. Oliver Goldsmith D. Samuel Richardson

单选题Which of the following is relational opposites?

单选题Howardisprobably______.

单选题"The lone ranger rode into the sunset and jumped on his horse" is a violation of the maxim of ______. A. manner. B. quantity C. relevance D. quality

单选题In the following dialogue, the maxim of______is not observed. F: What time is it? M: It's terribly cold in here.A. qualityB. quantityC. relevanceD. manner

单选题{{B}}TEXT D{{/B}} President Bush has proposed adding optional personal accounts as one of the central elements of a major Social Security reform proposal. Although many details remain to be worked out, the proposal would allow individuals who choose to do so to divert part of the money they currently pay in Social Security taxes into individual investment accounts. Individuals would have a choice of fund managers, and the return that they earn from those accounts would then partially determine the Social Security benefit they receive when they retire. Individual accounts pose a number of important and complex design and implementation issues, including how to lower the cost of administering accounts so that they do not erode the value of pensions that individuals receive when they retire, how many and what kinds of fund choices should be offered, and how to engage workers in choosing funds. In the late 1990s, Sweden added a mandatory individual accounts tier to its public pension system. This policy brief examines the Swedish experience and lessons it suggests-for the United States about the design and implementation challenges of individual accounts. Sweden has one of the oldest and most comprehensive public pension systems in the world. But by the 1980s, several problems with the system were becoming evident, including current funding deficits and a very large projected funding shortfall as Sweden's population, which is among the oldest in the world, continued to age. Between 1991 and 1998, Sweden adopted a new pension system built on three fundamental elements. A new "income pension" is intended to tie pension benefits more closely to contributions made over the entire course of an individual's working life, while lowering the overall cost of the system; it is financed entirely by a 16 percent payroll tax. A "guarantee pension" provides minimum income support for workers with low lifetime earnings. It is financed entirely by general government revenues and is income-tested against other public pension income. The third element is a "premium pension" financed by a 2.5 percent payroll tax. These funds are placed in an individual investment account. Individuals have a wide variety of fund choices. To lower administrative costs, and the administrative burden on employers, collection of premium pension contributions and fund choices are centrally administered by a new government agency, the Premium Pension Authority. Deposits into pension funds are made only once a year, after complete wage records for a calendar year are available from the state tax authorities. Employees choose up to five funds from a list of funds approved by the PPA. Swedes can change their fund allocations as often as they want without charge, but the system is not designed to facilitate "day trading"--- switching funds often takes several days. The new pension system's planners recognized that many workers might not make an active pension fund choice. They created a Seventh Swedish National Pension Fund to offer a default fund, called the Premium Savings Fund, for those who do not choose a fund or simply prefer to have the government invest for them.

单选题Eliot"s first major poem （1917） ______, has been called the first masterpiece of modernism in English.

单选题{{B}}TEXT E{{/B}} The magnet for tourists, the symbol of the city, Manhattan is probably the most deceptive of the boroughs to outsiders who generally limit themselves to quick looks at the Theater District around Times Square (moving gingerly past the seediness of 42nd Street west of Broadway), the shopping promenade of Fifth Avenue, the munificence of the temples of finance on and near Wall Street, the eccentricities of bohemian life in the East Village and Soho, the exotics of Chinatown, or the special flavours of Little Italy and Harlem. At first glance, Manhattan is only the city of skyscrapers, glaring lights, and frenzied pace, an island of the strange, the neurotic, and the avant-garde. Crammed into its 23 square miles (57 square kilometres) are more than 1,400,000 residents. Its waterfront, formed by the Harlem, East, and Hudson rivers, is 43 miles (69 Kilometres) in length, but only scattered groups of slum children swim in the pollution; and the few fisherment find only scanty catches. To the residents of the island, each section is a hometown. Those who live in the West 70s, 80s, and 90s -- the Upper West Side, though streets run above 200 at the northern tip -- know their neighbourhoods as a cosmopolitan mixture of languages, occupations, and income levels. It is the origin of much of the chaos of the party. On the Upper East Side, east of Central Park, is a different mixture, generally more affluent. The Chelsea area of the West 20s, with its tenements, renovated brownstones, and huge cooperatives built by labour unions, has a more sedate pace than the East Village and Soho (derived from "south of Houston Street" ), comprising much of the old Lower East Side and containing the city's major concentration of struggling writers and artists. Greenwich Village, the old centre of bohemian life, has become a favourite dwelling place for affluent professionals and successful authors and artists. Harlem means more than just tenements, housing projects, and black politics. It means a vibrant street life ranging from sports to stoop seminars, and it is spiced with luxury apartment houses with doormen, inhabited almost entirely by blacks. Yorkville, in the East 80s, retains pockets of Czech, Hungarian, and German cultures in a clash of old tenements and towering luxury apartment houses. The neighhourhood taverns of the Irish proliferate through Inwood at the northernmost part of the island, where the borough of Manhattan spills over the Harlem River to encompass an enclave of a few square blocks within mainland Bronx. In Inwood lie manhattan's few remaining forested acres, and on open recreation areas the Irish keep alive their national sports of hurling and Gaelic football -- much as courts are maintained for bocciball games in Little Italy many miles to the south. On Morningside Heights around Columbia University, the civilities of the academic world overlook the bleak stretches of Harlem below and to the east and north. Even fantastic Lower Manhattan, from the Battery, with its ferry slips at the island's tip, to City Halls, has begun taking on the atmosphere of a neighbourhood. Apartment houses have gone up in the vicinity of City Hall, and the overwhelming skyscraper jungle around Wall Street, which is home to hundreds of financial and insurance institutions and some of the nation's largest hanks, exerts international power.

单选题How many syllables does the word "syllable" have? A. 1 B. 2 C. 3 D. 4

单选题In the author's view, man is unique in ______.

单选题"To err is human, to forgive, divine", "A little learning is a dangerous thing" are taken from the poems written by ______.