单选题The word "stigmatize" in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to______.

单选题{{I}} You will hear 10 short dialogues. For each dialogue, there is one question and four possible answers. Choose the correct answer--A, B, C or D, and mark it in your test booklet. You will have 15 seconds to answer the question and you will hear each dialogue ONLY ONCE.Now look at Question 1.{{/I}}

单选题{{B}}Text 4{{/B}} When they were children, Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby accidentally locked her in a suitcase. She tried so hard to get out of the suitcase that she jumped up and down and screamed. The scene predicted, horribly, how she would end, though by that stage she had neither walked nor talked for more than 15 years. By the time she finally died on March 31st, her body had become a box out of which she could not escape. More than that, it had become a box out of which the United States government, Congress, the president, the governor of Florida and an army of evangelical protestors and bloggers would not let her escape. Her life, whatever its quality, became the property not merely of her husband (who had the legal right to speak for her) and her parents (who had brought her up), but of the courts, the state, and thousands of self-appointed medical and psychological experts across the country. The chief difference between her case and those of Karen Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, much earlier victims of Persistent Vegetative State (PVS), was the existence of the internet. When posted videotapes showed Mrs Schiavo apparently smiling and communicating with those around her, doctors called these mere reflex activity, but to the layman they seemed to reveal a human being who should not be killed. On March 20th, a CAT scan of Mrs Schiavo's brain — the grey matter of the cerebral cortex more or less gone, replaced by cerebrospinal fluid — was posted on a blog. By March 29th, it had brought 390 passionate and warring responses. All this outside interference could only exacerbate the real, cruel dilemmas of the case. After a heart attack in February 1990, when she was 26, Mrs Schiavo's brain was deprived of oxygen for five minutes and irreparably damaged. For a while, her family hoped she might be rehabilitated. Her husband Michael bought her new clothes and wheeled her round art galleries, in case her brain could respond. By 1993, he was sure it could not, and when she caught an infection he did not want her treated. Her parents disagreed, and claimed she could recover. From that point the family split, and litigation started. Each side, backed by legions of supporters, accused the other of money-grubbing and bad faith. A Florida court twice ordered Mrs Schiavo's feeding tube to be removed and Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, overruled it. The final removal of the tube, on March 18th, was followed by an extraordinary scene, in the early hours of March 21st, when George Bush signed into law a bill allowing Mrs Schiavo's parents to appeal yet again to a federal court. But by then the courts, and two-thirds of Americans, thought that enough was enough. On March 24th the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

单选题Everyone knows that taxation is necessary in a modern state: (21) it, it would not be possible to pay the soldiers and policemen who protect us; (22) the workers in government offices who (23) our health, our food, our water, and all (24) things that we can not do for ourselves. By (25) of taxation, we pay for things that we need as (26) as we need somewhere to live and something to eat. In most countries, a direct tax on persons, (27) is called income tax, exists. It is arranged in such a way that the poorest people pay (28) , and the percentage of tax grows greater as the taxpayer's (29) grows. In England, for example, the tax on the (30) people goes up as high as ninety-five percent! But countries with direct taxation nearly always have (31) taxation too. Many things imported into the country have to pay taxes or"duties". (32) , it is the men and women who buy the imported things in the shops who really (33) pay the duties, in the (34) of higher prices. In some countries, too, there is a tax (35) things sold in the shops. If the most necessary things are taxed, a lot of money is collected, but the poor people suffer (36) . If unnecessary things like jewels and fur coats are taxed, (37) is obtained, but the tax is fairer, as the (38) pay it. Probably this last kind of indirect tax, (39) with a direct on incomes which is low for the poor and high for the rich, is (40) arrangement.

单选题When mentioning "the $4 million to $10 million range" in Paragraph 3, the author is talking about ______.

单选题The writer of the passage wants us to know ______.

单选题 {{I}}Questions 11-13 are based on the following passage. You now have 15 seconds to read questions 11-13.{{/I}}

单选题 Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, beliefs, and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us. To the professional anthropologist, there is no intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy among languages. People once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage, undeveloped forms ofspeech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of "backward" languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind our Western languages not in their sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflect the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to be noted: 1. All languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2. The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in "backward" languages, while different from ours, are often surprisingly numerous and complicated. A Western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of remoteness ("this" and "that"); some languages of the American Indians distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or to the person addressed, or removed .from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future. This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the anthropologist that all cultures are to be viewed independently and without ideas of rank or hierarchy.

