单选题{{B}}Text 1{{/B}} I am extremely important. So important that all kinds of people might need to communicate with me 24 hours a day. Mere phone calls are good enough, letters take days, or at least a day, and meetings face to face—well, obviously that is out of the question. No, the index of my success is my faxability. Only God knows what international incidents have been averted by my black fax machine. For I am now at the centre of a vast global communications network, all of which is instantly faxable, and made up of busy people who cannot possibly wait for that vital document a minute longer. "Fax it to me," we say snappily, presuming that we are in the company similarly technologically endowed. "What do you mean you haven't got one?" We gasp in amazement at their willingness to admit they are not a member of this exclusive club. After all, membership only sets you back $400 or so and for this you get to review daily our motto: "I fax therefore I am." Once you are in possession of one of those magic machines a new world opens up to you. A world of escalating urgency, a world where the most mundane information becomes some how more significant because it arrives via a bleeping machine, a world where the medium has more cachet than the message. The fax machine, like the camcorder, has come into its own in the Nineties. The affordability of this technology has meant that the democracy of instantaneous communication has filtered down to us all. So we are all dutifully engaged in this orgy of electronic impulses, recording and erasing, faxing and receiving. But what we are actually communicating apart from the fact that we are in communication? The urgent messages we send each other on these electronic postcards are often little more than reminders that, "Yes, we have the technology, even if we have little use for it." Yet because we know that knowledge is power we cannot admit as much, for to do so would be to join the great faxless underclass. Instead, we pretend that every doodle, every hurried sentence is somehow so earth-shatteringly crucial that it must immediately be signaled halfway round the world. For some like Philippe Starck, who designs by fax, this may be the case. But what do most of us use fax for? We can now fax a pizza or a sandwich; we can fax afternoon radio shows with our funny stories; we can fax our bank manager; we can fax our resignation notice and nowadays we can even be fired by fax. Although there is soma argument about the legal status of any fax that declares to be contractual, the great benefit of all these is that it is done in public. Indeed what the latest hatch of communications technology, from mobile phones to camcorders to faxes, have in common is that they no longer respect the old boundaries between public and private, work and leisure. If you fall down and break your leg, some idiots with a camcorder will be recording your pain and sending it to an amateur video show on TV. If someone sends you a humiliating rejection by fax, you can guarantee that everyone else will have read it before you. Likewise, encouraged by insane advertising which advertises us to turn our homes into extensions of our offices, there is now no time in which work cannot intrude on leisure. The answering and fax machines may always be switched on in case we miss some vital pieces of information. But what exactly is it that for most of us cannot wait till tomorrow? We are not running countries, or multinational corporations, but the trick is to act like we are. In our "accelerated culture" speed feeds our sense of self-importance. It's not what you say but how fast you say it, and a fax provides instant gratification that this is the case. Faxes are about declarations rather than dialogue. But even this delicious frenzy of non-communication can go wrong. Fax terrorists sabotage business by bunging up the machine with 50 pages saying nothing except "Peace and love". And who has had a fax gone astray? As you slot your paper into the hungry mouth how do you really know where it is going, that you have the right number, that you are not sending your masterpieces into oblivion? Worse still: they can break down. Since my ten-year-old son poured a can of coke into mine I have not received any faxes at all. The sad truth is that I never did get many. Apart from the odd work stuff they would mostly be from friends trying out their new fax machines. Having received theirs, I could then fax them back to tell them that they were in full working order. See, I told you I was important.

单选题Mass transportation revised the social and economic fabric of the American city in three fundamental ways. It catalyzed physical expansion, it sorted out people and land uses, and it accelerated the inherent instability of urban life. By opening vast areas of unoccupied land for residential expansion, the omnibuses, horse railways, commuter trains, and electric trolleys pulled settled regions outward two to four times more distant from city centers than they were in the pre-modern era. In 1850, for example, the borders of Boston lay scarcely two miles from the old business district; by the end of the century the radius extended ten miles. Now those who could afford it could live far removed from the old city center and still commute there for work, shopping, and entertainment. The new accessibility of land around the periphery of almost every major city sparked an explosion of real estate development and fueled what we now know as urban sprawl. Between 1890 and 1920, for example, some 250, 000 new residential lots were recorded within the borders of Chicago, most of them located in outlying areas. Over the same period, another 550, 000 were plotted outside the City limits but within the metropolitan area. Anxious to take advantage of the possibilities of commuting, real estate developers added 800, 000 potential building sites to the Chicago region in just thirty years--lots that could have housed five to six million people. Of course, many were never occupied: there was always a huge surplus of subdivided but vacant land around Chicago and other cities. These excesses underscore a feature of residential expansion related to the growth of mass transportation, urban sprawl was essentially unplanned. It was carded out by thousands of small investors who paid little heed to coordinated land use or to future land users. Those who purchased and prepared land for residential purposes, particularly land near or outside city borders where transit lines and middle-class inhabitants were anticipated, did so to create demand as much as to respond to it. Chicago is a prime example of this process. Real estate subdivision there proceeded much faster than population growth.

