单选题There are advantages in 1997, if you want to look for them. The air is cleaner, and there seem to be fewer colds. The crime rate has dropped. With the police car too expensive, policemen are back on their beats. More important, the streets are full. Legs are king, and people walk everywhere far into the night. There is mutual protection in crowds. If the weather isn't too cold, people sit out front. If it is hot, the open air is the only air-conditioning they get. At least, the street lights still burn. Indoors, few people can afford to keep lights burning after supper. As for the winter--well, it is inconvenient to be cold, with most of what furnace fuel is allowed hoarded for the dawn. But sweaters are popular indoor wear. Showers are not an everyday luxury. It is sore in the suburbs, which were born with the auto, lived with the auto, and are dying with the auto. Suburbanites from associations that assign turns to the procurement and distribution of food. Rushcarts creak from house to house along the posh suburban roads, and every bad snowstorm is a disaster. It isn't easy to hoard enough food to last till the roads are open. What energy is left must be conserved for agriculture. The great car factories make trucks and farm machinery almost exclusively. The American population isn't going up much any more, but the food supply must be kept high even though the prices and difficulty of distribution force each American to eat less. Food is needed for export to pay for some trickles of oil and for other resources. The rest of the world is not as lucky as we are. They're starving out there because earth's population has continued to rise. The population on earth is 5. 5 billion--up by 1.5 billion since 1997--and outside the United States and Europe, not more than one in five has enough to eat at any given time. There is a high infant mortality rate. It's more than just starvation, though. There are those who manage to survive on barely enough to keep the body working, and that proves to be not enough for the brain. It is estimated that nearly two billion people in the world are permanently brain damaged by undernutrition, and the number is growing. At least, the big armies are gone. Only the United States and the Soviet Union can maintain a few tanks, planes, and ships--which they dare not move for fear of biting into limited fuel reserves. Machines must be replaced by human muscle and beasts of burden. People are working longer hours, and with lighting restricted, television only three hours a night, new books few and printed in small editions--what is there to do with leisure? Work, sleep, and eating are the great trinity of 1997, and only the first two are guaranteed.

单选题Most countries in the world now welcome tourists because of the money they bring in. Many countries make great efforts to encourage tourism, and many also depend on what they earn from it to keep their economies going. People who like adventure will even try to visit countries where travel is difficult and costs are high. Companies regularly arrange trips throughout the Sahara desert, or to the Himalayan Mountains for whoever enjoys such trips, but the numbers of visitors are small. Most tourists try to choose whichever places have fairly comfortable, cheap hotels, quite good food, reasonable safety, sunny weather and plenty of amusements or unusual things to see. Their choice of a place for a holiday also depends very much on when they can get away; it is not very pleasant to go to a place when it is having its worst weather. One of the big problems for a nation wishing to attract a lot of tourists is the cost of building hotels for them. Building big hotels swallows up a lot of money, and many of the countries that need the tourists are poor. What they spend on building has to be borrowed from foreign banks. And sometimes the money they can afford to borrow produces only chains of ugly hotels wherever there are beauty spots that are supposed to attract the tourists. Another problem is that more and more big international companies are building hotels all over the world, so that the profits from a hotel often do not stay in the country in which it has been built. And there is also the question of training staff; teaching them foreign languages, how to cook the kind of food that the foreign tourists expect, and so on. In many countries, special colleges and courses have been set up for this. Crime can also be a problem. Seeing tourists who seem to be much richer than them selves, the local inhabitants are often tempted to stem from them. Sometimes tourists resist and get killed, and then other tourists refuse to come to the country. But an even greater problem in many countries is the effect that the sight of foreigners has on the local population. A man who lives in a very small house, owns almost nothing, works very hard for his living and has very strong roles about modesty in dress and not drinking alcohol sees foreign tourists rejoicing in what to him is great luxury, owning radios, wearing very few clothes and drinking a lot of beer. These tourists may be ordinary workers back home, but to the poor inhabitant they seem to be very rich. And of course, he either feels envy for them or thinks them shameless. Tourists, too, often feel shocked by the different customs and habits that they see around them. They refuse the local food, and insist on having only what they eat back home. They say that travel broadens the mind; but it is doubtful whether this is so, often, it narrows it.

