单选题The passage provides information for answering all of the following questions EXCEPT______.

单选题Until men invented ways of staying underwater for more than a few minutes, the wonders of the world below the surface of the sea were almost unknown. The main problem, of course, lies in air. How could air be provided to swimmers below the surface of the sea? Pictures made about 2,900 years ago in Asia show men swimming under the surface with air bags tied to their bodies. A pipe from the bag carried air into the swimmer's mouth. But little progress was achieved in the invention of diving devices until about 1490, when the famous Italian painter, Leonardo da Vinci, designed a complete diving suit. In 1680, an Italian professor invented a large air bag with a glass window to be worn over the diver's head. To "clean" the air a breathing pipe went from the air bag, through another bag to remove moisture, and then again to the large air bag. The plan did not work, but it gave later inventors the idea of moving air around in diving devices. In 1819, a German, Augustus Siebe, developed a way of forcing air into the head-covering by a machine operated above the water. At last in 1837, he invented the "hard-hat suit" which was to be used for nearly a century. It had a metal covering for the head and an air pipe attached to a machine above the water. It also had small openings to remove unwanted air. But there were two dangers to the diver inside the "hard-hat suit". One was the sudden rise to the surface, caused by a too great supply of air. The other was the crushing of the body, caused by a sudden diving into deep water. The sudden rise to the surface could kill the diver; a sudden dive could force his body up into the helmet, which could also result in death. Gradually the "hard-hat suit" was improved so that the diver could be given a constant supply of air. The diver could then move around under the ocean without worrying about the air supply. During the 1940s diving underwater without a special suit became popular. Instead, divers used a breathing device and a small covering made of rubber and glass over parts of the face. To improve the swimmer's speed another new invention was used: a piece of rubber shaped like a giant foot, which was attached to each of the diver's own feet. The manufacture of rubber breathing pipes made it possible for divers to float on the surface of the water, observing the marine life underneath them. A special rubber suit enabled them to be in cold water for long periods, collecting specimens of animal and vegetable life that had never been obtained in the past. The most important advance, however, was the invention of a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, which is called a "scuba". Invented by two Frenchmen, Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan, the scuba consists of a mouthpiece joined to one or two tanks of compressed air which are attached to the diver's back. The scuba makes it possible for a diver-scientist to work 200 feet underwater or even deeper for several hours. As a result, scientists can now move around freely at great depths, learning about the wonders of the sea.

单选题Professor Meredith Thring, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Queen Mary College, London showed off his latest invention to the Press yesterday. It is a mechanical coal miner which, he claims, could solve Britain's energy problems within ten years. Not that he thinks the National Coal Board will be at all interested. "I have taken my previous ideas of mechanical mining to previous Chairmen of the Board but each time nothing has happened," he said. "The Board are not thinking enough about the future. My latest idea would put the cost of coal down and produce twice as much with the same labour force." Professor Thring finished making his mechanical coal miner only on Sunday night. He showed the wooden model yesterday at Queen Mary College. It is rather like a giant ant, with a headlight, two TV camera "eyes", and arms the same size and strength as human arms. This particular coal miner, however, would only be eighteen inches tall, which would enable it to mine much smaller areas of coal than those that can be mined by human beings. It would open up rich areas of coal in the Durham coal fields which have not been workable since the last century. "I would have thought the unions would be delighted with the mechanical coal miners," said Professor Thring. "We would be employing as many miners as at present, with all their skills, but they would all be working on the surface." The human miner would in fact sit at the controls above ground. He would put his .hands into "gloves" and work the metal hands of the coal miner as if they were his own. The mechanical miner could go down as deep as 10,000 feet, and would cost ￡10,000. "It will put the cost of coal down because the cost of the machines is going to be very low in relation to the present cost of supplying fresh air to mines," said Professor Thring. "There need to be no oxygen present, and this would mean there would be no risk of explosions." The Professor does his economic sums as follows. Britain needs each year as much energy as 350 million tons of coal would provide; and North Sea oil will only provide the same amount of energy as 150 million tons of coal for fifty years, while the cost of nuclear power is ten times greater than the cost of getting oil. "We can get ten times as much coal as North Sea oil. We could have 250 million tons a year—double the present amount—for 200 years at least, and solve the energy crisis. The mechanical coal miner could be developed and active within six or seven years." Could be, certainly! But Professor Thring knows very well how much luck he will need to succeed, which is why he gave the public display of his latest invention yesterday, to try to get opinion-makers on his side.