单选题Israel is a "powerhouse of agricultural technology", says Abraham Goren of Elbit Imaging (EI), an Israeli multinational. The country's cows can produce as much as 37 liters of milk a day. In India, by contrast, cows yield just seven liters. Spotting an opportunity, EI is going into the Indian dairy business. It will import 10,000 cows and supply fortified and flavored milk to supermarkets and other buyers. So will EI lap up India's milk market? Not necessarily. As the Times of India points out, its cows will ruminate less than 100 miles from the headquarters of a formidable local producer—the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation, otherwise known as Amul. This Farmers' Co-operative spans 2.6m members, collects 6.5m liters of milk a day, and boasts one of the longest-running and best-loved advertising campaigns In India. It has already shown "immense resilience" in the face of multinational competition, says Arindam Bhattacharya of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Its ice-cream business survived the arrival of Unilever; its chocolate milk has thrived despite Nestlé. Indeed, Amul is one of 50 firms—from China, India, Brazil, Russia and six other emerging economies— that BCG has anointed as "local dynamos". They are prospering in their home market, are fending off multinational rivals, and are not focused on expanding abroad. BCG discovered many of these firms while drawing up its "global challengers" list of multinationals from the developing world. The companies that were venturing abroad most eagerly, it discovered, were not necessarily the most successful at home. Emerging economies are still prey to what Harvard's Dani Rodrik has called "export fetishism". International success remains a firm's proudest boast, and with good reason: economists have shown that exporters are typically bigger, more efficient and pay better than their more parochial rivals. "Exporters are better" was the crisp verdict of a recent review of the data. Countries like India and Brazil were, after all, once secluded backwaters fenced off by high tariffs. Prominent firms idled along on government favors and captive markets. In that era, exporting was a truer test of a company's worth. But as such countries have opened up, their home markets have become more trying places. Withstanding the onslaught of foreign firms on home soil may be as impressive a feat as beating them in global markets. BCG describes some of the ways that feat has been accomplished. Of its 50 dynamos, 41 are in consumer businesses, where they can exploit a more intimate understanding of their compatriots' tastes. It gives the example of Gol, a Brazilian budget airline, which bet that its cash-strapped customers would sacrifice convenience and speed for price. Many Gol planes therefore depart at odd hours and make several hops to out-of-the-way locations, rather than flying directly. Similarly astute was India's Titan Industries, which has increased its share of India's wristwatch market despite the entry of foreign brands such as Timex and Swatch. It understood that Indians, who expect a good price even for old newspapers, do not throw their watches away lightly, and has over 700 after-sales centers that will replace straps and batteries. Exporters tend to be more capital-intensive than their home-bound peers; they also rely more on skilled labor. Many local dynamos, conversely, take full advantage of the cheap workforce at their disposal. Focus Media, China's biggest "out of home" advertising company, gets messages out on flat-panel displays in 85,000 locations around the country. Those displays could be linked and reprogrammed electronically, but that might fall foul of broadcast regulations. So instead the firm's fleet of workers on bicycles replaces the displays' discs and flash-cards by hand. The list of multinationals resisted or repelled by these dynamos includes some of the world's biggest names: eBay and Google in China; Wal-Mart in Mexico; SAP in Brazil. But Mr. Goren of EI is not too worried about Amul. The market is big enough for everybody, he insists. Nothing, then, is for either company to cry about.

单选题Part C You will hear a talk. As you listen, you must answer or complete the sentences for questions 21—30 by writing NO MORE THAN THREE words in the space provided on the right. You will hear the program TWICE. You now have 60 seconds to read questions 21—30.

单选题Questions 17 to 20 are based on an introductory talk about manufacturing. You now have 15 seconds to read Questions 17 to 20.

单选题Questions 8--11 Complete the following sentences with NO MORE THAN three words for each blank.

