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单选题It was the single, strangely spiraled tusk that first alerted scientists. Sticking out of the ice covered by Siberian soil, like an ivory tombstone, it revealed the. presence of a true scientific wonder: underneath lay the frozen body of a mammoth. The discovery has presented researchers with an unprecedented challenge--to move to laboratory, a mammoth's entire, undisturbed body where it can be analyzed at leisure and its biological secrets revealed. Last week, scientists completed the first stage of this remarkable transfer, using a helicopter to lift a twenty-three-ton block of ice and mammoth to a new site where defrosting can be started. As one of the team, Dutch paleontologist Dick Mol put it, "It's very exciting. I've been working on mammoths for more than 25 years, and this is a dream for me—to find the soft parts and touch them and even smell them." In particular, the discovery and recovery of the 23,000-year-old body has raised speculation that it may be possible to clone a mammoth from one of its cells. Could the same process used to clone Dolly the sheep be attempted with a mammoth, using an elephant as a surrogate mother? It is certainly an enticing prospect. Herds of woolly mammoths grazing the pastures of the world's many natural parks would be a mighty attraction, and a massive triumph for modem science, showing it could even resurrect eradicated species. Extinction would no longer be forever. Mammoths once roamed the world's northern hemisphere until they abruptly disappeared. Some. scientists argue that as the last Ice Age ended, the world went through major ecological changes, and these large woolly mammals found life awkward, sweaty and unaccommodating. No longer able to compete for resources, they became extinct.

单选题 A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but if it's not red or yellow, it doesn't sell. According to James Crowe, chief executive of the Worcester—based research company, Scintilla, the color of a product can dictate the strength of its sales. His company has pioneered a method of testing consumer response to color which he claims can predict, with 90% accuracy, sales of a new product for up to 18 months after the launch. The method, "Chromtest", has been used to test everything from ladies' dresses to sunglasses. Clients include Parsifal Lager, Amir Fashions, Coloroll Wallpaper and Meadowcourt China. Color, says Mr. Crowe, is critical in ensuring product acceptance. It is not merely a case of choosing an acceptable primary color—shades, tones and texture can all have a beating on the consumer's final choice. "We could take 10 colors, each with six shades and virtually guarantee that two of the shades would be most popular with 80% of the people interviewed," he said. "Products are associated with lifestyle: most kitchens are now in wood so if you make toasters you don't want a color that is unsuitable." Mr. Crowe, a former lecturer at the Institute of Marketing, formed Scintilla in 1992 with the help of a $ 5,000 second mortgage. First year turnover was $100,000. This year with 30 staff it will be ten times that. Chromtest, which was developed with the help of Crowe's artist wife, Susanne, now accounts for around 70% of turnover and provides most of the profits. Crowe admits that British companies still have their doubts, though he says a few retailers now insist that products are color screened before they are allowed on their shelves. He contrasts this with European manufacturers who commission over half the company's works. European tests do vary dramatically, however, and Crowe argues that, as with branding, color and design for pan-European products carry numerous pitfalls. For example, a recent test of a brown dinner service in Britain, Germany and France shows that while consumers in the first two countries like the product, Parisians will not eat off brown plates.

单选题What does the author imply in the last sentence of the passage?

单选题The period of adolescence, i. e., the person between childhood and adulthood, may be long or short, depending on social expectations and on society's definition as to what constitutes maturity and adulthood. In primitive societies adolescence is frequently a relatively short period 6f time, while in industrial societies with patterns of prolonged education coupled with laws against child labor, the period of adolescence is much longer and may include most of the second decade of one's life. Furthermore, the length of the adolescent period and the definition of adulthood status may change in a given society as social and economic conditions change. Examples of this type of change are the disappearance of the frontier in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the United States, and more universally, the industrialization of an agricultural society.　　In modem society, ceremonies for adolescence have lost their formal recognition and symbolic significance and there no longer is agreement as to what constitutes initiation ceremonies. Social ones have been replaced by a sequence of steps that lead to increased recognition and social status. For example, primary school graduation, high school graduation and college graduation constitute such a sequence, and while each step implies certain behavioral changes and social recognition, the significance of each depends on the socio-economic status and the educational ambition of the individual. Ceremonies for adolescence have also been replaced by legal definitions of status roles, rights, privileges and responsibilities, It is during the nine years from the twelfth birthday to the twenty-first that the protective and restrictive aspects of child-hood and minor status are removed and adult privileges and responsibilities are granted. The twelve-year-old is no longer considered a child and has to pay full fare for train, airplane, theater and movie tickets. Basically, the individual at this age loses childhood privileges without gaining significant adult rights. At the age of sixteen the adolescent is granted certain adult rights which increase his social status by providing him with more freedom and choices. He now can obtain a driver's license; he can leave public schools; and he can work without the restrictions of child labor laws. At the age of eighteen the law provides adult responsibilities as well as rights; the young man can now be a soldier, but he also can marry without parental permission. At the age of twenty-one the individual obtains his full legal rights as an adult. He now can vote, he can buy liquor, he can enter into financial contracts, and he is entitled to run for public office. No additional basic rights are acquired as a function of age alter majority status has been attained. None of these legal provisions determine at what point adulthood has been reached but they do point tO the prolonged period of adolescence.

