单选题The fire broke out in a bakery in the early hours of Sunday, 2 September 1666. The baker was a man called Thomas Farrinor, whose premises were in Pudding Lane. No-one knows exactly how it happened, but he probably left a pile of sticks too near the oven. They caught fire and then set the kitchen alight. The wooden houses nearby were very dry because of a long, hot summer and were joined together by narrow streets. A strong East wind caused the flames to spread quickly from the bakery to other houses. At first, no-one took any notice of the fire. Samuel Pepys woke up at three a.m., but "thought it far enough off, and so to bed again and to sleep", as he wrote in his diary. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, also thought it was just a minor outbreak and so he too returned to bed. Many of the houses nearby, especially near the river, were warehouses full of oil and spirits. These very inflammable materials quickly added to the fire. By the morning over three hundred houses were burning. Pepys at last realized the seriousness of the situation and went to warn the King, Charles II, who sent him to the Lord Mayor with instructions to pull down the houses. But few people listened to him, and many of them refused to allow soldiers to demolish their shops and houses. On Tuesday, 4 September, the King put his brother, the Duke of York, in charge of operations. He organised demolition immediately. The King himself helped fight the fire and distributed gold coins to encourage the workmen. Finally, on Thursday, the fire was brought under control. To the North-West, soldiers stopped it at Pie Corner. Pepys' house remained untouched by the fire. Miraculously, only eight people had died, but over 13,000 houses had been destroyed. Almost a quarter of a million people were homeless and many went to the country. Eighty churches in the city had been burnt including St Paul's Cathedral, and the streets were filled with smoldering timbers. Five-sixths of the medieval city had disappeared forever.

单选题Which of the following is closest in meaning to the first paragraph?

单选题Many people take part in marathons because they ______.

单选题 Questions 5 to 9 are based on the following conversation.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Fifteen years ago, I entered the Boston Globe, which was a temple to me then. It wasn't easy getting hired. But once you were there, I found, you were in. Globe jobs were for life-guaranteed until retirement. For 15 years I had prospered there—moving from an ordinary reporter to foreign correspondent and finally to senior editor. I would have a life- time of security if I stuck with it. Instead, I had made a decision to leave. I entered my boss' s office. Would he rage? I wondered. He had a famous temper. "Matt, we have. to have a talk," I began awkwardly. "I came to the Globe when I was twenty-four. Now I' m forty. There's a lot I want to do in life. I'm resigning." "To another paper?" he asked. I reached into my coat pocket, but didn't say anything. I handed him a letter that explained everything. It said that I was leaving to start a new media company. We were at a rare turning point in history. I wanted to be directly engaged in the change. "I'm glad for you," he said, quite out of my expectation. "I just came from a board of directors meeting and it was seventy-five percent discouraging news. Some of that we can deal with. But much of it we can't," he went on. "I wish you all the luck in the world," he concluded. "And if it doesn't work out, remember, your star is always high here." Then I went out of his office, walking through the newsroom for more good-byes. Everybody was saying congratulations. Everybody—even though I'd be risking all on an unfamiliar venture: all the financial security I had carefully built up. Later, I had a final talk with Bill Taylor, chairman and publisher of the Boston Globe. He had turned the Globe into a billion-dollar property. "I'm resigning, Bill," I said. He listened while I gave him the story. He wasn't looking angry or dismayed either. After a pause, he said, "Golly, I wish I were in your shoes."

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Some surveys show that a lot of people believe that the glare from snow causes snow-blindness. Yet, wearing dark glasses or not, they find themselves suffering from headaches and watering eyes, and even snow-blindness, when exposed to several hours of "snow light". The United States Army has now determined that glare from snow actually does not cause snow-blindness in troops in snow-covered country. Rather, a man's eyes frequently find nothing to focus on in a broad expanse of a wide snow-covered territory. His gaze, in consequence, continually shifts and jumps back and forth over the entire landscape in search of something he can look at. Finding nothing to focus on, hour after hour, the eyes never stop searching, and the eyeballs will become sore and eye muscles will ache. Nature reduces this uncomfortable feeling by producing more and more fluid which covers the eyeball. The fluid covers the eyeball in increasing quantity until vision becomes increasingly unclear. The result may be total, even though temporary, snow-blindness. Experiments led the Army to a simple method of overcoming this problem. A small group of soldiers will be sent ahead of a main body of troops. They are trained to shake snow from evergreen bushes, creating a dotted line as they cross completely snow-covered landscape. Even these soldiers themselves throw lightweight, dark colored objects ahead, on which they, too, can focus. The men following them can then see something. Their gaze is arrested. Their eyes focus on a bush and, having found something to see, stop searching the snow-blanketed landscape. By focusing their attention on lone object at a time, the troops can cross the snow-covered wilderness without becoming hopelessly snow-blind or lost. In this way the problem of crossing a solid white territory is overcome.

