单选题 Questions 17—20 are based on the following monologue. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17—20.

单选题Fevers cause______.

单选题 America's love affair with the credit card began in 1949. When businessman Frank McNamara finished a meal in a New York restaurant and then discovered he had no cash. In those days, gasoline and store charge cards were common, but cash was standard for almost everything else. McNamara called his wife, who rushed over to bail him out. His embarrassment gave him the idea for Diners Club. Within a year some 200 people carried the world's first multi-use card. For an annual fee of $5, these card holders could charge meals at 27 restaurants in and around New York City. By the end of 1951 more than a million dollars had been charged on the growing number of cards, and the company was soon turning a profit. The problem was to persuade enough people to carry the cards. Diners Club turned to promotions. It gave away a round-the-world trip on a popular television show. The winners charged their expenses and made it "from New York to New York without a dime in their pocket". By 1955 the convenience of charging was catching on in a big way. The first to turn a profit was Bank of America's Bank Americard. Bankers from all over the country descended on its California headquarters to learn the secret of its success—so many that in 1966 Bank Americard began forming alliances with banks outside the state. Five million holiday credit card shoppers would have created a bonanza for banks, but in the dash to market, the banks had been less than cautious in assembling their lists. Some families received 15 cards. Dead people and babies got cards. Hundreds of Chicagoans discovered they could use or sell a card they "found" and by law, the person whose name appeared on it was liable for the charges—even if he or she had never requested of received the card. The disaster sparked a movement to regulate the industry. Public Law 91-508, signed by President Nixon in October 1970, prohibited issuers from sending cards to people who hadn't requested them at all but eliminated card-holder liability for charges on a card reported lost or stolen. Later, the Fair Credit Billing Act set standard procedures for resolving billing disputes. Of course, Credit cards have not only replaced cash for many purposes, but also in effect have created cash by making it instantly available virtually everywhere. Experts estimate there are from 15,000 to 19,000 different cards available in his country. So the revolution that began in 1949 with an embarrassed businessman who was out of cash now seems complete. What Alfred Bloomingdale, then president of Diners Club, predicted more than 30 years ago seems to have come true: an America where "there will be only two classes of people—those with credit and those who can't get them."

单选题The study of reading skills is as old as written language. It is believed that it was approximately 3000 to 4000 BC when the first systematic efforts were made to teach people to read and to write. Egyptian scribes were taught these skills in formal schools, but we have no knowledge of the techniques that were used by them. The modern emphasis on the scientific study of reading dates from approximately 1887 when a French scientist named Javal discovered that the visual process in reading is not the technique people had originally assumed to be. It seems to most persons that as you read along a line of print your eye moves along smoothly recognizing words and phrases, one after the other, as it moves. Javal carefully observed the eyes of persons reading and discovered two quite important things. First, the eyes, rather than moving were stopped most of the time. Second, rather than moving slowly and smoothly along a line, they moved in extremely quick jumps from one point of fixation to the next. Javal was so struck by these jumps that he called eye movements saccadic after the French word "to jump". His findings were a surprise to many persons. If you are interested in trying out Javal's experiment, watch a friend very carefully as he reads, paying particular attention to the movements of his eyes. If you want to get a clearer picture of these rapid eye movements, you might try a technique invented by Professor W. R. Miles. It is known as the Miles Peep-Hole Technique and consists of the very simple process of cutting a small hole in the center of a page of print and observing the reader through the hole. This puts your point of observation approximately where the reader is looking, and you get a very clear picture of the saccadic eye movements. The discovery of saccadic eye movements by Javal stimulated many other people to try to study in more detail the nature of the mechanical process of reading. One of the earliest techniques was an effort to record eye movements on paper by connecting a little pneumatic tube through a long series of pulleys and wires to a pen which would write on moving paper and jiggle back and forth as the eyes moved. This turued out to be a reasonable good way of finding out how many eye movements a person was making but it was quite uncomfortable for the person being tested. Another rather disturbing technique was the process of putting a spot of white material on the comer of the eye. The material was then photographed with a movie camera as the person read. During the period from 1900 to about 1920 a new technique in studying eye movements in reading came into use with the development of eye movement cameras. Another complicated set of the eye through a series and onto a spool of moving film. Early cameras of this type were extremely expensive and difficult to construct. One of the first was used at the University of Chicago, another at the University of Minnesota, and after a few years more of them were built in other institutions throughout the country. Since 1920, many modem scientists have studied the problem of accurate recordings of eye movements in reading. As a result, there are several more modem techniques in use today. Modem equipment includes highly sophisticated cameras with high-speed film, cameras in helmets which fit on the head of the reader and show a picture of what he sees as well as the location of his eye movements, and other complex film devices. One very expensive but useful price of recording equipment is an electronic device which measures the location of visual fixation by measuring the voltage across the eyeball and feeds the electronic information into a computer which plots the exact location of the center of vision. All of these mechanical, photographic, and electronic devices have given us a great deal of useful information about the reading process.