单选题{{B}}TEXT 2{{/B}} Imagine a chart that begins when man first appeared on the planet and tracks the economic growth of societies from then forward. It would be a long, fiat line until the late 16th or early 17th century, when it would start trending upward. Before then the fruits of productive labor were limited to a few elites-princes, merchants and priests. For most of humankind life was as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described it in 1651-- "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But as Hobbes was writing those words, the world around him was changing. Put simply, human beings were getting smarter. People have always sought knowledge, of course, but in Western Europe at that time, men like Galileo, Newton and Descartes began to search systematically for ways to understand and control their environment. The scientific revolution, followed by the Enlightenment, marked a fundamental shift. Humans were no longer searching for ways simply to fit into a natural or divine order; they were seeking to change it. Once people found ways to harness energy-using steam engines-they were able to build machines that harnessed far more power than any human or horse could ever do. And people could work without ever getting tired. The rise of these machines drove the Industrial Revolution, and created a whole new system of life. Today the search for knowledge continues to produce an ongoing revolution in the health and wealth of humankind. If the rise of science marks the first great trend in this story, the second is its diffusion. What was happening in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was not an isolated phenomenon. A succession of visitors to Britain would go back to report to their countries on the technological and commercial innovations they saw there. Sometimes societies were able to learn extremely fast, as in the United States. Others, like Germany, benefited from starting late, leapfrogging the long-drawn-out process that Britain went through. This diffusion of knowledge accelerated dramatically in recent decades. Over the last 30 years we have watched countries like Japan, Singapore, South Korea and now China grow at a pace that is three times that of Britain or the United States at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. They have been able to do this because of their energies and exertions, of course, but also because they cleverly and perhaps luckily adopted certain ideas about development that had worked in the Westreasonably flee markets, open trade, a focus on science and technology, among them. The diffusion of knowledge is the dominant trend of our time and goes well beyond the purely scientific. Consider the cases of Turkey and Brazil. If you had asked an economist 20 years ago how to think about these two countries, he would have explained that they were classic basketcase, Third World economies, with triple-digit inflation, soaring debt burdens, a weak private sector and snail'space growth. Today they are both remarkably well managed, with inflation in single digits and growth above 5 percent. And this shift is happening around the world. From Thailand to South Africa to Slovakia to Mexico, countries are far better managed economically than they have ever been. Even in cases where political constraints make it difficult to push farreaching reforms, as in Brazil, Mexico or India, governments still manage their affairs sensibly, observing the Hippocratic oath not to do any harm.

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}}{{B}}Test 1{{/B}} The United States has hosted the Olympic Games a record eight times. St. Louis, Los Angeles (twice) and Atlanta have been the sites of the summer Games while Lake Placid (twice), Squaw Valley and Salt Lake City in 2002 have welcomed the winter Games. Ten U.S. cities have entered the process to become the candidate city for the 2010 Olympic Games which will be selected by the U.S. Olympic Committee Board of directors. The U.S. city will then face competition from around the world with the International Olympic Committee making the final decision. The 10 cities have until the spring of 2000 to prepare their final bids for the USOC. Following site evaluations and the XIXth Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah (Feb. 8 - 24, 2002), the U.S. Olympic candidate city will be elected in the fall of 2002 at the USOC' s Board of Direction meeting. The closing date for all worldwide candidate cities to submit bids to the International Olympic will be in the winter of 2003. The IOC will then select the 2010 host city in the fall of 2005. "Our work can begin in the fall of 2002, allowing us to have a great bid and saving bid cities a tremendous amount of money by shortening the expensive international campaign,'' said Anita DeFrantz, an IOC vice president. The U.S. Olympic Committee is also in the process of identifying a U.S. candidate city for the 2007 "Pan American Games." The United States has previously hosted this event for countries in North, Central and South America in Chicago (1959) and Indianapolis (1987). The timeline approved by the USOC Board for the cities registered and bidding to become the U.S. candidate city for the 2007 Pan American Games — Houston; Raleigh, N.C.; San Antonio, Texas; and south Florida — calls for each city's final bids to be submitted to the USOC by September 1998. Following site evaluations, the USOC Board will select the USA's 2007 bid city in the spring of 1999. The Pan American Sports Organization (PASO) will select the host city in 2002. USOC Executive Director Dick Schultz explained that the USOC's objectives in setting up the timelines for the bid cities were: to maintain focus on the mission, pursue strategic initiatives, complete the Pan American Games bids before the Olympic Games bids, complete the Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games and effort, and to then launch an international bid off the success of Salt Lake City.