单选题 In recent years, there has been a steady assault on salt from the doctors: Salt is bad for you—regardless of your health. Politicians also got on board. "There is a direct relationship," US congressman Neal Smith noted, "Between the amount of sodium a person consumes and heart disease, circulatory disorders, stroke and even early death." Frightening, if true! But many doctors and medical researchers are now beginning to feel the salt scare has gone too far. "All this hue and cry about eating salt is unnecessary," Dr. Dnstan insists. "For most of us it probably doesn't make much difference how much salt we eat." Dustan's most recent short-term study of 150 people showed that those with normal blood pressure underwent no change at all when placed on an extremely low-salt diet, or later when salt was reintroduced. Of the hypertensive subjects, however, half of those on the low-salt diet did experience a drop in blood pressure, which returned to its previous level when salt was reintroduced. "An adequate to somewhat excessive salt intake has probably saved many more lives than it has cost in the general population," notes Dr. John H. Laragh." So a recommendation that the whole population should avoid salt makes no sense." Medical experts agree that everyone should practice reasonable "moderation" in salt consumption. For an average person, a moderate amount might run from four to ten grams a day, or roughly 1/2 to 1/3 of a teaspoon. The equivalent of one to two grams of this salt allowance would come from the natural sodium in food. The rest would be added in processing, preparation or at the table. Those with kidney, liver or heart problems may have to limit dietary salt, if their doctor advises. But even the very vocal "low salt" exponent, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr. admits that "we do not know whether increased sodium consumption causes hypertension." In fact, there is increasing scientific evidence that other factors may be involved: deficiencies in calcium, potassium, perhaps magnesium; obesity (much more dangerous than sodium); genetic predispotition; stress. "It is not your enemy," says Dr. Laragh, "Salt is the No. 1 natural component of all human tissue, and the idea that you don't need it is wrong. Unless your doctor has proven that you have a salt-related health problem, there is no reason to give it up."

单选题 The idea of a fish being able to produce electricity strong enough to light lamp bulbs—or even to run a small electric motor—is almost unbelievable, but several kinds of fish are able to do this. Even more strangely, this curious power has been acquired in different ways by fish belonging to very different families. Perhaps the most known are the electric rays, or torpedoes, of which several kinds live in warm seas. They possess on each side of the head, behind the eyes, a large organ consisting of a number of hexagonal-shaped cells rather like a honeycomb. The cells are filled with a jelly-like substance, and contain a series of fiat electric plates. One side, the negative side, of each plate, is supplied with very fine nerves, connected with a main nerve coming form a special part of the brain. Current gets through from the upper, positive side of the organ downward to the negative, lower side. Generally it is necessary to touch the fish in two places, completing the circuit, in order to receive a shock. The strength of this shock depends on the size of fish, but newly-born ones only about 5 centimeters across can be made to light the bulb of a pocket flashlight for a few moments, while a fully grown torpedo gives a shock capable of knocking a man down, and, if suitable wires are connected, will operate a small electric motor for several minutes. Another famous example is the electric eel. This fish gives an even more powerful shock. The system is different from that of the torpedo in that the electric plates run longitudinally and are supplied with nerves from the spinal cord. Consequently, the current passes along the fish from head to tail. The electric organs of these fish are really altered muscles and like all muscles are apt to tire, so they are not able to generate electricity for very long. People in some parts of South America who value the electric eel as food, take advantage of this fact by driving horses into the water against which the fish discharge their electricity. The homes are less affected than a man would be, and when the electric eels have exhausted themselves, they can be caught without danger. The electric catfish of the Nile and of other African fresh waters has a different system again by which current passes over the whole body from the tail to the head. The shock given by this arrangement is not so strong as the other two, but is none the less unpleasant. The electric catfish is a slow, lazy fish, fond of gloomy places and grows to about 1 metre long; it is eaten by the Arabs in some areas. The power of producing electricity may serve these fish both for defence and attack. If a large enemy attacks, the shock will drive it away; but it appears that the catfish and the electric eel use their current most often against smaller fish, stunning them so that they can easily be overpowered.