单选题BPassage 2/B 　　If you look closely at some of the early copies of the Declaration of Independence, beyond the flourished signature of John Hancock and the other 55 men who signed it, you will also find the name of one woman, Mary Katherine Goddard. It was she, a Baltimore printer, who published the first official copies of the Declaration, the first copies that included the names of its signers and therefore heralded the support of all thirteen colonies.　　Mary Goddard first got into printing at the age of twenty-four when her brother opened a printing shop in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1762. When he proceeded to get into trouble with his partners and creditors, it was Mary Goddard and her mother who were left to run the shop. In 1765 they began publishing the Providence Gazette, a weekly newspaper. Similar problems seemed to follow her brother as he opened businesses in Philadelphia and again in Baltimore. Each time Ms. Goddard was brought in to run the newspapers. After starting Baltimore's first newspaper, The Maryland Journal, in 1773, her brother went broke trying to organize a colonial postal service. While he was in debtor's prison, Mary Katherine Goddard's name appeared On the newspaper's masthead for the first time.　　When the Continental Congress fled there from Philadelphia in 1776, it commissioned Ms. Goddard to print the first official version of the Declaration of Independence in January 1777: After printing the documents, she herself paid the post riders to deliver the Declaration throughout the colonies.　　During the American Revolution, Mary Goddard continued to publish Baltimore's only newspaper, which one historian claimed was "second to none among the colonies". She was also the city's postmaster from 1775 to 1789—appointed by Benjamin Frankli—and is considered to be the first woman to hold a federal position.

单选题Questions 11--13 are based on the passage about vanity stamps. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11-13.

单选题John Julius Norwich is the author of more than a dozen books on Norman Sicily, the Sahara, Mount Athos and the Venetian and Byzantine empires. Yet even his immense knowledge is not euough to keep his latest chronicle--of 5, 000 years of Mediterranean history—from appearing somewhat lopsided. Lord Norwich's first test, he notes in his introduction to The Middle Sea, was to compensate for an ignorance of Spain. He records that he was fortuitously invited to dinner by "my dear friend" the Spanish ambassador to London and "a few weeks later there came an invitation for nay wife and me to spend ten days in Spain. " It is hard to believe that was all the effort he made, for he acquits himself well, even in the convoluted diplomacy that ended in the war of the Spanish succession. Lord Norwich's second task was to strike a balance over time. The Middle Sea reaches from ancient Egypt to the first world war. Like many long, chronological narratives, it becomes progressively more detailed, though it is debatable whether this is a good thing. Few people have changed the region as much as the Romans, yet their republic's five centuries get only a page more than the great siege of Gibraltar which began in 1779. Lord Norwich's final, and arguably most important, challenge is the area that is most likely to engage modern readers: the intermittent, but frequently savage, conflict between Muslims and Christians. Impatient with the notion, echoed most recently and disastrously by Pope Benedict, that the Koran sanctions the spreading of Islam by the sword, Lord Norwich is no Islamophobe. He is hostile to the Crusades and fulsome in his praise of that traditional Western schoolbook villain, Saladi. Yet his account remains disappointingly focused from Christendom outwards. It is true that Muslims do appear in his book—usually in battle—but they rarely speak. Only two items in the 170-volume bibliography are by Arab scholars and only one is by a Turk. This is unabashedly history of the old school: Eurocentric (Octavian, the author declares without irony, was the "undisputed master of the known world") and largely uninterested in what other economic, social and technological changes may have shaped events. What fires Lord Norwich is recounting the doings of princes and preachers, warriors, courtiers and courtesans. And he does it with consummate skill. He spices his nan-ative liberally with entertaining anecdotes, deft portraits and brisk judgments. Aristotle, for example, is given short shrift as "one of the most reactionary. intellectuals that ever lived". Lord Norwich's control of his vast and complex subject matter is masterly. And the subject matter itself is as colourful as history can get. No sooner have readers bidden farewell to a short, fat, dissolute sultan, Selim the Sot, than they encounter the "piratical Uskoks, a heterogeneous, but exceedingly troublesome community". Although few will resist the temptation to keep turning the pages, readers will close this monumental work exhilarated and informed, but with plenty of questions still unanswered.