单选题Earthquake survivors trapped in rubble could one day be saved by an unlikely rescuer: A robotic caterpillar that burrows its way through debris. Just a few centimeters wide, the robot relies on magnetic fields to propel it through the kind of tiny crevices that would foil the wheeled or tracked search robots currently used to locate people trapped in collapsed buildings. The caterpillar's inventor, Norihiko Saga of Akita Prefectural University in Japan, will demonstrate his new method of locomotion at a conference on magnetic materials in Seattle. In addition to lights and cameras, a search caterpillar could be equipped with an array of sensors to measure other factors—such as radioactivity or oxygen levels—that could tell human rescuers if an area is safe to enter. The magnetic caterpillar is amazingly simple. It moves by a process similar to peristalsis, the rhythmic contraction that moves food down your intestine. Saga made the caterpillar from a series of rubber capsules filled with a magnetic fluid consisting of iron particles, water, and a detergent-like surfactant, which reduces the surface tension of the fluid. Each capsule is linked to the next by a pair of rubber rods. The caterpillar's guts are wrapped in a clear, flexible polymer tube that protects it from the environment. To make the caterpillar move forwards, Saga moves a magnetic field backwards along the caterpillar. Inside the caterpillar's "head" capsule, magnetic fluid surges towards the attractive magnetic field, causing the capsule to bulge out to the sides and draw its front and rear portions up. As the magnetic field passes to the next capsule, the first breaks free and springs forward and the next capsule bunches up. In this way, the caterpillar can reach speeds of 4 centimeters per second as it crawls along. Moving the magnetic field faster can make it traverse the caterpillar before all the capsules have sprung back to their original shapes. The segments then all spring back, almost but not quite simultaneously. Saga plans to automate the movement of the caterpillar by placing electromagnets at regular intervals along the inside of its polymer tube. By phasing the current flow to the electromagnets, he'll be able to control it wirelessly via remote control. He also needs to find a new type of rubber for the magnetic capsules, because the one he's using at the minute eventually begins to leak. But crawling is not the most efficient form of locomotion for robots, says Robert Full of the University of California at Berkeley, an expert in animal motion who occasionally advises robotics designers. "If you look at the energetic cost of crawling, compared to walking, swimming or flying, crawling is very expensive," he says. Walking, on the other every step, energy is conserved in the foot and then released to help the foot spring up. Saga acknowledges this inefficiency but says his caterpillar is far more stable than one that walks, rolls on wheels or flies. It has no moving parts save for a few fluid-filled rubber capsules. Biped robots and wheeled robots require a smooth surface and are difficult to miniaturize, and flying robots have too many moving parts. "My peristaltic crawling robot is simple and it works," he says.

单选题According to the writer， _______.

单选题The success or failure of a case often hinges on an organizing principle known as a case theme. For example, the case theme in the trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez, two brothers accused of murdering their parents, was "the abuse excuse". The brothers should be excused because they had been severely abused. A primary case theme of the O. J. Simpson defense was "the police messed up and planted evidence". Themes are simple, brief (one sentence!) statements that capture the essence of your argument. You control the lens through which the facts will be viewed. For a trial lawyer, this is absolutely critical. If the lawyer fails to establish a case theme, he or she gives opposing counsel the advantage. Or even worse, the listeners, or those you are trying to persuade, will adopt the theme suggested to them by your adversary. Whoever controls the definition of the case is inevitably the one with the power. Just as a theme gives the listeners a generalizing principle around which information can be organized, so too does it give you one. The great trial lawyers emphasize the need for an overall strategy as well as day-to-day tactics. A case theme embodies a lawyer's overall strategy in a nutshell and helps him organize the case so that he always stays on target. Use a theme to help you stay well and easily focused on the overall thrust of your presentation. A good case theme also greatly enhances your credibility. When you establish a succinct, easy-to-remember theme, you let people know that you have a well-defined and thought-out point of view. Such specificity adds to your perceived competence and trustworthiness. Remember: successful trial lawyers are never wishy-washy.

单选题The GTE's example shows that

单选题WhatdidChrisEvertbecameatfirstU.S.Open?A．Finalist.B．Semifinalist.C．Winner.D．Champion.