单选题Among the more colorful characters of Leadville's golden age were H. A. W. Tabor and his second wife, Elizabeth McCourt, best known as "Baby Doe". Their history is fast becoming one of the legends of the Old West. Horace Austin Warner Tabor was a school teacher in Vermont. With his first wife and two children he left Vermont by covered wagon in 1855 to homestead in Kansas. Perhaps he did not find farming to his liking, or perhaps he was lured by rumors of fortunes to be made in Colorado mines. At any rate, a few years later he moved west to the small Colorado mining camp known as California Gulch, which he later renamed Leadville when he became its leading citizen. "Great deposits of lead are sure to be found here." he said. As it turned out, it was silver, not lead, that was to make Leadvill's fortune and wealth. Tabor knew little about mining himself, so he opened a general store, which sold everything from boots to salt, flour, and tobacco. It was his custom to "grubstake" prospective miners, in other words, to supply them with food and supplies, or "grub", while .they looked for ore, in return for which he would get a share in the mine if one was discovered. He did this for a number of years, but no one that he aided ever found anything of value. Finally one day in the year 1878, so the story goes, two miners came in and asked for "grub". Tabor had decided to quit supplying it because he had lost too much money that way. These were persistent, however, and Tabor was too busy to argue with them. "Oh, help yourself. One more time won't make any difference," He said and went on selling shoes and hats to other customers, the two miners took $17 worth of supplies, in return for which they gave Tabor a one-third interest in their findings. They picked a barren place on the mountainside and began to dig. After nine days they struck a rich vein of silver. Tabor bought the other shares of the two men, and so the mine belonged to him alone. This mine, known as the "Pittsburgh Mine," made $1,300,000 for Tabor in return for his $17 investment. Later Tabor bought the Matchless Mine on another barren hillside just outside the town for $117,000. This turned out to be even more fabulous than the Pittsburgh, yielding $ 35,000 worth of silver per day at one time. Leadville grew. Tabor became its first mayor, and later became lieutenant governor of the state.

单选题Blinks can take several forms. Besides the blinks that wash the eye, there are those associated with unexpected circumstances (such as loud noises), as well as the voluntary flaps of the eyelids that may express anger or incredulity. Another type, the spontaneous eye blink, is neither voluntary nor reflexive. Most blinks are spontaneous. Mere eye-rinsing requires a blink no more than once a minute; yet most people blink around 15 times a minute. Why do we blink so frequently? Apparently there is a direct relationship between spontaneous blinking and the mind. Scientists can now discern how the frequency and duration of blinks vary according to whether a person is alert, bored, anxious or concentrating. Studies show first of all that we blink less when we are most alert. A person reading a novel blinks about six times a minute; someone engaged in conversation blinks more than twice as often. Automobile drivers blink less when negotiating distracting city streets than when cruising down highways. Researchers have learned that the rate and duration of our blinks vary according to the tasks we perform. People engaged in visual activities like drawing blink less frequently; fatigued individual blink more often than when they are rested. We blink more if upset. Anxiety also increases the number of blinks. Notice helicopter pilots blink more often than instructors, and witnesses under cross-examination blink more frequently than those facing friendly lawyers. This connection between blinking and apprehension explains why television newscasters are instructed to blink normally, in order to appear calm and controlled and, thus, unflappable before the cameras. This also applies to politicians. Newsweek reports that when neuro-psychologist Joe Tecce monitored Michael Dukakis and Geoge Bush during their debate last October, he concluded that the Massachusetts governor was more nervous. Dukakis averaged 75 blinks per minute (92 when asked if he'd raise taxes), Bush 67.

单选题Blocks of "high-rise" flats have been built in large numbers in London and in many other big cities. Just after the Second World War these big, twenty-to-thirty storey buildings, hundreds of feet in height, were thought to be the ideal solution to the housing problem. For on the one hand, there was severe housing shortage, but on the other hand, there was lack of space to build houses in urban areas. Blocks of "high-rise" flats seemed at first to be able to solve the problem, since they can offer more families to live in on less land. The beautiful, modem apartments in the high-rises were much sought after by people who lived downtown. Hundreds of the vast blocks had been built before anyone began to doubt about whether they were good solutions or not. Are they suitable places for people, children especially, to live in? A well-known British architect, who personally designed many of these buildings, now believes that the high-rises may well make those people who have been housed in them suffer a great deal. Evidence has been collected by social workers, which suggests that people do suffer. They complain about severe loneliness and deep depression living within these great towers. People also talk about lack of communication with others, no easy access to a playground for children, no chances for adults to get familiarized with each other. Many people say that they have lived next door to each other for years in the same building, but they never know who their neighbors are. Some experts say that a large number of people living in the high-rises suffer from mental disorder and even developed criminal tendencies. As a result of these new discoveries, plans for new high-rise blocks are being reconsidered. We Chinese are now building up many high-rises in big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Perhaps we should also reconsider the idea too.

单选题 Now Custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great importance. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior at its most common place. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the pre- dominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief and the very great varieties it may manifest. No man ever looks at the world with pristine (未受外界影响的)eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes(固定的模式); his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the language of his family. When one seriously studies social orders that have had the opportunity to develop independently, the figure(这种比喻) becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an adjustment to the patterns and standards, traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.

单选题I'm afraid it ______ tomorrow, but who knows? A. may have rained B. might rain C. would rain D. ought to rain

单选题The author believes that sporting activities ______.