单选题Today TV audiences all over the world are accustomed to the sight of American astronauts in tip-top condition, with fair hair, crew-cuts, good teeth, an uncomplicated sense of humour and a severely limited non-technical vocabulary. What marks out an astronaut from his earthbound fellow human beings is something of a difficult problem. Should you wish to interview him, you must apply beforehand, and you must be prepared for a longish wait, even it your application meets with success. It is, in any case, out of the question to interview an astronaut about his family life or personal activities, Because all the astronauts have contracts with an American magazine under conditions forbidding any unauthorized disclosures about their private lives. Certain obvious qualities are needed. Anyone who would be a spaceman must be in perfect health, must have powers of concentration (since work inside a spacecraft is exceptionally demanding) and must have considerable courage. Again, space-work calls for dedication. Courage and dedication are particularly essential. In the well-known case of the Challenger seven crew members lost their lives in space because of the faulty equipment in the shuttle. Another must be outstanding scientific expertise. It goes without saying that they all have to have professional aeronautical qualifications and experience. A striking feature of the astronauts is their ages. For the younger man, in his twenties, say, space is out. Only one of the fifty men working for NASA in 1970 was under 30. The oldest astronaut to date is Alan Shepard, America's first man in space, who, at nearly fifty, was also the man who captained Apollo 13. The average age is the late thirties. The crew members of Apollo 11 were all born well before the Second World War. In 1986 the Challenger astronauts had an average age of 39. The range was from 35 to 46. In a society where marital continuity is not always exhibited, the astronauts' record in this respect hits you in the eye. Of all the married men in NASA group, only two or three are divorced from their wives. Mind you, it is hard to tell whether something in the basic character of an astronaut encourages fidelity or whether the selection process demands that a candidate should be happily married. The NASA astronauts live in unattractive small communities dotted here and there around the base in Texas. You would expect them to find their friends from among their professional associates, But this is not the case. Rather, they prefer to make friends with the normal folk in their districts. Astronauts, like everybody else, must get fed up with talking shop all the time, and whereas they are indeed an elite, their daily life outside work should be as normal as possible, if only for the sake of their families. As for the astronauts' political leanings, they seem to be towards the right. This may be due to the fact that a large proportion of the astronauts have a military background. On the other hand, it could be just coincidence.

单选题What did the writer do when he walked away from the dry-cleaning store？

单选题Questions 14 to 16 are based on the following talk about the new marketing drive of Microsoft Corp. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with nonsequiturs, shattering your concentration with "Oh, look, it's raining," and "You see a lot of trees here". Travelling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican butter cups tend to say things like "Where is the rest of your team?" ). I think of evening in the hotel room in the strange city. My diary has been brought up to date; I hanker for company; what do I do? I don't know anyone here, so I go out and walk and discover the three streets of the town and rather envy the strolling couples and the people with children. The museums and churches are closed, and toward midnight the streets are empty. If I am mugged, I will have to apologize as politely as possible: "I am sorry, sir, but I have nothing valuable on my person." Is there a surer way of enraging a thief and driving him to violence? It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel selfconscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery, not diversion, that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision, which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling object that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. "Have a nice time," people said to me at my send-off at South Station, Medford. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be mine on that train to Limon.

单选题WhydoesMr.Kellyraisetherentby10%?

单选题England"s binge-drinking habit is one of the most entrenched in Europe—even Roman invaders wrote about it with horror. Many feared that the habit would worsen after the relaxation of licensing hours last November. Doctors, academics and newspapers were joined in opposition by the police and judges, who warned that the reforms were "close to lunacy". The government disagreed and abolished a restrictive regime first imposed during the First World War by David Lloyd George, the prime minister, who wanted to prevent munitions workers from getting too drunk. While ministers never denied that Britons had an unhealthy attitude to liquor, they argued that much of the crime and disorder that blighted city streets at night was caused by hordes of drunkards rolling out of pubs and clubs at the same time and fighting for the same taxi home. They cited the wartime experience in Australia, where an early closing time had led to a phenomenon dubbed the "six o"clock"s swill", in which people drank themselves silly against the clock. The hope was that, once hours were relaxed, Britons would adopt more civilised, continental habits, sipping delicately at glasses of Chablis rather than downing ten pints. Were the optimists or the pessimists right? Since the law was changed, around two-thirds of licensed premises have extended their opening times, most by an hour or so. (Fewer than 1 percent were granted a 24-hour licence.) That smoothed the 11p. m. and 2 a. m. chuck-out peaks and filled in some of the troughs. Local authorities in several large, lively cities, including Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester, report that the streets are no more disorderly than before. One popular drinkers" street in Birmingham has seen a dramatic drop in crime (although that may also be because businesses, fearing the worst, paid for street wardens). In London, most strikingly, there has not been a single month since the drinking laws were relaxed when more violent crimes were recorded than in the same month a year earlier. That is also true in Westminster, where many of the capital"s pubs and clubs are clustered. Overall levels of violence in the borough have fallen by 12 percent in the ten months since November 2005, compared with the same period a year before. The police remain cautious about such positive signs, saying it is still too early to tell what effect liberalisation will have on crime. They point out that local forces have diverted time and money to police late-night drinking, and have been given extra cash by the government. That will run out on Christmas Eve, at which point things may become trickier. In the meantime, pessimists are marshalling new, more ambitious arguments. Martin Plant of the University of the West of England maintains that freer drinking can lead to long-term problems that are not immediately apparent. Iceland"s capital, Reykjavik, softened drinking laws seven years ago. While policing became easier, more drunkards pitched up at hospital and drink-driving rates soared.

