单选题What makes women blind to the deceptive nature of high heels?

单选题New Zealand is the world's largest exporters of [A] lamb. [B] expertise. [C] honey. [D] potatoes.

单选题Opinion polls are now beginning to show that, whoever is to blame and whatever happens from now on, high unemployment is probably here to stay. This means we shall have to make ways of sharing the available employment more widely. But we need to go further. We must ask some primary questions about the future of work. Would we continue to treat employment as the norm? Would we not rather encourage many other ways for self-respecting people to work? 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 neighborhood, as well as the factory and the office, as centers 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 may have to be reversed. This seems a daunting thought. But, in fact, it could provide 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 depend ent 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 transportation improved, first by rail and then by road, people commuted longer distances to their places of employment until, eventually, many people's work lost all connection with their home lives and the place in which they lived. Meanwhile, employment put women at a disadvantage. In pre-industrial time, men and women had shared the productive work of the household and village community. Now it became customary for the husband to go out to paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still as some this norm today and restrict more flexible sharing of work roles between the sexes. It was not only women whose work status suffered. As employment became the dominant form of work, young people and old people were excluded—a problem now, as more teenagers become frustrated at school and more retired people want to live active lives. All this may now have to change. The time has certainly come to switch some effort and resources away from the idealist goal of creating jobs for all, to the urgent practical task of helping many people to manage without full time jobs.

单选题 A Colt Radical, contemporary design in a stylish compact form—this describes the new Mitsubishi Colt. Not only is Colt fun to drive, it also excels in its combination of interior flexibility and roominess. Sitting on an advanced but compact platform with a long wheelbase, Colt offers excellent cabin space. The people who designed the Colt are massively safety conscious. Colt models come generously equipped with driver and passenger front airbags, ABS anti-lock brakes with EBD electronic brake force distribution, and an emergency stop signal system. The Colt's Auto Stop the boot space holds up to 882 liters of luggage and there are trays and storage compartments throughout the car. It's perfect for a family-sized trip. Mitsubishi has tried to make everyone in the family equal, too. So, the seats in the second row can recline and slide backwards and forwards. This should end the squabbles about seating arrangements. When you want to get away from it all, with an easy switch from the two to the four-wheel drive mode you can explore the possibilities of what is a genuine off-road vehicle, ideal for families who love adventures. It will give you and your passengers all of the usual big-car protection and more (it's engineered to achieve the absolute maximum Euro-NCAP 5-stars); it's been designed to do it in such a way as to minimize injury to pedestrians or damage to smaller vehicles. The height of the Outlander makes it easy to look ahead, which you tend to do when you have a family. Impressively, then, the 2.0 DI-D has the lowest CO2 emissions of any seven seat 4×4 and achieves over 40 mpg.

单选题{{I}} You will hear three dialogues or monologues. Before listening to each one. You will have time to read the questions related to it. While listening, answer each question by choosing A, B, C or D. After listening, you will have time to check your answer. You will hear each piece once only.{{/I}}

单选题{{B}}Text 2{{/B}} Text 2 The Village Green in New Milford, Connecticut, is a snapshot of New England charm：a carefully manicured lawn flanded by scrupulously maintained colonial homes. Babysitters dandle kids in the wooden gazebo, waiting for commuter parents to return from New York. On a lazy afternoon last week Caroline Nicholas, 16, had nothing more pressing to do than drink in the early-summer sunshine and discuss the recent events in town. “I don't think a lot of older people knew there were unhappy kids in New Milford, ”she said, “I could see it coming. ” In a five-day period in early June eight girls were brought to New Milford Hospital after what hospital officials call suicidal gestures. The girls, all between 12 and 17, tried a variety of measures, including heavy doses of alcohol. over-the-counter medicines and cuts or scratches to their wrists. None was successful, and most didn't require hospitalization；but at least two attempts, according to the hospital, could have been vital. Their reasons seemed as mundane as the other happen-stances of suburban life. “I was just sick of it all, ”one told a reporter, “Everything in life. ”Most alarming, emergency-room doctor Frederick Lohse told a local reporter that several girls said they were part of a suicide pact. The hospital later backed away from this remark. But coming in the wake of at least sixteen suicide attempts over the previous few months．this sudden cluster—along with the influx of media—has set this well-groomed suburb of 23,000 on edge. At a town meeting last Wednesday night, Dr Simon Sobo, chief of psychiatry at the hospital, told more than 200 parents and kids, “We're talking about a crisis that has really gotten out of hand. ”Later he added,“There have been more suicide attempts this spring than I have seen in the 13 years I have been here. ” Sobo said that the girls he treated didn't have serious problems at home or school. “Many of these were popular kids, ”he said, “They got plenty of love, but beneath the reassuring signs, a swath of teens here are not making it. ”Some say that drugs, both pot and‘real drugs’, are commonplace. Kids have shown up with LIFE SUCKS and LONG LIVE DEATH penned on their arms. A few girls casually display scars on their arms where they cut themselves. “You'd be surprised how many kids try suicide, ”said one girl, 17. “You don't want to put pain on other people; you put it on yourself. ”She said she used to cut herself“just to release the pain”. Emily, 15, a friend of three of the girls treated in, June, said one was having family problems, one was“upset that day”and the third was“just upset with everything else going on”. She said they weren't really trying to kill themselves—they just needed concern. As Sobo noted, “What's going on in New Milford is not unique to New Milford. ”The same underlying culture of despair could be found in any town. But teen suicide, he added, can be a“contagion”. Right now New Milford has the bug-and has it bad.

