单选题In line 15 of paragraph 2, what is the author's purpose in mentioning "a rose, an apple, or an orchid"?

单选题From the context, we know that "attributes" (Para. 1)means

单选题 {{I}} Questions 11-13 are based on the following monologue introducing American holidays. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11-13.{{/I}}

单选题A weather map is synoptic because it ______.

单选题 Oil and Islam continue to define Saudi Arabia's room for maneuver. With global demand unlikely to wane in the foreseeable future and reserves elsewhere diminishing, oil will continue to keep the kingdom rich for decades to come. At the same time, the Saudis' attachment to their faith is not diminishing; it may even be growing stronger. But the faith itself is changing in subtle ways. Having gone through waves of progress and retrenchment during its 73 years as a unified kingdom, Saudi Arabia is now well into another period of rapid change. This time, however, the well-oiled complacency of the previous big boom, in the 1970s, is largely gone. Four years ago, a survey in this newspaper argued that it might require internal shocks to jolt the Saudis into taking reform seriously. Those shocks have now arrived. Since May 2003, when suicide bombers attacked a housing compound in Riyadh, terrorist violence has touched every corner of the kingdom, claiming some 200 lives. Saudi nationals, the most famous being Osama bin Laden, continue to be implicated in terrorist attacks abroad, most notably in Iraq. Yet far from rallying Saudis, terrorism has made them identify more closely with the state. More importantly, the violence has brought intense introspection and debate. Long accustomed to blaming outside influences for all ills, Saudis now accept that the fixing needs to start at home. Aside from extremism, the problems of unemployment, poverty and the abuse of human rights have moved to the top of the national agenda. Even the most absolute of previous taboos, political reform, is being widely debated. In dozens of interviews with Saudis of all stripes, one phrase kept coming up: the question is no longer whether to reform/restructure/change, but how fast to do it. The government's answer, to date, has been slow, and not very sure. But this survey will argue that far from being a dinosaur nation, lumbering to extinction, Saudi Arabia is capable of rapid evolution. On some important issues, such as the rules governing business, it is already far down the right track. On others, such as the ways it educates its youth and excludes women, the kingdom is only just beginning to shift course. Most Saudis reckon it is premature to speak of democracy in their country; but there are myriad ways to emancipate citizens, from upholding the rule of law to making budgets more transparent and loosening the grip of security agencies over universities and the press. Instead of their old tactics of prevarication, slow consensus-building and co-optation, the A1Sauds should try a new one: putting trust in their people.

单选题 No company likes to be told it is contributing to the moral decline of a nation. "Is this what you like to accomplish with your careers?" an American senator asked Time Warner executives recently. "You have sold your souls, but must you corrupt our nation and threaten our children as well?" At Time Warner, however, such questions are simply the latest manifestation of the soul-searching that has involved the company ever since the company was born in 1990. It's a self-examination that has, at different times, involved issues of responsibility, creative freedom and the corporate bottom line. At the core of this debate is chairman Gerald Levin, 56, who took over from the late Steve Ross in the early 1990s. On the financial front, Levin is under pressure to raise the stock price and reduce the company's mountainous debt, which will increase to $17.3 billion after two new cable deals close. He has promised to sell off some of the property and restructure the company, but investors are waiting impatiently. The flap over rap is not making life any easier for him. Levin has consistently defended the company's rap music on the grounds of expression. In 1992, when Time Warner was under fire for releasing Ice-T's violent rap song Cop Killer, Levin described rap as a lawful expression of street culture, which deserves an outlet. "The test of any democratic society," he wrote in a Wall Street Journal column, "lies not in how well it can control expression but in whether it gives freedom of thought and expression the widest possible latitude, however disputable or irritating the results may sometimes be. We won't retreat when we face any threats." Levin would not comment on the debate last week, but there were signs that the chairman was backing off his hard-line stand, at least to some extent. During the discussion of rock singing verses at last month's stockholders' meeting, Levin asserted that "music is not the cause of society's ills" and even cited his son, a teacher in the Bronx, New York, who uses rap to communicate with students. But he talked as well about the "balanced struggle" between creative freedom and social responsibility, and he proclaimed that the company would launch a drive to develop standards for distribution and labeling of potentially objectionable music. The 15-member Time Warner board is generally supportive of Levin and his corporate strategy. But insiders say some of them have shown their concerns in this matter. "Some of us have known for many, many years that the freedoms under the First Amendment are not totally unlimited," says Luce. "I think it is perhaps the case that some people associated with the company have only recently come to realize this."