单选题

单选题Why should anyone buy the latest volume in the ever-expanding Dictionary of National Biography? I do not mean that it is bad, as the reviewers will agree. But it will cost you 65 pounds. And have you got the rest of volumes? You need the basic 22 plus the largely decennial supplements to bring the total to 31. Of course, it will be answered, public and academic libraries want the new volume. After all, it adds 1,068 lives of people who escaped the net of the original compilers, Yet in 10 years' time a revised version of the whole caboodle, called the New Dictionary of National Biography, will be published. Its editor, Professor Colin Matthew, tells me that he will have room for about 50,000 lives, some 13,000 more than in the current DN B, This rather puts the 1,068 in Missing Persons in the shade. When Dr Nicholls wrote to The Spectator in 1989 asking for names of people whom readers had looked up in the DNB and had been disappointed not to find, she says that she received some 100,000 suggestions. (Well, she had written to" other quality newspapers" too.)As soon as her committee had whittled the numbers down, the professional problems of an editor began. Contributors didn't file copy on time; some who did send too much: 50,000 words instead of 500 is a record, according to Dr Nieholls. There remains the dinner-party game of who's in, who's out. That is a game that the reviewers have played and will continue to play. Criminals were my initial worry. After all, the original edition of the DNB boasted: Malefactors whose crimes excite a permanent interest have received hardly less attention than benefactors. Mr. John Gross clearly had similar anxieties, for he complains that, while the murderer Christie is in, Crippen is out. One might say in reply that the injustice of the hanging of Evans instead of Christie was a force in the repeal of capital punishment in Britain, as Ludovie Kennedy (the author of Christies entry in Missing Persons)notes. But then Crippen was reputed as the first murderer to be caught by telegraphy (he had tried to escape by ship to America). It is surprising to find Max Miller excluded when really not yew memorable names get in. There has been a conscious effort to put in artists and architects from the Middle Ages. About their lives not much is always known. Of Hugo of Bury St Edmunds, a 12th-century illuminator whose dates of birth and death are not recorded, his biographer comments:" Whether or not Hugo was a wall-painter, the records of his activities as carver and manuscript painter attest to his versatility." Then there had to be more women, too (12 per cent, against the original DBN's 3), such as Roy Strong's subject, the Tudor painter Levina Teerlinc, of whom he remarks:" Her most characteristic feature is a head attached to a too small, spindly body. Her technique remained awkward, thin and often cursory." Doesn't seem to qualify her as a memorable artist. Yet it may be better than the record of the original DNB, which included lives of people who never existed (such as Merlin) and even managed to give thanks to J. W. Clerke as a contributor, though, as a later edition admits in a shamefaced footnote," except for the entry in the List of Contributors there is no trace of J. W. Clerke".

单选题Before he left for his vacation he went to the bank to ______ some money.

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. {{B}}Text 1{{/B}} The Stone age, the Iron age. Entire epochs have been named for materials. So what to name the decades ahead? The choice will be tough. Welcome to the age of superstuff. Material science--once the least sexy technology—is bursting with new, practical discoveries led by superconducting ceramics that may revolutionize electronics. But superconductors are just part of the picture: from houses and cars to cook pots and artificial teeth, the world will sometime be made of different stuff. Exotic plastics, glass and ceramics will shape the future just as surely as have genetic engineering and computer science. The key to the new materials is researchers' increasing ability to manipulate substances at the molecular level. Ceramics, for instance, have long been limited by their brittleness. But by minimizing the microscopic imperfections that cause it, scientists are making far stronger ceramics that still retain such qualifies as hardness and heat resistance. Ford Motor Co. now uses ceramic tools to cut steel. A firm called Kyocera has created a line of ceramic scissors and knives that stay sharp for years and never rust or corrode. A similar transformation has overtaken plastics. High-strength polymers now form bridges, ice skating rinks and helicopter rotors. And one new plastic that generates electricity when vibrated or pushed is used in electric guitars, touch sensors for robot hands and karate jackets that automatically record each punch and chop. Even plastic litter, which once threatened to permanently blot the landscape, has proved amenable to molecular tinkering. Several manufacturers now make biodegradable forms; some plastic six-pack rings for example, gradually decompose when exposed to sunlight. Researchers are developing ways to make plastics as recyclable as metal or glass. What's more, composites—plastic reinforced with fibres of graphite or other compounds--made the round-the-world flight of the voyager possible and have even been proved in combat: a helmet saved an infantryman's life by deflecting two bullets in the Grenada invasion. Some advanced materials are old standard with a new twist. The newest fiberoptic cables that carry telephone calls cross-country are made of glass so transparent that a piece of 100 miles thick is clearer than a standard window pane. But new materials have no impact until they are made into products. And that transition could prove difficult, for switching requires lengthy research and investment. It can be said a firmer handle on how to move to commercialization will determine the success or failure of a country in the coming future.

单选题What do both theories assume to be true?

单选题That what the writers described in their works is social realities and the main characters are common people is called [A] Neo-Classicism. [B] Realism. [C] Romanticism. [D] Naturalism.