单选题The police set a ______ to catch the thieves.

单选题Gene therapy and gene based drugs are two ways we could benefit from our growing mastery of genetic science. But there will be others as well. Here is one of the remarkable therapies on the cutting edge of genetic research that could make their way into mainstream medicine in the coming years. While it's true that just about every cell in the body has the instructions to make a complete human, most of those instructions are inactivated, and with good reason: the last thing you want for your brain cells is to start churning out stomach acid or your nose to turn into a kidney. The only time cells truly have the potential to turn into any and all body parts is very early in a pregnancy, when so-called stem cells haven't begun to specialize. Yet this untapped potential could be a terrific boon to medicine. Most diseases involve the death of healthy cells—brain cells in Alzheimer's, cardiac cells in heart disease, pancreatic cells in diabetes, to name a few; if doctors could isolate stem cells, then direct their growth, they might be able to furnish patients with healthy replacement tissue. It was incredibly difficult, but last fall scientists at the University of Wisconsin managed to isolate stem cells and get them to grow into neural, gut, muscle and bone cells. The process still can't be controlled, and may have unforeseen limitations; but if efforts to understand and master stem cell development prove successful, doctors will have a therapeutic tool of incredible power. The same applies to cloning, which is really just the other side of the coin. True cloning, as first shown with the sheep Dolly two years ago, involves taking a developed cell and reactivating the genome within, resetting its developmental instructions to a pristine state. Once that happens, the rejuvenated cell can develop into a full-fledged animal, genetically identical to its parent. For agriculture, in which purely physical characteristics like milk production in a cow or low fat in a hog have real market value, biological carbon copies could become routine within a few years. This past year scientists have done for mice and cows what lan Wilmut did for Dolly, and other creatures are bound to join the cloned menagerie in the coming year. Human cloning, on the other hand, may be technically feasible but legally and emotionally more difficult. Still, one day it will happen. The ability to reset body cells to a pristine, undeveloped state could give doctors exactly the same advantages they would get from stem cells: the potential to make healthy body tissues of all sorts, and thus to cure disease. That could prove to be a true "miracle cure".

单选题 You will hear 3 conversations or talks and you must answer the questions by choosing A, B, C or D. You will hear the recording ONLYONCE. Questions 11—14 are based on the following talk.

单选题WhichofthefollowingsustainabilityprogramsisNOTmentionedinWal-Mart'sreport?A.Organicfoodguarantee.B.Environmentalprograms.C.Economicdevelopment.D.Employeehealthcare.

单选题

单选题 Text 2 A very important world problem — in fact, I think it may be the most important of all the great world problems which face us at the present time — is the rapidly increasing pressure of population on the land. The population of the world today is about 4,000,000,000. That is an enormous number, yet it is known quite accurately, because there are very few parts of the world which have not carried out a modem census. The important thing is not so much the actual population of twenty million — about six months' increase in world population. Take Australia for example, there are ten million people in Australia. So it takes the world about three months to add to itself a population which peoples that vast country. Let us take our own crowded country, England and Wales — forty-five to fifty million people. This is just about a year's supply. By this time tomorrow, and every day, there will be added to the earth about 120,000 extra people — just about the population of the city of York. I am not talking about birth rate. This is net increase. To give you some idea of birth rate, look at the second hand of your watch. Every second, three babies are born somewhere in the world. Another baby! Another baby! You cannot speak quickly enough to keep up with the birth rate. This enormous increase of population will create immense problems. By AD2000, unless something terrible happens, there will be as many as 7,000,000,000 people on the surface of the Earth! So this is a problem which you are going to see in your lifetime.