单选题{{I}}Questions 14 - 16 are based on the following passage. You now have 15 seconds to read the questions 14 - 16.{{/I}}

单选题 Dr Thomas Starzl, like all the pioneers of organ transplantation, had to learn to live with failure. When he performed the world's first liver transplant 25 years ago, the patient, a three-year-old boy, died on the operating table. The next four patients didn't live long enough to get out of the hospital. But more determined than discouraged, Starzl and his colleagues went back to their lab at the University of Colorado Medical School. They devised techniques to reduce the heavy bleeding during surgery, and they worked on better ways to prevent the recipient's immune system from rejecting the organ — an ever-present risk. But the triumphs of the transplant surgeons have created yet another tragic problem: a severe shortage of donor organs. "As the results get better, more people go on the waiting lists and there's wider disparity between supply and need," says one doctor. The American Council on Transplantation estimated that on any given day 15000 Americans are waiting for organs. There is no shortage of actual organs; each year about 5000 healthy people die unexpectedly in the United States, usually in accidents. The problem is that fewer than 20 percent become donors. This trend persists despite laws designed to encourage organ recycling. Under the federal Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a person can authorize the use of his organs after death by signing a statement. Legally, the next of kin can veto these posthumous gifts, but surveys indicate that 70 to 80 percent of the public would not interfere with a family member's decision. The biggest roadblock,according to some experts,is that physicians don't ask for donations, either because they fear offending grieving survivors or because they still regard some transplant procedures as experimental. When there aren't enough organs to go around, distributing the available ones becomes a matter of deciding who will live and who will die. Once donors and potential recipients have been matched for body size and blood type,the sickest patients customarily go to the top of the local waiting list. Beyond the seriousness of the patients' condition,doctors base their choice on such criteria as the length of time the patient has been waiting, how long it will take to obtain an organ and whether the transplant team can gear up in time.

单选题From the passage we can find out that the author mainly studies ______.

单选题Various security measures are recommended EXCEPT ______.

单选题How far away you are from retirement plays a large part in how you should invest your retirement money. According to Leslie Wright of Westminster Portfolio Services Ltd., there are three stages to a long-term regular savings plan for retirement: capitalization, consolidation and conservation. In the first stage, people should be most concerned with building up their retirement savings investment. According to Wright, these investors can "take as aggressive an outlook as their nerves can stand," because at this point there is little capital to risk. The second step, consolidation, makes up the bulk of your savings plan; balance the aggressive investments with some tamer ones, to better protect your existing possessions. The final change, from consolidation to conservation, when your investments should aim to preserve the capital you have, should take place one to three years before you retire. The exact timing of all these should take current market conditions into account, although Wright warns against risky betting on future growth. "Greed must not be allowed to blind prudence," he says. Whatever vehicles you choose for your retirement share-holding, be sure to take advantage of dollar-cost averaging. By investing a fixed amount at regular intervals, you"ll be able to avoid the risk of poorly timed investments by averaging out the peaks and valleys of the market. Plus, regular contributions will let you avoid the temptation to drop out when the market falls, and to buy too much when prices are high. Those who are well along the road to retirement may have cause for concern these days. The plunging stock and property markets have shrunk savings, for retirement and otherwise; and some people have not planned for their retirement at all. You won"t be that rash, of course, but what if you"re already in mid-career and don"t have a retirement plan in place? If you don"t make some serious cuts in your spending and save heavily now, you"ll have to sacrifice in your golden years. Of course, it"s better still to get off on the right foot by starting your planning early. "No one should have to compromise his living standards when he retires," says Wright. "Retirement is a time to really enjoy life. We have all worked so hard. " And one of the things you should be working hard on right now is planning for those days of enjoyment.

单选题The doctor asked the child' s parents ______ . [A] what is the problem [B] what was the problem [C] what the problem was