单选题His main concern in the evenings was to ______.

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 sha- ring 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 our- selves, 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 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 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 be paid employment, leaving the unpaid work of the home and family to his wife. Tax and benefit regulations still assume 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 frustra- ted 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.

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单选题Whydidpeoplemakegardensinto"flowerclock"?A．Tomakegardensintoaroundshape.B．Tolookattheflowerinthegardensatdifferenttimesoftheyear.C．Toattractpeople.D．Toknowthetime.

单选题In January 1995, the world witnessed the emergence of a new international economic order with the launching of the World Trade Organization. The WTO, which succeeds the GATT, is expected to strengthen the world trading system and to be more effective than the GATT in governing international trade in goods and services in many aspects. First, trade liberalization all over the world is expected to increase via the dramatic reductions in Wade barriers to which the members of the WTO are committed. Under the WTO, members are required to reduce their tariff and non-tariffs on manufacturing goods. In addition, protecting domestic agricultural sectors from foreign competition will become awfully difficult in the new WTO system. Second, rules and regulations governing international trade will be more strongly enforced. Under the old system of the GATT, there were many cases where trade measures, such as anti-dumping and countervailing duties, were intentionally used solely for protectionist reasons. The WTO's strengthened rules and regulations will significantly reduce the abusing of such trade measures by its member countries. The WTO is also equipped with an improved dispute settlement mechanism. Accordingly, we expect to see a more effective resolution of trade disputes among the member countries in this new trade environment. Third, new multilateral rules have been established to cover areas which the GATT did not address, such as international trade in services and the protection of intellectual property rights. There still remain a number of problems that need to be resolved before international trade in services can be completely liberalized, and newly-developed ideas or technologies are fairly compensated. However, just the establishment of multilateral rules in these new areas is a distinguished contribution to the progress toward a global free trade system. Along with the launching of the WTO, this new era in world trade is characterized by a change in the structure of the world economy. Today, a world-wide market for goods and services is rapidly replacing a world economy composed of relatively isolated national markets. Domestic financial markets have been integrated into a truly global system, and the multinational corporation is becoming a principal mechanism for allocating investment capital and determining the location of production sites throughout much of the world.

单选题For Immanuel Kant. the Enlightenment could be captured in two small words: sapere aude "dare to think". When 3.500 individuals professionally devoted to this proposition are gathered under one roof, as happened at the 20th World Congress of Philosophy in Boston this week. the effect may be more of Babel than of 18th-gentury discourse. Modern philosophy speaks a bewildering variety of languages, from analytic logic to existentialism, poststructuralism, semiotics and the wilder shores of ecofeminism, and there is a fair degree of apartheid between its practitioners. Hence the temptation to view the discipline as too rarefied and "academic" for mere mortals. Britons are notoriously wary of theory; the national prejudice is well captured by Kipling's "If you can think and not make thoughts your master ..." Isaiah Berlin captured British hearts with his tongue-in-cheek remark that he had turned to political thought because "philosophy can only be done by very clever people". This is one of the few European countries where almost no school teaches philosophy. Yet in this age of uncertainty, when today's vocational training may be tomorrow's passport to redundancy, "dare to think" should be the motto pinned on the wall of every undergraduate room and recruitment agency. Philosophy is making a modest comeback in British universities, and not before time. The great virtue of philosophy is that it teaches not what to think, but how to think. It is the study of meaning, of the principles underlying conduct, thought and knowledge. The skills it hones are the ability to analyse, to question orthodoxies and to express things clearly. However arcane some philosophical texts may be—and not everybody can come to grips with the demands of Austrian logical positivism—the ability to formulate questions and follow arguments is the essence of education. It can also be studied at many levels. In the US, where the number of philosophy graduates has increased by 5 per cent a year during the 1990s, only a very few go on to become philosophers. Their employability, at 98.9 per cent, is impressive by any standard. Philosophy has always been a good training for the law; but it is equally useful for computer scientists. In this country, the Higher Education Statistics Survey puts philosophy of science right up with medicine in its employment record for graduates. Philosophy is, in commercial jargon, the ultimate "transferable work skill". That is not the only argument for expanding philosophy departments and encouraging sixth-formers to read Plato, or John Stuart Mill on liberty. Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, has cautioned against an obsession with the narrowly vocational. Lecturing the Confederation of British Industry on the "sly utilitarianism" of employers, he defends a liberal education as needing "no justification beyond the satisfaction and enjoyment that it brings". Teenagers waiting for their A level results and pondering degree courses should consider philosophy. It is rewarding in itself; and it could nowadays be the passport to a successful, varied career.