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单选题The first electronic computers were

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}} Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The idea of humanoid robots is not new, of course. They have been part of the imaginative landscape ever since Karl Capek, a Czech writer, first dreamed them up for his 1921 play "Rossum's Universal Robots". (The word "robot" comes from the Czech word for drudgery, robota. )Since then, Hollywood has produced countless variations on the theme, from the sultry False Maria in Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis" to the wittering C-3PO in "Star Wars" and the ruthless assassin of "Terminator". Humanoid robots have walked into our collective subconscious, colouring our views of the future. But now Japan's industrial giants are spending billions of yen to make such robots a reality. Their new humanoids represent impressive feats of engineering: when Honda introduced Asimo, a four-foot robot that had been in development for some 15 years, it walked so fluidly that its white, articulated exterior seemed to conceal a human. Honda continues to make the machine faster, friendlier and more agile. Last October, when Asimo was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh, it walked on to the stage and accepted its own plaque. At two and a half feet tall, Sony's QRIO is smaller and more toy-like than Asimo. It walks, understands a small number of voice commands, and can navigate on its own. If it falls over, it gets up and resumes where it left off. It can even connect wirelessly to the internet and broadcast what its camera eyes can see. In 2003, Sony demonstrated an upgraded QRIO that could run. Honda responded last December with a version of Asimo that runs at twice the speed. In 2004, Toyota joined the fray with its own family of robots, called Partner, one of which is a four-foot humanoid that plays the trumpet. Its fingers work the instrument's valves, and it has mechanical lungs and artificial lips. Toyota hopes to offer a commercial version of the robot by 2010. This month, 50 Partner robots will act as guides at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Despite their sudden proliferation, however, humanoids are still a mechanical minority. Most of the world's robots are faceless, footless and mute. They are bolted to the floors of factories, stamping out car parts or welding pieces of metal, machines making more machines. According to the United Nations, business orders for industrial robots jumped 18% in the first half of 2004. They may soon be outnumbered by domestic robots, such as self-navigating vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and window washers, which are selling fast. But neither industrial nor domestic robots are humanoid.

单选题According to the passage, there are a growing number of aged people relocating their homes because

单选题Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Most worthwhile careers require some kind of specialized training. Ideally, therefore, the choice of an 1 should be made even before the choice of a curriculum in high school. Actually, 2 , most people make several job choices during their working lives, 3 because of economic and industrial changes and partly to improve 4 positions. The "one perfect job" does not exist. Young people should 5 enter into a broad flexible training program that will 6 them for a field of work rather than for a single 7 . Unfortunately many young people have to make career plans 8 benefit of help from a competent vocational counselor or psychologist. Knowing 9 about the occupational world, or themselves for that matter, then choose their lifework on a hit-or-miss 10 . Some drift from job to job. Others 11 to work in which they are unhappy or for which they are not fitted. One common mistake is choosing an occupation for 12 real or imagined prestige. Too many high-school students—or their parents for them—choose the professional field, 13 both the relatively small proportion of workers in the professions and the extremely high educational and personal 14 . The imagined or real prestige of a profession or a "white-collar" job is 15 good reason for choosing it as lifework. 16 , these occupations are not always well paid. Since a large proportion of jobs are in mechanical and manual work, the 17 of young people should give serious 18 to these fields. Before making an occupational choice, a person should have a general idea of what he wants 19 life and how hard he is willing to work to get it. Some people desire social prestige, others intellectual satisfaction. Some want security, others are willing to take 20 for financial gain. Each occupational choice has its demands as well as its rewards.