单选题The famous short story The Fall of the House of Usher was written by [A] Charles Dickens. [B] Edgar Allan Poe. [C] Washington Irving. [D] Thomas More.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} The steep rise in breast cancer over the past fifty years has been blamed on a variety of causes--from late childbearing to pesticides. Now Belgian scientists have evidence that it may be caused by teenagers drinking fizzy soft drinks instead of weak beer. At a meeting in Brussels last week, Jack Janssens of the Limburg University Centre in Diepenbeek described experiments in which teenagers fasted for 12 hours then drank a 330-millilitre bottle of a popular fizzy drink--he won't divulge the brand--or a bottle of "table beer", a drink containing 1.1 per cent alcohol that was popular in Belgium before soft drinks came on the market. The beer is still served in Belgian hospitals, especially to new mothers. The focus of the study was insulin, the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. As expected, insulin levels shot up after teenagers drank the sugar-laden soft drinks, but not after the beer, which although it contains complex carbohydrates has few simple sugars. "What was really a new observation," says Janssens, "was that the fatter the teenager was, the more the insulin went up." The insulin levels did not depend on the level of blood sugar or the total weight of an individual, just obesity. Janssens thinks insulin is a key factor in the development of the human breast, because it influences levels of several other hormones, including growth factor, sex steroids and their inhibitory binding proteins. Inappropriate secretion of insulin at a critical phase of development, he says, "might induce lesions in the breast cells leading to breast cancer later in life". He believes his research suggests a vicious circle in which "soft drinks and high caloric foods in pubertal children brings accumulation of body fat and in turn increases the response of insulin". This could lead to loss of sensitivity to insulin, which may have a continuing effect on breast cells. "A history of weight gain in early adult life is associated with an increased breast cancer risk in Western women," says Janssens. Insulin may be the link. In males, a similar effect may lead to testicular or prostate cancer. As for the beer, Janssens couldn't detect any alcohol in the teenagers' blood, which shows that they metabolise it efficiently, he says. While insulin may play a role in cancer, he says more epidemiological research is required before blaming soft drinks. Denise Baxter of Brewing Research International in Nuffield, Surrey, also told the meeting that as well as vitamin B, beer contains other anti-cancer nutrients, including antioxidants. The meeting was organised by the Confederation of European Brewers.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}} Read the following texts and answer the questions which accompany them by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. Text 1 A new era is upon us. Call it what you will: the service economy, the information age, the knowledge society. It all translates to a fundamental change in the way we work. Already we're partly there. The percentage of people who earn their living by making things has fallen dramatically in the Western world. Today the majority of jobs in America, Europe and Japan (two thirds or more in many of these countries) are in the service industry, and the number is on the rise. More women are in the work force than ever before. There are more part-time jobs. More people are self-employed. But the breadth of the economic transformation can't be measured by numbers alone, because it is also giving rise to a radical new way of thinking about the nature of work itself. Long-held notions about jobs and careers, the skills needed to succeed, even the relation between individuals and employers — all these are being challenged. We have only to look behind us to get some sense of what may lie ahead. No one looking ahead 20 years possibly could have foreseen the ways in which a single invention, the chip, would transform our world thanks to its applications in personal computers, digital communications and factory robots. Tomorrow's achievements in biotechnology, artificial intelligence or even some still unimagined technology could produce a similar wave of dramatic changes. But one thing is certain: information and knowledge will become even more vital, and the people who possess it, whether they work in manufacturing or services, will have the advantage and produce the wealth. Computer knowledge will become as basic a requirement as the ability to read and write. The ability to solve problems by applying information instead of performing routine tasks will be valued above all else. If you cast your mind ahead 10 years, information services will be predominant. It will be the way you do your job.

单选题 Questions 14 to 16 are based on a talk introducing American adult education programs. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 14 to 16.

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

单选题WhereisthesocializingdonetraditionallyfortheUKyoungpeople?A.MSNSpaces.B.Pubs&clubs.C.BeboSpaces.D.MySpace.

单选题Whatwouldhappenifyoumisuseyoureyes?A.Youmayfeeluncomfortableinvariousways.B.Youmayhavetowearglasses.C.Youcanletyoureyesrestforawhile.D.Youcangoandseeadoctor.,