单选题The average person sees tens of thousands of images a day—images on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the sides of buses. Images also grace soda cans and T-shirts, and Internet search engines can instantly procure images for any word you type. On Flickr. com, a photo-sharing Web site, you can type in a word such as "love" and find photos of couples in embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror", and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image?" asks the person who posted the picture. The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: they have become less magical and less shocking. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear. Today, anyone with a digital camera and a PC can produce and alter an image. As a result, the power of the image has been diluted in one sense, but strengthened in another. It has been diluted by the ubiquity of images and the many populist technologies (like inexpensive cameras and picture-editing software) that give almost everyone the power to create, distort, and transmit images. But it has been strengthened by the gradual surrender of the printed word to pictures. Text ceded to image might be likened to an articulate person being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language. We love images and the democratizing power of technologies that give us the capability to make and manipulate images. What we are less eager to consider are the broader cultural effects of a society devoted to the image. Historians and anthropologists have explored the story of mankind"s movement from an oral-based culture to a written culture, and later to a printed one. But in the past several decades we have begun to move from a culture based on the printed word to one based largely on images. In making images rather than texts our guide, are we opening up new vistas for understanding and expression, creating a new form of communication that is "better than print," as some scholars have argued? Or are we merely making a peculiar and unwelcome return to forms of communication once ascendant in preliterate societies? Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture. First, technology has considerably undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our notions of truth. Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the image, what impact will this have on culture? Will we become too easily accustomed to verisimilar rather than true things, preferring appearance to reality and in the process rejecting the demands of discipline and patience that true things often require of us if we are to understand their meaning and describe it with precision?

单选题The man behind this notion, Jack Maple, is a dandy who affects dark glasses, homburgs (翘边帽) and two-toe shoes; yet he has become something of a legend in America"s police departments. For some years, starting in New York and moving on to high-crime spots such as New Orleans and Philadelphia, he and his business partner, John Linder have marketed a two-tier system for cutting crime. First, police departments have to sort themselves out: root out corruption, streamline their bureaucracy, and make more contact with the public. Second, they have to adopt a computer system called Comstat which helps them to analyze statistics of all major crimes. These are constantly keyed into the computer, which then displays where and when they have occurred on a color-coded map, enabling the police to monitor crime trends as they happen and to spot high-crime areas. In New York, Comstat"s statistical maps are analyzed each week at a meeting of the city"s police chief and precinct captains. Messrs Maple and Linder ("specialists in crime-reduction services") have no doubt that their system is a main contributor to the drop in crime. When they introduced it in New Orleans in January 1997, violent crime dropped by 22% in a year; when they merely started working informally with the police department in Newark, New Jersey, violent crime fell by 13%. Police departments are now lining up to pay as much as $50,000 a month for these two men to put them straight. Probably all these new policies and bits of technical wizardry, added together, have made a big difference to crime. But there remain anomalies that cannot be explained, such as the fact that crime in Washington D.C., has fallen as fast as anywhere, although the police department has been corrupt and hopeless and, in large stretches of the city, neither police nor residents seem disposed to fight the criminals in their midst. The more important reason for the fall in crime rates, many say, is a much less sophisticated one. It is a fact that crime rates have dropped as the imprisonment rate soared. In 1997 the national incarceration rate, at 645 per 100,000 people was more than double the rate in 1985, and the number of inmates in city and county jails rose by 9.4%, almost double its annual average increase since 1990. Surely some criminologist argue, one set of figures is the cause of the other. It is precise because more people are being sent to prison, they claim that crime rates are falling. A 1993 study by the National Academy of Sciences actuality concluded that the tripling of the prison population between 1975 and 1989 had lowered violent crime by 10-15%. Yet cause and effect may not be so obviously linked. To begin with, the sale and possession of drugs are not counted by the FBI in its crime index, which is limited to violent crimes and crimes against property. Yet drug of-fences account for more than a third of the recent increase in the number of those jailed; since 1980, the incarceration rate for drug arrests has increased by 1,000%. And although about three-quarters of those going to prison for drug offences have committed other crimes as well, there is not yet a crystal-clear connection between filling the jails with drug-pushers and a decline in the rate of violent crime. Again, though national figures are suggestive, local ones diverge: the placer where crime has dropped most sharply (such as New York City) are not always the places where incarceration has risen fastest.