单选题{{I}} Questions 17 to 20 are based on the following talk about good manner. You now have 20 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.{{/I}}

单选题Questions 1--6 Choose the best answer.

单选题 {{B}} Questions 14～16 are based on the following talk. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14～16.{{/B}}

单选题What does MacDonald warn people when they intend to buy life insurance products?

单选题{{B}}{{I}}Questions 11～13 are based on the following conversation. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 11～13.{{/I}}{{/B}}

单选题Whydidthewomangotoseeherdoctor?A.Shewascomingdownwithsomething.B.Shewantedsomeadviceonprevention.C.Shefeltalittleembarrassed.D.Shewentthereforamedicalcheckup.

单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} Statistically, each of these new changes in law-enforcement has made some difference to the picture. Yet it seems probably that the factors that have really brought the crime rates down have little to do with policemen or politicians, and more to do with cycles that are beyond their control. The first of these is demographic. The fall in the crime rate has coincided with fall in the number of young men between the ages of 15 and 21, the peak age for criminal activity in any society, including America. In the same way, the rise in the crime rate that started in the early 1960s coincided with the teenage years of the baby-boomers. As the boomer generation matured, married, found jobs and shoulder mortgages, so the crime rate fell. This encouraging trend was quickly overshadowed, starting in the mid-1980s, by a new swarm of teenagers caught up in a new sort of depravity: the craze for crack cocaine. Crack brought with it much higher levels of violence and, in particular, soaring rates of handgun murders by people less than 25 years old. Yet the terror became too much, and the young began to leave crack alone. Within a few years, at least in most big cities, the drug market had stabilized and settled, even moving indoors; the tuff-wars were over, and crack itself had become passe. Studies of Brooklyn by Richard Curtis, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, show the clear connection; around 1992, many young bloods decided to drop the dangerous life of the street in favor of steady jobs. In direct consequence, the local crime rate fell. Murder rates among Americans older than 25 had already been declining since 1980. Here, according to Alfred Blumstein, a professor of criminology at Carnegie-Mellon University, there may be even longer term social factors involved. In an age of easy divorce and more casual relationships, men and women are less likely to murder their partners: between 1976 and 1996, such murders fell by 40%. The decline in alcohol consumption, too, means that fewer bar-room brawls leave a litter of corpses on a Friday night. It seems that changing social trends also sometimes lie behind the fall in property crime. Burglars tend not to steal television sets now because almost everyone has one; their value on the street has plummeted, At the same time, the fact that people stay in watching their sets, rather than going out, deters would-be burglars. Extra garages are standard in the suburbs, to safeguard extra cars; credit cards mean that shoppers carry less cash in their pockets; people working from home, by means of computers, can keep a closer watch over their streets. Lastly, people are going to greater lengths to protect themselves and their property than they did in the past. This is partly because of the huge fear of crime that preceded the present decline, and partly because even with recent increases in the number of policemen--the ratio of police to violent crimes reported is still way below what it was in the 1960s.

单选题Questions 1～3 are based on the following talk; listen and choose the best answer.

单选题Questions 4～6 are based on the following talk, listen and choose the best answer.

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单选题The history of responses to the work of the artist Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) suggests that widespread appreciation by critics is a relatively recent phenomenon. Writing in 1550, Vasari expressed an unease with Botticelli's work, admitting that the artist fitted awkwardly into his evolutionary scheme of the history of art. Over the next two centuries, academic art historians defamed Botticelli in favor of his fellows Florentine. Michelangelo. Even when anti-academic art historians of the early nineteenth century rejected many of the standards of evaluation adopted by their predecessors, Botticelli'work remained outside of accepted taste, pleasing neither amateur observers nor connoisseurs. (Many of his best paintings, however, remained hidden away in obscure churches and private homes. ) The primary reason for Botticelli's unpopularity is not difficult to understand：most observers, up until the mid-nineteenth century, did not consider him to be noteworthy, because his work, for the most part. did not seem to these observers to exhibit the traditional characteristics of the fifteenth-century Florentine art. For example. Botticelli rarely employed the technique of strict perspective and, unlike Michelangelo, never used chiaroscuro. Another reason for Botticelli's unpopularity may have been that his attitude toward the style of classical art was very different from that of his contemporaries. Although he was thoroughly exposed to classical art. he showed little interest in borrowing from the classical style. Indeed, it is paradoxical that a painter of large-scale classical subjects adopted a style that was only slightly similar to that of classical art. In any case, when viewers began to examine more closely the relationship of Botticelli's work to the tradition of the fifteenth century Florentine art, his reputation began to grow. Analyses and assessments of Botticelli made between 1850 and 1870 by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as well as by the writer Pater(although he. unfortunately, based his assessment on an incorrect analysis of Botticelli's personality), inspired a new appreciation of Botticelli throughout the English-speaking world. Yet Botticelli's work, especially the Sistine frescoes. did not generate worldwide attention until it was finally subjected to 4 comprehensive and scrupulous analysis by Home in 1908. Home rightly demonstrated that the frescoes shared important features with paintings by other fifteenth-century Florentines—features such as skillful representation of anatomical proportions, and of the human figure in motion. However, Home argued that Botticelli did not treat these qualities as ends in themselves—rather. that he emphasized clear depletion of a story, a unique achievement and one that made the traditional Florentine qualities 1ess central. Because of Home's emphasis crucial to any study of art, the twentieth century has come to appreciate Botticelli's achievements.

单选题Whatdoestheofficerhavetodoasabeatofficer?A.Intervenewithbeatings.B.Dotheshiftwork.C.Driveinarain.D.Beatthepolicestation24hours.