单选题Would you like to orbit the Earth inside the International Space Station? Now you can take a space holiday—for a price. This is due to a recent decision by top space officials of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency. Last April, American businessman Dennis Tito reportedly paid between twelve million and twenty million dollars to spend one week on the International Space Station. NASA had strongly objected to the Russian plan to permit a civilian on the costly research vehicle. After two years of negotiations, space officials have agreed on a process to train private citizens to take trips to the International Space Station. NASA recently agreed to conditions that will permit Russia to sell trips to the space station. The trips are planned by an American company called Space Adventures Limited of Arlington, Virginia. The company calls itself "the world"s leading space tourism company". The company has sold a space trip to Mark Shuttle-worth , a South African businessman. In April, Mr Shuttleworth will be launched into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Experts say the change in policy at NASA shows a new desire to use space vehicles for business and industrial purposes. In a speech to Congress last year, NASA official Michael Hawes said that the space agency had not considered civilian travel as one of the industries it wanted to develop. However, Mr Hawes said that private space travel could now be done as long as safety measures are observed carefully. Yet, the average citizen will not be able to travel into space in the near future. Space Adventures Limited sells a training program for space flight that costs two hundred thousand dollars. That price does not include the cost of the trip to the International Space Station. That holiday in space costs twenty million dollars. Candidates for adventure space travel trips must be in excellent heaith and must pass difficult health tests. They must receive a lot of training. Besides, good English can help you prepare for a space holiday. This is because all successful candidates who wish to travel to the International Space Station must be able to read and speak English.

单选题For many years, any discussion of reparations to compensate the descendants of African slaves for 246 years of bondage and another century of legalized discrimination was dismissed. Many whites and blacks alike scoffed at the idea, reasoning that slavery is part of the past that would only unleash new demons if it were resurrected. Opponents contend that the fledgling reparations movement overlooks many important facts. First, they assert, reparations usually are paid to direct victims, as was the case when the US government apologized and paid compensation to Japanese-Americans interned during World War Ⅱ. Similarly, Holocaust survivors have received payments from the Germans. In addition, not all blacks were slaves, and an estimated 3, 000 were slave owners. Also, many immigrants not only came to the United States after slavery ended, but they also faced discrimination. Should they be paid reparations, too? Or should they receive them? And regardless of how much slave labor contributed to the United States" wealth, opponents contend, blacks benefit from that wealth today. As a group, Afro-Americans are the best-educated, wealthiest blacks on the planet. But that attitude is slowly changing. At least 10 cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Washington, have passed resolutions in the past two years urging federal hearings into the impact of slavery. Mainstream civil rights groups such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference regularly raise the issue. The surging interest in reparations parallels a heightened sensitivity to the horrors of slavery, in which as many as 6 million Africans perished in the journey to the Americas alone. There also is growing attention being paid to the huge economic bounty that slavery created for private companies and the country as a whole. Earliest this year, Aetna Inc. apologized for selling insurance policies that compensated slave owners for financial losses when their slaves died. Last summer, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut printed a front-page apology for the profits it made from running ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaways. Next month, a new California law will require insurance companies to disclose any slave insurance policies they may have issued. The state also is requiring University of Californian officials to assemble a team of scholars to research the history of slavery and report how current California businesses benefited. Proponents of reparations argue that, even for nearly a century after emancipation in 1865, blacks legally were still excluded from the opportunities that became the cornerstones for the white middle-class.

单选题What is the biggest trouble?