单选题 Questions 14—16 are based on the following passage.

单选题Steve Courtney wrote historical novels. Not, he was quick to explain, over-colourful love stories of the kind that made so much money for so many women writers, but novels set, and correctly set, in historical periods. Whatever difference he saw in his own books, his readers did not seem to notice it, and his readers were nearly all women. He had studied in university, but he had been a particularly good student, and he had never afterwards let any academic knowledge he had achieved interfere with his writing. Helen, his wife, who did not have a very high opinion of her husband" s ability as a novelist, had been careful to say when she married him she was not historically minded. Above all, Helen was doubtful whether her relationship with Steve would work at all in the village of Stretton, to which they had just moved. It was Steve who had wanted to move to the country, and she had been glad of the change, in principle, whatever doubts she was now having about Stretton as a choice. But she wondered whether Steve would, before long, want to live in London again, and what she would do if he did. The Stretton house was not a weekend cottage. They had moved into it and given up the London flat altogether, partly at least, she suspected, because that was Steve" s idea of what a successful author ought to do. However, she thought he was not going to feel like a successful author half as much in Stretton as he had in London. On the other hand, she supposed he might just start dashing up to London for the day to see his agent or have dinner with his publisher, leaving her behind in Stretton, and she thought on the whole she would like that.

单选题{{B}}Text 3{{/B}} A mystery over what caused the brightest supernova ever observed finally appears to have been solved. Two astronomers in the Netherlands say the explosion was the result of a cosmic pileup: dozens of massive stars crashing into each other, producing a monstrous heavyweight star that eventually exploded, leaving a giant black hole in its wake. Supernova 2006gy burst into view in September 2006 in a distant galaxy, 240 million light years away. The blast was 100 times more powerful than a normal supernova, suggesting the exploding star weighed in at more than a hundred times the mass of the Sun. But astronomers found a puzzling detail in their observations: the supernova debris contained large amounts of hydrogen, which they would not have expected for such a massive star: It should have shed its outer hydrogen layers at an earlier stage. Although several possible explanations have been put forward to explain the massive blast— including the formation of a quark star and the production of huge quantities of antimatter—no single theory could easily explain all of the observations. Now, in the journal Nature, Simon Portegies Zwart and Edward van den Heuvel of the University of Amsterdam say 2006gy may have been the result of a multiple-star collision in a dense stellar cluster. They say dozens of stars—some of them hydrogen-rich—collided to form a giant weighing in at over 100 Suns. Unable to support its own weight, the colossus blew itself to smithereens in an explosion that outshone its home galaxy. Computer simulations reveal that multiple collisions are quite likely in very dense star clusters. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, contains two such superdense clusters (the Arches cluster and the Quintuplet cluster), close to its centre. Indeed, supernova 2006gy also occurred close to the core of its host galaxy. If Portegies Zwart and van den Heuvel are right, the dense cluster of stars should become visible once the supernova has faded sufficiently. This should happen a few years from now, they say. There may be another explanation for the brightness of the supernova, however. In the same issue of Nature, Stan Woosley of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his colleagues show how multiple explosions in a single, very massive star could account for 2006gy's behaviour. In this model, every explosion produces an expanding shell of material. When new ejecta catches up and collides with an older shell, so much energy is released that the result will look like an over-luminous supernova. "One could, I suppose, make our massive star by merging smaller ones," Woosley said, "but that was not part of our model and does not seem necessary." According to Woosley's calculations, the star may not yet have collapsed into a black hole. A new explosion might happen in about 10 years or so, he says.

单选题The London Marathon is a difficult race ______, thousands of runners participate every year.