单选题Howmanypeoplebecomeinfectedwithmalariaeachyear?A.Over3million.B.Over7million.C.Over30million.D.Over70million.

单选题 Questions 14--16 are based on the following monologue about Marco Polo's life as a traveller. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14--16.

单选题Before the At Home-Excite deal, Excite had attempted a deal with ______.

单选题 American humor and American popular heroes were born together. The first popular heroes of the new nation were comic heroes, and the first popular humor of the new nation was the antics of its hero-clowns. The heroic and the comic were combined in novel American proportions in popular literature. The heroic themes are obvious enough and not much different from those in the legends of other times and places: Achilles, Beowulf, Siegfried, Roland, and King Arthur. The American Davy Crockett legends repeat the familiar pattern of the old world heroic story: the pre-eminence of a mighty hero whose fame in myth has a tenuous basis in fact; the remarkable birth and precocious strength of the hero; single combats in which he distinguished himself against antagonists, both man and beast; vows and boasts; pride of the hero in his weapons, his dog, and his woman. Davy Crockett conquered man and beast with a swaggering nonchalance. He overcame animals by force of body and will. He killed four wolves at the age of six. He hugged a bear to death; he killed a rattlesnake with his teeth. He mastered the forces of nature. Crockett's most famous natural exploit was saving the earth on the coldest day in history. First, he climbed a mountain to determine the trouble. Then he rescued all creation by squeezing bear-grease on the earth's frozen axis and over the sun's icy face. He whistled, "push along, keep moving!" The earth gave a grunt and began moving. Neither the fearlessness nor the bold huntsman's prowess was peculiarly American. Far more distinctive was the comic quality, all heroes are heroic; few are also clowns. What made the American popular hero heroic also made him comic. Maybe, said Crockett, you'll laugh at me, and not at my book. The ambiguity of American life and the vagueness which laid the continent open to adventure, which made the land a rich storehouse of the unexpected, which kept vocabulary ungoverned and the language fluid—this same ambiguity suffused both the Crockett legends were never quite certain whether to laugh or to applaud, or whether what they saw and heard was wonderful, awful, or ridiculous.

单选题Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage. It is difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers. Yet a considerable number of the most significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century consisted in large part of newspaper reviews. To read such books today is to marvel at the fact that their learned contents were once deemed suitable for publication in general-circulation dailies. We are even farther removed from the unfocused newspaper reviews published in England between the turn of the 20th century and the eve of World War Ⅱ, at a time when newsprint was dirt-cheap and stylish arts criticism was considered an ornament to the publications in which it appeared. In those far-off days, it was taken for granted that the critics of major papers would write in detail and at length about the events they covered. Theirs was a serious business, and even those reviewers who wore their learning lightly, like George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman, could be trusted to know what they were about. These men believed in journalism as a calling, and were proud to be published in the daily press. "So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in journalism, " Newman wrote, "that I am tempted to define 'journalism' as 'a term of contempt applied by writers who are not read to writers who are. '" Unfortunately, these critics are virtually forgotten. Neville Cardus, who wrote for the Manchester Guardian from 1917 until shortly before his death in 1975, is now known solely as a writer of essays on the game of cricket. During his lifetime, though, he was also one of England's foremost classical-music critics, a stylist so widely admired that his Autobiography (1947) became a best-seller. He was knighted in 1967, the first music critic to be so honored. Yet only one of his books is now in print, and his vast body of writings on music is unknown save to specialists. Is there any chance that Cardus's criticism will enjoy a revival? The prospect seems remote. Journalistic tastes had changed long before his death, and postmodern readers have little use for the richly upholstered Vicwardian prose in which he specialized. Moreover, the amateur tradition in music criticism has been in headlong retreat.

单选题The author gives the two examples in Paragraphs 2 and 3 to show ______.

单选题The writer mentioned the case of the United States to justify the policy of______.