单选题Learning How to Make Rain The idea of rainmaking is almost as old as man, but it was not until 1946 that man succeeded in making rain. In ancient times, rainmakers had claimed to bring rain by many methods: dancing, singing, killing various kinds of living creatures including humans) and blowing a stream of water into the air from a kind of pipe. During World War Ⅱ, Dr Irving Langmuir, a scientist, was hired by the General Electric Company to study how and why ice forms on the wings of airplanes. He and a young assistant named Schaefer went to a mountain in the State of Hampshire, where snowstorms are common and cold winds blow. While in New Hampshire, Langmuir and Schaefer were surprised to learn that often the temperature of the clouds surrounding them was far below the freezing point, and yet ice did not form in the clouds. After the war, Schaefer experimented with a machine that created cold, moist air similar to the air found in clouds. To imitate the moist air of a cloud, Schaefer would breathe into the machines. Then he would drop into the freezer a bit of powder, sugar or some other substances. For weeks and months he tried everything he could imagine. Nothing happened. No crystals of ice were formed. None of the substances would serve as the center of snow crystals or raindrops. One July morning, Schaefer was dropping in bits of various substances and watching the unsuccessful results. Finally, a friend suggested that they go to eat lunch, and Schaefer gladly went with him. As usual, he left the cover of the freezer up, since cold air sinks and would not escape from the box. Returning from lunch, Schaefer was beginning to perform his experiments again when he happened to look at the temperature of the freezer. It had risen to the point higher than that required for ice crystals to remain solid. The warm summer weather had arrived without his noticing it. He would have to be more careful in the future. There were two choices now. He could close the cover and wait for the freezer to lower the air temperature, or he could make the process occur faster by adding dry ice, a gas in solid form that is very cold. He chose the latter plan. He decided to try a container of dry ice. As he dropped the steaming while dry ice into the freezer, he happened to breathe out a large amount of air. And there, before his eyes, it happened! In the ray of light shining into the freezer, he saw tiny pieces of something in his breath. He knew immediately that they were ice crystals. Then he realized what had happened! He had made ice crystals, not by adding centers to the moisture but by cooling the breath so much that the liquid had to form crystals. Schaefer called to his helpers to come and watch. Then he began to blow his breath into the freezer and drop large pieces of dry ice through it to create crystals which became a tiny snowstorm falling slowly to the floor of his laboratory. If he could make snow in a freezer, he thought, why couldn"t he do so in a real cloud? He decided to try it in an airplane with a machine to blow dry ice out into the clouds. On a cold day in November, Schaefer and Langmuir saw clouds in the sky, and Schaefer climbed into the airplane. He realized that he would have to fly some distance before finding the right kind of cloud—a big gray one that must be filled with moisture. Seeing one, Schaefer told the pilot to fly above the cloud. At the proper time, he started the machine, and dry ice began to fall from the air plane into the cloud below. When half the load of dry ice was gone, the motor stopped because it had become too cold. Schaefer had to think quickly. He merely threw the remaining dry ice out of the window of the plane and into the cloud below. On the ground, Dr Langmuir watched excitedly and saw snow falling from the bottom of the cloud. When Schaefer returned to the ground, blue with cold, Langmuir ran to him, shouting, "You have made a history!" And indeed he had. Almost as soon as the news of his accomplishment was sent across the United States and around the world, other rainmakers were throwing dry ice into clouds, or "seeding the clouds" as it was called. When Schaefer discovered that ice crystals could be formed, he stopped searching for such materials. But another young worker at General Electric, Bernard Vonnegut, had become interested in the problem. Vonnegut began looking through a chemistry book for some chemical compound that might have the right size and shape to form crystals around it. He found what he was looking for. It was a compound called silver iodide. He got some silver iodide and developed a way of burning it to produce tiny particles that would separate in the air and form snow—he hoped. Finally he shot the material up into the air and waited for the storm. Nothing happened. He couldn"t understand why. The compound ought to form centers for crystals. He asked a scientist to examine the chemicals he had used. Here was the trouble. The silver iodide he had used was not pure. He got more of the material, performed his experiment again, and there was the snow crystals! Today, scientific rainmakers generally use silver iodide, which can be sent into the air from the ground by means of a simple, inexpensive machine. This process is more satisfactory than the use of dry ice which can be destructive. Rainmaking has finally been accepted as a fact by formerly doubtful scientists everywhere.

单选题We______a farm if it doesn't rain tomorrow. [A] will visit [B] visit [C] have visited

单选题—Will you come to the net bars with me? —Sorry. My mother always tells me ______ there. A. not go B. not to go C. go D. to go