单选题Why does Professor Thring think that the unions should be pleased about the mechanical coal miner?

单选题{{B}}Part B{{/B}} In the following article some paragraphs have been removed. For Questions 66～70, choose the most suitable paragraph from the list A～F to fit into each of the numbered gaps. There is one paragraph which does not fit in any of the gaps. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. It was a moment most business executives would pause to savor:late last year, German sporting goods pioneer Adidas learned that after years of declining market share, the company had sprinted past U. S. Reebok International to take the second place behind Nike in the race for worldwide sales. But Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the rumpled Frenchman who now runs Adidas, and didn't even stop for one of his trademark Havana cigars in celebration,worried that the company would grow complacent. Instead,he and a group of friends bought French soccer club Olympic de Marseille "Now that's something I have dreamed about since I was a kid. " Louis-Dreyfus says with an adolescent grin. 66.______ With sales in the first three quarters of 1996 at $ 2.5 billion, up a blithering 30.7% over 1995, it's hard to recall the dismal shape Adidas was in when Louis-Dreyfus took over as chairman in April 1993. Founded in 1920 by Adi Dassler, the inventor of the first shoes designed especially for sports, the company enjoyed a near monopoly in athletic shoes until an upstart called Nike appeared in the 1970s and rode the running fad to riches. By the early 1990s Adidas had come under the control of French businessman Bernard Tapie, who was later jailed for bribing three French soccer players. Although the company tried to spruce up its staid image with a team of American designers, Adidas lost more than $100 million in 1992, prompting the French banks that had acquired control of the company from Tapie to begin a desperate search for a new owner. 67.______ The poker-loving Louis-Dreyfus knew he had been dealt a winning hand. Following the lead set by Nike in the 1970s, he moved production to low-wage factories in China, Indonesia and Thailand and sold Adidas' European factories for a token one Deutsche mark apiece. He hired Peter Moore, a former product designer at Nike, as creative director, and set up studios in Germany for the European market and in Portland, Oregon, for the U. S. He then risked everything by doubling his advertising budget. "We went from a manufacturing company to a marketing company, "says Louis-Dreyfus. "It didn't take a genius--you just had to look at what Nike and Reebok were doing. It was easier for someone coming from the outside, with no baggage, to do it,than for somebody from inside the company. " 68.______ "The marketing at Adidas is very,very good right now," says Eugenio Di Maria, editor of Sporting Good Intelligence, an industry newsletter perceiving Adidas as a very young brand. "The company is particularly strong in apparel, much stronger than Nike and Reebok. " Although 90% of Adidas products for wear on street instead of sports fields, Louis-Dreyfus felt the previous management had lost sight of Adidas' roots as a sporting products company. After all, Adi Dassler invented the screw-in stud for the soccer shoe and shod American champion Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. So he sold off or folded other non-core brands that Adidas had developed, including Le Coq Sportif, Arena and Pony. Europe is still the company's largest market because Adidas dominates the apparel industry and thanks to soccer's massive popularity there, Louis-Dreyftts is quick to share credit for the turnaround with a small group of friends who bought the company with him in 1993. One of those fellow investors is a former IMS colleague, Christian Tourres, now sales director at Adidas. "We're pretty complementary because I'm a bit of a dreamer, so it's good to have somebody knocking on your head to remind you there's a budget," says Louis-Dreyfus. Commuting to the firm's headquarters in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach from his lakeside house outside Zurich,Louis-Dreyfus also transformed Adidas from a stodgy German company into a business with a global outlook. Appalled on his first day at work that the chief executive had to sign a salesman's travel voucher for $300,he slashed the company's bureaucracy, adopted American accounting rules and brought in international management talent. The company's chief financial officer is Australian and the international,marketing manager is a Swede. English is the official language of the head office and no Germans remain on the managing board of the company, now whittled down to just himself and a few trusted aides. "It was clear we needed decentralization and financial controls, "recalls Louis-Dreyfus. "With German accounting rules, I never knew if I was making money or losing. " 69.______ "He gives you a lot of freedom, "says Michael Michalsky, a 29-year-old German who heads the company's apparel design team. "He has never interfered with a decision and never complained. He's incredibly easy to work for. " 70.