单选题Questions 14～16 are based on a story about a woman's encounter with creatures from outer space. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14～16.

单选题It can be inferred from the passage that a change in class relationship after the Middle Ages led to greater productivity because______.

单选题[此试题无题干]

单选题What would a Gusii mother from Kenya most likely do to punish her children?

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{{I}} You will hear four dialogues or monologues. Before listening to each one, you will have 5 seconds to read each of the questions which accompany it. While listening, answer each question by choosing A, B, C or D. After listening, you will have 10 seconds to check your answer to each question. You will hear each piece ONLY ONCE.{{/I}}

单选题Why can many people see "silver linings" to the economic slowdown?

单选题 Questions 17～20 are based on a report about high style cameras. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17～20.

单选题Revolutionary innovation is now occurring in all scientific and technological fields. This wave of unprecedented change is driven primarily by advances in information technology, but it is much larger in scope. We are not dealing simply with an Information Revolution but with a Technology Revolution. To anticipate developments in this field, the George Washington University Forecast of Emerging Technologies was launched at the start of the 1990s. We have now completed four rounds of our Delphi survey—in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996—giving us a wealth of data and experience. We now can offer a reasonably clear picture of what can be expected to happen in technology over the next three decades. Time horizons play a crucial role in forecasting technology. Forecasts of the next five to ten years are often so predictable that they fall into the realm of market research, while those more than 30 or 40 years away are mostly speculation. This leaves a 10-to 20-year window in which to make useful forecasts. It is this time frame that our Forecast addresses. The Forecast uses diverse methods, including environmental scanning, trend analysis, Delphi surveys, and model building. Environmental scanning is used to identify emerging technologies. Trend analysis guides the selection of the most important technologies for further study, and a modified Delphi survey is used to obtain forecasts. Instead of using the traditional Delphi method of providing respondents with immediate feedback and requesting additional estimates in order to arrive at a consensus, we conduct another survey after an additional time period of about two years. Finally, the results are portrayed in time periods to build models of unfolding technological change. By using multiple methods instead of relying on a single approach, the Forecast can produce more reliable, useful estimates. For our latest survey conducted in 1996, we selected 85 emerging technologies representing me most crucial advances that can be foreseen. We then submitted the list of technologies to our panel of futurists for their judgments as to when ( or if) each technological development would enter the mainstream, the probability that it would happen, and the estimated size of the economic market for it. In short, we sought a forecast as to when each emerging technology will have actually "emerged."

单选题You will hear two dialogues and one passage. Before listening to each one, read the questions related to it. While listening, answer each question by choosing A, B, C or D. You will hear each piece ONLY ONCE.

单选题{{B}}Passage 2{{/B}} Beads were probably the first durable ornaments humans possessed, and the intimate relationship they had with their owners is reflected in the fact that beads are among the most common items found in ancient archaeological sites. In the past, as today, men, women, and children adorned themselves with beads. In some cultures still, certain beads are often worn from birth until death, and then are buried with their owners for the afterlife. Abrasion due to daily wear alters the surface features of beads, and if they are buried for long, the effects of corrosion can further change their appearance. Thus, interest is imparted to the bead both by use and the effects of time. Besides their wearability, either as jewelry or incorporated into articles of attire, beads possess the desirable characteristics of every collectible. They are durable, portable, available in infinite variety, and often valuable in their original cultural context as well as in today's market. Pleasing to look at and touch, beads come in shapes, colors, and materials that almost compel one to handle them and to sort them. Beads are miniature bundles of secrets waiting to be revealed: their history, manufacture, cultural context, economic role, and ornamental use are all points of information one hopes to unravel. Even the most mundane beads may have traveled great distances and been exposed to many human experiences. The bead researcher must gather information from many diverse fields. In addition to having to be a generalist while specializing in what may seem to be a narrow field, the researcher is faced with the problem of primary materials that have little or no documentation. Many ancient beads that are of ethnographic interest have often been separated from their original cultural context. The special attractions of beads contribute to the uniqueness of bead research. While often regarded as the "small change of civilizations", beads are a part of every culture, and they can often be used to date archaeological sites and to designate the degree of mercantile, technological, and cultural sophistication.