单选题[此试题无题干]

单选题Opinion polls are now beginning to show an unwilling general agreement that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to find ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some fundamental questions about the future of work. Should we continue to treat employment as the norm? Should we not create conditions in which many of us can work for ourselves, rather than for an employer? Should we not aim to revive the household and the neighbourhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centres of production and work? The industrial age has been the only period of human history in which most people"s work has taken the form of jobs. The industrial age may now be coming to an end, and some of the changes in work patterns which it brought about may have to be reversed. This seems a discouraging thought. Bat, in fact, it could offer the prospect of a better future for work: Universal employment, as its history shows, has not meant economic freedom. Employment became widespread when the enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries made many people dependent on paid work by depriving them of the use of the land, and thus of the means to provide a living for themselves. Then the factory system destroyed the cottage industries and removed work from people"s homes. Later, as transport improved, first by rail and then by road, people travelled longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people"s work lost all connection with their home lives and places in which they lived. Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. It became customary for the husband to go out paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the impractical goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full-time jobs.

单选题Excuse me. Which is the way ______ Zhongshan Park? A. of B. with C. to

单选题Millions of Americans run to the bank or visit automated teller machines when they need cash. They use credit cards when they want to buy clothes, VCRs, or television sets. But there is an underclass — people with low incomes and no credit history — who visit their neighborhood pawnshops when they need cash or a loan. An estimated 20 percent of the US population has no bank account, more than half of this group don't have credit cards and cannot get bank loans. "These people are borrowing an average of $50," said John P. Caskey of Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. "If you add up in terms of how much dollar value pawnshops provide, they don't look very important. If you add up how much of the population they serve or the number of loans they make, they are important." Because they make loans, pawnshops are a type of bank, often calling themselves "the bank of the little people". Caskey and Swarthmore student Brian Zidmund in 1989 looked at the importance of pawnshops in the US economy — the first serious study of the subject since the 1930s. Their conclusion: Pawnshops are the consumer's lender of last resort. Pawnshop customers typically cannot get credit at mainstream financial institutions. They have poor credit records, excessive debt in relation to their incomes, low and unstable incomes, or cannot maintain positive bank account balance. Typically, pawnshop customers borrow relatively small amounts that traditional lenders are unwilling or unable to provide on a secured basis. "If you look at total consumer credit, the amounts provided by pawnshops remain small," Caskey said. "They are lending primarily to low-income people. In terms of the population they serve, they're really important." In 1988, about 6,900 pawnshops operated in the United States — one for every two commercial banks. Data suggest these pawnshops made about 35 million loans, providing what Caskey and Zidmund estimate as 1 percent of the nation's consumer credit.

单选题In 1942, the HMS Edinburgh was sunk in the Barents Sea. It was on its (21) back to Britain with ninety-one boxes of Russian gold. (22) thirty-nine years it lay there, too deep for divers to (23) . No one was allowed to explore it, either, since the bodies of sixty of the crew also lay in the (24) . Then, in 1981, an ex-diver called Jessop decided to try using new diving techniques. (25) he could not afford to finance the (26) which was going to cost four million pounds, he had to look for people who were (27) to take the risk. (28) , they were not even sure the gold was going to be there! First a Scottish diving company, then a German shipping company agreed to join in the retrieval (29) Not long after that, Jessop (30) a fourth company to take a (31) Since the gold was the (32) of the British and the Soviet governments, they both hoped to make a (33) , too! The biggest problem was how to get (34) the gold. Fortunately, they were able to examine the Edinburgh's sister ship, the HMS Belfast, to (35) out the exact location of the bomb room, (36) the gold was stored. They knew it was to be an extremely difficult and dangerous undertaking. To reach the gold, they would have to cut a large square (37) the body of the ship, go through the empty fuel tank and down to the bomb room. After twenty-eight dives, they (38) to find the first bar. Everyone worked (39) the clock, helping to clean and stack the gold, (40) as to finish the job as quickly as possible.

单选题Which of the following is true about distance education?

单选题—When will you arrive ______ China? —Next week. [A] at [B] in [C] /