______ The challenge for Louis-Dreyfus is to keep sales growing in a notoriously trend-driven business. In contrast to the boom at Adidas, for example, Reebok reported a 3 % line in sales in the third quarter. Last fall Adidas rolled out a new line of shoes called "Feet You Wear" which are supposed to fit more comfortably than conventional sneakers by matching the natural contour of the foot. The first 500 000 sold out. Adidas is an official sponsor of the World Cup, to be held next June in France, which the company hopes to turn to a marketing bonanza that will build on the strength of soccer worldwide. But Reebok also has introduced a new line called DMX Series 2000 and competition is expected to be fierce in the coming spring. A. Just as the transition was taking place, Adidas had a run of good luck. The fickle fashion trendsetters decided in. early 1993 that they wanted the" retro look", and the three-stripes Adidas logo, which had been overtaken by Nike swoop, was suddenly hot again. Models such as Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer and a score of rock idole sported Adidas gear on television, in films and music videos, giving the the company a free publicity bonanza. Demand for Adidas products soared. B. Louis-Dreyfus, scion of a prominent French trading dynasty with an M. B. A. from Harvard, earned a reputation as a doctor to sick companies after turning around London-based market research firm IMS-a feat that brought him more than $10 million when the company was eventually sold. He later served as chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, then the world's largest ad agency, which called him in when rapid growth sent profits into a tailspin. With no other company or entrepreneur willing to gamble on Adidas, Louis-Dreyfus got an incredible bargain from the banks: he and a group of friends from his days at IMS contributed just $10,000 each in cash and signed up for $100 million in loans for 15% of the company, with an option to buy the remainder at a fixed price 18 months later. C. In another break with the traditional German workplace, Louis-Dreyfus made corporate life almost gratingly informal: employees ostentatiously called him" Rowbear" as he strides down the corridors, and bankers are still amazed when counterparts from Adidas show up for negotiations wearing sweatshirts and sneakers. D. The company's payroll ,which had reached a high of 14,600 in 1986 ,was pared back to just 4,600 in 1994. (It has since grown to over 6 000. ) E. A sports fun who claims he hasn't missed attending a soccer World Cup final since the 1970s or the Olympic Games since 1968, the 50-year-old Louis-Dreyfus now is eminently well placed to live out many of his boyhood fantasies. Not only has he turned Adidas into a global company with market capitalization of $4 billion (he owns stock worth $ 250 million), but he also has endorsement contracts with a host of sports heroes from tennis great Steffi Graf to track's Donovan Bailey, and considers it part of the job to watch his star athletes perform on the field. "There are very few chances in life to have such fun. "he says. F. After reducing losses in 1993, Adidas turned to a profit in 1994 and has continued to surge: net income for the first three quarters in 1996 was a record $214 million,up 29% from the previous year. Louis-Dreyfus and his friends made great personal fortunes when the company went public in 1995. The original investors still own 26% of the stock,which sold for $46 a share when trading has doubled to $90.

单选题It is hard to predict how science is going to turn out, and if it is really good science it is impossible to predict. If the things to be found are actually new, they are by definition unknown in advance. You can"t make choices in this matter. You either have science or you don"t and if you have it you are obliged to accept the surprising and disturbing pieces of information, along with the neat and promptly useful bits. The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. I regard this as the major discovery of the past hundred years of biology. It is, in this way, an illuminating piece of news. It would have amazed the brightest minds of the 18th century Enlightenment to be told by any of us how little we know and how bewildering seems the way ahead. It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of the 20th century science to the human intellect. In earlier times, we either pretended to understand how things worked or ignored the problem, or simply made up stories to fill the gaps. Now that we have begun exploring in earnest, we are getting glimpses of how huge the questions are, and how far from being answered. Because of this, we are depressed. It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance, the worst spots and here and there the not-so-bad spots, but no true light at the end of the tunnel nor even any tunnels that can yet be trusted. But we are making a beginning, and there ought to be some satisfaction. There are probably no question we can think up that can not be answered, sooner or later, including even the matter of consciousness. To be sure, there may well be questions we can"t think up ever, and therefore limits to the reach of human intellect, but that is another matter. Without our limits, we should be able to work our way through to all our answers, if we keep at it long enough, and pay attention.